toads and gender roles

[yippeecahier]

In November, as I have brought to the attention of everyone I have talked to in the past month, I adopted a toad. I am just pleased as punch about this. She is a lovely toad, though understandably a little skittish. I think she needs a little more living space, and maybe a rock to burrow under and a bit of hollow log to hide in. I am doing my

Comments

[thalerian]

Your argument does still hold, but it's worth keeping in mind that we create characters for people, too, and often project onto them our own feelings and experiences. Without realizing it, our judgments of people are as likely to be a priori (derived internally, through reasoning) as a posteriori (derived through external observation). Of course, we don't always even have a true awareness of our own feelings and experiences--you once said that reading friends' reviews on Goodreads told you more about the friends than about the books. This is probably even truer of how we see each other, since books are more objectively knowable than people. And, of course, we write characters for ourselves. I know that I've steeled myself to do things by reminding myself that Liz Thaler is strong and brave, and that heuristic cuts both ways. Our self-written characters/narratives can help or hurt; the same is true of the characters/narratives we put together for others. So, the etymology of the words "person" and "persona" is fascinatingly accurate-- we are the masks we wear. With work and maturity we can figure out what's behind the mask, but a) the mask is part of the reality, and b) we can never know for sure what is Factually True. We can never know if we're right.

It reminds me of Plato's Cave, except that any Philosopher King who tries to tell us the truth could be, as far as we prisoners know, another shadow.

None of which is to contradict what you say about toads, but rather to extend and extrapolate.

[Whoa, sorry for the long-winded philosophizing. It's a combination of Scheibe's influence and the fact that I'm a bit under the weather.]

[yippeecahier]

In fact, it supports what I say about toads!

Feel better!