Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

The eighth April Moon prompt is another feather, this time in focus, with a brick pathway in the background. The feather itself appears to be one from a male peacock or a related species, with the blue and green eye that is part of the fantastic plumage males use to attract mates.

This time around, though, the plumage brings to mind things like failure and effort. I put in to speak at a couple conferences this year as part of a goal for myself to go out and do more at conferences and maybe network a bit more.

I got back responses - one put me on a waitlist as a possible alternate speaker, the other said no. Which, as someone who thinks they might be good at this, kind of hurts, in the way that ego gets bruised when you have a higher opinion of yourself than reality.

Because the conference selection process is usually opaque (and often with good reasons), it's not easy to determine why someone was selected and why someone wasn't. Which leaves the person who want selected with the...opportunity, I suppose, to construct their preferred narrative about the reasons. What they decide to do with it depends on them and the situation they're in.

It's easiest to blame external forces for why things didn't happen - after all, someone else was making the decision about whether or not I came. This sort of external attribution can run the spectrum from benign ideas to malice-filled conspiracies. More and more in seeing the malice part of it. This seems to be a backlash against the increasing trend of conferences adopting Codes of Conduct regarding attendee and presenter behavior to curb instances of harassment and conferences adopting explicit calls and stances to increase the diversity of their presenters. If you're playing on an easier difficulty level (as I am), the explicit diversity call is an easy scapegoat to hang why you weren't selected - some "quota" that let in less-qualified presenters and kept out you. It's not fair, something something, political correctness. Which conveniently feeds the idea that white people, and especially white men, are the real victims of discrimination these days and the world should go back to the way it was, with white men unquestionably the best at everything and everyone else underneath, using bootheels if necessary. You can see that mentality everywhere - the Republican Party, Fox News, MRAs, PUAs, the idea that there are such things as "alpha" and "beta" men, redpillers, Gamergate, the Sad and Rabid Puppies, the serious use of the ideas "feminazi" or "social justice warrior", and so forth. It boils down to an attitude that believes expressing a preference for anything other than straight cis white Protestant men is embracing lawlessness and license to do anything illegal or immoral, because that preference hurts their ego and self-insistent belief that white men did everything to build civilization and are the only people who can preserve it, so clearly they deserve the position at the head of the table (and every other position, too) and the adoration of all the others who would otherwise be uncivilized if left to their own devices. It's very easy to blame the outside.

It's equally easy to blame the inside. The first thing that came to mind at those results was, "Huh. Maybe I'm not as good at this as I think I am." Which can be a realistic assessment of capabilities and contexts, or which can lead to "...and therefore I should stop trying and accept that I am useless and worthless at this." That way lies Impostor Syndrome, which can be inculcated very early on in life, in those places where we are reduced to our quantifiable selves by entities scrutinizing our potential and to caricatures of our complex selves in our social interactions - school. If the narrative that has been constructed around you says you're the smart kid, failure is an opportunity for ridicule and shame, not a useful building block to success. If you're the dumb kid, you may never get to show your true intelligence because remedial classes eat your time and leave you no elective. Die as much lip service is given to the idea of the "well-rounded child", there is precious little in the way of allowing children to learn and demonstrate those things that allow them to become a complex person in the eyes of others. If the self internalizes the message that there are only a few, or one, thing(s) about them that matter, any blow to those things reverberates throughout. If I don't succeed at the things I'm supposed to be good at, what is there left for me to build myself with? A rather fragile tower can collapse easily and take the rest of self-esteem with it. In earlier parts of life, it would have.

One of these problems comes from an excess of ego, the other from an unstable one. Neither are particularly healthy. At the same time, I don't think that meditation or other methods that are supposed to help get ego out of the way will help with these things.

The best way forward is between those two points. Pointed out to me was the possibility that I am as good as I think I am, and the selection committees just didn't choose me. Ego intact, truth still true, no need to attribute motivations, conspiracies, or demerits and self-destructive ideas to anyone. The universe being random, people making decisions based on the strength of the presentations and their ideals and desires to see more people who may have been excluded from presenting get a chance to do so. It's the easiest and the most difficult decision to make, the one that confirms reality and chooses not to substitute a more convenient narrative. If you wanted something to kill ego, living in reality, acknowledging it as it comes, rather than trying to make reality fit your own ideas, will be very effective. And possibly depressing. But it also allows you to be your fully complex self by not letting any one aspect come to dominance or lead you to believe that it is the sole aspect that matters.

