stereotypes?
Sunday, January 22nd, 2006currently thinking: (aimlessly)
question in hand: can there ever be an entirely untrue stereotype?
wot the fuck is a stereotype anyways. and isnt classifying a stereotype, stereotyping in itself.
oh boh-jeesus. this is drivin me nutting nuts
well, from a neutral acedemic standpoint,
Stereotypes are considered to be a group concept, held by one social group about another. They are often used in a negative or prejudicial sense and are frequently used to justify certain discriminatory behaviours. More benignly, they may express sometimes-accurate folk wisdom about social reality.
Often, a stereotype is a negative caricature or inversion of some positive characteristic possessed by members of a group, exaggerated to the point where it becomes repulsive or ridiculous.
if i remember correctly, and yes i normally do,
Stereotype production is based on ; Simplification, Exaggeration or distortion, Generalization and/or a Presentation of cultural attributes as being ‘natural’.
on the contrary, socially more so,
Stereotypes are seen by many as undesirable beliefs which can be altered through education and/or familiarization. However, stereotypes need not be confined to negative characterizations about individuals or groups, and can thus have positive characterizations.
There are also genuinely positive stereotypes about groups. Some groups have, as a deliberate political strategy, tried to evolve new genuine positive stereotypes for themselves.
on another note, i highly recommend john grays "men are from mars and women are from venus". cos he discusses men and women as though they are stereotypical hybrids of any all-american soap you watch on your telly. funny, though it makes me wonder, if the claim of "we are indeed unigue individuals" is true (or partually) why is it that we often choose to conform every way we can to fit into the societal mould of the percieved ideal?
do we choose to do so?
or is it already in our being to be like everyone else. well, it seems these days as we mature from cavemen to "cave"-conquerers that mediocrity thrives more than anything else.
hypothetically speaking, it lasts years and years and have given birth to sterotypes over the ages, and now, more so in the media, our family, our daily lives. to the point, im intrigued to the point of blatantly adressing it.
ok, bah. ive been thinking enough.
(inserted 2 hours of pondering)
later on….
interestingly,
when it comes down to it, I mean really, words are just stereotypes, too. The act of naming, of representing something - it anchors a thing/person/group/concept to a set of characteristics (read: a definition) and a corresponding word (read: a stereotype).
We stereotype wooden things with four legs and a top as table;
we stereotype a creature with two legs, two arms and a face like ours as human.
for months, before, ive stereotyped a creature w two legs, two arms, a face like ours,
and
a penis, as an asshole.
This is why things that push the edge of our stereotype boundaries are disconcerting: upended boxes as tables (warren would say in his mahai tai kor, kanasai im too up-end /west-end glory that, "that’s not a table, that’s a box");
or more lucidly, that repressed disgust at mangled human faces, mangled limbs, mental patients in a cushioned "box" we’d given to call a "room", (another pushing boundary), that we struggle to call human. Artificial intelligence. Fetuses. Things that hover on the cusp of disorder.
ive figured out that maybe,
its because words, like stereotypes, try to harness the world into order. We’ve an inherent need to categorize.
"this wan too short, this wan too fat, ah dat wan too thin, too tall, too smart, too black too white".
ive realised in my discussion recently, that many of us have fallen prey to this categorization. i like to call it "black-white-zation".
why is it so though, i mean we are all smart enough to realise the grey areas that hover below and above this branding…then why so hard to live life in the monochrome sometimes.
cos it just is.
black and white is easier. who the hell wants a maybe for an answer?
"will you go out w me? ". maybe.
fuck you, you stupid mook.
"will you have sex w me, in a black thong, suspenders and a nurse outfit and spank me w a spanking board?" maybe. well, thats still up for debate. a yes or no, might mar the surprise.
ok like i was saying.
categorization is much easier init, as weve all discovered while studying math at warwick, stats programming, stochastic processes, probability or stats anything will be a living hell if it wasnt for categorisation.
yea la. yea la.
and most importanly ive come to a conclusion that..
And it’s in this way, I realize, that stereotypes can never be entirely untrue: because like everything else they’re temporal.
If enough things start to emerge on the edges of the stereotype, we reorder.
(i wonder though, if there is some math behind it to how and when we reorder?, if anyone is willing to work on that contact me asap)
yea, reordering takes time. a lot, dunno how much.
It takes time (the world isn’t flat - that characteristic was forced out over a couple of centuries), but it seems we move towards an increasingly accurate representation of everything: an eschatology of total naming. (go google that up, its well good shit).
or if you do math or like math, then look at it from an analysis I point of view:
weve learnt that in a number scale, you can never truly reach that number, there are infinite ways to divide up the scale, a subgrouping within subgrouping, like the theory of convergence, but you will never hit zero. or any other infinite number floating around in the universal echelon set. you can try, but believe me, if stephen hawkings tried it and failed
so, dont you come fuck w me.
Stereotypes are interims, what we make do with in lieu of perfect representation. I mean, that’s the meaning of a stereotype, right? that it’s, you know, mostly true?
or is that just a stereotype, too?
aiyo. im scared now, i wanna go back to warwick and ask my analysis teacher wot he thinks. maybe i will conduct some research on the whole infinigram of stereotypes and come back again on it.
but, for now, fuck the media and all their air brushing high tech kani-nya machines cos they make stereotypes appear so damn hot.
