#women also tend to have more complex social cues than men (not saying that's a bad thing obv) and my neurodivergent ass struggles w that too

[mitragynines]

how do i make friends with women

[whentherewerebicycles]

wow okay i am skipping the lingerie party lol and am instead going to just briefly jot down some thoughts before i go to sleep and wake up at 5 for my flight tomorrow morning. jesus christ i have ONE MILLION thoughts and feelings about this weekend. i want to preface this by saying that on the whole, it was a fine social experience! it was nowhere near as awkward or painful as i was expecting. or like, parts of it were painful, but it was 100% to do with my own complicated feelings about literally every part of this tradition and the wedding industry in general lol, and not anything to do with the people themselves. the other women were friendly and very welcoming, i made an event best friend who was wonderful company, and it was really fun to get to spend time with both my sister-in-law and her older sister, who was so charming and wonderful. i’m glad i came even though thinking about the $$ i spent on this trip makes me physically gag.

but okay i want to just record some THOUGHTS that maybe i will continue unpacking with some distance. i feel likeeeee okay here are my thoughts.

the social norms around femininity are just a fucking minefield and i feel like i really just gotta keep walking back the impulse to judge other women for the choices they make as they navigate around the manifold traps and snares and half-buried landmines that constitute the landscape of being a woman. like jesus christ. it’s so fucked up, it’s so fucked up, the received and socially enforced norms of femininity are just so fucked up. I think ALL THE FUCKING TIME of this margaret atwood poem i love so much, which was REALLY on my mind this weekend:

How can I teach her some way of being human that won’t destroy her?

I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone’s voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.

I feel like the first bit was very much on my mind throughout the weekend, but those last three lines have come to the forefront over the course of this last day, as i have tried to do some Thinking about what i observed/experienced/felt this weekend. whether or not this is what it means in the context of the poem, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it, expresses something of my complex feelings: I don’t know that I can tell the truth about femininity because I don’t know that I can see it. i am both too close to it/still emotionally entangled in it and too far from it to know which parts of it are ‘real’ and which parts are just performance.

i feel like one thing that struck me this weekend, in ways that i don’t know if i’ve noticed as much before, was that so much of the things women say to each other or do in these social contexts is performative, and they know on some level it’s a performance, but we are all going through the motions of doing and saying the expected things anyway. that has not always been clear to me. i have spent so much of my own life as a woman thinking that other women perfectly, seamlessly, naturally embodied the norms of femininity, and i was the only one (or part of a group of only ones) who couldn’t remember my lines, or kept fumbling my cues, or felt so painfully, self-consciously aware that i was playing a role that i could never deliver a convincing performance. but this weekend, after the initial social panic had passed, i started trying to get out of my own head a little bit and look for things that disproved the very strong theory i had brought into the weekend. and of course then i started seeing more and more of the little moments where women say one thing and do another, or profess one belief/conviction but then the whole corpus of their lived experiences and choices contradicts that stated belief, or whatever. and also just like, moments of pathos, where someone i had judged harshly at the beginning of the weekend offhandedly revealed something about her past that really changed my perception of her, or at least made me think like, ah god, i have to have empathy for and with this person, because i think she might be a complex person just like me, with an intricate inner life that her performance partially reveals and partially occludes from view, and agh, it sucks to have to think of people as complicated instead of as safely two-dimensional & easy to dismiss, and the reason it sucks is because then it forces you to realize that you share more with this person than you’d like to admit, and that some of your wounds are the same, even if you dealt with those wounds (the wounds of girlhood, or rather the emotional wounds that our culture inflicts upon girls, which then become tangled up in complex and painful ways with the lived experience of girlhood itself) in really different ways.

but also ugh. we are all performing gender norms but there is just something that does not feel playful at all about embodying conventional femininity. i can’t think of a better way to phrase that right now but it’s like.. the performance isn’t fun. it doesn’t seem to be fun. i don’t know that anyone here was having fun doing it, even if they were having fun being with each other. but it was like doing the intensely gendered social rituals was like, the price of admission? like it was the toll we had to pay to be together spending time in the company of other women? i don’t know man but it fucking exhausts me. like i can push myself to stretch my genuine empathy and sense of solidarity with other women much further than my knee-jerk judgmental reaction, but i can’t ever get to a place where i find any of those social rituals anything other than fucking exhausting. they feel so fucking joyless. they feel like things that many women have internalized as ‘things we must do in order to have relationships with other women.’ (please do not even get me started on how exhausting heteronormativity is i think i could write an entire other essay on how women use these bachelorette party-type rituals to spend time with their closest female friends, but the whole event is still implicitly organized around men, and these women’s male partners are still positioned as the priority in their lives, and the whole event is framed as like, a last burst of intense closeness between women before the bride is delivered over to her husband. like i KNOW that this is not how women think of it but all the RHETORIC of the bachelorette party, the little events and rituals and games, the little comments everyone makes all fucking weekend, good fucking lord, my jaw is so TENSE.)

anyway god i just AGHHHH. idk sorry this is definitely not coherent at ALL because i’m tired and still need a bit more distance/time to process some of this. i guess here is one last thing i want to register before i sleep. i am in my 30s now and i am living a life that is so, so far removed from the social world i grew up in. marriage is not a norm among my friend group, almost all of my female friends are queer women, many women i know are not partnered and have no interest in being partnered, and the friends who are in heterosexual relationships tend to be in very gender-balanced relationships or slightly nontraditional relationships where it feels like both partners have engaged in conscious reflection about what they want their relationship to look/feel like. also i now date women, am out as a lesbian, and spend most of my time teaching/working with queer- and trans/nonbinary-identified kids.

so like, the world i live in now is just so different from the world i grew up in. and sometimes it is easy for me to kind of downplay the intensity of my own gender distress as a teen and young adult, or to sort of - act like it was a phase in my life that had much more to do with me than with the social environment i lived in. i don’t mean ‘phase’ in a dismissive ‘those feelings weren’t real’ kind way, but more like, ‘oh that was just part of the normal growing pains of figuring out who you are and what kind of person you want to be as an adult - everybody pretty much goes through some version of that.’ it’s true that everyone DOES go through some version of that, as just like, part of the process of individuation in that age range. but also like. idk man. being back in this environment - straight white women from the midwest and south, all engaging in the rituals of heterosexual white femininity - was just so intense and so MUCH, and it brought back a flood of feelings and visceral memories that i feel like i will need to spend some time sorting through over the next few weeks. like, what i experienced back then really WAS gender distress, and it was so, so distressing. i spent the years from age 11ish to 24ish existing with this constant lowgrade baseline feeling of wanting to claw my own fucking skin off because my own gendered body felt like such a prison, and i sometimes felt like i literally wanted to destroy my own body because i could not yet conceive of an alternative to inhabiting that body or playing the role that had been handed down to me. until i started reading queer memoirs and inhaling lesbian media and (especially) reading about queer femme identities, i literally did not have an image or any kind of felt sense of what another way of inhabiting my own body might look/feel like. i literally could not imagine it!!!

