That Willful Misunderstanding Thing

One of my friends posted a black and white picture of 80-year-old Yoko Ono on Facebook. In it, she was wearing shorts that were nearly small enough to be underpants and displaying pristine pure white thighs. There was not a blemish or wrinkle. Her legs were as pure and youthful-looking as a 6-year-old schoolboy in his school uniform. Her comment was something like, 'wow, doesn't she look great.'

To this picture and her comment, I said that, though she may indeed look good for her age, the picture was certainly manipulated in some fashion. Either Photoshop was used to adjust the contrast and white out shadowing in her legs and face or the lighting in the original shoot was intense enough to blow-out any shadows. The latter thought occurred to me because I once read someone say that Bette Davis, in one of her much later movies, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, looked young and beautiful in one scene because the bright lighting washed out all of her wrinkles. In the pre-Photoshop era, there were ways to make older folks look younger and that was one of the ways.

I believe that it is possible that Yoko Ono has aged very well. I don't believe it is possible that she has pristine legs at age 80. Japanese women are famous for avoiding the sun and meticulously looking after their skin, but they are not immune to the effects of age and gravity no matter how much of an effort they make. Even if she took a bath in a vat of Oil of Olay every day, she'd still have some blemishes or wrinkling on her legs. Aging is not a failure. Accepting that people who are quite elderly are showing age is not a criticism of them. It's just a fact.

One of my friend's friends came out of the shadows hissing and spitting like a rabid pit bull and attacked me personally for what he interpreted as an knock against Ms. Ono. Apparently, merely asserting the high likelihood that an old lady's picture was likely manipulated by the magazine to hide her flaws was a form of character assassination and  warranted an ad hominem attack. I didn't want to play his game, so I explained that I was not criticizing Yoko Ono, but rather the people who published or manipulated the picture to hide any flaws. I believe that this is not a good thing for anyone as it makes her aging seem like a failure or like a shameful thing. That old broad has been through a lot. I'd think she'd earned some battle scars and it'd be honoring her to let them be seen rather than to smooth them over.

After explaining what I meant, something which any rational person would have understood considering there never was any criticism of her in anything I said, he came back foaming at the mouth again and insisted that I was insulting her. What I meant and actually said was ignored in favor of what he wanted to conclude or believe. It was willful understanding pushed to the next level. I let it drop at that point because one learns not to explain oneself to idiots, especially those who are not close personal friends of a famous person but somehow take anything remotely negative and vaguely related to them as a personal affront. If someone identifies that much with a stranger, their identity and ego integrity are too brittle to tolerate any pesky reality.

In my opening post, I mentioned that I'm not putting up with any willful misunderstanding. Experiences like the one above are part of the reason why. In addition to the uncivilized manner in which such exchanges can be carried out and the fruitlessness of trying to explain to people who don't want to hear it that you didn't say something that they cooked up in their febrile imagination, there are the reasons that people (often willfully) misunderstand. There is little more willful than having an explanation of what was meant and then rejecting that in favor of ones initial erroneous interpretation.

One of the reasons people do this is that we experience all information through their own particular perspective or understanding. The angry being that was sure I was knocking Ms. Ono was clearly a fan who has been a witness to far too many ugly opinions about her character. Frankly, I don't have any feelings about her. I don't give her much thought as she plays no role in my life whatsoever. However, that person's filtering mechanism is turned up to "hyper-vigilant" when it comes to sniffing out potential attacks on his aging idol. Since so many people knock her, I must have been doing so as well. You can never know what someone's filter is going to consist of and can't predict what they're going to interpret your words as. This is not the worst of it, however.

The part that I am tired of putting up with is not just the willful misunderstanding itself, but the insistence that ones interpretation was correct even after an explanation is offered which says, "No, that was not what I meant. Here is what I meant..." Often, what I meant is exactly what I said, not what was read into it. That denial of the writer's intent is about ego. To accept the message the sender intended rather than the one you received is to admit that one is wrong. Since some people can't bear being wrong, then they have to insist that you meant what they thought rather than what you actually said. I get tired of repeating myself, and even tireder of doing so and then being disbelieved.

The second reason relates to the way in which feedback from such people generally comes across. That is, they tend to be snotty, angry, and offensive. They do this because being mad actually feels good. The chemicals released in your brain while you're all hopped up on madness juices make you feel powerful. Personally attacking a person who has no capacity to meaningfully retaliate or make you face any consequences is also empowering. The internet, for all of its delights, provides the perfect platform to find a way to be pissed off and then get lots of fun brain action from the resulting sense of "mad" and the satisfaction of "showing them" by attacking.

The third reason that people misunderstand is the old tl;dr mentality. I write long posts and a lot of the stupidest comments that I've gotten on my other blogs have been the result of people who didn't read all of one or didn't pay much attention as they read. I've had people make a snarky comment saying I didn't acknowledge that pease porridge can be both hot and cold rather than simply writing about how tasty it is cold. I must be utterly unqualified to write about food of any sort if I can't acknowledge the utter short-coming of writing a review that is only about cold pease porridge. I get tired of writing the equivalent of, 'in my fourth paragraph, I said that I've had pease porridge both hot and cold, but I prefer cold and that's what I'm focusing on today.' Why should I waste my time? I'd rather delete the comments in moderation and make the commenter feel he wasted his time.

The final reason, and I can't quantify any of these to say which is most likely, but this one is the easiest to conclude, is that people are stupid and lacking in reading comprehension skills or the ability to remember the contents of a post for more than three seconds. If I could create a commenter qualification test to make sure people were bright enough to understand posts before they were allowed to comment on them, I would. Instead of making you try to read the letters or numbers on fuzzy pictures to prove you're a real person, I'd offer a logic question or something which proved one possessed critical thinking skills before one could bang out a comment. Unfortunately, such technology does not currently exist, but I'll be first in line to beta test it when it becomes available.