Monthly Archives: April 2018

Hypocrisy Howled at the Wolf

30 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in Politics

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imagesThe second most memorable thing Michelle Wolf said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was that; “people are saying America is more divided than ever.”

Okay, at face value, the line itself isn’t all that memorable, but her speech and the reaction to it fairly illustrate the very point, which is memorable in my book. When a line from a speech captures that much of its own context, that will get my attention every time.

Listening to Wolf’s jokes, I find myself wondering if we could really expect people to take some of these jokes in good fun? It isn’t always clear from the content, but the stone faces scattered among those smiling and laughing tell a pretty clear tale. For some at least, these were not jokes; they were attacks. From her deadpan list of inconveniences ending with; “Trump is President; it’s not ideal,” to the suggestion that Kellyanne Conway should be struck and pinned underneath a falling tree, it’s easy enough to understand why someone might not want to roll with the punches here. Sure, someone could laugh it off, but it would be just as reasonable to take these as indications of genuine contempt. We could pick away at this or that point, but the reality is that the room was already saturated with divisions far too great for people to come together in laughter.

That’s the nature of humor though; it’s almost always at the expense of someone else. So, it’s always fair to ask ‘with me’ or ‘at me’? In this case, a fair portion of the right wingers present (and many who weren’t) clearly figured it was the latter. Of course they tend to assume this about much of the media and the entertainment industries as well. With increasing frequency, they would be right about that, but there is certainly the trace of a self-confirming prophesy to all of this media and Hollywood bashing. They don’t seem to notice when their favorite scapegoats aren’t following the script. Wolf took some serious shots at the media too, pointing out that they are largely responsible for Trump’s success, but today the right wing has bundled her up with that very media and used the dinner as yet another example of an ‘elitist’ culture holding them in contempt.

Some of us on the left might be tempted to suggest that the best fix for this problem is for today’s right wing politicians to try to be less contemptible. And of course the contempt is mutual; it has been for as long as I can remember. With countless ‘conservatives’ still telling stories about a socialist Muslim from Kenya, I have a hard time swallowing the notion that those of us on the left ought to rein it in, and lest anyone suggest this is merely the fringe of right wing politics, let me remind you that one of those fringe lunatics in the birther movement is in the White House right now.

..placed there by a wave of contempt for liberalism.

That contempt for liberalism is so strong it seems hard to escape the notion that Trump was placed in the White House, not because anyone seriously thought he was going to make America great again, but rather because they hoped he would break America as we currently know it. Even now, his cabinet is undoing over a century of work to protect America from threats to our safety, both domestic and foreign. Even now, Americans in Puerto Rico are still struggling to recover from a natural disaster, and from the willful neglect of an administration happy to kill Americans when he is offended by one of their leaders. We can debate whether or not Trump will ever do anything positive for this country, but there is little doubt that he is willing and capable of hurting a lot of people.

He was placed in office for precisely that reason.

…all of which makes it a little difficult to look at a speech such as that given by Michelle Wolf and say let’s cry foul this time. No, this, THIS, was going to far!

Bullshit!

Still, the hypocrisy of the other guy isn’t much of an excuse for any we produce ourselves. Is there a serious argument to be made here? The main focus of scrutiny in this case seems to have fallen on Wolf’s comments about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What did she say about Sanders?

Every time Sarah steps up to the podium, I get excited because I’m not really sure what we’re going to get: you know, a press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. “It’s shirts and skins, and this time, don’t be such a little b—-, Jim Acosta.”

I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. Like, she burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like, maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s lies.

It’s probably lies.

And I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You know, is it Sarah Sanders? Is Sarah Huckabee Sanders? Is it Cousin Huckabee? Is it Auntie Huckabee Sanders? Like, what’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Oh, I know: Aunt Coulter.

People have been saying this amounts to making fun of Sanders’ appearance. Others have been saying, no it isn’t. And yes, the battle lines are pretty predictable on this one. The issue is already touchy, because a lot of folks have already taken some seriously cheap shots at Huckabee’s looks. What Wolf said is really mild in comparison to some of the comments and memes out there. In fact, she doesn’t appear to be commenting at all on Sanders’ actual body or face. The main joke here isn’t even about Sanders’ looks; it’s about her mistreatment of the press, and the fundamental dishonesty with which she has approached her work in this administration. In the process of making this perfectly valid, and perfectly relevant point about Sanders’ work, Wolf worked in a comment about Sanders’ eye shadow. That comment has become the focus of virtually all subsequent commentary on the dinner.