and that is why the distress feels so distressing, and becomes internalized in such violent ways, i think. because it’s the blind, mindless panic of a trapped and wounded animal. except that you lack any real understanding of the larger social forces at work, or any language with which to describe or conceptualize what social norms are or how they’re enforced. so in your mind, the only thing you can see wounding you is your own gendered body, or the way that gendered body is socially 'read’ by others. and that is why you want to claw your own fucking skin off, just literally dig your nails into your own flesh and claw it the fuck off. because you can’t see a norm, but you can see your gendered body, and you can see the ways that it causes other people to react to you, or treat you, or hold you to a certain set of expectations, and so in your mind you are like: this must be destroyed. in your mind you are like, the only way out is to get out of this fucking body, but that’s impossible, surely, you can’t get out of your own body, so you have to settle for starving it and self-harming it and ruthlessly punishing it in a thousand terrible ways, because you might not be able to leave your girl’s body behind, but you can make it suffer and pay for what it’s done to you. 

i am old enough now, and have spent enough time thinking and writing about those feelings, to identify them when they arise again, and to get the necessary distance from them so that i can say, what i want to destroy are the norms themselves, and the distress they cause, and not the body that has done nothing to me but be me. so i am not quite as sucked under as i used to be. but i think that there is something about the violence and intensity of those feelings that i forget sometimes, or misremember with age and distance. it’s easy to be a little bit patronizing to my younger self (or by extension to my younger students sometimes), because i now live in a social world that is largely arranged in ways that minimize rather than intensify or amplify gender distress. but when you have no choice in how to arrange your life, and no language with which to understand what is happening to you or what you are experiencing, and no frame of reference to help you understand that this is a period in your life and not forever, and no models you can look to in order to discover alternative ways of inhabiting your body or arranging your life... my god, that’s quite different from being an adult with a wide range of experiences and with much greater autonomy over your own body and life. anyway idk i need to keep thinking but now i must go to bed and try to sleep five hours before the plane.

[innuendostudios]

We hit 200k subscribers! Holy heck! Here’s a small, celebratory video collecting my favorite bits and pieces that got cut from other videos.

If you like this, or the videos these bits were removed from, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

The Artist is Absent

If I tell you about what I did yesterday, you do what? You take a bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells from your experience and stick them together in your head into a complex picture of my experience? Well, that’s what I’m doing when I use my memory. I don’t have a prefab image of what’s happened to me in my life that I break down into pieces when I describe it to you; the act of remembering is building up from pieces, reconstructing reality from a mass of tiny sensations, and all a memory is is a set of instructions for which ones to assemble and how. This act is performed every time a thing is remembered. And the difference between my memory and your imagination is that, having lived it, I have way more sense memories than I could ever communicate, and the knowledge that mine actually happened to me. Those are really the only differences; you could characterize memory as “imagining things that actually happened,” or imagination as “remembering things that didn’t.”

The Artist is Absent 2

OK, quickie sidebar on what the meaning of “meaning” is in this context. I don’t want anyone to trip over this term and think I’m saying all art is part of some grand design, like I’m going to argue The Avengers is an allegory for the Bay of Pigs or something. I’m not using “meaning” in a lofty sense. If you wanna argue that the only substance to The Avengers is “it’s fun,” that’s cool. That’s still a meaning, but it’s perfectly valid if that’s all there is to it.

...I mean, that’s not all there is to it, it’s also about family, and about how being in a family with people who are different from you can make you a better person. It can teach you the value of selflessness, or the value of compassion over mercenary coldness, or the value of accepting yourself and your flaws, or help you fit your idealism into the modern world, or… deliver exposition, because Thor doesn’t have an arc in this movie.

But you see my point! All I mean by “meaning” is that there is an answer to the question, “Why does this exist?” If someone made it, they had to have a reason, anything from “I wanted to change the world” to “I wanted to make money” to “I was bored.” Those aren’t all great answers, but they’re answers.

Also, all creators exist within their culture, which means their works are products of that culture, and their contents will either reflect or differ from that culture’s values. Like, the fact that all the central characters in The Avengers save one are white, and all save one are men, means something. We can debate the whats and wherefores of that meaning and how much that meaning matters, but since things like race, gender, the military, and New York City, mean things to our society, they can’t not mean things in our movies.

And, let’s be honest: following The Avengers, Tony has PTSD from being a rescue worker during Something Very Bad that Happened in New York, and SHIELD dramatically expands the surveillance state and employs Cap in fighting terrorist threats, so, while not the Bay of Pigs, The Battle of New York is doing work as a 9/11 allegory. Both of these movies have been praised for exactly that.

But, let’s follow through: in our 9/11 allegory, the US government could not have possibly predicted nor prevented the bad Guys’ invasion, America is wholly innocent and has had no political or social impact on the Bad Guys, the Bad Guys are literally inhuman, and any amount of violence against them is justified, up to and including the Good Guys nuking them.

But whatever.

Bringing Back What’s Stolen

OK. A lot of psychoanalytic film writing comes from the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s, including gender analysis of horror films, and it can read a little Freudian: gender essentialist, heteronormative, and obsessed with the D. “Does this empowered woman look feminine? Well, she’s holding a gun, and I’ve got news for you: guns are penises. She’s smoking a cigarette, and cigarettes are penises. She’s wearing high heels, and high heels are penises. That slit in her dress that shows off her long legs? [Long Legs Are Penises]”

It’s a bit Second Wave-y. And not completely off-base! Like, I get it, Laura, sometimes a knife is a dick. (Symbolically, I mean.) But sometimes a stiletto is just a stiletto.

Bringing Back What’s Stolen 2

I want to stress that a trope does not define a character, and does not, alone, make her or the movie around her bad. I love a number of the characters I’ve cited. But when a movie, even a great movie, tells me, “Don’t worry, this woman is violent, but we’re not saying women at large are as strong or violent as men,” I feel condescended to. The lengths some movies go to soothe my ego, like I’m a seven-year-old who’s going to throw his toys against the wall, strike me as a big waste of time that could be spent on the more interesting parts of the movie. I’ll take another shootout any day.

WSGT3

Imagine you’re called onstage to do a cold reading of a two-person scene from a play you’ve never read. You don’t know the story, the characters, or even the stage directions. And the director hands out only one script to the other actor. You will have to improvise all your lines. The other actor knows the premise, knows the story, but they still need you to make the scene work. The person who knows what happens is trying to signal everything you need to you without straying from the script, while you attempt to discover your role in the story and perform it at the same time. That is the attention that must be paid. And, together, you try to make a story.

This is an exercise my acting teacher used to do with us, to get us listening to the other actors in a scene instead of just waiting for our cues. And this is how an adventure game feels.

DOOM

It was 1993, and we all knew about DOOM. It had a reputation. Many of us learned it existed with the same breath that forbid from playing it, in the same way we were forbidden from watching Beavis & Butt-head or Terminator 2. We didn’t have those kinds of parents. But most of us knew someone who did.

We came to learn three things about DOOM: that was intended for grown-ups, that our access to it was scarce, and that having not played meant getting teased by those who had. Some of us never asked if playing it interested us, we simply knew playing it was important.

And when we played - and we did play, on whatever computer someone had secreted the shareware version onto - it was like nothing we’d ever seen before. Amazing and terrifying, in the way that a kid alone in the house watching their first skin flick finds it shocking, because half-naked women and simulated sex are so far outside their limited experience. We had never seen anything close to this, and it unsettled us at first. But we played.

The titillation of an art student drawing a nude model lasts for the few moments between the dropping of the robe and the touching of charcoal to paper. Then nakedness becomes just another series of lines to render. We acclimated. When we fired our shotguns into an enemy, soon enough all we saw was an obstacle neutralized. We saw a series of lines elegantly intersecting a series of boxes. That’s not what our parents saw. Our parents saw an imp howling in pain as its ribcage burst from its chest.

