betterbemeta:

feynites:

quinzelade:

soundssimpleright:

quinzelade:

feynites:

So the footage of Owen training the tiny raptors in the new Jurassic World kind of (inadvertently, I think) confirmed something that always bugged me about the social dynamics mentioned in the first film.

Owen’s using the term ‘alpha’ wrong.

Of course, the concept of pack alphas is rooted in a lot of erroneous studies anyway. But if we take his actual assertions about it and Blue’s behaviour at face value, then Owen is wrong. He’s not the alpha. Blue is the alpha. The pack follows her cues, that’s why they go with her when she decides to follow the Indominous, and it’s also why they listen to Owen – because Blue does. If Blue stops, so do the other raptors. They’d don’t just wait it out to see who’ll win, they immediately follow Blue’s lead.

Blue’s the leader. 

Owen is, actually, the mediator.

He is the one who stops disputes between the raptors and defuses tense situations. He is permitted this status precisely because he’s physically weak (compared to raptors) but socially important. His social importance was created by rearing the raptors and forming emotional bonds with them. But they know full well that he’s squishy and beatable (though they probably don’t realize just how lethal some behaviours might be for him, comparatively). Blue knows she can kill Owen and that Owen is not strong or very useful at leadership decisions for a velociraptor pack. She accepts his input because he’s dad.

So since Owen actually isn’t even in the running for pack leader, and challenging him would be pointless because then you’d just hurt him and cost the pack a socially important member, and also probably get beaten up by Blue, he is the ideal mediator of disputes. His intervention de-escalates situations by reducing the amount of violence that’s permissible. 

But because he was using so much containment and physical force (even if it was through equipment, obviously) to keep the raptors in check, I think Owen misjudged his placement in the raptor social group. Especially since he actually was tougher than them when they were babies. He thought they listened to him because they believed he was stronger than them, and that this was an illusion he had to maintain.

That was never actually the case, though. Blue knew Owen was way weaker than her the whole time. She just valued him anyway.

There’s probably a metaphor about toxic masculinity in there somewhere.

You had me until the last line.

Would it still work for you if you removed “toxic”?

Nope. One bloke misunderstanding his social role in a group of bloodthirsty, primitive monsters is not a good or accurate metaphor for men.

Not a good one for women either if we’re the aggressive monsters, hmm?

Actually, what I was alluding to was the concept of Owen fixating on the assumption that he had to protect his social position via force and a misrepresentation of his own physical power, as having some allegorical similarities to masculine expectations of leadership and authority.

It’s not so much that he misunderstands his role in the social group that’s relevant, but why.

And that doesn’t actually require that the raptors be allegorical stand-ins for women. Because the dynamics of or composition of that social group is irrelevant, the salient point with regards to the toxic masculinity quip is Owen’s preconceptions about authority in the animal kingdom.

But, if we do want to look at the raptors as an allegory for women, it’s still not all bad. Because one of the major themes of the Jurassic Park movies is that the dinosaurs are not monsters. The monsters are the scientists and businessmen who seek to profit from their existence, who have made them, manipulated them, fenced them in, etc..

The reason why the dinosaurs are a problem in the movies is because they break free of the confines constructed around them, and then it’s no longer just about what the humans want, but about what the dinosaurs will do. And the messages of the movies, overall, is that responsibility still lies with the people who built the cages and manipulated the living things into forms and shapes they found pleasing, not with the creatures who then proceeded to liberate themselves.

But that’s a bit more of a stretch.

Still, that’s why I was deliberately vague with that last line. There’s always more than one way to read a story. Or piece of meta, as it happens.

I think this post is a great example of how some people seem to think masculinity happens because femininity exists– if someone says that a behavior is due to toxic masculinity, obviously it must be because a man is threatened by an allegory for human women or something. But that’s not what OP was talking about– Toxic masculinity has to do with the messages served to men that direct hierarchical dominance is of the utmost importance.

This isn’t a post about “one bloke misinterpreting his role among monsters representing all men,” but certainly it is one about that men are encouraged to think of themselves as on some rung of a straightforward power hierarchy rather than inhabiting some softer or less intuitive social role that isn’t really on a continuum of prestige. And that Owen, as a fictional character, can definitely model (and definitely does model) the expectations writers and the audience take for grated for his role.