What's in a name? In the last eight years, I have had just as many blogs because I couldn't think of one with the perfect name to it. When I have to finalize a name, it has to make me feel something that I have always been feeling but with renewed measure. For instance, this blog is called "isnerd". It's not a smart title, coming up with it cannot require a session of focused thinking. Instead, it just struck me. I was trying to solve a physics problem when I decided to name my blog by its personality. Now, however, my dissatisfaction with it grows because its name no longer befits its content. There is a disconnect between the two. Seen one way, I think the title is highly misleading. Seen another way, the title often keeps me from posting casual content. The relationship has become quite abrasive and it must stop now.
So, I need a new title.
Showing posts with label relationship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationship. Show all posts
Monday, 14 May 2012
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Gender as a loaded question
Up until earlier this afternoon, I was of the opinion that my beliefs were half-formed inasmuch as gender and gender studies were concerned and, for the purpose of decision-making, ignorable. However, after a short discussion with a friend of mine, NP, I realized that I did have something to say. Worse, not only did I have something to say, but I was apparently saying things that were “evolved”, or well-formed. That makes me sad (because even without as much forethought, I had opinions more rigid than the others that NP had spoken to).
One more thing. Once the discussion concluded, however, it struck me that I’d observed that most of NP’s questions were loaded. For example, her first question was this: “Would you marry a woman who earns more than you?” This question assumes that the woman’s income is a factor in me making my decision. If I’d said “Yes”, I would’ve ended up acknowledging that I would have considered her earnings before arriving at a decision – irrespective of the outcome. If I’d said “No”, it would have been a simple refusal of commitment solely on the basis of something I’m sure I’m not acknowledging in the first place.
Because I was her friend and was having the conversation informally, I could clarify, saying, “That’s a loaded question. The question should have been: Do a prospective bride’s earnings matter if you had to decide whether you wanted to marry her or not?” If it had been someone else, someone who didn’t have the liberty to scratch the question and see through what the questioner was going for, the study’s results would have come out nice and biased. “Would you be OK with staying at home and taking care of the babies” was the other question that assumed too much, though not as much the first one. I wouldn’t mind at all, but I don’t want babies!
NP was only being curious, attempting to give form to something she’d already thought about. They seemed like loaded questions to me because I wasn’t sure in the beginning as to what she was thinking, and once that became clear, I could come clean. My caution is only directed at those who are concerned with field-work and surveys.
Anyway, the rest of the discussion proceeded smoothly, and was a bit of an eye-opener for me (like I said earlier). It jumped from one point to another and achieved coherence towards the end, so I’m going to just copy and paste the edited conversation here. As a primer: I explore the notion of gender as performance. It most definitely isn’t a new thing but it feels like it is, perhaps simply because not many people see it that way.
NP: Do you think today women have become more aggressive and dictate how a relationship plays out?
Me: In some cases, yes. Let me divide it into three categories. 1. The relationship is egalitarian, where both partners dictate what's happening. 2. The woman is aggressive and wants to dictate more of what's going on for reasons other than what constitute a relationship. 3. The woman is aggressive and wants to dictate more of what's going on for reasons within the relationship - these are subjective cases.
I think #1 is more often noted than #2. However, #1 would also mean the woman's role in the relationship has advanced toward the front, which I think is what you were gunning for.
NP: Why I am asking is, often men today seem really out of depth when dealing with women and what they want. So what I want to know is, why that is? Is it because the women are more vocal today and aren't shy about asking for things?
Me: Men are finding spaces which they used to assert their masculinity in being invaded by women, and that's troubling. However, how they adapt to it makes the difference. If they understand that those spaces in the relationship that were once open to assertion are now gone because of reasons that have nothing to do with a "gender-based" role, then it's fine. That they don't is what causes attrition.
It's not just being vocal - being vocal constitutes the establishment of an identity in spoken terms, in terms of an identity. There are other things that constitute that identity, and those are what I refer to when I say spaces.
NP: like what?
Me: Like the girl earning more than the guy.
NP: But what I am asking you is how you see men negotiating this change? Do you think these are issues that still bother men: urban, educated men?
Me: As far as I'm speaking for myself: I’d like see gender as performance. Gender is not just in the genitals but also in the mind, and if a girl chooses to live like a boy, it is her choice. In that case, however, I don't expect anything from that person.