So, was this a comment about Sanders appearance?

I can think of two reasons to say ‘yes’ in answer to that question. 1) Sarah’s eyes have often been primary a focus of many of the cheap shots taken at her. So, when Michelle Wolf talks about Sanders’ eye shadow, she is hitting a theme well-primed by many others. If Wolf is actually commenting on eye shadow instead of Sanders’ actual eyes, then that’s a thin layer of powder away from a very common and very cheap shot. 2) More importantly, a comment about dress or make-up is already a comment about someone’s looks, and women in the public arena get dragged on that topic far more than men. Far from trivial, this is one of the double standards that makes it much harder for women to succeed in public life than men. Working that angle doesn’t just hurt Sanders; it hurts women in general.

If Wolf’s comment doesn’t measure up to the low standards of filth spilling from the mouth of Donald Trump over the years, it certainly doesn’t measure up to the high standard many on the left (and in particular feminists) have been trying to promote for about as long as I can recall. I don’t know that Wolf has ever committed to such standards, but the fact remains, she could do better. Hell, she was doing better! She was doing better in that very point. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a professional liar. That was the point of the very joke in question, and everybody knows it. THAT point remains sound, regardless of the cheap shot Wolf unfortunately bundled into it.

Some of us could wish that Wolf had left her brief foray into physical commentary out of her speech, but it’s there. I can’t help thinking that brief moment of self indulgence was a god-send to America’s right wing, because that’s been the very means they’ve used to draw attention from the rest of the Wolf’s criticism, criticism which is very richly deserved. While the denizens of echo chamber do the meta-hypocrisy shuffle, hiding their own double standards behind an accusation of the same, they have successfully shifted the narrative about this speech away from the many horribles now nurtured by the outright fascism which has taken over the Republican Party, horribles Wolf was right to call out.

Horribles like Sanders’ many lies.

It may well be that the whole country has reached a point where we can no longer expect Americans of different political orientations to sit peacefully together and laugh at the same jokes, but no, both parties are not equally responsible for helping us reach that point. With a President actively and openly supporting white nationalists while Democrats continue to embrace more moderate conservative policies, I don’t see how anyone could seriously embrace the ‘both sides’ narratives out there.

I don’t really blame right wingers for not wanting to sit through a performance like that of Wolf. I blame them very much for bringing us to that point. The Republican Party didn’t have to put a living joke in the White House; they didn’t have to support a man so corrupt and so incompetent that every spokesperson for him has had to bend over backwards lying for him only to find the man debunking their own spin even as they spin it. They didn’t have to make themselves so contemptible.

But they are.

The Republican Party of today is not conservative; it is not patriotic; and it is certainly not Christian. It’s leadership is none of the things they pretend to be, and they all know it. This is why they cannot abide humor like that of Wolf. This is why Donald Trump wasn’t even there, and this is why others walked out. They cannot abide an honest stand-up routine, any more than they can abide a competent journalist. And this is why they want to focus on that one joke; to keep our minds off Trump himself (and Pence, and Sanders, and all the rest of the circus) and to lay the grounds for retaliation against future critics.

Oh, I did say that the line about Americans being more divided than ever was the second most memorable thing Wolf said in her speech. So, what was more important than that?

Flint still doesn’t have clean water.

 

 

Epithets and Implicatures, and History as Damage Control

19 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in Native American Themes, Politics, White Indians

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I haven’t been monitoring the controversy about the Washington football team that closely for awhile now, but the topic hasn’t entirely escaped my attention. This morning, I took a moment to scan the old Redskinsfacts website, which is a case-study in double-speak if there ever was one. That hasn’t changed.

…either.

One thing I find fascinating and revolting in equal measures is the way the site uses the work of a linguist, Ives Goddard, in defense of the team’s name, If you click on the option to “Get the facts” on the home page of the “Redskins Facts” website, you will be taken to another page telling you about the history of the name. Near as I can tell, that page hasn’t changed in awhile. Here is a screenshot of that history as it is now on 4/19/18:

Screenshot 2018-04-19 12.19.54

With just three items, this is a brief history to be sure, but the omissions aren’t entirely a function of brevity. What they leave out here is every bit as important as what they choose to tell us. Taking their bullet points in reverse order:

Notice they tell us that when the team came into being four players and the head coach “identified themselves as Native Americans.” This wording was carefully chosen to promote a common team legend without actually claiming that legend is true. Defenders of the team name commonly tell us that the team was named after a Native American (William “Lone Star” Dietz). It’s not at all clear that the team name was ever meant to honor him, but more importantly, Dietz’s claims to Native American heritage are questionable at best, having come under intense scrutiny when Dietz stood trial for evading the draft during World War I. The folks at Redskinsfacts.com know very well that team fans team defenders still cite the story of Lonestar Dietz in defense of the team name. Telling us that Dietz claimed a Native American identity enables them to promote that story without actually making any false claims on the topic themselves. So, I guess it’s not an outright lie. More like, a cowardly equivocation.

