Warm Worlds and Otherwise

[supergee]

Dr. Alexander on some of the ways we live in different worlds.

Thanx to Slate Star Codex

Comments

[arlie]

Fascinating. I'm tempted once again to comment on the original blog. But I'm latish for work already, and account creation hassles + long delay for approval --> not going to bother.

One thing I didn't see in the comments was how the same person can live in different worlds during different periods of their life. And how, when appropriately triggered, they can be back in an older space once again.

Currently, any gender harassment I experience is non-obvious and probably statistical. I haven't encountered catcalls or even attempts to chat me up since I got my first dog, 17+ years ago. (Before that, I avoided exercising in public, even walking, because of male entitlement.) My sisters report that even without the dog, they'd noticed that society seemed to have gotten far more civil - until they compared notes with some younger women (my neices), who were getting all the harassment and catcalls we remembered from the same age.

When I remember the situation when I was high school age, with strangers (who maybe knew me, but prospognosia means I didn't know them) felt OK pinching my butt in passing on a public street - I'm back in an emotional space where men and boys should be castrated on the first such offence, and executed on the second. I was willing to do my part by kneeing them in the groin when they tried it on me, but frustrated that I wasn't generally able to respond fast enough.

In a second phase, I was clearly non-ambitious (not being male), suitable to be assigned boring routine work, and not promoted, while probably being underpaid, but my body was my own. Of course I was expected to demonstrate an appropriate sense of humour (i.e. laugh at jokes about women, and act undistressed by lewdness in a professional setting). And advances in the workplace were entirely my problem - to be defused without destroying the "relationship" if I wanted to keep my job - his wasn't at risk, of course. It was still a several order of magnitude improvement, and I no longer wanted to kill the average normal male.

Blessedly, my very first job was short on the "non-ambitious because female" crap, so I recognized a problem when I did encounter it, rather than taking it as simply the way of the world, and learnt to deal with it. And I also figured out that job hopping was the best way to keep my salary advancing - maybe not as fast as a similarly skilled male - no way to get data to be sure of that - but well enough for me to experience continual improvement, living increasingly comfortably with good savings and a comfortable emergency fund, even as the cost of living increased.

Currently, there's no provable gender harassment or bias in my life. Of course I rarely reveal my gender on line, and avoid the high risk adventure of making controversial public posts while female - just as I avoid other risky behaviours like crossing streets without looking first. And I'll be 60 this year, as well as being generally taken for a married lesbian - so not attractive to the males in my environment.

But get me back down memory lane - and I find I'm still angry, and basically want to kill every male who acts entitled to inflict his sexuality on others. The "open source boobs project" caused me to abandon all thoughts of every attending a convention again, except for purely engineering events. (And that even though I'm old enough the entitled male infants involved would have been extremely unlikely to have targetted me.) It's an embarassing, near pathological rage - made even stranger by my own recognition that I identify as just as much male as female. (I do not, however, identify as a rapist, or even a rapist-lite [butt pincher]. It's just that when triggered, I see "male" as a near synonymn for "rapist" or "potential rapist.")