NP: So to you it’s a non-issue…
Me: To me, gender is not a fixture of society. It was at a point, but in seeing gender as a choice - in seeing gender as coming with a set of decisions that some women are conditioned to make every day in one particular way - I can understand if some other women choose to play their gender-character differently. At the same time, because women play their roles differently, it is also necessary that I engage with my spaces differently. And that's why I say I don't care if my partner earns more than me or if she wants to go to work while I stay home and cook. I don't see earning or cooking as being the definition of what makes me me, just as I don't see earning or cooking as what makes her her.
One more thing. Once the discussion concluded, however, it struck me that I’d observed that most of NP’s questions were loaded. For example, her first question was this: “Would you marry a woman who earns more than you?” This question assumes that the woman’s income is a factor in me making my decision. If I’d said “Yes”, I would’ve ended up acknowledging that I would have considered her earnings before arriving at a decision – irrespective of the outcome. If I’d said “No”, it would have been a simple refusal of commitment solely on the basis of something I’m sure I’m not acknowledging in the first place.
Because I was her friend and was having the conversation informally, I could clarify, saying, “That’s a loaded question. The question should have been: Do a prospective bride’s earnings matter if you had to decide whether you wanted to marry her or not?” If it had been someone else, someone who didn’t have the liberty to scratch the question and see through what the questioner was going for, the study’s results would have come out nice and biased. “Would you be OK with staying at home and taking care of the babies” was the other question that assumed too much, though not as much the first one. I wouldn’t mind at all, but I don’t want babies!
NP was only being curious, attempting to give form to something she’d already thought about. They seemed like loaded questions to me because I wasn’t sure in the beginning as to what she was thinking, and once that became clear, I could come clean. My caution is only directed at those who are concerned with field-work and surveys.
Anyway, the rest of the discussion proceeded smoothly, and was a bit of an eye-opener for me (like I said earlier). It jumped from one point to another and achieved coherence towards the end, so I’m going to just copy and paste the edited conversation here. As a primer: I explore the notion of gender as performance. It most definitely isn’t a new thing but it feels like it is, perhaps simply because not many people see it that way.
NP: Do you think today women have become more aggressive and dictate how a relationship plays out?
Me: In some cases, yes. Let me divide it into three categories. 1. The relationship is egalitarian, where both partners dictate what's happening. 2. The woman is aggressive and wants to dictate more of what's going on for reasons other than what constitute a relationship. 3. The woman is aggressive and wants to dictate more of what's going on for reasons within the relationship - these are subjective cases.
I think #1 is more often noted than #2. However, #1 would also mean the woman's role in the relationship has advanced toward the front, which I think is what you were gunning for.
NP: Why I am asking is, often men today seem really out of depth when dealing with women and what they want. So what I want to know is, why that is? Is it because the women are more vocal today and aren't shy about asking for things?
Me: Men are finding spaces which they used to assert their masculinity in being invaded by women, and that's troubling. However, how they adapt to it makes the difference. If they understand that those spaces in the relationship that were once open to assertion are now gone because of reasons that have nothing to do with a "gender-based" role, then it's fine. That they don't is what causes attrition.
It's not just being vocal - being vocal constitutes the establishment of an identity in spoken terms, in terms of an identity. There are other things that constitute that identity, and those are what I refer to when I say spaces.
NP: like what?
Me: Like the girl earning more than the guy.
NP: But what I am asking you is how you see men negotiating this change? Do you think these are issues that still bother men: urban, educated men?
Me: As far as I'm speaking for myself: I’d like see gender as performance. Gender is not just in the genitals but also in the mind, and if a girl chooses to live like a boy, it is her choice. In that case, however, I don't expect anything from that person.
NP: So to you it’s a non-issue…
Me: To me, gender is not a fixture of society. It was at a point, but in seeing gender as a choice - in seeing gender as coming with a set of decisions that some women are conditioned to make every day in one particular way - I can understand if some other women choose to play their gender-character differently. At the same time, because women play their roles differently, it is also necessary that I engage with my spaces differently. And that's why I say I don't care if my partner earns more than me or if she wants to go to work while I stay home and cook. I don't see earning or cooking as being the definition of what makes me me, just as I don't see earning or cooking as what makes her her.
