Shortcuts of Culture
Mar. 29th, 2005 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseI asked ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
allourapus for permission to blog on a difficult moment that came up at the party in Syracuse a couple of weeks ago.
A great swirling pit of marginally drunken hilarity opened up on Saturday night that showed a divide between the people who are almost intravenously swallowing cultural markers and deconstructions of those markers and those who are leading less wiredly hip lives.
Note toallourapus: The majority of the following is hidden behind the link below. This is called an "LJ cut" and is used when you make long posts or upload a lot of pictures so that you don't fill your friends' friends pages with huge reams of text or image. Click on the following link to read the whole post.
The point of painful confusion arose when the leading edge of the hip maelstrom starting riffing on ridiculous porn, namely double-anal, double-vaginal penetration movies. I should point out that this preposterous area of *ahem* culture was not one that I had been aware of but I quickly understood that it is already such a signifier of over-the-top sexual grotesquery that it has been referenced on South Park in the person of a little girl character with the initials, DADV on her t-shirt. As I recall, we began wondering how two men would fit into said configuration and decided that they would have to be amputees, perhaps hoisted into position on overhead tracks.
Now, we are talking about mediation of mediation of mediation here. Someone has to be dramatically removed from the realities of sex that the idea off stuffing four organs into a woman simultaneously would have any resonance at all. Then you have the fact that there is an industry segment devoted to creating and selling representations of that. Then you have the strange congruity of us sharing the same porous Internet pathways for our amusements as this porn segment uses. Our segment briefly crosses over with the DADV segment at some juncture and picks it up for ironic commentary. We then spread it at the speed of blog and soon it is an in-joke touchstone for some winking cell of geeks. Even though I'm not part of that particular cell, I can recognize it for what it is and intuit the stages of mediation it has passed through.
But suddenly the real world slaps us in the face:allourapus hears this thread of conversation and is deeply disturbed. To him it sounds like nothing so much as a group of macho, violent men laughing at the idea of a woman being gang-raped -- the kind of men who have frightened and hurt him before. He does not know how to reconcile that image with the group of friends in front of him.
There was some consternation and confusion left at the end of the weekend about this and I've been doing some thinking on these issues. Primarily I had to ask myself if our joking had crossed some sort of line and indicated a lack of empathy in my soul. I have to conclude that it did not.
There is no way to walk the streets of the city and pretend it's a meadow. To live in the wired world, the way I do, to participate in the lateral skitter of globalization, I have to be exposed to a huge, uncensored array of human thought and behaviour. I have to accept that it's there and, if I want to keep love alive for the human race in the process, I have to look on some of it with indulgent humour at the same time as I acknowledge the cesspool of horror.
I mean, things are horrific and you don't have to go far on the 'Net to hear every heinous, soul-destroying, apocolyptic view expressed by some loony and applauded by a hundred others. But that is the price to pay for also hearing some of the clearest, most progressive, most love-imbued thinking that there is in the world.
I can't just sit on a rock by a lake and turn off the world -- I crave involvement. The mainstream media fill me with palpable despair because they are ultimately profit-driven and cannot say what really needs to be said. I need the porous chorus with its slanted rants. I need to be able to create my space and share it with others as they create theirs to share with me.
I'm sorry,allourapus, because me and snowmit and the others carry on this breathless discourse daily, it must seem like a cliquey in-group that is hard to enter. But you should know that we don't all get each others' references. What I was seeing in the room was two people sharing something which changed to three others and then, briefly, five and then a different two, etc.. But it was happening fast. And you have some hearing loss on top of that.
One other person in the room decided for himself that he was an outsider and the rest were a cohesive contingent. That was his own insecurity speaking. Anyone could have asked anything at any time. You have said that your decision to go for a walk was a good one; but please know that if you had approached me or others about how you were being triggered, we would have stopped and discussed it with you. Our desire to help our friend would have outweighed our desire for passing hilarity. (note: I should avoid speaking for others, but at least snowmit and I discussed it on the drive home.)
It is hard to know how to be yourself and at the same time how to take care of everyone around you. I don't have all the answers.
allourapus for permission to blog on a difficult moment that came up at the party in Syracuse a couple of weeks ago.A great swirling pit of marginally drunken hilarity opened up on Saturday night that showed a divide between the people who are almost intravenously swallowing cultural markers and deconstructions of those markers and those who are leading less wiredly hip lives.
