THERE’S A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION FOR THE WESTERN WORLD’S PROLIFERATION OF FURRIES??
Okay no, you can’t just drop a knowledge bomb like that and not EXPLAIN! Or at least link! Gimme a search term?! Anything!
ok i’ll write up the lightning-bolt of bizarre mental synthesis later but here:
the pacific standard article and the pdf of the study in question
find the term “folkbiological reasoning” and peruse this paragraph in the psmag article:
“Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.”
now consider, and i say this in the least pejorative way possible, that furry culture seems to arise at least partially from a desire/instinct to anthropomorphize and identify with non-human animals, often in broad, non-species-specific categories (cat, dog, etc.).
i need to lie down
As an outsider to furry culture the whole thing is really interesting.
I approach animals from a certain point of view (veterinary medicine) and I think I understand them, what they are and what they do pretty well. I assumed somebody who goes around introducing themselves as a cat, for example, actually knows something about cats.
Not in this case.
So one evening my brother brought a few of his friends around to my home with fursonas consisting of a dog, cat and kangaroo.
I was bottle raising a litter of seven adorable kittens at the time (a handful and a half, let me tell you) and I thought this was brilliant. Three animal lovers, in my home, which don’t have any pets of their own. Perfect future kitten owners, right?
I mean, at a certain stage in kitten season you start trying to pimp out those cute little fuzzballs to anybody.
Mr Cat Fursona had no idea what to do with a real live cat or kitten. He’d never interacted with one, he’d only seen pictures and videos. He was so thoroughly awkward, and possibly a little bit afraid, completely unsure about how to hold them, what to do if they wiggled and even if they were happy. He marveled at the way their ears twitch when they swallow but freaked out about their toileting habits. And to my surprise he wasn’t actually interested in these real cats for more than three minutes.
They had minimal interest in this litter of kittens, they were not interested in real animals. They were not familiar with real animals.
I don’t think they’re ascribing human characteristics to an animal. This group seemed to be taking perceived animal qualities (eg dog=loyalty, cat=aloof) and applying it to themselves. Even if the real animals don’t actually have those qualities at all, they were interested in the qualities that society had assigned those animals and then applying that to themselves. Is was society’s concept of a cat that was of interest to him, not the real thing.
So you can be a cat, it seems, without knowing a single thing about cats. And perhaps if he had grown up with cats then he wouldn’t have chosen one for his fursona.
Fascinating!
I grew up in the woods, in farm country, very close to nature and animals. I wonder if that’s why I’m not a furry? *shrug*
id like to thank god, jesus, and those bullshit lake camps my parents sent me to when I was ten
Tag: sociology
oh my fucking god
Everyone go home. The internet is over.
Okay, you know what? I just reblogged this but I wanna get geeky over it. ‘Cause this is some high-class humor right here, and if you don’t get that you need to be educated so here I am about to do the thing you’re not supposed to do and explain the joke, because I’m just really impressed by this joke’s construction, okay?
So back in Paris in the 1920s, the surrealist movement in art was just starting to take off. The surrealist movement was born from the dadaist movement, which was a response to strict societal ideas of what was “art” and what wasn’t. The dadaists made a lot of works to try and challenge society’s ideas of what art even was in the first place, and this continued on into the more sophisticated abstract works of surrealism.
One such artist, Rene Magritte (also known for his paintings of people with invisible heads, or with fruit for heads), painted a work called “The Treachery of Images,” depicting a pipe, and underneath the words (in french) “This is Not a Pipe.” The words were meant to refer to the fact that the painted pipe was literally not a real physical pipe that a viewer could smoke out of, it was just a painting of a pipe.
The painting was extremely meta, and really challenged the habit of allowing oneself to get so immersed in a work of art that one forgets it is a created representation of life, and not actual life. Understanding that alone takes a good deal of abstract thinking ability. And really appreciating and enjoying it requires a certain amount of one’s own frustration with society’s habit of trying to put limits on the definition of art; and being unable to think outside the box and really see something from all possible perspectives, including the perspective of being completely outside the thing.
Now what’s even more fascinating to me is that modern art movements (and I don’t mean “modern art,” I mean actual contemporary art movements that are being led by our peers) are kinda doing the same thing the dadaist movement was doing, but in reaction to the art that came out of the dadaist movement. Things have circled back around again, and abstract surrealist art is now what society has decided “art” is. And our generation doesn’t accept that. Comics, video games, TV shows and movies, graffiti art, web series, even flash mobs, all of these are our generation’s way of saying, “no, society, you don’t get to define art as strictly as ‘if it doesn’t make sense to me it must be brilliant.’ Art can be simple to understand, art can be accessible to all people, art can make you beg to find out what happens next!” And that’s really interesting to me.
