"She lied! She lied to us!"
--Grand Moff Tarkin, Star Wars, (1977)This is something that I've been kicking around for a very long time, and which I suppose doesn't really need a good "hook" to tie it to, as the problem never seems to go away. We talk a lot about "empathy," defined in Webster's as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being
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This is always infuriating to me, and my instinctive response is, "Maybe you're an idiotic fluffhead, my dear, but I am not."
Thus, by stating the difference between us, a bridging has been made, an attempt to imagine the experience of another has had the result of a humility of interaction,
Well-described. Yes. This is the inherent balancing-act of empathy. You need to imagine and enter into the feelings of another because you can, because we're all human. Yet you also need to acknowledge that this is only imagination and you can't fully experience the reality, because we're all individuals with our own unique relationships to our cultures, and a failure to acknowledge that is domination and appropriation of the other person's experiences.
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There were times as a teenager/college student in art classes filled entirely with older women when I wanted to stab my eardrums out with my 4H pencils, because I could only take so much gabble about fat fat fat fat obnoxious children fat fat stupid husbands fat kids these days fat fat fat shoes fat sale at Jordan's fat before hitting my limit - and THEN to top it all off by saying "tee hee, of course I can't find my car keys/use a map/assemble a DIY bookcase/figure out politics or economics, I'm an artist and I think with the RIGHT side of my brainasdfjhlkl;now *which* paint is the most toxic? OMNOMNOM -- Honestly, it made finding feminism all that much harder, because between them and the parish council women it was damn hard to argue against the idea that only exceptional women cared about anything beyond the narrow confines of domesticity or had any interest in abstract thought or a wider world of any ( ... )
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Gawdawmitey, I hate that shit! It always makes me want to sneer, "Well, I'm a person and I think with BOTH sides of my brain!"
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What these women don't get is that there are TWO ways of being a rolemodel: 1) Being a person that a child wants to emulate, and 2) Being somebody they don't want to emulate. By constantly complaining about their lives in front of you, they clued you in to the fact that they weren't happy with said lives. Naturally, you decided to not copy their sorry examples.
What they also don't get is that some things are usually within a person's control, like whether or not they will marry and/or have children. Circumstances may force you to live in a given area or work in a certain field, but you still have some say over your life.
Besides, why shouldn't you try to be "exceptional"?
--Architeuthis
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