Sorry, I didn't check your link out yet. When I got to work I had over slashdot replies I was trying to go through before I got anything done!
I'm actually not that desperate to be right about Firefly, Serenity, and Wheddonites. I'll look into the site that you sent me. So far I've run into a lot of Wheddonites claiming to analyze things and very few that rose above the level of fandom. Of course that's not to say no such examples exist - I just haven't seen them yet.
1. The "entire community" doesn't mean "every member hated it". It means that on the official board a significant number of fans hated it and a significant number felt compelled to defend it and for days the hottests threads were those flamewars to the point where it was hard for fans who were OK with it to hold any kind of thread going without it breaking into a flameware over this issue. That's indisputable.
2. Man, it's his story. If, in his story, Wash dies... it's not because Joss Whedon hates you.
The idea that it's "his story" is laughable. Joss doesn't get rich watching his own movies. He doesn't even get paid watching his own movies. He gets paid making movies FOR OTHER PEOPLE. On top of this, he doesn't make movies alone. It requires actors, editors, stage hands, etc. So to act as though no one else has any claim in the franchise is absurd. The studio would certainly take issue with that claim for one thing. And for another any fan who supports the series has a tiny bit of ownership - we're all little shareholders.
There's not show without Joss, but there's also no show without fans. Fans can't take a show away from Joss, but Joss can't take a show away from the fans either (unless he finds new ones). Without someone to watch - the show gets cancelled and Joss has nothing left but the ideas in his head - and that's NOT the same thing as a show.
As for Wheddon hating me, who says he does? I don't. I think he just didn't understand his fans this time.
And as for "it's just he way he thought things should go" that doesn't mean it's the way thing should go. Look at George Lucas and the prequals. They're "his" movies more than Joss's movies are his - because Lucas really owns them and doesn't need fans. And so by your logic the AWFUL dialogue is "the way things should go" because George wrote it.
But the fact is that no matter how good the original Star Wars movies were the new ones SUCK. And just because the owner makes decisions doesn't make the decisions good.
And in the end, well every sci-fi movie ends with everyone living happily so there's no real suspense.
What the Hell sci-fi movies do you watch? Sure, in Star Wars (original) everyone lives. And we LIKE that movie - it's a classic. And in Star Trek too. But in every OTHER movie everyone dies. From Predator to Aliens (every movie in the series) it's a STAPLE of sci fi to kill off main/supporting characters in sci-fi movies.
And in hindsight I think Washw wasn't the best choice. Inara (who the Hell shoots a bow and arrow 500 years in the future anyway) or Simone would have been better choices. River's better - so Simon's not needed except as a love interest for Kaylee. Inara annoys me anyway and also serves little purpose in the movie except a little tension with Mal. And we all know that if they actually get together Wheddon will just kill one of them.
Just like he kills the only character in the show that's actually IN a relationship (as well as the only other character who CAN'T be in a relationship).
What is it with Wheddon and relationships? One of the reasons I liked Zoe/Wash so much is showed a working marriage - not something that you see a whole lot of in adventure/sci-fi shows.
It's like Gilmore Girls (don't ask, my wife made me watch and I got hooked). Whenever Lorali gets ready to actually settle down with a man ratings plummet, so they screw up the relationship and set her up witha new potential man. When the uncertainty rises, ratings go back up. But if the match is successful, ratings go back down. And so there's a never ending cycle of looking for true love.
Anybody who's taken philosophy classes knows how much kids this age like to sound deep - and maybe even feel deep. You get kids that can pontificate for hours and hours and hours on end without ever really saying anything.
Plus fanboys and fangirls of ANY series are known to way overanalyze their beloved franchise. But that doesn't magically transfer all those long, long essays on whether Hermione is right for Harry or Ron into academic-level literary criticism.
1 - I don't personally have an issue with River's killing prowess, I was just being informative (other people do have an issue with that)
2 - I agree that Book's mystery should have been unravelled more. But this can be done posthomously.
3 - Killing Wash didn't leave questions unanswered, but it disturbed the balance of the core crew. Book dying didn't shake anything up. Wash dying cuts off most of the levity for the whole damn show. And replacing him with a character that brough back levity would have seemed cheap.
4 - What the show needed to kick of a new series wasn't plot changes. The plot was working fine. Better to make those in the new series, when there's more time to flesh complicated changes out. (I think killing Wash at end of series 2 could have been a great move). What the show needed was VIEWERS. And, as I've stated already, I think killing Wash in the way it was done contributed to that failure.
See any of my numerous posts where I respond to the whole "killing Wash made me feel like ANYONE could die".
But in addition, the movie is already such a plot stretch in exactly the ways you stated that killing Wash added more of a feeling that the plot was contrived to cover for the weaknesses than to a general feeling of "realism"
Wash: I don't know, doesn't that sound like science fiction or something? Zoe: Dear, we live in a spaceship.
1. A movie's greatness is not, in my opinion, directly proportional to how "hard-hitting" it is. If that were the case, I'm sure we would all enjoy some nice unedited footage of hostage executions or genocide in Rwanda. Yet for me that's not really what I'd call entertainment. Maybe worth viewing for othe reasons, but not what I'd want to pay money to see on a Friday night.
2. Anyone who thinks that characters need to die in order to make a movie plausible has a very warped sense of reality. As I've stated before, in wartime there are far more permenant injuries than death. If you really wanted realism, you wouldn't be so sated by offing a few characters. That's really a fairly cheap, American attitude. Rather than deal with the messy complexities of having a main character learn to live with loss of limb or something we'd rather just have them dead altogether.
I think that it would actually be more realistic and hard hitting to have more characters maimed then to have them cleanly removed. Life is messy and full of ambiguities. Killing characters is, in terms of plot, very neat and tidy and clear cut.
3. I realize that some people need to be shocked in order to be pleased by a movie. I find this depressing because it's evidence or our over-exposure and resulting desensitization. I like to be shocked or surprised as much as the next guy, and although I tend to be a happy-ending fan, I enjoy sadness as well when it enriches the movie experience. My favorite movie/play of all time is Cyrano D'Begerac - where the hero never gets the girl and dies in the end. So it's not like I can't handle death.
But I'm saddened when I go to a movie and feel as though the director has to reach harder and harder with each passing year to shock and awe his audience. It's like the Roman Circus without the mess - we need ever increasing amounts of emotional input to get the same return on investment.
I think if we slowed down our consumption of eye-candy just a bit and spent a bit more time in general reflecting and being peaceful maybe we wouldn't have to see, as we see in Serenity, a murder by gang-rape, a village being razed, a planets population wiped out, a main character dead, a new supporting character dead and then STILL, after all this, be like "Oh yeah, and killing ANOTHER main character is what really made the film real to me."
