By James Curcio
As I move away from some social media I've found a desire to be less formal (as if that were possible) in the other places that I write. So I wanted to start by saying I've been struggling with chronic pain and illnesses lately.
So that's why I've been off my game here. As one of the primary contributors to this site, that has meant the content has slowed down. I'll be more present here if I get better... if I don't, hopefully someone else will carry on the torch.
I have a number of articles that I want to write - to further expand upon the core idea of modern mythology - the cultural ideas, and concepts that structure our understanding of the world on a sort of rote or subconscious level. The "a priori assumptions," the things that people say, "well of course girls and boys are a certain way..." But it's been hard to flesh them out lately, and I'm going to get to that as well as a topic I want to talk about in a sort of round about way because they both interweave. As we get older and more complex, our own myths become so complex that it can be hard to communicate at all. (At least without dumping 10 books on your desk and saying, "read these and then what I'm saying will make some kind of sense.")
So let's begin with just one article idea, like a thread in a sweater, while the other article ideas sit on the shelf and hopefully don't collect too much dust.
Gender stereotypes at work. Here is something that I have seen a lot on twitter and other social media:
"All men are x, all women are y."
"If you're a boy, you y, but if you're a MAN, then you x."
And also a number of jokes that depend essentially on the premise that men are beer guzzling, emotionally distant or dead, competitive, sport-loving and so on, and all women are gold-digging whores or whiny bitches or ice-princess prudes, or damsels-in-distress, or you name it. Not that many people don't live these stereotypes, and who can say whether that is a result of cultural casting (they have played to the roles they were provided by peers, media, and family) or some natural personality type is hard to say. Maybe some mixture of the two in many cases.
But that kind of thinking itself is clearly a part of what produces the stereotypes. Every time someone makes that assumption and passes it on, the stronger the myth is. This is also the basis for one argument that one should not make rape jokes, even 'funny ones', because it strengthens the ideology of 'rape culture' for those that don't comprehend absurdity. (
I have my own take on that issue but don't want to sidetrack.)
There is a strange way, as we've discussed, that the myths we create take on a life of their own. To work properly with myths, one must understand their dual nature as fictive representation, and existent force, almost a living entity. In the
Immanence of Myth we stop just short of saying that myths are alive. (To really understand this statement you've got to unfortunately plum through 300,000 words of repetition that is carefully designed to beat these ideas into your head until you actually begin sublimating them yourself.)