Ray Bradbury is dead

So, at long last, Ray Bradbury has died. He's one of my all-time favorite authors, so I thought it warranted a mention here. I think it's spectacular and fascinating that he has lived up until now; this is a man who started his career writing about Martians. He was eighteen when the radio drama War of the Worlds was broadcast. He saw the rise and fall of the US Space Program. Many others live long lives, of course, but this man wrote science fiction - and I find something beautiful in that. He lived his life trying to see into the future, and he lived long enough to see where he was wrong, and where he was right, more than three-quarters a century worth of future. Rest in peace, Mr. Bradbury.

Boy Vision

Okay, so this post is a thought sprung from three entirely unrelated things I've read and heard about. They are:

1. The Mantis Shrimp, which can see colors which we can't see.
2. What D remarked a while ago at a party about how culture is integral and cannot be changed once it is set.
3. A forum thread about sexism I recently read.

Now, to actually explain what these have in common will take some work, so bear with me here. I'll try to start with explaining the relevant points in number 3. See, this woman - Devilfish - was remarking that what bothers her with sexism isn't so much the big things, because nobody is advocating the big things. As in, nobody (at least, nobody serious) is arguing that women shouldn't be allowed same pay for the same jobs, for example.

What bothered her was, instead, all the tiny things. People making fun of women without make-up. Wolf whistles while eating popsicles. Being appreciated not for her skills but for her looks. Many small things. The exact phrase she used was "death by a thousand cuts", because taken by themselves, they're small and trivial and can be brushed off, but they aggregate into becoming very frustrating over time. Now, I started thinking - how come I haven't noticed all those small things? It seems to be that small "cuts" of sexism occur towards women very often, yet it's rarely that I - or other men, for that matter - seem to register them. It's hard to understand what living under such a torrent of tiny annoying things might entail.

That brought me into thinking about point number 2. We can't say much for certain about the biological differences between behavior in men and women, but whether there are biological differences or not, men and women are raised as part of slightly different cultures, or at least, are raised to understand their roles in that culture differently. This sort of thing is ingrained in us from a very young age. And that leads me to point number one, the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp has 16 different photoreceptor pigments; humans have only three. What this means is that the mantis shrimp can see 32 colors whereas humans can only see 6; every other color we see is just mixture of black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow.

So the mantis shrimp can see colors that we, as humans, cannot understand because we are biologically different. Then it stands to reason that perhaps, I can't perceive some things that women perceive because I am culturally different; because I have been raised to focus my attention elsewhere. It might be that some such things are simply impossible for me to understand, and because I already have my formative years behind me, they will always be impossible for me to understand; even if I were zapped by a gender-transformation gun and lived the next 50 years as a woman, and tried my damnedest to adapt to that, I would still retain the way that I was raised, and old habits die hard.

I don't know if I had a point with this, exactly, but I found the thought that we are "brainwashed" not only into a set of behaviors, but also into a certain perception very interesting. When a woman hears a comment about her body, it can be argued that - because she's been raised to think about her appearance in a whole other way than I have - she hears that comment in a different way than what I do, and I will never be able to hear some of the "shades" of that comment. I can tell whether it's a light or a dark color - a positive or negative comment - but I sometimes can't tell whether it's tinted in the unpleasant tones of "You are a sex object" or not, unless those tones are unusually stark. At least that's what I imagine.

This might be absolute hogwash, I don't know. Maybe people aren't all that different, even if society does its damnedest to try and make us different; still, the theory of radically different perceptions would explain why some men can't seem to understand that they're being sexist even when a lot of women insist they are.