If that's what it takes, maybe the real problem isn't with the movie after all.
I'm *SO* tired of hearing this. Have you guys never seen an action flick before? If you have a cast of 9 in an action flick, SOMEONE'S going to die! And it's going to be more than 1. And the reason is always the same - to make viewers unsure of who's going to live.
If you really want to be unsure of who's going to live or die in a movie I guess this is an important plot tool for you. Personally, there are other aspects that are more important to me than a feeling of uncertainty when I watch a movie.
And in any case when Wash got killed I didn't think "Oh gee! Who could get it next?!" I thought "Wheddon, what the Hell did you do that for?!" The fact that I was thinking about the writer during the movie is a very, very bad sign. It means I've been completely taken out of the movie.
Plus I maintain that the way the crew handled the death was really, really bad. There wasn't enough time in the movie and it would have slowed the pacing down to have scenes of real grief. The one scene with Zoe and Mal was achingly perfect, but it still left fans like me feeling like we lost one of our favorite characters to that those of you who get off an uncertainty could have your shot.
The weird thing to me is that it's the fans of Wheddon who seem to require this uncertainty. And yet you fans of Wheddon shouldn't need to see Wash die to be uncertain - you've already seen Wheddon's work in a hundred episodes of Buffy and Angel.
So the whole proposition seems like a very little bang for a very lot of buck.
If you read my posts you'd know I dont' follow Buffy or Angel. Saw on ep of Angel - it was so awful I could barely finish it. You could tell it was written for people who were REALLY into the characters because the viewer was expected to care about them w/out being given any real in-script reason to do so. Kind of like seeing a soap-opera at random.
Have seen about 4 episodes of Buffy. It doesn't seem bad at all, but I don't see what all the fuss is about yet. Except that Buffy's hot, of course.
But I still prefer the original movie to the series.
Final note, most fans aren't angry because he killed off characters. Most fans have no issue with Book's death. What we have an issue with is HOW and WHY Book got toasted.
You're missing the point. Of the people who are hurt in the movie (and there were many) how many outcomes were there?
1 - they make a full recovery (Mal, Zoe, Simon, the Operative)
2 - they die (Wash, Book, Mr. Universe, everybody else)
In real life what do you have?
1 - full recovery 2 - death 3 - partial recovery
So that's my problem. Not just with Serenity but with entertainment in general - option 3 almost never happens even though in real life it's more likely than 2 for those seriously injured in warfare.
My further annoyance is with people who think making more characters die is more "realistic" because of the simple fact that it's just making a film darker, and I don't think darkness is inherently more real. It's also perpetuating the same unrealistic world view by continuing to make sure that our characters with stay nice and perfect and whole or not at all.
In real life we learn to live with ambiguity and shades of gray. I'm not saying all entertainment should be reduced to nothing but ambiguity, but I'd like to see a little more complexity and honesty in our treatment of disabilities.
OK, let me rephrase - realism is boring entertainment.
This isn't an opinion so much as an obvious fact. Would you actually be interested in watch reality on TV? Not reality TV. Reality TV is heavily edited and usually involves people in rather unrealistic and contrive situations.
Realistic TV would be watching a street corner from a stationary camera. The point is that plot, theme, protagonists, anatagonists in short all the things that make life a narrative are not inherent to "reality". We imbue these things on our own life. We see ourselves as the protagonist and the plot is determined by our hopes and aspirations. We see our lives as stories. And so we want stories in our entertainment. And that means we trim from our entertainment that which does not lend itself to the narrative. That's why you don't see a show where 1/3 of the show is dedicated to the main characters sleeping. If a show spans more than one day - like a crime drama - you don't see anyone on their commute, anyone in their house, anyone eating, anyone sleeping unless something specific happens there to further the plot.
That's not realistic. Realistic doesn't have editing.
Also consider how many times during a normal day people say something that's incoherent. A lot of people mumble and you have to infer what they are saying form the situation. If you pay attention, you'll notice your friends (and you) do it all the time. But unless the stumble is part of the narrative (and usually it's not) you just pay no attention to it. And that's why no one mumbles on TV (unless there's a specific reason to). Again - that's not realistic.
In real life stuff just happens. We make that stuff interesting and coherent by constructing a narrative with it.
Entertainment skips the bit where "in real life stuff just happens" and skips straight to the constructed narrative - so it's by definition not real.
how much fun can you have if you're crippled? no offense to real-life disabled people
That's really exactly what I'm getting at, and I think it IS offensive to real-life disabled people. In America we don't repair things or make-do. For the most part we throw stuff away and buy something new.
We take a similar approach to our disabled citizens. If a healthy person tries to commit suicide we say "Oh, a cry for help!" but if a disabled person tries to commit suicide we're likely to pass a law to make sure a doctor can help them do the job right. This is despite the fact that a disabled person who attempts suicide is just about as likely as a healthy person to be suffering from clinical depression - which can be treated.
But we have a bias against disabled people in this country and that's why we can't conceive of them being interesting characters. We make movies about a few of them, like Christopher Reeve, but any movie with a disabled person is going to be ABOUT the disability.
We're worry about all kinds of minority representation in TV. I think that one minority that deserves a little more representation is the disabled.
Final point: everything you say about how those with disabilities are in more danger in the universe would theoretically make it EASIER to write them into the film - not harder. Tension is based on danger to characters, there's more danger to disabled.
And finally let's just say Wash's leg got blown off. Could he still pilot a ship? I think so. We'd have peg-leg Wash wandering around. Even if he was in a wheelchair he could still have contributed. Could Kaylee continue to be an engineer if she lost a hand? Probably, in their universe. But nobody wants to see wheelchair ramps in the future, and no one wants to see a prosthetic on a pretty girl - and THAT'S the real reason we don't see disabled people on TV. They make us uncomfortable.
I'm not saying women/men ARE better at CS, I'm saying they are better at certain things and CS may or may not be one of them. I'm not the one saying we should just except empty assumptions for or against. Take "God exists" for example. In my opinion you can have very good reasons for believe for or against - or you can have stupid and shallow reasons for believing for or against.
What I'm really advocating isn't a certain position, it's just open mindedness and reason instead of dogma and assumption.
Simon, Mal and Zoe all prove my point not yours. They're all shot, stabbed, seriously beat up and they're all ok. Then Wash and Book are killed. Just by what we know of warfare in the 20th century you'd expect something like 9-10 injuries per death. We have 3 injuries for 2 deaths. In addition all 3 make full recoveries before the movie is even over - not even a scar remains.
I've heard the opposite. It Alan really wanted to move on than of course I wouldn't blame Wheddon for it. Last I heard Alan recommended his own death at the end of season 2 - but that he was actually disturbed by the death of his character in the movie.
