12:50 a.m. - 2002-10-10
\"What Women Want\"
Bliss! Three days where pantyhose haven't been necessary. Three days where the daytime temperature hovered around 70 F/20 C. That doesn't mean that it isn't fall here though. Nights have been very cool and often there is sleet or rain after dark. Yesterday there was hail in places in and around the city. Depended where you were, what you experienced.
Lots of astronomical activity too in the form of the Northern Lights. We've been treated to a brilliant light show almost every night for a week. Mostly the display is a pretty, intense green, but the Aurora Borealis comes in many colours depending on atmospheric conditions. I know there are scientists who could tell you, by using spectography, what particulates and elements were causing the coloration (why is the sky blue?), but it doesn't really matter. It's still just one of those natural wonders that takes your breath away no matter how often you see it.
I watched Mel Gibson and Lauren Holly in "What Women Want" the other night. Sort of a men are from Mars.... theme. The storyline is about two people in a situation, experiencing the same objective conditions, who are interpreting their perceptions in such different ways that they can't understand the other person at all because they aren't relating to the other person as an individual - a fundamental North American value. Then one of them gets a jolt of electricity that allows them to hear what the opposite gender is thinking.
It was like that at work today. People coming from such different sets of experience or conditioning, that even though they were using the same words, they might as well have been talking in separate rooms. Not a lot of tolerance or willingness to hear the other person out either; just cattiness and put downs instead.
In the movie, the miscommunication was based on gender issues, but today it was coming from other forms of ingrained prejudices. I guess this might be easier, in some people's minds, because it requires no effort or thought - just judge a whole group of people on preconceived notions that have no basis in fact. It is often the case that the person hanging on to their prejudice feels that their belief gives them more power or, in some way, means they are superior to the other person.
The most disturbing example - one of the HR staff had decided that some of the other workers in the building were just lazy and stupid. Asking her to consider other factors that might be driving their behavior resulted in the HR person raising her voice to restate her beliefs. The volume went up another notch and she began to blame them for circumstances over which the people she was attacking had no control. If the word "females" had been substituted in her sentence for the name she had applied to the workers in question and applied to her instead of them, then she would likely have been citing gender discrimination and demanding justice for herself. I wonder why she was so afraid to see that these people were just like her?
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