And so part of playing DOOM became learning how to defend it. “I play DOOM for the gameplay” became a generation’s “I read Playboy for the articles.” When we got caught, we tried to explain the the lines and the boxes: The bullet wounds were just there to let you know when you’d hit your target. The space marine’s bleeding face was just there to tell at a glance how your health was doing. The enemies were Satanic hellspawn just to make it perfectly clear their function was to be dispatched by your shotgun. What we wouldn’t say was that all these things could be accomplished through other means, without blood, but we didn’t want to play Chex Quest.

What we couldn’t put into words, most especially under threat of punishment, was that, while the blood and gore wasn’t why we wanted to keep playing, it was usually why we sat down in the first place. DOOM was good, but being good wasn’t what made it important; it was important because it was illicit. Yes, we were kids, and we probably would play a game that offered us nothing but brutal violence, but if the lines didn’t pleasingly intersect the boxes we would soon stop playing. DOOM is loved today because there was more to it than that. Blood was captivating, but it wasn’t enough - we sat down, but we did not stay, for blood alone. What our parents could rarely put into words was that us no longer seeing the blood was part of what worried them.

Indivisible Talk

These are some fundamentals I want you to keep in mind as we look at the Right.

Everybody’s people. When I talk about the difference between the Right and the Left, I’m not saying “the Right does this and the Left does that.” I’m talking about things all humans do, and the difference between the Right and the Left is a matter of scale and proportion. If I say “the Left values data over gut feelings” or “the Right values family over extended community,” obviously everyone values all of those things. It’s a question of how they’re prioritized. But small differences in our priorities can lead to dramatically different worldviews. So when I say “the Right does X,” don’t get too hung up on whether the Left also sometimes does X, but try think about how it manifests on the Right versus the Left and what those differences between them mean.

People vote their beliefs, not their self-interest. The Left tends to ask things like, “Why would working-class voters who depend on Obamacare vote for the party that wants to repeal Obamacare? They must have been lied to.” And I won’t deny that a lot of lies were involved, but it’s a mistake to think people only vote for what’s good for them. It seems like this should be obvious; I mean, why do I vote to have my taxes raised to pay for someone else’s education, someone else’s food stamps? We tend to answer that by arguing it is in my self-interest, that a well-fed and well-educated population leads to a stronger economy and a richer culture, and that this will trickle down to make my life better in the long run, and I could make that case, but, really, that’s not why I do it. I believe in education, I believe in fighting poverty, and if you proved to me that neither would ever benefit me personally, I would still fight for them, because it’s the right thing to do. So when someone across the political spectrum does something that confuses us, it may be true that they are misinformed, but we can’t assume that simply correcting them will change their minds. Right or wrong, they are acting in accordance with their beliefs, they trust misinformation because it aligns with those beliefs, and, if you don’t understand what those beliefs are, you’re going to misdiagnose the problem.

Tolerance and sectarianism. A tolerant view of society is the melting pot, the idea that Real America is the combination of many different walks of life, all of which are valid and deserving of the same rights. A sectarian view thinks of one walk of life (usually one’s own) as the Real America, and this walk of life is one society should trend towards: that America is a Christian nation, English should be the national language, or the ideal family as nuclear and heterosexual. I think it’s obvious which ways the Parties lean.

But, again, these are human traits. Everyone is balancing both these impulses every day. And I don’t want us to split these into “tolerant good, in-groups bad.” Democrats who over-commit to the melting pot run into the Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: that, if you treat every group as equally valid, including Nazis, fascists, and the Klan, you create a less tolerant society. And treating one group as a greater priority than others is logical when that group is persecuted; there is a degree to which all minority activism is defending one’s family. So it’s a matter of knowing when to be tolerant and when to be familial, and coalition-building is all about being both at the same time.

End

Um. So. I’m not sure how to end this. Uh. 200k subs! Wow! I find that number very humbling. Thank you all so much. And back me on Patreon, if you want to and if you haven’t already. There’ll be a proper video soon. Uh. What do people usually do in these things, they do Q&A’s, right? People ask you “what’s your favorite movie, book, game, comic, anime, musical, poem, album, joke”? I’ve been wondering what it says about me that all my answers would be things I experienced in my 20s, or earlier. Is it that I don’t love things the way I used to? Or is it just that, the more art you experience, the harder it is to be blown away? Like, something can be better than anything I’ve seen before, but it can’t shatter the record the way it could when I was younger. But I’m not making a video essay about that, so: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany, LOOM, Sandman, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Woman is Talking to Death by Judy Grahn, a three-way tie between In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, Lincoln by They Might Be Giants, and Onomatopoeia by Jonny 5, and the lemon cookie joke.

[dropintomanga]

With Mental Illness Comes Great Responsibility

I know for many of us that have mental illness or mental health issues, we often do things that irk the people around us. We sometimes get a free pass for actions that cause trouble because mistakes do happen and our brains are acting in ways that hurt us. A big problem, however, is when we start to develop some kind of superiority complex due to mental illness.

A huge and horrifying report on Anime News Network came out regarding the Vancouver-based anime convention, Anime Revolution, and their stance on letting two men with histories of sexual harassment at conventions come to their con earlier this month. One of them in question (who I will not name) was noted to be a man with mental illness who was banned from AniRevo and for some reason, he was allowed back in this year.

What caught my eye about this situation was this man has autism spectrum disorder. He claims that the disorder has been a big cause in how he interacts with the many young women who have found him to be a frightening individual. He is prone to aggressive behavior when he doesn’t get what he wants (which is usually sexual relations). The man also has a history of interacting with the law and served time in jail as well.

I’m very concerned about this person’s psyche as it seems apparent that he has let his mental illness/disorder completely define him as a person. It’s not fair to anyone else living with similar conditions who are trying to get by with little-to-no trouble. It makes life harder for the mentally ill to get taken a lot more seriously.

To be fair, I’m well-aware of how mental illness makes those with it unaware or afraid of certain social cues that seem like they will end us. And it is justified that the mentally ill can say that it’s not their fault. The problem lies in a belief by saying that it’s mental illness, not them, the fault should go directly to the other person. It becomes the blame game when for the most part, it’s no one’s particular fault. This is how I see this whole “AniRevo is okay with child predators” mess. 

The individual used mental illness in a way that absolves him of fault and directs that fault to make his victims feel absolutely guilty about rejecting him. It’s terrible. I did search for the word “apologies” in the report for signs of remorse. He has for one girl, but his actions have never reflected his words.

What’s worse is how his mother is involved. Like any parent, she believes her child is innocent and that his mental disorder shouldn’t subject him to discrimination. She convinced AniRevo’s chairperson that her son was fine and had an official doctor’s letter to boot. There’s a part in that ANN report stating that one event organizer couldn’t ban the guy (who caused problems at their event) because his mother would sue him.

It feels like the two family members are just so angry at life to the point that they are trying to find fault in people for no reason. There seems to be no kind of self-compassion or self-acceptance in the two. So they just take it out on anyone for the sake of “advocacy.”

I also wonder if they feel that saying sorry means you’re weak. It’s a very common misconception. Yet I know there are some folks who apologize in a way that’s not genuine and using that pity to puff themselves up. I’m feeling that here after reading the whole AniRevo harassment report.

