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Let's Study the Man-Child

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Posts

  • Irond WillIrond Will WARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!! Cambridge. MAModerator mod
    edited September 2010
    i am all for trying to accommodate people with disorders like aspergers to the degree that it's possible, and i also think that programs should (and do!) exist to try to socialize them in a more mainline fashion.

    what i'm less sympathetic towards are the people who emulate aspergers/ autistic behaviors because if society is going to accommodate someone with a disorder, they feel like society should accommodate them as well. it's like someone taking a handicapped space because they're lazy.

    Irond Will on
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  • FartacusFartacus __BANNED USERS regular
    edited September 2010
    Irond Will wrote: »
    what i'm less sympathetic towards are the people who emulate aspergers/ autistic behaviors because if society is going to accommodate someone with a disorder, they feel like society should accommodate them as well. it's like someone taking a handicapped space because they're lazy.

    haha, this is gold

    Also, while CasedOut is not doing the best job of it, he's basically restating some standard Foucauldian views about normalcy and deviance -- I think in Discipline and Punish Foucault even talks about psychology and psychiatric disorders.

    I basically agree, actually -- there's nothing about a disorder that objectively makes it a disorder, but we're getting into some pretty philosophical territory. I mean, in a certain sense, people have argued that nothing we define really exists objectively -- i.e., that the way we chop up reality is essentially arbitrary and doesn't exist external to human cognition.

    But anyway, while surely people with, say, ADD have different neurochemistry than an average person, contextualizing that neurochemistry under the heading of "disorder" is something that is, frankly, subjective. It depends on one's historical and social constructs. Hell, even schizophrenia was once not considered a disorder -- you weren't someone handicapped to be drugged and nursed, you were just an oracle or a shaman or a dude who should go write the Book of Revelations or something.

    The point being that we should be a little circumspect in claiming that disorders definitively exist and are disordered. Now, on the other hand, just because something's a social construct doesn't necessarily mean it's not real or important. While psychology can be argued as a tool of social normalization, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because, really, as society changes such that certain modes of conduct and cognition become privileged over others (e.g. people who can focus for extended periods of time on a single task are generally rewarded over those who cannot), the two options are to change society, or to change the outlying individuals. Well, the third option is just to be OK with people falling through the cracks and ending up at perpetual disadvantage, but I think most of us are not in favor of that.

    And even if you do change the society, it's hard to create any system that privileges all modes of behavior equally -- personally I can't really think of any system that does this. So, even if you chose "change society" as your preferred option, it's really more a matter of re-distributing than fundamentally changing the reality of the situation.

    Fartacus on
  • celandinecelandine Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Yeah, Fart has it right, it's actually a hard problem.

    My personal inclination is that it's really important to do all you can to be responsible for yourself. That means taking as little outside assistance as you can reasonably manage, including government support. If you're holding down a job, taking care of your own personal life skills, and treating other people with respect, then your mental quirks and strengths and weaknesses don't really detract from you as a person. Even if you have rather severe weaknesses, or at least things most people perceive as weaknesses. You're doing what you can.

    If you're taking more than you're giving, I think that's dishonorable. Don't accept help for what you can fix yourself.

    celandine on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited September 2010
    It's not really a dysfunction unless it actually reduces your quality of life.

    Being wierd, even very weird, is not an issue if you can pay your bills, enjoy life, and not make the lives of others miserable in the process.

    Those people who dress up as Disney characters at Disneyland for a living? If they have a warm home, healthy relationships, and are responsible citizens, they are, despite being professional fursuiters as healthy as any engineer or scientist.

    Incenjucar on
  • Irond WillIrond Will WARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!! Cambridge. MAModerator mod
    edited September 2010
    it's not really a good comparison to draw a parallel between people who are dressed oddly as a profession and people who choose to dress oddly.

    my argument is that "being very weird" can very much reduce one's quality of life. we are built to be social creatures, and encouraging an utter disregard for social expectations and public sentiment is counterproductive and unhealthy.

    Irond Will on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Being weird can reduce your quality of life, or it can actually improve it. People dress weird as hell at clubs on a regular basis, and it gets them into conversations.

    There are specific kinds of weird that don't work, and in certain locations, sure.

    Incenjucar on
  • DracilDracil Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Irond Will wrote: »
    How is reading manga an infantile hobby in the first place? This is what no one has explained. Everyone just says it is because it just is, basically. Saying manga is infantile is like saying novels are infantile. The content is so broad that painting it all with one brush like that is absolutely silly.

