#|| Parasitic Prompter

[lonesome-witching]

Broken Pieces (AKA Mind Control Part 3)

I once again bring you the Mind Control AU (Part 1 and Part 2) with a third (probably not final) edition. This was requested by @thepartyfriendship and an anonymous prompter. This is the first time two people have send me the same prompt. At least that is how I'm interpreting the messages because I thought it was cool. Anyway, here is part 3. I hope I have done it justice.

You can read my previous prompts or send me some new ones.

Nancy watched helplessly as Steve wrapped Robin’s arm. Her own hands were still shaking. It didn’t matter that Robin smiled at her, the guilt was eating at Nancy’s heart.

“Steve? Can you leave us for a moment?” Robin asked.

Steve searched Robin’s face and then nodded hesitantly. “Just shout if you need anything.”

Robin nodded, watching the boys exit the room. Nancy remained curled up within herself, sitting next to her bed.

“Are you alright?” Robin asked the second the door closed.

Nancy laughed and noticed Robin tense up. “Sorry, it’s just a bit ridiculous that you are asking me if I’m alright. You got shot because of me.”

“And I’d do it again. And again. And again. Nancy, I would shoot myself a thousand times over if it helped safe you.’

“Well, maybe I don’t want you to!” Nancy jumped up. “Maybe I don’t want you to sacrifice yourself for me. Maybe I want you to be safe. Even if that means being far away from me.”

“I know you want that. But Nance, this isn’t just about you. I wouldn’t be safe if I was far away from you because I don’t know if I can still breathe without you around. I— Nance, you mean everything to me. I’m not going to leave when you’re in danger.”

“What if I want you to leave?” Nancy felt tears prick in her eyes. She didn’t want Robin to leave. She wanted Robin to come closer. She wanted Robin to hold her.

“Then I’ll leave, after I make sure you’re okay. After I make sure Vecna is gone and dead and buried. After I know you’re safe, I’ll leave. You’ll never have to see me again.”

Robin was cradling her arm. A grimace on her face. “Does it hurt?” Nancy asked carefully. Her voice nothing more than a plea for Robin to look at her.

“Yeah, it does.” Robin looked at the ceiling instead. “You know, I don’t get you. You write in your diary about how much you love me and about how amazing I am, but to my face you’re acting like a bitch.”

“You read that?” In the midst of everything Nancy had forgotten she even kept a diary.

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy or anything. I was just trying to figure out what was wrong with you.”

Nancy nodded.  She wasn’t angry with Robin. She doubted she could be.

“Nance, I think it’s pretty obvious how I feel about you.”

“I’m still dating Jonathan,” Nancy responded quickly. It only resulted in Robin taking a step back.

“I know. I’m not trying to come on to you or anything.”

“I know.”

“So, are you alright? Any traces of Vecna left?”

“I don’t know. I feel weird. And it’s like somewhere in the back of my head he’s still simmering, like some kind of parasite. Just feeding off me and waiting to strike again.” Nancy hugged her arms around herself, hoping to find some kind of comfort in her own embrace. She didn’t.

“Is it— Can I hug you? Is that okay?” Robin asked carefully. Treating Nancy like the ticking time bomb she really was.

“Yeah, I’d really like that actually.”

Robin wrapped herself around Nancy, not caring about her injured arm or her hurt feelings. “I’ve got you, Nance. I’ve got you until you tell me to let go.”

Nancy held onto Robin, pulling her ever closer. “Please, never do. Don’t let go.” She barely noticed the sobs wreaking havoc on her body.

“I won’t. I’ll hold on.”

“I really do love you, Robin.” Nancy whispered in Robin’s ear. Hoping Robin hadn’t heard her. Hoping Robin had.

---

Steve took Robin home. Or maybe to the hospital. He hadn’t said much. He had just grabbed Robin’s good arm and told them they were leaving. Jonathan had stayed. He had looked at Nancy with sad eyes before sinking into the couch.

“Should we talk?” he asked, voice hoarse.

“Probably.”

“Are we breaking up?”

“Probably.”