Flash forwards to 2006, when rapper Gucci Mane writes a song called “Pillz” in which the phrase “bitch I might be” was coined and used several times. In the song, it’s used as a sarcastic, somewhat indignant but not wholly angry way to say “it’s none of your business,” in response to a beautiful woman in a club accusing the rapper of being high. The phrase became a meme in 2013, following Gucci Mane’s indictment for assaulting a soldier, when a redditor photoshopped a screencap of news coverage of the trial to reference the song. The photoshopped image changed the previous on-screen text to read “Rapper Gucci Mane responds with ‘bitch I might be’ when asked if guilty”. Again, the usage of the phrase is a sarcastic and indignant “none of your business.” The phrase then quickly gained popularity and was added to numerous other photoshopped images.
Now, memes are really cool as a concept anyways, when you think about them hard enough (I mean, the speed at which an entire world full of young people are able to latch onto something as simple as a phrase that they all mutually find funny, and within a matter of days explore every possible usage and implication of that phrase, including how it might relate to other complex systems of knowledge and understanding such as the rich character and plot developments of stories that generate fandoms), but lets put that aside for now and talk about sarcasm, instead.
Because sarcasm is a very sophisticated, complex, and subtle form of wit. It’s a difficult thing to be able to understand, through tone of voice alone, that what someone says, and what they mean, are two different things. And to be able to discern the actual meaning when the words were not said. As wikipedia says, “different parts of the brain must work together to understand sarcasm.“ It’s even harder when those words are typed and not spoken audibly, as the reader must imagine the tone in the first place. That’s a lot of brain work involved in even understanding the true meaning behind that simple little phrase.
And sarcasm is popular right now. More than popular, it’s a hallmark of our generation. People have been writing lengthy articles and psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies and musings on why we’re so sarcastic. As this article suggests, it’s because we’re so angry. We’re a generation that was promised a lot and the world didn’t deliver. We’re disenchanted, and jaded, and mad. And we vent that through sarcastic humor. We laugh at things older generations don’t think are funny. We have come to expect so much disappointment, that we no longer afford “serious” things the respect we’re told they deserve. Because we no longer believe they deserve it. As the article states, “We are a generation that believes nothing is sacred. And if nothing is sacred everything becomes profane.”
One could even go so far as to make the argument that the popularity of the statement on the above image is due partially to the attitude amongst today’s youth (especially on tumblr) that one’s own life and choices are one’s own, and not the business of anybody else. This attitude can be seen in everything as simple as the “be yourself” and “follow your dreams” statements many of us were raised on, to the more serious issues we deal with today of discrimination against the LGBTGA+ community, fat shaming, slut shaming, prejudice against muslim people, etc., to political issues like free speech and government invasion of privacy, and even into more subtle ideas present in social media of privacy settings, controlling who gets to see what posts, block and ignore features, and even the philosophy of “nobody can tell you what to post in your own space. If somebody doesn’t like it, they can unfollow.”
None of this would be happening consciously, of course, but we can’t help but be influenced by the world around us. And a phrase whose meaning is essentially “it’s none of your business” is very likely to resonate strongly with a group of people whose fundamental philosophies of polite interpersonal conduct revolve roughly around the same concept.
Taking all this into consideration, this joke is taking a lot of pre-knowledge and putting it all together to kind of say, in a funny way, “stop acting like you have it all figured out, because you don’t. And some things are just not for you to figure out anyway.”
So to sum up, to understand the above image, you must:
- have a descent grasp on art history to recognize the original painting.
- have good abstract and/or creative thinking skills to understand and appreciate the original painting.
- have a good grasp on modern pop culture, internet culture, and current slang and memes (basically, be an active participant in the wider world).
- have the complex emotional and interpersonal understanding necessary to understand the subtleties of sarcasm.
- understand enough of what’s going on in the world around you that you are disenchanted enough to appreciate sarcastic humor.
- participate in our generation’s general philosophy of life and how to interact with other human beings in the world at large.
So basically, if you laughed, you’re smart. :3
Reblogging for the A+ analysis.
Well, I think it’s cool analysis, anyway. I’ve been told by others that this is one of the most pretentious things on the site. So…what does that make me?
i like the idea that there are no longer such things as casual groups of friends. no, you’re in a squad. weaponize your friendships. battle other squads for social dominance. who wants to fucking fight
Natalie Portman being confused by the fact that you have to say “hi” to someone before starting a conversation in France got me like ?????
“I feel there’s a lot of rules of politeness and codes of behavior there you have to follow. […] A friend of mine taught me that when you go in some place you have to say “bonjour” before you say anything else, then you have to wait two seconds before you say something else. So if you go into a store you can’t be like “do you have this in another size,” or they’ll think you’re super rude and then they’ll be rude to you.” [X]
So that’s it guys. French are not rude, we just don’t like it when people don’t say “Hello” or “Hi” when they start a conversation.
