模倣子 Vestigial Memeplex of Staring at Women

 Medium article

Hmmmm… How to put this. In conservative Arab/Muslim countries where women are expected to wear things like burkas and be in the company of a male relative, they are hounded by all men around on the street when they are not, like western women who go out wearing a bikini top or such. I wonder if we need to replace the memes that if a woman is walking around by herself, or at night, in various states of undress that she be treated with “disapproval” (which is what we’re really talking about, right?) with some other script, some other set of memes. Just saying that men are all jerks and they should all just “be nice” is unsatisfying. For various principles of the theory of macromemetics which I won’t get into that probably won’t work and would probably land us in in worse stead anyway.  You’re kind of right—it is about power. The power that comes with knowing that one’s behavior cannot be attacked. A meme cannot be deleted directly—it must be replaced by something more appealing. If we say that back in the day women were expected to not go out unescorted or in a state of undress or after dark, then it follows that there was a system of memes (memeplex) that enforced that, which typically takes the form of creating an environment where normally antisocial behaviors (cat-calling a woman, staring at her, making untoward gestures, and even worse) become “acceptable.” And this sort of “enabling of bullying opportunities” looks like power, or as you say “they know they can get away with it.” While it’s maybe not wrong to blame and shame men as a group, the solution may lie elsewhere.  If we’re looking at a vestigial or fossilized system for keeping women “in line” in a Victorian or sharia Muslim sense, which seems an interesting theory, we can’t just leave it there; we have to extirpate it by replacing it with something else.  And that is an exercise in memetic engineering.