Update:: This post probably comes off a whole lot harsher and demeaning than it’s intended to be. Blame the “recovering sinner” effect. When reading the personality type discussed below, try to think in terms of–borrowing Pete’s favored frame–someone who is adopting the markers of the tribe he thinks he should belong to without realizing that the tribe doesn’t actually exist and probably wouldn’t accept him even if it did.
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I mean, I know it’s some unfair. I know it’s more than 50% unfair. What I’m wondering is, is it more 100% unfair or 60% unfair?
There’s a great post up at Pandagon, Megawatt assholes not finding fembots for sale; wingnut welfare on the case!. It’s worth reading and discussing, but I’m more interested in my own reaction to the comment (first comment? I have read past this point) by Ellid. I’d link directly to the comment, but that seems to be broken.
Now, to be a little bit fair to me, this comment occurs in the context of significant others who’ve gone or proven dysfunctional. To be excruciatingly fair, though, I don’t think that framing significantly influenced my reaction.
Ellid wrote:
Then there are the curious cases like my former husband. When we first dated, and for the first couple of years of our marriage, he was responsible, hard-working, either employed or in school, and treated me well. He liked classical music…
And that’s where I made a snap judgment, the judgment I’m not sure is more 60% unfair or 100% unfair. I read “He liked classical music…” and I thought “Ah, one of those.” I had a picture of a young(ish) fellow who was overall a bit of a drip, the kind of guy who fails to recognize that his social skills are much less developed than he thinks, who projects an unearned arrogance (usually) wrapped up in bonhomie. (But he thinks he deserves that air of superiority, oh yes he does.) The kind of guy who’s secretly convinced he’s a Heinlein hero but is really just another nothing who happens to be good at math or word games (but, again, probably isn’t as good as he–and most of his acquaintances, actually–thinks he is).
(K–think “Dr. D”. Or, better, think “Dave!”. Yeah.)
This isn’t necessarily a bad person, just a gingerbread man who leapt from the oven before he was cooked all the way through. It’s the kind of guy whose interests and proclivities haven’t developed organically but has been borrowed from the traits ascribed to the ubermenschen in all the genre books he’s read. Really, what we’re talking about is a subspecies of Genus Callow, Species Geek, Gender Male.
The identifying characteristic of this subspecies is the unusually intense lack of self-awareness, this lack replaced by a curious mixture of overconfidence in his inherent abilities but deficiency in what we usually think of as self-confidence. Note that I’m not talking about all callow geek men; just the ones who don’t have the goods that they’re convinced they have. The young male geek version of “all hat and no horse”, I guess, but with the added twist that they genuinely believe they have a full stable.
(Yeah, I was this person. I hope I’m not still this person.)
They usually grow out of it, but not always. I went to library school with a guy who’d made it to his early 30s without progressing. Shudder.
So, yeah. I hope you have kind of an idea of the kind of guy I’m talking about, and I hope I’m right in thinking that the cluster of traits is distinct enough that they can be considered a type.
So anyway, why did “He liked listening to classical music…” make me twig? Among the guys of this type I’ve known–and there’ve been dozens–there is a near-universal tendency to proclaim a like or love for classical music. This tendency is markedly rare among people not of this type. Why is this so? Heinlein, and his posse; the rugged manly heroes in mid-century science fiction are the kind of people who listen to classical music, and that’s the kind of people the gingerbread boys want to be/think they are.[1]
(Note: a Stuff White People Like entry suggests that class markers could confound this analysis. The “white people” described by that site are not the population of white Americans but instead are those who are in the upper-middle class[2], but I’ve never run with that kind of folk and so am not familiar with their ways and manners.)
So how unfair was it that I pushed the guy under discussion into the gingerbread boy bin? It was totally a knee-jerk response, and those are almost never good. Still, the remainder of the comment filled in more of the blanks and convinced me I was right. But, then, it would, wouldn’t it.
[1] Other markers include attempts to work in references to ancient Roman society and politics whenever possible; a tendency to show off and frequently misuse a large vocabulary; a sexuality that is adventurous in theory but almost typical (maybe vanilla with chocolate sauce) in practice; pedantic prescriptivism in language matters; and an uncontrollable desire to tell people about his sophisticated tastes in film, food, and drink. None of these, save maybe the linguistic pedantry, is as universal as the professed appreciation for classical music.
[2] This deserves some talking about at some point. Doing some reference work for a student this week, I was stymied by the fact that there’s no good definition for “middle class”. As near as I can tell, when the media talks about “middle class” and many of the rest of us talk about “upper middle class”, we’re actually talking about people at the not-quite-lower end of the top quintile of income earners. That’s a really fucked up definition of “middle” no matter how you slice it.