Don’t everyone say “Hi” before they ask something to someone? What’s next? Saying please is also a french thing or others countries does that too?
Canada is similar. We say sorry and please. The Hello thing seems strange, but it actually makes sense.
Bro, this threw me for a loop when I moved up north. Like in the southern United States you say “Hi, how are you?” And then make a few seconds of small talk before you ask your question or order your food and when I went to Connecticut they were like “What do you want?” Without any hello or anything. In other places they just STARE at you waiting on you to place your order and gtfo.
I laid my hand over my chest the first time, and the only way to describe my look was “aghast” before I said “Good lord!” My husband said it’s the most southern thing he’s seen me do. He thought it was hilarious. But…. Like??? That’s rude as fuck??????? Don’t y’all say say “Hello” before throwing your demands at someone??
maybe this is why everyone thinks new yorkers are rude
this is absolutely why ppl think new englanders r rude. no one has any fucking manners
african culture, at least in ghana, demands you greet a person before you ask them something. if youre in an open market they may even ignore you if you dont.
We do this in Australia as well. If you just started straight off saying “yeah I want XXXX” we’d think you’re rude as all fuck. You say hi, then make your request. It’s basic acknowledgement of the other person as a person rather than some random request-filling machine.
Huh. Speaking as a New Englander, I usually go with “Excuse me,” but sometimes “hi” or “hey,” but with no pause – it’ll be, “Excuse me, hi, I was looking for X?” From my POV, it seems rude to get too chatty and waste some stranger’s time; I assume they have better things to do than make small talk with me, so I just get my request out there so they can answer me and get back to whatever needs doing. I always thank folks for their help afterwards, if that helps?
(The rules of etiquette are strange. People say New Englanders are rude and cold, but once during an unexpected snowstorm here in Seattle, my car got stuck and I was standing by the side of the road at a busy intersection in the snow for half an hour waiting for my housemate to come pick me up, and not a single person stopped. Back in Massachusetts, every other car on the road would’ve been pulling up to check to see if I was okay, if my phone was working, did I need a lift, etc.)
No but this was the first thing my cousin told me in France? you never ever ever start a conversation with anyone, not even like “Nice weather today, huh?” without saying Bonjour first. You HAVE to greet them or, just like Ghana, they’ll ignore the shit out of you, you rude little fucker
(And “excuse me” or “pardon me” doesn’t cut it. you still have to open with bonjour)
[and I can’t speak for New England but coming from Chicago and then moving Out West where the culture is VERY influenced by the South and DETERMINED to think of themselves as small town folk… I HATE when I have to make small talk before ordering food??? Like, if it’s a coffee shop that’s pretty much empty I’ll chit chat for a few seconds, but I’m still not going to make inane conversation about the weather unless the weather is extreme.
In a big city it is rude as fuck to waste my time making small talk with me when we are not even friends or neighbors??? I am here to get shit done. There are four other people in line behind me, and I don’t want to waste their time. I am here, I HAVE MY ORDER ALREADY DECIDED BY THE TIME I GET TO THE FRONT BECAUSE I AM NOT A CAVE WOMAN, and I am being polite by saying both Please and Thank You and not wasting other people’s daylight.]
I live in a small northern city, and I feel it would be rude to engage someone in more than maaaaaybe a sentence of small talk before placing my order. In addition to feeling I was wasting their time, I’d feel like I was demanding emotional labour (small-talk is emotional labour for *me*) that they weren’t being paid to give.
so bizarre. New Yorker here. Saying hi, how are you, etc before these kinds of commercial interactions is what’s rude to me – because ffs, there are people in line behind you, we have lives, move it along. It’s really just a dramatic cultural difference – but borne of a real practical necessity.
Oh my god saying ‘hi’ takes less than A SINGLE SECOND YOU ARE NOT WASTING ANYBODY’S TIME
In Spain you have to say hello to people before you talk to them even people who work in retail deserve that bare minimum courtesy hello??
Transplanted New Yorker here, and the feeling here is: people who work in retail deserve the bare minimum courtesy you would afford anyone else, which is to not waste their time. You maybe say a half-second “hi” and/or possibly “excuse me” to be sure you have their attention, then you get to the point as quickly and concisely as possible. You don’t wait to get a “hi” back, you probably don’t ask “how are you”, you definitely don’t talk about the weather. You smile and keep your tone of voice courteous-to-friendly, you say please, you thank them when you’re done, and you do. not. waste. their. time.
Except ”time” is really only shorthand for the concept: you don’t intrude on their lives more than you have to. NY is a very very crowded city which allows for very little personal space, so New Yorkers have developed a form of courtesy that involves minimizing our unavoidable intrusions on each other. Which is why we hold doors without making eye contact, and why we tend to feel that in any interaction with a stranger, it’s actively rude to do anything but get to the point immediately.