Wow... excellent post. I have little to add, but I really like your take on that.
What I will add is that Buffy fans, in my experience, aren't really open to the kind of fine-distinctions you're talking about. Plus they seem to have a misery fetish. OK, I know I'm generalizing, but people that are like "Wheddon, why do you make me cry! I love you!" (as many Wheddonites aka Buffy fans) tend to give that impression.
OK, speared instead of shot. But my point wasn't so much that after being hit be a spear it would be more realistic to be injured as it was that in generally violent situations you have a higher chance of injury than death.
Talk about a flashback. This was the most common thing I heard on the boards "they live in a dangerous world and killing wash made that world more realistic".
But I think that's really superficial. First of all, realism isn't the goal of entertainment. Realism is boring - we spend 1/3 our lives unconcious. That's real. Try that for a movie. When people say they want a movie to be "real" they mean they want it to be an immersive experience. This is something that fans of schindler's list and braveheart have in common with fans of the original star wars: we all want the movies to SEEM real, but not really be real.
And so the problem with killing Wash to me was that it DIDN'T help immerse me in the world. We've already seen one village decimated by reavers, the recording of another woman raped to death by reavers, AN ENTIRE F***ING PLANET where everyone's dead, every one the crew has ever met has died, one of the crew die, a lot of extra people die, and we're about to see Mr. Universe die. Oh and by the way the captain has threatened to start shooting his own crew. So for me, anyway, the whole "dangerous world" point had already been made.
What really bugs me, however, is that people act as though realism means people dying. How many people die in a real war? That are shot, I mean. In Iraq there's like what, 9 injured that survive to every one that dies? And yet in movies it's binary. You are shot and you either live or you die. So to me it seems amazingly hollow and superficial to be like "people dying is realistic". No, people GETTING HURT is realistic. When was the last time you saw a show or a movie where a main character got hurt and had to learn to live with the disability. I mean aside from the sub-genre where that IS the plot most characters exist in this crazy world where you're alive or you're dead. Could Wash have been paralyzed, lost an arm or a leg? THAT would have been realistic and challenging - but the truth is that that's not what we want in our movies - no matter how dark of a tone we're after.
I'm not desperately trying to say "why did they have to kill him", I'm saying that a world where bullets either kill you or you make a full recovery is just as escapist as a world where none of the hero's die. I would like to see a movie, this or any other, where a character suffers a serioues, permenant injury and the show goes on. That's not the whole plot, he never recovers, he just learns to live with the disability and the rest of the characters learn to deal with it.
In America we all avidly follow the body count in Iraq, but when we see someone without a limb or in a wheelchair we either stare or look away and in the end go back to our escapist world where you're either whole or gone. That's not reality at all.
I just think we tend to put WAY too much emphasis on society. It's like society becomes this monstrous force we can pin anything on.
I don't so much object to any specific instance of it, I just think our quickness to write off so much as "society's fault" is demeaning of both personal responsibility and individuality on the one hand, and is rather sexist on the other. Just because we talk about girls getting the short end of society's stick more than boys. And in general we talk about girls being victims WAY more than we talk about boys being victims.
While in some cases this is true, I think that our society is equitable enough that unless we balance our victim-talk, we end up doing more harm talking about how helpess and victimzed girls are then good. We perpetuate theh very thing we'd like to get rid of.
Finally, when we say "it's society's fault" we never think about what that means. That's like saying "what does the elephant holding up the earth stand on? another elephant". What is society? Why does it have the gender conditionin that it does? It's not like society just popped into existence ex nhilo one day. We evolved and so does society - we should address that intead of acting like society is the black box where all inquiry ends.
Do you *really* want to have a whole long discussion about this here? Well, I have no self-control so I'm going to go for it
1. If anything I felt that it showed the core audience that this was not an episode of a TV series, where much could be expected to end up the same at the end as at the beginning.
I suppose that's valid, but people campaigned hard to get Firefly back. Serenity was not Firefly. For some people that's fine. For others it's not fine: the loved Firefly and they missed those aspects of it that they had fallen in love with. The most quoted aspect is warmth. The show, and the ship itself, seemed colder in the movie. And for others it's just main characters. You don't kill Han Solo off in A New Hope because the character is so great for the movie. Killing him off in Return of the Jedi would have been a bummer, but not nearly as bad a decision.
I don't see how new viewers can have been a factor in the decision to let them die. New viewers would have gotten the same effect of seriousness if new characters had been added and then killed. There was no way to add anymore new characters, Wheddon had a hard enough time getting all of the essential cast in (some say he failed at that, but with 9 characters to introduce again I think he did well). So in order for the show to be a Hollywood action flick with an ensemble case, SOMEONE had to die. That's the formula, and in the sense that making this a Hollywood action flick is for the newbies, killing Wash as part of that final-action tension-raising plot tool was definately for those newbies.
2. Also, River had been shown as having a 'super weapon' mode in the Firefly series, where she closed her eyes and killed three armed troops with three shots in about one second, so the movie was not 'turning' her into something new.
In this case you're preaching to the choir. I personally LOVED that scene - it brings a lump to my throat every time River says "My turn" and then goes off and kicks major Reaver butt. Plus the action sequences are just incredible with her - some of the best I've ever seen. I was just trying to add that for the sake of completeness because I know a lot of fans disliked it. And they have a point too, it would have been hard to have had characters like Jayn and Zoe matter so much as the hired muscle now that River the kick-ass assasin can do more damage than both of them combined. And any attempt to have limited her powers would have seemed a little too artificial and comic-bookish. She just recovered from being nut-case, how are they going to make her be one again?
All in all I had a really hard time liking the movie because of what happened to Wash. But that was because I wanted to see more movies. I was hoping the movie would do well and they'd relaunch the series. Or try something genuinely ground-breaking and do direct-to-DVD episodes. But the movie was sweet, and now that it's the conclusion to the series I like it even more.
We have a fundamental misunderstanding here that I think I understand now. It goes like this: You have an argument in your head (argument A), but you actually only stick the very tip of it in your post. This tip, taken in isolation, consists of argument B - not an incomplete version of A, but a separate argument altogether. Since I'm not a mind-reader I only see B, and I attack B for reasons that you will soon understand. But you actually see A as my target (which can't possibly be my target, no one knows A but you at the start of our debate). So in turn you see my counterarguments as ineffectual (straw men) insofar as they fail to address A. Furthermore you need to fill in the gaps in my argument to make it even relevant to A and the obvious fill-in-the-gaps happen to be even more ridiculous than my straw men. And so now you're happily and contendedly attacking your own construal of my argument. But the fact is that if you realize that you only actually COMMUNICATED B, and that I was responding to what you communicated and not what's in your head, then my arguments hold up fine (there are no straw men) and there are no gaps that need to be filled with straw men of your own.