The second bullet point in this ‘history’ is simply off topic (and rather vague). That prominent native leadership of the 19th century, have referred to themselves as ‘redskins’ does not establish that the term is not now or at any other time free of pejorative implications. Resting as it does in this simple, narrative the claim that some of them have done so does nothing to tell us how they felt about the term or why they came to use it. It doesn’t even enable us to sort which ones called themselves ‘red men’ and which ones called themselves ‘redskins’. It doesn’t address problems of translation. It really doesn’t establish anything except for the sloppy thought process of the website administrator. He’d have to answer a few questions before we could even get to the ‘so what?’ part of the conversation. Or we could just skip to the chase, I suppose.

So what?

The first point in the pseudo-history of the team name is the one that interests me the most. Defenders of the name will often cite Goddard’s article as proof that the term in question is not an insult. (Seriously, I’ve long since lost track of the number of people that have done this,) I always ask them if they have actually read the article. Often that seems to be the end of the conversation. When these folks do tell me they’ve read the article, I ask them if they’ve read the last line in the article. To date, none have answered that question. So, what is the last line in Goddard’s article?

The descent of this word into obloquy is a phenomenon of more recent times.

My point is of course that Goddard didn’t write an article telling us that the term in question is not an insult. He wrote an article telling us that it did not begin as an insult, which is an entirely different claim. It isn’t entirely clear from Goddard’s piece just how he would account for the present significance of the term, but he is very clear on the fact that his own work does not actually address that question. So, the article should leave us with a full stop right around the 1830s. Goddard helps us to understand the use of the term up to that point, and he doesn’t have much to say about anything after that.

Goddard’s work is interesting for a number of reasons, but it doesn’t tell us much about what the term means today, or even what it meant by the end of the 19th century. He does take issue with the claims of at least some modern activists, Susan Shown Harjo being among them, but he himself points out that rejecting her claims about the origin of the term does not prove that many Native Americans find the term objectionable in the present time (p.1). I think Goddard does a pretty good job of showing that Harjo and others have been wrong about the origins of the term, leaving the rest of the case against the team name largely untouched by his article. The correction seems a bit one-sided to me, but at least Goddard has been clear about the limits of his own work on the subject. If he has published anything addressing the later history of the term or correcting any of team’s misuse of his work, I am not aware of it. (If anyone does know of such a response, I would very much appreciate a reference.)

So, why is Goddard’s work the first thing Redskinsfacts.com cites in their history of the term? Well they have to know that many people equate the origin of a term (or at least our earliest known account of it) with its contemporary meaning. This is called the etymological fallacy, and it’s an extraordinarily common mistake. So, they don’t really have to tell us the article proves the term is innocent; the folks at Redskinsfacts.com know very well that is what many of their fans will take away from their reference to the article. Citing Goddard and providing a link to his work enables them to strengthen the impression that the team name is innocent without actually going so far as to say that’s what Goddard has shown. They invite their readers to indulge in an etymological fallacy, just as they invite us to think of Lonestar Dietz as a Native American when he was likely an outright fraud. It’s fascinating to see how the site avoids making the false claims in question, even as they invite readers to infer those very claims from the one they do make.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t even the worst of it. Defense of the Washington football team has produced all manner of horribles over the years. This isn’t even the worst of it.

Still, it’s pretty damned deceitful.

And cowardly.

Djou Know Juneau?

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Alaska, Animals, Travel

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Well over a thousand miles separates Barrow from Juneau. It’s enough to make the place as different from Barrow as either place would be from much of the lower 48. I imagine many of my friends and family must themselves imagine the sights Moni and I have been enjoying here this last few days are common experiences. But we don’t have eagles in Barrow, nor trees or mountains. We don’t have glaciers either, unless you count the whole ocean as a glacier for part of the year. (Jokes aside, I’m pretty sure that’s not how glaciers work.) Southeast Alaska is a truly beautiful place. It’s one we don’t often get to enjoy.

Still…

Travel happens!

***

This guy was a little ways off, which is why Moni and I weren’t immediately sure what we were looking at. I was busy snapping stills of this eagle with as much zoom as I could. Moni scooped me with a vid.

