An open question to friends of Dean’s World: How has a technology changed your sense of boundaries, yourself in the world, with other people, who you thought you were?
Or has it? Tell me how a technological development altered a boundary in you, for good or ill. This is for a magazine article, a think piece, and my editor said it was perfectly fine for me to throw this question out. Nobody will be quoted without expressed permission.
I recall, for example, a discussion about the dilemma of witnessing a colleague’s wife (possibly) doing something unspeakable with a man not her husband. Stuff like that. How did that end by the way?
The question is: Have we lost our boundaries altogether, as a society? *
* That’s one of those annoying magazine cover questions that has no real answer.
*Update*: Bumped by Dean because it probably got lost in the kerfuffle on other stuff.
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Celia,
The technological developments that changed my life were two-fold:
1) While I was a US Army reservist on active duty in various stateside training units for two years late in the Korean war, I volunteered to undertake training as a typist. This may seem like nothing now, but few men could type in 1953, and among those, even fewer could touch-type using all eight fingers and both thumbs. One of the devices used to train us were typewriters without identification letters or numerals. There was no sense looking at the keyboard with these devices. You either knew the key and its alphanumeric function from memory, or you knew nothing at all.
Fairly soon, I mastered the technique, and some time later, I was offered an interesting clerical assignment on a military counts and boards unit which was part of our artillery group headquarters staff. Our role were to staff military courts martial activities, and in that, I became a relatively proficient trial recorder.
Back in civilian life in 1955, I discovered that my ability to type got me some of the more interesting work assignments I’ve ever had. For instance, in summer 1957, while I was an undergraduate student at the old Navy Pier campus of the University of Illinois in Chicago, I got a job with Science Research Associates, whose Test Research Department at that time was collating and analyzing results of surveys of science and mathemtics teachers who had attended special training seminars in the summers of 1955 and 1956. One of my assignments was to help classify open-ended survey responses so they could be coded, measured and cross-analyzed with other response data. Before my job there ended, I served as part of a team of people who put together the first National Merit Scholarship tests, and part of my assignments was to carry test forms to high schools in southern Illinois, oversee their distribution to students by the school staffs, then collect the completed surveys, drive them back to SRA headquarters in Chicago, where they were stored under lock and key.
Later, I was able to get jobs as an investigative reporter on a large suburban Chicago newspaper chain, and still later, as a bureau reporter with United Press International.
Still later, I got managerial jobs in public relations.
In all these work assignments, my ability to touch-type was part of what got me hired. We had a lot of communicating to do, but nobody had budgets to waste assigning secretarial services to other than top executives. And among reporters, all of them had to type their own stories. Some of them had to work with two fingers and one thumb. I was able to compete with them by using all 10 of mine.
2) The next major technologically based leap in my life came in late 1981, when I purchased one of the first IBM-PCs that showed up in Madison, Wisconsin, at a local franchise of the old BusinessWorld chain. Nobody knew much of anything about computers in general in 1981, and even less about the new microcomputers (Apple IIC and IBM-PC). So then and there, I had to teach myself how to write programs so I could put to use the old dBaseII interpreter-language database system (Ashton-Tate Software) and certain other products introduced for use in IBM’s new microcomputers.
That immediately led me to organize my own small business, first comprising research in remote access (online) science and engineering databases through the Lockheed Dialog network, for various engineering firms around the Madison area. Later, I shifted focus to assembling and marketing mailing lists from accessible and purchasable data, serving local markets.
Still later, I got involved in selling and performing change of address updates on customer mailing lists, as a licensee of the US Postal Service, and more recently, as a time-share licensee of one of the large postal software firms, with whom I am still involved.
A true story.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold, we really need to set you up with your own diary here on DW. I really want to start being able to keep these collected recollections of Arnold Harris where we can find them. You’re an ornery old cuss but I love reading you.
To answer Celia’s question, I’m not sure I fully understand it, but, in terms of boundaries, here’s my personal experience:
I am by nature a quiet person. This surprises some of my Meatspace* friends, because they don’t think of me that way. What most of them don’t know is that I make what I consider friends very rarely. When it comes to casual friends and acquaintances, I talk very little, and actually find small-talk almost painful. When I have a real friend, it’s hard to get me to stop talking. So my real friends don’t think of me as quiet at all, where as my meatspace casual friends/acquaintances think of me as quiet, even aloof or stuffy. I live with roommates whom I hugely appreciate and admire, but we aren’t “friends” in the intimate way and they think of me as very quiet and withdrawn. But I get together with close friends and we talk and talk and talk and talk. They even occasionally crticize me for being too open, too forthcoming.
So for me, in the real world, I have boundary issues. If I don’t consider you a close friend, I barely talk to you, I’m very cautious with you, I’m almost afraid to talk to you for fear of giving offense or being unwelcome, conversations are very short. It’s verrry hard for me to break those boundaries, not because I don’t like people per se but because, well, frankly, I’m an odd duck and I know it.