Note to
allourapus: The majority of the following is hidden behind the link below. This is called an "LJ cut" and is used when you make long posts or upload a lot of pictures so that you don't fill your friends' friends pages with huge reams of text or image. Click on the following link to read the whole post.The point of painful confusion arose when the leading edge of the hip maelstrom starting riffing on ridiculous porn, namely double-anal, double-vaginal penetration movies. I should point out that this preposterous area of *ahem* culture was not one that I had been aware of but I quickly understood that it is already such a signifier of over-the-top sexual grotesquery that it has been referenced on South Park in the person of a little girl character with the initials, DADV on her t-shirt. As I recall, we began wondering how two men would fit into said configuration and decided that they would have to be amputees, perhaps hoisted into position on overhead tracks.
Now, we are talking about mediation of mediation of mediation here. Someone has to be dramatically removed from the realities of sex that the idea off stuffing four organs into a woman simultaneously would have any resonance at all. Then you have the fact that there is an industry segment devoted to creating and selling representations of that. Then you have the strange congruity of us sharing the same porous Internet pathways for our amusements as this porn segment uses. Our segment briefly crosses over with the DADV segment at some juncture and picks it up for ironic commentary. We then spread it at the speed of blog and soon it is an in-joke touchstone for some winking cell of geeks. Even though I'm not part of that particular cell, I can recognize it for what it is and intuit the stages of mediation it has passed through.
But suddenly the real world slaps us in the face:
allourapus hears this thread of conversation and is deeply disturbed. To him it sounds like nothing so much as a group of macho, violent men laughing at the idea of a woman being gang-raped -- the kind of men who have frightened and hurt him before. He does not know how to reconcile that image with the group of friends in front of him.There was some consternation and confusion left at the end of the weekend about this and I've been doing some thinking on these issues. Primarily I had to ask myself if our joking had crossed some sort of line and indicated a lack of empathy in my soul. I have to conclude that it did not.
There is no way to walk the streets of the city and pretend it's a meadow. To live in the wired world, the way I do, to participate in the lateral skitter of globalization, I have to be exposed to a huge, uncensored array of human thought and behaviour. I have to accept that it's there and, if I want to keep love alive for the human race in the process, I have to look on some of it with indulgent humour at the same time as I acknowledge the cesspool of horror.
I mean, things are horrific and you don't have to go far on the 'Net to hear every heinous, soul-destroying, apocolyptic view expressed by some loony and applauded by a hundred others. But that is the price to pay for also hearing some of the clearest, most progressive, most love-imbued thinking that there is in the world.
I can't just sit on a rock by a lake and turn off the world -- I crave involvement. The mainstream media fill me with palpable despair because they are ultimately profit-driven and cannot say what really needs to be said. I need the porous chorus with its slanted rants. I need to be able to create my space and share it with others as they create theirs to share with me.
I'm sorry,
allourapus, because me and snowmit and the others carry on this breathless discourse daily, it must seem like a cliquey in-group that is hard to enter. But you should know that we don't all get each others' references. What I was seeing in the room was two people sharing something which changed to three others and then, briefly, five and then a different two, etc.. But it was happening fast. And you have some hearing loss on top of that.One other person in the room decided for himself that he was an outsider and the rest were a cohesive contingent. That was his own insecurity speaking. Anyone could have asked anything at any time. You have said that your decision to go for a walk was a good one; but please know that if you had approached me or others about how you were being triggered, we would have stopped and discussed it with you. Our desire to help our friend would have outweighed our desire for passing hilarity. (note: I should avoid speaking for others, but at least snowmit and I discussed it on the drive home.)
It is hard to know how to be yourself and at the same time how to take care of everyone around you. I don't have all the answers.
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Taking care of myself
Date: 2005-03-29 11:23 pm (UTC)I don't know whether I was capable of thinking clearly enough before I went for a walk to articulate what I was feeling and/or to approach anyone. My mind did clear some when I was outdoors; and my intention as I made my way back to the house was to ask permission to invite anyone who might need to check in about what they were feeling (including me) to do so. When I got back to the house, however, I saw that the group had divided in two, and I did not see how gracefully to bring the two parts back together to do what I had intended. Instead, I witnessed the process of the people who were processing (and spoke some myself).
My own emotional charge had dissipated a lot during the walk. I am really pleased that I thought of doing that as a way of taking care of myself.
I must leave in around a minute for my Tuesday night meditation circle -- but I want to say of your penultimate sentence that my own intention in any situation is to be myself (I'd undoubtedly say "to be as present as fully as possible," which maybe is the same thing) and to keep my heart open. I'll give some thought to whether I give energy to taking care of everyone around me. I know that doing that is not exactly part of my philosophy, although being present with an open heart implies (to me) being sensitive to how other people are feeling.
I don't have all the answers either. (Maybe I don't have any of them.) I do know that I left the party on Sunday feeling only love toward you and snowmit.
Gotta go.
Thanks again.
I love you.