…the persistence of seagulls pays off.

A needlessly hurried spin around Mendenhall Lake.

…and a short photo gallery (click to embiggen):

Chilkat Weaving demo at the Alaska Native Studies Conference
Form Line Art on a Utility Box
Dancing at the Folk Music Festival
Mendenhall+
Mendenhall Glacier
Blues
Downtown Juneau
Sunset at the Anchorage Airport
Nugget Falls
Denizens of the University of Alaska, Southeast
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
Juneau
A Bit of Street Art
Shore of Auke Lake
Mountains Overlooking Mendenhall Lake
The Visitor Center and a small Pond at Mendenhall Lake
Couple friends walking under a rainbow
Mendenhall Lake
Mendenhall Lake in the evening
This was Auke Bay as seen from the University of Alaska, Southeast (taken through a chain link fence)

Irony Ain’t Erasure, Not Even in a Song

10 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Music

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Got any guilty pleasures?

Accident only knows, I sure do. Some of my favorites involve song lyrics. Don’t get me wrong here; there are plenty of off-color lyrics that I wouldn’t think twice about. Sexual innuendo, irreverence toward religious or political figures, or foul language? Unless these themes are just done badly, they won’t bother me in the slightest, and if they are done badly, then they aren’t a pleasure at all, much less a guilty one.

What I’m talking about here are lyrics that really do strike me as evoking a definite sense of wrong. It would be a little easier if my sense of aesthetics were completely amoral, but the truth is that I do sometimes react to art in moral terms. There are songs that I reject precisely because I find their content morally objectionable. Still, there are times when I like a song despite a few moral qualms about the lyrics, and maybe even a few that I like because of them. I don’t think I’m that I’m unusual in this regard. I expect most people could name a few such songs among their favorites, even as most people could name a song or three they don’t like on account of moral objections. If this isn’t inconsistency, the rationale behind the pattern isn’t entirely obvious. Sometimes we care, and sometimes we don’t.

…and sometimes the whole thing just gets a little uncomfortable.

One index of this discomfort would seem to be the lengths to which people will go to deny the problem altogether. Luckily, music fans don’t always have to do this on our own. The artists are often willing to help us find a way around the moral implications of an awkward lyric.

What has me thinking about this is a variety of efforts to explain away an offensive lyric by calling attention to its ironic usage. The problem is interesting enough at face value, but what fascinates me is the number of artists who seem to think an ironic usage means we can forget the baseline meaning altogether.

***

Case in point?

Remember that old Guns N’ Roses song, “One in a Million.” The song purportedly tells the story of Axl Rose’s arrival in Los Angeles. Fresh off the bus, and full of himself, Axl treats us to a range of prejudiced reactions to various people in L.A. scene. The song contains at least a hint of self-criticism, but it doesn’t do much to qualify the barrage of bigotry already present in the song. It was quite possible to see the song as a story about his past, but it wasn’t clear from the song just how much it reflected his current views. Axl’s explanation of the lyrics didn’t actually make things any easier. Asked about the offensive lyrics, Rose seemed to express a kind of ambivalence over the matter. He wouldn’t say that they reflected his actual views, but he didn’t quite disclaim them either. Perhaps that was honest. It was also disturbing.

What sticks in my mind most about the controversy was a particular account Rose gave to Rolling Stone Magazine. Asked about the line; “Police and niggers, that’s right/Get outta my way/Don’t need to buy none/ Of your gold chains today,” Rose had the following to say;

I used words like police and niggers because you’re not allowed to use the word nigger. Why can black people go up to each other and say, “Nigger,” but when a white guy does it all of a sudden it’s a big putdown? I don’t like boundaries of any kind. I don’t like being told what I can and what I can’t say. I used the word nigger because it’s a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem. The word nigger doesn’t necessarily mean black. Doesn’t John Lennon have a song “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”? There’s a rap group, N.W.A., Niggers With Attitude. I mean, they’re proud of that word. More power to them. Guns n’ Roses ain’t bad . . . N.W.A. is baaad! Mr. Bob Goldthwait said the only reason we put these lyrics on the record was because it would cause controversy and we’d sell a million albums. Fuck him! Why’d he put us in his skit? We don’t just do something to get the controversy, the press.

