Posted on 10/18/2023 11:37:16 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Sure. Listen, my getting crossways about this was, in retrospect, an irritation with what I see as a larger problem (not with you, but with the problem) in society.
Your post hit a nerve with me, and it is about something I see as a real problem that is rarely acknowledged or talked about, and that is the obsession with safety.
So I apologize for framing my response to it as I did. I am in an ongoing way, trying to figure out how to more consistently engage in civil discourse on this forum, rather than ignoring it and moving on or breaking out a flamethrower. I am a hothead by nature (even if it is generally short-lived) and I try to combat it.
So, yeah. I got my head wrapped around something else I saw which I found interesting, and it gave me room for perspective.
Agreed. We would all want people looking out for sisters, daughters etc.
Fair enough. Happens to all of us sometimes
I do agree that men are being marginalized and degraded by too many. It has to stop
On that we can agree
Years ago, a co-worker & I were at a bodega in downtown Omaha & another co-worker who was an attractive young African American woman asked if we could escort her a couple blocks. She said a homeless AA man outside was harassing her & since she knew that we worked for the same company, she felt comfortable asking two older, fat white guys if we would escort her - which we did. Later on I heard she left to be in a Christian ministry in China.
Yes we can...:)
I apologize for the length of this post-your comment about Orwell in this context really made me think about that quote. First, because there are many who will attack that quote as the work of a misogynistic fossil, in much the same way people get called racist for comments based objectively rather than subjectively. It had the ring of truth to me, but it made me immediately stop and wonder why it had that ring, and I have been thinking about that quote for a few hours.
I have always been an admirer of George Orwell, not because I believe he is an advocate of the terrible tyranny he has had the gift to portray, but because he had displayed a Nostrodamus-like ability to prophesize the future, much as Ayn Rand did in some of her works.
I have read that Orwell was a Socialist, but for the life of me, I cannot understand how he could be a Socialist and write “1984”, and especially, “Animal Farm”. He was a brilliant portrayer of tyranny, and I find it difficult to believe it did not occur to him that Socialism in all its forms is, at its very core, implicitly tyrannical.
It cannot be worked around or ameliorated to make it palatable. It always leads to the same end as it is described in Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom”.
The best I can do is thank him for the bottom of my heart for expressing tyranny so well (for the splendid education of what tyranny looks like as it approaches the full totalitarian end of the spectrum) and just accept that he must have had a blind spot.
I know nothing regarding his views on women other than what I glean from his works, and in this quote you posted, I feel there is some truth in it.
Some.
Not all.
But women, overall being verbal (and men, visual) are more finely tuned to hear the nuances and inflections of speech, and thus, their ear would pick up the unmistakable (them) pitch and cadence of “unorthodoxy”. Men, being mainly visual, are better tuned in to the physical manifestations of thought that are, in the uninitiated (and sometimes, the initiated) person seen in the shapes and countours of the face, mouth, eyes, and bodily posture.
The disadvantage in this human dectector of unorthodoxy is found in men, who, looking for clues in these features, do not always see it, because people can can be quite skilled at controlling their face and posture quite well. I think that men are generally better at detecting facial deception (”unorthodoxy) than women (not always, and most certainly, not in my case) Which is why, at the very top, Poker champions are men.
Side Note: I intuited, rather than knew this, or probably heard it somewhere. So I just went onto Wikipedia to get a quick look. (This is one of the few types of info-gathering I will use it for-Wikipedia would have a hard time lying about Richard Nixon’s date of birth...) I was surprised at how one-sided it was.
And it wasn’t due to the dynamic described by Pierce Brosnan playing Thomas Crown in “The Thomas Crown Affair”, when he explained to his lover that his drive in the business world had nothing to with the money, and she baited him with with the declaration: “You like the chase.” He smugly said: “It’s like Poker. We don’t let you into the game.”
I do not play poker, but it HAS to be one of the most completely fair, performance based competitions that exist. You are either good, or not. Luck evens out over time and cream rises to the top. (Any poker players on FR who stumble across this and see this as completely untrue, please tell me straight up. I am making educated guesses here!)
So, getting back to it, I was talking about Orwell’s comments on women in that unflattering way, even though it is reserved for the subset of women who WOULD be looking for signs of “unorthodoxy”.
These visual, physical methods (used as a “detector” by men) were not developed to look for deception.
They were developed to look for threats. (These are my opinions by the way, drawn mostly from direct observation)
Men are using visual and physical cues developed in us to adeptly determine danger, and in this case, they are repurposing those packages of tools to detect deception or in this case, “unorthodoxy” as Orwell put it.
It works pretty well, but it has its flaws. Anyone who has taken even a cursory look at theories of body language can see that if someone has active knowledge of the theory (is “initiated” as described above) is is remarkably easy to fool someone who is either ignorant of it (is “un-initiated as mentioned above) or knows enough of it but not enough to know someone might use that knowlege to convey false information. It is on this rock that the “rep-purposed” toolset founders and can fail.
Unless the deceptive (or “unorthodox”) person is very skilled at controlling their appearance, a lot of people can see something is wrong without knowing why. They unconsciously pick up changes in the countenace or posture and “feel” rather than “know”.
All of us have looked at a painting of some person and knew instantly something was off, and it was not a good likeness. Usually it is the eyes. In the painting or drawing of a scene, if the perspective is off, many people, without any idea how or why feel a flaw in it that renders it unrealistic or even amateurish.)
And so it is with these things, that person skilled in this type of non-verbal warfare, will mislead someone who is not. And there is no “compensating” inner skill in men(such as audio cues)that can make up for it if someone isn’t talking.
But if someone IS talking, people are less able to hide their “unorthodoxy” over time. There are so many aspects of sound communication, such as language, tone of voice, cadence, sentence construction, and so on that betray the unorthodoxy and thus, must contantly be constructed, monitored, modulated, and filtered by the person in real time as they speak. And on top of that, women are also capable of visual cues as well.
When I was a kid, my mother would inform us that she could unerringly tell if we were lying, and I believe her.
A woman who is tuned to the sounds of unorthodoxy, listening to people (and they are not only better at verbal/speech processing but are more sensitively tuned in to the audible end of things in general) can hear something in a voice a man might miss. And, she has the additional ability view and factor in the physical changes that most uninitiated (unaware of the importance of non-verbal cues) people, not just men, might miss.
All that is why I don’t feel he was being sexist in that observation. He did, after all, have the real-time example of female Nazis, who were said to be among the most rabid “swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy” as Orwell put it.
But it’s mostly harmless coffee.
Just telling someone, repeating loudly if necessary, that you are not interested and wish to left alone does indeed protect you. Especially if you are sitting in a coffee shop with people around you.
Does not work as well if you are alone and unarmed in a dark alley but there would be no friendly barista there to help in any case.
Mostly peaceful.
It is true that the oversexualization of everything under the sun has caused issues but they really do need to get over it if they expect to have any sort of healthy relationship.
Not everyone is trying to get in their pants. Sometimes people are just being normal and friendly.
And gives you curly eyelashes.
It bats eyes too.
How it got them is anyone’s guess.
It likes the view, what can I say.
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