#i cannot explain to you in words that matter how upsetting this phenomenon has become to me

[monsterroonio]

If I see one more white twink human sans I am going to die

[ggukcangetit]

Namjoon-ing in the Rain

Pairing: namjoon x reader

Synopsis: You hate the rain but your best friend, Namjoon, doesn’t feel the same. 

Genre/AU: fluff| best friends!au

Word Count: 1.6k

Rating: PG-13 for language

Warnings: nothing really

A/N:  i’ve never really written a member-centric fic for anyone other than jungkook. not sure how this worked out. just something that felt like being written. mainly because i hate the rain and i miss my friends. banner by @sushireads​ !!

There is something about the rain. It makes everything horribly squelchy and disgusting. Daily routine is hampered, and everyone and everything is thrown off kilter. Frankly, you hate the rain. 

You do not own a car, instead having to rely on public transport for every single commute. Another reason why you cannot stand the rain. Squishing yourself into a crowded bus during rush hour, completely drenched and trying your utmost to avoid the wandering hands of well-meaning perverts, is not your idea of fun. And why are you drenched when the weather app has predicted a week’s worth of showers which should have prepared you to carry an umbrella along with you. Honestly, you have half a mind to sue every single umbrella manufacturer there is. What is the point of the umbrella if you are still soaked to the bone after holding it up in the rain for a maximum of 3 minutes?

Of course, you do not verbalize these grievances when the opportunity arises. Instead, you opt for a more succinct phrase.

“Fuck the rain.”

Your best friend doesn’t have much of a response to this, continuing to sip the americano in front of him.

“Namjoon, pay attention!” you yell, snapping your fingers in front of him to get his attention.

He looks up with a mildly amused expression. “I heard you.”

“It’s only polite to respond when someone says something.”

“Yes, but-” he shuts the book he had been reading- “when someone only ever says the one thing over and over again, responses are more likely to run out.”

“Rude.” You cross your arms across your chest, glaring out the window of the coffee shop situated opposite your place of work - the place you meet Namjoon every Friday when work gets over an hour early.

“Come on, Y/N,” Namjoon chuckles, tapping on the table to grab your attention. “You always complain about the rain, but you’ve never actually said why you hate it.”

“It’s an inconvenience,” you say simply.

“I beg to differ.”

“Why? Don’t tell me it’s some romantic bullshit like the rains make everything magical and wondrous. Or the ever popular notion that rains are cleansing - a new beginning!” You scoff and roll your eyes, fingers impatiently tucking wet strands of hair behind your ear.

“I’m sure that’s true to an extent. But that’s not what I’m talking about,” said Namjoon, tiredly rubbing his eyes. “I’ll try and explain it to you some other time. Right now, I’m too tired to think. Yoongi was up all night mixing tracks and I couldn’t fall asleep in the next room.”

“You should’ve gone home after work,” you say, feeling a little guilty.

“I should’ve,” he replies with a shrug, but doesn’t budge from his seat for another hour as you finish your latte and he makes a few notes in the book he was reading.

An entire month passes by, and you and Namjoon have missed your weekly Friday coffee meets twice. It’s nothing life-changing or particularly alarming that has caused this disruption. It’s just life. But on the fifth Friday, the weather is bright and sparkling, and Namjoon suggests sitting by the Han river instead of inside the coffee shop. Since you are breaking from your routine anyway, you decide to order an iced honey chai instead of your usual latte. Namjoon opts for two iced americanos instead of one. 

You’ve only been to the river a handful of times. Each time, Namjoon has been there with you. In a way, you can’t imagine the river without him. Memory is funny in the way that it attaches permanence to the more fleeting parts of existence. 

“Did you submit the report on time?” Namjoon asks, stretching his long limbs above his head. 

“Just. Two minutes more and I would’ve missed the deadline.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything less from a fellow deadline junkie.”

You grin before sipping the iced honey chai. It doesn’t taste that great. This is why you don’t experiment with new things. They tend not to work out for you. Or maybe it’s just that you’re unwilling to give change a chance. But that thought is not something you dwell on for longer than a moment.

“Honey chai not to your liking?” Namjoon chuckles at your disgruntled expression.

“This is the last time I’m experimenting with things. Dunno why I did it in the first place. It’s all thanks to your terrible influence. Changing up our usual meeting place pressured me into changing up my choice of beverage.”

“Whatever makes sense to you.”

“I’m just glad the weather is good today! Crisp skies and warm sunshine! I’ve really missed this!” You gaze up at the sky happily, noting a single grey cloud floating by. 

The weather gods have never particularly liked you as is evidenced by the fact that a torrential downpour begins mere seconds after you utter that sentence. 

“Fuck!” You stand up, gathering your belongings and calculating the driest path back to the coffee shop.

“Where are you going?” Namjoon asks, not having moved from his place on the bench.

“Inside. In case you haven’t noticed, Joon, it’s raining like the fucking apocalypse!”

“You’ll be drenched by the time you manage to get to any of the shops. It’s actually better to stay here. The benches here don’t really get wet unless there’s a strong accompanying wind.”

You groan dejectedly, dropping your bag on the bench and flopping down beside him. Namjoon always looks so peaceful during rains. It’s a complete contrast to the immense irritation this particular weather phenomenon has always ignited in you. 

“Why do you like the rain so much?” you ask, turning away from his handsome profile.

“I don’t like it, per se.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I have time.”

“I always look to people to learn about life. Each person in my life has taught me something different. But I also realised that this applies to rain as well. There are so many different kinds of rain, and just like the different people in my life, each type of rain has showed me something different about life. There’s the soft shower that barely touches you as it falls from the sky which is such a contrast to the relentlessness of the rainstorms that continue for hours on end. Then you have the sudden storms that burst through without any warning, upsetting the natural rhythm of things. The cold showers in early November that indicate the incoming winter. And lastly, the first rain that hits the ground after a brutal summer. That’s my favorite one because the smell of the wet earth coming to life always reminds me of that day in our first year of college.”

Namjoon wanted to cry. He was nineteen years old, studying art history and business at the most prestigious college in the country, on his way to becoming a research assistant for one of his favorite academics. Yet, today all he really wanted to do was cry. It was the last week of the semester, the weather had been particularly oppressive, the cafeteria had run out of food by the time he had managed to get out of a meeting with his professor, and to top it off, his bicycle chain had snapped just as he was preparing to cycle home. 

