quick, random poll: can you imagine smells? (I cannot, or at least my attempts to right now are failing, and I also can’t recall ever specifically doing so)
No! This is disturbing why didn’t I know this?
Hmm, this is difficult to think about.
I can sort of remember a time when I smelled a strong smell and get a pretty good idea of what it would be like to smell it again, but I can’t just use my introspective sense to “re-smell” the smell.
Kind of like how I can imagine hearing a symphony in my head played by an orchestra in a vague and diminished way, but it sure isn’t the same as hearing it in person.
Or how I can visualize things in a vague way, but it’s certainly nothing like really seeing them. Also, I have a really hard time “holding” visual images in my imagination. Like, I can imagine what my mother looks like, but only for a split second and it goes away. I can’t inspect the image in detail or anything.
I can’t imagine smells. I can’t imagine taste either. And I can’t visualize.
I can imagine sounds. When I think about a person, I “hear” what they’d be saying to me in their tone of voice. When I think about a song, I “hear” it playing in my head. When I remember an image, my memory is of the image described in words. I think in a (mostly third person point of view) internal monologue that “sounds” exactly like my voice.
I can also imagine physical sensations, but to a lesser degree than I imagine sounds.
Can imagine smells very vaguely, taste not at all, visualisation happens only on purpose and is also fuzzy. Have perfect pitch, though, auditory memory and imagination are very good. Physical sensations less good.
I’m probably way too optimistic, but - most of the people I hear talking about the social justice/feminism culture wars talk about them like they’re really intractably bad, no middle ground anywhere, no safe way to opt out, destined to end with one side crushing the other entirely, lives and livelihoods constantly being destroyed in the meantime.
And, actually, this set of culture wars strikes me as the least zero-sum of all the ones I know of. The big culture wars issues of the last generation were abortion and school prayer. Abortion’s very zero-sum. Either you think it’s murder and want it illegal or you think that’s like grabbing people and demanding they donate their livers to save clumps of cells, right now, you’re a murderer otherwise. School prayer I have a hard time engaging with seriously as a culture war battlefield, even though I know it was one, but it’s also pretty zero-sum: one side getting what they want necessarily entails the other side not getting that.
All possible compromises were pretty tangential: can’t we all agree on more adoptions? sure, great. can’t we all agree that schools can give students a moment for reflective meditation? sure, great. At best these whittle at the edges of the culture war; at worst they satisfy no one and leave you exactly where you started, and I get the sense that’s usually what happened.
But whenever I try to engage with people in the SJ/anti-SJ debate I get this sense of astonishing vistas of unnoticed common ground. There are extremists on both sides who literally can’t arrive at a positive-sum compromise because the success of the other side is precisely the thing they’re upset about, but they’re minorities. Most people are scared and agree with half the other side’s goals but none of their rhetoric and are afraid if they achieve even their good goals they’ll use that as momentum to achieve their bad ones. Most people aren’t even clear on what the other side wants and it’s not that hard to describe it in terms that make them say, suspiciously, “oh, well, if that were really what they wanted then that’d be all right.”
Male birth control and more awareness that reproductive coercion is a form of domestic abuse? Positive-sum. Both sides want that. No more draft, even symbolically or as an irrelevant result of institutional inertia? Yup, please. Fewer people in prison, even though that means not sending some people there who really deserve it? Both sides want that (except when reminded that that means people who they really really think deserve it won’t be in prison.) People being less afraid of getting fired for things about their private life that have no bearing on their job? Positive-sum. Abusive behavior not being tolerated, and being characterized better so that people can recognize it, but also not being handled by callout posts and public fights? Positive sum. An end to the war on drugs? Positive sum. People are speaking incredibly different languages, but once you translate for them they want a lot of the same stuff.
And so I feel like we can win the culture wars. Not in the ‘my tribe tramples yours and salts the fields’ sense, in the ‘explain stuff well enough that people agree they want it, build enough trust that they accept that their enemies want it too, render irrelevant the people who are intractably opposed to their enemies being happy’ sense. I think it should be easier than achieving it would have been for the culture wars of thirty years ago. (I think it will still be really hard.)
So on the recommendation of a friend I watched all of How I Met Your Mother
It’s pretty good, like as US sitcoms go it’s good. It’s not quite Brooklyn 99 or Parks and Rec but it’s better than like Scrubs or Friends
But what has really struck me about it is how it is Monogamy Ruins Everything: The Show
So many of the conflicts are a result of what my brain considers Supermonogamy - that is, things that are not what monogamy is, which is only having sexual and romantic relationships with one person at a time, but things that monogamy seems to come with, like emotional jealousy and distrust of male-female friendships in straight people.
Multiple relationships fail because somebody’s new partner can’t deal with them having a deep and committed friendship with their ex-partner.
People freak out because their partners own things they got as gifts from previous partners.
And yes, Barney is a sociopath who treats women terribly, but everyone acts as if his options are:
1. trick women into sleeping with him by pretending there’s scope for a long-term committed relationship
2. have a long-term committed relationship and don’t sleep with other women.
Nobody ever considers options like ‘be up front about just wanting to bang, and cultivate a network of FWBs who don’t want monogamy or a relationship, but do want to bang.’ Or ‘have a long-term committed relationship where you’re both allowed to bang other people.’
I mean, monogamy is not actually toxic or bad, but it’s weird to see all it’s failure modes explored in explicit detail in a show that also seems to be pro One True Love.