There's always going to be another time to show off and try again, much like the fanning of the plumage.

The sixth April Moon prompt is a black and white photograph of an insect. The picture is composed, however, so that we only see the silhouette of the insect against the wall, and the reflection of that silhouette on a particular axis underneath the shadow of a dividing pipe. The insect itself is not visible, nor the pipe.

We're really good, as humans, about paying attention to the shadow and not the thing itself. It's a staple of horror movies, games, and the like to have a looming shadow approaching the protagonist or the next victim while they do what they are doing, unaware of the danger. In comedy, the thing casting the shadow turns out to be small. In straight horror, it usually turns into a Discretion Shot as someone gets killed or otherwise removed from humanity.

Plato spoke a myth of a cave, where prisoners watched shadows on a wall, gave them names, argued about them, and otherwise invested themselves in insubstantial things, rather than finding a way to break their chains and get out into the light and the real world. Buddhists could conceivably be described as thinking of our entire existence as shadows and insubstantial things, born of desires that wish to perpetuate themselves, but that eventually will cease in the achievement of oneness with the cosmos itself. Not this, not that. Xion, no. i.

We make entertainment out of shadows as well - contorting hands or constructing objects such that when the light is applied, the silhouette of something very different appears. It's the magic of illusions, of seeing something that is right there and yet cannot actually be. Whether we appreciate the effect or, as skilled practitioners of our own illusions, the method by which the illusions are built, there is something that we all enjoy in seeing the unreal become real.

Of course, that's only when we're doing it, as the disclaimer says, "for entertainment purposes only." When we start building and exposing other people to illusions because we want them to do, not do, or believe something, it becomes much less entertaining and much more angry-making. For example, the man responsible for allowing an experiment about guards and prisoners to continue long after it had exceeded ethical boundaries says that young men are not receiving proper support and instruction in correct masculinity, because a lack of male role models means technology and women are the primary definers of what it means to be a man.

This is an increasingly writ topic as many men that thought they knew what gender roles meant (and that were quite happy with being the top of the heap) find women are increasingly able to live lives, raise children, and have careers without requiring a man to provide financial or other support for any of these tasks. And furthermore, that women may have opinions and preferences about what kind of men they will willingly consort with, rather than having to choose from bad options to ensure survival. The shadow being cast here is one where men are both unnecessary and not present in the lives of young men, although it's usually called "feminism" when people such as Zimbardo are writing about it.

The "absent fathers" problem is paradoxical, in that "Absent fathers" is both "men who leave their male children because they are insufficiently manly" and "women who kick men to the curb because feminism teaches them they don't need men". Even though the supposed solution, forcing women and children to stay with the men that impregnated them by removing their agency, supposedly works in both cases, ignoring the litany of good reasons why men and women should separate and stay very far away from each other. The presence of a father in someone's life is no guarantee that the father is an appropriate role model of masculinity. Zimbardo proves this by citing a poor example of why a father is necessary - conditional love. According to him, mothers give love unconditionally to their children, but fathers do not, and the lesson that some people will only like you based on whether you perform for them or please them is apparently essential to the development of a healthy man. According to Zimbardo, men require extrinsic motivation from another man to develop properly.

If this seems nonsensical, or rings your bullshit alarm, look past the thing itself and watch the shadow that it casts. The unstated part is that "conditional love" is a code word for "discipline". The statement above then transforms into "Mothers love their children too much to effectively discipline them, therefore every child needs a father who will provide the necessary structure and discipline." Which is no more a true statement than "mothers give unconditional love, fathers give conditional love", but at least makes more sense as to why "conditional love" would be touted as essential to proper masculinity instruction. Zimbardo admits as such when taking about how many black homes have no fathers and that this syndrome is now spilling into white culture as well (because blaming black people makes it safe to admit that white people have a problem).

The other great shadow of fear labeled "feminism" by those in masculinity crisis is the march of women into spaces previously thought exclusively the province of men. Those that define their masculinity as the space where men can be that women cannot go find themselves attacked on all sides by non-discrimination statutes and lawsuits as well as women just showing up in male spaces and demanding to be treated as an equal. To that man, as Zimbardo is, this is not seen as equality, but unacceptable "feminization" of these spaces. The increased success of women in these spaces, combined with the "absent father" scare, the shadows they cast for young men are a world controlled by women where there are no spaces for men to bond with other men, apart from women, and to engage in those behaviors that are the rite of passage from boys to men.

