things i've noticed people doing
two nineteen year old virgins find themselves agreeing to go on their first ever date. anxious not to come across as domineering, he asks what she wants to do. anxious not to come across as innocent, she suggests a burlesque show. they go watch women (twice their age on average) strip. the show is free and has a vaguely edifying atmosphere. the performers and the audience all tacitly agree that this will improve their characters. but the body positive & sex positive messaging must not stick, because our heroes don’t take off their clothes that night. ten years later they are calling each other their partner while he works and she stays home with the kids.
***
a young woman who drinks like an even younger man is telling us the story of her last 24 hours. drinking til she can’t climb the stairs to her apartment. waking up to a hangover that keeps her in bed til afternoon. “this is the second time you’ve told the same story today,” her boyfriend says. it’s the hundredth time she has told the same story since we’ve known her.
then someone else wants to tell us about his weekend mushroom trip. when he says the word “connected,” she pulls out her phone and scrolls until he stops talking.
***
to combat clique-ishness, a small utopian-idealed private school institutes a rule that students have to invite every classmate to their birthday parties. the parents, being the kind of people who would pay for a school like this, are thrilled to obey. of course, the kids themselves know better than to take every birthday invitation seriously. except for the kids who don’t know better. when the weird girl shows up at the most popular girl’s sleepover, nothing too bad happens. she isn’t even sure she’s being excluded. but when the weird girl shows up at the birthday party of a girl who isn’t sure whether she is popular or not, the weird girl is bullied so mercilessly that the school feels forced to its strongest measures: holding a series of meetings where parents, students and administrators sit in a circle.
in case you haven't seen it, the third vignette strongly reminds me of the section of The Gervais Principle talking about group status legibility:
"Andy doesn’t belong, and it frustrates him to the point that he punches holes in walls. He can’t get into the Finer Things Club (a lunch group comprising Pam, Oscar and Toby, devoted to occasional elitist indulgences) despite his best efforts, while Jim can drift in without even trying. Andy’s life is about joining clubs. And Marx provides the core idea we need in his famous line, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
There is a deep truth here. Social clubs of any sort divide the world into an us and a them. We are better than them. Any prospective new member who could raise the average prestige of a club is by definition somebody who is too good for that club.
So how do social groups form at all, given Marx’s paradox? The answer lies in the idea of status illegibility, the fuzziness of the status of a member of any social group. This is governed by what I will call Marx’s laws of status illegibility.
Marx’s First Law of Status Illegibility: the illegibility of the status of any member of a group is proportional to his/her distance from the edges of the group.
Marx’s Second Law of Status Illegibility: the stability of the group membership of any member is proportional to the illegibility of his/her status.
So the status of anyone who is not the alpha or the omega, is necessarily fuzzy (and yes, it is related to James Scott’s idea of legibility in Seeing Like a State, but never mind that).
Read the laws carefully. This is a tricky concept. The laws imply that in a group of ten people it is much easier, both for insiders and outsiders, to identify numbers 1 or 10 (alpha and omega) than it is to identify number 4 unambiguously. They also imply that alpha and omega are weakly attached to the group, while the obscure middle is stably attached (the two-way attraction/repulsion expected-value math is straightforward; work it out)."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/14/the-gervais-principle-iv-wonderful-human-beings/
This story does well to highlight the complexities of social dynamics and the impact they can have on individuals. It's unfortunate that the characters in these situations were faced with challenges related to social expectations, vulnerability, and acceptance.