Pretty People Behaving Stupidly
<p>I&#8217;ve been learning about the romance genre recently.  I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we&#8217;ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre.  Along the way I&#8217;ve learned that romance fans use an acronym TSTL which expands to &#8220;Too Stupid To Live&#8221;, describing a class of bad romance in which the plot turns on one or both leads exhibiting less claim to sophont status than the average bowl of clam dip.</p>
<p>My wife and I have parts in an upcoming live-action roleplaying game set in early 16th-century Venice.  As preparation, she suggested we watch a movie called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118892/">Dangerous Beauty</a> set in the period. I couldn&#8217;t stand more than about 20 minutes of it. &#8220;It&#8217;s just,&#8221; I commented later &#8220;pretty people behaving stupidly.&#8221;</p>
<p>On reflection, I&#8217;ve discovered that PPBS describes a great deal of both the fiction and nonfiction I can&#8217;t stand.  It&#8217;s a more general category that includes not just TSTL, but celebrity gossip magazines, almost every &#8220;romantic comedy&#8221; ever made, and a large percentage of the top-rated TV shows (especially, of course, the soap operas).</p>
<p>Obviously there&#8217;s a huge market for this stuff.  I must be from Mars or something, because I don&#8217;t get it.  How is wallowing in PPBS any different from going to the zoo to watch monkeys masturbate?</p>
<p><q>B-but&#8230;</q> half my readers are probably spluttering, &#8220;&#8230;those are <em>monkeys</em>.  PPBS is about <em>people</em>. Their hopes, their loves, their foolishness and dreams.&#8221; Yeah.  And your point is? The entire emotional range of PPBS is duplicated in the social dynamics of any chimpanzee band; that&#8217;s exactly what makes it so boring.</p>
<p>There is nothing there about what actually makes us human, neither the good stuff like science and art and discovery nor the bad stuff  like warfare and governments.  In a universe of satoris and supernovas, the people who produce and consume PPBS only care about who slept with or dissed or made up with who.</p>
<p>I find that truly sad.</p>
<p>UPDATE: I&#8217;m a shadow Tourette&#8217;s Syndrome case, not a shadow autist like many other geeks.  Nevertheless, this description of <a href="http://home.att.net/~ascaris1/neurotypicality.html">neurotypicality</a> seems relevant.</p>