    And explain to me how dressing up as a character you like at a convention is any more infantile than dressing up as something for Halloween. In both cases, it is people dressing up for an occasion where dressing up is considered part of the event. Like yeah, walking around the street dressed as Naruto is kinda weird, but lots of people, including people here, will see it at a convention and act all repulsed at it.

    You see a lot of people who hate on someone who would dress as Batman at a comic con, but not if they dressed as Batman for Halloween. It's the same damn thing.

    Basically, I think that people that are solely in your first group are not childish people at all, and don't deserve to be called that. I also think that most of these hobbies aren't childish at all, and only become that way when the person develops their hobby down the group 2 or 3 road. I have yet to hear a really good reason why things like anime, video games, figure collecting, etc. should inherently be considered childish. They ARE considered that way, but that doesn't mean they SHOULD be.

    Look, i'm not justifying society's views as being kind or fair or consistent. I'm just relating the world as I understand it. Yes, maybe adults are expected to read comic books in japan. Most of us don't live in japan. Comics are generally regarded as kid stuff and the amount of disdain an adult will get for reading comic books is about in proportion to how much he is into them. This goes maybe a little less so for video games.

    Maybe some of this is that I am in my thirties and most of your are in your teens and twenties. The expectations of adulthood crystallize more as one gets older, especially in this modern era of forced dependency and extended adolescence.

    Also, Ive mentioned that i still play video games, maybe less that I did when i was younger, but I do. I go out with my friends even if they're wearing something I think is not befitting an adult. I don't throttle the fat guy wearing a naruto shirt on the bus.

    It's also possible these people, especially the ones who are still in their teens, disagree because by the time THEY are in their 30s, society will have changed enough again that gaming is fully accepted as being mainstream and comics are in the same state as gaming is today.

    Really, a lot of this is made of self-fulfilling prophecies. If the old generation insist on clinging to the old ways, then it'll be harder for the new generation to usher in their new ways. And vice versa.

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  • LucidLucid Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Also, while CasedOut is not doing the best job of it, he's basically restating some standard Foucauldian views about normalcy and deviance -- I think in Discipline and Punish Foucault even talks about psychology and psychiatric disorders.

    I basically agree, actually -- there's nothing about a disorder that objectively makes it a disorder, but we're getting into some pretty philosophical territory. I mean, in a certain sense, people have argued that nothing we define really exists objectively -- i.e., that the way we chop up reality is essentially arbitrary and doesn't exist external to human cognition.
    Hm, as a social animal isn't it natural for humans to tend towards an ordered social structure though? A mental disorder is essentially an aspect that removes one from the social order. Even if we get into philisophical questions as to whether a disorder is negative or not, do they not still exist independantly? I mean, unless everyone was an isolated nomad, a physical defect like chemical imbalance in the brain is going to cause some kind of removal from the the inherent social structure we create when around each other. It's to what degree that it removes someone that's important to recognize, I think.

    Wearing cat ears and all of this other nonsense doesn't remove someone to any significant degree from the order we exist in. Not taking care of yourself financially and otherwise would.

    Even then, there's just so many complicated factors involved in what is acceptable to the greater order(region, ideology, etc) that categorizing people as things like man child is pointless and hollow. the whole concept itself seems to be a case of overestimation. It's likely extremely rare that there exists people that simply say fuck it, I'm not going to care or pay any attention to any social mores.

    Lucid on
  • FartacusFartacus __BANNED USERS regular
    edited September 2010
    speaking of appearance

    gilt.com had a "Suits under $200" sale today, but fucking everything sold out literally within 3 minutes of the sale starting

    god

    damnit

    Fartacus on
  • LadyMLadyM Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Aspergers is certainly a disability, especially on the extreme end. When you can't, not "don't choose to", but literally CANNOT read someone's facial expression or body language, that is a disability. And it's a disability much more crippling than merely being in a wheelchair or blind . . . because those are easily understood by the outside world. " Oh, he's in a wheelchair. That means he can't walk up stairs." "Oh, she's blind. She cannot read a book unless it's in braille." In other words, "Oh, your body can't do this physical task because it's physically incapable of it."

    Whereas Aspergers, being a mental disability, is more "invisible" . . . and someone who lacks the ability to read social cues is going to miss nonverbal cues such as "you are making me uncomfortable", "go away", or "I'm bored because you've been yammering on about something I'm not interested in for twenty minutes. LOOK, I AM YAWNING. WHY CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BORED?" Sometimes Aspergers comes with an inability to feel empathy, too. Not good.