Monday, 28 February 2011
The Voice
There are many different kinds of voices. Some you can hear, some you can't, some that seem to boom into your cavernous head from all sides, some that seem to sprout from the centre, some that come and go as they wish, some that you bump headlong into like an innocuous but ubiquitous lamppost. Then, there are those voices that are not inside your head at all, but at the other end of the phone call you're attending to right now.
These voices have bodies, I'm given to believe, something to which a head is affixed to, and through the head, words are spoken. For the record, I don't like spoken words. One moment they're there, the next moment they're gone. I hate that kind of indecisiveness - unless of course they're forced into a small box called a "voice recorder" or if they're carved into stone by a manic engraver. The voice in my earpiece is now telling me about what a bad morning it had.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Early morning... blues?"]
[/caption]
How do voices have bad mornings? Are they blown out into the world through a snot-smeared windpipe? Or do they bear messages as murky as the mind that conceived them? Actually, the voice in my ear seemed to be suffering both maladies: expletives four to fourteen letters long were clamoring for an audience with blatant disregard for the Doppler effect, and the immutable moss-green of the phlegm I could almost hear.
Whether voices can have bad mornings or not, I can. I was having one then and there. First call I get in the morning is from a "friend" complaining about how her HDD crashed and how I could be responsible for it. I was stupefied when I heard that, and when she went on to inform me that the catastrophe befell her after I forwarded an email from Reuters, I snorted. That was the signal, I'm thinking, for the barrage of mucosal sludge.
Even so, I don't like being looked down upon or frowned upon for hitting out at a messenger who's brought me bad news. That is unfair, to expect a receiver to receive all kinds of glop and remain silent. Come to think of it, that'd be the psychopathic silently-thinking cold-bloodedly-conspiring contemplatively thumb-twiddling Mephistopheles down the hall. An honest man should be allowed to lash out, to have it over with. The mistake lies with the dolt who set the messenger on his journey. He didn't sponsor any armour.
What can you do against voices? What can you do against something that seems to come from a head far, far away? You can shout back, sure, but that's head versus head. Can you trap voices in small black boxes? I don't think so. What's going to be in the box when you reopen it later is a rant without beginning or end, eviscerated neatly out of a morning it had sought to destroy but now, doing nothing to the evening.
How do you knock the serrated stiletto out of a voice that's waiting to stab you in the back?
These voices have bodies, I'm given to believe, something to which a head is affixed to, and through the head, words are spoken. For the record, I don't like spoken words. One moment they're there, the next moment they're gone. I hate that kind of indecisiveness - unless of course they're forced into a small box called a "voice recorder" or if they're carved into stone by a manic engraver. The voice in my earpiece is now telling me about what a bad morning it had.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Early morning... blues?"]
[/caption]How do voices have bad mornings? Are they blown out into the world through a snot-smeared windpipe? Or do they bear messages as murky as the mind that conceived them? Actually, the voice in my ear seemed to be suffering both maladies: expletives four to fourteen letters long were clamoring for an audience with blatant disregard for the Doppler effect, and the immutable moss-green of the phlegm I could almost hear.
Whether voices can have bad mornings or not, I can. I was having one then and there. First call I get in the morning is from a "friend" complaining about how her HDD crashed and how I could be responsible for it. I was stupefied when I heard that, and when she went on to inform me that the catastrophe befell her after I forwarded an email from Reuters, I snorted. That was the signal, I'm thinking, for the barrage of mucosal sludge.
Even so, I don't like being looked down upon or frowned upon for hitting out at a messenger who's brought me bad news. That is unfair, to expect a receiver to receive all kinds of glop and remain silent. Come to think of it, that'd be the psychopathic silently-thinking cold-bloodedly-conspiring contemplatively thumb-twiddling Mephistopheles down the hall. An honest man should be allowed to lash out, to have it over with. The mistake lies with the dolt who set the messenger on his journey. He didn't sponsor any armour.
What can you do against voices? What can you do against something that seems to come from a head far, far away? You can shout back, sure, but that's head versus head. Can you trap voices in small black boxes? I don't think so. What's going to be in the box when you reopen it later is a rant without beginning or end, eviscerated neatly out of a morning it had sought to destroy but now, doing nothing to the evening.
How do you knock the serrated stiletto out of a voice that's waiting to stab you in the back?
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