It was at that moment that you walked over to him. You both had become friends about a year ago, and if he was perfectly honest, Namjoon wasn’t really sure how that happened. You were calm, even slightly formidable, in the way that you handled every part of your college life. Whereas, he was a bit of a bumbling mess, misplacing lecture notes, contact lenses, and plastic utensils. He often wondered what it was that was holding your friendship together.

“You missed food,” you said to him, matter-of-factly. “It sucked. But I snagged one of Seokjin’s homemade chicken wraps for you.”

Namjoon blinked a couple of times before taking the neatly wrapped packet from you. 

“Well, go on,” you said impatiently. “Eat it. What’re you waiting for?”

“R-right.”

But just as he unwrapped the foil, a crack of thunder erupted followed by a burst of rainfall. Namjoon had resigned himself to the fact that things were not going to go his way that day. What he had not expected was to hear you yell the most interesting cuss words at the top of your voice.

“FUCKING HELL! THIS WAS NOT ON THE FORECAST FOR TODAY! I DON’T HAVE A BLOODY UMBRELLA WITH ME! BASTARDS IN THE WEATHER DEPARTMENT CAN’T EVEN DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS PROPERLY! UGH!!!”

Though everything that could go wrong had gone wrong that day, he had never been able to forget the smell of the wet earth on that day. Because that was when he began seeing you as a real person and stopped questioning the mechanics of your friendship. 

“I realised that day that you and I were different in many ways, but there would always be something that united us. We’re human and all humans feel despair and frustration at something or the other. The rain humanized you that day. And I’ll always be grateful to it because otherwise I would’ve never gotten to know my best friend.”

It continues pouring for a couple of hours more. But the two of you don’t move from the bench alongside the river. The iced honey chai lays neglected on the iron armrest, while the empty americano cups have long since been deposited into the nearby trash can. 

There is something about the rain. It makes everything horribly squelchy and disgusting. Daily routine is hampered, and everyone and everything is thrown off kilter. But frankly, there are better things to hate than the rain.

[starringemiliaclarke]

Emilia Clarke on Why Game of Thrones Is the Perfect Form of Escapism + HQ Scans

As Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke created a warrior queen for the ages. Her legend can be told on the walls of caves or on T-shirts at Comic-Con. But behind the Valkyrie wigs and very testy dragons, Clarke has an inspiring origin story of her own.

A valley sprawls before her, rich with every color of green in the kingdom, reaching out to a twinkling city, which borders the infinite sea. Her hair (tinted not with peroxide, but tiny flecks of actual gold) glows with a radiance that makes the setting sun so jealous it hides behind the surrounding mountains, and the evening sky blushes. She is Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of the Andals, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. Everything in sight belongs to her.

Just kidding! She is Emilia Clarke, sitting high above Beverly Hills in a glass mansion rented for a magazine cover shoot. So high up that passing aircraft rattle the bones of the house and those inside it. So high up that you can see Santa Catalina Island in the distance, peeking out from behind a curtain of fog. She laughs about something the makeup artist says, and the last of the evening light bounces off of her cheekbones and shoots into the camera lens.

We are in the sky to talk about Clarke’s reign as one of the most preeminent television actresses of our time, as Daenerys on Game of Thrones. But first, I have a few questions about her abandoned career as a jazz singer.

Clarke’s default emotion is joy — her resting heart rate seems to be just below that of someone seconds after winning a medium-expensive raffle prize — but it quickly congeals into theatrical horror when I reveal that I know that she is a casual but talented singer of jazz music.

When she was 10, Clarke was an alto in a chorus that she describes as “very churchy.” Then a substitute teacher introduced her class to jazz. “I just innately understood it,” she explains. “I was always sliding up and down the notes. Every time, the [chorus] teacher would be like, ‘Quit sliding, just sing that note and then that one and that’s it. Stop trying to fuck with it.’ Then this [jazz teacher] was like, ‘Fuck with it. That’s the point.’ ” Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Clarke was singing “The Way You Look Tonight” at the American Songbook Gala in New York, honoring Richard Plepler, erstwhile CEO of HBO. Nicole Kidman was there, too, and that is the story of Emilia Clarke, a very famous singer.

Just kidding, again! That is the story of Emilia Clarke, extremely famous actress, and it is not even the beginning. Game of Thrones, the HBO fantasy epic that has captured the global zeitgeist for most of the past decade, has entered its ultimate season. Since the show premiered in 2011, Daenerys’s searing platinum blonde has been branded into the brains of every living person with cable access, so much so that she has become as recognizable an action figure as Princess Leia. Every autumn, legions of Americans don Grecian-style dresses and carry stuffed dragons to Halloween parties in homage. Kristen Wiig even appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in a full Daenerys getup. This phenomenon exists in part because it’s a relatively easy costume to assemble, but more likely because Game of Thrones is the most popular TV show in the history of TV shows.

It’s also just one of three popular entertainment franchises Clarke has participated in. Last year: Solo: A Star Wars Story, as a paramour of Han Solo. Two years before that: the fifth Terminator movie, beside Arnold. She was also Holly Golightly in a short-lived Breakfast at Tiffany’s production on Broadway. None of those projects were particularly successful — but none of that matters, to a remarkable degree, because what matters is: The people love Daenerys.

They love a character whose series arc begins with her indentured servitude as a warlord’s concubine and ends, most recently, with her fighting for sovereignty over a league of nations and for a throne made of swords. They love how fictional languages drift from her mouth like dancing smoke, and how her searing-white mane retains a fearsome curl, even in or near battle. They love the whole dragons thing.

The people would love Emilia Clarke, too, if only they knew who she was. During the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, Clarke was able to fool the general public into believing she was very regular civilian Emilia Clarke, because Daenerys was blonde, and Clarke was not. Now, she says, recognition happens more frequently. Particularly Stateside.

For reasons I cannot fathom, Americans feel more entitled to command the attention of celebrities. “People are like, ‘UH-melia CLORK!’ ” she says, in perfect American. In London, people are prone to whisper about her as she passes by. “ ‘Was that Emilia Clarke?’ ”

“I move like a shark when I’m in public,” she says. “Head down. I think I’ve got quite bad posture because of it, because I’m determined to lead a normal life. So I just move too quickly for anyone to register if it’s me or not. And I don’t walk around with six security men and big sunglasses and a bizarre coat. I really try to meld in.” It gets worse when the show is being promoted, but otherwise, she says, it’s not so bad.

“I move like a shark when I’m in public. Head down…I’m determined to lead a normal life, so I just move too quickly for anyone to register if it’s me or not.”