It is unsurprising, then, that Zimbardo chooses places that are still seen as nearly-exclusively male (and resisting the presence and inclusion of women) as the refuges these boys are supposedly retreating to - porn, video games, and anti-hyperactivity drugs. Considering that the piece is about the lack of masculinity in young men, it shouldn't be a surprise that the justifications for these three elements engage in gender essentialism, but it disrupts the flow for me.

Video games are addictive because they reinforce the innate male desire to do things rather than reflect and engage in self-awareness, says Zimbardo. As such, they don't appeal to girls. And thus, Gamergate and the entire horde of examples of active exclusion perpetuated at girls and women who want to play games with their friends or in mixed company. Because games aren't appealing to girls. But more importantly, video games prevent boys from engaging in self-examination and developing an individual identity that can withstand the pressures outside.

Which might be true in a world where single identifying markers constitute the entirety of a person's identity for the entire time they are there - that is to say, high school - but the outside world is generally multifaceted, and assuming that their spirit hasn't been crushed by the time they leave high school, most men likely have more than one thing they can claim as a part of their identity. They may have several parts that have been waiting to flourish, now that they have left the single-facet world.

Plus, have you seen games these days? Especially on the indie circuits, there are a lot of games that encourage self-reflection and moral decision-making.

Porn is an easy one for them to tie into the current narrative - lacking appropriate role models of working, living relationships in their lives, and because women and girls always conceive of sex in terms of romance and feels instead of rutting, young men turn to porn to get their visual brains satisfied, and as a consequence, absorb the world of porn as instructive in how their sex lives should be, without narrative, romance, love, touching, or anything other than an endless parade of sex acts that is supposed to be normal.

Furthermore, because they can have a fantasy life that always works without rejection, boys will never navigate the world of dating, being turned down, breaking up, and all of that turmoil. It's phrased as boys not knowing what a girl's agenda is our what she wants, rather than the real risk of rejection, especially in high school, so that Zimbardo can make sure his blame stays squarely on women.

His conclusion is that since boys don't risk anything, they don't get anything, either, and the increasing realism of porn will soon mean they don't have to talk to real women if they don't want. An entire generation of men that don't need women.

Which does not mesh with reality at all. I doubt many men think of porn as the instruction guide to sex and sexuality, especially in this age of Internet, where real and useful information is available to those with a Web browser, including places where questions are answered about all sorts of topics. I suspect it holds cachet because it is, at least to U.S. society, the forbidden fruit for the underage. It's less about what it is and more about how it's not allowed. And it does have an upside, ish - it can be really handy for figuring out preferences, kinks, and things that are arousing, without endangering a partner with inexperience or having them go tell the world of your high school about what kind of sick pervert you are. As an experienced graduate of small-town school, I assure you that the pressures on kids to not be seen in any way that attracts scorn and derision is quite high, and that gossip travels fast. If there is to be conversation and possibly even flirting, there has to be a safe scenario to talk in, where even if rejection is possible, it will not turn into school-enveloping drama. It's not about a woman's "agenda", it's about fostering a safe environment for both men and women to be able to try, fail, and succeed without disastrous consequences.

Rather than relying on a gender essentialist argument, though, this could easily feed the narrative so far constructed - a lack of fathers and male role models means there aren't men in their life who can answer the embarrassing questions and teach them properly about what to do with their actual identities.

No, group settings with a nurse don't count, as the peer pressure present means very few of the real questions on anyone's mind will be asked. And that is assuming that someone gets to that point in school - plenty of religious objections will pull students, even in public schooling, out of classes that talk about sex. It also assumes that the school program itself will be comprehensive and accurate, which is not always the case in states with meddling legislatures and Moral Guardians.

Let me put it this way: in all the conversations I had with my dad about sex (which were, we note, all one way, from him to me), I learned only a few things:

• Sex outside of marriage is forbidden by God. Don't do it.
• Looking at naked women who aren't your wife is forbidden by God. Don't do it.
• If you have sex, you are indicating you want God to bless you with a child.

Considering my dad is a devout Catholic who has been married to his wife for decades now, this should surprise exactly nobody.

