{"id":204,"date":"2005-08-29T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-29T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=204"},"modified":"2010-07-17T02:28:36","modified_gmt":"2010-07-17T07:28:36","slug":"pretty-people-behaving-stupidly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=204","title":{"rendered":"Pretty People Behaving Stupidly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been learning about the romance genre recently.  I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we&#8217;ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre.  Along the way I&#8217;ve learned that romance fans use an acronym TSTL which expands to &#8220;Too Stupid To Live&#8221;, describing a class of bad romance in which the plot turns on one or both leads exhibiting less claim to sophont status than the average bowl of clam dip.<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I have parts in an upcoming live-action roleplaying game set in early 16th-century Venice.  As preparation, she suggested we watch a movie called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0118892\/\">Dangerous Beauty<\/a> set in the period. I couldn&#8217;t stand more than about 20 minutes of it. &#8220;It&#8217;s just,&#8221; I commented later &#8220;pretty people behaving stupidly.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>On reflection, I&#8217;ve discovered that PPBS describes a great deal of both the fiction and nonfiction I can&#8217;t stand.  It&#8217;s a more general category that includes not just TSTL, but celebrity gossip magazines, almost every &#8220;romantic comedy&#8221; ever made, and a large percentage of the top-rated TV shows (especially, of course, the soap operas).<\/p>\n<p>Obviously there&#8217;s a huge market for this stuff.  I must be from Mars or something, because I don&#8217;t get it.  How is wallowing in PPBS any different from going to the zoo to watch monkeys masturbate?<\/p>\n<p><q>B-but&#8230;<\/q> half my readers are probably spluttering, &#8220;&#8230;those are <em>monkeys<\/em>.  PPBS is about <em>people<\/em>. Their hopes, their loves, their foolishness and dreams.&#8221; Yeah.  And your point is? The entire emotional range of PPBS is duplicated in the social dynamics of any chimpanzee band; that&#8217;s exactly what makes it so boring.<\/p>\n<p>There is nothing there about what actually makes us human, neither the good stuff like science and art and discovery nor the bad stuff  like warfare and governments.  In a universe of satoris and supernovas, the people who produce and consume PPBS only care about who slept with or dissed or made up with who.<\/p>\n<p>I find that truly sad.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: I&#8217;m a shadow Tourette&#8217;s Syndrome case, not a shadow autist like many other geeks.  Nevertheless, this description of <a href=\"http:\/\/home.att.net\/~ascaris1\/neurotypicality.html\">neurotypicality<\/a> seems relevant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we&#8217;ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I&#8217;ve learned that romance fans use an acronym&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=204\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Pretty People Behaving Stupidly<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-sex","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2124,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/2124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}