The quote contains all manner of sketchy rationalizations. The one that interests me here is the notion that the term could be viewed as race neutral, that it could mean just about anyone who is ‘basically a pain in your life’. It’s a fascinating gambit, one that’s still rather popular with casual racists. But the pretense doesn’t quite work. You could choose to apply it to a limited range of black people. You could even apply the word to someone who isn’t black. And yes, African-Americans can use these words too, and yes again, that seems to mean something rather different than it does when the rest of us use it. So, yes, you could certainly use the word in ways that don’t quite equate to a racial category. What you can’t really do is erase the history behind the word, or pretend that any other meaning you care to associate with the word is somehow divorced from that history. No. Whatever odd or ironic significance Axl Rose or anybody else may attach to the term in question, that significance is built on the very racial significance that he (and so many others) hope to deny. You can build on such meaning, but you can’t escape it.

***

Prodigy tried a similar maneuver in explaining their song, “Smack My Bitch Up.” Like Guns N’ Roses, they seemed to explain their song in a variety of ways. At least one of these included an effort to suggest that anyone interpreting the song title as a reference to domestic abuse (or perhaps that of a pimp beating a prostitute) was missing the point entirely. It was actually, so they suggested, a reference to “doing anything intensely.” You could imagine the phrase as a general reference to intensity, but if that’s where they were going, they got there through an allusion to violence. Maybe that’s a deal-breaker for anyone listening to the song, and maybe it isn’t. Fair enough, but what doesn’t work is to pretend the phrase isn’t referencing a violent act. It is.

***

When I recently stumbled into Banjo Odyssey by The Dead South, I thought surely the band had been going for pure shock value. With allusions to incest, violence, possibly rape, and still more incest, I couldn’t imagine any interpretation of the song that didn’t involve all kinds of wrongitude. It should of course come as no surprise that the band received some flack for the song. Their response was to produce the following statement on their Facebook page:

 

ATTENTION EVERYONE: We would just like to clear the air over some recent online discussion concerning our song, “Banjo Odyssey”. There have been a number of people concerned that the song is about rape, and that the song condones non-consensual sex. We would like to take a moment to explain the song to anyone who has been hurt or offended.

The song is written as a narrative. It is a story about two cousins who engage in a relationship, and are trying to escape their family, who is not O.K. with the relationship. The lyrics were meant as a satirical, tongue-in-cheek reference to our own genre; playing on the inbred-hillbilly stereotype often brought to mind when one thinks of bluegrass music.

We sincerely apologize to anyone who has been hurt or offended by these lyrics, as the last thing we would want to do is offend anyone. We make music because we love to, and as anyone who has seen our live show knows, we try not to take ourselves too seriously; we like to laugh, dance, and have fun and the song was written in jest.

Obviously, we do not condone rape or violence, and “Banjo Odyssey” (like many of our songs) is written as a story, and not as something to be taken literally.

Nate, Colton, Scott, and Danny

I still can’t decide just how much that explains and how much it doesn’t. It certainly helps to put the central theme of incest in a sensible story-line, but does that explain pulling the girl out by her hair? And what is the whole thing about going faster? I can’t help thinking the song is inviting us to savor the prospect of the girl’s discomfort in that particular moment. If it isn’t the allusion to rape that some took it to be, they have certainly traveled well down the path toward such an implication.

So, the song is meant a tongue-in-cheek parody. Got it! But how was this ever supposed to be inoffensive? I’m almost inclined to take that line from the statement as a deliberate barb in itself, because I cannot imagine any take on this song that isn’t built around the intentional discomfort inflicted on the audience. That the song means to play with that discomfort, and not to inflict real harm, seems clear enough to me. I could even add that I enjoy the song, but then again, I’ve never faced any of these themes in any meaningful sense. It’s a kind of privilege to be able to think of such things as fodder for humor. I can do that easily enough, myself, but what I can’t do is pretend a song like this doesn’t contain material that would be genuinely hurtful to some people. How that shapes any particular person’s response to such a song is an interesting question, but once again, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to pretend the offensiveness isn’t really there, or that it isn’t a significant feature of the song.

***

It isn’t just bad boys that give us music to take to the confessional. The song Kiss with a Fist by Florence and the Machine is a really catchy tune with a really violent theme, at least if you think songs about hitting people, breaking their bones, and even setting fire to a bed come across as violent.

…but not according to Florence.

I’m quoting this from Wiki, but apparently the statement originally appeared on the Myspace page for the band:

“Kiss with a Fist” is NOT a song about domestic violence.

It is about two people pushing each other to psychological extremes because they are fighting but they still love each other. The song is not about one person being attacked, or any actual physical violence, there are no victims in this song. Sometimes the love two people have for each other is a destructive force. But they can’t have it any other way, because it’s what holds them together, they enjoy the drama and pushing each other’s buttons. The only way to express these extreme emotions is with extreme imagery, all of which is fantasism and nothing in the song is based on reality.

