If you're happy and you show it ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

 ... sometimes that freaks people out.  chordatesrock pointed me to this fascinating post about happy dance expression.  I'm finding that very useful as I work on the series An Army of One.

My stance is that people have the right to be themselves, and social conventions really only have grounds for safety or practical reasons.  If what you do is not hurting yourself or others, people don't really have grounds to complain.  "That makes me uncomfortable" is a valid (if annoying) expression of personal feeling; "Don't run around the room and crash into things"  is a valid safety concern; "Stop doing that because I don't like it" is not valid.  If there's a communication gap, well, I consider the obligation to learn someone else's mode to be equal and reciprocal.  That's a really unpopular stance, but then I don't think terribly highly of human culture in certain regards.  I don't think it's okay to pressure people to communicate in ways they find unsatisfactory or unnatural, whether it's spoken language or body language.

Though I will say, if you're in a relationship with someone whose communication mode differs, and you want the relationship to last, and you don't want to re-have the same fight for decades on end, you will get better results on the premise that the obligation to learn each other's modes goes both ways.  And so you make an effort to try, even if you suck at it.

Comments

[sylvaine]

Reading that is very interesting to me because apparently flappy hands and happy dances and squeeing is a neuro-atypical expression of joy? And that's not my experience at all, I suppose because most of my friends are in fandom, and fandom (at any rate online fandom) does a lot of squeeing and happy-dancing to express joy in-text, and I suppose that has normalized it for me (& my friends) in real life, too. I mean, I do realize that most people don't do that! But I just always figured that other people were just boring and emotionally constipated! :P

... I sort of lost the thread of where I was going with this. I think it was something about the effect fandom has on emotionality and expression, and how interesting it is to find tat reflected in neuro-atypical persons.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's normal by my standards too, for similar reasons, although the sample videos were somewhat more intense that what I usually see.

1) Fandom contains a great many people at the far ends of the bell curves. There is thus more diversity, including in modes of expression.

2) Fandom tends to be more tolerant than many other subcultures. Thus people feel more free to express themselves according to their own preferences rather than to mainstream expectations.

Re: Well...

[sylvaine]

Right, that makes sense. I tend to forget that fannish diversity is a lot greater - or at any rate a lot more visible - than irl. &FANDOM;

[siliconshaman]

It's atypical because that's what we're told adults don't do. Watch a roomful of kids and you'll see it.

I guess fans do it because they're more in touch with their inner child or something.

I'd hazard a guess that people on the autism spectrum also do it, because they never really learnt not to. I think they might be the better for that.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>It's atypical because that's what we're told adults don't do. Watch a roomful of kids and you'll see it. <<

I have seen similar behavior widespread among children. Some of the gestures are the same, some a little different. I suspect that some may be endemic to humans as a whole, while others may appear mostly in a subset of the population.

>>I guess fans do it because they're more in touch with their inner child or something.<<

Possibly so, or just that they care less what people think. If folks are going to hate you anyhow, you might as well at least please yourself.

But it's also true that autistic-spectrum traits appear more often in the fannish community.

>>I'd hazard a guess that people on the autism spectrum also do it, because they never really learnt not to. I think they might be the better for that.<<

That ... is a more complicated concept. It's hard to tell what is age-related and what is not. And there's a general problem with treating people with handicaps like children, or thinking of them that way. The overlap and implications make this whole conceptual territory a minefield.

I'm actually working a bit of that into An Army of One.

[sylvaine]

True that! Now I'm very curious what factors lead to fandom being so much more, as you say, in touch with their inner child, than the rest of the adult world. Are people more in touch with their inner child drawn to fandom? Does fandom encourage such expression because our subculture is all *about* feeling emotions strongly? Is it because of how emotions are communicated online (text-based, thus emoticons showing stronger emotions than irl, where more subtle emotions are actually visible and thus more obvious expressions are technically unnecessary). Probably a the reason is "all of the above", as it usually is. *g*

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I believe that all those factors are in effect.

I also note the rise of smileys in online communication, although such devices were used rarely throughout the long history of other print communication. I suspect this is because online communication has attracted a different subset of people, who find visible emotional markers to be very valuable, and therefore modify the language according to their needs in an environment where they are numerous enough and skilled enough to have that kind of control.

Re: Yes...

[sylvaine]

True, emoticons are very much a mark of the digital age. I think there's another factor to that, too - in every age previously, written communication took time (that is, time to get to the person it was intended for), was limited to the elite, and oftentimes fairly expensive. So people tended to think twice about what they were writing and if they really needed to. Whereas with the rise of online communication it's a) immediate and b) not limited to the rich and educated (this, of course, coinciding with mandatory schooling and such). I imagine emoticons became especially popular thanks to IMing, since you then no longer have the time to think about the exact formulation three times (and don't want to, either) and emoticons help carry across the intended meaning of an ambiguous phrase where otherwise more precise wording might have been used instead.