The internet, for me, shattered boundaries. (Although in my case the online experience predates the explosion of the internet, that’s another subject.) I share, pretty openly, the inner parts of myself, my thoughts and feelings, my passions and frustrations, with anyone who cares to read what I have to say.
Some would call this boundary-shattering effect a form of narcissism; sharing your most intimate thoughts and feelings for strangers does perhaps resemble or have elements of self-obsession. But at least in my case, having had an extremely difficult childhood and suffered from social awkwardness my entire life, it was, and is, almost miraculously wonderful and freeing and liberating. I can show the real me–or at least part of the real me–to the world, and anybody who doesn’t like it doesn’t have to read it.
It has also shattered the barriers of time in space in important areas. Before the internet, I could write a letter to a friend and they’d get it eventually and respond eventually and I’d get the response eventually. Email compresses all that. The down side: too much email. The up side: regular contact with people hundreds, thousands of miles away, or too busy to always come to the phone.
I have made friends, people I consider real, true friends–people who could contact me and ask me for practically anything and I would do anything I could for them–solely through the internet. I’ve also kept friends I would have lost without the internet; my meatspace friend Kevin D is like a brother to me; he moved a thousand miles away, but it doesn’t matter, I “see” him all the time in Cyberspace, and that Cyberspace contact winds up encouraging and facilitating phone contact too. We talk on the phone at least once a week. He’s in Texas, I’m in Michigan, and while it still sucks sometimes that he’s not here (we can’t get together and go to a movie or play video games–the bastard won’t get an Xbox Live Gold account) the friendship stays, and I know it just wouldn’t without the internet.
Those shattered boundaries have their down side. I have people who hate me who I’ve never met. I’ve have people attack me personally in truly vicious ways, in ways others would even consider frightening. Personally, I’m extremely difficult to frighten (I’ve had the experience of nearly dying, and I’ve had people in meatspace physically attack me more than once, and I long ago conquered personal fear), but I’ve been afraid for others, including family and friends, by anonymous and psychotic-seeming personal attacks and smears. And no, I am not *just* referring to recent events discussed here. I do have fears for what some psycho might do to someone I love. And I am enormously protective of my friends, possibly sometimes to a fault, so if you threaten someone I care about I tend to go on Red Alert and fire all guns at once.
I’m getting distracted. The boundaries shattered by the internet have allowed me to make intimate and wonderful contact with people that would be simply impossible without it. But it does carry its down side: the boundary-shattering effect leaves me and others more vulnerable to attacks that could never have happened otherwise.
In a way, I think it’s a subset of what famous celebrities go through: people you don’t even know can now know you. That’s really cool a lot of the time, but not always.
Let me summarize: for me, the boundaries of the internet have brought me cherished friends, taught me things I never would have learned, and allowed me to make human contact that enriched and rewarded my life, and I would not be without it. It’s also led me to occasionally embarrass myself, writing about things I shouldn’t have, intemperately saying things I shouldn’t have, and so on. But I wouldn’t give it up for the world.
* – “Meat-space” is tongue-in-cheek internet lingo. Cyberspace is what we inhabit when we’re online interacting like this, Meat-space is where you’re interacting with your meat, i.e. bodily presence. I suppose to some it sounds gross but it’s meant to be humorous. I’ve never met you in Meatspace, Celia, but I consider you a friend anyway, a very real one, even though we’ve only met in Cyberspace.
Not sure if this is germane & I don;’t think this could happen anymore. Today’s military has internet service; I can talk to my son on deployment in Iraq, can do the skype thing & actually see him; beats a collect phone to home call any day. The military today has no appreciation for the isolation in deployments not that long ago.
In the Navy for 6 years 1974-1980, overseas for part of it. I missed the three-point rule change in basketball, which wasn’t a big deal because I don’t watch the sport anyway. I went to a pro game last year & was flummoxed to see them awarding 3-points for some shots & really didn’t understand why; felt like a real dope for long-standing ignorance.
Mike: I’m pretty sure it does still happen, and it’s one of the positive sides, and it’s an illustration of the internet shattering boundaries.
There’s a negative side of shattering boundaries, that we haven’t touched on, but I’ll tell a somewhat similar story to yours.
A couple of years ago I was on Xbox Live–that’s Microsoft’s Internet gaming service for those who don’t know, and not only can you play games with people on it, but it features voice chat, so you can put on a headset and talk to whoever you’re playing with.
Anyway, I got into a shooting match in a game called Halo 3, my then-current obsession. It’s a science fiction shoot ‘em up game, you either shoot at aliens or, more fun, get in matches with other people and shoot each other. Think of it sort of like paintball with laser guns.
You get into these random matches where you team up with random strangers, and you can strategize together, joke together, or just generally bullshit while you figure out how to survive while trying to waste the other team.