Nancy didn’t cry as she pushed herself through the inevitable. Instead, she pictured Robin’s embrace and her kind words. She thought back to the fairytales her mother had read to her when she was a kid. About how true love conquered all. A true loves kiss erased all the curses in the world. And she hoped that the solution was that easy. That all she needed was to kiss Robin and it would clear up her head. That it would erase Vecna and then they could plan on how to shoot the bastard once again.

Jonathan slammed the door as he left and suddenly Nancy was all alone. All alone with traces of evil lurking in the back of her mind. Slowly she dragged herself upstairs. She noticed the gun that still lay on the floor and for the first time noticed the diary that lay folded open next to the bed.

She walked to her nightstand, opened the drawer and picked up her Walkman. She doubted it would help but she’d be stupid not to try.

She crawled under the covers and closed her eyes. Dreaming of Robin. Maybe in some alternate universe there wouldn’t be an Upside Down. Maybe there she had met Robin at school. Maybe there she’d have kissed Robin before she kissed Steve or Jonathan. Maybe there was a universe out there where she hadn’t made the mistakes she had made in this one. One where Barb was still alive. One where Mike didn’t wake up screaming late at night. One where she didn’t have to worry about Holly never growing old.

Tomorrow she’d call Robin. She’d tell her that she broke up with Jonathan. She’d ask to meet and then she’d kiss Robin. She’d kiss her and she’d never stop kissing her. She’d drown in Robin’s body and swallow up her smell. Tomorrow she’d fix everything.

But today she was too tired. Today she needed to sleep.

---

Robin fell down on her bed. The back of her head itched. As her hands reached over to scratch, she felt a strange liquid on her fingertips. She pulled her hand back and saw the drops of blood sliding down her fingers.

[khepiari]

Why are so many creative people using AI?

So, a few days back, I ran into multiple people having a meltdown on Twitter about a seasoned and reputed artist who had been using AI tools and experimenting with them to create new works. Most of these people were hurt because this artist person is an icon and has impacted many young people.

The most common QTs that I read had more or less the same dilemma framed as a question, which when paraphrased boils down to: It’s hard to understand why amazing artists are turning to using AI?

The answer that many are seeking isn't that hard to find: IT IS CAPITALISM.

Isn’t it simple: the physical and mental labour behind an original work does not yield the money these talented and hard-working artists deserve. So if something makes their life easier and pays the same for less effort, why will they not use the latest tech? Which in their case is the AI. To many artists, using AI for certain aspects of their work is like using Grammarly for us copyeditors, they see it as a tool.

Art is labour-intensive, that’s why you demand better pay or watch your heroes doom.

Instead of screaming from a moral high ground and calling out, understand why talented people are tempted to use AI. They are not slithering to the Dark Side because they lack artistic integrity, they are slowly being made to feel that playing by the set rules is not in their favour. And I am not talking about AI prompters calling themselves artists here at all, those parasites can fall off the face of the planet. I am talking about actual artists with years of training and learning using AI because of poor pay-scale, unfair working conditions and unethical practices in IP Laws.

Likewise, I have said this before, AI is not limited to just gen AI like Chatgpt, Sora or the one used in Midjourney. AI has existed for a while in many industries. It is extremely helpful in healthcare, accounting, agriculture, and cancer research, albeit its usefulness can be exploited by people with money and power and copyright and patent. And who are these people; they mostly work for the tech companies. These companies and industries monopolize each field of knowledge for profit and will use AI and anything that comes after it to squeeze out profit at any cost. Many artists have understood this and are quit-quitting on their efforts, and can we blame them? Why do I know this, as a former book-editor I know many book-cover designers, who are refusing to stretch their creative selves for new work. AI-developing companies have stolen their work to train their systems, so they are using those AI tools to cut down on the raw material called the thinking process. Eventually, it will become a cycle where the snake eats its tail, only with the presence of AI rendering the snake might not look like a snake, but what an individual’s idea of a snake-form! “Twice removed thrice placed” like Plato said.

So before calling out individual artists: CALL OUT CORPORATIONS! They are making the creative and innovative fields hostile to originality and harming the most important factor of creation; the need for time to think. Everyone and everything is being churned, good art and good results come with patience. Capitalistic demand for everything instantly is destroying not only our attention span but the long process of conceiving an idea, planning the project and executing the idea and deliverance! Because remember, talented people not from only art but also from other branches will and are using AI. If they find the value of their hard-work is undermined. They will use AI to get by. Thinking and doing creative work is an exhausting process. So if clients and giant companies can’t respect that, more and more people will become frustrated or just decide to use any tech that helps.

