Misc. comments 26

[redbird]

Responding to an excellent post by copperwise about kinds of beauty and the value of looking outward rather than in the mirror, nellorat (doing something akin to what I'm doing here) pointed out that physical beauty isn't just a few stereotyped features and talked about the interaction of mind and body.

What I wrote doesn't seem to connect to that summary above, but here it is:

I agree that "mind" and "body" are misleading categories, in part because of the ways they affect each other. Some of the other things you mention also interact: speech is tone and accent and content (and probably several other things).

There are contexts in which the body doesn't matter--as copperwise points out, we make friends through this medium without (necessarily) knowing anything about their bodies. ("On the Internet, nobody knows you're a colony of fire ants.") And there are contexts in which it probably should matter less than it does--many jobs, for example. But it does matter to me that my partners look at me, personality and intellect and muscle and tattoos--and bifocals and all--and find me beautiful.

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To a post by gnimmel on what we do and don't know about people whose journals we read:

I don't think of the net--which includes LJ, email, Usenet, online chat, and so on--as separate from "real life": it's real to the extent that I'm interacting with real people, or finding information about real things (e.g., a weather report). Yes, entirely verbal contact differs from in-person contact where we're also reacting to facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, accent, odor, and numerous other factors. But my long-distance friendships exist while we're emailing each other, reading each other's journals or Usenet posts, or talking on the phone, as well as when we've managed time together in the same physical location.

A possibly useful comparison is between someone telling a story to a group of people, or singing in public: the hearers may not respond with a story or song of their own, and the person may not even know who all of them are. But information has been given, and reacted to.

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livredor posted about her general disconnection from feminism:

It seems to me as though you are not so much anti-feminist, as taking as givens the gains feminism has made, and not paying attention to the places where they don't exist.

For example, you are used to an egalitarian Judaism--many Jewish women don't have that, may not even realize it's possible. (I'm thinking, inter alia, of the more insular Hasidic communities in the United States.)

For most purposes, I'm not that interested in how people's reproductive organs are arranged: but I have to live in a world in which the way many people treat each other is determined in large part by that fact. I'm not that interested in skin tone as an absolute, either; I'd like to live in a world where it mattered only for choosing flattering garments, and to my dermatologist. I'd like to live in a world where people could deal with gender in a variety of flexible ways, and actual reproductive organs were irrelevant unless people were interested in reproducing (or in certain kinds of sexual activity with the other person involved--it shouldn't matter to someone outside the relationship, let alone a stranger on the street or my actual or potential employer.) In the world I actually live in, these things do matter, and can be life-or-death issues.

The status quo always has a great deal of inertia behind it: right here and right now, that inertia still tends to sort people by gender as well as, and sometimes instead of, by qualifications, interests, or personality.

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callunav has a poll about rereading, and since none of her categories seemed to quite fit how I reread, I elaborated a little:

I reread most fiction I like, if it's not too fluffy. Fluffy in this case is a matter of complexity (character, plot, world-building, ideas, maybe other kinds can qualify), I think, rather than emotional tone.

Some things I have to go back to periodically--The Left Hand of Darkness, for example.

I reread some narrative nonfiction (John McPhee is what I'm thinking of at the moment); looking things up feels different from rereading. Reading is a more immersive experience than looking up. Skimming for specific information (e.g., verifying that the Stamp Act didn't say anything about letters, because stamps in that sense wouldn't be invented for another several decades) is a third thing.