Part 2: A vs. B (and proving B wrong)
This is what you actually wrote in the post I initially responded to:
"Women SHOULDN'T enter engineering because they aren't interested or lack the aptitude". vs "Women CHOOSE NOT TO enter engineering because they aren't interested or lack the aptitude"....Either way I would not trust this man to make fair hiring decisions.
This is what you communciated, it's argument B. Argument B boils down to this: Believing that women are less apt at activity X implies sexism. Since you listed no distinguishing characteristic or feature for engineering you gave me no reason to believe it was anything but a general difference between men and women. Written logically you have: W -> S (where W is "believing that women are less apt to do a general activity" and S is "sexist").
Your actual argument is stated much later in the most recent post:
THIS is the reality you are ignoring: 1) Many men in CS hold sexist attitudes toward women in CS, believing that women are inherently inferior to men at the subject. 2) Women are discouraged from entering the field by these attitudes.
This argument is completely different from B, and we'll call it A. Now I'm not responding to A when I write my replies, I'm responding to B. And the problem I have with B is specifically its generality. My whole beef is that your argument (for you did write it) means that ANY difference between women and men that makes women less apt that a man notices makes that man sexist.
All I have to do to prove that this statement is wrong IN GENERAL, is find an element w that is a subset of W, such that w & ~S. I went straight for the simplest: men and women have different physical characteristics that bestow upon men in general a greater aptitude for, to pick one of my examples, professional basketball. So there's my w: women have less of an aptitude for playing in the NBA then men. I think we can all agree that this is not sexist - it's just realistic. So there I have my w & ~S. This is sufficient to prove that ~(W -> S) for all w in W.
Case closed: I've just proved B wrong in general.
Part 3: Where Have All The Straw Men Gone?
A straw man is when I say you think something that you don't (usually that is similar to what you do believe) presumably for the purpose of burning the straw man and claiming to have won a debate. The trouble here, however, is that while you may not have intended to put forward argument B - you did. The words are there, the logic is complete (if fatally flawed) and so when I went after it I was not creating a straw man. I was, as it turns out, using a straw man but not one of my creation: one of yours. If you don't believe argument B, then it can't be helped that I THO
Critics loved it (by sci fi standards) and I can admit that, in isolation, it was a great movie. The problem was that that movie turned off a lot of Firefly fans. I've debated this ad nauseam already on the official message boards - but the one things that's indisputable is that the entire community broke out into a firestorm over the killing of two characters, Wash and to a lesser extent Book.
I'm one of those that protested that loudest that killing Wash was a stupid, stupid move. There were a variety or other problems Firefly fans had with the movie (eg turning River into "River the Reaver Slayer") but I think that was really at the core.
Wheddon created a series that a lot of people fell in love with and they rallied after it was cancelled to bring it back to life. Killing Wash in a way that many felt was pointless was a slap in the fact to a lot of fans that had worked, struggled, evangelized and pretty much gone above and beyond to bring their show back to life.
I think he made a fundamental miscalculation in thinking that his Firefly crowd would stick with him while he reached for a broader audience. Given how he's revered by Wheddonites who also love Buffy and Angel, I'm not surprised he erred on the side of appealing to a broader audience. But a lot of the fans of Firefly were no fans of Wheddon, and so they were completely unwilling to go follow him just because he's Wheddon. They saw his treatment of characters (Wash in particular but also others) as wanton disregard for their beloved franchise, they spurned the movie, quit trying to bring their friends, and went home to watch their Firefly DVD set one more time.
The remaining Wheddonites who crowded into the theaters night after night and dragged friends and relatives along were just not quite the critical mass needed to really get the show to break out. Whether or not things would have turned out differently had Wheddon not killed Wash - no one will ever know. I think the chance was there to make a new Star Wars (the original) mega-hit and that that was the mistake that cost him, but I'm sure there are plenty of Wheddonites and others who disagree with me.
In any case, I'm sad to see it go, but I won't be eager to catch the next Wheddon project anytime soon. As far as I'm concerned Wheddon and Lucas are just proof-postive that talent is a fickle creature and some creators clearly create works that far outsrtip their own understanding. Just because the muse visits, doesn't mean she'll stay.
I don't have proofs that women make better nurses than men. I haven't seen any proof of that question either way. So, in light of the absence of proof (and until we get proof) which do we presume?
1 - that the discrepency in hiring (be it CS or nursing) is a result of discrimination on the part of the hirers or current people in that career (active discrimination, if you will)
2 - that the discrepency in hiring is a result of preferrences of the women that are placed there by societal conditioning that is harmful (more subtle, passive discrimination)
3 - that the discrepency in hiring is a reflection of the general preferences and aptitudes of men and women that are in turn the result of evolutionary specialization
I can't prove that #3 is right. If I could, I wouldn't be having this argument, I'd be publishing papers or linking to published papers. What i can do (and am doing) is present my reasons for being skeptical of 1 and 2 and indicating especailly that #2 entails its own form of even more insidious discrimination while arguing that #3 is more probable.
I consider it logical that women, who in the homo sapien species have evolved as primary care givers of infants that are helpless for longer than any other species, are biologically better suited to care-giving tasks as a group. This involves multi-tasking because young children need watching after for so long that there may be many successive childbriths before the oldest children are even basically self-preserving.
Men, on the other hand, are genetically predisposed to hunting - which involves more physical speed and a different skill set.
These divergent natures are not the result of societal traditions, by and large they are the CAUSE of societal traditions. As we become self-aware and societal we have increasing power to override our genetic predispositions - and that's fine. Perhaps in time they will fade.
All I'm saying is that at this point in time men and women are specialized towards different types of tasks, and that we should not be surprised to see this reflected in their career preferences and other modern behaviors. Furthermore, the true sexism is the sexism to say that men's specializations are superior. In other words, women need to be equally represented or they are somehow not as empowered as men. I find that stupid, counterprodctive, and sexist.
If any individual woman desires to be a CEO, comp sci major, not have a family or whatever that's terrific. Individual variation is greater than group variation. Some women would make better hunters and some men would probably make better caregivers - these are exceptions that prove the rule. But we shouldn't force individual women to act in ways that they are not individually disposed and I think it's a waste of time (and insulting) to try and coax them to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I didn't check your link out yet. When I got to work I had over slashdot replies I was trying to go through before I got anything done!
I'm actually not that desperate to be right about Firefly, Serenity, and Wheddonites. I'll look into the site that you sent me. So far I've run into a lot of Wheddonites claiming to analyze things and very few that rose above the level of fandom. Of course that's not to say no such examples exist - I just haven't seen them yet.
