RNDP 19: Dating Schema and Spectacular Efforts

In my quest for the RNDP, I not only googled the search phrase "dating paradigm", I also googled "dating schema".

If you are unfamiliar with the academic term "schema", you are in luck because the first hit for "dating schema" is an article titled "Schema Theory (drawn from D’Andrade 1995)" that expains the term and includes an excerpt on dating to help explain it.

Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner (1987) studied the US undergraduate dating schema. They describe the "taken-for-granted world of male/female relations" from the perspective of a female undergraduate as follows:

"… a male earns the admiration and affection of a female by treating her well. Intimacy is a result of this process. The female allows herself to become emotionally closer, perhaps as a friend, perhaps as a lover, perhaps as a fiancee, to those attractive males who make a sufficient effort to win her affection. Besides closeness and intimacy, the process of forming a relationship also has to do with prestige. When a male is attracted to a female and tries to earn her affection by good treatment, her attractiveness is validated and she gains prestige in her social group. For his part, the male gains prestige among his peers when he receives admiration and affection from and gains intimacy with females.

Normally, prestigious males are attracted to and establish close relations with prestigious females, and vice versa. Sometimes, however, a male can succeed in winning the affection of a female whose prestige is higher than his own. However, the more attractive she is, the more he must compensate for his lack of prestige by spectacular efforts to treat her well. Correspondingly, females sometimes do form close relationships with males who have higher prestige than they do. When the male is more attractive or has higher prestige than the female, she often must compensate by giving her affection to him without his doing anything to earn it." (1987:101-102)

Within this simplified and idealized world, one set of problematic males is termed jerks, nerds, turkeys, and asses. These are men who are undesirable and don’t know it. They are unattractive (physically or otherwise) and don’t or can’t make up for it with higher cost gifts and other exchange items. Furthermore, they are too dumb to "take a hint," and therefore have to be rejected in such direct ways that the women have to be repeatedly unpleasant, which is stressful for the women. To understand what one of these college women means when she calls a man a jerk we need to understand the (women’s) dating schema.

Experts

I have just spent several hours watching videos from Expert Village. If you are wanting to blow a couple of hours this evening, go ahead --- enjoy!!!
I have to admit, this "expert" freaked me out a bit.

Why are airports so boring?

IO's note: This was written Thursday but I had trouble posting it because I was, er, stuck in an airport.

I am stuck in an airport. That's a bad thing. Airports are like the bland yet evil automatons that populate sci-fi movies. Veritable zombies of the travel world. They are pretty much all alike: devoid of personality, soulless and vaguely annoying. (An exception is the colourful Morun airport in northern Mongolia, which features a billiard table, sandstorms and squat toilets.)

But it doesn't have to be so. Here are five ways to improve airports:

1. More comfortable seats. What is it with these bench-like things with stubby armrests and nowhere to put your beverage?

2. Cheaper prices. The airport is like some former Soviet republic where inflation is always running at 483 per cent.

3. An Internet cafe. What better place for one?

4. A craft co-op. Why not a spot where the vibrant, cool art and handmade goods produced in our city can be displayed and sold?

5. A giant aquarium. Travelling can be stressful. Watching seahorses cavort and tropical fish glide through the water is a good way to relax. They are the smart ones, choosing to swim rather than fly.

The feeling of dreams

We millenia-old semi-mythical dog types spend a lot of time weaving through dreams, the subconscious and the unconscious. It's in the job description. So, when, a couple of days ago, Japanese scientists announced that they'd taken tentative steps to 'read' images in people's brains and display them, I raised an eyebrow. The mechanics involve a lot of big expensive, cool science-y stuff, described in science-y language, but there's a slightly simpler translation here.

The commentary I've seen so far is along the lines of "Cool! In ten years I can show my friends my dreams! In Technicolor®™!"

Does anybody else feel alarmed?

Until now, we coyotes assumed that our thoughts and dreams were very private things, unless we ourselves chose to describe them to somebody else. Considering some of the things I've thought, that's a comfort. Because the idea that others might see them leads my thoughts down a very dark Orwellian alley. Coyote's 116th Law states if such a tool exists, somebody, somewhere, will find a way to misuse it, probably in the name of something like, oh, homeland security. The corollary to Coyote's 116th Law is that such equipment will eventually be consumerized, be manufactured in quantity and then fall into the hands of officious masses of un- or under-trained idiots who think they know what they're doing, simply because they're packing the gear and had a half-day workshop. Think airport security screeners. Or Tasers.

You may also be thinking that the paranoid doggy dreams of imaginary monsters under his bed, but that leads to my point. My dreams are mine, and you very probably can't understand them unless you are me. I don't know what you dream, of a night, when your paws scrabble as if you're chasing bunnies across a pristine prairie, but I'm not convinced that somebody else peeking in on the complicated swirl of oddly dis/un/connected images that is a dream is gonna interpret it with any reliability. I have trouble articulating it because of the nature of dreams themselves, but I suspect that they are far more about individual background, context and feeling than about a fragmentary movie playing on a voyeur's monitor. Without the associated feelings the movie is really out of focus. I also suspect that any equipment freak who thinks he can parse 'em in anything other than the crudest way can dream on. In Technicolor®™.

Breaking News. . .

Major transit strike + major snowstorm = excellent timing.

I blame Larry. But I always do...