(no subject)

[andrew_jorgensen]

Shaker Heights is noted for its diversity, but as far as its street names go, it's wall-to-wall whitey here. Every road bears a faux tweedy, upper-crust English moniker, with some lowlands Scots mixed in around the bad parts of town. This can get a little confusing, so if you're driving by Horseshoe Lake, and you see me out running, and if my body, forced to consume its own fatty deposits, has decided to ignore my belly and instead start eating into my gray matter, and you ask me how to get to Claythorne Road, it is entirely likely that I will give you authoritative, impeccably correct directions to Sherbrooke.

There is a cliché, or to a sociobiologist, a datum, that men are less willing to stop and ask for directions than are women. I cannot speak to the accuracy of such a suggestion, or to its possible cause, but I know that I'll almost never ask a stranger for assistance. I suspect though that this is not due to some innate feature of the Y chromosome, but instead is a behavioral tendency learned after a long history of being stopped and asked for directions. I am a very courteous person -- does a good deed daily -- and I have a phenomenal geographic sense -- taught the orienteering merit badge -- so I always try to help people out. But ten minutes later I realize that the directions which seemed so sensible at the time I gave them were in some way crap and I've just made things immensely worse. I suspect many people have had this experience, and been discouraged from asking for directions of their own by their own examples. Perhaps it is an experience shared by a larger proportion of men than of women, because at the same time that the patriarchy is spewing out misdirection and confuddlement, we're also serving up large amounts of propaganda extolling our putative superior spatial facilities.

So, really, ask women for directions, or just anyone but me, and try to live in a city with the streets laid out in a nice numbered grid.

Comments

[ladystarlightsj.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this explains my urge to take people where they need to go when asked for directions....

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

Are you grabbing them by the earlobes?

[ladystarlightsj.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly, no. I usually want to take them by the hand and lead them around.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

*nods* I also prefer to have someone physically take me along rather than give me verbal directions (unless they're v. v. good at verbal directions, and even then.... ditto well-drawn maps, esp. since not all intersections actually have street signs).

[ladystarlightsj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I draw little maps out too ("Okay, so we're here and you go this way for two blocks..."). Complete with arrows and landmarks.