A little more inspiration, Armitage: or, a gentle suggestion to the marketing department

Hey, Richard Armitage’s marketers. (Servetus waves wearily, since I guess now most of us think you’re reading along.) I keep looking at this RT and my stomach keeps churning and since I know why, I thought I’d share it with you, even though I know that by drawing into question the sanctity of the Armitage’s words, I won’t endear myself to a lot of my readers. I know as well that as a forty-six-year-old female, I no longer occupy the sweet spot of your marketing efforts. I’ll even give it to you for free, since I give you everything else — my extreme loyalty to your product being first and foremost, but also my willingness to be humiliated every time any media outlet says anything derogatory toward fans — for free as well.

For me, as for a lot of women in their mid-forties, I suspect, this isn’t a message that’s either new or one that we haven’t long ago internalized. I’m certainly not speaking for everyone, but I can speak for myself. My parents made clear to me by the age of five at the latest that as girl, I should expect this to be my purpose in life. Always be kind, please us, do the right thing, please G-d, do a good turn daily, be a helping hand, jump to help when you see someone who needs it, never complain, if you can’t say something nice keep your mouth shut. Always put a smile on your face, be polite, put some feeling in that smile, always fulfill your promises, always do what you say you will, always make the extra effort even if others aren’t as trying as hard. If any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two. The U.S. Midwestern behavioral jinx was laid over all of this as well. Wisconsin / Minnesota / Iowa / North Dakota nice.

When you hear a message for that long, you internalize it. It was ultimately a disabling message. It’s not just that it was a poor recipe for professional success, although that has been the case. It’s that it’s taken me three decades of my life, approximately, to get to a place where I don’t believe on principle that it’s my obligation to be nice to everyone at all times — no matter how they are behaving. I can not only disagree in my heart, I can say that I disagree. I may not only dislike something in my senses, I may express that dislike. And you know what? That freedom not always to put abstract rules about ethics ahead of every thought I think? That’s been the beginning of renewed creativity for me. The capacity to not like things — interestingly — has also intensified my ability to feel love for the things I really love.

I admit it. I’ve turned into that stereotypical woman of a certain age with a midlife crisis, the kind of woman I so arrogantly looked down upon when I was twenty-two. But you know, there’s a reason that women have sobbed their eyes out in cinemas all over the U.S., listening to this song:

I sob when I hear it, too, and I haven’t seen the film and I despise Disney on principle.

So, yeah. I get it. Be nice. You know, it’s not even that I think that those life lessons were wrong. I can think of several good arguments against the universal applicability of the ethic of reciprocity, which depends heavily on context for its utility. Still, it’s a general rule that I try to follow in my day-to-day life. Nowadays, I am employed as one of the perpetually, professionally nice. I tend toward cheerleading anyway and now I do it forty hours a week. As it was final exam week here, that facet of my job was called into use a lot. Of course, a lot of times, my efforts to make someone feel good fall flat in the face of the actual situation. There were several days this week when “make someone feel good” wasn’t even on the menu of possibilities; I just wanted to avert utter disaster.

And I come home and I want to be creative and I wonder, after having spent much of a day trying to make people just feel okay enough about themselves to function long enough to take a final exam, where I am supposed to get that energy from. The only I answer I have is from autonomy, from the freedom not to make what I am doing about what might or might not please others.

This commentator said it succinctly [my translation]: “It would be nice if his messages to fans were more ’empowering,’ encouraging, strengthening, a little more “YES,” a little less raised index finger.” That remark also echoes something another friend of mind said a long time ago, that one reason we keeping reading those endless press blitz interviews is that he’s often talking about artistic process, and it comes out a little differently each time, and there are clues in the nuances of those remarks about how to build and how to create.

~ by Servetus on May 3, 2015.