-stormin
1. The "entire community" doesn't mean "every member hated it". It means that on the official board a significant number of fans hated it and a significant number felt compelled to defend it and for days the hottests threads were those flamewars to the point where it was hard for fans who were OK with it to hold any kind of thread going without it breaking into a flameware over this issue. That's indisputable.
2. Man, it's his story. If, in his story, Wash dies... it's not because Joss Whedon hates you.
The idea that it's "his story" is laughable. Joss doesn't get rich watching his own movies. He doesn't even get paid watching his own movies. He gets paid making movies FOR OTHER PEOPLE. On top of this, he doesn't make movies alone. It requires actors, editors, stage hands, etc. So to act as though no one else has any claim in the franchise is absurd. The studio would certainly take issue with that claim for one thing. And for another any fan who supports the series has a tiny bit of ownership - we're all little shareholders.
There's not show without Joss, but there's also no show without fans. Fans can't take a show away from Joss, but Joss can't take a show away from the fans either (unless he finds new ones). Without someone to watch - the show gets cancelled and Joss has nothing left but the ideas in his head - and that's NOT the same thing as a show.
As for Wheddon hating me, who says he does? I don't. I think he just didn't understand his fans this time.
And as for "it's just he way he thought things should go" that doesn't mean it's the way thing should go. Look at George Lucas and the prequals. They're "his" movies more than Joss's movies are his - because Lucas really owns them and doesn't need fans. And so by your logic the AWFUL dialogue is "the way things should go" because George wrote it.
But the fact is that no matter how good the original Star Wars movies were the new ones SUCK. And just because the owner makes decisions doesn't make the decisions good.
-stormin
And in the end, well every sci-fi movie ends with everyone living happily so there's no real suspense.
What the Hell sci-fi movies do you watch? Sure, in Star Wars (original) everyone lives. And we LIKE that movie - it's a classic. And in Star Trek too. But in every OTHER movie everyone dies. From Predator to Aliens (every movie in the series) it's a STAPLE of sci fi to kill off main/supporting characters in sci-fi movies.
And in hindsight I think Washw wasn't the best choice. Inara (who the Hell shoots a bow and arrow 500 years in the future anyway) or Simone would have been better choices. River's better - so Simon's not needed except as a love interest for Kaylee. Inara annoys me anyway and also serves little purpose in the movie except a little tension with Mal. And we all know that if they actually get together Wheddon will just kill one of them.
Just like he kills the only character in the show that's actually IN a relationship (as well as the only other character who CAN'T be in a relationship).
What is it with Wheddon and relationships? One of the reasons I liked Zoe/Wash so much is showed a working marriage - not something that you see a whole lot of in adventure/sci-fi shows.
It's like Gilmore Girls (don't ask, my wife made me watch and I got hooked). Whenever Lorali gets ready to actually settle down with a man ratings plummet, so they screw up the relationship and set her up witha new potential man. When the uncertainty rises, ratings go back up. But if the match is successful, ratings go back down. And so there's a never ending cycle of looking for true love.
Which, in the end, gets really old.
-stormin
Let's not mistake quantity with quality.
Anybody who's taken philosophy classes knows how much kids this age like to sound deep - and maybe even feel deep. You get kids that can pontificate for hours and hours and hours on end without ever really saying anything.
Plus fanboys and fangirls of ANY series are known to way overanalyze their beloved franchise. But that doesn't magically transfer all those long, long essays on whether Hermione is right for Harry or Ron into academic-level literary criticism.
-stormin
1 - I don't personally have an issue with River's killing prowess, I was just being informative (other people do have an issue with that)
2 - I agree that Book's mystery should have been unravelled more. But this can be done posthomously.
3 - Killing Wash didn't leave questions unanswered, but it disturbed the balance of the core crew. Book dying didn't shake anything up. Wash dying cuts off most of the levity for the whole damn show. And replacing him with a character that brough back levity would have seemed cheap.
4 - What the show needed to kick of a new series wasn't plot changes. The plot was working fine. Better to make those in the new series, when there's more time to flesh complicated changes out. (I think killing Wash at end of series 2 could have been a great move). What the show needed was VIEWERS. And, as I've stated already, I think killing Wash in the way it was done contributed to that failure.
-stormin
See any of my numerous posts where I respond to the whole "killing Wash made me feel like ANYONE could die".
But in addition, the movie is already such a plot stretch in exactly the ways you stated that killing Wash added more of a feeling that the plot was contrived to cover for the weaknesses than to a general feeling of "realism"
Wash: I don't know, doesn't that sound like science fiction or something?
Zoe: Dear, we live in a spaceship.
-stormin
1. A movie's greatness is not, in my opinion, directly proportional to how "hard-hitting" it is. If that were the case, I'm sure we would all enjoy some nice unedited footage of hostage executions or genocide in Rwanda. Yet for me that's not really what I'd call entertainment. Maybe worth viewing for othe reasons, but not what I'd want to pay money to see on a Friday night.
2. Anyone who thinks that characters need to die in order to make a movie plausible has a very warped sense of reality. As I've stated before, in wartime there are far more permenant injuries than death. If you really wanted realism, you wouldn't be so sated by offing a few characters. That's really a fairly cheap, American attitude. Rather than deal with the messy complexities of having a main character learn to live with loss of limb or something we'd rather just have them dead altogether.
I think that it would actually be more realistic and hard hitting to have more characters maimed then to have them cleanly removed. Life is messy and full of ambiguities. Killing characters is, in terms of plot, very neat and tidy and clear cut.
3. I realize that some people need to be shocked in order to be pleased by a movie. I find this depressing because it's evidence or our over-exposure and resulting desensitization. I like to be shocked or surprised as much as the next guy, and although I tend to be a happy-ending fan, I enjoy sadness as well when it enriches the movie experience. My favorite movie/play of all time is Cyrano D'Begerac - where the hero never gets the girl and dies in the end. So it's not like I can't handle death.
But I'm saddened when I go to a movie and feel as though the director has to reach harder and harder with each passing year to shock and awe his audience. It's like the Roman Circus without the mess - we need ever increasing amounts of emotional input to get the same return on investment.
I think if we slowed down our consumption of eye-candy just a bit and spent a bit more time in general reflecting and being peaceful maybe we wouldn't have to see, as we see in Serenity, a murder by gang-rape, a village being razed, a planets population wiped out, a main character dead, a new supporting character dead and then STILL, after all this, be like "Oh yeah, and killing ANOTHER main character is what really made the film real to me."
If that's what it takes, maybe the real problem isn't with the movie after all.
