Okay. There’s a social interaction concept that I’ve tried to convey multiple times in multiple conversations, so I’m going to just go ahead and make a graph.
I’m calling this concept “Affordance Widths”.
Let’s say there’s some behavior {B} that people can do more of, or less of. And everyone agrees that if you don’t do enough of the behavior, bad thing {X} happens; but if you do too much of the behavior, bad thing {Y} happens.
Now, let’s say we have five different people: Adam, Bob, Charles, David, and Edgar. Each of them can do more or less {B}. And once they do too little, {X} happens. But once they do too much, {Y} happens. But where {X} and {Y} starts happening is a little fuzzy, and is different for each of them. Let’s say we can magically graph it, and we get something like this:
Now, let’s look at these five men’s experiences.
Adam doesn’t understand what the big deal about {B} is. He feels like this is a behavior that people can generally choose how much they do, and yeah if they don’t do the *bare minimum* shit goes all dumb, and if they do a *ridiculous* amount then shit goes dumb a different way, but otherwise do what you want, you know?
Bob understands that {B} can be an important behavior, and that there’s a minimum acceptable level of {B} that you need to do to not suffer {X}, and a maximum amount you can get away with before you suffer {Y}. And Bob feels like {X} is probably more important a deal than {Y} is. But generally, he and Adam are going to agree quite a bit about what’s an appropriate amount of {B}ing for people to do. (Bob’s heuristic about how much {B} to do is the thin cyan line.)
Charles isn’t so lucky, by comparison. He’s got a *very* narrow band between {X} and {Y}, and he has to constantly monitor his behavior to not fall into either of them. He probably has to deal with {X} and {Y} happening a lot. If he’s lucky, he does less {B} than average; if he’s not so lucky, then he tries to copy Bob’s strategy and winds up getting smacked with {Y} way more often than Bob does.
Poor David’s in a situation called a “double bind”. There is NO POSSIBLE AMOUNT of {B} he can do to prevent both {X} and {Y} from happening; he simply has to choose his poison. If he tries Bob’s strategy, he’ll get hit hard with {X} *AND* {Y}, simultaneously, and probably be pretty pissed about it. On the other hand, if he runs into Charles, and Charles has his shit figured out, then Charles might tell him to tack into a spot where David only has to deal with {X}. Bob and Adam are going to be utterly useless to David, and are going to give advice that keeps him right in the ugly overlap zone.
Then there’s Edgar. Edgar’s fucked. There is *NO AMOUNT* of behavior that Edgar can dial into, where he isn’t getting hit HARD by {X} *and* {Y}. There’s places way out on the extreme - places where most people are getting slammed hard by {X} or slammed hard by {Y} - where Edgar notices a slight decrease in the contra failure mode. So Edgar probably spends most of his time on the edges, either doing all-B or no-B, and people probably tell him to stop being so black-and-white about B and find a good middle spot like everyone else. Edgar probably wants to punch those people, starting with Adam.
In any real situation, the affordance width is probably determined by things independent of X, Y, and B. Telling Bob to do a little more {B} than Adam, and Charles to do a little less {B} than Adam or Bob, is great advice. But David and Edgar need different advice - they need advice one meta-level up, about how to widen their affordance width between {X} and {Y} so that *some* amount of {B} will be allowed at all.
In most of the situations where this is most salient to me, {B} is a social behavior, and {X} and {Y} are punishments that people mete out to people who do not conform to correct {B}-ness. A lot of the affordance width that Adam and Bob have would probably be identified as ‘halo effects’.
For example, let’s say {B} is assertiveness in a job interview. Let’s say {X} represents coming across as socially weak, while {Y} represents coming across as arrogant. Adam probably has a lot going for him - height, age, socioeconomic background, etc. - that make him just plain *likeable*, so he can be way more assertive than Charles and seem like a go-getter, *or* seem way less assertive than Charles and seem like a good team player. Whereas David was probably born the wrong skin color and god-knows-what-else, and Edgar probably has some kind of Autism-spectrum disorder that makes *any* amount of assertiveness seem dangerous, and *any* amount of non-assertiveness seem pathetic.
