A Pontification on Objectification
In the grand editorial tradition of writing about a subject of which I have no expertise I've decided I should delve into the realm of female psychology. I got to pondering a term used in a variety of political/social circles, namely the "objectification" of women. Typically, the word has a negative connotation in this context, associated with a superficial preoccupation with external physical characteristics. My purpose here is not to defend such a shallow worldview, of which I must admit being guilty on any number of occasions, but rather to investigate the full ramifications of the concept and the possible alternatives I might employ to improve the situation.
I'll assume as a starting point that women (or at least a non-null subset thereof) object to being objectified. The question then becomes how do I, and other abject males, selectively eliminate the behaviors that cause this dejection. More specifically, how can we as Techers help to prevent women from being objectificated?
The answer, I suspect, is more difficult at Tech, since scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are trained to objectify pretty much everything. The entire universe is broken down into its most objective form as a preliminary step in any analytic project. Abstract quantities become simple variables, intricate systems are reduced to lifeless diagrams, with the effect of making analysis as impersonal as possible. (Programmers have it worse; they're enthusiastically encouraged at every turn to be even more object-oriented.) I suspect that the deductive reasoning process is limited in its range of subjects. A message repeatedly trajected to me in subtle and not-so-subtle forms is that human females are, by some strange and wonderful characteristic in their nature, squarely outside this range. Logic, science, math, and every other technique from a Techer's bag of tricks of intellect are completely useless in the one project of paramount importance to us; there's just not a matrix big enough.
One method that has proven experimentally to be particularly poorly suited to this field is recursive analysis. When a scientist encounters a dead end in any problem under investigation, the most common (and usually the best) response is to step back, change one experimental parameter or another, and keep probing the system to look for patterns. Unfortunately, women are one set of parameters that never quite seem to get isolated. Indeed, countless experiments conducted by my male colleagues and me have demonstrated that, under all but the most perfect initial conditions, the more times one of us tries to gain esoteric data on a female specimen, the more resistant to cooperating with the experiment she becomes. Several of these experiments have had unpleasant, or even violent, ends. Apparently, failure to make a breakthrough in the first attempt causes the success rate of all future attempts to decrease exponentially. While quantum physicists whine about the uncertainty principle, at least electrons don’t hold a grudge about being studied objectively. Despite being several orders of magnitude more interesting (and more attractive) than fundamental particles, women are impervious to the scientific method. This quality may account in part for why there aren’t many women here in the first place.
Another popular approach, in keeping with our proud tradition of quality research, is collaboration. The justification for this scheme is straightforward: by induction, if two heads are better than one, then n + 1 heads are bound to be better than n. Thus, with enough combined brainpower, we’ll eventually be able to figure out anything. If there’s any facility on the planet with the resources, experience, and willingness necessary to tackle the phenomenon, it’s the good-ol’ CI of T. Unfortunately, even if IQ is additive, whatever type of common sense is required to understand the system of interest is most definitely not. This harsh fact, combined with the male beaver’s aforementioned academic tenacity, leads to the phenomenon commonly known as “glomming,” which is only exacerbated by The Ratio. This problem is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, for when a he-beaver sees a she-beaver in danger of being smothered by a dozen interested suitors, his natural protective response is to rush to the scene in order to scare the others off. It is trivial to prove that the number of glommers (which, by the way is not a real word) is unbounded in the limit as the number of coeds approaches zero.
What I really don’t get is the paradox that, while it appears that women go to considerably more trouble to be noticed than do men, they react much less favorably to attention. One could argue (I won’t, because I’ve already got both my feet in my mouth and don’t want to spoil my lunch) that women (at least in the only cultures I’m familiar with) tend to objectify themselves and each other by employing elaborate evolutionarily and technologically developed means to attract men. For some reason that my fellow researchers and I have yet to grasp, we fall right into their trap while they make us feel guilty for it. It may be the case that women are less interested in science because they have evolved beyond the need for it. With all the men around, they feel smart enough already.
I must interject that in order to connect in any cross-gender emotional project, we'll have to devise some scheme for de-objectifying our beloved Venutians. Given that they reject being objects, and seeing as how objectively accounting for them is an empirically impossible prospect, the task becomes finding a new way to inspect the women of Tech. The opposite of “object”, if I recollect, is “subject,” but that is a label I suspect is possibly less welcome than the one they reject. I'm pretty sure they don't want to be subjected to much of anything, nor do they want to be our subjects. We could always eject them, but the effect of that prospect is not what we want to achieve. Besides, the Lady Beaver's ability to self-select may well cause this outcome without our help. Despite incredible advances in biotech, our drug of choice is not one we can inject. I'm pretty sure they can't be transfected either. We could dissect all the insects on the planet, but we wouldn’t come any closer to a solution of this enigma.
Among the worst factors complicating the analysis is their preference for being indirect. No matter how much data we collect, the lack of objectivity makes it too qualitative to be of any use. We abject males have to detect a method whereby we can protect the women of Caltech from outside competition. If we fail to deflect the objectification of women, we can't expect any effect on the rejectification of men.