The only thing I can say right now is that having mental illness doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole. Make a honest effort in giving a genuine apology to someone you hurt badly and back it up with the right actions. Educate that person about your condition. Have honest and open conversations with them about what you both need from one another. If it doesn’t work out, let that relationship end because all it will do is hurt the hell out of everyone involved.

If you’re a parent of a child with mental illness, please don’t enable them. Try to think of them as more than just their illness. Your child can still make something good of themselves with the right kind of help. Try to educate yourself as much as possible so that you don’t become frustrated if you can’t get access to good help (because I know parents who can’t get it and are rightfully mad at their respective healthcare systems). 

I could say more because I feel that there’s more than meets the eye. Mental disorders combined with awful support causes problems for everyone else. I know what happened with AniRevo is part of a larger web of other issues that warrants a proper discussion beyond the scope of this post. If I were the judge, I would force this man to get assisted outpatient help so that he can actually get rehabilitated since his mother isn’t helping.

At the same time, I don’t want people with mental illness to over-apologize for having it. We got to figure out when to let our brains speak for us, not just our hearts in some cases.

Maybe we should just do what shonen heroes tend to do - just shut up and actually train ourselves to be better. That’s often the best kind of apology to someone and one I wish some fans take to heart. 

[armsdealing]

▌real name: marcelo giancarlo reyes marconi. ▌single or taken: single or taken depending on the timeline.  ▌abilities or powers: mixology, cards (don’t play poker with him because you will lose; for that matter, don’t play baccarat or faro or even uno -- again, because you will lose), public speaking, gun handling (has been taught how to use them since he was 14), dancing (breaking/hip hop; salsa; merengue, among others), kickboxing (trained since he was 7), playing sports (primarily soccer; he’s a forward winger) + the powers that come with being a werepuma (being nigh indestructible; healing factor; heightened senses and superhuman condition; shapeshifting, and immunity to psychic attacks, just to name some relevant ones) ▌eye color: dark brown. the puma eyes, when shifts into them, are pretty striking: besides the fact that they gleam, the iris is a ring of green/blue inside a ring of yellow. they seem almost hypnotic, and in the dark, they retroreflect light. (reference / 2) ▌hair color: brown ▌family members: gianna marconi-reyes (mother, deceased), ysmael reyes (father, deceased); a lot of aunts and uncles but primarily -- on his father’s side -- berenice and emmanuel reyes, and daniela and adán, all alive; then there’s his many cousins, all of which he’s very close to (acting sometimes more like siblings than cousins). on the maternal side there’s the marconi family which is big and complex on its own right but he’s not particularly close to any of them. it’s worthy to mention that he’s the grandson of giancarlo marconi, a very prominent don in the east coast mob, though.  ▌pets: he doesn’t have any, but he feeds any and all stray cats he comes across, and they end up following him around.  ▌something they don’t like: he doesn’t like stuck-up attitudes and people out of touch with reality. doesn’t like people noseying into his business, either. alas, he chose to work in social media and he deals with both of those things on a daily basis.  ▌hobbies/activities: the abilities above mentioned count as hobbies, frankly. marcelo is so good at them because he enjoys doing them and practices as often as he can. he also likes cooking (it’s a good sign when he cooks for you) and talking walks, running, swimming, watching movies, listening to podcasts, riding his motorcycle, camping, bouldering, hiking, taking pictures (with a camera and his phone), playing instruments (piano + guitar) and singing. he also likes traveling.  ▌ever hurt anyone before: yes. though big on pacifism nowadays, marcelo is not a stranger to fighting, and not just the kind of fighting where you throw a few punches and then quit. i’m talking full blown brawls where bones have been broken and eyes blackened and he’s had to get yanked away from the other party. he used to be much worse when he was younger, when he was more temperamental and less mindful of his own strength, and when his tolerance towards bullies and insults was zero point zero. nowadays you can still catch that side of him under specific circumstances. however, it’s rare -- he much prefers to remain unresponsive to insults and provocations. and as for hurting people emotionally... tbh yes. sometimes, he doesn’t think before he speaks. and sometimes, he does thinks he speaks, but you deserve to hear what he’s about to say (at least according to him).  ▌ever killed anyone before: in his main verse, not just yet.  ▌animal that represents them: puma, cougar, catamount, mountain lion! but if you want other examples, all felines in general.  ▌worst habits: he pours all his emotional labour into other people and none on himself, usually without noticing that people just use him. he’s gotten a bit better at this (he’s lost some “friends” because of it, no doubt), but still... he worries a lot and whats to Help, and he stresses out when he can’t solve the problems of people he cares about.  ▌role models: his parents but that’s kind of falling apart the older he gets. his aunts, berenice and daniela, and his older cousin natalia (played by @neotropical​). his godmother, also named gianna played by @tribeof​​. emiliano @riverbodies. and his best friend ivana played by @neotropical​​. nearly all his role models are women because men kinda suck, frankly.  ▌sexual orientation: bisexual.  ▌thoughts on marriage/kids: he wants both those things very much. he would definitely love to get married someday and have a small, intimate, but fun wedding and he would love to have kids (he’s thinking three) to raise and love. he would be a natural as a father, far from perfect, but definitely the type of parent that just intuitively knows what his kid wants and needs -- and works to help them even if he doesn’t.  ▌fears: as a result of past traumas, marcelo is terribly afraid of losing people he loves, cue him being very protective over them. he can’t stand the thought of them getting hurt, nevermind actually dying.  ▌style preferences: marcelo values his family above all other things, and it shows pretty much in the fact that he carries them everywhere with him and they really have an impact on his sense of style. he always carries his father’s silver cross necklace not out of a sense of faith (that hasn’t been there for a long time) but because it belonged to his father. he has the birthdate of his twin cousins (inigo and ignacio) tattooed on his shoulders in roman numerals, and the names of his parents on the back of his neck. he’ll often wear necklaces with pictures of family members, and pieces that belonged to his aunts, from chains to rings and bracelets. he made paintings and drawings by his little cousins into shirts he often wears. he lets alba sew patches into his jeans. he gets his nails painted by camila and his hair cut by elián. much of his wardrobe is actually hand me downs when not thrift finds and tend to be combined with high fashion clothes that are, more than often, gifts (from either industry friends or, let’s just say, benefactors) -- but yeah, when not wearing sportswear, he’s mixing and matching repurposed clothes with luxury fashion items. point is: there’s a lot of history to a lot of the things marcelo wears and much of it goes back to his family, which he’s gone as far as to immortalize on his skin in some form. ▌someone they love: ivana, his best friend, is basically his soulmate as well tbh and the person he loves the most. on that same tier go charmaine and rafael (@neotropical). in a platonic and familial manner, he loves gianna (@tribeof), zephyr (@isolctions), emiliano and alondra @riverbodies, and honestly.... this list ain’t long enough. he’s so full of love and you’re all missing out on that shit, smfh. of course, he also loves his entire family to bits.  ▌approach to friendships: marcelo would do, and does, anything for his friends and he loves always making new ones. he’s the helpful, generous type that is happy simply spending time with you, but will also try and get you involved with new things he’s doing, and will always be down for whatever you’d like to do. as a matter of fact, involved is the best way to describe the way marcelo always tries to make his friends feel. he’s not nosey or pushy, but if y’all haven’t talked in a while he will often send you a text to check up on you. he treasures his friendships and devotes time to them. as mentioned before, he’s also very protective and very much a mom friend. ▌thoughts on pie: he’s not crazy about it but he enjoys a good strawberry pie now and then! ▌favorite drink: (non-alcoholic) water, and coffee. colombian coffee to be precise: don pablo colombian supremo, but any colombian brand will do. (alcoholic) his go to alcoholic brands are bacardi, havana club, josé cuervo and antioqueño. he loves his mojitos, daiquiris and cubalibres and those are his usual orders, when not ordered plain.  ▌favorite place to spend time at: his apartment. he isn’t gonna pay rent not to spend time in that shit. that being said he equally enjoys both the city and nature. he thrives in the night life and in clubs, parties of all kinds, the neon HQ and high end bars, and he loves beaches, and parks, and forests, and mountains).  ▌swim in the lake or in the ocean: he won’t refuse either, boy just loves swimming.  ▌their type: honestly it’s really flexible. he can date from the sweetest angel to the biggest asshole if you’re ultimately a good person. he likes people that are comfortable in their own bodies, that are confident and got spine without being conceited. mutual interests definitely help, but a similar desire to grow together and put effort into things and each other is even more attractive to him. just be mature and know how to communicate. 

