Alicorn comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Your first paragraph was merely presumptive, false, and ignorant. Your second was also accusatory and rude. Please reconsider.
Edit: To go into more detail in case the above statements are not immediately obvious.
I didn't say tiny. I didn't say outlier. I didn't even say subculture. The people who worked on Legally Blonde portrayed Elle as an individual woman who spends a great deal of time on the sorts of things Cosmopolitan is known to write about. She therefore refers to as Cosmopolitan as "the Bible", in much the same sense a cook might call The Joy of Cooking "their Bible".
I think they're supposed to go, "ha ha, look at this wacky, silly, caricatured protagonist who thinks everything revolves around makeup and fashion and romance!"
It's not clear if you think I have lied or just that I have said things that resemble lies. Still, such entanglement is not at all obvious to me, mostly because you made distant and unwarranted leaps from what I actually said to the funhouse mirror version of what I said.
Ahem. You claimed that the scene was only intended to reveal a fact about just one (presumably ultra-unique) character, and you disputed my claim that the humor in the scene derived from the knowledge -- assumed to be held by the audience -- that women heavily rely on Cosmo.
I just did your work for you by presenting the best way I could think of to defend your alternate interpretation -- that is, a framing that would have the filmmakers NOT assume "everyone knows" women rely on Cosmo.
Now, if you find anything presumptive, false, ignorant, accusatory, or rude about my post, all you have to do is come up with a better defense of your interpretation. But this is an uphill battle -- you're defending a position that appears quite ignorant of the prevailing culture.
Maybe it's best to just concede the point?
(P.S. The "lie" bit was a reference to Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies. But you knew that, right?)
No. I claimed that the scene is revealing of Elle's character and is not revealing of her entire gender. The very same movie, not to mention movies in general, contain other female characters who do not share her Cosmopolitan-topic obsession (the female professor; the rival; the woman she gives the magazine to); Legally Blonde also includes a horde of sorority sisters who are portrayed as being inch-deep replicas of Elle in everything except intelligence, who would presumably agree about the Biblical nature of Cosmo.
Do me no favors. Please. If you find something I say indefensible, ask me to defend it, don't paint a parodied strawman to make me look ridiculous.
I have told no lies of which I am aware.