And so we’re just chatting, and we like each other so we stuck together for more than a half hour of play and I just casually mentioned I was in Michigan and asked where he was, and he told me he was currently in Iraq, on deployment over there. Playing with me in a tent near where their communication gear was. Not on the sly, either, no one minded, he wasn’t the only one who’d use this, the soldiers there enjoyed using the internet for entertainment while off duty and they were in fact encouraged to use the equipment so long as the techies assured them it couldn’t hurt anything or interfere with anything important (which it couldn’t).
Not long after that I started semi-regularly playing with a Marine who was in a military hospital–in Germany, I’m pretty sure–doing rehab because he’d had one of his hands badly mangled in combat, amongst other things losing one of his thumbs. He was trying to learn to work with his new impairment, and it was tough but playing Halo was helping him get good at adapting.
I still can’t imagine what a pain in the ass it was for him, but I also always thought, “damn, 30 years ago this guy would have been so goddamned lonely and bored stuck in a goddamned military hospital with nothing to do, and here he was able to meet people from ordinary life, connect with them, PLAY with them.”
There are reams that can be written about the inappropriate ways the internet can shatter boundaries–people being exhibitionists, people anonymously smearing and atacking others, people getting addicted and forgetting how to function in the real world, etc., but anyone who thinks there’s no positive side to all this isn’t paying much attention. If this kid had been wounded that way in Viet Nam, or Korea, or before, his story would be so different it’s not even comparable.
I wrote yesterday, to thank Dean and Arnold, (it got lost or I pressed something wrong) now I add P Mike to the list. Thank you–this is all very helpful.
Is JayMaster around perchance? I wondered how that…incident…ended.
Okay, Dean, I think that idea of an online diary is a great idea. How would I implement it?
By the way, I ought to have included the coming of the internet revolution as the third great technological revolution that has shaped my life.
How do I get in touch with you by email and telephone these days? Your old contact info doesn’t seem to work anymore. Send me an email with all this. You certainly have my email address in your login system.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold: We’re working on implementing diaries.
I’ll shoot you an email.
I’ll shoot Jay a note.
Put this story on the front page, please. I read it out loud to Mrs. Wince.
Yours,
Wince
Message was acknowledged therefore now removed.
McKiernan: Well I guess it would depend on which hospital where I suppose. The point is, here he was, interacting with someone from back home, a human touch from far away but still there and real.
Well he seemed to like it anyway.
removed…
Not a direct answer to your question, Celia, but for your article it might be worthwhile to briefly sketch the impact of some of the *earlier* boundary-removing technologies. A couple of examples:
1)Comment by an un-named journalist shortly after the introduction of the telegraph: “This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all *here*.”
2)Heinrich Heine, then living in Paris, on the coming of the railroads: “I feel the mountains and forests of all countries advancing towards Paris. Already, I smell the scent of German lime-trees; the North-Sea breaks on my doorstep.”
3)Joseph Roth, writing in Berlin in the 1920s: “There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack”
See my post Duz Web Mak Us Dumr?
I’m not sure the question of observing a colleague’s spouse (or someone who might be the colleague’s spouse) in an infidelity is all that new. I think for as long as there has been infidelity, there have been accidental observations of same. The Internet gives us a different setting in which that can happen, but it doesn’t create the situation.
Wow.
Kind of interesting reading what Dean said, because in many respects my situation is the opposite.
I’m pretty much exactly the person in “meat space” as I am online. What the Internet did for me however was eliminate the boundaries of space and time so that I could interact with orders of magnitude more people than I otherwise could before.
I also realized it attenuated boundaries of class as well, which I came to appreciate only later in life were much more profound than I had appreciated in my naive earlier days.
I enjoy interaction.
Oh my, where to start! I’ve been tied up with foreign visitors all week, and now I seem to have some sort of virus on my PC. But I’m slowly getting caught up on the rest of the world.
I’ve got several anecdotes to share on this subject, plus I want to comment on Dean’s comments, but first I’ll address the burning question of how the coworker’s situation ended up.
I came to the conclusion that “MYOB” was the best route to take, so initially, I did nothing. But then I saw my co worker (actually, I’m his boss) and his wife at our office Christmas party, and there was obviously some conflict going on between the two. That got me motivated to say something to him. During my holiday break, I worked up a scheme, and it was actually a modern day internet enabled chain of events.
Let’s call my coworker with the potentially cheating wife “Ted”. Ted and I have another coworker who is located 2000 miles away, with whom we are both very good friends. Let’s call him Bob.
Bob and Ted and I are in email communication almost daily, with many conference calls and web meetings too. And we meet face to face 5-6 times a year. And on top of that that, we’re all part of a group of 6-8 emailers who share humorous political and sometimes mildly pornographic emails. Mostly semi nekkid women. I’m sure you’ve all seen that stuff…..
We had been talking for years about having Bob come to our office Christmas party, and it just so happened that this year, he actually made it out. This was the first time Bob met Ted’s wife, which gave me my opening.
