Top Posts Tagged with #an affront.

#gender is a social contract.

#Unfortunately!!!

#Like ok. I know that the nature of communication is on a continuum with manipulation and likewise that

#all social interactions are functionally on a continuum with power dynamics.

#I don't like to take a hardline view on that because often in my experience people who really harp on

#'All communication is manipulation' also have personal communication styles I don't tend to enjoy

#But I'm not out here earnestly believing we can actually scrub posturing and power plays out of social dynamics.

#But the thing is.

#One of the utilities of gender is that it allows for a lot of this posturing to happen on unobtrusive levels due to finely tuned signalling

#So that the posturing can happen in parallel with other social communication a lot of the time

#but the downside to this is that the posturing never fully turns off.

#There's no situation where you have even the option to set it all willfully aside.

#Because it's so deeply and thoroughly baked in to so many aspects of expression and styling and posture and behavior

#And any way you try to confound it - piling on contrary signifiers or trying to scrub them all out - ends up signaling something else

#Because it is a system that is built to hold contradictions and complexities but not the null value.

#So you really truly are stuck in the dance no matter how many steps you keep missing or bad collisions you get into

#or how badly you just want to leave. And do something else and have a different type of interaction where people aren't Doing This at you.

#You are stuck in the dance and anything you do or don't do is perceived as a dance move and every misstep and collision is taken as

#an affront.

#And any silly little jig you fall into to get by incidentally sets you up to be the mortal enemy of someone somewhere out there

#Who either sees you as a foil or a mockery or an affront to how they move through the dance

#And they WILL make it your problem.

#an affront.