Finally, a CD by Big Country found its way into the local used record store (it's a greatest hits). The songs taken from The Crossing don't just get me up on my feet -- just about any decent new wave song could manage that. There's something more, like they're calling to something inside me to wake up, alternately using battering rhythms and streams of heart-string-tugging flourishes to get its attention and hold it.
Here are "Harvest Home" and "Fields of Fire", but you probably know them best for "In a Big Country" --
There's no one else here in my room, but that doesn't stop me from bouncing around in a circle dance, imagining that like-minded, or like-bodied others are here cutting a little rug too. I've never heard Big Country at '80s night, so it's not like a re-enactment of a real experience. It feels more like a family reunion with people I've never met but who, from shared roots, automatically resonate to music like this.
It's not simply grooving to it, which outsiders could feel as well. As I said before, I groove to plenty of good music, but this is something more. It's like how people who read Shakespeare in translation can resonate with it, but to a native speaker of English, the experience is more pure and immediate. That's no slight to non-native speakers -- we too would have a less powerful connection when reading Dante than our Italian counterparts.
Music and dance are already so effective at what social psychologists call "de-individuation," or in plain terms just letting go and going with the flow of the group. But that final remaining fence-post of self-awareness gets washed away too when there's a direct channel to conduct your individual spirit into the greater culture source.
It seems a little odd since only between 1/4 and 1/2 of my blood is Celtic. One grandmother is Scotch-Irish, and her husband was some English, I think Scotch-Irish, and maybe Welsh too. I've got a fully Japanese grandmother, and her husband is a mix of French and English.
Consciously pursuing one or another directions back through my history has yielded very little in the way of feeling a strong bond with that root of the tree. It's a lot like dating and mating -- you get to know the various ancestral voices, and either there's instant chemistry or there isn't. Something about Celtic musical influences, or the thought of grazing my sheep on rolling green hills, just does something for me. (I think the corniness of what I just said only proves how involuntary the reaction is.)
Well, to get away from the more mystical side of things, what might explain these kinds of responses to a culture that we may be quite unfamiliar with in our own lives -- I've certainly never been to Scotland, nor have I seen or heard much, if any, of their folk music through media here in America. All we have to do is remember that the culture that survives isn't a random sample of what was circulating -- it resonated with people's preferences. So it's not something you need to be exposed to, or explicitly taught to appreciate, when you're growing up. If those are your people, and they liked it enough to hold onto it, it'll probably strike a chord with you too.
That would also explain why Irish music picks me up as well, although not to the same extent. I don't have any Irish roots, but the ways of making a living in Ireland and Scotland weren't so radically different, with both places (as well as mountainous Wales) relying much more on pastoralism than they have in other nearby parts of Northwestern Europe. And of course ultimately they do share blood far enough back.
Perhaps it's just chauvinism, but Scotland does seem to strike the proper balance between pastoralist and agrarian influences, not as footloose as the Irish but not as nose-to-the-grindstone as the English either. In fact it seems like every region where pastoralism and agriculture mixed has their Scottish, Irish, and English. In the Near East, that would be, respectively, the Lebanese, the Bedouin, and the Egyptians.
Maybe the best way to wrap up would be listing some more pop songs with greater or lesser Celtic influences, for those interested in exploring further. I'm not counting songs that are too self-consciously Celtic, only those where it fits in seamlessly, even if strikingly. Something that feels like it's trying to call your soul back to the land of the ancestors, kind of thing. Not merely rock songs by bands from a Celtic country. Please leave a comment for the ones I've missed.
- Just about anything from Starfish by the Church. The solo for "Under the Milky Way" has the same bagpipe-sounding guitar that Big Country pioneered.
- Speaking of Australians, "Kiss the Dirt" by INXS. It's only faintly there, but still enough to make it sound like an eclectic mix of rock plus something more ancient.
- The pennywhistle solo in "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon.
- "The Hardest Walk" by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Several songs on Psychocandy have a clear Scottish folk sound, only fused with grungy modern rock music.
- On that note, My Bloody Valentine wouldn't make it, at least not the songs on Loveless. Just your generic grunge music, not grunge fused with something else like on Psychocandy. Ditto for U2, a great band, but not one whose songs have made me feel like I need to re-connect with my Celtic roots.
- But if you are looking for something alterna from that time, a much more successful effort was "Dreams" by the Cranberries.
- "Song to the Siren" as covered by the Cocteau Twins for the This Mortal Coil project.
- Something from Bananarama's self-titled album (1984), when they were more new wave and synthpop. It's a great album all the way, by the way, which you might not have expected if you only knew them from "Venus" and later dance pop songs. The Celtic influence is more low-key, but also more pervasive, in their way of vocal harmonizing and copious use of melodic ornamentation in the vocals, although no one instance ever rising to the distracting level of Mariah Carey et al. "Rough Justice" and "King of the Jungle" might have it more than the others.
- Which reminds me of "Since Yesterday" by Strawberry Switchblade, although admittedly it's not so central in this song. But I'd suspect that listening to the rest of their songs would uncover a purer example.
- "The Village" by New Order. I'm not sure that the band members have any Celtic roots, but this one sure sounds like it. It's got the two parts: an unsustainable pairing of restraint with a driving beat, then letting loose with all those melodic motifs trying to tug at the heart-strings.
- "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush. Another excellent fusion of the primeval with the futuristic, drawing on Celtic for the ancient sound.
- There's a whole lot of everything, including Celtic, on Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart by Camper Van Beethoven (Dave Lowery's college radio band before Cracker). But "She Divines Water" and their adaptation of "O Death" have that summoning-you-back-to-your-roots quality.
- It's too bad red-headed babe Belinda Carlisle never did anything palpably Celtic, although "Half the World" and "Summer Rain" have vague unspecified World Music influences.
- "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by the Proclaimers.
- The highly similar "Don't Look Back" by Fine Young Cannibals.
- More ancient-futuristic fusion from OMD with "Joan of Arc" and "Maid of Orleans". A lot of their other songs have at least a passage here or there, like the motif between verses of "Talking Loud and Clear".
- I was going to suggest something by Echo and the Bunnymen, but I'm growing too tired to think of a good example right now. Also not sure how prominent the sound would be within the overall song.
October 14, 2012
Gay Peter Pan-isms: Campiness
The most popular view of gay weirdness is that it's a form of feminization (acting like sissies), but most of the evidence shows that it's actually infantilization. Females are more neotenous, though, so it's easy to confuse the two. So, we need cases that point only to one or the other cause, where females are not very childlike.