I gave Bob a call, and told him about my dilemma, and my plan. He checked out the link, and agreed with me on the likeness. And he agreed to help out. He sent a humorous email to Ted, along the lines of “Dude, I knew your wife reminded me of someone, and it’ this chick here I saw online!!”
Ted didn’t respond for about a week. So Bob and I were both sweating bullets for a while. But eventually he did reply, and basically said “Wow, that does look like her. I hate to bust your bubble, but I can assure it’s not her.”
And that was that.
I later learned that Ted’s problems with his wife were related to a gambling problem she had recently developed. Or at least that’s what he told me.
All in all, I feel like I met all my personal and professional responsibilities.
Those first 6-7 paragraphs are the best description I have ever read, of ME!!!
Dean and I have never met in meat space. And we come from very different backgrounds, and live very different lives today.
But damn, that description fits me to a T. Maybe that’s why I agree with Dean on so many issues.
My gosh. Jay, I was really expecting no good end to that story at all, but your solution was ingenious.
Gargh, every story we’re coming up with has a happy tale to it. I was almost hoping for something darker from somebody–the internet is *not* all sunshine and roses and *does* bring out bad in people.
Well, there is a dark side to Jay’s tale I suppose, which is that this entire affair *could* be seen as gossip/inuendo–it could have gone totally the other way, if you and your buddies were real scumbags you could have utterly humiliated this woman with the “proof” and made her deny it and all those awful things that, fortunately having a conscience, you worked so hard to avoid.
You handled it class with people you trusted. It could sooooo have gone another way.
I met my wife online – and she was living in Shanghai at the time.
I had lived in Beijing, but had never been any near Shanghai. I guess that counts :)
I’m not sure that changed “boundaries”, since I’ve been using the Internet since the ARPAnet days in the early 1980s. The first time I used realtime chat with someone in Japan in 1984, I knew this would be big. (But I wasn’t smart enough to invest – grump…)
As for David’s comment, the telegraph really was the biggest boundary-changing communications tech since the taming of the horse. For the first time in human civilization, news could travel faster than a messenger on a fast horse or ship.
A good way to see just how big the world was before the telegraph is to watch the HBO miniseries “John Adams”. Communications between Boston and John Adams’ farm in a nearby town was much slower than us talking to the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn. And anything involving oceans took months or more.
foo,
That comment on the speed of communications in all the long ages before the advent of telegraphy was one of the more perceptive and interesting thoughts that I have read in a long time. From poking around in your own blogsite, I see that you are a technologist. An appropriate and well-deserved descriptor.
An excellent example of the effects of pre-telegraphy communications was the Battle of New Orleans, in which General Andrew Jackson’s american troops were fighting british imperial troops about two months after the treaty was signed in Europe ending the War of 1812. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Ghent
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sorry to dissappoint but I have another feel good story.
My sister died suddenly in December. (Middle of 5 girls). My mother wasn’t well enough to travel and my oldest sister felt the need to stay with her in Fla, as my Dad was already in NY visiting another sister and my nephew whose mother died when it happened. Trying to plan a funeral was turning into a nightmare and things were leaning toward having 2 – one in NY and a service in Fla.
Enter Skype! It saved the day. Thanks to laptops, WiFi and Skype my mother and sister attended the funeral via modern technology. We used the webcam before the wake to show Mom and sis all the flowers and the casket and everything. Then we set up Skype in the back hall and everyone “visited” my Mom and Sis via Skype. A friend helped to link them into the church video system so they could watch the funeral. (Did you know a lot of churches now broadcast Sunday Mass for shut ins?) We set up Skype again at the after funeral brunch.
They didn’t miss out on a thing! This was so important to my Mom and sister – I can’t tell you how much it meant to them that we found a way for them to be there.
The funeral home was impressed and was planning on developing a service for their clients based on our idea. (I’m sure they’ll charge a pretty penny for what we did for free.)
Also re the telegraph..Tom Standage’s book “The Victorian Internet” deals with parallels between the social impact of the telegraph and that of the Internet. One of his stories:
George McCutcheon was in the business of selling periodicals, and he wanted to be able to take orders on the net. He wasn’t very into technology, so he asked his teenage daughter, Maggie, to handle that part of the business. Maggie soon had the connection working, but also used it to flirt with many men she met on-line. She invited one of them, Frank, to visit her in the real world. Her father found out, and was furious…furious to the point that he threatened to kill her if she saw Frank again. Maggie had her father arrested and charged with threatening behavior.
This happened in the 1880s, with the “net” referred to being the telegraph network.
A few more thoughts on this. One of the effects of travel and communications technologies is to allow people to pick their associations based on common interests rather than accidents of geography. Chesterton argued that this has a real downside:
“The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique….The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell”
I think that Chesterton’s words represent an important truth, but by no means the whole truth. It is true that much is lost in modern society to the extent that people only associate with others like them. But it is also true that much is lost in traditional societies to the extent that people are denied the opportunity to seek out others of similar interests. And also, in traditional societies, the “fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences” of which Chesterton writes are often to a large extent mediated by standardized and ritualistic behavior.