And do not bring environmental issues here just to call out artists. Yes, we have every right to be angry at what the use of AI does to the planet. But having a public meltdown on social media, and harassing underpaid exhausted artists, is not the answer.

The problem of environmental safety again lies with big tech, Fortune 500 and the oil companies who are fucking the planet at the very moment while the entire human population sits tied, bound and gagged to a chair like a hostage.

It's sad, I can understand that it hurts to see your creative heroes sell out and go to the other side, but these are consequences of long-term inaction.

Hence, bring out the sticks, stones, and boulders and riot. Grieve out openly and make it a headache for organizations who are replacing the human workforce with AI.

P.S: Before you call me pro-AI, I am not. I am someone who is currently unemployed because AI literally took over my job. I am trying to be sensible and make sense of the bigger picture, which is beyond the 280 character count.

[virulentphotographer]

Like for a starter dears. 🎵

[femnet]

When you sleep, you allow your body and mind to recover from the day’s activities and stresses, you favor the best conservation of your muscles, and you help your brain to memorize the information collected through the past hours.

Sleeping is also a preventive measure that will avoid you the gain of weight, and decreases the risks of developing diabetes and risks of accidents and clumsiness. It calms the heart and arteries tension, and favors a healthy growth in children.

You must have gotten the point: sleeping is a natural, compulsory, and vital human activity. The time of rest that you should get strongly depends on your metabolism, daily activities, and other little details, but no one should skip this important way of loading out battery and living a better life.

And yet, many of us struggle to close our eyes at night.

This lack of inclination to sleep can have many reasons, some of which we will examine later in the article, but most of the time only one solution is proposed to insomniacs in order to solve their problem: sleeping drugs.

However, sleeping drugs can hurt you more than they help you: in most of cases, their collateral effects include long-time energy decrease, memory troubles, and an addiction to those substance that become less and less effective in the long run.

So what if you’re looking for a steady sleep, but do not want to damage your health in trying?

There is good news for you: this article exposes 5 of the best tips to solve sleeping issues.

First of all: how does sleep work?

One good night of rest, in order to be effective, needs to be composed of four to five cycles of the sleeping stages.

Each cycle lasts around 90 minutes, and is made of four phases: the transition between wakefulness to sleep, the progressive decrease of the body’s activity and temperature, the deepest part of the sleep, and the paradoxical sleep.

Each stage is controlled by the subconscious part of your mind.

1- Educate your brain:

As explained above, your brain controls your sleep. In consequence, is there a more logical mean to avoid insomnia than educating your reflective organ? Probably not.

If you want to be able to sleep at night, you need to teach your brain what sleep is, and how, where and when to sleep.

Now, you might be telling yourself that this is a very silly thing to even think of. A child would know what sleep is, that it has to be done on a bed, at night, and in total calmness. And yet, without realizing it, you might be sending wrong sleep-related information to the subconscious part of your mind, everyday.

We need 21 days to develop a habit, and the brain requires consistency to adapt itself. If some days you fall asleep on the couch, and others on the bed, your brain will end up confused. Is the bed the sleeping place, or the couch? It will get harder for you to doze off on any of the two after a while, and the same can happen in different other areas.

Here are some tips to teach your brain what is right for sleep:

Use your bed only to sleep. Do not lie on it to read or to work.

Set fixed hours to go to bed, and avoid altering them. Even during weekends, keep the same sleeping schedule.

Avoid taking naps during the day, or at least keep them shorter than 35 minutes. One nap, even if it lasts less than 90 minutes, will count to your brain as a sleeping cycle, and it will be removed from the four to five ones that you need to get at night. This will not encourage a reduction in insomnia.

Make your surroundings progressively darker. If you sleep in a room where there are two or more lights on, turn them off one by one in about fifteen to thirty minutes. The slow approach of darkness will slow your brain waves down.