Her best efforts aside, anonymity may be a pipe dream. The show is as decorated as a Christmas tree in a craft store. Game of Thrones has won a Peabody and 47 Emmys, the most of any television drama in history. The show marries critical praise with popular success, then it mercilessly slaughters those who have come to celebrate this union and receives even more acclaim (“The Rains of Castamere,” season 3, episode 9). The plotlines are famously convoluted. Luckily, we have an entire web’s worth of episode explainers, encyclopedias designed specifically for the Westeros universe, and a self-explanatory Funny or Die segment called Gay of Thrones, starring Jonathan van Ness.

When Mad Men first aired, television bloggers dutifully unpacked its symbolic elements, and millennials celebrated the show’s style with Mad Men–themed parties that were really just ’60s-and-one-red-wig-themed parties. Game of Thrones is basically an economy of its own. Since the show premiered, tourism to Croatia, whose coastal port Dubrovnik stands in for the fictional city of King’s Landing, has nearly doubled. Game of Thrones–themed weddings are so popular that it is almost impossible not to attend them — in 2016, Clarke accidentally walked into one that was occurring at the same hotel where she and the cast were staying during filming. (It was not a canonical wedding, and no guests were harmed.)

Game of Thrones has also earned one of the most important pop culture accolades of the century: The attention of Beyoncé Knowles. I believe it is her favorite TV show, and this is why.

Exhibit A: Jay-Z reportedly gave her a prop dragon’s egg from the set, at great personal expense. Exhibit B: At an Oscars after-party this year, Beyoncé approached Clarke (“voluntarily,” according to the actress) to introduce herself. “I watched her face go, ‘Oh, no, I shouldn’t be talking to this crazy [woman], who is essentially crying in front of me,’ ” remembers Clarke. “I think my inner monologue was, ‘Stop fucking it up,’ and I kept fucking it up.”

“I was like, ‘I just saw you in concert.’ And she was like, ‘I know.’ ” Clarke also mentions that Beyoncé complimented her work but declines to share specifics.

Why are people (more specifically, everybody) and goddesses (more specifically, Beyoncé) all obsessed with a show about some dragons and lots of dungeons?

“The show is sensationalist in a way,” Clarke explains, in an effort to describe a TV series that features twins having sex and a child’s defenestration in the very first episode. It doesn’t matter — Clarke’s conversational style is so intimate and emphatic that basic facts feel like sworn secrets. When she smiles, she does so with every single muscle in her face. “It’s the reason why people pick up gossip magazines. They want to know what happens next…. You’ve got a society that is far removed enough from ours but also circulates around power. How that corrupts people and how we want it, and how we don’t want it.”

In other words, Game of Thrones’ value proposition is creating a rich other world for people to experience a prestige, high-production version of pure, horny, violent, unbridled drama. It is, according to Clarke, pitched perfectly: “I think it caught Western society at exactly the right moment.”

“I don’t know about you,” she says, “but when I watch something, it’s escapism. I’m feeling crappy; I’m just sad, moody, depressed, upset, angry, whatever it is. I know that distraction is what makes me get better. Distraction is what really, really helps me.” She laughs and then quickly pivots to a caveat: “I’m sure that’s not what a therapist would advise.”

It is at this point that Emilia Clarke leans in very close, her breath knocking at my sideburn, and explains to me the bombastic and devastating ending to the most important TV show of the decade.

Wow — just kidding once more. But, uh, while we’re on the topic, how is this whole thing going to end?

It was not hard to root for the Breaker of Chains, until recently. Now we’re seeing the gentle unspooling of her character, and flickers of a dangerous prophecy that she will ascend the throne only to follow in her father’s footsteps and burn it all to the ground. For a while, Daenerys seemed like the Lawful Good ruler, but we have had the great pleasure of watching how power can pervert people. (Nate Jones, at Vulture, leads a thrilling discussion of this very topic.) (Also, if Daenerys were to rule the Seven Kingdoms, only to go nuts, we might at the very least have a spinoff to look forward to.)

Clarke will never say. Throughout 10 or so years in the public eye, her interviews have been peppered with the same handful of charming personal details from her career — the service jobs she worked prior to making it, dancing the funky chicken during her Game of Thrones audition — which feels a lot like walking a vast beach and finding the same series of 10 seashells.

Then, in March, some very different treasure washed ashore when The New Yorker ran the most illuminating profile of Emilia Clarke to date. It was written by Emilia Clarke.

If I am truly being honest every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.

In it, Clarke revealed that she had suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms during the early seasons of Game of Thrones. The first hit her mid-plank during a training session, and not long after, doctors discovered a second that required them to open her skull for a risky operation. The recovery period was, to her, more painful than the aneurysms. “If I am truly being honest,” she wrote, “every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.” She also announced her charity venture, SameYou, which seeks to provide rehabilitation for young people recovering from brain injuries.

The second time we talk, it is the day before the Game of Thrones New York premiere, and Clarke is at a morning fitting, surrounded by a coronation’s worth of gowns. It’s early, and a passing cold has fried the edges of her voice. But her words still vibrate with so much joy, it’s like she doesn’t even notice. She’s just happy to be here, wherever she is.

Source

Emilia Clarke on Why Game of Thrones Is the Perfect Form of Escapism + HQ Scans was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke | Est 2012

[dontcallmesensei]

Non-Terminal Education and Language

I’m not a pedagogue, so I’m a bit out of my field with this. I’ll also note that I don’t have any clear statistics for what I’m claiming. So take it with a grain of salt.

I had to invent a term to describe a phenomenon I’ve witness: Non-Terminal Education. Non-terminal education describes learning settings where little to nothing contextually important is intended to be taught. Note that I’m not saying that the teacher has failed to teach the important thing, but that nothing important was taught in the first place.

Let’s give you an example of the opposite: Terminal Education

Schools tend to do a good job of teaching mathematics. From the first grade to the twelfth grade, one is gradually taught more and more complex arithmetic, and then one progresses to geometry, and algebra, and calculus. And most people understand how to transfer these skills into the real world. People understand how to add, subtract, multiply and divide actual things. People know how to measure actual things. People tend to have some notion of measuring rates of change and instances in that change. You may complain that certain aspects of the curriculum are too abstract for real-life application, but the fact of the matter is that you can do maths, and quite a lot of it.

Language is by and large a form of Non-Terminal Education

The question you have to ask yourself, finishing a language course, is this: 

Do I now know the language? 

Or, 

Do I have the skills necessary to engage with the language and relatively quickly figure out what I don’t know?