There’s plenty of other values for {B}, {X} and {Y} that I could have picked; filling them in is left as an exercise for the reader.
Does this make sense to people?
Everybody want to do me a personal solid? Yeah? Good.
Add on some example behaviors that fit this. They don’t have to be gendered or something like that. They can be very specific, they can be broad. Just things people can do an amount of and that bad things happen if they do too much or too little of them.
I’ll start with eating. You can eat too much food (short term sickness, long term obesity) or too little (starvation).
This applies nicely to gendered vs. cross-gendered behaviours with punishments of negative stereotyping on either end.
Adam, as an attractive heterosexual man can appear as butch or as femme as he wants within pretty large limits and people are just going to compliment him on it.
Bob, a less-than attractive heterosexual man can act more masculine without too much fear of reprisal but can’t generally slip into more effeminate behaviours without negative comments about his presumed sexuality.
Charles, as a gay man, needs to ensure that he confirms to gendered expectations as much as possible to avoid derisive stereotyping for effeminate behaviours.
David, as a trans man, is pretty much screwed if he acts the least bit feminine, but can occasionally avoid accusations of transitioning poorly if he loads up on balls out machismo.
Emily, being a trans woman, gets screwed over in that she can’t act effeminate without being accused of re-enforcing sexism and can’t act masculine without getting accused of not-being-trans-enough and pretty much gets assaulted with both negative outcomes simultaneously anyway.
Emily feels sick when she sees Adam dance around in lingerie she fears even buying, David considers punching Bob in the face for always being on his case about going to the gym too much.
Thanks for the addition! This is a really insightful take on this. I’m glad to see people contributing as I think the original post was missing at least one good example. It’s also enlightening to see just how well this can apply to such a wide array of social behaviors and expectations.
HOT SHIT THIS IS A GREAT MODEL FOR A THING THAT I HADN’T THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT BUT IS REAL AND IMPORTANT.
Also… The OP made a graph. Bless you, OP. 😍
I’ve thought about exercise like this for a long time. X is when you aren’t really doing anything, like, heart rate isn’t up, muscles aren’t trying that hard - it’s not bad, but it’s not actually helpful in any way. Y is when you do too much, end up aching and exhausted in a bad way, maybe feel like barfing or just lying down and not moving for a week. Or worse. The goal zone is where it feels good - the pleasant burn, the breath lost but catchable, the actual building of muscle and slimming of fat and etc. Endorphins.
Most people are in the Adam or Beth group. I, with a muscle tissue disorder and one partially collapsed lung, am a Charlie. I’m a fan of powerwalking and yoga. And I know people who are Denise or Elton, with chronic pain and no or very minimal win conditions.
Exercise was the first thing I thought of when reading this, too. Also, there’s Fritz and Gus.
Fritz’s graph changes from day to day, too fast for them to make plans that will help them stay between X and Y, plus other people are going to keep saying “why can’t you do that today? you managed it fine yesterday.”
And Gus’s measuring, graph-making, and/or graph-reading apparatus is broken, so they can’t monitor what’s happening with their body (or with their social reception, if this is about gender presentation not exercise) and have to rely on other people for input on how much of the thing they should be doing. Which is a problem if the person advising them is Adam, and Gus’s graph (if they had one) is more like Charles’.
also: I realized this causes something like a problem I have, which I thought of as the ally’s problem.
Suppose B is trying to be helpful to a marginalized group of which you’re not a member. Too little, you’re upholding current oppression; too much, you piss off some members of the groups of which you ARE a member AND some members of the group you’re attempting to help since you’re taking up too much space and/or Doing It Wrong because you haven’t lived through things and groups are not monoliths so anything you do relating to a group you don’t belong to is bound to piss off somebody.
