I was chatting with a 25-year-old from Los Angeles, where the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp lawsuit is unfolding (posting 1; posting 2). By the time the dust settles, Amber Heard will likely have gotten paid more for every time that she had sex with her defendant during their one-year marriage than this 25-year-old, an arts educator, will earn in a year. Yet the 25-year-old was not envious of these profits nor skeptical of Amber Heard’s claim that the person from whom she was seeking tens (or hundreds?) of millions of dollars was also, conveniently for her financial lawsuit, a person who had been beating her up. “We were taught not to engage in victim-blaming or slut-shaming,” said the 25-year-old.
Related:
How long was that your chat with the 25 year old whose nominal and declared genders you made sure to obscure. Also, were you acquainted before. This is not to disparage your (if) ad-hoc interviewing/ chatterbox techniques, which may be excellent, but, as with “impromptu street gallups,” it is my experience that, faced with questions that they haven’t considered before, people will rather try to please by supplying what they instinctively feel are the least offensive answers, than disappoint the interviewer (and/ or reveal themselves to be ignorant) by begging off. The answer you quote sounds like a politically correct case of the former. This condition is not unknown to pollsters, and that is also why written (composed) laic opinions always weight heavier than any oh-so-clever sound-bitty ones. (Just me written opinion ;-))
I am assuming she is a woman. I’m sure its true that she was taught not to slut shame, but if women don’t want to be slut shamed, they shouldn’t be sluts.
Why isn’t anyone thinking of pistol and boo?
Should you ever be thinking,
let alone writing, of
the über-adorable, world-famous
Pistol and Boo,
in such denigrating,
all-lowercase terms
question mark exclamation mark.
ianf: The 25-year-old in question was visiting us for a few days (she and her boyfriend will soon be moving to Boston and she was interviewing for jobs here) so the conversation regarding Amber Heard was quite leisurely.
She learned her lessons well. Just as one can now be old enough to remember when western Europe was safe, one can also remember when young people were considered rebellious. Fortunately, one can get up to date by reference to something written about 70 years ago –
“…by means of such organizations as the Spies they were
systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this
produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline
of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything
connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against
the enemies of the State…”
Lord P: who’s that she, who has learned what lesson?
Also, the WWII ended 71 years ago. So anything written before that must have been about the war years.
I know of no wartime organization called “Spies,” that would have turned then-youth into ungovernable little savages. There was a Danish, first bus-tour, later charter flight travel operator called Spies something (after its owner), but that could not have started until 1955-1958 at the earliest, when some Euro states attained a level of welfare needed for mass out-of-state vacations. I only know of it, because, if literary lore is to be believed, that Spies and other-like (often “summer studies of English/French” abroad) outfits were directly responsible for exporting of “loose” Scandinavian sexual morals throughout Europe (read: girls being able to lose virginity with foreign exotic boys without the stigma of being branded sluts. Or something).
So what was that your post ABOUT?
That reads like 1984
ian has it.
http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/1.html
It (=your entire comment in the context of the post) still doesn’t make any sense.
ianf, perhaps this further extract will help you!
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. “
Yes, Lord P., the further extract, apparently a preamble to the quote in #6, clears things up, but I still don’t see how that’d apply to Phil’s young interviewee, whom you allege “has learned her lesson well.” What lesson? Insights dissipated where? To be an ungovernable little savage devoid of rebellion (as per the quote)? Your 2nd and 3rd sentences then compound the confusion because they make as much sense as were they literally ROT13-encoded.
So, fine, you hold “1984” in so high regard, that you see direct analogies to its themes by default. I’ve also read Animal Farm and can distinguish between them, but what makes you assume that others would share that your habit. And then especially in the NO-context of this post.
Phil: your house guest was in a sense dependent on your good will, which doesn’t nullify her sincerity, but then let’s also agree that such testimonies are of strictly anecdotal character/value. Nothing wrong with that as long as they are not used as foundations for something bigger (in comparison, the interviews in RWD read like depositions).
Years ago I was for a time part of a 3-4 man strong TV crew doing quick street interviews/ reactions to specific local events. We didn’t have all day long, at most 4 hours to broadcast, that means doing the talking heads in max 45 minutes, then back to the studio. I am ashamed to admit that we became quite proficient at extracting just the reactions that the producer-du-jour expected, and we did it instinctively on our own volition, and thought nothing of it (when in reality we were shape-shifting the public opinion). Only years later did I learn, in a PR-media management setting, that there are ad-hoc interview techniques with which one can arrive at any predefined answer, a adulterated mixture of linguistic prowess and psycho-something which the younger us inadvertently made use of.
In other RWD news: Art Imitates Life, sort of thing. Found in John Croce’s Digested Read of “Cometh the Hour” by Jeffrey Archer:
[…] Evil Lady Victoria had just … read in the Daily Telegraph that the American multi-millionaire Cyrus Grant was in London. “I know what I’ll do,” she said to herself. “I will get him to think that he got me pregnant and then he will give me a million pounds to keep quiet.”
“I will give you a million pounds to keep quiet,” said Cyrus Grant. […]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/20/cometh-the-hour-by-jeffrey-archer-digested