Most important is the absence of a nurturing instinct among queers, which is the defining feminine trait.
How about campy tastes and behaviors? Adolescent and adult females aren't very into camp -- they're more likely to call it childish, although they may have a few favorite guilty pleasures. And certainly the entire culture is campier now than it was even 20 years ago, but I'm talking about relative to the whole society at a given time.
Camp is really more of a juvenile male domain. There's the fascination with violating disgust taboos just to get a rise out of others, plus the caricatured understanding of how others look, think, feel, and behave. As they mature, they might still retain the desire to violate taboos to shock the squares, but it'll turn more toward symbolic disgust taboos, like pointing out that the audience's beloved Target is a Wal-Mart for liberals. And from more experience interacting with others, they'll have more nuanced views of what makes people tick.
Normal males might still have a few guilty pleasures that exploit camp -- I can still get a kick out of the Garbage Pail Kids -- but after age 10, they out-grow it as a primary source of enjoyment and entertainment.
By the way, gays' campy tendencies are the main thing that keeps them from becoming the style icons they fantasize themselves to be. It's hard for them to look like they're not in some child's "let's play dress-up" costume of a normal adult. When I watched Project Runway sometime in the mid-2000s, Tim Gunn had a stock phrase to describe these inclinations among homosexual designers, because it was so common -- "clown clothes".
So here's another case where the infantilization theory of homosexuality can account for the facts, and the feminization theory cannot.
Most important is the absence of a nurturing instinct among queers, which is the defining feminine trait.
How about campy tastes and behaviors? Adolescent and adult females aren't very into camp -- they're more likely to call it childish, although they may have a few favorite guilty pleasures. And certainly the entire culture is campier now than it was even 20 years ago, but I'm talking about relative to the whole society at a given time.
Camp is really more of a juvenile male domain. There's the fascination with violating disgust taboos just to get a rise out of others, plus the caricatured understanding of how others look, think, feel, and behave. As they mature, they might still retain the desire to violate taboos to shock the squares, but it'll turn more toward symbolic disgust taboos, like pointing out that the audience's beloved Target is a Wal-Mart for liberals. And from more experience interacting with others, they'll have more nuanced views of what makes people tick.
Normal males might still have a few guilty pleasures that exploit camp -- I can still get a kick out of the Garbage Pail Kids -- but after age 10, they out-grow it as a primary source of enjoyment and entertainment.
By the way, gays' campy tendencies are the main thing that keeps them from becoming the style icons they fantasize themselves to be. It's hard for them to look like they're not in some child's "let's play dress-up" costume of a normal adult. When I watched Project Runway sometime in the mid-2000s, Tim Gunn had a stock phrase to describe these inclinations among homosexual designers, because it was so common -- "clown clothes".
So here's another case where the infantilization theory of homosexuality can account for the facts, and the feminization theory cannot.
October 13, 2012
The transmission of social avoidance across generations
One of the stranger patterns in this age of helicopter parenting is how neglectful the mother or father is when their child shows clear signs of distress, even in public, where you'd think that shame would lead parents away from neglectful behavior. You'd also think that all that hovering meant they're just waiting to receive the distress signal, when they'd swoop in and smother the kid with affection to reassure it.
In reality, though, kids scream and cry all the time in public spaces, and their parents either totally let it slide or respond to them with incredibly flat affect, at least considering the kid's apparent cry for help. The inflection in their voice isn't so different from an ordinary conversational tone, nor do their facial expressions depart from their normal shape (they don't reflect a sudden surge of concern, for example).
In fact, they try to engage their child on a completely rational, rather than emotional level, explaining why the kid is in factual error in assuming that the evident cause of distress will continue to distress them. Man, he doesn't care about whether his beliefs are true or false -- he just wants someone to comfort him.
They take this approach also when the kid is obviously acting out to get attention, such as the toddler who kept kicking the back of the seat of a woman in my row on a plane. The mother twice asked the ankle-biter how he would feel if someone else were kicking the back of his seat. Children are incapable of empathy at such a young age (which is why they find it so easy to kick people's seats like that), so the mother was clearly trying to reason logically with her kid, as though it were a discussion in an ethical philosophy course.
When parents either don't respond at all to distress signals or acting out, or if they only respond in an emotionally uncommitted way, the kid begins to suspect that he lives in a world lacking emotional closeness or fellow-feeling. Of course he could be wrong by inferring this only from how his parents treat him, but since the way that adults in general treat children in general tends not to vary so much within a given time and place, it's not such a bad guess.
That hunch is then confirmed when genetically unrelated grown-ups also fail to respond to his distress signals and acting out, or do so without any feeling behind it. All the other grown-ups feel that "It's not my place" to intervene, whether to console an upset baby or to pinch the ear of one who's acting out, and shouting "Listen to your mother!" to drive the point home.
So, the child concludes, basically no one is emotionally invested in coming to my aid (if they do in the first place). If that's how the grown-up world is, and I'll eventually wind up in that world, I'd better prepare by dialing down whatever desire I may have to attach myself emotionally to others. By adolescence, that avoidant attachment style has more or less hardened into shape for life, much as their native language development is done by that point, after which they cannot effortlessly acquire other languages.
And of course the opposite goes for children who experience a world where adults respond with gusto, whether positive or negative. You don't get that worked up emotionally for those who you aren't very attached to, so it must be that emotional closeness will be a regular feature of adult life, and you had better prepare for that by dialing up your desire to connect that way with others.
The main source of change over time is, as usual, the trend in the crime rate. When it's rising, parents take a greater risk by ignoring their children's distress signals, whereas parents can afford more to call their kids' bluff during a falling-crime period.
This creates very sharp divides between those who went through childhood just before vs. just after a resting point in the crime rate. For example, those who went through most of childhood from 1959 onward into the '60s -- the Baby Boomers -- were seen by the Silent Generation just before them as having been shown too much affection in childhood, which made them overly emotional as adults. The Silents had been children during an earlier era of helicopter parenting, where parents let their kids be watched over by radio and later TV, and where spanking was frowned on as retrograde. And with kids sheltered from public spaces, they wouldn't receive correction from adults outside the family. The results can be seen in exaggerated but no less illuminating form in the classic film noir movie Mildred Pierce.
As the crime rate soared, parents only devoted greater emotional intensity to their children -- again, positive or negative. If you gave signs of distress, they took it very seriously, and their tone of voice switched to a highly inflected form of Motherese, and they'd twist their faces into more unusual, silly shapes to try to cheer you up. Also, if you were acting out, they wouldn't just try to explain why what you did was wrong -- they'd just give you a real passionate beating. Spanking with the hand, spanking with a shock weapon, smacking in the face, pinching the ear, pinching the tender parts of your arms or legs, vocalizing through shouts, wearing a clearly angry face, and so on. I don't recall specific cases, but I do remember adults outside the family taking an interest in our discipline if it was in a public space, although not trying to usurp our parents' role.
