Shower thoughts

While it depends, when referring to the human species, I prefer using the single-syllable word 'man' instead of 'human'.

In my mind, when referring to 'man' in a broad sense, I am specifically thinking of the human species, but in an individual sense, I am (most likely) referring to specifically the male gender.

It depends, of course, as all things do, but this is something that's been slowly brewing in the back of my mind and was one of those shower thoughts that I found and picked up and have been considering that it's pretty interesting.

Now, I recognize and understand that using 'man' instead of referring to the species of homo-sapiens as 'human' can be considered (to a certain extent, at least) a kind of misogyny, as males are not the only group that make up the human race - however, in certain "poetic" contexts, I do also genuinely prefer being able to use the word 'man', as I feel it can provide a certain degree of weight to it where-as "human" (a two-syllable word) will be less punchy.

Of course, I will provide further explanation into this idea as best that I can, and you can do what you like with it;

When I imagine a blank homosapien, a person with no specified gender, I am thinking of a kind of combination of traits that can be assigned to the sexes of "boy" and "girl". 

(Note the two words I used in that last sentence - I did not use "woman" or "female" to refer to the latter sex, as both are dependent on the -male/-man portion at the end of it. If this isn't making sense to you yet, just know that the idea of using "boy" and "girl" to define the sexes independently is important to what I'm getting at with this whole thing.) 

The Greeks had this same idea that I do - when they imagined a god, something that is holier than any regular skin-and-bone person like you or I, they (sometimes, not always) typically thought of gods as being a combination of the two sexes. In my understanding, it is only recently that we (the modern peoples) have begun ascribing symbols of STRENGTH and DOMINANCE to MEN whereas women are timid and meek. 

I don't like this idea of ascribing concepts to groups of people, as this is what one might call "essentialist" and can lead an individual down a long and complicated road of contradictory concepts that end up somewhere in the camp of fascist ideologies.

For the depiction of Greek stories in media, however, it kind of made sense that certain traits of characters would need to be shown in a certain light - they are similar to humans, after all, and (in my understanding/readings) are described as such in the original texts, so it would also make sense that particular characteristics would also bleed through in visual media.

8/2/2024:

Recently a CEO laid a bunch of people off. Unsurprising, right?

The reason that I bring this up is that I am also interested in gaming news, especially where it concerns employment/unemployment due to my own interest in getting into the video game field, because of course I'm interested in it.

Essentially what ended up happening is that a CEO of a gaming corporation (Bungie) showed off a bunch of cars he'd recently bought to a bunch of his employees that he'd later go on and fire.

I also just now watched a video by Bellular News - a channel on Youtube that puts out content about gaming stuff, and had the following series of thoughts;

The idea that an uber-wealthy CEO is flaunting his wealth to the people he knew he was going to fire is, frankly, an idea that shouldn't be surprising to anyone.