Leona Lewis‘s “Bleeding Love” isn’t actually about her bleeding and this song isn’t actually about punching someone in the mouth.”[

Once again, I think I get it. Hell, I even love it. This song is about intensity; it is about reckless passion, and it’s a damned compelling song precisely because it conveys that intensity very well. What doesn’t work is to pretend that violence didn’t play a vital role in achieving that sense of intensity. It clearly did. This song too may use disturbing content to achieve something interesting, perhaps even wonderful, but the disturbing content is certainly there. Some of us can enjoy the Hell out of it, but I suspect it’s a little easier for those of us who have never had to worry about getting beaten by someone we love.

***

So, where am I going with all this? Maybe nowhere. I actually like all these songs, and many with far more disturbing messages than these. Suffice to say that I’m not in the habit of policing musical taste, but there is something challenging in the way that irony skews each of these tunes, something the artists themselves have trouble explaining, at least outside the context of a performance.

None of these tunes actually advocate the views or actions expressed within them, but each plays with objectionable content in ways that at least some listeners are likely to find a bit too much. Pressed on the issue, the artists (or perhaps in some cases their management teams) each tried a bit too hard to backtrack out of their musical beds. Each has tried at some point or another to deny the central motif of their songs, which is a shame.

It’s a shame to see people work so hard to erase some of their work, at least in the narratives they tell outside their performances. It’s a shame, partly because it’s worth remembering we aren’t all uniformly sensitive to such things. One man’s guilty pleasure can easily be his girlfriend’s time to leave the room (guilty as charged). It’s also a shame, because it’s a denial of the something valuable in the songs themselves. Such music isn’t innocent, and that’s part of its appeal. If there is anything good about these songs (and I do realize that’s debatable), then that good thing is somehow built around all the disturbing themes contained in them.

We all have some guilty pleasures. Hell, sometimes we may not even have genuinen cause to feel all that guilty about them. Sometimes, an artist can wring something really positive out of disturbing material. Sometimes they fall a bit short of that and still end up giving us something enjoyable. Either way, there is no sense kidding ourselves about the matter.

…or about what we are listening to.

 

Self-Awareness and Internet Dating Profiles

03 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in General

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I can’t really remember when I created my first profile on a dating website. It’s been a very long time since I was active on any them. What I do remember was how conflicted I was about doing it, and how that made every step of the sign-up process really irritating. When my chosen username kept coming up as already used, and adding digits didn’t seem to help, the result was a username that reflected my irritation. (No, I’m not posting it here.) I told myself I would change the name later, but I forgot. Soon, the first question I received from any women I contacted was about the name. For a time, I entertained the notion of changing it, but I soon realized something. The women I actually connected with found the name humorous. Those who didn’t like the name weren’t going to stick around long anyway. So, if my sarcastic username was a deal-breaker, it was probably just as well that the deal was broken anyway. It was a useful lesson, one that served me well, I think.

Another lesson, I don’t think I really got at the time was just why I found the whole thing so irritating to begin with. Oh, there can be lots of reasons to be nervous about dating sites (or dating in any context), but at least one of them would be this, it’s hard to tell people about yourself. Really hard! Of course, doing so for the purpose of making a personal connection ups the stress level considerably. So, in retrospect I really think a good deal of my discomfort was probably normal. Internet dating begins with a whole bunch of writing, writing about yourself, and that is bound to make people uncomfortable.

It’s been a long time since I’ve scanned the pages of any dating sites, and even longer since I did so for reasons other than idle (possibly morbid) curiosity, but a few of those thoughts that formed in those odd days of trying to find a match are still with me. I could tell a few horror stories. Hell, I’m probably featured in a few horror stories myself! More to the point, I keep reflecting on all those profiles from back in the day. They were an education of sorts. I may or may not have gotten the lesson right, but whatever it’s worth, I thought I’d share a few observations on those profiles.

