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Kickle
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Metaphor and objectification
#28131979 - 01/09/23 10:13 AM (1 year, 19 days ago) |
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I've been listening to a podcast called Archetypes put out by Meghan Markle. And the focus is specifically on archetypes represented in recent history to characterize women (e.g., bimbo, slut, dumb blonde, housewife, etc.)
She often interviews individuals who create stories, such as movies/TV, books, magazines, plays, and more. She often asks how they've seen women represented in their own lives as well as the reasoning for their depictions of women in their related storytelling.
In an episode I just listened to, she was speaking to 3 men and there were two interesting comments made IMO. The first was from Judd Apetow and when asked about a stereotype he has held or does hold about women, he said: I think everyone has a degree of awful and awesome in them. Most of the characters I create are really pretty awful. But they increasingly move towards awesome. I don't think this is just women, I think this is a stereotype I hold for all people. That we are all awful but working hard to show our awesome.
The second was from Trevor Noah. His response to the same question was this: A stereotype I used to hold about women, is that I used to think of them very objectively. As though they were objects and I as the man needed to figure out the right combination of buttons to press. Like I was working with a computer or something. And the onus was all on me to find the correct input to get the output I wanted.
This seems to really strike at what it means to create an object. To place the responsibility for understanding squarely on our own shoulders. And to expect consistent results once we've got it "figured out".
This leads towards metaphor which is a strange representation of an object. It both assumes objects but represents them in a way that is difficult to take literally. Stars are diamonds in the sky. Who literally thinks stars are diamonds? But it relies on both stars and diamonds as objects to create any meaning.
IMO metaphor is one of the simplest ways to try and prevent objectification from happening towards a new representation, given that objectification has already taken place.
Thoughts?
-------------------- Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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redgreenvines
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28132108 - 01/09/23 11:52 AM (1 year, 19 days ago) |
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Meghan is the future queen of metaphoric culture. I really do not have a precise word for her, so I use this metaphorical phrase which begins an understanding game with all who read it. If I had the right word for the matter of MM and her interview show, then you would have the right meaning for what I am saying; but also after concrete meaning is expressed the judgements will start as to whether I chose the right word or even respected the matter sufficiently in this day and age, or should have expressed something more contextually appealing to the cultural norm. or at least more PC for those who are attracted to the issues in MM's show.
as for pressing the right buttons, that's what tv is supposed to do to us, no wonder people are out there stuck in a mental button pushing frenzy motivated by mating instincts.
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loladoreen


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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28132118 - 01/09/23 12:00 PM (1 year, 19 days ago) |
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Quote:
Kickle said: I've been listening to a podcast called Archetypes put out by Meghan Markle. And the focus is specifically on archetypes represented in recent history to characterize women (e.g., bimbo, slut, dumb blonde, housewife, etc.)
She often interviews individuals who create stories, such as movies/TV, books, magazines, plays, and more. She often asks how they've seen women represented in their own lives as well as the reasoning for their depictions of women in their related storytelling.
In an episode I just listened to, she was speaking to 3 men and there were two interesting comments made IMO. The first was from Judd Apetow and when asked about a stereotype he has held or does hold about women, he said: I think everyone has a degree of awful and awesome in them. Most of the characters I create are really pretty awful. But they increasingly move towards awesome. I don't think this is just women, I think this is a stereotype I hold for all people. That we are all awful but working hard to show our awesome.
The second was from Trevor Noah. His response to the same question was this: A stereotype I used to hold about women, is that I used to think of them very objectively. As though they were objects and I as the man needed to figure out the right combination of buttons to press. Like I was working with a computer or something. And the onus was all on me to find the correct input to get the output I wanted.
This seems to really strike at what it means to create an object. To place the responsibility for understanding squarely on our own shoulders. And to expect consistent results once we've got it "figured out".
This leads towards metaphor which is a strange representation of an object. It both assumes objects but represents them in a way that is difficult to take literally. Stars are diamonds in the sky. Who literally thinks stars are diamonds? But it relies on both stars and diamonds as objects to create any meaning.
IMO metaphor is one of the simplest ways to try and prevent objectification from happening towards a new representation, given that it has already taken place to the old.
