(August 23, 2017 at 12:44 am)bennyboy Wrote:(August 22, 2017 at 11:32 pm)emjay Wrote: Stereotypes are a strange kind of self-reinforcing phenomenon; they start a statistical tool of the brain to identify and categorise the common features of something. But then on top of that, you get the social effect of people conforming to stereotypes, which reinforces them but kind of distorts the data set that they work on. So like a snowballing or gravity well effect they get stronger, at first relatively accurately, but later, less accurately as a result of this distortion.Good post!
When I first came out I played into the gay stereotypes big time. I don't know exactly why I wanted to pigeonhole myself like that but I did; I think it was probably to do with wanting to belong/fit in and to do with having solid and clear expectations. But as I've got older I don't do that any more... now I don't pigeonhole myself at all... I'm just me.
That's something to seriously consider: that once a stereotype's in place, people may consciously strengthen it. Or, even more insidiously, they may fall into step with that stereotype just because that's how people work. They say if you tell a kid he's bad, he'll almost certainly act badly. I guess if you tell a young man he's super-gay, he'll act super-gayly.
I wondered about that when I was young, actually. Some of the gay guys in Vancouver were way too la-dee-daaaaa for my comfort (I mean, they really seemed to be going for maximum swish!), and I wasn't sure if that was just a social thing (like valley girls talking the way they did), or if something about being gay makes you lisp (I mean, I can imagine what might do that, but zomg it would have to be a LOT of that), or if it was a social cue so they could more easily identify each other at a glance, or what. But to me, the degree of drama they (I mean this particular kind of gay man that I was familiar with in the 90s) exhibited didn't seem to have anything to do with gender or sexuality. It seemed like Hollywood drama rehearsal 24/7
Since then, I've met some gay soldiers, teachers, and so on, and some of them are WAY more masculine than I am, and almost all of them are smarter than I am. If I knew that when I was in my teens, I think I would have benefited from that knowledge.
There's also a flip side to that stereotype-distorting conformity that Khemikal has touched upon; rebelling against a stereotype... eg accentuating the opposites/differences to the stereotype. I'd say that's just as distorting of the actual picture, because by accentuating those opposite/different aspects, it creates new stereotypes that probably would not have been extracted by the passive stereotyping process of the brain on their own. Personally I'd guess that that sort of effect is in play a lot in the gay world, both for gay men and lesbians, because there are uber-masculine and uber-feminine stereotypes in both camps eg 'camp' and 'butch'. So if we assume that the original gay (male) stereotype was camp... after all, that's how it's always portrayed in old TV... limp wrists and mincing etc... uber-feminine... then the now existence of uber-masculine gay stereotypes might have spawned in rebellion against that.