And sure enough that's resulted in high levels of emotional attachment among those kids. I'd say roughly those born between 1975 and 1984 are most likely to be sentimental, nostalgic, and most at ease opening up emotionally, not to mention wanting others to open up as well. That's just the culmination of the trend first begun with Baby Boomers, and continuing through Generation X.
Then on the other side are the Millennials, most of whose pre-pubescent social learning took place in falling-crime times, when parents began to emotionally detach themselves more from their kids, notwithstanding all the hovering, monitoring, and regulating. Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers find the Millennials' social nature puzzling, but it's downright bewildering to people born in the late '70s and early '80s, where the contrast with Millennials is sharpest.
Millennials always have their guard up, even around people they're supposed to feel comfortable with. The physical reflects the emotional: even around supposed friends, they've got their laptop out to wall others off, or they're holding their protective phone or ipod in front of their chest, jamming earbuds in their head, wearing sunglasses indoors, etc. It's totally common to see a group of "friends" all like this sitting near each other in Starbucks -- physically close yet emotionally isolated. Time to update the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks...
I haven't asked around really extensively, but I think most people my age and older share this assessment about the younger generation. It's easier for me to shoot the shit with a Baby Boomer who's pushing 60 years old, just because they aren't socially and emotionally retarded.
It seems like in the good old days, people wanted to socialize to some degree with those who were somewhat younger than they were. It was like your responsibility to initiate them, all in a fun-loving and informal way -- show them the ropes. But if there's a fundamental split between the two in attachment styles, it won't go anywhere. Kind of like how the Silents didn't really mentor the Boomers, who more or less brought themselves up, my mini-generation of late '70s / early '80s births doesn't seem to care much about showing Millennials how to join the cool older kids. The personality differences are just too great.
For a little while during the mid-2000s, I gave it a shot, and they actually responded somewhat. But that was a partly rising-crime zeitgeist, due to the reactions to 9/11. Somewhere around 2009 they started to really dork out, and it's only gotten worse since. It feels like a gip, since you get a sense of meaning in life by helping the next age group below you to join you and eventually take your place. It gives you a feeling of continuity and immortality of the cultural group that you belong to.
Now, though, they'd rather snicker along with Jon Stewart's lame snark, plug into video games, or pretend to converse on Facebook / texting. By now, there's little use in trying to help them act normal; their preferences are set. Might as well wait until the next incarnation of the Baby Boomers come along, where you'll find a more receptive audience. Of course it won't be two adjacent age groups interacting, but that doesn't prevent you from having some influence.
In reality, though, kids scream and cry all the time in public spaces, and their parents either totally let it slide or respond to them with incredibly flat affect, at least considering the kid's apparent cry for help. The inflection in their voice isn't so different from an ordinary conversational tone, nor do their facial expressions depart from their normal shape (they don't reflect a sudden surge of concern, for example).
In fact, they try to engage their child on a completely rational, rather than emotional level, explaining why the kid is in factual error in assuming that the evident cause of distress will continue to distress them. Man, he doesn't care about whether his beliefs are true or false -- he just wants someone to comfort him.
They take this approach also when the kid is obviously acting out to get attention, such as the toddler who kept kicking the back of the seat of a woman in my row on a plane. The mother twice asked the ankle-biter how he would feel if someone else were kicking the back of his seat. Children are incapable of empathy at such a young age (which is why they find it so easy to kick people's seats like that), so the mother was clearly trying to reason logically with her kid, as though it were a discussion in an ethical philosophy course.
When parents either don't respond at all to distress signals or acting out, or if they only respond in an emotionally uncommitted way, the kid begins to suspect that he lives in a world lacking emotional closeness or fellow-feeling. Of course he could be wrong by inferring this only from how his parents treat him, but since the way that adults in general treat children in general tends not to vary so much within a given time and place, it's not such a bad guess.
That hunch is then confirmed when genetically unrelated grown-ups also fail to respond to his distress signals and acting out, or do so without any feeling behind it. All the other grown-ups feel that "It's not my place" to intervene, whether to console an upset baby or to pinch the ear of one who's acting out, and shouting "Listen to your mother!" to drive the point home.
So, the child concludes, basically no one is emotionally invested in coming to my aid (if they do in the first place). If that's how the grown-up world is, and I'll eventually wind up in that world, I'd better prepare by dialing down whatever desire I may have to attach myself emotionally to others. By adolescence, that avoidant attachment style has more or less hardened into shape for life, much as their native language development is done by that point, after which they cannot effortlessly acquire other languages.
And of course the opposite goes for children who experience a world where adults respond with gusto, whether positive or negative. You don't get that worked up emotionally for those who you aren't very attached to, so it must be that emotional closeness will be a regular feature of adult life, and you had better prepare for that by dialing up your desire to connect that way with others.
The main source of change over time is, as usual, the trend in the crime rate. When it's rising, parents take a greater risk by ignoring their children's distress signals, whereas parents can afford more to call their kids' bluff during a falling-crime period.
This creates very sharp divides between those who went through childhood just before vs. just after a resting point in the crime rate. For example, those who went through most of childhood from 1959 onward into the '60s -- the Baby Boomers -- were seen by the Silent Generation just before them as having been shown too much affection in childhood, which made them overly emotional as adults. The Silents had been children during an earlier era of helicopter parenting, where parents let their kids be watched over by radio and later TV, and where spanking was frowned on as retrograde. And with kids sheltered from public spaces, they wouldn't receive correction from adults outside the family. The results can be seen in exaggerated but no less illuminating form in the classic film noir movie Mildred Pierce.
As the crime rate soared, parents only devoted greater emotional intensity to their children -- again, positive or negative. If you gave signs of distress, they took it very seriously, and their tone of voice switched to a highly inflected form of Motherese, and they'd twist their faces into more unusual, silly shapes to try to cheer you up. Also, if you were acting out, they wouldn't just try to explain why what you did was wrong -- they'd just give you a real passionate beating. Spanking with the hand, spanking with a shock weapon, smacking in the face, pinching the ear, pinching the tender parts of your arms or legs, vocalizing through shouts, wearing a clearly angry face, and so on. I don't recall specific cases, but I do remember adults outside the family taking an interest in our discipline if it was in a public space, although not trying to usurp our parents' role.