tagged by: i forgot but i love them. tagging: @neotropical​ (ivy), @tribeof​ (gianna or abel) @isolctions​​​ (zephyr or rue), @belissimae​, @withlwolves​​ (maria) @dirtypaw​​ @zkljns @curdledmiilk​ (your pick, someone you haven’t done) @undones​ (griff) @wheelmans​ @strikier​ (yes im tagging all ur fuckin blogs) 

[donnerpartyofone]

So, here is my deal. I have been single for a year now, after being in a long term relationship and I am really struggling to impress women. I’ve tried all the classic dating apps, starting casual conversations, and nothing seems to do the trick. I wouldn’t call myself handsome, but not an eyesore either. I am exercising, but still have a few extra pounds. Any tip for how to land something long term? That I should try?

EDIT: Hopefully you haven’t read this yet--I just reread your question, and realized you’ve only been out of your last LTR for a year. Certainly you know you better than I do, but I would strongly recommend being single for a little longer than that, to really clear your system of whatever is still rattling around in there. It’ll be better for you in the long run, and probably better for whoever you date next too. At the risk of being too accusative with a total stranger, you might wanna read a couple of articles on serial monogamy, and decide if any of it rings true with you, before proceeding.

Well, that’s a pretty complex question! Obviously I don’t know you, so I have to generalize a lot. I guess I have a few bullet points that may or may not be useful. It’s worth saying that even though I’m a lady and that means we face these challenges in different ways, I do know where you’re coming from. I’ve been with very few people in my life, was rejected or ignored by a lot more, and I had to go through a long stretch of facing the idea that I might truly die alone–which included realizing that that should not be the worst case scenario that everybody neurotically makes it out to be. So, here are the things I think:

- I wonder where you live, what kind of scene there is around you. Sometimes it might not be the worst idea to entertain a pen pal-type beginning, from the internet, or whatever you can dig up for a resource. Especially if your main goal is making a lasting connection with somebody (which would be something that many people would consider moving out of state for), it’s really worth considering that that person might live literally anywhere. It’s also worth acknowledging whether your immediate environment is just not conducive to healthy dating, for whatever reason. Even in a huge bustling city like NYC, where I live, statistical realities may affect your ability to find what you are looking for. Here, women outnumber men so radically that if you’re female and you’re looking for dudely companionship, you may have to put up with all sorts of bullshit, because men have an embarrassment of choice.  A lot of them feel no obligation whatsoever to get tied down, even if they think they’re “nice guys” and they’re not really consciously aware of this, even if they have a really attractive woman on the hook. My gay male friends make pretty much the exact same complaint to me: That New York has this reputation of having a huge supportive gay community, but the reality is that men who are willing to settle down are really hard to find, because they just have so many options, and even a lot of the guys who think they want a relationship are just all fighting over the same handful of top 10 status-symbol twinks all the time anyway. Soooo that’s all about how hard it is to find a standard boyfriend where *I* live, but like, there could be something legitimately similar going on with finding a girlfriend near you. It’s not ALWAYS your own fault if you can’t get what you want. 

- A lot of people who say that they just wanna be with “someone nice”, or who make generalizations like “NOBODY likes them,” are hiding or ignoring the fact that they actually want something pretty specific. That’s not a crime, it’s just something that would be better to be honest about with yourself. The little you’ve said here makes it sound like goal for you is just, being in a long term relationship. Obviously you have a right to that, but even if you’re NOT unconsciously rejecting people who don’t fit your secret standards, you still may face the problem that your candidates could find your open-mindedness a little impersonal. Obviously you’re not telling people you “just wanna be in a relationship” out loud, but intuition is a powerful thing, especially when it’s fed by body language or subtle behavioral cues. People can become supernaturally perceptive when questions of sex or dating are on the table. So, this might be a good time to interrogate what your goal means to you. When you try to imagine what you’re looking for in really specific terms, what does it look like? What comes out of a long term relationship, that you absolutely can’t get out of any other part of your life? Are those things that you can live without? Also, what kind of person do you imagine being with? If your answer is really vague, or kind of amounts to something like “just someone who treats me well”, try to refine that. If people sense that your standards are totally amorphous because your only goal is having someone to warm your bed, then they’re not going to be really flattered by your attention. I mean you can find people out there who want to be in a relationship just to be in a relationship, but they usually also want babies and all the social, marital trappings above all else. There are apps for that. 

- You’ve probably heard this before, and you’re going to roll your eyes when you hear it again, but “looks” aren’t THAT important. At least for straight dudes, mostly. I’m definitely not going to tell you that looks don’t matter at all, at which point you would know not to believe anything I say, but there’s more going on here. I’ve known plenty of men in the plain-to-ugly range, as traditional standards go, who have dated beautiful women, and/or just lots and lots of women, because they have really inviting personalities: Some combination of, they’re really funny, they have a lot of confidence, they’re super bright, they communicate well about their passions in life, they’re really nice (not “I held the door for you so now you have to fuck me” nice–which is called “being fake” actually–but compassionate/considerate/humble/genuinely interested nice), etc. I also have known plenty of guys in the upper register of physical attractiveness who don’t perform the way you might expect them to because they act fucking weird: any combo of pushy, argumentative, withholding, insecure, superior, combative if you try to be kind to them, or sometimes they just haven’t trained themselves to engage–like, they act like OTHER PEOPLE should compensate for their shyness, and they become resentful if they believe YOU didn’t work hard enough to pry them out of THEIR shell. So like it’s a good thing to care about your appearance and your hygiene and everything, but a big part of the reason that stuff matters is that it shows you care about yourself. No matter what you look like, if you carry around this vibe that it’s somebody else’s job to make you feel good about yourself or your life, then all you’re going to attract is nobody–or people who are seriously damaged, which you probably don’t want either. Depression and insecurity are as normal as they are difficult, but it’s important to try to show that you’re not gonna be somebody’s full time job, with a combination of personal presentation AND personality. The latter is more important.