I tend to veer a lot between being Bob and Dave, and trying hard to keep to a Charles level, as my energy levels to cautiously navigate social mores not my own and my standing in groups I supposedly belong to wavers.
I mean: if I go out and volunteer at a charity for refugee kids instead of working enough hours a week to support my family, people will be rightously pissed. Same if I get overloaded in a conversation about racism, lash out at someone who said the wrong thing, and end up shouting at the very people I’m trying to help. Or if I try to help a friend with mental issues, get overloaded, and get us both caught in a mutual triggering spiral.
I have a LOT of friends whose mental illnesses put them at firmly Edgar levels when it comes to social justice - either we must be ALWAYS CORRECT ALL THE TIME or SCREW ALL THIS SJW SHIT rather than “This is important and your pain is real but I can’t help without hurting myself.”
This metric also applies to addict vs non-addict behavior patterns, and to chronic pain and mental illness survivors, and to social perceptions of safety for survivors of rape and domestic violence. And if you’re feeling sprightly, it can apply to profanity patterns in atheists vs staunch believers too.
It really is a useful metric.
As a teacher, I feel like this is an important thing to remember about my students. The way I experience the world, and how they experience the world, may be very different
For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the
lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock
strikes twelve … we’ll meet ourselves.
I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.
The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.
Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”
We stan an icon.
I never knew the whole quote or its circumstances. Lord she was amazing.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” – Ursula K LeGuin
That right up there is the essential style of the woman who radicalized me. :) It was a privilege to share the planet with her, though (to my great regret) we never met.
things the kittens have so far yelled at me about with the righteous indignation of child monarchs:
- i could not find my brother for 1.3 seconds - my brother bit my ears when i pounced on him - my brother refused to bite my ears even though I pounced on him - my brother has carried away the little mouse toy but I wanted to carry away the little mouse toy - want to lie in lap but no room - want to lie in lap but am on floor - want to lie in lap but it is too warm in lap - too small to jump on table - too large to get behind washing machine as is my sacred right - i am being prevented from drinking the coffee, a substance which would do me grievous harm - you are not letting me lick the inside of your nostrils - i am too small to headbutt you with enough force to adequately represent my affection
You know, I don’t think I’ll ever get over how that one post I made about women as knights in history, made it all the way to Reddit only for a bunch of redditors to argue that women couldn’t actually be knights because:
- “the term is gendered” (it’s not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)
- “they didn’t actually do things as knights” (who didn’t? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)
…and a few other reasons that come down to “I don’t like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties”.
And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on “Knight”, specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: “Wikipedia is not an academic source”–but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.
Knights were sometimes women. 🤷
I saw this and needed to answer.
The gendered versions of ‘knight’ come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn’t like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame’, but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero’. This is the default masculine.
The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera’.
Similarly in French: “Chevalier” becomes “Chevaliére”.
In Italian, “Cavaliere” becomes “Cavaliera”.
Outside of Romance languages, “knight” is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).
So it’s not a silly infantilisation, than using a word for the knightly class and gendering it in a binary, which means we can actually tell that, yes, women as knights existed, enough that the feminine form of the word pops up now and then, so we know it existed.
ooh, where one could read that original post??
Just a note about translations and … well, patriarchal bullshit.
When you say “Hatchet women fought the Moors” I was like “hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?”, and when I googled it … I actually have heard about it, it’s the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But … there’s something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like “Order or the hatchet”? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there’s no really a difference between “Axe” and “Hatchet”: There’s a single word for them, “Hacha/Atxa”. But in English, there’s a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:
So It’s pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use “Hatchet” and not “Axe”. I’m pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms:
So dear academic-who-translated-this-first: Does that look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?
Important inclusion I was not aware of, thank you very much friend. :)
I’m going to be chuckling over ‘Does this look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?” for the rest of the day.