Ah guess ah'll always have mah dialect.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Minifesto
So I wrote this little article in college when I was at Pacific Tech.
Here's a good ole' 60-ft tall server error I found in Times Square. Or somewhere in Manhattan; it all kinda ran together. I wish I had a million-dollar screen to debug .NET apps on. That job would rule, and apparently the standards aren't all that high. I apologize for the picture quality, or lack thereof. (Ever notice that there's a "thereof" but no "hereof" or "thatof" or "whatof"...I'll add it to the list of words I'm adding to the language.)
Xtreme lameness
So I'm going on 3 months since being laid off, and pulling my hair out trying to keep my mind in shape. I'm reading like 10 books at once, trying to catch up on my game cube playing, and applying to jobs by the dozens. I'm kinda stuck in between the "just qualified enough" and "overqualified" levels for most gigs, although I've gotten some bites.
Anyway, I discovered Jenga XTreme, or rather, discovered that it was like 60% off, and I figured, if nothing else, it's 54 parallelepipeds for $8. I'm a sucker for 120 degree angles.
Since I'm at least as obsessive as I am lazy, I've been writing down all the words I come across whose meanings aren't clear to me, or that are used in a sense I don't recognize. They say most people's vocabulary stops growing at 22 or so, so I figure I'll keep at it and maybe sound educated even when I'm senile. Judging by my parents and grandparents, this will happen around age 26 for me, and I just turned 24.
I don't want to keep my reader(s) in suspense any longer, so here in all its return-delimited glory, is my list (as of yesterday):
I tried to write a macro in Excel to look up all of them and put the definitions in the next column over, but then just gave up and alt-clicked on all the words to use the English dictionary. Then I fixed it using CONCATENATE and the simple URL syntax from Merriam-Webster.
Well I'll be; this Blogger deal is smarter than I gave it credit for. Looks like it interpreted my range of cells as a table. I can feel the power swelling within me.
Anyway, I intend to use this as a place to dump those thoughts that would be unwise to inflict upon people in casual conversation, or, more likely, the ones that I'd like to inflict on them but have trouble finding listeners for.
Might as well try to paste a link while I'm at it. Jenga XTreme
That ought take you there when clicked upon.
We need to come up with some synonyms for click, b/c it's kinda overused on the web. I guess a right click could be a clack, maybe. But that won't solve the problem I'm starting with.
If anyone is interested, I'm gonna post my listing on match.com (no endorsement implied (for the site, that is, I'm plugging myself shamelessly here)). Since the Match people are stingy with their access, I'm just gonna use a pdf file and save everybody the trouble of logging in and trying to search for me (or of having to lie about your gender or orientation to get to it). It's all accurate, although not up to date. The pictures are old, but that's OK, since I look better now. I'll put pictures on here later if the mood strikes me.
OK, so I'm a moron. Blogger doesn't host photos, or PDF files for that matter. Time to call the alumni people and tell them I want my webpage. I certainly paid for it.
Later
Anyway, I discovered Jenga XTreme, or rather, discovered that it was like 60% off, and I figured, if nothing else, it's 54 parallelepipeds for $8. I'm a sucker for 120 degree angles.
Since I'm at least as obsessive as I am lazy, I've been writing down all the words I come across whose meanings aren't clear to me, or that are used in a sense I don't recognize. They say most people's vocabulary stops growing at 22 or so, so I figure I'll keep at it and maybe sound educated even when I'm senile. Judging by my parents and grandparents, this will happen around age 26 for me, and I just turned 24.
I don't want to keep my reader(s) in suspense any longer, so here in all its return-delimited glory, is my list (as of yesterday):
I tried to write a macro in Excel to look up all of them and put the definitions in the next column over, but then just gave up and alt-clicked on all the words to use the English dictionary. Then I fixed it using CONCATENATE and the simple URL syntax from Merriam-Webster.
Well I'll be; this Blogger deal is smarter than I gave it credit for. Looks like it interpreted my range of cells as a table. I can feel the power swelling within me.
Anyway, I intend to use this as a place to dump those thoughts that would be unwise to inflict upon people in casual conversation, or, more likely, the ones that I'd like to inflict on them but have trouble finding listeners for.
Might as well try to paste a link while I'm at it. Jenga XTreme
That ought take you there when clicked upon.
We need to come up with some synonyms for click, b/c it's kinda overused on the web. I guess a right click could be a clack, maybe. But that won't solve the problem I'm starting with.
If anyone is interested, I'm gonna post my listing on match.com (no endorsement implied (for the site, that is, I'm plugging myself shamelessly here)). Since the Match people are stingy with their access, I'm just gonna use a pdf file and save everybody the trouble of logging in and trying to search for me (or of having to lie about your gender or orientation to get to it). It's all accurate, although not up to date. The pictures are old, but that's OK, since I look better now. I'll put pictures on here later if the mood strikes me.
OK, so I'm a moron. Blogger doesn't host photos, or PDF files for that matter. Time to call the alumni people and tell them I want my webpage. I certainly paid for it.
Later
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