What this does, though, is point out the lie that having a male role model is enough to avoid porn. Plenty of people that I know who had fathers present will admit to having seen some. No, the point to be made here is that if your parents choose to avoid educating you about your sexuality, whether because of deeply held religious beliefs or similarly deep discomforts with talking about it with their children, they should provide an alternative who will talk frankly with their children and answer questions honestly, with or without the instructions of religion about those topics. To not provide this means the curious will go about finding that information on their own, and the best you can do is hope they find somewhere informative and accurate, instead of somewhere with an agenda on how everyone should behave. You're leaving that very important thing up to their judgment to exercise good search strategy and to sift and test the information they receive for bullshit. If you don't trust your kids to be able to do that, then you need to provide them with an alternative that will work.

If you wanted to scare people, though, All you have to do is lop off the parental responsibility part, and there's your scary spectre of kids getting wrong information from the Internet. Or porn.

As for hyperactivity medications, this is more a swipe at the idea that teachers and schools are geared to women, who sit, read, write, and have no trouble talking about feelings. Boys and men, of course, are the doers who move, act up, and otherwise get bored because their kinesthetic learning centers (and they're all kinesthetic learners, of course) aren't being satisfied. No gym, no sport, and assignments that require composition and reflection, quelle horreur, because diaries are for girls. (We note the above lament about action versus reflection in video games is apparently not remembered, or has been sacrificed to this newer point.) In any case, since they are not being properly stimulated, the boys become disruptive and get ADHD medication they don't need.

The solutions proposed for all these problems might look like feminism if viewed in the right context. More men as teachers, men clubs where young men can get mentorship and rule models from older men, video games that aren't as violent and are more cooperative, parents taking to their kids about sex, and getting men to learn how to dance - the kind of dancing one does with a partner, I'm guessing, since it's being used as a way for young men to be able to talk to women. There's also a bit about reforming welfare to encourage fathers to stay, which is a no, because no woman should be dependent on the presence of a man to be able to raise her children, but the rest are pretty good, if we assume that the mentorship and modeling the young men are getting represent healthy models of interaction that respect women and don't perpetuate outdated or retrograde ideas. I'm not very hopeful for that, because of the person advocating for it, but I remain willing to be surprised.

Mr. Zimbardo is doubtful his vision will come into reality, though, because he doesn't think that the terrible state for men is going to change any time soon. The citation here is a documentary that seems to be better at convincing is that the current model of masculinity is in need of change, and that the change should be away from doubling down on the current practice of masculinity that Zimbardo and others have been building as the solution to the twin spectres of absent male role models and the march of feminism. If the outer shell of toughness and the inner core of fear are what the current situation produce, we need a new situation. One that needs mentors and role models and talking and teachers and librarians and all of that... but oriented toward making sure we don't reinforce what's already not working.

We have to deal with the insect, not be afraid of its shadow.

nanila asked if I would do a link set on "chromatic" as an idea, which could cover all sorts of possibilities of color or music or any other sequence where you go from one end to the other, stopping at all the important points along the way. And maybe I'll do a more fun version of that later, but it seems the gods have dropped a rather large group of related things on my lap that can serve as a spectrum, although one without much for a lighter end.

Minnesota doesn't really care if you die,
Since all you are is a thorn in corporate profits' side.
In Wisconsin they say that all should eat like the pregnant women do,
Because Republicans don't care about you.

Sexist reviewers do get sacked, after Twitter shows how many are mad enough to act.
That said, when harassed at a construction site repeatedly and without fail, a woman going to the police is told by her assailant that she's a "silly girl", even though he's the one with the conviction for the same kind of behavior. And that it was "just banter". Which didn't stop and did escalate, so bullshit on that. And similarly on the excuse that hair-pulling is also just banter. That kind of stuff is gaslighting and contributes to the problem of women being told their experiences aren't real.

And then there's the Dude Social Fallacies.

Women still excluded from all-men clubs,
"No penis, no power" the cry of some schlubs.
So to take that power, they dress in masks and make noise for others who are awesome.

It's a spectrum of aggressions, some small, some large, but all of them wearing away just that much more on the women who deserve better than this stuff.

And sometimes, there is actual progress, even if it isn't enough.

The third April Moon prompt is a black and white piece of art, incorporating spiral designs and various patterns in each of the arms of the inward spiral.

I have a relationship with art and creativity that is probably not the healthiest. Because creative talent has always been defined to me as the ability to make things from scratch, without having or needing a recipe or formula to produce them. And heavily weights toward visual art, although music and writing are in the scope of that idea. Creative people come up with ideas and then have the ability to put those ideas on their chosen medium. They don't copy or face or take something else and build on it.