Related thoughts from Peter Drucker.
Thank you again everybody here for giving your energy, thoughts, experiences to this project. All perspectives are nourishing the final essay, in which I expect to come down resoundingly in favor of boundaries, even if it means I have to abdicate some of my notions of liberty. (Age does this, eh?)
Sexual boundaries, on the internet, are obviously totally obliterated. I don’t find what I have seen online over the past few hours shocking, so much as I find it extremely depressing.
What does confuse me utterly is WHERE all these thousands upon thousands of extremely extremely exhibisionistic girls and women come from, spiritually or financially or morally or whatever. They all look the same and they are all repeating the exact same motions like some kind of military formation. And how do they get so enthusiastic about these men, who seem reduced to helpless studs in this new sex-flooded internet dystopia.
GOD how weird.
It’s like reversing, imploding, the entire concept of the feminine realm, which has always seemed to me to be about the dynamic of escaping the identity as sexual object in ORDER to be able to have status, protection, serenity, etc.
Clearly, the only subversive thing left now is romantic love.
“When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself. Anybody moving into a new world loses identity…So loss of identity is something that happens in rapid change. But everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody. This is what’s called the masked man. The masked man has no identity. He is so deeply involved in other people that he doesn’t have any personal identity.”
– McLuhan, quoted in Forward Through The Rearview Mirror
“Because the camera sees but cannot think, it doesn’t matter who sings the undying songs of love, or whether the twenty-four-hour circus parade goes nowhere except around in circles. Nothing necessarily follows from anything else; what is important is the surge and volume of emotion, not its object or its subject…Narrative dissolves into montage and knowledge becomes a matter of instantly recognizing the iconography (Osama’s beard, the Nike swoosh, Ralph Lauren’s polo player, Howard Dean’s upraised fist); history reverts to myth, and politics collapse into the staging of pageants sometimes accompanied by a fall of brightly colored balloons.”
– Lewis Lapham, Harper’s Magazine (May 2004)
I’m not sure I agree with this. I’m not especially feminine, so perhaps my perspective isn’t common, but I am female, and I don’t see myself in a realm where I’m trying to escape my identity as a sexual object (or at least I didn’t back when I had the wherewithal to be considered as a sexual object). I didn’t want that to be my *whole* identity, that’s all. I don’t think men have to forfeit their sexuality to have status or security, and I’d rather, in my ideal world, not have to forfeit mine to have those things either.
And, sometimes, being looked at can be fun, if it’s a situation of safety where the looked-at retain some control over the situation and aren’t at the mercy of the lookers. I would think that making an Internet video voluntarily might satisfy those conditions for some people. I don’t think, for example, that most of the young women in those videos would go to the supermarket naked, so they retain *some* boundaries.
The Very Model of the Metaphor
The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.
– Chip Morningstar
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
Marshall McLuhan
Oh no,
You’re a canadian ? Why haven’t you told us.
Okay addressing the issue;
“How has a technology changed your sense of boundaries, yourself in the world, with other people, who you thought you were?”
The internet has made possible the fact that the joe and jane schmoos of the world can actually comment on the internet.
Now consider this young lady and her unique individual spirit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8XkYjc11lA
So now five years later this young woman is still able to get a message out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z2CYV9ho0Y
But, here, in America it seems we live in one huge dumbed down, media driven, mono-culture. Like everyone needs to get into box A or Box B, either of which from which deadly daggers of truth cross each.
But, english girl continues on with her own creative thrust.
I’m for that stuff.
Celia: The movements aren’t fascist. They’re mammalian.
I expect part of this is we’re just about exactly the same age and we were taught that “objectification of women” was “subjugation of women” and thus I think was one of the things that confused an entire generation of men and women (especially the liberal-minded types our age). I know it certainly confused the hell out of me, and upset me, and gave me some painful experiences I had to unlearn.
I don’t know how much I should write on this here, but, I think feminism had some good arguments and some bad arguments, some good ideas and some bad ones. I can think of several in both directions, from both men’s and women’s perspective, which is why I hesitate to write more than a little but:
Why should escaping status as being sexually desirable be the same thing as gaining status, power, independence? That’s wrongly binary to me, when the real answer is orthogonal to both. Women HAVE a natural power over men sexually–feminism seemed to deny the very possibility that this is true, to even suggest that saying they do was somehow oppressive. Well in that, they were wrong. Women do have such power.
The grinding and the predictable movements you see in the exhibitionist videos? Watch mating behavior in other higher mammals. We’re so different? I think not; there’s only so many ways in body language to say “here I am, come get me if you can.” That’s human nature at its most primal and primitive, and what you’re seeing (I think) is young women unhealthily using a POWER THEY HAVE as part of our species.