And sure enough that's resulted in high levels of emotional attachment among those kids. I'd say roughly those born between 1975 and 1984 are most likely to be sentimental, nostalgic, and most at ease opening up emotionally, not to mention wanting others to open up as well. That's just the culmination of the trend first begun with Baby Boomers, and continuing through Generation X.
Then on the other side are the Millennials, most of whose pre-pubescent social learning took place in falling-crime times, when parents began to emotionally detach themselves more from their kids, notwithstanding all the hovering, monitoring, and regulating. Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers find the Millennials' social nature puzzling, but it's downright bewildering to people born in the late '70s and early '80s, where the contrast with Millennials is sharpest.
Millennials always have their guard up, even around people they're supposed to feel comfortable with. The physical reflects the emotional: even around supposed friends, they've got their laptop out to wall others off, or they're holding their protective phone or ipod in front of their chest, jamming earbuds in their head, wearing sunglasses indoors, etc. It's totally common to see a group of "friends" all like this sitting near each other in Starbucks -- physically close yet emotionally isolated. Time to update the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks...
I haven't asked around really extensively, but I think most people my age and older share this assessment about the younger generation. It's easier for me to shoot the shit with a Baby Boomer who's pushing 60 years old, just because they aren't socially and emotionally retarded.
It seems like in the good old days, people wanted to socialize to some degree with those who were somewhat younger than they were. It was like your responsibility to initiate them, all in a fun-loving and informal way -- show them the ropes. But if there's a fundamental split between the two in attachment styles, it won't go anywhere. Kind of like how the Silents didn't really mentor the Boomers, who more or less brought themselves up, my mini-generation of late '70s / early '80s births doesn't seem to care much about showing Millennials how to join the cool older kids. The personality differences are just too great.
For a little while during the mid-2000s, I gave it a shot, and they actually responded somewhat. But that was a partly rising-crime zeitgeist, due to the reactions to 9/11. Somewhere around 2009 they started to really dork out, and it's only gotten worse since. It feels like a gip, since you get a sense of meaning in life by helping the next age group below you to join you and eventually take your place. It gives you a feeling of continuity and immortality of the cultural group that you belong to.
Now, though, they'd rather snicker along with Jon Stewart's lame snark, plug into video games, or pretend to converse on Facebook / texting. By now, there's little use in trying to help them act normal; their preferences are set. Might as well wait until the next incarnation of the Baby Boomers come along, where you'll find a more receptive audience. Of course it won't be two adjacent age groups interacting, but that doesn't prevent you from having some influence.
October 10, 2012
Shared rhythmic motion and affection for pets
I haven't yet read William McNeill's book Keeping Together in Time, but the basic idea is that shared rhythmic motion is a powerful way to bond individuals within a social group, be it a church, military unit, or sports team. Just think of something so simple and effective as, doon doon CHA, doon doon CHA, We Will, We Will, Rock You!
As modern populations become more cerebral, and less corporeal, books like this are sorely needed to remind ourselves of the power of ritual, and the relative weakness of beliefs, in holding a group together.
I should probably wait until reading the book before saying much more on that topic, but there seems to be another, less important application of the idea, namely to human-animal bonding. My impression is that the closest bonds are between horse-riders and their horses, then cat-owners and their little purr-balls. Riding a horse is the highest degree of shared rhythmic motion that a person and an animal can reach. Petting a purring cat is not so striking of an example, but still above all other cases of normal human-animal interaction. You generally don't see dog-owners stroking their dog's fur rhythmically for a decent stretch of time, and the dog's happy panting isn't as resonatingly rhythmic as a cat's purring. And dog-owners maintain more emotional distance from their dogs, regarding the cat-owners as too closely connected for the good of their own independence.
Depending on how they're being used, cattle, sheep, and goats may also elicit strong feelings of attachment from their owners. Generally, if they're being driven by pastoralists, an intense bond forms -- this is kind of a looser form of riding the animal from point A to point B, with the owner walking alongside the herd, their trotters all striking the ground with more or less the same rhythm. If they're kept as more sedentary barnyard animals, though, with little or no shared rhythmic motion, you don't find their owners composing songs to them, using their eyes as the ideal to compare the beauty of human eyes to, and so on.
The same seems to be true with pigs: if they're being driven hither and thither by their young male owners, they get real attached to the little snub-noses. Being kept as barnyard animals doesn't lower the affection as much as it does for cattle or sheep, perhaps because the driving-around case is not as intense as it is for herd animals. My mom grew up on a "farm" -- there was little agriculture up there in the Appalachian hills, but they did keep lots of domesticated animals and relied on them somewhat for subsistence. At least in her case, she said that slaughtering the pigs always felt like the greatest loss of a social bond.
Shallow bonds are the most you can hope for between people and birds or fish, and sure enough they don't share any rhythmic motion, or even get in synch with little or no motion, as when cats purr. You can bet, though, that if we ever domesticate a large bird of flight, and feel the repeated flapping of its wings as we rode it for transportation, we'd develop a real soft spot for them.
At the very bottom are the creepy-crawlies -- insects, arachnids, snakes, and so on -- that we not only do not share any rhythmic motion with, but have typically been a threat to our health.
I'm no expert on human-animal relationships, but the basic idea seems to be borne out, not just across species but even within species, like what emotions cattle stir up in pastoralist vs. sedentary societies, or how connected people feel to dogs that just loaf around the house vs. go out jogging with their owners.
As modern populations become more cerebral, and less corporeal, books like this are sorely needed to remind ourselves of the power of ritual, and the relative weakness of beliefs, in holding a group together.
I should probably wait until reading the book before saying much more on that topic, but there seems to be another, less important application of the idea, namely to human-animal bonding. My impression is that the closest bonds are between horse-riders and their horses, then cat-owners and their little purr-balls. Riding a horse is the highest degree of shared rhythmic motion that a person and an animal can reach. Petting a purring cat is not so striking of an example, but still above all other cases of normal human-animal interaction. You generally don't see dog-owners stroking their dog's fur rhythmically for a decent stretch of time, and the dog's happy panting isn't as resonatingly rhythmic as a cat's purring. And dog-owners maintain more emotional distance from their dogs, regarding the cat-owners as too closely connected for the good of their own independence.
Depending on how they're being used, cattle, sheep, and goats may also elicit strong feelings of attachment from their owners. Generally, if they're being driven by pastoralists, an intense bond forms -- this is kind of a looser form of riding the animal from point A to point B, with the owner walking alongside the herd, their trotters all striking the ground with more or less the same rhythm. If they're kept as more sedentary barnyard animals, though, with little or no shared rhythmic motion, you don't find their owners composing songs to them, using their eyes as the ideal to compare the beauty of human eyes to, and so on.