2- Prepare your body to sleep:

Getting into sleep stance requires slowing down in your body activity and brain waves. In order to do so, you should pay attention to the following details.

Do not ingest caffeine in the afternoon. It is a renowned stimulant, and will make it harder for your body to slow down when rest time comes up, because it will remain in your blood circulation for at least twelve hours. Other stimulants also include, but are not limited, to: theine (tea), dark chocolate, energy drinks, sodas, etc.

Avoid doing exercise at least two hours before going to bed, be it physical or logical. If you practice sports or work before going to bed, you increase the level of stress hormones in your body, which will act as a prevention for the sleeping cycles to begin naturally. Playing video games is also a negative. However, some physical activity during the day is crucial.

Eat at least two hours before going to bed, and diminish your meal quantities. After eating, your body enters in a phase of digestion that can last up to two hours to complete itself. Digestion requires energy, and a higher flow of blood to your organs, which will also act as a prevention to the first natural sleep cycle. It is advised to eat vegetables and dairies during dinner, and strongly advocated against to choose meat, spices, and fats.

Do not stare at screens for at least thirty minutes before bedtime. Computers, phones, tablets, televisions, and other gadgets display a violent light, which increases your brain activity in an unhealthy way before sleeping. If you really need to remain connected to a screen, at least make sure that other lights are on in the room. However, reading a book is a perfect alternative, and it will also favor the transition to sleep.

Do not delay sleep. The sleep cycle announces itself with yawning and a felt heaviness in the eyelids and body. Take this opportunity: it’s your entry to a good sleep. If you try to resist, you will have to wait 90 more minutes (the duration of a sleep cycle) before the first stage of sleep becomes available again.

3- Breathing is the key:

There are various breathing techniques that can appease you before sleep, but the most useful one is the 5-5 exercise.

Inhale deeply for five seconds, and exhale slowly for the same amount of time, all while focusing on the movement of your rib cage. Repeat this for around five minutes, and your mind will abandon itself to sleep easily.

In order to make the breathing more effective, be sure to open the window of your bedroom for some ten to fifteen minutes, at least one hour before going to bed. This will refresh the atmosphere in the room, and supply it with more oxygen.

4- Noise is the number one enemy:

Noise increases the activity of your brain, the exact opposite of what you should want before going to sleep.

Loud television or music, rackety surroundings, or even a tap dripping create a disturbance in the mind, and delays your access to sleep. Soundproofing is strongly recommended, and all parasite sounds such as a working fan, a running AC, or a tapping window should be eliminated.

Some kinds of melody, however, can help you dozing off easily. Classical, jazz, and instrumental pieces are advised.

5- Choose some natural remedies:

Instead of taking drugs, try out your grandmother’s natural recipes. Here are some examples of famous insomnia remedies that were used back in the days, and that are slowly becoming popular again:

Sip infusions. Chamomile, verbena, lime-flower and valerian teas (specifically without theine) are some of the best sleep-prompters. A cup of one of those, thirty minutes before bedtime, can even be accompanied by a spoon of honey.

Diffuse scents. Pouring a couple of Petit Grain bigarade or lavender essential oil drops on a handkerchief, and keeping it close to your pillow favor a deeply restorative sleep.

Decrease your body temperature. Taking a cooling shower to bring your body temperature some degrees lower will prompt your muscles to seek the warmth of a bed.

Discover homeopathy. You will be amazed by the calming powers of gelsemium, coffea (to not be confused with coffee), and escholtzia.

When the problem is big, the solution most of the time lies in the smallest things. Take care of each of these aspects, and you’ll sleep better than a baby at night.

This article was also published on WomenExamples.

[go-redgirl]

Limbaugh: RNC Was About Saving America from a Race War Democrats Actively Trying to Promote

During his nationally syndicated show on Friday, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh discussed the Republican National Convention held earlier in the week and how it compared to the Democratic National Convention in a prerecorded message he made as he recovers from an infection.

Limbaugh gave President Donald Trump and the RNC high marks but said the DNC was being used by Democrats to be divisive.

One of the elements Limbaugh praised about the RNC was the push for inclusiveness, and argued Democrats were promoting racial hostilities.

Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):

LIMBAUGH: We can rest assured that this is the case, having watched it last night. I saw people complaining. The Fox News people were complaining that the speech was too long, 70 minutes. Let me tell you: If anybody has earned the right to take as much time as he wants to explain himself, it’s Donald Trump. The man has been slandered and libeled multiple times a day every day for four years.

He has been unfairly criticized. He’s been lied about. He has been the subject of a search-and-destroy campaign. And this entire week the Republican National Convention has been a focused period of time for Trump and his administration to tell their story, and if it took him 70 minutes last night to do it, fine and dandy. They say, “Well, y’ know, he didn’t see to have a whole lot of energy out there.”

He was not going to win, no matter what he did. If he’d done Trump at a rally, they’d have said he wasn’t presidential. If he had gone out and been really tough and called Biden a bunch of names, they would have said, “He’s not presidential! He’s not taking it seriously.” So last night I thought he was actually really good. The only thing that upset me about it going long was people were falling asleep in the Eastern Time Zone and missing some of it.

I thought it was exactly what was called for. It was calm. It was assuring. And you know something else? Remember the prepublicity on all this. The prepublicity was, “Trump was gonna come out, he was gonna fire on all cylinders, and he was gonna be ripping Biden and Kamala Harris a new one,” and that’s not what we got last night.

We got a guy who was self-assured, who was confident. I couldn’t tell when he was on the prompter and when he wasn’t. He was funny in a deadpan, slow-stated or downplayed kind of way — and he was unthreatening. You know, the prepublicity on this was, “Well, this guy, he’s going to come out firing both barrels! You better be prepared! He’s going to launch everything.” It wasn’t that way at all.

It was calm, it was reasoned — and for those watching Trump to learn a little bit about him, there wasn’t anything about it that was threatening.

Look, folks, I also have some other observations about things that have happened while I’ve been away. I want to take the opportunity here of this occasion just to get some of those thoughts in, in preparation for my return to the Golden EIB Microphone on Monday. I loved Ivanka’s speech last night. One line particularly stood out: “Washington didn’t change my father. My father changed Washington.”

Boy, is that true. It is right-on-the-money true, and it continues to be the case, and it explains why they continue — in the establishment, deep state, whatever — to be so outraged and indignant and irrational. They’re incapable of being rational when Trump is around, precisely because he is changing where they live. He’s changing where they work.

Now, can I remind you of something? And I took a lot of heat for this. I said last week that the Democrat challenge was going to be to find a way to renege on the debates, and everybody — blogosphere, pundits, and people on cable news — said, “Limbaugh is off his rocker! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Of course there’s going to be debates!

“There’s going to be three debates. Biden is assuring everybody there’s going to be debates,” and what happened? Nancy Pelosi … Stop and think of this, folks. Nancy Pelosi comes out and says, “I would not legitimize a conversation with him.” Now, she’s clearly laying the groundwork for Biden not to have to debate, and she wouldn’t have done that without the Biden campaign’s knowledge of it.

The idea she’s out there shooting from the hip? I guess it’s possible because it’s Pelosi. She may be trying to manipulate things because I’ll tell you something else going on out there, folks. You know, internal polls for politicians don’t lie. The polls that they do that they report to you and me — like take your pick of any poll. Those polls, as you well know, are made to shape public opinion, not reflect it.

But internal polls, like the Trump campaign internal polls or the Biden internal polls? They’re not lying to themselves in those polls — and those polls must be bad. I saw a poll, and I can’t remember the name of it right now. Let me find it real quick. (shuffling papers) Black Lives Matter in Wisconsin’s popularity has gone from plus-25 to zero in two months. Oh, yeah. It was a tweet here from noted hate expert Jonathan Chait.

“Democrats need to be extremely concerned about what’s happening in Wisconsin, where support for BLM has gone from +25 to +0 in 2 months.” In Wisconsin! It’s happening all over the place, and by now I’m sure you’ve all heard that CNN anchors are warning, “Oh, we gotta get serious. We got to talk about the rioting. The focus group data looks bad. The polling data looks bad.”

