Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 319 Editor's Choice: 34
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meaning
[Read the article: More on Miss Landmine 2008]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I’m not sure that Ms. Clark-Flory is off track in exploring the psychosocial meaning of phenomena like this. That’s what this site is for. There may well be a perverse irony in the fact that in order to gain our attention or empathy, or distract us from the absurdity of what was inflicted on them, these victims of male pathology would need to be swimsuited and bejeweled in tacky tiaras. Like prizes. Or spoils.
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funny thing
[Read the article: Is rape off-limits for laughs?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Humor is essentially an adaptive behavior that achieves social needs about inclusion, safety, control, group cohesion, and marginalization and neutralization of deviants. The subject matter is largely irrelevant to these functions. Observe comedy routines. Generally there is nothing witty, ironic, or even interesting in the subject matter. It’s all about manipulation of the relative worth and status of individuals and of affect and behavioral orientation of the audience to deviants as related to group safety and cohesion. Those who are not marginalized feel safer. Check out your own overt behavior and inner experience when laughing in a group – you make eye contact with others (why?), and it feels like relief. Silverman understands this.
The subject matter is always secondary because empathy is suspended – empathy would interfere with the archetypal and evolutionary element of humor, which is to marginalize and exclude others in order to establish safety for self. So when we ask “Is X ever funny?” or “Is it OK to laugh at X?” what we are really struggling with is our conflicted need for inclusion in group (to bond with others through laughter for safety) versus a capacity and courage to suspend the need for group safety and inclusion and risk marginalization oneself, in order to access, evaluate and operationalize some level of empathy with objects of humor.
That is to say, rape is never OK to laugh about, but our natural and healthy aversion to it may be subverted by need for group acceptance and, yes, innate propensities. Try not to laugh along with a group of peers the next time some unattractive, awkward, or deviant peer is singled out as the victim of cruel humor, even when it doesn’t feel right to laugh. Try it. That is the primal conflict between group safety and empathy. Male rape is more often the subject of humor than female because it is socially safer to marginalize homosexual behavior than women.
As Ms. Clark-Flory notes, humor has evolved to victimless forms that transcend its roots. It may reflect back on itself to exclude and marginalize the very need to marginalize. It may target ideas and behaviors, rather than individuals. And it may be self-deprecatory, a sublime ironic negation of humor’s original lethal function.
So, decrying the subject matter of humor is largely off track. The social meaning and import of humor become operationalized, and in potentially radically different ways, only through its interpretation by each individual’s internal cognitive/emotional templates – beliefs, attitudes, and most importantly insecurities and need for acceptance. Thus sketches in Borat would be likely to strengthen and operationalize tendencies toward racism, misogyny, and classism when viewed, say, by a group of Duke University lacrosse players. Conversely, viewed by an adult audience, the same sketches have the opposite effects, because the joke is on the joke, what is lowered in status and marginalized are the maladaptive attitudes aimed at the objects, not the objects. It’s an inside job.
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Articles like this are so important
[Read the article: Ron Paul is a baby elephant]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]because surely we will get back on track if only we find the right leader to elect. I put it on the same footing as finding the right church to attend.
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Right. About that gender thing.
[Read the article: Roundup: Do these punching bags encourage female violence?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Headlines appearing simultaneously November 29, 2007 on msnbc:
Britney Spears displaying mental issues?
and
Devout boy dies after refusing transfusions
Maybe it’s just me. I gotta go.
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Fracking brilliant
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Existentialism/post-modernism accosted in the bathroom by Mr. Social Dominance Orientation feeling angry and impotent.
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Glenn
[Read the article: Democratic complicity in Bush's torture regimen]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I wonder if you actually intended “jaded omniscience”?
In any case, you will likely inspire greater confidence in your readers if, even when feeling uncertain or threatened, you refrain from name-calling. It’s a bit regressive and unfocused.
Self-control, like any real solution to intractably failed Systems and maladaptive fairy-tale social constructs, is about change on the inside and a willingness to question all.
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Read the lyrics
[Read the article: Flirting with disaster]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The artist’s work is pro-recovery precisely because it is anti-rehab. It musically decries the well-kept deception that nonetheless has always been transparent: “rehab”, denoting traditional confrontational, shaming, and 12-step approaches to treatment of substance use disorders, does not work. Never has. It does provide normalized early death by nicotine along with comforting denial and avoidance of underlying dysphoria driving addictive behaviors, hidden behind the façade of “clean and sober”. I get a sense of the futility of traditional rehab from the lyrics of Ms. Winehouse, not glorification of addiction:
I'd rather be at home with ray
I ain't got seventy days
Cause there's nothing
There's nothing you can teach me
That I can't learn from Mr Hathaway
I didn't get a lot in class
But I know it don't come in a shot glass
I don't ever wanna drink again
I just ooh I just need a friend
I'm not gonna spend ten weeks
have everyone think I'm on the mend
They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
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upside
[Read the article: Generation XXX?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Most porn may tend toward misogyny and exploitation, but if BYU thinkers are right, the loosened libidos are facilitating the dismantling of Family. Who could object to that?
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remarkably productive thread
[Read the article: Feminist hypocrisy on the hijab?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]generated by Ms. Clark-Flory eliciting our conflicted, largely avoided, and dis-integrated orientations around personal autonomy, culture, family and religion.
Summary: it’s not about articles of clothing per se, and the opportunity for factions with pre-existing agendas to charge each other with hypocrisy, misogyny or cultural bigotry is a sideshow.
What’s that leave? Just this – our discomfort with facing what meaning could be freely constructed for what it means to freely choose in the face of the pathologies of Family, Culture, and Religion.