With how the site is, now's a good a time as ever, right?
Recently met up with and had a conversation with an old acquaintance (who I respect in some ways more than others), noticed a few things.
It is easy for a man to have contempt for what culture and society claims are the follies of women: they are emotional, they do not know what they want, they play mindgames, they are petty. A woman's anger is considered hysterical. A woman's interest in fashion is a mark of her vapidity. A woman without a father has "daddy issues." These are reinforced and internalized over and over again, from an essentialist view, as 'irrational' behavior.
But when a man does not know what he wants, it is "him finding himself." When a man plays mindgames, he is smart and devious and a "magnificent bastard." When a man is petty and one-ups someone, it is an "alpha move." A man's anger is considered to be just, righteous, and awe-inspiring. A man's interest in fashion is a mark of his class. A man without a father is a noble tragedy.
People hate in others what they hate in themselves, as they say.
When girls write love letters to murderers in prison, society gasps collectively. How dare they! But when boys commit murder, we shrug and say... why wouldn't they?
It's easy to say you're a feminist or ally or whatever you want. But remember the society you came from sank its hooks in deep, and its fallacious appeals to nature ("Women just want to be mothers, and this is clear by how we pressure them to be mothers!") are persistent. Remember a lot of psychological and sociological research was performed on specific populations that aren't universally representative. Remember that sexual dimorphism and differences in brain structure are not the end-all. Don't ever stop being self-critical.
One of the rightists' greatest weaknesses is their inability to see the potential in half of the world population. Women hold up half the sky, and you're doomed to failure if you entertain ideas to the contrary.
Something that blew my mind when I realized it was that, because our brains are plastic (they change their shape in response to their environment and the demands placed on them, especially when we're young), even definitive structural differences between different populations' brains can be a social construct.
Epigenetic changes, including those caused by poverty, can cause issues two generations down the line as well.
When I first learned about that, the rage I feel about poverty in general increased measurably.
It's so insidious too, because your decision making is often completely fucked by the immense stress of having limited stability
This is especially the case when it comes to language. The linguistic system you use affects how you store memories and subjectively perceive the world.
eh sapir-whorf is still pretty controversial no? There are a few empirical examples but nothing definitive. Personally I believe it, but I would use caution before making grand statements like you just did
The strong version (where language determines and potentially limits how you think) is highly controversial; the weak version (where language only influences thinking) is pretty much accepted.
This is the struggle session I was born for! Critical support for unproven linguistic theories that I personally agree with!
Let me give u what u crave bb :)
Strong Sapir-Whorf is debunked and weak Sapir-Whorf is weak. The two results I always remember is that 1) Russian speakers can tell shades of blue apart sliiiiiightly better than other people because Russian basic colour terms differentiates between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and 2) speakers of some Australian aboriginal languages are better at knowing where north is because instead of using left-right, their language always uses cardinal directions (“The pen is to the west” instead of “The pen is to your left”). And the second one is kinda iffy anyway because there’s counter evidence that if an Australian aboriginal speaker moves to a different region, it’ll take them a while to learn to orient themselves properly - suggesting they go more by landmarks than knowing where north is like a bird or whatever.
In regard to gender and languages specifically, I suppose there's some evidence that languages with grammatical gender influences how people perceive objects. In one experiment, when asked to describe a bridge, German speakers (die Brücke, feminine) called up adjectives like dainty, elegant, etc. while Spanish speakers (el puente, masculine) preferred adjectives like strong, sturdy. But crucially, this experiment is more about social perceptions and stereotypes and stuff, not that Spanish and German speakers have a different mental capabilities.
Altogether, I think that this idea that language determines thought is uncomfortable for linguists because it slips into insane racism so quickly. "Chinese does not have morphological tense markings, the Chinese do not understand time the way we Westerners do!! The Ancient Greeks used the word typically translated as 'wine-coloured' to describe the sea, they were all colour-blind!! It is no wonder Indo-Europeans invented logical thinking, the subject-verb-object construction is uniquely suited to logic in a way those filthy foreigners with their verb-subject-object thinking are not!!"
No... no! My preconceived notions!
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Fuck Noam Chomsky! All my homies accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis uncritically.
to make matters even more complicated, our brain isn't fully developed until the mid-20s
and everything we do before then has an influence on how it's gonna look
im critical of the idea the brain is ever 'finished'. not until you get anterograde amnesia. if you look at what the mid twenties represents in 'western' culture, it seems awfully coincidental.
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ending college (or choosing an academic carreer or studying one way of thinking and specific slice of a system of knowledge really in depth), settling into one job and way of life and doing the same fucking thing every fucking day until you fucking die. or settling into shit and slowing down on the drugs and adventure and probably spawning.