The answer to this, by and large, is no. 

And why not? 

The answer to that is very complex, and it does vary from place to place. But let’s see if we can get to the heart of the matter in at least one setting.

High schools tend to teach a series of contained, independent curriculums in one year. One takes somewhere between 5 to 9 classes per year, and the order in which you take them does not seem to matter. You don’t need to have an extensive knowledge of physics to take Chemistry. You don’t need to have read a Shakespeare play to understand The Scarlet Letter. You don’t really need to know Euclidean geometry to do calculus. (Calculus does hinge on algebra, though.) You get the idea. 

Second languages are different from mathematics and sciences and first languages. You cannot honestly learn a language in 10 months. Schools understand this. So what they do is that they divide create a Beginner-Intermediate-Advanced curriculum that runs anywhere from two to four years. (And let’s at least be optimistic and say it’s a good and effective curriculum.)

Here’s the heart of it though: Nobody is required to take all four years.

Schools tend to say something like “students must complete one intermediate level course.” That tends to mean one year of beginner and one year of intermediate. With that, the administration assumes that students have some worthwhile ability in the language.

This is not true. 

If you cannot engage with the language, you won’t. 

Sounds rather obvious, but what I mean is that human beings don’t go out of their way to engage with languages they do not know. Very few people who don’t know Chinese pick up a Chinese newspaper and a Chinese dictionary and just start reading it that way. If you’re at the intermediate level, you’re probably not able to do much more than that. When one is a student, and one’s brain is divided between 5 to 9 classes, the one they will put on the back burner is the one that that’s a set of data that they can’t use in a meaningful way.

Pedagogic Institutions Accept Non-Terminal Education

And this is a big problem, because it’s wasting people’s time. 

What upsets me on a personal level is what I call Hoop Jumping Teachers. Hoop Jumping Teachers are those native speakers of the language you want to learn who don’t really speak your language and they only teach one or two years of the language.

In a lot of countries, especially in Asia, they’re foreigners who are contracted by the government or by universities to come in and teach. They’re assigned a textbook, which comes with a set of phrases, and they just teach that. And most of them can’t do much more than that. They don’t understand the language of the students well enough to break it down to the point where the students have a good handle of why the sentence means what it means. So they have you “jump some hoops” until you’re happy with what you snazzy new expressions and then you move on from their class and they do the exact same thing with the next class the following year.

(I’m not saying all language teachers are like this. There are many wonder teachers, both native speakers and second language speakers, who work very hard to get their students to fluency. But they’re not in the majority. And I’m not dissing on people who go abroad to teach their language for a year, either, because there are many who do give it their all.)

The real problem with hoop jumping teachers is when you leave it to them to establish a curriculum and what they come up with once the level of the language they teach is greater than their own fluency in their students’ language. 

What they tend to come up with is an arbitrary barrier where they say “after this point we will only speak to you in [my language]. And at this point you must learn to teach yourself.” (In other words, you become fluent now and I will not be teaching you.) They give their lesson in their language, leave virtually everyone in the dust, and those who aren’t in the dust are pulling resources from different places in order to understand what their teacher refuses to explain. 

The situation, obviously is more complex than this. A lot of the way language is taught has to do with languages imitating the way other languages are taught, in many cases those languages with more extensive histories of instruction being languages that are closely related. Whether or not two languages are closely related is another dimension all together. Each of these deserves careful attention.

But here’s my overall point: Language instruction is not like the instruction of any other subject. It has to be treated differently, and the habits of the industry offer very little satisfactory results and have created a plethora of teachers that are very content with teaching people a small set of information that will ultimately prove useless. 

Rant over

[allopropaganda]

In regards to these posts 1  2

As we, hopefully, reach a new era in our history, one where we may talk freely among ourselves and explore new and old ideas. We are at a cusp of growth.

We have dealt with foaming aphobes, we’ve been dealing with them for so long, maybe we forget that there are other levels of violence.

Let me be clear, I have been fighting for a long time. Reactions that spring up in me come from years of “training”, I have a very intuitive grasp of social justice issues and I’ve come to realize/reason that just because something seems obvious to me, can’t make it so for others. I think we need a bit of breakdown to see where the community is becoming ableist, aphobic, and victim blaming, and areas that are going to hurt us in the long run.

So this post is in two parts, because when I said I felt “ganged up on” I meant it in more than one way.

The Personal Attacks.

You make what you believe to be an innocent comment, maybe you make hasty judgements, and in many many ways even I - the CPSTD sonofabitch - must admit, that there would be no way for you to truly know where you’ve misstepped, before you’ve stepped.

Nobody thinks they’re saying something harm/that harmful, and that’s essentially why it’s not up to them to decide they didn’t! (not without real evidence).

*dramatically opens curtains* Come see through my eyes *tinkling music plays*

Firstly, claiming I had reacted aggressively - was majorly aphobic and ableist. For the aphobic part, that may be a little easier to see. My response did not shame someone, believe me I can shame I’m sure you’ve seen it. I did not look to attack them personally, I actually did not attack at all! My response was about the heartache a-specs had to go through, it was about experiences that happened to me. To assert that I was harming them, that mentioning the attacks on me where harming them, the words “that’s messed up” come to mind.

The left hook on this is the implication that showing any emotion and not seeking to soothe the aggravator is aggressive. At no point does an oppressed person have to placate the oppressor - nor does the oppressed person have to coddle and soften words to soothe their feelings. If you spread oppression, even if you didn’t mean to, that is your rightful title! And the world is inundated with people making these  mistakes, the best thing for you to do is own up to them, take responsibility, and seek to rectify! THAT makes you an ally! THAT truly changes the world! And yes, you can definitely spread oppression even if you are in that group, that is exactly how oppressive systems work! They rely on many hands.

Boop down to the abelism which I don’t think you could have possibly recognized even if you DID take a special interest in me, or in C-ptsd, or remember those two things at a time - but this is what happened to me all the same.

C-PTSD Is Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many of you may be familiar with PTSD, that’s what war veterans get diagnosed with all the time. I think we can all remember instances where it’s been depicted of war veterans suddenly going in to “fight mode” when they get triggered. All of the bad instances where they had to survive comes up, boiling hot like a geyser, and the truth is that it’s not always wrong.   That’s me. I don’t know what you may be thinking what fight mode may be like, but fight mode is filled with fear, panic, and anger. I am ready to attack and disable my attacker at all costs. For me, enemies are everywhere, everyone’s motive is suspect, each new thought is a breakdown in my spatial cognition. This is a survival mechanism that is made to protect me.