The same seems to be true with pigs: if they're being driven hither and thither by their young male owners, they get real attached to the little snub-noses. Being kept as barnyard animals doesn't lower the affection as much as it does for cattle or sheep, perhaps because the driving-around case is not as intense as it is for herd animals. My mom grew up on a "farm" -- there was little agriculture up there in the Appalachian hills, but they did keep lots of domesticated animals and relied on them somewhat for subsistence. At least in her case, she said that slaughtering the pigs always felt like the greatest loss of a social bond.
Shallow bonds are the most you can hope for between people and birds or fish, and sure enough they don't share any rhythmic motion, or even get in synch with little or no motion, as when cats purr. You can bet, though, that if we ever domesticate a large bird of flight, and feel the repeated flapping of its wings as we rode it for transportation, we'd develop a real soft spot for them.
At the very bottom are the creepy-crawlies -- insects, arachnids, snakes, and so on -- that we not only do not share any rhythmic motion with, but have typically been a threat to our health.
I'm no expert on human-animal relationships, but the basic idea seems to be borne out, not just across species but even within species, like what emotions cattle stir up in pastoralist vs. sedentary societies, or how connected people feel to dogs that just loaf around the house vs. go out jogging with their owners.
October 9, 2012
Ruining haunted houses with the flick of a switch
As if kids today weren't sheltered enough, now their bed-wetting parents have pushed it even further -- "lights-on" haunted house tours. Here's a list of some. I read about it in a Columbus, Ohio newspaper, but through googling found ample examples from Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois. Before long expect it to infect the brains of mush-head parents near you.
It's just one more case in an ongoing series of "family values" meaning the unraveling of community cohesion and the sweeping of traditions into the dust bin. Whatever it takes to isolate every nuclear family unto itself. "Fun for the whole family," meaning that no member will have an excuse to leave the nuclear unit for even a few hours to interact socially within non-kin groups, like your peers. And everyone being bored out of their minds from the lowest common denominator, kiddie crap that's supposed to give the entire family a great big boner...
I also notice that there seems to be another important source of parents these days trying to delay their children's development until, well, forever. The clear source is their fear that the real world will hurt their kids' feelings, scrape their knees, etc., so that they lock them up inside all day to prevent that harm.
But the overlooked source is that in times of helicopter parenting, the entire society has shifted its time horizons farther into the future, so even the adults aren't maturing like they used to be. Grown-ups are doing things that used to be kiddie stuff, but that -- due to the time horizon shift -- are now considered adult. Like dressing up and going out unsupervised on Halloween. Or watching fantasy-themed movies. Etc.
So when you've got a man-child for a father, he's going to hold back your development because, Hey, this Hobbit movie stuff is some real heavy mature shit -- didn't you hear how low their chanting voices were in that preview? Maybe when you're as tough as your old man, you can see it alone. But since you're 10, I'd better go with you just in case. And your 5 year-old brother can forget about it. Perhaps in 2012 it needs to be stated overtly: grown men shouldn't pride themselves on accomplishing what any normal kindergartner does in a normal world.
It's just one more case in an ongoing series of "family values" meaning the unraveling of community cohesion and the sweeping of traditions into the dust bin. Whatever it takes to isolate every nuclear family unto itself. "Fun for the whole family," meaning that no member will have an excuse to leave the nuclear unit for even a few hours to interact socially within non-kin groups, like your peers. And everyone being bored out of their minds from the lowest common denominator, kiddie crap that's supposed to give the entire family a great big boner...
I also notice that there seems to be another important source of parents these days trying to delay their children's development until, well, forever. The clear source is their fear that the real world will hurt their kids' feelings, scrape their knees, etc., so that they lock them up inside all day to prevent that harm.
But the overlooked source is that in times of helicopter parenting, the entire society has shifted its time horizons farther into the future, so even the adults aren't maturing like they used to be. Grown-ups are doing things that used to be kiddie stuff, but that -- due to the time horizon shift -- are now considered adult. Like dressing up and going out unsupervised on Halloween. Or watching fantasy-themed movies. Etc.
So when you've got a man-child for a father, he's going to hold back your development because, Hey, this Hobbit movie stuff is some real heavy mature shit -- didn't you hear how low their chanting voices were in that preview? Maybe when you're as tough as your old man, you can see it alone. But since you're 10, I'd better go with you just in case. And your 5 year-old brother can forget about it. Perhaps in 2012 it needs to be stated overtly: grown men shouldn't pride themselves on accomplishing what any normal kindergartner does in a normal world.
October 3, 2012
Disgust-based morality, by politics and class
I haven't gotten around to reading Jonathan Haidt's books just yet (just talks and shorter prose), so the result below may already be known and discussed. If so, at least this would replicate it using another sample.
Briefly, his work has shown that liberals and conservatives differ in how many moral "taste receptors" activate when they ponder moral questions. (I don't know if there are behavioral studies too). The moral sense of liberals gets activated mostly by the receptor for avoiding harm / caregiving, and for fairness / justice / reciprocity. Conservatives' moral sense gets activated by those two, but also by those for authority / obedience, maintaining in-group vs out-group borders, and purity / sanctity / disgust / taboo.
This is part of the ongoing culture wars, so I thought it might also look like what Andrew Gelman and others have found about class differences and participation in ideological wars. They found that lower-income people are not so divided politically when you look across the country -- a poor blue-stater and a poor red-stater are pretty close, and both fairly in favor of Democrats. However, as you move up toward the highest-income people, the divide between red-staters and blue-staters rips into a chasm. So, the rich in Texas and in Connecticut are very far apart, the former heavily Republican and the latter heavily Democrat.
It also gets at the reminder from Henrich et al (2010), "The Weirdest People in the World," that studying college-educated Americans will obscure patterns happening at the lower-class level within the West, not to mention in non-Western countries.
To examine disgust-based morality, let's look at the General Social Survey question that asks what you think about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex. Other aspects of the pro-gay movement may activate other moral receptors in conservatives, but the corporeal act of one man getting jammed up the butt by the cock of another man -- that's enough to make a conservative's skin crawl.
Responses basically fall into there's nothing wrong with it vs. it's always wrong, so I lumped them into those who said there's nothing wrong vs. there's something wrong. The red bars below show the "yuck" responses. There are many ways to operationalize class; the charts split people up by years of education -- 1 to 8 years, 9 to 12, 13 to 16, and 17 to 20. Respondents are restricted to whites to avoid racial confounds with both class and with disapproval of homos. Their age was restricted to 30+ since lower ages might not have had the chance to complete so many years of schooling.
