Poll to Torchwood

reading thoughts is a bit like reading diaries, only more so.
writing thoughts would be up there with chemical rape.

How much "more so" do we have to get before the two begin to seem equivalent? Reading thoughts is committing a type of violation which isn't contained in altering those thoughts without knowing what their previous state was, and I'm beginning to wonder to what degree they really are comparable.

Not that there is really any doubt in my mind which one I think is worse (and nine other people seem to agree with me) but I'm not 100% sure why I think that, and I'm in a problematizing mood.

see I don't really understand privacy as a concept. how it can be a good thing. ignorance is poison, and privacy as an idea seems like saying there's some stuff one should not dispel ignorance about.

and my mum is always 'you should get better curtains, people can see around those curtains' and I'm like 'and?' and she tries to explain how people shouldn't be able to see me and I just purely don't get it. Totally. Do not understand. Because how is it a problem? How is it even remotely to do with me?

Now if after seeing they then did something bad, that would be a problem. But the seeing isn't bad, just the hypothetical doing a bad thing.

So looking in someone's mind? *shrugs* violates privacy, I guess, but all I understand about that is people seem to like it.

Until there's anything that actually goes back in to those people's lives, how can there be a bad?

And then if a bad goes into their lives, how is it in the seeing, and not the doing?

I don't see it.



I mean, it's not like I'd like people to read my private LJ entries, but if they did I wouldn't even know about it. So how can it be a bad thing if it does nothing to my life?



Now the knowledge=power therefore seeing without allowing self to be seen =power imbalance, that part makes sense. Unfair advantage, that's a thing. But still it is in the what they do with it.
And the solution would be to pass the necklace around, or give everyone one.


All this connects with that Panopticon thing, and the surveillance society, and the persistent use of CCTV on Torchwood, and even Jack standing on tall buildings because he's watching people that do not know they are watched let alone know all about him (and he is the not-seen even with the pendant).


But it is nearly one in the morning and I hear sleep is recommended for humans.


... I reserve the right to come back and delete this when I have brain cells. I maybe make no sense here.


(PS about the curtains thing - I do grasp that showing people things they don't want to see is a thing, but my mum's hypothetical way they can see me is to go right up to my window and squint and look through the blinds. I think at that point I aren't showing.)

So I wonder what the response would be outside of our demographic. After all, by definition LJers are willing and eager to have people share (some of) our thoughts with the world at large; as a part of the community we're both exhibitionists and voyeurs. At the same time, I imagine that, among our many thoughts about our bodies, LJers (would tend to) maintain a very strong sense of personal space -- after all, we are intellectually and emotionally intimate without touching at all, many of us without sharing what our meatspace faces or bodies even look like. In other words, we are already more guarded about our bodies than our thoughts, and so view violation of the latter as less severe than the latter. (To me, the answer I and 8 other people choose is intuitively correct, and I can't imagine feeling otherwise, but then, I am very firmly entrenched in this world and it suits my personality so entirely that it's hard to imagine being in some other way.)

I agree that the answer that you, I, and (as of this writing) 8 other people chose is intuitively correct, but like you I'm not completely sure why. Your response raises the question of whether the former choice represents a violation of body, mind, or both; I was thinking of it primarily as an alteration of thoughts which could be but wouldn't have to be followed by a physical violation in the form of rape; but you point out, wisely and correctly, that of course attraction is at least partly a physical response. But my intuition is that the physical violation, insofar as it existed, wouldn't bother me nearly as much as the mental one, which makes sense as I do think I end up valuing my mind over my body.

It's strange; I actually immediately translated it to a bodily violation and then after seeing beccaelizabeth's comment essentially reframed the problem in terms of physical vs mental violation, which isn't the question you're asking. (While I imagine there's a wee bit of context I'm missing, I wonder if rephrasing "Using alien technology to make other people attracted to you," is a less adequate parallel than "Using alien technology to alter your thoughts." Which I still think is a worse violation than reading thoughts, so perhaps I'm being needlessly problematic.

I think it's pretty clear in the canons we share that altering people's thoughts or memories is a pretty atrocious wrong (though maybe I'm projecting onto the text what I read as the fannish consensus wrt, frex, Willow in S6, Angel and The Mindwipe of Doom, etc.)

I've thought of another related question: which is a worse violation, violent rape or using alien technology to make someone attracted to you and then having sex with them?

I still think the severity of Owen's spray depends on exactly what it does. Altering people's perceptions (so he looks exactly like the person they most want to shag) is less severe than tinkering with their brain and/or hormones, so that they have no choice in whether they shag him. In my opinion anyway -- I suspect some straight men would disagree for a start -- witness how a certain class of guy turns violent when they discover that the attractive woman they were chatting up is biologically or chromosomally male.

Hmm, yes. I think the distinction between "perceptions" and "thoughts" is very much problematizable, but then what isn't in this world, and there does seem to be an intuitive logic at work.

Having reread the questions and responses, whilst I obviously cannot recreate the mental state I was in when I answered, I suspect that my voting resulted from my different interpretation of what the question meant. To me Using alien technology to make other people attracted to you. implies no element of altering thoughts. I'm thinking of it more as an alien equivalent to those perfume adverts where the person magically becomes irresistible. To get from that to an assumption of mental and physical invasion seems quite a leap to me, yet oddly everyone else seems to have made it without pause. Interesting.

I think to me, there's a subtle but crucial difference between:

make other people attracted to you
and
make yourself attractive to other people

One is altering yourself, the other is altering the other person.