- At this point you’re probably thinking, “This is like that thing where you need experience to get a job, but you can only get experience FROM getting a job, so where am I supposed to get all this confidence from if my confidence is constantly eroded by rejection?” Well, that’s a good question! This stuff can take like a superhuman amount of effort. Unfortunately there’s no just and reliable way to simply fix this conundrum. I will say this, though: One thing you can do is just try to stop being so focused on it. Yes, I know, THAT SOUNDS REALLY HARD ALSO. But if you can achieve it, to some degree, then it takes a lot of pressure off both yourself and other people, leading to interactions that are easier and more fun, which takes you a big step in the right direction. I’m more or less speaking from experience. I had been painfully oriented toward being in a relationship for most of my life. Men have almost never wanted anything to do with me, for any number of reasons: I’ve never been what you’d call hot, I act like a fucking weirdo, I get along so well with guys that they tend to just think of me as another guy (I’d called this being “friendzoned” if I were a WAY BIGGER ASSHOLE), and surely the few people I was close enough to to try to start something could tell that I was pretty desperate about it. Because I was so…yeah, desperate, about being in a relationship, I took what I could get, and on all but one of the very few past occasions where I “got” something, it turned into a gnarly abusive nightmare, some of which I’m still processing. So, there came a point in time when I really had to review what I’d been doing. I started to ask myself really hard questions like, why DO I need to be in a relationship? Isn’t it true that I would still have to have other things to live for, even if I DID get into a decent relationship? What are those things? Can’t I just start focusing more on those things NOW? Basically I started to experiment with going about my days as if I knew for a fact that I would never get into a relationship, ever. It wasn’t exactly a party, at first, but I knew I was doing a good thing for myself. Actually, it was the only rational thing I could think to do. Then, a month or two later, I met the man I’m going to marry in December. I was sort of confounded by it, like I had finally made this big achievement in being more zen about everything, when I suddenly found myself in a serious, healthy relationship. I almost felt like some kind of hypocrite. But anyway, my explanation was that I was finally in a mental state where I was genuinely ready to be in that kind of relationship, I was prepared to enter it as my own person, without all kinds of baggage about what I “needed” to get out of it. I must have been putting out that vibe, finally.

So these are just some ideas, if there were a surefire fix for your situation, then everybody in the world would know about it already. I guess I’d just conclude by saying that if you can remember that “life isn’t fair” AND you can prevent yourself from blaming others for that, then you’re already a lot closer to getting what you want, than people who think they’re owed satisfaction. Which is a LOT of people.

[korikafez]

Relationships 68

Encountering physically attractive rivals can induce a woman’s intention to have cosmetic surgery.

Women intra-fight themselves over mates in subtle ways.

The notion of mate preference and empirical evidence indicate that men value cues to a woman’s fertility such as youth, facial attractiveness, waist-to-hip ratio and the firmness and size of breasts.

Cosmetic surgery may be considered as intrasexual competition. Women who encounter physically attractive rivals may have greater intentions to take cosmetic surgery for enhancing their advantage over other women.

Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women’s sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

Women in underwear weren’t any harder to recognize when they were upside down—which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants.

University of New South Wales researcher Khandis Blake says the next time you see a woman adjusting her bikini provocatively with her phone at the ready, don't think of her as vacuous or a victim. "Think of her as a strategic player in a complex social and evolutionary game," Dr Blake said. The study revealed women tend to sexualise themselves in environments with greater economic inequality, rather than where they might be oppressed because of their gender.

The number one way that psychologists usually look at women's preoccupation with their appearance is that it happens because of patriarchal pressures - that women live in societies that value their appearance more than their other qualities. "The argument is usually that when you see sexualisation, you see disempowerment.

"What we found instead is that women are more likely to invest time and effort into posting sexy selfies online in places where economic inequality is rising, and not in places where men hold more societal power and gender inequality is rife."

They say income inequality increases competitiveness and status anxiety among people at all levels of the social hierarchy, making them sensitive to where they sit on the social ladder and wanting them to do better than others.

And for women, that is to use what they have always used to climb societal ladder: attractiveness.

That income inequality is a big predictor of sexy selfies suggests that sexy selfies are a marker of social climbing among women that tracks economic incentives in the local environment," Dr Blake says.

"Rightly or wrongly, in today's environment, looking sexy can generate large returns, economically, socially, and personally."

The researchers then found the exact same pattern in real-world spending in other appearance-enhancing areas.

The basic idea is that the way people compete for mates, and the things they do to put themselves at the top of the hierarchy are really important. This is where this research fits in - it's all about how women are competing and why they're competing. "So, when a young woman adjusts her bikini provocatively with her phone at the ready, don't think of her as vacuous or as a victim. Think of her as a strategic player in a complex social and evolutionary game. She's out to maximise her lot in life, just like everyone."

What we found in more than 1000 different economic areas in the US when looking at women's spending in beauty salons and clothing stores is that income inequality is also predicting this type of spending," Dr Blake says. The researchers say that the findings make sense from an evolutionary point of view. "In evolutionary terms, these kinds of behaviours are completely rational, even adaptive," he says.

[evilsnowswan]

What does having adhd mean for you? I always only knew about the typical hyperactive little kid, but i see that's not right. Can you help me understand it more?

Hey nonny, so I wanted to take some time to answer this properly. Last weekend. Now it’s Monday and that didn’t happen, and I’m so swamped at work (and will be until Christmas) that I either answer this now or not at all. 

I’ll try my best.

So, first things first. ADHD is real. ADHD isn’t just for (hyperactive) boys. ADHD isn’t a phase you grow out of. It’s not “caused” by minor brain damage, trauma, poor diet, or poor parenting. The reason many people think that a) it’s a myth perpetuated by pharmaceutical companies/bad parents/bad teachers, b)just boys being boys or c)an excuse used by lazy/dumb people to get out of things they don’t want to do, is because, in general, people don’t know any better, aren’t interested in learning about what doesn’t concern them personally, and like to believe what is fed to them by whoever agrees with them or yells the loudest. People like to believe that their opinions are the truth and leave it at that (you know, rather than to listen to the people who might actually tell them what living with ADHD is really like). (Not attacking you here, nonny, or anyone in particular. You actually asked- which I love, because not many people do that. ❤). 

[THIS TURNED OUT LONGER THAN I THOUGHT]

The reason we associate ADHD with little boys is because that’s what we’ve been taught to expect. If there is representation at all, it’s little boys who are disruptive in class and hard to handle at home, who never sit still and don’t know the word ‘no’. There are young boys who fit this description and suffer from ADHD. Others exhibit the behaviors but the cause might be an entirely different one altogether (which is why proper testing is so IMPORTANT. Misdiagnosis helps nobody.). Boys are also more likely to be diagnosed, because that’s the demographic the early studies focused on. All the symptoms and criteria lists were biased (and still are to so extent), because they looked at boys and boys alone (initially research was focused on studying hyperactive, school-aged boys) and failed to understand that ADHD manifests differently in girls. If untreated, many adults (men and women) exhibit symptoms that have very little to do with hyperactive little boys, but the problem is still ADHD. Some researchers have suggested that ADHD is more prevalent in boys/men, but this is not the case. ADHD in girls/women is simply consistently under-diagnosed and under-treated compared to boys/men, especially those girls/women who do not demonstrate hyperactivity and behavior problems (or not in the same way that’s been observed in and linked to boys/men).