Interesting discussion of regional differences in conversational convention. But the amount of “my way is the right way; everyone else is super rude and also wrong” going on in this post is giving me hives.
Hey. Listen. "Polite” and “rude” are relative concepts. Something you were taught was rude may not be seen as rude elsewhere, and might even be the polite thing to do. Conversely, something you might have been taught was polite might be seen as rude elsewhere. Saying “no one has any manners” about a group of people whose culture and, by extension, whose conversational expectations work differently than yours is really arrogant.
In the US the thumbs up means good job or great. In France and Germany it means one, they start counting with the thumb instead of the index finger. In Greece it’s an obscene sexual gesture.
This guy I knew in college worked with the campus d/Deaf/HoH group and told a story about the dinner they had to welcome everyone in. They were trying to tell this little old lady what one of the dishes was, something casserole I forget what kind, and she was getting really flustered. Finally they figured out they were speaking to her in ASL and she was from South Africa. The ASL sign for whatever it was (spinach maybe?) in South African Sign means sex. They were offering this little old lady a sex casserole.
There’s an Italian toast ‘chin chin’, mimicking the sound of the glasses clinking together. It becomes hilarious when Japanese folks are around since in Japanese chin means penis.
As for the South, I will bet you anything that how we have conversations at the register stemmed from the homestead days when a farmer would come in to town maybe once a month and this would be the only time they’d get to talk to someone they didn’t live with. I like talking with customers! If I can get them to smile then it’s a victory and I have a better day for it. It only becomes emotional labor if they’re an outright ass or are sexually harassing me. But in the big crammed city of New York it makes sense to take the get your shit and get out approach, people have a subway to catch. Out here I had to drive myself anyway since it’s fifteen minutes to the edge of town from where I live, so what does it matter if I spend an extra minute at the register?
It’s important to be aware of the differences and ultimately there’s a degree of ‘when in Rome’ that has to happen. Someone who moves from Greece to the US is going to be startled by the amount of thumbs up but ultimately they’re going to have to adjust. Someone from the US is probably going to be shocked that telling someone they did a good job was taken as an insult and they similarly are going to have to adjust. Mom’s a damn Yankee transplant and said it was weird moving to the South and having cashiers younger than her daughter call her dear, but that’s just what we do. Sweetheart, darling, honey, sugar, they don’t have overtly romantic/sexual connotations here. As long as there’s not a leer attached to it if a guy calls me ‘sugar’ when I’m at work it doesn’t parse as a flirt because it’s not one, it parses the same as if he called me ‘miss’. But when a busload of Californians came through it took me three people to realize that ‘baby’ was not flirting, it was just California.
NOTHING is universal.This is the biggest place I’ve ever worked so it took some getting used to, like any skill, but even being socially awkward it’s easy to tell what scripts to follow. Test the waters, if they don’t respond then okay this is a move them through kind of person, be quick and efficient and to the point, feel good when they smile at ‘last question I promise, do you want your receipt’. If they do then pull out the five small talk scripts, get a smile, feel good when they laugh at the cat small talk script.
It’s also important to note that claiming your culture’s way of doing polite right is a fantastic way to fall into some really bigoted nonsense. In Puerto Rico the personal bubble is much smaller than in the US proper, like RIGHT at your elbow close. I had a cashier who was super uncomfortable because our steward was getting in her personal space constantly and he was pissed off because he was trying to HELP her with moving orders why is she mad at him? Once I sat them down and explained the difference they both had this aw shit moment because from their own standpoints they were being polite and from the others’ standpoints they were being rude. After that they were fine, when he got a little too close she’d say ‘whoa man my bubble’ and he’d laugh and shake is head and step back.
Lots of non-white cultures have things like that, particularly since white America has serious problems with sexualizing ANY physical contact to the point we’re all touch starved. The normal speaking voice is at a higher volume or it’s more acceptable to show your emotions or gesture when you speak. None of this is WRONG, but when people star getting into ‘my culture is the only right culture’ then guess who comes out on top? It ain’t the little guy.
One of my labmates was from Poland, and she had a tendency to come off as kind of abrupt and brusk, verging on mean. In particular, when she was providing feedback on a presentation or paper she could come across as SUPER cutting. Which was not her intention! From the way she would explain it, we had a running joke in the lab, “it sounds nicer in Polish.”
And this is actually true; there are scientific articles comparing the cultural contexts for communication! It’s really neat.
So in (most parts of) America, we equate indirectness with politeness. “Excuse me, would it be possible for you to perhaps pass me that salt, if you don’t mind?” The more roundabout you are, the more we consider that a signal of social courtesy.
In Poland, not only is indirectness viewed as rudely wasting the listener’s time, but directness is viewed as communicating intimacy and friendliness. “Give me the salt.”
…It sounds nicer in Polish. 🙂
Omg I love this
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
O.K. is an ancient MEME.
sparksoffandommagic 