Note: Just about all of my observations would relate to the early 2000s, which is when I was on these sites. If things on the net-dating scene are now different, well then get off my lawn anyhow! (Age happens.) Hell, I don’t even know if people are still doing this. I think so. Anyway…

First and foremost, it’s hard to escape the notion that most dating profiles aren’t all that accurate. Most seem to see this as a reflection of dishonesty, and I can certainly think of a few women who may have deliberately misrepresented a thing or two on their profiles. Mostly , I think the problem is a bit deeper than that. The vast majority of us (both men and women) aren’t all that sure how to describe ourselves. We may have a notion or two in mind, but these rarely stand up to scrutiny. If someone describes themselves as ‘outgoing’, they probably have a vision of a certain kind of context in which they really will be outgoing. What they don’t think about is the many contexts which will find them sitting in the corner quietly. That’s not even all that much of a problem for most people, not until they meet someone who thinks they are outgoing because they specifically said they were on a profile designed to help you figure out whether or not you want to meet them in the first place. Thus, ordinary human frailty comes to look like outright deception. Now multiply this by countless other descriptive themes and you have plenty of cause for suspicion, frustration, and general noncallbackalation.

The pattern that always stood out for me was pretty simple; time and again, I found that women had not described themselves in their profiles so much as an idealized version of the person they wanted to be. I really don’t know if men do that same thing on these sites (or if we have some completely different and possibly more irritating quirk), but I certainly saw this self-idealization in a good number of the women I met. In particular, I remember someone who had one of the most positive profiles I’d ever read. I’m not normally a sucker for warm and fuzzy sentiments, but I couldn’t help smiling when I read this woman’s profile, and it wasn’t just the ten-year old photo. She really seemed to capture a sense of what it meant to wake-up with hope and carry that hope with her all day. A few weeks after we began making phone calls, I found myself thinking this person complains more than anyone I know. Hell, she complained more than I do! (…and that IS saying something.) She wasn’t the sunny positive person in her own profile. If anything, she was chronically depressed, and probably had been all of her life. None of the positive themes in her profile made it into any of her communications with me. So, had she lied? I don’t think so. I think that bright and happy source of positive energy she put in her profile was what she truly wanted to be. That she wasn’t that happy person was sad, and I found the difference rather jarring, but I could never really hold it against her. Like so many others, she had imagined herself in terms of aspiration.

The gap between our own character and that we hope to have can be a problem, but how much of a problem it is varies. Some people have a constructive relationship with their ideals. It shapes their actions in meaningful ways, and they seem at least to move toward those ideas over the course of their lives. Others have long since relegated their idealized self to a kind of fantasy life. They don’t even hope to achieve that version of themselves, and they cannot even begin to think about what it would take to become a little more of what they would like to be. Here, I’m thinking of a woman who billed herself as a writer in her profile. She was working on her life story. When she shared the first page of that story, it contained more grammatical errors than I could count, to say nothing of poor stylistic choices, vague word choice, and a generally incoherent narrative line. Hell, I make plenty of mistakes in my own writing. So, I try not to cast too many stones, but this was just way too much. Her response to polite suggestions told me everything I needed to know about her project. She couldn’t even begin to grasp questions about how to tell her story. Spelling and grammar were beneath consideration, and she didn’t get any questions about stylistic choices. In her mind, that story was so compelling that she didn’t need to worry about the craft of telling it. Anyone who might bother her with such things clearly didn’t get it.

…and I didn’t.

…really, I didn’t!

Yes, the world is full of wanna-be writers (guilty as charged), but this one wasn’t even on the case, so to speak. Her idealized self wasn’t even an ambition. It was an indulgence. Like the depressive woman with a sunny profile, I could hardly blame this lady, though I did think for awhile about what it said about her approach to life. Being a writer for her was about getting away from the daily struggles of life, a chance to imagine herself as someone else for awhile, someone with more to show for all her struggles than she had at that time. To actually take seriously the task of writing her life story would make that too into a struggle. As much as she needed to be writing a book, she needed that writing to be free of hard labor. And thus, the appearance of a lifelong ambition within her profile turned out to be a lot closer to naming her favorite television show. Sometimes profiles are like that; information just shows up in the wrong places under the wrong labels.

One thing that came to jump out at me more and more over time was the number of pointless descriptions that never seemed worth reading. So many lay claim to being open minded, down to earth, and intelligent in these profiles. Almost everyone tells you they have a good sense of humor, even a great one. It gets frustrating to read such things, especially when the rest of the profile contains absolutely no hint of any of these qualities. When you see counter-indications, the whole thing just gets sad.