[raze]

Ooh, thank you for sharing that link! Loved the happy dance, and it was a very thought-provoking post.

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm actively looking for more source material like that. I'll be compiling some such resources as part of a series I'm currently developing, An Army of One.

[siliconshaman]

There are people who get pretty freaked out by significant displays of any sort of emotion ... I have this theory that this is because they're desperately holding in negative emotions themselves or have been taught not to display so by someone who was. In other words, they're pretty darn f**ked up.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That matches my observations. It usually makes me think that the balloon is in want of pins.

[hrafn]

Oh, that linked article hurt to read :(

This notion that "normal" people don't express happiness in certain ways once they are "grown up" . . . augh.

Just.

What the fuck. Is wrong with our culture that it wants to squash expressions of joy unless they are expressed the "right" way? (I have run into this too too much in certain online pagany communities.) What is REALLY going on here?

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

From an anthropological perspective, all cultures set standards for their members, looser in some areas and tighter in others. Some really discourage any emotional displays in public; others encourage expression and are suspicious of stoics.

There's a widespread but not universal human tendency to police the boundaries, trying to change or drive out what "doesn't fit." On the upside, this helps prevent the spread of certain diseases (notably those with behavioral effects like rabies or Yersinia pestis) and minimize the collateral damage from mental illness. The downside is that it guts the diversity, and diversity what determines a species' resilience in the face of change. Lose that and you're headed for extinction.

I'm xenophilic and tolerant precisely because my observations of nature -- which has had billions of years to figure out what works -- indicate that diversity maximizes a system's functionality and survivability.

Re: Well...

[hrafn]

My current theory is that a lot of this, in American culture, comes out of the particular strains of Protestantism that we got early on, and is coupled with trying to keep people quiet, because if people are emotionally expressive, that forces other people to think about their own lives and emotional expression, and that threatens the status quo.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I think that's a contributing factor. So is the Calvinist work ethic, which tends to marginalize and devalue everyone who is not able-bodied and fully employed.

Consider that many of America's "founders" were people who got kicked out of England for being too stuffy.

[cadenzamuse]

Your stance = my stance. I love watching the happy dance from anyone, and then I get angry because ignorant, self-absorbed people in power label neuroatypical happy behaviors as "inappropriate."

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have whole boxen full of rants for such occasions, ranging from the relatively genteel "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" to things like "Well, we consider your intrusive bigotry to be inappropriate. If my soul were that small, I'd be ashamed to whip it out in public like that."

Re: Yes...

[technoshaman]

OUCH! Though I don't doubt (sadly) that you've seen behaviour worthy of such a takedown.... (I'm gonna have to remember that one! And hope I don't have an occasion where I have to use it... )

Xenophilic. What a lovely word.

And while "normal" [sic{k}] society may frown upon it, seeing somebody squeeeeee and get all kermit-arms makes my inner ten-year old grin, and sometimes giggle.

"Mudita" is another good word: Pleasure taken in the happiness of a friend. It comes from Buddhist culture... something else decidedly alien to the average schmoe, but strangely very common amongst geeks and nerds.

Re: Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I like "mudita" a lot.

[je-reviens.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry but.. I will never ever think picking your nose in public is ok. I don't care what mode of expression someone is using!

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

But picking one's nose is a hazard in terms of spreading infection when that person later touches shared surfaces or other people's hands or whatever. Not to say that I don't find it gross myself, but the only person I'll actually correct on it is my son - and teaching him social conventions is my job.

On the other hand, I get very strange looks when I sing to myself in public, no matter how softly, and I really don't see why that makes people uncomfortable. Though I did have one woman who noticed comment "if I had a voice like yours, I might sing in the parking lot too!" :)

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>> the only person I'll actually correct on it is my son - and teaching him social conventions is my job.<<

Fair enough. Your perspective on raising a neurovariant son would be helpful, if there are things you're comfortable sharing. I've got a whole discussion post about my new series An Army of One, the research for which led me to the happy dance videos.

>>On the other hand, I get very strange looks when I sing to myself in public, no matter how softly, and I really don't see why that makes people uncomfortable. Though I did have one woman who noticed comment "if I had a voice like yours, I might sing in the parking lot too!" :) <<

I rarely sing in public because my voice isn't appealing. I'll do it if I'm working on metrical poetry. I also use it as an active defense tactic: in college when I walked alone at night, I sang loudly the most ball-busting songs I knew.

To my great amusement, fraternity boys sometimes crossed the street to get away from me.