These charts show disapproval of gay sex by political orientation, from very liberal to very conservative, separately for the four education-based class groups.
The difference in disgust-activation across the political spectrum can be seen by the slope of the line going across the tops of the red bars. It's more or less flat among the lowest class, who didn't complete any high school, from a low of about 80% within "very liberal" to a high of about 95% within "very conservative". Among those who had high school, there's a steeper slope, and there's an even steeper one among those who had some college. The steepest slope of all is among those with post-graduate schooling, going from a low of about 15% to a high of about 85%.
The same pattern turns up if, instead of education, you use income or job prestige to measure class (charts not shown). I split up income into those who made $10,000 or less, $30-50K, $50-90K, and $90-170K. (No one made more than $163K; data are in constant 1986 dollars.) For job prestige, I split people up into 8 groups of size "10" on the GSS' job prestige scale, which goes from roughly 17 to 97.
So, as with the red-state vs. blue-state culture war, the broader culture war seems to be a divide mostly among the middle and upper classes. Closer to the bottom, pretty much everyone is in agreement that sodomy is sick and wrong. Across the world's primitive cultures, disgust plays a decent role in morality, so lower-class Westerners and conservatives of all classes are more in touch in real life, the natural roots of mankind, etc.
That ties back to a point I recently made about conservatives being more emotionally intact and liberals more emotionally numb. Disgust is after all one of the most powerful emotions you can experience. For liberals, a homosexual half-corpse eaten up by diseases, of which HIV is only the nastiest species out of thousands, is an abstract public health problem that activates the caregiving receptor. How the body got that way is anybody's guess, I guess. The liberal disconnect from reality here stems from their blunted disgust response.
I'll try poking around the GSS to see if other moral receptors show this pattern as well. And I'll re-visit the theme of disgust and morality a few other times too.
GSS variables used: homosex, polviews, race, age, educ, realinc, sei
Briefly, his work has shown that liberals and conservatives differ in how many moral "taste receptors" activate when they ponder moral questions. (I don't know if there are behavioral studies too). The moral sense of liberals gets activated mostly by the receptor for avoiding harm / caregiving, and for fairness / justice / reciprocity. Conservatives' moral sense gets activated by those two, but also by those for authority / obedience, maintaining in-group vs out-group borders, and purity / sanctity / disgust / taboo.
This is part of the ongoing culture wars, so I thought it might also look like what Andrew Gelman and others have found about class differences and participation in ideological wars. They found that lower-income people are not so divided politically when you look across the country -- a poor blue-stater and a poor red-stater are pretty close, and both fairly in favor of Democrats. However, as you move up toward the highest-income people, the divide between red-staters and blue-staters rips into a chasm. So, the rich in Texas and in Connecticut are very far apart, the former heavily Republican and the latter heavily Democrat.
It also gets at the reminder from Henrich et al (2010), "The Weirdest People in the World," that studying college-educated Americans will obscure patterns happening at the lower-class level within the West, not to mention in non-Western countries.
To examine disgust-based morality, let's look at the General Social Survey question that asks what you think about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex. Other aspects of the pro-gay movement may activate other moral receptors in conservatives, but the corporeal act of one man getting jammed up the butt by the cock of another man -- that's enough to make a conservative's skin crawl.
Responses basically fall into there's nothing wrong with it vs. it's always wrong, so I lumped them into those who said there's nothing wrong vs. there's something wrong. The red bars below show the "yuck" responses. There are many ways to operationalize class; the charts split people up by years of education -- 1 to 8 years, 9 to 12, 13 to 16, and 17 to 20. Respondents are restricted to whites to avoid racial confounds with both class and with disapproval of homos. Their age was restricted to 30+ since lower ages might not have had the chance to complete so many years of schooling.
These charts show disapproval of gay sex by political orientation, from very liberal to very conservative, separately for the four education-based class groups.
The difference in disgust-activation across the political spectrum can be seen by the slope of the line going across the tops of the red bars. It's more or less flat among the lowest class, who didn't complete any high school, from a low of about 80% within "very liberal" to a high of about 95% within "very conservative". Among those who had high school, there's a steeper slope, and there's an even steeper one among those who had some college. The steepest slope of all is among those with post-graduate schooling, going from a low of about 15% to a high of about 85%.
The same pattern turns up if, instead of education, you use income or job prestige to measure class (charts not shown). I split up income into those who made $10,000 or less, $30-50K, $50-90K, and $90-170K. (No one made more than $163K; data are in constant 1986 dollars.) For job prestige, I split people up into 8 groups of size "10" on the GSS' job prestige scale, which goes from roughly 17 to 97.
So, as with the red-state vs. blue-state culture war, the broader culture war seems to be a divide mostly among the middle and upper classes. Closer to the bottom, pretty much everyone is in agreement that sodomy is sick and wrong. Across the world's primitive cultures, disgust plays a decent role in morality, so lower-class Westerners and conservatives of all classes are more in touch in real life, the natural roots of mankind, etc.
That ties back to a point I recently made about conservatives being more emotionally intact and liberals more emotionally numb. Disgust is after all one of the most powerful emotions you can experience. For liberals, a homosexual half-corpse eaten up by diseases, of which HIV is only the nastiest species out of thousands, is an abstract public health problem that activates the caregiving receptor. How the body got that way is anybody's guess, I guess. The liberal disconnect from reality here stems from their blunted disgust response.
I'll try poking around the GSS to see if other moral receptors show this pattern as well. And I'll re-visit the theme of disgust and morality a few other times too.
GSS variables used: homosex, polviews, race, age, educ, realinc, sei
October 2, 2012
Knowing suicide victims doesn't affect number of sex partners
A previous post showed that knowing homicide victims made a person take more sex partners, even after controlling for age, race, sex, education, and one's own violent experiences, such as having been punched or having been threatened with a gun.
Terror Management Theory is a body of research that shows how people respond differently when they're primed with thoughts of death. That naturally links into my focus on rising-crime vs. falling-crime cultures. In that paradigm, though, they don't distinguish violent from non-violent death, or even within violent deaths, those that are self-inflicted (suicide) or other-inflicted (homicide).
So for the earlier result, is it something about exposure to a murder that triggers this change in behavior, or will any kind of death have the effect? Does violence need to play a role in the death? My explanation in the first post was that it had to be caused by someone else because that gives you the signal that there seem to be more bad guys out there, almost closing in on your own social circle. Feeling that squeeze motivates people to get on with getting it on before it's too late. That is general -- they should start "things," whatever they are, earlier and try to accomplish their goals sooner.
