ROY: Lying To Yourself: The Power Of Unsophisticated Personalization
I wondered what intuitive prejudices I could expose this week. Would the awareness of my own hand interfere with my auto-intervention? Given the past few weeks of this class, I shouldnāt have been surprised at all. The elephant is powerful.
Two posts informed this weekās experiment. Leah Reich, User Researcher at Slack and Sociologist, wrote The Value Of Empathy as a response toĀ cultural and corporate notions around the idea of āempathetic companies.ā This passage stuck with me:
But language like āsoftā and āhardā is incredibly loaded and gendered. Lots of women are exceptional at āhard skills,ā and there are certainly men who excel at āsoft skills.ā But softness is, at least in recent tradition, considered a more feminine trait, while hardness is masculine. Emotional labor is womenās work.
Single Women Are Our Most Potent Political ForceĀ isĀ adaptedĀ from Rebecca Traisterās recently published book, āAll the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.ā It focuses on the current US elections and recent economic and sociological reasons related to voting patterns for single women.
I revisited it in light of Leahās piece and wondered, how much of it can I understand? What does it mean to really understand? How can we understand other people?
To see what my own biases might reveal I modified Danās Chrome Extension and set about swapping female-gendered pronouns with male-gendered pronouns.
That incredibly simple, yet conscious process itself was forced a basic examination of gendered identity: women/men, mother/father, girl/boy, motherhood/fatherhood, she/he, wifey/hubby, maid/manservant, feminist/menās rightās activist (not really an analogue!), etc.. None of this is surprising, but demonstrates the simple power of media that is centered on those that are different from yourself.
I also considered āpersonalizingā the extension further to swap for racial identity, but decided to keep it simple by focusing on gender.
As I reread the piece through the filter of the extension (and continually updated the extension), I was surprised to find that I was highly sensitive to the gendered swaps even though I knew I was responsible for them. Other socio-political-racial dynamics felt the same regardless of the gender changes.
what am I accepting as reality and what feels congruent?
what causes tension/discomfort? I feel some ingrained part of my unconscious mind fighting with my conscious mind (sexist/racist parts of me coming through)?
is this simplistic, blatant reversal reveal something about how menās rightās activists see the world?
I wondered if IĀ engaged with the piece more closely when it was gender-swapped to represent (gender-wise) āme.ā This is really troubling because itās so dumb and demonstrates the power of how we relate to media and the narratives being presented. Does this mean that Iām valuing this narrative over the other in an unconscious way? To paraphrase Dan, āIām being a sexist bastard.ā
The notion of storytelling and cinema as powerful means to speak to our unconsciousness has come up in class. This experiment raises questions of the representations of the self in media that weāre presented with, that we consume, and the narratives we prioritize.
What happens when weāre presented with an environment or culture when weāre presented with the narratives and representationsĀ of (face, genitalia, bodies, beliefs) similar to our own?
What happens when weāre rarely presented with narratives and representations similar to our own? Or when those representationsĀ are terrible stereotypes?
None of these are new questions, yetĀ itās surprising to see what happens when the identities are flipped. I ended up examining my own ideas of gender, power, race a little more closely to make sense of the story.Ā It takes effort to step outside of our own identities and explore differences when the familiar is so comfortable. And when the familiar doesnāt represent us, it feels like tremendous effort to seek, tell, and share those stories as well.
Read the gender-swapped exceptĀ Single Men Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America ā nymag.com. Converted with āread nowā since the swaps were making parts of the original webpage unreadable.
It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what male life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent male adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult men who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.
Many single men, across classes and races, would like to marry ā or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, and many of them do, partnering or cohabiting without actually marrying. Still, the rise of the single man is an exciting turn of historical events because it entails a complete rethinking of who men are and what family is and who holds dominion within it ā and outside it.
If black men were working all day (often scrubbing the homes of white men), it was impossible for them also to fulfill the at-home maternal ideal that white men were being celebrated for. If black men had a harder time getting educations and jobs, earning competitive wages or securing loans, it was harder for them to play the role of provider. If there were no government-subsidized split-levels to fill with publicly educated children, then the nuclear family chute into which white men were being funneled was not open to most black men. Itās not that black men simply happened not to experience mid-ā50s domesticity; they were actively barred from it, trapped in another way ā walled off in underserved neighborhoods by highways that shuttled fairly remunerated white husbands back to husbands who themselves had been walled off in well-manicured, stultifying suburbs.