Somewhere along the line, I recall going through my own profile and taking out any direct descriptions of my own character. I don’t think I included many of these claims to begin with, but I do remember making a conscious effort to get rid of any that I might have been boring enough to write in the first place. I figured the old writing idiom that you should show people instead of telling them also made a good rule of thumb for dating profiles. If you want someone to know you have a good sense of humor crack a joke. To show that you can appreciate humor, explain what you like about your favorite comedy. Want someone to think you’re intelligent. Tell them what you think about something important to you. As to down to earth and open minded? …I got no suggestion for these cliches, other than simply dropping them. The point, is that people will decide for themselves whether or not you are smart, good looking, humorous, or anything else. It just doesn’t work to tell them these things.  So, just like you put your best picture in a profile in the hopes someone will find you attractive enough to want to chat, I reckon you do the same for character. You put things in the profile to display the character you hope you really do have. Whether or not that works will be a judgement your prospects make for themselves.

…which of course brings us back to the first problem, knowing yourself. It really is the tricky part to these profiles. I don’t say this in order to set up internet dating as a voyage of self-discovery. (Blech!) Really, I think the lesson here is a lot closer to a kind of humility. Most (probably all) of us don’t really know ourselves all that well. This is another reason to be a little restrained about your own self-descriptions. It’s also a reason to be a little compassionate when you discover the difference between the profile and the person you are actually meeting. That difference is going to be there. So, I figure we should try to be a bit generous whenever we notice it in a dating profile.

…or anywhere else for that matter.

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It should go without saying that none of my comments here should be taken in the spirit of authority. Like many I found internet dating to be a rather frustrating experience (which, I suppose, makes it an awful lot like ‘regular’ dating’). I met a few women this way whose presence in my life was a genuinely positive experience, but the majority of contacts were disappointing to at least one of us. So, these aren’t the pro-tips of a champion internet dater, not by any means. They are just the observations of a rather awkward fellow who happened to do this for awhile.

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A couple random observations:

  • When speaking to women about their profile pics, I found an awful lot of them favored one of their least attractive pictures. If there was a pic that I particularly liked, it was often one she was thinking about deleting. There is probably an interesting lesson in there about self-perception and physical beauty, but I wouldn’t be too quick to suggest it applies to women only. In my case, the pic I liked the best (or hated the least) was the one that almost cost me a few replies. Some pic I hardly thought twice about was usually the one they liked. Guess maybe it’s hard to tell what others really find attractive about yourself.
  • It’s easy enough to see that people may not want to meet too quickly. Lots of reasons to take it easy! In time, I realized that meeting up too late could be an issue as well. Actually, the process of meeting seemed to involve a few stages; a transition to email, another transition to phone conversations, and finally a meeting (with perhaps a second one and so on). I think the transition to phone and then to actually meeting can come too late in the dialogue. The issue here is imagination. You just can’t read too many messages without imagining all the rest. You fill in your sense of the other person with a voice, a sense of body language, intonation patterns, etc. In the context of dating, this too gets filled with hope. You imagine their voice a certain way, their gestures, the way they look at you when they speak, and countless other things. So, if you’re not careful, the person you meet won’t be able to compete with the one you’ve imagined while messaging back and forth. …and of course, visa versa.
  • Kids are fine, but they don’t belong on the first date. …and you will probably regret making an exception. (At least I did.)
  • People often make multiple contacts on dating sites, partly because most contacts come to nothing. If someone stops responding, there is a good chance that they have begun seeing someone in real life. That may sting, but it probably shouldn’t. More to the point, the transition to actual dating is full of hazards. So, if you wait a week or two, there is a good chance that things will have already gone south and she may be free again. She may even be wondering how to re-initiate. Whether or not that is a prospect worth following depends on a lot of variables, but sometimes it’s worth considering.
  • Lots of people put way too much stock in personality tests.
  • Shirt off and/or posing with guns or weights may work on some women, but the ones I met sure did spend a lot of time griping (and laughing) about men with that in their profile.
  • I figured it was always best to meet in public for an event planned to take an hour (lunch, dinner, or drinks work just fine). Optimism regarding a first meeting should take the form of leaving time open afterwards, NOT committing yourself to spend hours together at some event from which neither of you can easily escape.
  • I once said to one date; “I can be nice to anyone for an hour.” The next woman I met put that claim to an awful test. …speaking of self-awareness!
  • I met a couple women who circumvented many of the problems mentioned above by letting someone else write their profiles for them. This might have injected a little more objectivity into the narratives, but in the long run, I don’t think it was helpful, because their descriptions didn’t carry their own voice. I just had to get that much further into an exchange with them before I gained a sense of their approach to things. …which may be an important lesson in itself. People don’t really learn about each other by collecting a set of facts about them; they do it by interacting, by seeing and hearing the other person in action. What you communicate about yourself, or what others may say about you, will never be quite as important as how you say it, and that only works if you yourself are willing to be the one saying it.