The General Social Survey also asks if you know anyone who committed suicide in the past year. I repeated the procedure from the case of knowing homicide victims, but this time there is no effect of exposure to death, even a violent death. In a similar regression as before, but swapping suicide for homicide victims, the "know someone who was killed" variable is no longer a significant predictor, not even close.
Repeating the look at 18-39 year-olds who had ever been hit or punched (to control for a person's level of rambunctious or wild lifestyle), those who knew a suicide victim had exactly the same number of partners as those who did not. Those who knew a suicide victim were equally likely to have had 2+ partners, and slightly more likely to have had 0. This again is in contrast to the effect of knowing homicide victims, within this young and wild sub-population.
So, just being exposed to death in real life, even a violent one, does not appear to put one's feet to the fire and alter their daily behavior. It specifically has to be a violent death caused by someone else. The interpretation is that you don't change your own behavior if you feel the cause of violent death couldn't also cause yours, as in suicide, but only where the cause of their death might also seek you out, as in homicide.
One prediction that I don't know how to test right away is that you should see something similar, although less pronounced, if the cause of violent death were not an agent -- say, a recurring series of earthquakes that graphically claimed the life of someone you knew, and could well claim yours tomorrow. It's not as motivating as believing that there are agents out there purposefully targeting people, but it still has that "we're all in the same boat" feeling.
GSS variables used: partners, suiknew, gun, hit, age, sex, race, educ
Terror Management Theory is a body of research that shows how people respond differently when they're primed with thoughts of death. That naturally links into my focus on rising-crime vs. falling-crime cultures. In that paradigm, though, they don't distinguish violent from non-violent death, or even within violent deaths, those that are self-inflicted (suicide) or other-inflicted (homicide).
So for the earlier result, is it something about exposure to a murder that triggers this change in behavior, or will any kind of death have the effect? Does violence need to play a role in the death? My explanation in the first post was that it had to be caused by someone else because that gives you the signal that there seem to be more bad guys out there, almost closing in on your own social circle. Feeling that squeeze motivates people to get on with getting it on before it's too late. That is general -- they should start "things," whatever they are, earlier and try to accomplish their goals sooner.
The General Social Survey also asks if you know anyone who committed suicide in the past year. I repeated the procedure from the case of knowing homicide victims, but this time there is no effect of exposure to death, even a violent death. In a similar regression as before, but swapping suicide for homicide victims, the "know someone who was killed" variable is no longer a significant predictor, not even close.
Repeating the look at 18-39 year-olds who had ever been hit or punched (to control for a person's level of rambunctious or wild lifestyle), those who knew a suicide victim had exactly the same number of partners as those who did not. Those who knew a suicide victim were equally likely to have had 2+ partners, and slightly more likely to have had 0. This again is in contrast to the effect of knowing homicide victims, within this young and wild sub-population.
So, just being exposed to death in real life, even a violent one, does not appear to put one's feet to the fire and alter their daily behavior. It specifically has to be a violent death caused by someone else. The interpretation is that you don't change your own behavior if you feel the cause of violent death couldn't also cause yours, as in suicide, but only where the cause of their death might also seek you out, as in homicide.
One prediction that I don't know how to test right away is that you should see something similar, although less pronounced, if the cause of violent death were not an agent -- say, a recurring series of earthquakes that graphically claimed the life of someone you knew, and could well claim yours tomorrow. It's not as motivating as believing that there are agents out there purposefully targeting people, but it still has that "we're all in the same boat" feeling.
GSS variables used: partners, suiknew, gun, hit, age, sex, race, educ
September 29, 2012
The pro-gay push as a surrogate Save The Children movement for childless women
Ever since I began trying to reduce all
aspects of the gay universe down to their being socially and
emotionally stunted in childhood, so many other pieces have been
snapping into place.
For instance, women are somewhat more
likely to support gay marriage than men,* but their outrage and
defensive posturing is so much more extreme than men's when it comes
to gay issues. Women are fairly apolitical, and only get that
passionate when it comes to topics that strike at the individual
woman herself and her kinship sphere, both real and figurative, where
she plays a mothering role.
How do gays possibly fit into that
narrow range of “the personal is political” issues?
Having observed countless fag hags and
their gay BFFs during college and within the past several years, I
now see that the female is indulging her maternal instinct with her
Peter Pan friend. Aside from those mini-doggies that such women also
choose as surrogate babies, you couldn't ask for a more childish
grown-up for the woman to treat in a motherly, or at least big
sisterly way. Your garden variety man-child today would be an
inferior choice, since he's pretty lethargic and plugged into video
games all day long, more like an adolescent, whereas the queer skips,
claps his hands, and is generally more hyperactive, like a real
child.
This applies not only to women who are
actual fag hags, but also those who would like to be, yet who live
where gay BFFs are in short supply.
Thus, when a homophile female hears the
vaguest attack on the normalization of gay deviance, she takes it
personally as an attack on a close member of her kin, whether her own
small child or her kid brother. And nothing sets the mama bear
a-roarin' like an outside attack on her defenseless young 'uns.
This also explains why there's such a
panic about “bullying” nowadays. It's always about normal kids
teasing or harassing the gay kid. Before the pro-gay movement took
off, women in their role as figurative mothers for the young
generation were more concerned with serial killers, drug dealers,
kidnappers, pedophiles, and so on. Now that those problems have
lightened up, they've taken in sissy kids as their new figurative
offspring and have switched their targets to other kids who hurt
their figurative kids' feelings.
Here
is a first-hand account from a lifelong fag hag:
You see, I have been around them since I was a little girl and – if we’re really being honest – growing up, all I wanted was a gay best friend. And I wanted my relationship with said best friend to be like the one between Will and Grace. That special friendship with someone who loves you to the moon and back, would do anything for you and who you just click with.
Someone who loves you to the moon and
back, would do anything for you – that's not a friend. She's
clearly looking for the unconditional love of a dependent younger kin
member, like a grateful son or grateful kid brother. Of course when
the queer inevitably starts behaving like an ungrateful son, she'll
flip out and feel he's violated the bonds of kinship, rather than the
lighter offense of acting like a poor friend. She does mention that
her gay BFFs have included “people who I’ve loathed and who have
hated me just as much.” Those damn ungrateful faggots just don't
appreciate how much I give as a mother!