Thoughts?
Where can I find and listen to this podcast?
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“One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient.”
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Kickle
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: loladoreen]
#28132323 - 01/09/23 02:33 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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Not sure if this will open for you. Pops open the Spotify App on my phone.
https://open.spotify.com/show/6UfyXZgVAUX1UzF8j5L72t
-------------------- Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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loladoreen


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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28132333 - 01/09/23 02:37 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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it opened. Thank you, I will watch it sometime.
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“One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient.”
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syncro
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28132337 - 01/09/23 02:41 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
IMO metaphor is one of the simplest ways to try and prevent objectification from happening towards a new representation, given that it has already taken place to the old.
Metaphors earn their timelessness, or fade. If not, I suppose that can show the downside of dogma, or by definition, dogma appears to be that which lasts without merit, or without confirmation anyway. Dogma could have merit nevertheless. I'm fuzzy on vocab.
Edited by syncro (01/09/23 02:45 PM)
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redgreenvines
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: syncro] 1
#28132350 - 01/09/23 02:55 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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metaphors evoke images and feelings with indirection abstraction and substitution. some could lose relevance via culture reference shifts, but we constantly make metaphors up and use them internally as approximate keys to our associative process.
sometimes the linkages are really abstract but functional.
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Kickle
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Meghan is the future queen of metaphoric culture.
I think I see which object caught your attention 
as for pressing the right buttons, that's what tv is supposed to do to us, no wonder people are out there stuck in a mental button pushing frenzy motivated by mating instincts.
Well hmmm I'll think on that. But it's sort of saying then we are the object upon which TV is pushing buttons
Which is a cool inversion of objectification but runs into the same pitfalls doesn't it?
-------------------- Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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Kickle
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: syncro]
#28132500 - 01/09/23 04:43 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
syncro said:
Quote:
IMO metaphor is one of the simplest ways to try and prevent objectification from happening towards a new representation, given that it has already taken place to the old.
Metaphors earn their timelessness, or fade. If not, I suppose that can show the downside of dogma, or by definition, dogma appears to be that which lasts without merit, or without confirmation anyway. Dogma could have merit nevertheless. I'm fuzzy on vocab.
Do you think that things with merit last? And those without fade? If so, how do you define merit?
-------------------- Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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Buster_Brown
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28132594 - 01/09/23 05:51 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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Here's a convoluted objectification of archetypical female attitude towards men:
Cadbury's Bakes Them And Covers Them With Chocolate- an English confectioner's commercial from the 70's

Cad-bury; to bury the cad one turns them into drunken sots (baked) and covers them in shit.
Her-she's bought Cad-bury's
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Buster_Brown
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28132616 - 01/09/23 06:04 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
Kickle said:
Do you think that things with merit last? And those without fade? If so, how do you define merit?
My example objectifies the meritous behavior of those who prevail.
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Kickle
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I do think women objectify things too. And silliest of all, we objectify ourselves
-------------------- Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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Buster_Brown
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle] 1
#28132745 - 01/09/23 07:19 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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I expect the evidence or substance of the observation may be pondered in higher circles than present company.
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Kickle
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Could be that it really doesn't mean anything
Maybe that's also why the OP had so much filler
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Freedom
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle] 1
#28133020 - 01/09/23 10:30 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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yeah thats interesting, i think the ability to metaphor depends on the ability to think outside the box, the box being a simple definition lacking dynamism.
I notice people vary in their ability to understand metaphors, and when they have this trouble they often use words very literrally as well, there is not much flexibility in the meaning of words
I remember once the startling realization that I was unonsciously boxing people into a handful of things i liked about them and a handful of things i disliked. so I would reduce them to these limited perspectives and relate to the perspectives as if they were actually parts of the person, and I would try to get the parts I liked and avoid the parts I didn't. Its like finding a portal to another universe and reducing it to annoying chewing sounds and a pretty face.
I guess it gets back to the river. the objectified world and objectified people give a sense of the same river. "oh jim's doing that thing again". its kind of true and false at the same time. jim does do that thing, and it is always fresh, and if it is a thing he does it is pretty stale, depending how i look at it.