It's kind of like the relationship Sheldon and Leonard of the Big Bang Theory have with each other, namely that Sheldon forever considers Leonard an inferior physicist, because Leonard, the experimental physicist, is only taking other people's ideas and seeing if they work, instead of coming up with the ideas and theories themselves. (They both look down on Howard, the engineer that actually builds and repairs stuff, for not having a doctorate and for not working with a "pure" science. It's very Platonic, actually, both this idea of creativity and the heirarchy of the geeky professions.) Creativity was defined in a narrow band of possibilities within a limited range of disciplines. And since, at the formative stage, I didn't have the ability to create things from whole cloth in those disciplines, I haven't really ever felt like a creative person.

With age comes wisdom, though, and an expanded appreciation of what creativity entails. Remix culture, for example, expands the available creative space to people who can put together already existing things in novel ways. Fanworks and transformative works say that creativity exists in those who can take the raw blocks of a setting and characters and produce new things. (With a proper public domain, that creative work could be sold or otherwise profited upon to make a living openly.) Music performance involves making runtime decisions about what the symbols on the page actually mean in terms of the intended sound - does your "medium volume" actually mean "medium volume underneath the melodic line" or "medium volume as the melodic line, so don't step on your accompaniment" or just "medium volume, because my scored dynamics make sure everything comes out correctly"? There is a gap between playing what's on the page and making music that has to be filled by the creative capacities of each player. Writers need editors, cover artists, and other creative talents to take a manuscript and make a book, and so forth.

Perhaps because I'm still a bit blocked on my own "out of nothing" abilities, or because, as Ira Glass notes, my talent Gant caught up to my taste, I find I've got the knack for taking other people's work and helping them refine it, or snagging something and adapting it to my needs. I might not be able to create the script or program from the beginning, but if someone's already done it, or there's an idea present, I can often get to completion. So while I don't draw, I have picked up the skill of digital line drawing and put it to use digitizing the works that appear on my drawing pad at work. I took a shell script that pointed at one file and then made copies to point at other files so that RetroPie could play all of the games needed instead of just one.

And I've been helping flesh out ideas for the summer program by taking the skeletons of other ideas and transforming them into fuller, more complete versions. It's the mid-work that's the province of Hufflepuff - it's got to get done, and it gets done by people who are just putting their heads down and working.

Which is why it was such a delight to see an email in my inbox giving praise for the work done on a particular idea. And praise in the form that mentioned how creative it was. That kind of encouragement is pretty rare. At least in the States, where we value the innovator, the discoverer, the "creative force" that does it first, being the person that comes next, or the one that takes the idea and makes something practical and useful out of it sometimes means a lifetime membership in House No Credit.

Doing all of this, though, and boosted some by the compliment given, I think I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there is creativity in tinkering, in changing, in deconstructing and analyzing, and in transformation. Such that yes, even in the work of the library, we can all say that we are creative beings, even if none of us have ever made a thing from scratch.

I think it would do wonders for our perception of self.

The picture of the prompt, April Moon 2015 #1, is of a pair of sneakers straddling the word "Ciao" in a word balloon. Which brings up some painful memories of a time where I was that close to being told "We don't want you here any more." For reasons that didn't seem serious, or that refused to change in the face of the truth.

Perhaps ironically, I got that kind of dismissal, for reasons that can be as incomprehensible as the others, from places that I would normally do some part of my job. That indirect feedback provoked more direct conversation about skill building and such, and I've been assured that this is not that situation before, but there's been very little acknowledgement of what they think about the situation and a lot more of just getting to solutions. It makes it harder to believe that everything's okay. Because whether or not the situation resolves well depends on other people. That's not a situation I really ever want to be in again, considering how poorly the first one went.

The shoes could also mean someone tarrying at saying goodbye, which is always tough when the goodbye is permanent. You want to both stay right there in the hope that things will reverse and be better, and you want to be very far away from it so that you don't have to see the conclusion when things go bad.

But now, there's just reminders and comparisons. And the knowledge that one day, they'll all be saying "Ciao" to me, too.

So, perhaps as a change of pace, I thought perhaps we could participate in the idea of three_weeks_for_dw, posting content meant just for this platform, for three weeks or so.

Leaving me in the usual quandary - what do I write about?

So, if you're prompt-inclined, please do leave topics or entire writing prompt sequences on the doorstep, and I'll see what I can get. I could also do

• the April Moon image sequence
• a series of video game prompts that look fun
• more baseball Tarot

...or something else entirely. Prompt away, please!