    Now, I do think these days a lot of people conflate "any behavior remotely out of the ordinary" with Aspergers and other mental disorders, and that's just silly. Example: I was on a message board where someone claimed Charles Darwin had Aspergers because he was shy, collected beetles, and took nature walks. "People with Aspergers have social problems, like being alone, and often collect things!" was her argument. Yeeeeah, hm.

    LadyM on
  • SipexSipex Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Aspergers will be fine in a bit, it just has the same problem that ADD had 15 years ago. It was new and the symptoms were so vague and hard to proove without professional analysis. Everyone seemed to have it!

    Sipex on
  • Modern ManModern Man Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Sipex wrote: »
    Aspergers will be fine in a bit, it just has the same problem that ADD had 15 years ago. It was new and the symptoms were so vague and hard to proove without professional analysis. Everyone seemed to have it!
    There does seem to be a trend to try and pathologize personality flaws. Just because someone is shy and socially awkward doesn't meant they have a mental illness (though they might).

    Probably the overhwleming majority of the man-children out there don't have anything wrong with them, from a clinical perspective. They're just dofuses.

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  • CasedOutCasedOut Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    Fartacus wrote: »
    Irond Will wrote: »
    what i'm less sympathetic towards are the people who emulate aspergers/ autistic behaviors because if society is going to accommodate someone with a disorder, they feel like society should accommodate them as well. it's like someone taking a handicapped space because they're lazy.

    haha, this is gold

    Also, while CasedOut is not doing the best job of it, he's basically restating some standard Foucauldian views about normalcy and deviance -- I think in Discipline and Punish Foucault even talks about psychology and psychiatric disorders.

    I basically agree, actually -- there's nothing about a disorder that objectively makes it a disorder, but we're getting into some pretty philosophical territory. I mean, in a certain sense, people have argued that nothing we define really exists objectively -- i.e., that the way we chop up reality is essentially arbitrary and doesn't exist external to human cognition.

    But anyway, while surely people with, say, ADD have different neurochemistry than an average person, contextualizing that neurochemistry under the heading of "disorder" is something that is, frankly, subjective. It depends on one's historical and social constructs. Hell, even schizophrenia was once not considered a disorder -- you weren't someone handicapped to be drugged and nursed, you were just an oracle or a shaman or a dude who should go write the Book of Revelations or something.

    The point being that we should be a little circumspect in claiming that disorders definitively exist and are disordered. Now, on the other hand, just because something's a social construct doesn't necessarily mean it's not real or important. While psychology can be argued as a tool of social normalization, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because, really, as society changes such that certain modes of conduct and cognition become privileged over others (e.g. people who can focus for extended periods of time on a single task are generally rewarded over those who cannot), the two options are to change society, or to change the outlying individuals. Well, the third option is just to be OK with people falling through the cracks and ending up at perpetual disadvantage, but I think most of us are not in favor of that.

    And even if you do change the society, it's hard to create any system that privileges all modes of behavior equally -- personally I can't really think of any system that does this. So, even if you chose "change society" as your preferred option, it's really more a matter of re-distributing than fundamentally changing the reality of the situation.

    thanks fartacus for more clearly stating what I was trying to get at, I do have a tendency to botch my ideas when I put them down on paper

    CasedOut on
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  • mythagomythago Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    nstf wrote: »
    Not that men can't be bonkers as well.

    Don't get me started.

    It tends not to manifest itself in the passive-aggressive kind of backstabbing that women are taught is the only proper mode of interpersonal conflict, but in openly shitty behavior.

    mythago on
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  • Xenogear_0001Xenogear_0001 Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    I prefer passive to open, personally.

    Xenogear_0001 on
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  • AtomikaAtomika Live fast and get fucked or whatever Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    I prefer passive to open, personally.

    Really? In my experience, passive aggressive people are far more likely to conspire against someone while maintaining a pleasant public facade.

    If someone had a problem with me, I'd generally rather just be told about it and air it out.

    The only time I went around someone's back and went over their head to complain about them was once, and it was because the person I was complaining about was showing legitimate psychological deficiency and would have likely made a huge fucking scene. And yes, she got fired because of it. I felt kind of bad, but then again she was responsible for taking care of sick people, and you don't want psychotic people performing medical care.

    Atomika on
  • DracilDracil Registered User regular
    edited September 2010
    On one hand, mind games. On the other hand, getting punched. Decisions decisions...

    Dracil on
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