Zaverexus said:
Simple Enough: What stereotype is do people apply to you that you most dislike?
My answer: That intelligent people cannot also be athletic. I know everyone on the internet says he is intelligent, but taking high level classes and fencing and practicing parkour I run into far too many people who assume academics and athletics are mutually exclusive.
There aren't many stereotypes that I dislike, even the ones that are negative and can be applied to me. I'm a big believer in sociology and how true they tend to be despite resistance. I won't go into a major rant on this though.
That said, I think there is some misunderstanding of stereotypes. For example saying that athletics and academics are mutally exclusive is not actually a proper stereotype. Actually there are proper stereotypes about that, with say the quintessential "gentleman" or "renaissance man". The typical preppy/upper class snob of fiction is someone who both has a degree, and awards for athletic excellence. By way of being annoying the media usually has this stereotype getting trounced (as unrealistic as that may be) in a sort of social satire, you know the snob who also happens to be a golden glove boxer, yet somehow manages to get beaten up by your blue collar protaganist. I believe there was an incidence of this in "Quantum Leap" that wound up being parodied for a while, though to be fair Sam Beckette himself was supposed to be one of those scholor/athlete types, hand to hand combat being one of his fortes and he was well known for using those skills in some very unlikely bodies (sometimes with hilarious results, or a bad misfire when the body he occupied couldn't keep up with what he was trying to do).
The stereotype your looking at is one about extremes, the stereotype, and the truth, is that someone who is at the absolute PEAK of an academic or athletic field, is going to be deficient in the other, and that's generally true, since getting there comes at the expense of focusing on other things. Typically the exceptions that many exist come at the expense of putting someone into a differant stereotype like the "snob" above. That's one thing about stereotypes, by avoiding one you enter into another one, which might even be less flattering. It should be noted however that in general by stepping out of the stereotype of an extremely focused athlete or academic, it generally means your not going to be dealing with someone who is actually at the very top of the game despite what they might think. It's very true that dedication comes with costs, and the stereotype exists for that reason.
You might in your mind have an image of certain renaissance men, or the "Bucakroo Banzai" hero of fiction who are somehow magically good at everything (you know... Batman) but that doesn't reflect reality. Even the actual "Reinaissance Men" that the term comes from, guys like Davinci, were not all that when you learn more about them. For example for all the fields Davinci allegedly mastered, it seems increasingly likely that he himself was something of a con artist and might have been stealing the work of others and was simply very good at it. I've read some stuff about his engineering for example, with various scholors pointing out that what he supposedly originated seems to have origins in writings before what he came up with. He in some cases might simply have built a prototype of something that someone else actually developed and said "this is mine" since his sources were then obscure enough where he was unlikely to be questioned. I believe books like "The Davinci Code" actually mentioned this, but were also quick to dismiss it for the purposes of the story for example.
The point I'm making is not so much to make an arguement for the sake of arguement, but to point out that stereotypes exist for a reason, and while people rebel in thinking that humans are magical and beyond classification and so on, that's a false path of logic, as sociologists and psychologists continually prove. In general someone breaking all stereotypes is usually a sign of a deception, rather than stereotypes not being true. In most cases however someone saying that stereotypes are wrong, because they don't fit one people try and put them into, well as often or not that's simply a matter of mis-classification. As in the case of the whole "all Academics are by nature weak and unathletic" that being true is part of certain steretypes (and an extreme one dealing with dedication) but it's not a stereotype as much as an intellecual construct since there are stereotypes that include a person being both.
At any rate I'm rambling. I won't get into why, but this is sort of an issue for me. Not so much because I love stereotyping people, but because I think people make a mountain out of a molehill, and by screaming about humans refusing classifiction we both make ourselves the victims of those who use sociology for things like advertising, and avoid addressing problems that could be dealt with fairly easily if people would just get over their resentment of groups of people and patterns of behavior being able to be identified, singled out, and dealt with on their own merits.