So what I’m saying is, with all of this running through my veins, clouding my mind, how my brain screamed attack and justified any means of survival, and was actively telling me that not to attack was wrong, I still did not attack. I did a really great job of restraining myself, in the interest of bettering my community, and you…trashed that.

And in regards to claiming my tags were “aggressive”, well like I mentioned above about hostility and all - my tags where about asking if this ask was legit or not. So with CPTSD it is hard to tell when someone is being sincere, or reading any other emotion other than hostility. Let me tell you, I have literally read really nice messages sent to me and couldn’t understand them because I read them in an hostile slant. So that’s why I ASKED, to make up for my disability.

Oh man, which brings up another thing. Gaslighting me. Gaslighting is further explained down the post but in regards to me - My thoughts scatter, and I may read things that just aren’t there. To make up for that I read, reread, think - over think, reduct my think, over think a little more, write out the thinking. There’s a hell of a lot of thinking just to be absolutely sure that I’ve had this down correctly. No offense, but I’m a really smart person, and I am highly intuitive. When I come up with a stance, I have written a book in my head to back me up (see ENTIRE POST). It is so inappropriate to jump in and say “nuh uh”, just because you like the person who said the thing, or is entirely reactionary. I see that as highly disrespectful of my intelligence and trying to take advantage of my cognitive disabilities. Hey, that could be my CPTSD talking, but also you could just not do that, ever. For the record, if I doubt something I ASK, or put it in non-definitive terms. No argument of “nuh uh” is an acceptable retort to what I put into my words.

And to put an extra fine point on it, don’t even try using my disabilities against me to attempt gas lighting me. I specifically take precautions to protect myself from that.

And for icing on the abelism cake - using anger as a reason to dismiss marginalized peoples. No.

I was able to save myself, because I’m pretty kick ass at that. You take this entire post and everything it means, and crunch it into one burst, and shove it in my soul - all of this at once and ongoing. Could you possibly imagine that I would be able to make a coherent argument? I think not. It would have gone on - everyone justifying their actions because “I can’t act right”, but this in turn sparking even more hostility. But I stopped myself, even when I KNEW I was right and you DESERVED to be gotten and I was wrong and dangerous to leave, I knew this in my soul, but I still left because I could take hold of something tiny and believe in it against all odds. To say that this is fair and just to expect other people to do, other victims to do - I could never suggest such a thing. I am just lucky. Respect people’s right to be hurt.

Part Two

In regards to our community, in the new times there will be new prejudices rearing it’s ugly head, it will be subtle, it will be blatant, it will come from our own side.

And you’ve been exposed to blatantly violent aphobes for so long, I know a certain feeling arises in you that you associate with “bad people.” To be sure, assigning labels such as “good” and “bad” person wise is a mistake made time and time again, stretching time and place.

“Nice Guy”*

*The “nice guy” is a phenomenon ever occurring in our society and is not meant as a way to gender anyone - phenomenons have no gender.

What you are teaching yourselves is that no one “nice” should be corrected or called to attention. They should have words minced, you feel like a traitor and mean for suggesting that they might have some aphobic biases. Newsflash, everyone has aphobic biases, we live in an aphobic society!

And to be honest, the “nice guy” rhetoric has been used on just about every abuse victim and should never deign to cross the lips of someone interested in justice. In my mind this is the shock, anger, and call to fight that fills my heart.

But let’s go back. For one, the defense of the “Nice Guy” is often that they didn’t know better, they misspoke, and/or they didn’t really mean that. In all of that - it doesn’t change a thing of what was done. Aphobia doesn’t just stop “because it was a mistake”, it keeps going, it gets picked up. You can’t undo what you’ve done by saying, “not me”! You can only work to erase your actions by having a reaction, you must put forth an effort to rectify your mistake. In fact, raising your hands and declaring no responsibility is dangerously disrespectful.

Next, you cannot say, “they didn’t mean that”, just because you like the person. This is a form of gas lighting. You are taking reality and shouting that it never happened. Gaslighting is abuse.

Here’s the scenario, either A) They typoed something and they said the exact opposite of what they meant. That means they still said it, that means it was still spread. That means it definitely exists and has caused harm. To say it didn’t exist doesn’t help a-specs, to recognize the mistake and take steps to fix it does. Just own up to your mistake and don’t get angry that it upset people and they reacted. Of course they reacted they just got blindsided by aphobic rhetoric, just respect their feelings.

B) They didn’t realize how horrible they sounded, until it was pointed out. This is called “internalized aphobia”, or maybe micro aggressions for allo people. It happens to everyone. That means they still said it, that means it was still spread. That means it definitely exists and has caused harm. To say it didn’t exist doesn’t help a-specs, to recognize the mistake and take steps to fix it does. Just own up to your mistake and don’t get angry that it upset people and they reacted. Of course they reacted they just got blindsided by aphobic rhetoric, just respect their feelings.

C) They really did mean what they said, but are willing to shrink back due to backlash. This has no matter (and no way to determine through isolated incidents) because all you need to do is call out the behavior.

But they were Mean to the Nice Guy  It forever remains a mystery how you can demean someone with a smile on your face, but when the oppressed don’t smile back they are viewed as the hostile ones! I think we’ve covered this time and time again! It really should not be your priority to police the emotions of a harmed oppressed person. People can react hostilely to people because they are using a system of oppression that boosters them up while putting the oppressed down. People have feelings.

The Logical Conclusion to Nice Guy So your first instinct is to not make waves, to be as understanding as possible, you are friendly, you are nice. As long as you Smile you are Nice. You see something that makes you uncomfortable and you let it pass, because we’re all friends! So that something is passed around, it’s multiplied, other people, it becomes established. The implications of why it made you uncomfortable becomes clear as an aphobic notion takes root. What was now one misinformed statement is now a war. WOULD your nice guy, because they are so nice, really want that? Would they really want to harm the a-spec community? If they would, well then they’re not so nice, if they wouldn’t, then in the end you are helping them and yourself out.

[arabellaflynn]

I quit Facebook a few weeks ago. Shortly after the lockdown protests began in Michigan, I posted an explanation of what their mindset was, why the protests were inevitable, and how bad an idea it was to pretend we could keep them from happening. I was dog piled by a load of people trying to explain to me in tiny words why the best way to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading was to keep people inside and away from each other. The only reply I could give them was yes, I know what science says, I'm telling you what people are actually going to do. This exact thing has happened during every pandemic in recorded human history, up to and including the fictional Corrupted Blood debuff in World of Warcraft. 