When you look at what professional strippers do, I think someone’s definitely being used, definitely being exploited, just like the feminists said. But they missed it: it’s the men, not the women, being exploited.
You can’t go back to the era of the ’60s and ’70s when Playboy and Penthouse magazine were relevant (way more than they are now) and tell me most of the women in those magazines were doing it solely for the money. Yes, a few here and there, but mostly, they enjoyed it; it was a power trip.
It’s the same now. These young women aren’t even paid for it, or not paid much. They don’t care, because it’s about power. THEIR power.
This is not to say men don’t have power over women. That’s different spheres, different circumstances. The feminist mistake was in the false belief that women never had any power in the first place. They do. They always did. They still do. And we watch these young women flashing and gyrating on the internet and are surprised? They’re enjoying a power they have, real power, biological power, primal power. It’s amazing we can’t see this when it’s so obvious.
We were taught this was men objectifying and subjugating women. It wasn’t. It’s women exploiting men–their loneliness, their biological urges. Sometimes, in some men, it reaches a pathological level that drives violence and rape, but mostly it doesn’t. In fact, some male anger at feminism stemmed from angry confusion: “you said you were just like us, that all these differences were social, so why don’t you want to be casual about sex just like us–you must hate us or just be stuck up?”
When all along we should have just been saying the truth: girls aren’t as casual about sex, stop expecting them to be. Boys are more anxious to jump into sex; stop making them feel bad and guilty about that, start finding ways to channel THAT in healthy directions too, and to teach girls to handle it in a healthy way. Start finding ways to LIKE these differences, appreciate them, put them in positive directions.
Look, I’ve been to strip clubs three times. Once purely out of curiosity–I’d never been. Once because a buddy cajoled me. The last, because I was dragged to one at a bachelor party (I specifically requested no such thing at my own). Do you know how I feel in a strip club? Exploited. Like I’m paying someone to tease me, paying someone to pretend to be my friend. I feel cheapened, and used, and I’m far from the only guy who feels that way. I’m amazed most of the men there don’t see that in themselves.
It was wrongheaded binary thinking that got us into all this confusion in the first place. And now as a whole society we’re still confused about it, but at least we’re a bit less angry about it. These days. I think.
(I don’t know if that all made sense or not. I hope some of it did. I need to go to bed. But these girls are exploiting their own power for their own gratification. That’s what it is. The boundary change has made them feel free to do that without consequence–although most of them probably haven’t thought through the long-term consequences and dangers, short term they’re young and don’t see it yet. It’s just exploitation for the power to exploit: they, the girls, exploiting the boys. Eventually as they get older most of them will figure it out. I hope.)
I posted this on Facebook this morning. Not retracting.
I used to feel so sorry for the hamsters when they put their tiny paws against that metal water bottle. I’m starting to feel we are all reduced to hamsters and this is the cold water bottle that is all we got. I bet it will take about five seconds before somebody starts lecturing me about how unprecedented and great the Internet is. What a tool of liberation!
What a load of bollocks.
Dean,
You wrote:
“Celia, the movements aren’t fascist. They’re mammalian.”
Chill out, bro.
Do you realize what a strong tendency you have to correct me as though I were a car engine? Sorry to use gender stereotypes.
I understand you are a man and men have to fix things that are broken all the time, and you do it all day long. I understand it. But thoughts and ideas we explore can’t be wrong, they can only be on their WAY to integrating into something larger. In other words, the sea refuses no river, like Pete Townshend said in a song.
The motions I saw were fascist. That is to say: Identical. Repetative. Mechanical/industrial in their rythm. This conversation could easily become completely crackers so let’s call a truce. k?
Maggie,
That’s a comforting story. I’m glad you all had the inventiveness to handle it that way. I’m sorry to hear about your sister.
Your comment makes the editor in me want to assign a piece on technology and burial rituals. But I guess we have enough problems…
Elizabeth…yeah, I see what you mean. This is a huge subject (or maybe about 10 different ones) and if I came across as being prunish and disapproving of these girls, I guess…I just feel that they are debasing the currency that I myself am stuck with, ie being female, not feeling it is possible, quite, to get anywhere. Damned if you do damned if you don’t. I am becoming increasingly conservative as I age. I found myself telling a young very beautiful Ukrainian girl who worked for me for a while to simply not let anybody touch her until he has mapped out what kind of a LIFE he wishes to build with her. For her I want a man clear like my great grandfather, who took one look at my great grandmother in Russia and asked for her hand in marriage, and even sailed BACK to Russia to get her. AND paid 300 kopeks to the family of the girl whose time he had wasted by courting her before he saw my great grandmother.
All I want to talk about now is to do with pre-modern life which I have romanticized hopelessly.
I want to join some kind of Russian Jewish Peasant re-enactment society. I am NOT kidding. Take me back!!!
