Aloof

[darkemeralds]

In my research into attachment "disorders" I came across this article about cold people in Psychology Today.

If you've gotten into a relationship with a cold person, the article says, "hopefully you walked away." "Avoidant-dismissive attachment disorder" (characterized by aloofness, coldness, lack of affection, self-absorption--the list is long and decidedly not neutral) is caused by faults of "maternal caretaking". One commenter on part 2 of the article calls for finding and sterilizing women with this disorder, presumably to curb the creation of more people the commenter might feel uncomfortable with.

It's just one pop-psych article, written in a comment-baiting style, so I don't take it too seriously. But its strongly biased language and illustrations caused some disparate ideas to coalesce in my mind--ideas about myself, heredity, types of people, and the peculiarly American drive for "self improvement" that has dogged me all my days.





Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1960s by studying the effect a mother's nurturing style has on the personality of her baby. Basically, "good" nurturing fosters a "securely attached" child who grows up to be well-liked, well-integrated, easy with intimacy and, if female, likely to raise good, socially-desirable children of her own. (The language in the field really is that value-laden.)

Bowlby himself questioned why the undesirable attachment styles (present in a sizable minority of the population) would persist unless they served an evolutionary purpose. Otherwise wouldn't they have been selected out of existence? Maybe attachment style is heritable--like introversion. The nurture argument still holds the field--Blaming Mom, after all, was the name of the 20th century psychology game--but the nature crowd might be making some inroads.

It doesn't matter whether I was born this way or made this way. What matters is that I am this way. What matters is that I've spent way too much of my life trying to be cured of something that's far more of a problem for other people than it is for me.



All the therapies, programs and methods I tried were aimed at fixing me. I don't blame them--I went into each of them hoping to be cured. I longed to be one of those winning, attractive people.

Funny, it was a scientifically-unsound fashion-and-beauty system that gave me the gift of self-acceptance that years of therapy withheld.

In Carol Tuttle's Energy Profiling, the Cold Person corresponds strongly with Type 4-Carbon, and Carol (quite unscientifically) contends that your Energy Type is detectable from birth--sometimes even in utero--clearly implying nature, not nurture.

Energy Profiling and Dressing Your Truth provided better illustrations than Psychology Today, and a much better vocabulary: cool, still, deep, silent, bold, exacting, striking, poised, moderate, dignified, commanding, structured, thorough, elite, serious, regal, reflective. (Also ironic, sarcastic, intolerant of fools, literal-minded, logical, and perfectionistic. So sue me.)

"But don't you pay a high price for your insistence on being an ice queen?"

Okay, a)? I don't insist; it's not like I haven't tried to change and b) Yes, there's a price. I'm not popular. Nobody discernibly wanted to marry me and hardly anyone even had the nerve to get to know me when I was younger. I have few friends: I just can't keep up a warmhearted facade long enough to win a host of social contacts. Even as a little girl I was sometimes perceived as a threat by adults. I'm looking at an old age of pretty much total self-sufficiency (which, thank God, I can probably manage).

What's more, I'm rigid, and prone to ailments of rigidity like arthritis. I have rarely been lonely, but I have been terribly ashamed of being alone, and I spent years battling the depression that arose from that self-hatred. The stress of not being able to become what I was supposed to be took on near-suicidal proportions.

So yes, there's a price. Cry me a river. The thing is, I've accepted it. I've learned how to pay it because trying to avoid it costs a lot more.



To every wonderful person who has dared to be my friend I say thank you, from the bottom of my cold (but deep) heart.

And to the name-calling institutions and individuals who can't get past the fact that I'm not the kind of lady you're comfortable with, I say NOT SORRY. FIND BETTER WORDS, OR STOP TALKING ABOUT ME.

Comments

[greghatcher]

Well, here's the short version of my thoughts on fanservice-- you don't give fans what they ASK for, you give them what they WANT.

The classic example of this is STAR TREK. Gene Roddenberry spent years going to conventions and being hailed as a living God. Fans told him over and over what they loved about his vision, about how inspiring his ideas had been for them, and on and on and on. So he listened to them. And when it was time to bring STAR TREK back we got STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, and it was all utopian and thoughtful and stuff. And it was a thudding bore. The truth of the matter is that Gene Roddenberry's utopia is really kind of stupid. Dull. With an ending that was a complete anticlimax. And yet...

...it had everything the fans had asked for. It was the Roddenberry meditation on humanity and morality that everyone at cons had been talking about for years, the science was impeccable, there had been consultations with NASA and Isaac Asimov... it was the LITERATURE OF IDEAS!! The hell of it was, we were so hungry for more STAR TREK, ANY Star Trek, that none of us wanted to own up to the fact that it was, well, bad. (I wince at the memory of defending it as 'almost' good, back in the day....) They even threw a few bones to the slashfic ladies ("Jim-- this simple feeling...") although Roddenberry was so embarrassed over this part of fandom he actually put a footnote in the novelization about it. --But I digress.

The point is, the Trek movie that saved the franchise was the SECOND one, Wrath of Khan. When they got rid of Roddenberry and the fan service and the carefully-extrapolated science and sociology, and instead told a very human, character-based story about mortality and legacy, using the template of the classic naval adventure. Plus they had lots of tense and exciting fight scenes, cool visuals, and warmth and humor. It FELT like Star Trek. The REAL one, not the lie fans had been telling themselves to justify a decade's worth of devotion.

And you saw the same story play out with the television revivals. The first season of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION is legendary for how awful it was behind the scenes and how many writers Roddenberry alienated with his insistence that only he knew what would work.The show didn't really catch fire until the third season, when Roddenberry became too ill to stay on as producer.

Now, you can contrast that with the first six or eight episodes of the ORIGINAL series that Roddenberry produced back when he was still trying to explain the show to everyone and create the thing, when he rewrote every script himself to make sure it was consistent. Those shows were very much written to be ACCESSIBLE, and more, they have the sense of a pro writer doing smart work. Back then, he knew that his show could be smart, but it also had to be FUN. "Charlie X," "The Man Trap," "the Corbomite Maneuver," "The Enemy Within"... those shows are all built around naval adventure tropes, but with an SF twist. The castaway has a terrible secret. The island natives turn out to be dangerous. The ship has to avoid a dangerous battle engagement. Etc. Those were shows that were AHEAD of the audience, not being LED by it.

--Wow, I said this was the SHORT answer, didn't I? But Roddenberry's is just one example. I can think of half a dozen other efforts that began to fail artistically as soon as they started overtly trying to cater to fans. I bet you could too.

Look, I have tremendous affection for fandom and especially the creative side of it, the folks who write and draw and make costumes and build models and shoot movies. But I also think that it should stay firmly behind the fourth wall. I know of many lovely stories of fans interacting with creators-- I've even lived some of them-- but for every one of those, I know a hundred more where it's ended badly. Because it breeds familiarity and entitlement and contempt. And in superhero comics it's been particularly awful. I sometimes think the internet is the worst thing that ever happened to Marvel and DC, and I say that as someone who gets paid to write about them on the internet.

But you don't need to take MY word for it. Google "Dan Slott Spider-Man death threats," or "Ron Marz Green Lantern H.E.A.T.," or "Ryan Coons Rob Liefeld." That's just scratching the surface.

In comics, these are the fans publishers cater to. That's my complaint. They should be marginalized. Instead, they're courted. It's creepy.

[darkemeralds]

This is rather a short response, but have a look at this interview with Joe Hill. Scroll down to this question: "You've mentioned in interviews that you start with a hook but that will only take you so far, and then you have to have good characters" and have a look at his reply. I think it's pretty fitting.