-stormin
I'm *SO* tired of hearing this. Have you guys never seen an action flick before? If you have a cast of 9 in an action flick, SOMEONE'S going to die! And it's going to be more than 1. And the reason is always the same - to make viewers unsure of who's going to live.
If you really want to be unsure of who's going to live or die in a movie I guess this is an important plot tool for you. Personally, there are other aspects that are more important to me than a feeling of uncertainty when I watch a movie.
And in any case when Wash got killed I didn't think "Oh gee! Who could get it next?!" I thought "Wheddon, what the Hell did you do that for?!" The fact that I was thinking about the writer during the movie is a very, very bad sign. It means I've been completely taken out of the movie.
Plus I maintain that the way the crew handled the death was really, really bad. There wasn't enough time in the movie and it would have slowed the pacing down to have scenes of real grief. The one scene with Zoe and Mal was achingly perfect, but it still left fans like me feeling like we lost one of our favorite characters to that those of you who get off an uncertainty could have your shot.
The weird thing to me is that it's the fans of Wheddon who seem to require this uncertainty. And yet you fans of Wheddon shouldn't need to see Wash die to be uncertain - you've already seen Wheddon's work in a hundred episodes of Buffy and Angel.
So the whole proposition seems like a very little bang for a very lot of buck.
-stormin
If you read my posts you'd know I dont' follow Buffy or Angel. Saw on ep of Angel - it was so awful I could barely finish it. You could tell it was written for people who were REALLY into the characters because the viewer was expected to care about them w/out being given any real in-script reason to do so. Kind of like seeing a soap-opera at random.
Have seen about 4 episodes of Buffy. It doesn't seem bad at all, but I don't see what all the fuss is about yet. Except that Buffy's hot, of course.
But I still prefer the original movie to the series.
Final note, most fans aren't angry because he killed off characters. Most fans have no issue with Book's death. What we have an issue with is HOW and WHY Book got toasted.
-stormin
You're missing the point. Of the people who are hurt in the movie (and there were many) how many outcomes were there?
1 - they make a full recovery (Mal, Zoe, Simon, the Operative)
2 - they die (Wash, Book, Mr. Universe, everybody else)
In real life what do you have?
1 - full recovery
2 - death
3 - partial recovery
So that's my problem. Not just with Serenity but with entertainment in general - option 3 almost never happens even though in real life it's more likely than 2 for those seriously injured in warfare.
My further annoyance is with people who think making more characters die is more "realistic" because of the simple fact that it's just making a film darker, and I don't think darkness is inherently more real. It's also perpetuating the same unrealistic world view by continuing to make sure that our characters with stay nice and perfect and whole or not at all.
In real life we learn to live with ambiguity and shades of gray. I'm not saying all entertainment should be reduced to nothing but ambiguity, but I'd like to see a little more complexity and honesty in our treatment of disabilities.
-stormin
OK, let me rephrase - realism is boring entertainment.
This isn't an opinion so much as an obvious fact. Would you actually be interested in watch reality on TV? Not reality TV. Reality TV is heavily edited and usually involves people in rather unrealistic and contrive situations.
Realistic TV would be watching a street corner from a stationary camera. The point is that plot, theme, protagonists, anatagonists in short all the things that make life a narrative are not inherent to "reality". We imbue these things on our own life. We see ourselves as the protagonist and the plot is determined by our hopes and aspirations. We see our lives as stories. And so we want stories in our entertainment. And that means we trim from our entertainment that which does not lend itself to the narrative. That's why you don't see a show where 1/3 of the show is dedicated to the main characters sleeping. If a show spans more than one day - like a crime drama - you don't see anyone on their commute, anyone in their house, anyone eating, anyone sleeping unless something specific happens there to further the plot.
That's not realistic. Realistic doesn't have editing.
Also consider how many times during a normal day people say something that's incoherent. A lot of people mumble and you have to infer what they are saying form the situation. If you pay attention, you'll notice your friends (and you) do it all the time. But unless the stumble is part of the narrative (and usually it's not) you just pay no attention to it. And that's why no one mumbles on TV (unless there's a specific reason to). Again - that's not realistic.
In real life stuff just happens. We make that stuff interesting and coherent by constructing a narrative with it.
Entertainment skips the bit where "in real life stuff just happens" and skips straight to the constructed narrative - so it's by definition not real.
-stormin
how much fun can you have if you're crippled? no offense to real-life disabled people
That's really exactly what I'm getting at, and I think it IS offensive to real-life disabled people. In America we don't repair things or make-do. For the most part we throw stuff away and buy something new.
We take a similar approach to our disabled citizens. If a healthy person tries to commit suicide we say "Oh, a cry for help!" but if a disabled person tries to commit suicide we're likely to pass a law to make sure a doctor can help them do the job right. This is despite the fact that a disabled person who attempts suicide is just about as likely as a healthy person to be suffering from clinical depression - which can be treated.
But we have a bias against disabled people in this country and that's why we can't conceive of them being interesting characters. We make movies about a few of them, like Christopher Reeve, but any movie with a disabled person is going to be ABOUT the disability.
We're worry about all kinds of minority representation in TV. I think that one minority that deserves a little more representation is the disabled.
Final point: everything you say about how those with disabilities are in more danger in the universe would theoretically make it EASIER to write them into the film - not harder. Tension is based on danger to characters, there's more danger to disabled.
And finally let's just say Wash's leg got blown off. Could he still pilot a ship? I think so. We'd have peg-leg Wash wandering around. Even if he was in a wheelchair he could still have contributed. Could Kaylee continue to be an engineer if she lost a hand? Probably, in their universe. But nobody wants to see wheelchair ramps in the future, and no one wants to see a prosthetic on a pretty girl - and THAT'S the real reason we don't see disabled people on TV. They make us uncomfortable.
-stormin
Blah blah blah.
I'm not saying women/men ARE better at CS, I'm saying they are better at certain things and CS may or may not be one of them. I'm not the one saying we should just except empty assumptions for or against. Take "God exists" for example. In my opinion you can have very good reasons for believe for or against - or you can have stupid and shallow reasons for believing for or against.
What I'm really advocating isn't a certain position, it's just open mindedness and reason instead of dogma and assumption.
-stormin
Simon, Mal and Zoe all prove my point not yours. They're all shot, stabbed, seriously beat up and they're all ok. Then Wash and Book are killed. Just by what we know of warfare in the 20th century you'd expect something like 9-10 injuries per death. We have 3 injuries for 2 deaths. In addition all 3 make full recoveries before the movie is even over - not even a scar remains.
-stormin
I've heard the opposite. It Alan really wanted to move on than of course I wouldn't blame Wheddon for it. Last I heard Alan recommended his own death at the end of season 2 - but that he was actually disturbed by the death of his character in the movie.