ADHD Is caused by chemical, structural, and connectivity differences in the brain, mostly as a result of genetics. Research shows that those with ADHD have abnormalities in how the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine work to facilitate communication between neurons and activation of various brain functions. This affects the parts of the brain involved in reward and consequence (which is why many people with ADHD are at risk for addiction and more likely to engage in dangerous activities. They may be more impulsive and are very accident-prone.), brain networks involved in the engagement and regulation of attention (well, duh.). and the modulation and regulation of the dopamine system (mood-swings, here we come). Also there’s issues with performance and effortful engagement in activities (i.e. executive dysfunction. We want to do the thing. We really do. We just don’t get our brains to switch from P to D, and when we do, it takes us a hell of a lot more effort and energy to do it.) The general ADHD brain has differences in activity levels and the way certain areas are structured. Brain scans show significantly reduced activity throughout the brain, especially within areas responsible for motor activity and attention capacity (again, we are accident-prone and it’s our brain that wasn’t listening. We didn’t do it on purpose), and there are other structural differences that have been linked to memory issues and emotion regulation (brain-wise we are stuck forever 17… dancing queens who have a hard time NOT overreacting and calming ourselves down. Emotions are tough.). I could keep going on like this, but my point is: it’s not made up, it’s very real, and it’s not just in our heads… well, except, of course, IT IS. 

Some time ago I saw a post on my dash liking ADHD to a Vespa. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but the point was this: Imagine your brain (the neurotypical brain) as a car. People with ADHD don’t have cars, we have Vespas. Neither the car or the Vespa are, by themselves, a superior vehicle. They are both perfectly suitable to get you from A to B. The only problem is: The world we live in is built for cars. Roads are built with cars in mind - and while a Vespa may take you places a car can not go (think narrow, winding alleyways)- the advantage is with the car-drivers. We teach people how to drive cars. The instruction manuals are for cars. The maintenance tools are for cars. Try driving a Vespa like you would a car and you end up roadkill. In short: the ADHD brain is a different brain. It’s not a defective brain, it’s a different brain.Moving on… boys, and girls and women. And ADHD isn’t all there is.

There are different subtypes of ADHD (inattentive, hyperactive, and combined type), and every person has a unique brain profile. There’s ADHD, there’s ADD, there’s something somewhere in the middle, or leaning more or less one way or another. Like so many things, AD(H)D is a spectrum. I don’t feel like going into specifics right now, but things are far more complicated than hyperactive boys and daydreaming girls. People are more complex than that.

The issue is that ADHD isn’t properly taught to the people who are supposed to detect and diagnose it. That’s why some doctors still refuse to “believe” ADHD even exists, or that girls/women can have ADHD , or that you can have ADHD and not be a drug-addict, a dropout, or a felon. Well, just because you don’t “believe” in it, doesn’t make it any less real or any less of a fact. That’s not how the world works. (Feels like that needs to be said more often these days, so I’m saying it.).

I grew up with male family members diagnosed with ADHD. Part of my family at least  was aware of the genetic link, but failed to look at the girls/women, because we weren’t “like the boys” (hyperactive little boys syndrome). Only, we were. I got an ‘H’ with my diagnosis, and I fought them on it. I fought them hard, because what I thought the “hyperactivity” in ADHD stood for was what I had been told and had seen growing up - little loud, misbehaving boys, who I, more often than not, wanted to chuck out the window, because they got free passes way more than us girls did. I wasn’t like that?!?! AT ALL?!?!

Turns out that ‘the hyperactive trait’ can also manifest as “talking too much/too loud/at the wrong times/ missing social cues/trouble taking turns when speaking/trouble talking coherently and in a way that allows people to follow your train of thought/trouble listening/trouble not interrupting…”

it can present as impulsive shopping, online-addiction, leg-bouncing, nail-biting, hair chewing… and a lot of other things that LITTLE GIRLS ESPECIALLY are told not to do/be and are (constantly) reprimanded for, because it’s considered rude/improper/unacceptable behavior (more so for girls than for boys). The list of tell-tale signs in girls that get overlooked, because girls find other “outlets” is very long, but I’m very tired, so I’d have to elaborate on that at another time.

If untreated/ not diagnosed, many adults with ADHD develop coping mechanisms and strategies (not all of which are healthy. Many self-medicate with sugary drinks/food, legal and illegal drugs, risk-seeking behaviors…)… and there are a lot of comorbidities - drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, self-harm, eating disorders, anxiety disorders… girls/women tend to turn the restlessness inwards and against themselves, boys/men display more signs of outward aggression. Some people even OVER-compensate.

I used to be that kid who’d forget and lose her head if it weren’t attached to her body, but grew up to be super organized, structured, always prepared, and overly punctual. Dependable. Responsible. Hard-working. So I didn’t fit the stereotype. Not at the first glance anyway. But all my planning and scheduling? I overdid it. Overdid it to the point that any spontaneity would become impossible and the slightest hiccup in my plans would turn me into a headless chicken with severe anxiety attacks (which I tried to cover up and hide as well). 

I CAN drive my Vespa like a car if I have to, but it damn near killed me. That’s all I’m saying. But to claim that I couldn’t possibly have a Vespa in the first place, because I somehow made it from A to B and am still ALIVE is laughable and ableist, and UGH, somebody hold my flower.

Yeah, so that’s pretty much what growing up a girl with AD(H)D is like. Driving your Vespa like mad, praying to God you don’t crash, that the driver next to you doesn’t call you out for using the car-lane, that they don’t give you a ticket for parking in the wrong place and speeding when you shouldn’t, and that you don’t die out in the middle of nowhere when you suddenly, unexpectedly, run out of gas and DIDN’T-gasp!-plan ahead and your phone is dead as well. 

PS: This wasn’t very informative or well-structured, and I’m sorry. 

PPS: One important afterthought: You don’t “get” AD(H)D as an adult like you catch a virus. It’s in your brain and you’d have to have had it (i.e. displayed symptoms) since childhood to be diagnosed (as an adult). Just FYI. Important.

[leviathangourmet]

Amidst the recent brouhaha about the alleged sexism of discussing Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s perceived “unlikability” and relative unpopularity as a presidential candidate, Atlantic columnist Peter Beinart asserted that any conversation on this issue should take account of America’s entrenched misogyny — especially hostility toward female ambition. As evidence, he pointed to a 2010 study with seemingly striking results:

[T]wo Yale professors, Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto, showed identical fictional biographies of two state senators — one male and one female — to participants. … When they added quotations to the biographies that characterized each as “ambitious” and possessing “a strong will to power,” the male state senator grew more popular. But the female state senator not only lost support among both women and men, but also provoked “moral outrage.”

As Beinart notes, he has written about this study several times before, mostly in the context of arguing that hostility toward Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi is rooted in sexism: a female politician seen as ambitious or power-seeking elicits not only negativity but “contempt, anger, and disgust” (feelings that the study groups under “moral outrage”). The issue is clearly important to him, and he clearly finds the Brescoll/Okimoto study compelling. Others, including current New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg during her time at Slate, have also cited it as a stark demonstration of fear and loathing of powerful women.

Guess what: the study actually shows nothing of the kind. Also, it’s a pretty bad study, and the people who peddle it should feel bad — especially since they generally link to various summaries rather than the study itself, of which a free digital copy is available online.