I think it’s easy to see that this is a community that I feel very strongly about. It’s my home in a sense.It’s a community that has been my life for a number of years and one that I am defiantly proud of. I will argue gay rights and marriage equality with anyone who cares to disagree with me. I will protect and nourish my close friends to the lengths of this earth. I am a fiercely loyal friend and I have a strong maternal instinct. I have a lot of friends but there is a very select bunch who I hold extremely dear. I literally believe that my friends are the family I have hand-picked for myself. I do not know what I would do without you. You make me smile, laugh and cry.
Now it all comes out. Close friends are not people who you “protect and nourish,” which is clearly an example of the maternal instinct, a phrase she uses explicitly. The gay community is her home and a hand-picked family. Unlike with an authentic family, though, she cannot feel a sense of wonder looking at her children, who are given to mothers and not hand-picked like baubles for her jewelry box (another tellingly shallow metaphor that she uses without shame). Nor will she feel pride at watching her children grow up and live their own healthy and productive lives, since hers are permanently stunted in childhood, doomed to make the same self-destructive mistakes forever – dating drug addicts, catching VD, etc.
To wrap up, there are hard data showing that homophile women are opting out of real marriage and out of having real children. The General Social Survey asks three questions that get at homophilic tendencies – do you think homosexual sex is never wrong, do you agree that they should be allowed to marry, and how many of them do you know well enough to trust, talk about important issues with, etc. The first two options don't even require you to know any in real life. The GSS also asks how many children you have and what your marital status is.
Let's start by using the “gay sex is never wrong” question to identify the homophiles, and restrict respondents to reproductive-age women (ages 18-39). The homophiles are far more likely to have never been married (54% vs. 40%), and far less likely to be currently married (37% vs. 50%). On average the homophiles have 0.4 fewer children, and have a much greater rate of childlessness (65% vs. 48%). Essentially the same numbers come up using the “let gays marry” question to identify the homophiles. A similar pattern of differences shows up with the “confide in at least one gay” question, although both groups show lower rates of marriage and children since this question was only asked in 2006, rather than back through the 1970s.
So homophilia and fag-haggery really do stem from a desire to avoid marriage and having children of one's own, just like with those airheads who spend more money pampering their micro-poodles than they would by putting the fruit of their womb through private school. It can be no surprise that they get so ferocious when someone speaks out against treating their screwed-up pseudo-children as though they were normal, healthy, and well-behaved.
* 50% to 42% in the 2010 General Social Survey
GSS variables used: sex, age, marital, childs, homosex, marhomo, trtgay
September 28, 2012
Emotional disconnection as a feature of guys' fantasies these days
What started my mind on this topic was
wondering whether or not the Millennials thought about a person from
their daily lives, or perhaps a real-enough character from a TV show
or movie, when they're alone with themselves. The steady trend toward
social-emotional avoidance for the past 20 years suggests that they
probably do so less, and rely more wholly on looking at porno chicks,
no imagining at all.
I wonder what effects that has. It's a
very new state of technology, so we have no guidance from the past –
none of those “Now remember son...” kind of moments. It must numb
a person's social skills and weaken the overall pleasure they get,
the worst of both worlds.
At least when I was in middle and high
school, thinking about a girl in my school always involved some kind
of initial social interaction – my mind's eye didn't start the
movie in media res, so to speak. Sure it was incredibly superficial,
no Shakespearean dialogue or anything, and of course the beforehand
talking and flirting didn't last very long – let's get to it, you
know. But there still had to be some kind of minimal emotional
connection to ease my mind into another state. And I don't mean that
it had to be sweet – it could've been flavored with any believable
emotion, whether sentimental or debauched.
This simple practice of thinking about
someone in real life must serve to keep you grounded particularly
during those times when you're most tempted to spiral off into outer
space, whereas porno encourages you to keep divorcing yourself
further from reality. Even better, it heightens the pleasure by
compounding the physical catharsis with a social-emotional feeling of
triumph – like, “I can't believe I just made it with Kelly
Kapowski...” You don't feel that simulated sense of accomplishment
when staring at a dirty magazine – the girls have no importance in
your life. And given the two ways of going about it, imagining
someone in a real-life situation makes you more ambitious and
confident when pursuing girls in real life.
One of the great mysteries in pop
cultural history is the disappearance of narrative plots and
character roles in porno movies. They used to be universal, and if
that mode survived for so long in a competitive industry, it had to
have been meeting some kind of audience demand. Otherwise it wouldn't
have been worth the cost of writing the script, building and dressing
the sets, and having the players memorize their lines, all of which
would count now as pure waste from the producers' view.
Obviously nobody watched those movies
for the narrative, dialogue, etc., themselves – just about any
movie playing in theaters or on home video would've done a far better
job at that.
I think it must have been a need to get
more into the setting emotionally before getting on to your main
business. It doesn't need to be finely textured; even the thinnest
semblance of reality helps you to suspend disbelief and let your mind
wander into the mind of the dude on the screen, where the act seems
to follow from some minimally plausible scenario. It doesn't have to
be drawn-out or complex, just enough to put your mind at ease that you're
not merely watching a documentary shot of on-camera prostitution. The
latter style would only heighten your self-awareness and prevent even
the most fleeting connection with the girl you're picturing.
And what's with all the close-up shots
of the man's overjoyed face in porno movies from the good old days?
Seems like they haven't done those in ages. It's a simple reaction
shot, helping the viewer to empathize and experience it more
viscerally. Unconsciously your mind is thinking, “Damn, if she
twists his face into that shape, this girl must be the fuck of the
century.” The target audience of porno today must have no need at
all to resonate on the same emotional wavelength as the dude whose
body they're watching.
And then there's all the T&A that
used to be shown in popular movies, but has since disappeared.
It seems like every movie from the 1980s is about 90% the real movie
and 10% soft-core porn. There was thus more than one way that guys
met their need for a blending of characters-in-a-narrative and naked
girls, to enrich the overall experience. Over the last 20 years,
those two functions have been split apart, with popular movies
showing no skin at all, and dirty movies dispensing with any
plausibility and going for a prostitution documentary style.
I have little interest in the history
of porn per se, only for what it reveals about larger changes within
our society. Psychological states, social patterns, attachment
styles, etc., don't leave direct traces like bones and stone tools
do. Their lasting impressions are more indirect, and anyone
interested in finding out what went on then and what's going on now should not
be above the approach of “leave no stone unturned”. In fact looking
at an off-beat case like dirty movies makes the overall pattern of
change much more vivid than some other case studies – even where
you'd think empathy, the need for emotional closeness, etc., might
always be zero, there's actually a striking change over time.
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