-stormin
Wow... excellent post. I have little to add, but I really like your take on that.
What I will add is that Buffy fans, in my experience, aren't really open to the kind of fine-distinctions you're talking about. Plus they seem to have a misery fetish. OK, I know I'm generalizing, but people that are like "Wheddon, why do you make me cry! I love you!" (as many Wheddonites aka Buffy fans) tend to give that impression.
-stormin
OK, speared instead of shot. But my point wasn't so much that after being hit be a spear it would be more realistic to be injured as it was that in generally violent situations you have a higher chance of injury than death.
-stormin
Talk about a flashback. This was the most common thing I heard on the boards "they live in a dangerous world and killing wash made that world more realistic".
But I think that's really superficial. First of all, realism isn't the goal of entertainment. Realism is boring - we spend 1/3 our lives unconcious. That's real. Try that for a movie. When people say they want a movie to be "real" they mean they want it to be an immersive experience. This is something that fans of schindler's list and braveheart have in common with fans of the original star wars: we all want the movies to SEEM real, but not really be real.
And so the problem with killing Wash to me was that it DIDN'T help immerse me in the world. We've already seen one village decimated by reavers, the recording of another woman raped to death by reavers, AN ENTIRE F***ING PLANET where everyone's dead, every one the crew has ever met has died, one of the crew die, a lot of extra people die, and we're about to see Mr. Universe die. Oh and by the way the captain has threatened to start shooting his own crew. So for me, anyway, the whole "dangerous world" point had already been made.
What really bugs me, however, is that people act as though realism means people dying. How many people die in a real war? That are shot, I mean. In Iraq there's like what, 9 injured that survive to every one that dies? And yet in movies it's binary. You are shot and you either live or you die. So to me it seems amazingly hollow and superficial to be like "people dying is realistic". No, people GETTING HURT is realistic. When was the last time you saw a show or a movie where a main character got hurt and had to learn to live with the disability. I mean aside from the sub-genre where that IS the plot most characters exist in this crazy world where you're alive or you're dead. Could Wash have been paralyzed, lost an arm or a leg? THAT would have been realistic and challenging - but the truth is that that's not what we want in our movies - no matter how dark of a tone we're after.
I'm not desperately trying to say "why did they have to kill him", I'm saying that a world where bullets either kill you or you make a full recovery is just as escapist as a world where none of the hero's die. I would like to see a movie, this or any other, where a character suffers a serioues, permenant injury and the show goes on. That's not the whole plot, he never recovers, he just learns to live with the disability and the rest of the characters learn to deal with it.
In America we all avidly follow the body count in Iraq, but when we see someone without a limb or in a wheelchair we either stare or look away and in the end go back to our escapist world where you're either whole or gone. That's not reality at all.
-stormin
it's about socially conditioned gender roles.
I just think we tend to put WAY too much emphasis on society. It's like society becomes this monstrous force we can pin anything on.
I don't so much object to any specific instance of it, I just think our quickness to write off so much as "society's fault" is demeaning of both personal responsibility and individuality on the one hand, and is rather sexist on the other. Just because we talk about girls getting the short end of society's stick more than boys. And in general we talk about girls being victims WAY more than we talk about boys being victims.
While in some cases this is true, I think that our society is equitable enough that unless we balance our victim-talk, we end up doing more harm talking about how helpess and victimzed girls are then good. We perpetuate theh very thing we'd like to get rid of.
Finally, when we say "it's society's fault" we never think about what that means. That's like saying "what does the elephant holding up the earth stand on? another elephant". What is society? Why does it have the gender conditionin that it does? It's not like society just popped into existence ex nhilo one day. We evolved and so does society - we should address that intead of acting like society is the black box where all inquiry ends.
-stormin
Egads, not back to this again are we?
Do you *really* want to have a whole long discussion about this here? Well, I have no self-control so I'm going to go for it
1. If anything I felt that it showed the core audience that this was not an episode of a TV series, where much could be expected to end up the same at the end as at the beginning.
I suppose that's valid, but people campaigned hard to get Firefly back. Serenity was not Firefly. For some people that's fine. For others it's not fine: the loved Firefly and they missed those aspects of it that they had fallen in love with. The most quoted aspect is warmth. The show, and the ship itself, seemed colder in the movie. And for others it's just main characters. You don't kill Han Solo off in A New Hope because the character is so great for the movie. Killing him off in Return of the Jedi would have been a bummer, but not nearly as bad a decision.
I don't see how new viewers can have been a factor in the decision to let them die. New viewers would have gotten the same effect of seriousness if new characters had been added and then killed. There was no way to add anymore new characters, Wheddon had a hard enough time getting all of the essential cast in (some say he failed at that, but with 9 characters to introduce again I think he did well). So in order for the show to be a Hollywood action flick with an ensemble case, SOMEONE had to die. That's the formula, and in the sense that making this a Hollywood action flick is for the newbies, killing Wash as part of that final-action tension-raising plot tool was definately for those newbies.
2. Also, River had been shown as having a 'super weapon' mode in the Firefly series, where she closed her eyes and killed three armed troops with three shots in about one second, so the movie was not 'turning' her into something new.
In this case you're preaching to the choir. I personally LOVED that scene - it brings a lump to my throat every time River says "My turn" and then goes off and kicks major Reaver butt. Plus the action sequences are just incredible with her - some of the best I've ever seen. I was just trying to add that for the sake of completeness because I know a lot of fans disliked it. And they have a point too, it would have been hard to have had characters like Jayn and Zoe matter so much as the hired muscle now that River the kick-ass assasin can do more damage than both of them combined. And any attempt to have limited her powers would have seemed a little too artificial and comic-bookish. She just recovered from being nut-case, how are they going to make her be one again?
All in all I had a really hard time liking the movie because of what happened to Wash. But that was because I wanted to see more movies. I was hoping the movie would do well and they'd relaunch the series. Or try something genuinely ground-breaking and do direct-to-DVD episodes. But the movie was sweet, and now that it's the conclusion to the series I like it even more.
-stormin
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/05
But still... sorry!
So... am I to understand that any comment on any issues that doesn't include proof is worthless?
Part 1: Intro
...Either way I would not trust this man to make fair hiring decisions.