A few years back I was trainning leaders for the scouting movement. The “politically correctness” was strangling the fun out of everything. So I got a hold of a book: Scouting for Boys, by R.S. Baden-Powel. This was the opinions of the man who wrote the book that got the kids excited enough to start scouting. {Then the adults figured someone should be running the show and now it is organized. Not as fun but organized.}
In this book R.S. B-P, made a statement which I used to lighten up the leaders. To show themthat though tecnology is changing our world it isn’t really something to worry about. It is always changing and the youth just adapt quicker.
Now I have passed on the book so I can not directly quote…
BP states ” I am concerned with this new tecnology. Where the youth of today stay inside, looking at this screen which has a tendency to mesmorize and result on a collosal waste of time. Though to be fair, I suppose it could be used , cautiosly, to educate…”
He was talking about motion pictures.
But it still resonated a few years ago. Wonder what he would think of the folks geocasheing? Packing little screens with them into the outdoors. Watching co-ordinates instead of the beauty around them. Damn GPS.
For it used to be you would want to go into the wilderness and find no sign that anyone had been there before you. You would be depressed to find thier garbage. Now, because they told you where it was, thier garbage, You are thrilled to find it!
On that point I am lost.
“they are debasing the currency that I myself am stuck with, ie being female”
cute, profound, self deprecating. wow. I am deeply impressed.
P Mike: That is sarcastic, right?
God help us get off this thing.
I think it’s sort of natural for people to get more conservative as they get older; our perceptions of risk vs. benefit change. The only problem I have with this tendency is that people who are experiencing it tend to conceptualize it as, “when I was younger, I was foolish, and now I am wise,” as opposed to, “when I was younger, I had that set of priorities and therefore ordered my life that way, now I have this set of priorities and order my life this way”.
I guess middle age is hitting me differently. Now more than ever, I don’t want my bod and my ability to gyrate to be my currency at all, because time is debasing it faster than an Internet’s worth of young women with exhibitionistic tendencies ever could. I think those young women are taking much more of a risk than they realize, and that it’s kind of too bad they don’t have anything more satisfying to do, but at the same time sexual stuff is kind of fun, and I’d hate to see a return to a society where a young woman can’t have any of that kind of fun because that’s the only currency she has and if she ‘spends’ it having fun she’s doomed.
And I have never never never experienced a moment’s worth of longing for the life of a Jewish Russian peasant! (OK, Romanian in my case, but I doubt it was all that different.) Because, with the lack of anesthesia, and the lack of food, and the pogroms, and the … I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason my grandparents came here as soon as it was humanly possible, and I never heard my grandmother once wax nostalgic about life in the Old Country. She wouldn’t even let my dad learn Yiddish.
My brain does work in stereotypically male ways sometimes. And then sometimes not at all.
Mostly I have this problem where I instinctively analyze–can’t stop myself from analyzing–everything that comes in my path. Then I share my analyses. I don’t think I’m correcting anyone, but they think I am. I don’t think I’m trying to prove I’m smarter than them, but they think I am. In the physical world what this usually means is I shut up and don’t talk to people much unless I think I’ve found a kindred spirit (and I’ve found them so very rarely, even in jobs where I’ve met dozens of new people a day).
In the cyberworld I let fly whatever’s in my brain. And you inscrutable earthlings can take it or leave it.
Inscrutable earthlings, the lot of you.
;-)
Elizabeth,
I know I was being preposterous about Russian Peasants. I was trying to “own” that.
I am going to stop saying yang on the internet.
I actually think he was being nice.
Text communications are so weird. We gain much when we strip away the confusions caused by voice timbre, tone, inflection, body language. And we lose much when we strip away the useful information in voice timbre, tone, inflection. I’ve never been able to sort it out when the written word is better and when it’s not.
There I go analyzing for earthlings again. But anyway, I think Mike was paying you a compliment. You’re funnier and more insightful than you think you are, I think.
Come to my neighborhood for Shabbos — it’s not Williamsburg or Crown Heights but it’s a start…
No pogroms, either.
I am going to stop saying yang on the internet.
You’d better not, or I’ll have to say all sorts of Yin about you.
Don’t make me yingry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m yingry.
Yeah, I have a friend whose father was from Lithuania, and he always reminds us when we talk about the glory of the spiritual life in the old country, “One thing I never heard my father say was he wished he was back in LitteM.”
(That’s Yiddish for Lithuania. We do still speak a bit of that.)
Elizabeth: When I was younger (and more foolish, maybe not–you make a good point about that) I usually looked upon romanticization of the past with scorn. Then I got older (and wiser, or maybe just faux-wiser) and realized it has its place.
Every time society experiences a profound change, even a very positive one, it does bring negatives about. Always.
Say what you want about sexual repression in the era where a boy had to go get a girl’s family’s permission just to court her let alone be alone in a room with her, and all its oppressiveness, it also had its positive side: clear communications, clear understanding on all sides.
