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Of a Sexual Nature

Anne and I were watching the new movie Bombshell in our living room last night.  In one disturbing scene, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) asked Kayla (Margot Robbie) to hike her skirt high enough to show her underwear.

Anne and I had different reactions.

Anne was quite unsettled.  Angry maybe.  Maybe not at first, but my being dispassionate seemed to call the tempest from the storm.  I saw the scene as an example of how horrible one person can be to another.  Terrible, yes, and criminal.  People who do horrible things should be held to account.  She saw it as an encapsulation of the power dynamic between men and women.

So we started to talk over the movie.

The I said/she said is not remarkable.  Maybe a little, but it’s not the point.  I just want to say what I think and make it make sense beyond the drama.

As background, I think that people are just that, people; individuals who live life with a glancing nod to culture and god.  We each flit along our littered path, trying our best to ignore the noise and dodge the rough patches.  Day after day after tedious day.  For a god-awful long time.

Along the way, we create maps of what comes next by remembering formative moments and layering in the hear-told experiences of our brethren.  Those shared experiences make our own feel ever more real.

To be clear, one can not have the experience of another.  Even if two people trudge through the same moment together, they will almost certainly emerge with unique takes.  If two people are not in the same moment, media fortuitously closes the gap.  Stories from the New York Times congeal with Jane Austin, Bombshell and every meeting of my book club ever to produce a sanitized indictment that everyone is true.

 

Unfortunately, nearly every recounting of others’ moments are highly produced, elevated messages designed to support and smoothly merge into the narrative that the audience already has running through her head.

This is not that message.

This message asserts that the vicarious affirmations that permeate and animate social truths across the spectrum are vapid and self-serving, serving only to assemble adherents into self-identified collections of us and them.  Fuck them.

The reality is, people make personal decisions, thousands of decisions daily.  Some decisions matter.  Most are meaningless.  Nearly none of those decisions are forced, but every one adds to one’s experience.  Hindsight, and the need to appeal to an audience, elevates an experience to a story.

Roger Ailes abused his position and destroyed the trust of people around him.  The careful calculus of those who wanted access to what he controlled enabled, and even defended, this behavior.

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The Funk Becomes Us

There’s a lot of noise echoing down the hall.  Most of the noise is in my head, admittedly, but much of it comes from the raspy voices of angry people convinced that “things” are terribly wrong.  Perceptions are reality, so they must be.  Wrong that is.

Here’s my perception:  Sociology has created generations of provocateurs who see society as simple sets of victims and villains.  In the din, they peg the perpetrators, shield the wronged and present the whole process as “social justice”.  This process, in turn, sets the stage for all manner of hard feelings to erupt.

Now, before saying that my net is too wide and my grasp of “the data” is too shallow, let me say one thing:  I know.   I’m neither an academic nor a scholar.  I have an informal working premise, derived from watching and listening, that makes sense to at least one person, me.  By that measure it can’t be entirely ridiculous.

OK, it could be ridiculous, but it goes a bit like this:  People are individuals who transcend their labels.  These individuals, every last one of them, defy the strictures of race, gender, age, income, education or religion.  Our lizard brains instinctively identify and judge the signals we get from other people’s behavior in excruciatingly subtle ways.  I call those signals ‘funk’.

By affixing labels, to pursue my premise, Sociology masks the funk with simplistic explanations that are hardly as much science as sloganeering.  These explanations presume to expose the wrong and to make things right, often at the expense of the actual victim.  In my estimation, that’s wrong.

Let’s make up a thought experiment:  Two people are hired by one company at the same time to work in the same department.  They receive the same title and the same salary.  Over time, the personality, interest and skill of each person becomes known to their peers as well as to their boss.  Their work, initially the same, begins to diverge.  One employee works faster and produces higher quality work products that anticipate unspoken needs and are easier to use.  When annual review time arrives, they both get the same rating, because that’s the chunky nature of HR ratings, but the manager gives the better employee a greater salary increase.  This continues, year after year, until the two employees are paid at substantially different rates.

Fair? I think so.  The manager used information that was too granular for labels.  But if Sociology wanted to chime in, they would insist upon restoring the missing labels.  If the rewarded employee was a woman and the other a man: “justice”.  If the rewarded employee was white and the other black: “injustice”.

The low-minded hypocrisy of judging a person on the basis of labels such as race or gender while in the same breath decrying that judgement is positively outrageous.

That’s why people are so insanely angry.  Public policy and social discourse does not pass the sniff test.  A collective cognitive dissonance permeates our experience, tainting personal relationships and driving people to become their labels instead of proudly being themselves.

So, Sociology, this is my challenge:  Revise your models.  Understand people as individuals.  Promote diversity by measuring qualities like excellence, integrity, character, grit.  Stop protecting a parochial academic hierarchy that is poisoning our institutions and fragmenting our communities, nay our nation.  Embrace people in all their funky profuseness and become the diversity that you so rightly espouse.

But don’t be hypocrites.