We have a fundamental misunderstanding here that I think I understand now. It goes like this: You have an argument in your head (argument A), but you actually only stick the very tip of it in your post. This tip, taken in isolation, consists of argument B - not an incomplete version of A, but a separate argument altogether. Since I'm not a mind-reader I only see B, and I attack B for reasons that you will soon understand. But you actually see A as my target (which can't possibly be my target, no one knows A but you at the start of our debate). So in turn you see my counterarguments as ineffectual (straw men) insofar as they fail to address A. Furthermore you need to fill in the gaps in my argument to make it even relevant to A and the obvious fill-in-the-gaps happen to be even more ridiculous than my straw men. And so now you're happily and contendedly attacking your own construal of my argument. But the fact is that if you realize that you only actually COMMUNICATED B, and that I was responding to what you communicated and not what's in your head, then my arguments hold up fine (there are no straw men) and there are no gaps that need to be filled with straw men of your own.
Part 2: A vs. B (and proving B wrong)
This is what you actually wrote in the post I initially responded to:
"Women SHOULDN'T enter engineering because they aren't interested or lack the aptitude".
vs
"Women CHOOSE NOT TO enter engineering because they aren't interested or lack the aptitude".
This is what you communciated, it's argument B. Argument B boils down to this: Believing that women are less apt at activity X implies sexism. Since you listed no distinguishing characteristic or feature for engineering you gave me no reason to believe it was anything but a general difference between men and women. Written logically you have: W -> S (where W is "believing that women are less apt to do a general activity" and S is "sexist").
Your actual argument is stated much later in the most recent post:
THIS is the reality you are ignoring:
1) Many men in CS hold sexist attitudes toward women in CS, believing that women are inherently inferior to men at the subject.
2) Women are discouraged from entering the field by these attitudes.
This argument is completely different from B, and we'll call it A. Now I'm not responding to A when I write my replies, I'm responding to B. And the problem I have with B is specifically its generality. My whole beef is that your argument (for you did write it) means that ANY difference between women and men that makes women less apt that a man notices makes that man sexist.
All I have to do to prove that this statement is wrong IN GENERAL, is find an element w that is a subset of W, such that w & ~S. I went straight for the simplest: men and women have different physical characteristics that bestow upon men in general a greater aptitude for, to pick one of my examples, professional basketball. So there's my w: women have less of an aptitude for playing in the NBA then men. I think we can all agree that this is not sexist - it's just realistic. So there I have my w & ~S. This is sufficient to prove that ~(W -> S) for all w in W.
Case closed: I've just proved B wrong in general.
Part 3: Where Have All The Straw Men Gone?
A straw man is when I say you think something that you don't (usually that is similar to what you do believe) presumably for the purpose of burning the straw man and claiming to have won a debate. The trouble here, however, is that while you may not have intended to put forward argument B - you did. The words are there, the logic is complete (if fatally flawed) and so when I went after it I was not creating a straw man. I was, as it turns out, using a straw man but not one of my creation: one of yours. If you don't believe argument B, then it can't be helped that I THO
Critics loved it (by sci fi standards) and I can admit that, in isolation, it was a great movie. The problem was that that movie turned off a lot of Firefly fans. I've debated this ad nauseam already on the official message boards - but the one things that's indisputable is that the entire community broke out into a firestorm over the killing of two characters, Wash and to a lesser extent Book.
I'm one of those that protested that loudest that killing Wash was a stupid, stupid move. There were a variety or other problems Firefly fans had with the movie (eg turning River into "River the Reaver Slayer") but I think that was really at the core.
Wheddon created a series that a lot of people fell in love with and they rallied after it was cancelled to bring it back to life. Killing Wash in a way that many felt was pointless was a slap in the fact to a lot of fans that had worked, struggled, evangelized and pretty much gone above and beyond to bring their show back to life.
I think he made a fundamental miscalculation in thinking that his Firefly crowd would stick with him while he reached for a broader audience. Given how he's revered by Wheddonites who also love Buffy and Angel, I'm not surprised he erred on the side of appealing to a broader audience. But a lot of the fans of Firefly were no fans of Wheddon, and so they were completely unwilling to go follow him just because he's Wheddon. They saw his treatment of characters (Wash in particular but also others) as wanton disregard for their beloved franchise, they spurned the movie, quit trying to bring their friends, and went home to watch their Firefly DVD set one more time.
The remaining Wheddonites who crowded into the theaters night after night and dragged friends and relatives along were just not quite the critical mass needed to really get the show to break out. Whether or not things would have turned out differently had Wheddon not killed Wash - no one will ever know. I think the chance was there to make a new Star Wars (the original) mega-hit and that that was the mistake that cost him, but I'm sure there are plenty of Wheddonites and others who disagree with me.
In any case, I'm sad to see it go, but I won't be eager to catch the next Wheddon project anytime soon. As far as I'm concerned Wheddon and Lucas are just proof-postive that talent is a fickle creature and some creators clearly create works that far outsrtip their own understanding. Just because the muse visits, doesn't mean she'll stay.
-stormin
I don't have proofs that women make better nurses than men. I haven't seen any proof of that question either way. So, in light of the absence of proof (and until we get proof) which do we presume?
1 - that the discrepency in hiring (be it CS or nursing) is a result of discrimination on the part of the hirers or current people in that career (active discrimination, if you will)
2 - that the discrepency in hiring is a result of preferrences of the women that are placed there by societal conditioning that is harmful (more subtle, passive discrimination)
3 - that the discrepency in hiring is a reflection of the general preferences and aptitudes of men and women that are in turn the result of evolutionary specialization
I can't prove that #3 is right. If I could, I wouldn't be having this argument, I'd be publishing papers or linking to published papers. What i can do (and am doing) is present my reasons for being skeptical of 1 and 2 and indicating especailly that #2 entails its own form of even more insidious discrimination while arguing that #3 is more probable.
I consider it logical that women, who in the homo sapien species have evolved as primary care givers of infants that are helpless for longer than any other species, are biologically better suited to care-giving tasks as a group. This involves multi-tasking because young children need watching after for so long that there may be many successive childbriths before the oldest children are even basically self-preserving.
Men, on the other hand, are genetically predisposed to hunting - which involves more physical speed and a different skill set.
These divergent natures are not the result of societal traditions, by and large they are the CAUSE of societal traditions. As we become self-aware and societal we have increasing power to override our genetic predispositions - and that's fine. Perhaps in time they will fade.
All I'm saying is that at this point in time men and women are specialized towards different types of tasks, and that we should not be surprised to see this reflected in their career preferences and other modern behaviors. Furthermore, the true sexism is the sexism to say that men's specializations are superior. In other words, women need to be equally represented or they are somehow not as empowered as men. I find that stupid, counterprodctive, and sexist.
If any individual woman desires to be a CEO, comp sci major, not have a family or whatever that's terrific. Individual variation is greater than group variation. Some women would make better hunters and some men would probably make better caregivers - these are exceptions that prove the rule. But we shouldn't force individual women to act in ways that they are not individually disposed and I think it's a waste of time (and insulting) to try and coax them to do so.
-stormin