Oh, so now it’s not about saving lives, not about saving property. Now that all this is starting to hurt the Democrats, now they’ve got to start talking about it? But these internal polls must be bad. They don’t lie in these internal polls. Biden … Did you notice yesterday he didn’t just leave the basement; he went up a floor? He went to the living room. He went up to where there’s a fireplace — in August.

Kamala Harris emerged from whatever hovel she was living in to come out and tell a bunch of whoppers about Trump, and I think the fact that these polls — the internal polls in the Biden campaign — are bad can be seen in the Biden campaign’s activity. Here’s a New York Times story: “How Chaos in Kenosha Is Already Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin,” and there’s a quote from somebody here.

“Ellen Ferwerda, who owns an antique furniture store downtown just blocks from the worst of the destruction that is now closed, said … Democratic leaders seemed hesitant to condemn the mayhem. ‘I think they just don’t know what to say.'” Uh, if you don’t know what to say about rioters, if you don’t know what to say about people that are destroying your town, then it’s obvious you don’t know what to do about it, either.

Bruce Arians, the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You know, a lot of these players — NFL, NBA, NHL — decided to not practice or cancel a bunch of games because of the shooting in Kenosha, and Bruce Arians, the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, said, “I don’t know that protest is an action. I think each guy has a personal thing.

Already people in the sports media are outraged that he would say this, that “the Boston Tea Party was protest.” No, it was action. It was much more than just marching up and down the street or carrying a bunch of signs or looting and destroying other people’s property. There is a big difference between action and protest. What he was really saying was (summarized):

“Canceling practice — not practicing football one day — is not going to change anything you claim to be in favor of. It’s not going to matter a whit,” and so — he didn’t say this; I will — they’re getting away with engaging in a bunch of symbolism while not having to engage in any genuine substance.

Folks, a couple of other things here that I want to delve into. I actually believe… I saw a little note from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. Actually, there were some major things happening this week that I haven’t heard anybody say. Now, that doesn’t mean nobody has, because I haven’t been able to listen to everything. But I look at the Republican convention.

It’s been the most diverse political convention I’ve ever seen, including Democrat conventions. And as I’ve watched it, it has occurred to me that Trump isn’t just running for reelection. The story that is being told at the Republican National Convention is about saving America. It’s about saving America from a race war that the Democrats are out there actively trying to promote. They’re trying to foment it.

They want this country to be black versus white, immigrant versus native, male versus female. That’s what they want. They want that chaos. They want this constant us-versus-them aspect of daily life. And Trump is making it clear that he’s interested in people who are constructive, productive, generally happy. He’s not interested in parasites, the generally miserable.

He wants everybody to join in this project of making America great again, to restoring America’s greatness where we had contentment and happiness, and people sought happiness. The fact that all of that is controversial still amazes me. But I think it’s an… If you look at the Republican convention, it is astounding, the understory, or some of the themes underneath the surface that are, I think, extremely powerful.

There’s another thing, folks, that is undeniable, and that is the Republican Party is no longer the party of the McCains or the Bushes or the Romneys or take your pick. I mean, or the Koch brothers, all the big donors and so forth. This is clearly a Republican Party now that is Donald Trump’s, and he’s got 92 to 95% Republican loyalty.

It’s one of the most amazing transformations of a political party, and it’s taken place in less than three years. At this convention, George W. Bush was nowhere to be found. None of the old Republican elders. Romney was nowhere to be found. Not that they wanted to be there, but that’s the point. So I just… I think that there is a lot, folks, to be optimistic about, particularly if President Trump wins.

(alarm chime)

Oops! There’s my timer telling me that my time is up, but it’s not up. I gave myself a couple of extra seconds here. It is an opportunity for an upbeat, positive nature among all of us. This week has been very eye-opening for me. It’s been a very bad week, and yet it has ended for me feeling inspired and upbeat and really confident about the future of our country if President Trump is reelected. I believe the opposite is true if he’s not.

[spectaculardistractions]

So far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and by such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is no biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection of women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem, actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller than those of men; their muscular co-ordinations are surely no prompter. One finds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many bodily blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites; their senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even assuming that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects of alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids, gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma, arthritis and so on–in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibrium that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, night sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers in men. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and appetites. They react in substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Côte Rôtie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic as he is.

H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women