Freaks of the world, unite.

Interesting that they’re called “junk slots” – I don’t really like the term, since it seems to imply that the spot “ought” to belong to a “real” person. Feels like the sort of thing a lot of people would extend to online friends, too. But primarily: darnit, I’ve learned a lot from some fictional characters, and I think they’re a very useful cultural tool

Good point about diversity within groups, too.

Your point about diversifying fiction is excellent! That’s really exciting!!! And it also helps explain the bi poly kinky pagan gamer geek effect! Geeks have a high diversity of fiction, so they have more diverse monkeyspheres, hence the overlap with all these other subcultures. I think I will make a top-level post about this! I’ve added it to my to-post-about list.

Anyways, the point of this all: Mass Media.

A lot of my group-awareness comes from movies, books I’ve read, documentaries on TV, whatever. I have an awareness of doctors and nurses, lawyers, spies even! All sorts of groups.

And I know that all of this is incredibly biased, too, but that’s the only data I have. So I do have awareness of these groups in an odd sort of way – plenty of fictional characters exist *within* my monkeysphere, being used as examples and data points. I would expect this is a very human trait, too, to have fictional people within their monkeysphere.

So there’s an even more revolutionary path: You don’t need to know real people! You can diversify media, fiction, and that will grow the monkeysphere too!

Someone whose only exposure to transsexuality is the Australian Borderguard Special on these evil identity-fraudsters is going to be very negatively biased. Someone who has seen a more personal, sympathetic story will probably have different attitudes.

Diversity WITHIN groups is also important! If you only know one gay person, and they’re an asshole, it’s easy to extrapolate that all gay people are assholes. If the only transsexual you know is an MTF obsessed about surgery and acting feminine, it’s going to be a lot harder for you to grok and accept someone who is more casual or genderqueer or dyke or tomboy or god forbid an FTM (Funny story: We had an FTM come out at work the same day I came out as MTF. Almost no one was phased by me, but more than a couple people responded to the FTM with a bewildered shock: “Wait, they can DO that?!”)

This also helped me to understand something about other people that confuses me. I think I’m not wired for a size limit on my monkeysphere, but it makes sense to me that most people are. It just helps me to understand why other people are so amazed that my monkeysphere is so big…I guess if someone’s hitting their limit at 150, it would seem amazing to them that I never seem to hit a limit. But it doesn’t seem amazing to me, because…that’s just how I’m wired. ;-)

I guess, stemming from that, it also makes sense that most people’s instinct is to try to fill their monkeyspheres with people with whom they’re comfortable. After all, if you’ve only got room for 150, most people probably want to be very selective about who gets a seat on their monkeybus, especially since once someone gets in, by definition they’re someone you deeply care about, so you don’t want them to leave…even to make room for someone else!

I mean…not that I necessarily want to go around advocating that everyone should be more like me or anything…but maybe it would be useful for people to try to expand their monkeyspheres and not just diversify them? Then you wouldn’t have to make people you like get off the bus to make room for new people.

We might also consider that it probably doesn’t really diversify much at all if everyone in your monkeysphere is diverse in the same ways. If everyone in your monkeysphere is a “freak”, for instance, even if you’re all fairly diverse freaks, you still don’t have any non-freaks in your monkeysphere, and they’re all off in their own monkeyspheres without you, either….and then the divide between “freaks” and “non-freaks” (whatever the hell THAT means XD) grows even wider.