It is a horrible idea to predicate your public health plans on the assumptions that 1) people will behave rationally all of the time if you just shout at them loudly enough, or 2) people looking at the same data set will always draw the same conclusions.

All things in life include an element of risk. I don't know about other places, but I don't personally remember a time when Americans were not bombarded with dire warnings about everything in their quotidian existence. Eat eggs, don't eat eggs, living in a city raises your risk of cancer, living in the country raises your risk of tick-borne diseases, coffee will make you live longer, coffee will kill you, salt is dangerous, fat is dangerous, carbs are dangerous, the sun is dangerous, breathing is dangerous.... and all of it is fed to us as if we have a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring our risk of dying as close to zero as possible. It is acknowledged that the results of a lot of these studies are in conflict, and that it's difficult to sift through all the information to decide which one is more 'correct' about how to keep yourself safe. But never is there room for anyone to conclude that maybe they would rather have that thing in their life, than gamble on statistically raising the odds of living a few more years without it.

In the early days of the AIDS pandemic -- before PrEP, before HAART, after we had acknowledged that HIV was a thing and was killing people -- the only messaging was dire. Sex could kill you! Think twice before you get laid! The underlying assumption was that if you could get people to pause and remember the risk, of course they would decide not to go through with it. We do the same thing today with teenagers, in the secular version of abstinence-only sex education. It does not seem to have crossed anybody's mind at any point that anyone might go over the numbers and decide, yeah, that level of danger is acceptable to me. I want the possible positive outcomes of that action enough to risk the negative ones.

When people start doing just that -- and they always start doing that -- the reaction of the moral authorities is to start bolstering their side of the "rational" argument with fear. They may genuinely believe that their side holds more weight, but surely that will be more obvious if they help it along with a thumb on the scale. It is a known phenomenon that the scarier and more profound the consequences seem, the more probable they look, even if the odds have not changed. It is also a known phenomenon that people will weigh personal experience more heavily than abstract arguments featuring strangers. As anyone who has gone through the DARE program will attest, the more you (and your friends) do something "bad" and come out of it unscathed, the more you view anyone who claims to be an authority as being completely full of shit. Whether they are or not.

All of this is to say, riots were inevitable under the "abstinence-only" model of self-isolation and social distancing. They were as inevitable as the Summer of '69, and the failure of the War on Drugs. They made it a moral imperative to fight a basic human motivation (stay away from your loved ones, abstain from sex, don't seek out pleasurable drugs), "for the good of society". People can only deny basic drives and force themselves to suffer for so long. People still die from complications of AIDS, and they fuck anyway. People still ruin their lives over addictions, and they still take drugs. It was only a question of when it would happen, and what would tip it off.

In this case, the propaganda urging people to accept suffering "for the greater good" has blown up in their faces. All of the people in the streets have done the calculus and decided that overturning the system "for the greater good" is more important than avoiding the personal risk of catching COVID. Which, to be honest, a lot of them were becoming inured to anyway. 

We are tired of being told to be afraid, and that the correct way of dealing with this fear is to wall yourself off from the scary thing. I was horrified when I first saw advertisements for "Safr", a ride-sharing service whose selling point was that it was women-only. I mentioned this to a friend, and his reaction was oh of course, it's horrifying that rape culture is so entrenched that the only way to escape it is to establish your own alternate economy. And I said no, that's not it. The part I find upsetting is that we as a culture are normalizing the idea that the correct way of dealing with your personal anxieties is to just refuse to engage with anything in the outside world that makes you uncomfortable. I have seen this accusation lobbed (rightfully) at hyper-conservatives who complain about the push for diversity, but it is just as often true, in other contexts, of hard-line liberals. Men make you nervous? Don't interact with men. Afraid immigrants will take your job? Bar them from entry. Racist words in old books offend your moral sensibility? Demand to be excused from the class. Resent bisexuals for being able to "pass" as heteronormative? Form a group exclusive to gold-star gays and lesbians. 

You cannot pad, pillow, and gatekeep your world until nothing in your bubble makes you nervous. That's not how this works. I have not been more than half a mile from my house since March 13th. I have only once been farther than the garbage bins, and it freaked me out so badly I came back in after fifteen minutes. To be clear: I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. This is very bad. The point where I normally yeet myself to the nearest emergency room came and went at least a month ago, and the only reason I didn't go was rampant plague. I am coherent enough to operate a keyboard right now because I had the foresight to order a metric fuckton of gray-market diazepines at the beginning of this whole shitshow. People with fewer resources and less internet savvy are drinking themselves blind, or just melting the fuck down.

And yet, this is the mindset the power structure has been sowing since at at least 2001. Stay in, stay insular. Cocoon yourself. Outside is a threat. The miasma will seep in and destroy your way of life. The authorities are special, they are allowed to roam freely -- but be afraid of other people, be afraid of their proximity, their difference, of the very air that they breathe. Be afraid of Black people, they break laws. Be afraid of strange people, they break quarantine. It is a matter of life and death, so it's okay to emotionally-blackmail your loved ones into doing the same. Be afraid of the police, if they scare you that means they're scaring your enemies away too!

We can't do this anymore. We're tired. If everything is deadly, then nothing is particularly deadly, and it doesn't matter. If all roads lead to ruin, then we're free to just pick which mess we want to be in. A life in unremitting isolation is not a life. It doesn't matter whether we're told it's because of a virus or because "other people" are dangerous animals. No one can do that. No one is going to do that. Have you not, like, met other humans? I don't know why anyone thought that was going to work.

I really don't know where all this is going, other than I fucking told you so, and maybe a warning that if you try to talk to me and I seem a little incoherent, it's only because I refuse to be sober right now for what I feel are completely valid mental health reasons. For the record, I am 8-10 miles outside of the parts of Boston that are intermittently on fire, on the north side of the river, in a very calm suburb where absolutely nothing is happening. The local police force consists of like three bored cops, who spend most of their time attending traffic accidents and telling drunk teenagers to go home. The most violence I have seen in the past few weeks are the squirrels outside my window squabbling over ownership of the pine tree.

The rat is handling this much better. He was chittering his fool head off, loudly, for almost an hour after I turned the lights out last night. I finally went over there to make sure his unbridled joy wasn't because somehow gotten hold of an entire chocolate bar. No; Durnik was just settled down in a HAMMOCK, and it was COMFY, and this made him so HAPPY he had to announce it. I fed him half of a pitted medjool date, making him even happier, and went back to bed.