I had someone at work who was difficult we didn't get along. someone said to me one day something like, "we only see a tiny part of a person, there is so much more that we don't see." wow, so i went back to work and stopped looking at this person the way i had become habitualized to and we became friends immediately. They had been the way they were because i made them into that.
I think a lot of objectifiacation happens around like and dislike, because we are so often trying to get a steady flow of things we like. similar to the original example pushing the buttons of an objectified system, objectifying ourselves too, so that we can get some mind state. I think some people live almost entirely in that way of objectification, and there is something else that is missed.
i don't know how to talk about that, but there was a blog i read once, let me see if i can find it, ok here it is that took a few minutes but for you i guess its instant, its what its like to stop objectifying everything:
Quote:
For a long time in the life of this Miranda thingie, it seemed there was a world divided into beauty and non-beauty, things and people that were “beautiful” and those that were “not beautiful.” The Miranda mother once told me at a relatively young age that I was “very pretty but not beautiful.” Mother would always classify the dancers in her daughter’s class according to their looks, and let me know who were the “real” beauties. When a young man would say I was beautiful, I would correct him, remembering my mother’s words. But one strange day, the whole world of what was “beautiful” and “not beautiful” seemed to change, and all that appeared began to somehow transform itself into a kind of beauty that was radiant, luminous, and far beyond any idea of beauty that I ever had. Somehow, “this” happened --- madness or liberation; the names seem not to touch it but only make it sound like something happened to someone, and that is felt to be as real as the stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks ... But the beauty seemed to expand until this aliveness was completely infused by it, colored by it, flooded and drowned in it; the beauty enveloping all that appeared until there was no place it was not, the beauty overflowing like a tsunami not just in sunsets and flowers and smiles, but in crowded streets, in Nazi teenagers yelling threats, in bombed out buildings and war orphans, in stray straggly cats and pimps and whores, in a dying woman's scarred face, in a man who said he wanted to kill me, in all that appears, without exception, in the ephemeral and dream-like aspect of all that simply is and can never again be seen as separate --- the beauty, like a kaleidoscopic whirl of wonder and awe without things or beings, including the apparent writer of these words that feel written by life and love itself, and not even that can be found… Beauty that is the light and the shadow, and there are no such separate things, for the light is the shadow is the light and not even that at all…. It is not the kind of beauty we seem to have been taught to see, but like love, beauty is the word we have, however inevitably inadequate, as much as any words can be related to any other words, which is not much at all… .....as Rilke said, "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying." And there are only ever angels and there is only ever this beauty that is the end of separation, the very end of what we are...and are not, my most beautiful beloveds. 💖
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BrendanFlock
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28133025 - 01/09/23 10:37 PM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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The idea of beings being objects can be useful in a scientific study of those people..
For example the idea that the brain is a central processor like in computers.
Woman ARE objects..
But they are beings as well..
I think,both approaches are valid..
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BrendanFlock
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Its just an abstraction it doesn't have to be malevolent..
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redgreenvines
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good people on both sides? brain is not like a central processor.
brain is about impressions and associations all together all at once
computer is like a worm processing instructions serially. It might one day simulate a brain but it is not doing the same thing as a brain and a brain does not do what a computer does.
people might say it metaphorically and agree and just carry on.
just saying.
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BrendanFlock
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So the brain doesn't process information?
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syncro
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Re: Metaphor and objectification [Re: Kickle]
#28133225 - 01/10/23 06:36 AM (1 year, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
Kickle said:
Quote:
syncro said:
Quote:
IMO metaphor is one of the simplest ways to try and prevent objectification from happening towards a new representation, given that it has already taken place to the old.
Metaphors earn their timelessness, or fade. If not, I suppose that can show the downside of dogma, or by definition, dogma appears to be that which lasts without merit, or without confirmation anyway. Dogma could have merit nevertheless. I'm fuzzy on vocab.
Do you think that things with merit last? And those without fade? If so, how do you define merit?
It's what I was considering though Rgv's reply reminded that surely meritorious metaphor could be forgotten as in past culture, and those without merit kept for lesser purpose.
Defining merit, I'd say it is that which serves to reveal the pure, or the beauty Freedom talked about.
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