That’s just one example, there’s many others. We live now in a society where it’s possible, common even, to feel utterly, desperately alone, lonely, and isolated and confused about what you can do or say to or with anyone, even living in a city of a million people.
There are probably more than ten thousand people living within one mile of me (seriously, I did the math once) yet I know almost no one here, and perhaps two very well, and we aren’t close.
Alone in a sea of people. Preposterous, but true. When we lived in small villages, it was not possible to be like this. But then, it was often the opposite: talk to people from such small communities, and often they felt absolutely suffocated, absolutely unable to have any privacy, unable to escape gossip and constant judgment of everybody who knew you.
What I think stuff like hstorical re-enactment societies and whatnot are doing is trying to rediscover the good in the things we gave up in the past, without bringing the bad that came along with it. How cool it could be to live in a medieval village if you didn’t have the medieval sanitary conditions and poverty, for example. And to be able to take that when you want it, and leave the rest.
Celia: I’ll make you a pact. If we ever meet in real world, if you will put on a peasant dress, I will put on a peasant pants and man-blouse, and we will learn a peasant dance. We’ll make it a date. And if it doesn’t happen, we’ll remember it as great times that never were, and it will be fun anyway. :-D
The funny thing is, you live in Orthodox Jewry (Jewdom?). To a very large extent, having witnessed the Orthodox Jewish community in action, it’s striking how it is fundamentally an effort to hold on very tightly to the old ways, the old traditions of your people, without completely eschewing the modern. And a constant battle for that community to decide what new things to allow, and what not to allow. I think partly that’s religious observance of course, but also I think is what binds the community. And you, in particular, I know, CHOSE it. You could have chosen Reform, or Conservative, and decided no, this was where you belonged, or where God wanted you, or both.
The community faces the same problems: the young people who can’t stand it, find it stuffy and confining. And others who wouldn’t give it up for anything.
Just my goyim-ish (goyish?) observation. I have no profound statement about it except to observe it.
We as humans often desperately want privacy.
We also often desperately want attention.
We’re often impossible to please, aren’t we?
I think the Internet is much less anomie-generating than is television. I was never much of a TV-watcher, and have been watching basically none lately…except I had to switch from Netflix to network TV to continue watching a series, and was impressed with what a bizarre experience it felt like. The whole idea of devoting an evening to watching whatever sequence of content was selected by some network executive somewhere was really pretty strange, although I understand the technical and economic reasons for this. With the Internet, I read and interact with people with intelligence, perceptiveness, and interesting personal histories, and have become friends with some of them in “real life”…others I know only on-line but still value highly.
Celia, I doubt if you would have been very happy as a Russian peasant. You seem like an independent and even iconoclastic thinker, and these traits tend to be tolerated only to a very limited extent in peasant societies, especially among women.
I’m a female college-educated computer programmer with two children who were both birthed via deeply necessary c-sections. I was able to have the relationships I wanted to in my twenties without loss of status. I can own my own property and keep my wages, vote, and wear blue jeans without censure (a right I avail myself of nearly 99% of the time, much to George Will’s consternation). I have a hard time imagining a more romantic era than the one I’m in!
Which is not to say that it’s perfect. I’m absolutely sure that my husband and I spend more time fighting about household responsibilities than if our roles were more clearly defined. I agree with you about the loneliness, and I’d add in stress as a huge problem. I think there are all kinds of negatives in modern life. I’m just not willing to fix them by agreeing to give up any of the above.
Dean,
You make me laugh. But don’t get me over-excited about this peasant business. What ethnicity are we by the way? I could get almost as excited about Swedish peasants, or even better we could don LAPP garb, meaning YOU would have a big red pompom atop your bright blue hat. I would be stuck with a bonnet.
True story: When I was in (Swedish) Lappland in 2001, I tried to buy one of those crazy Lapp hats (pictures to follow) with the red pompom and I had every intention of wearing it on Broadway, but my (male) Lapp guide would not allow a female to buy a male hat so I had to buy a bonnet which was not what I wanted. Not sure I can find pictures. Lapps hate having their clothing photographed or taken out of Lappland. This all brings me to another point: I have a friend in Sweden, Urban, who claims the Lapps were a construct of the Swedish welfare state, and never really existed the way we (romantically) think. Must probe. Possibly rubbish.
He’s probably serious there, Celia, and I’d jump on it if I were you.
For some reason I’m thinking Lithuanian. Love those skirts. And don’t make me explain, but I have this “thing” about babushkas on young women. I said don’t make me explain it. Something to do with Tuesday Weld I think. But they’re *hot*. Also Lithuanian cooking is the bomb.
I like the blousy big shirts for men. They’re so cool, no one wears them anymore.
http://www.images.com/image/213815/portrait-of-sami-traditional-national-costume-lainio-lapland-finland/
You know what? Looking at this…I wonder if there isn’t an element of Swedish state propaganda after all. But what a GREAT hat.
That was what I wanted.
http://angelasancartier.net/folk-dress-western-europe
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