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[asrarblog]

Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #277. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. If you wish to share your stories, ideas and thoughts, please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Listening is a favorite topic and is covered in all courses on Communication, of which it is an integral part anyway.

It is emphasized with great force and vigor that one must listen. At a more advanced level, it is also said that we must not listen for words only; we must listen for emotions and feelings also. Studies suggest that in the communication process, relative contribution of Words, Tone, and Expression goes like this.

Words – (verbal part)             7%

Tone – (emotional part)             38%

Expression – (physical part) 55%

If words are so unimportant, why is there so much emphasis on words, vocabulary and dictionary? Why do some learned people bring difficult, rare and exotic words to make a flowery speech? Is it better to use simple words or complex words? Do complex words really impress others? We can settle the Words Part right here. Words are important, but not critical. It is better to use simple words and short phrases. If words become difficult, even 7% contribution may be lost.

Tone is quite effective. We can understand happiness, anger, sadness and other such things from speech even when it is in a language which we do not understand. Tone is fortunately quite universal, and we have conditioned our minds to associate particular tone with particular emotion. In fact, we expect it to happen the same way in all cases. If it is different, it baffles us, and we refuse to accept. Malcom Gladwell in his latest book ‘Talking to Strangers’ has dealt with this phenomenon at length. He explains it, highlights its problems, but suggests that such universality is necessary for us to live together socially. Tone is so effective that we can convey a range of emotions without even raising voice. As Listeners, we focus more on Tone and less on Words and try to find clues from Tone. When someone is speaking in a flat Tone, we are confused and upset. We cannot make much out of it.

Expression is a combination of facial expression, hands gestures, and body postures. All may be used together or in various combinations. Expressions also vary between cultures. In some countries, hands are used more while in others face is used more to convey the emotion in the message.  Expressions form the bulk of communication, overriding Words and Tone. It is fortunately so, otherwise, people who cannot listen or speak would have hard time conveying their messages.

When we are listening, we listen to all above factors and then understand the communication fully.

There are several barriers in communication; unclear idea or thought, inappropriate words/tone/expressions, unfavorable environment, attention deficit, wrong interpretation, and cultural differences.

Rather than focusing on barriers, I would like to share from Erich Fromm, the humanistic philosopher and psychologist (1900 – 1980). He addressed the matter of Listening in a 1974 seminar in Switzerland. The long discourse was later transcribed and published as a 400-page book ‘The Art of Listening’. You can imagine how much emphasis is there on listening from the length of this single volume.

Erich Fromm was a practicing psychologist and had argued that Listening “is an art like the understanding of poetry”. He offered the following guidelines for mastering the art.

The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.

Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.

He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.

He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.

The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.

Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

Maria Popova suggests that communication is an effort which has unpredictable outcomes. Although we apparently communicate freely, but actually it is an act of courage. When we convey words, feelings and emotions, there are always two possible outcomes. One is that we may be understood, and therefore may be able to transmit what exactly we wanted to do. Second is that we may be misunderstood and the effort to transmit across fails. In every exchange, both possibilities exist. Even then, we courageously keep up with the communication.

So far, we have talked about live communication. What happens when we read the written words, when we see a painting, we see landscapes, natural sceneries, when we see acting and dance performances on screen or live; we listen to instrumental music.

We connect with the music, painting, poetry, painting, landscapes, nature and many other things, absorb them and complete the Listening process.

Ursula K. Le Guin (Oct 1929 – Jan 2018) says: ‘Listening is not a reaction; it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we do not so much respond as join in – become part of the action.’

This is the highest level of communication where the parties involved become completely synced with each other. They all join the action; sending and receiving at the same time.

Communication is the key to living. It is the most important sign of our existence. Within communication, Listening is more critical than Speaking. We all need to work upon mastering the Art of Listening constantly, consistently and continuously.

Concluded.

Is Listening Only Hearing? – Blog Post #277 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #277. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large.

[chriscanwell]

New Post has been published on Develop Attraction

New Post has been published on https://www.developattraction.com/magic-touch/

How to Touch a Girl to Turn Her on Sexually

If you want to know how to touch a girl to turn her on sexually, then this article will show you everything you need to know to get a girl interested in you and focused on you.

The moment we’re born, we crave touch. Touch has an almost intoxicating effect on the human body. A woman runs her hand through your hair, then softly touches your chest before kissing you. A bolt of electricity shoots down your spine, and you feel wonderful as a wave of oxytocin courses through your body.

Touch expresses your intentions and desires in a way that words cannot. There’s no need to tell a woman that you want to become intimate with her. If you touch her the right way, she’ll know what you’re thinking.

Touch Leads to Greater Influence

Touch wields enormous power and influence. If you ask someone to do something for you and touch the person at the same time, that person is much more likely to comply with your request. Studies into influence and touch have confirmed this finding. One study found that a man who asked a woman for her phone number and followed his request with a light touch on the arm was much more likely to gain compliance from the woman and get her phone number.

Another interesting study examined what would happen when a man asked a woman to dance in a nightclub. The study found that the man’s request was more likely to be accepted if the man touched the woman on the arm for one or two seconds before asking her to dance.

The implications of this study are far-reaching and powerful. What is it about touch that increases a woman’s compliance? In both of these experiments, after the woman complied with the man’s request to either “get her phone number” or “dance,” the woman was asked to fill out a survey to explain her feelings during the experiment.

The women explained that they felt as though the man who touched her was more confident, and as a result, they felt more inclined to comply with his request.

Further research into this phenomenon has found that touch creates feelings of attraction in both men and women. Not only does touch build attraction, touch also makes a woman’s heart beat faster and leads to increased feelings of desire, especially when accompanied by eye contact.

Only one question remains: are you bold enough and confident enough to touch a girl to turn her on sexually?

Touch a Girl to Turn Her On Sexually

Touch a woman the right way and you pour rocket fuel on the flames of attraction; touch her the wrong way, however, and there’s a good chance you’ll turn her off and she’ll lose attraction for you. In the same way, if you touch a woman too frequently and too soon, you run the risk of smothering the woman and making her feel uncomfortable.

The same applies if your touch is clumsy. A lack of finesse will make you look uncertain and unsure of yourself.

When you touch a woman, you must touch her with confidence and boldness. You must reach out to her and commit to the touch. Allow her to feel you, if only for a brief second, before pulling away.

With this in mind, when you first start dating a woman, there’s no need to be distant. Hug a woman. Embrace her. Allow her to feel you because your touch sets the tone for the rest of the encounter.

If you sit beside a woman while watching a movie, lean in and touch her on the arm whenever you say something. The same applies if you go for dinner or go out for drinks. Sit beside your date and position yourself so your hand can brush up against her hand. Don’t attempt to kiss a woman in public or smother her with excessive touching. Doing so will only ruin the seduction and build resistance.

Your goal, as with all seductions, is to be patient and build the fire of attraction into a raging inferno. When you touch a woman’s hand, forearm, shoulder or back, you put her at ease and give her a sense of comfort.

Even if she pulls away from you or tells you that you’re moving too fast, the fact that she’s still with you shows that she wants you to keep trying. There will be occasions when you touch a woman and she doesn’t respond. She might even cross her arms and physically pull away from you. Expect a degree of resistance, especially early on, but don’t let it stop you from pushing for intimacy.

A woman will never punish you for trying to have sex with her. She’ll only punish you if you apologize for your actions. Going back on your actions is a form of weakness and a huge turn-off to women. As a man, you must be bold and push for physical intimacy, even if you encounter resistance—resistance, after all, is simply a woman’s way of testing you.

Case Study: Never Seek a Woman’s Touch

Alex and Grace had been together for almost six blissful months when one day, while walking down the street, Grace unexpectedly pulled away from Alex and let go of his hand. Alex immediately felt unsettled and anxious. Why’s she pulling away from me? he thought. Have I done something wrong?

“Are you okay?” Alex asked.

“I’m fine,” Grace replied as she continued to walk beside him with her arms folded across her chest.

* * *

Later that week, Alex and Grace were sitting on the couch, watching TV, with their arms wrapped around each other when Grace suddenly pulled away from Alex and moved over to the far side of the couch.

“You okay?” Alex asked, an edge of anxiety creeping into his voice.

“Uh-huh,” Grace muttered, staring at the TV. “You’re not getting away that easy,” Alex said as he shuffled over towards Grace and wrapped his arms around her, holding her firmly from behind. Grace immediately stiffened and pulled away. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

“Why do you have to touch me all the time?” Grace said.

“I’m not.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Grace snapped. “Why are you so clingy?”

“I’m not clingy, why do you keep pulling away from me?” Alex said as a well of emotion built up inside him.

“Wait, oh my God. Are you crying?”

“No.”

“You are.” Alex turned his head, but it was too late. Grace had already seen the tears. “Stop being so sensitive,” Grace said.

“I’m not,’ Alex shot back.

Grace got up from the couch and grabbed her keys off the table. “God, you’re acting like a woman. It’s so unattractive.”

Don’t Panic If She Pulls Away

There will be moments in a relationship when a woman purposefully holds back, making it a point to introduce distance between the two of you. She neither reaches for you nor welcomes your touch. This has the effect of bringing a certain level of tension and anxiety into the relationship. Why doesn’t she want to touch me, is she pulling away from me? the man thinks.

And with that, the man reaches out to try and close the distance, wondering all along why the woman doesn’t want to touch him and why she’s being so cold?

There are many reasons why a woman might act this way. She might be testing you to see how you’ll react. Will you feel uncomfortable and insecure or will you remain strong and unaffected by her withdrawal? At other times, she might simply be asking for space. In both situations, it’s important to let a woman pull away from you without feeling the need to reach out and seek her touch.

Attractive Versus Unattractive Touch

At this stage, it’s important to distinguish between two different types of touch. Brief touching on the arm, shoulder, and back is closely aligned with flirtatious, non-needy playful behavior. On the other hand, holding a woman’s hand, hugging, and embracing is more closely aligned with needy, clingy behavior. Initiate the second type of touch too frequently and the woman will come to think that you need her more than she needs you.

Once this realization sets in, the woman’s attraction for you will inevitably fade. Research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin observed that women rated men who displayed traits of neediness and insecurity as extremely unattractive.

How can a woman trust you when all she has to do is withdraw her touch to upset you? The secure and confident man never seeks a woman’s touch for comfort or validation.

Case Study: Too Timid To Touch

Sarah, an elegant woman in her mid-thirties, was talking to two men, Richard and Joe, at the same time. It was Richard, however, who made the first move, inviting Sarah out for coffee over the weekend. When Sarah and Richard started talking to each other they were both struck by how much they had in common. For one, they had both graduated from the same college. They also loved the same kind of movies and the same kind of music.

Sarah had a great feeling about Richard. He was the perfect gentleman. He didn’t try to touch her or come on too strong. Instead, he appeared to be genuinely interested in who she was and what she had to say.

A couple of days later, Sarah accepted Joe’s invitation to go out for dinner. The moment Joe picked her up, Sarah was taken aback by his brash behavior. Right from the start, Joe came across as selfish and self-centered.

Sarah didn’t care for his manners either. When they got to the restaurant, she noted with dismay that Joe never once said “please” or “thank you” to the wait staff. To make matters worse, Joe didn’t even seem that interested in anything she had to say, and he even openly disagreed with her on several occasions.

Sarah didn’t like his attitude. But despite the many red flags, there was something about Joe that intrigued her. Yes, he was rude and arrogant, that was true. But he was also interesting. He flirted like crazy and didn’t hesitate when it came to touching her.

When she got home, Sarah felt confused. She had nothing in common with Joe, but she’d still enjoyed their time together. When Richard called to schedule another date, Sarah was surprised to discover that she no longer had any interest in seeing him.

Richard seemed so flat and lifeless in comparison to Joe. Asshole or not, Joe was exciting and fun to be around. For better or worse, he was exactly the type of guy Sarah found attractive.

* * *

Why did Sarah choose Joe over Richard? The answer, again, comes down to attraction.

Sarah felt a greater level of attraction for Joe compared to Richard. Joe’s body language and actions were bolder and more confident. He wasn’t afraid to call her out and disagree with her. And he wasn’t afraid to signal his interest by touching her. This was in stark contrast to Richard who came across as timid and shy in comparison.

When you’re out on a date, talking is the easy part. Taking the interaction from friendly chitchat to playful touch, however, is what separates the attractive man from the unattractive man.

Your ability to escalate the interaction and become physical with a woman is of paramount importance. A woman knows you’re interested in her the moment you ask her out. Why not demonstrate your interest in a physical way? After all, she’s not dating you because she wants to be your friend. Your ability to touch a girl to turn her on sexually makes a huge difference.