In the internet-based study, 230 Americans 18 to 76 years old (two-thirds of them women) read a short biography of a fictional Oregon state senator, identified as “John Burr” or “Ann Burr.” They then rated Ann/John on a 7-point scale on various qualities of “agency” (strong, assertive, tough), “communality” (caring, supportive) and “competence” (competent, productive, effective). The questionnaire also asked participants to rate how much they would like Burr to be their representative and to what extent they felt various emotions toward him/her (including contempt, anger, irritation, disgust, etc.). Half of the participants got a version of the text with this added paragraph:

The Oregon Sun-Sentinel described him/her as “one of the most ambitious politicians in Oregon … a politician that has always had a strong will to power.” Burr him/herself has been quoted as saying that “Being hungry is everything … it’s key to gaining influence in politics.”

And here is the table summarizing the results:

Yes, it’s true when a female politician is described as power-seeking, her ratings become somewhat more negative while those of a male politician become somewhat more positive. But the summaries and the media reports omit some key information.

When the politician is not explicitly described as power-seeking and ambitious, Ann is perceived more favorably than John, with much higher ratings on some items. She also comes out ahead in voter preference. (This finding echoes other recent research showing that voters of both parties tend to be biased in favor of female politicians.)

And the “moral outrage” part? With no ambition/power-seeking cues, the mean moral outrage rating for John was .27 points higher than for Ann. Among participants who got the text with the power-seeking cues, the mean moral outrage rating was .17 points higher for Ann than for John.

However, the claim that participants reacted with “moral outrage” to the power-seeking female politician but not to the power-seeking male is simply wrong. (Disturbingly, the misconception was promoted by the study authors themselves in a brief write-up on the website of the Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard.) In fact, the moral outrage ratings for both were extremely low: midway between 1 and 2 on a 7-point scale, i.e., between “none” and “very little.” The man fared marginally better than the woman with the “power-seeking/ambition” cue; the woman fared marginally better without it.

Do these findings indicate lingering negativity toward open ambition in women? Maybe. But several caveats are in order. One, the study has not been replicated; knowing what we know about the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, drawing sweeping and far-reaching conclusions from a single study is foolhardy at best. To take a related example: There has been a lot of hype about a 2003 experiment in which business school students regarded a male entrepreneur as more likable and a better colleague than his female twin with an otherwise identical resume (the “Heidi/Howard study”). The fact that the experiment was repeated 10 years later and this time the woman was rated as more likable and as a preferable colleague has gotten a lot less exposure.

Second, the somewhat negative reactions to “Ann Burr” happened when the text had a passage explicitly stressing her ambition and power-seeking (with a quote from the politician herself about being “hungry”). Without those cues, the study found, the female politician was not perceived as more ambitious or power-hungry than her male counterpart. In real life, messages about a politician’s ambition and power-seeking are far more complex than in the study’s fictional vignette, with a lot of variables the study didn’t explore. (For instance: is the negative effect of such messages neutralized by stressing that the politician is caring and ethical, two areas in which women in politics have an edge in popular perception?)

In short: The John Burr/Ann Burr study tells us zilch about prejudice against ambitious female politicians, and people would do well to stop using it.

Are female politicians held back by gender biases? That’s a complicated topic. (There’s evidence that, for the most part, being female is now an advantage in politics — or at least it was 10 years ago.) But, ironically, misogyny in politics can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: some Massachusetts voters have told The Boston Globe they don’t want Warren to run because “there are still some people out there who won’t vote for a woman.”

So next time you want to hype a study supposedly showing that Americans find female ambition in politics repulsive, think again. And check your data.

[survival0001-blog]

Survival Skills for Highly Sensitive People

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Survival Skills for Highly Sensitive People

Traits of a Highly Sensitive Person: All highly sensitive people (HSPs) are unique individuals, but they have certain traits in common. Elaine Aron, PhD, a researcher who specializes in the topic, has developed an acronym that summarizes them: DOES.

D: Depth of processing “HSPs simply process everything more, relating and comparing what they notice to their past experiences,” Aron explains. “When we decide without knowing how we came to that decision, we call this intuition, and HSPs have a good — but not infallible! — intuition.”

O: Overstimulation “What’s overstimu­lating to each person is different,” says Bevin Niemann, who coaches HSPs and self-identifies as highly sensitive. “It could be noise, bright lights, crowds, emotional situations — the scratchy tags in the back of a shirt might be intolerable.”

E: Emotional reactivity and empathy “We connect deeply with art, music, theater, nature, animals, stories, and books,” Niemann says. Studies have found HSPs to be especially empathetic to others, sometimes to the point of being overgiving.

S: Sensing the subtle Highly sensitive people are attuned to signals that others might miss, Aron asserts. “Our awareness of subtleties is useful in a number of ways, from simple pleasure in life to strategizing our responses based on others’ nonverbal cues.”

By all appearances, Lynelle Trigalet was thriving. In her early 40s, she managed the hectic costume shop for a theater company, where she led teams of up to 30 employees. As soon as she left the shop in the evenings, however, things changed: She had little energy for the rest of her life. She’d make dinner and then almost immediately fall asleep in front of the television. Her husband half-joked that she had an on/off switch.

Trigalet wondered why she didn’t seem to have as much energy as other people. Assuming the problem was her long work hours, she quit her job to ­become a wellness coach. But something was still not right. Her life — including her marriage — was falling apart, and she felt like “a failure in every aspect.”

Planning to switch careers again, Trigalet enlisted the help of a professional mentor, who happened to ask her if she was a “highly sensitive person,” or HSP. She hadn’t heard the term before, so she took a self-test designed by sensitivity expert Elaine Aron, PhD, author of The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.

Trigalet scored high — “really high,” she says — and her initial reaction to the label was shame. Like many people, she associated the word “sensitive” with being weak or overly emotional.

But HSPs aren’t simply overwrought or neurotic. Highly sensitive people — a designation that includes about 20 percent of the population — have uniquely receptive nervous systems. The trait runs in families and even appears in animal behavior.

These types have a harder time filtering out potentially extraneous information, so their brains absorb everything. They may be hypersensitive to sounds, bright lights, tastes, and scents, which means they get overstimulated easily. But these people are also often highly creative, detail oriented, and capable of synthesizing diverse information in novel ways.

Once Trigalet recognized that she was an HSP, events in her life that had been puzzling before — like the fact that she cried every day after school during junior high — made sense. She hadn’t been depressed; she was tired and overstimulated from interacting with people all day.

The reason for the exhaustion she felt after work became clear, too. Because the brains of HSPs absorb so much information, they require extra downtime to process it. When she was busy managing her teams, usually working straight through lunch, Trigalet had no downtime whatsoever.

Her entire life improved when she finally began to understand the trait she’d carried since birth. Her marriage stabilized as she and her spouse recognized the reasons behind her need for space and quiet. And instead of beating herself up for being “different” and struggling to fit into jobs that didn’t suit her, Trigalet used her perceptive and conscientious nature (another HSP trait) to become a transformational leadership coach who works primarily with HSPs.

Reframing past events and recognizing one’s strengths are among the key steps toward thriving as a sensitive person, says Aron. These strategies can help you support HSPs — whether it’s yourself or a loved one.

Mental Self-Care

HSPs are often mistaken for introverts. There’s an overlap, but they’re not the same. Aron estimates that 70 percent of HSPs are introverts and 30 percent are extroverts. And, while it may seem more feminine in nature, the trait appears equally in women and men.

Similarly, many HSPs are labeled shy or socially awkward as children, but they may not be at all. “Sensitive people just need a little bit more time to process,” says Bevin Niemann, a coach and mentor for HSPs. “We’re going through a database of experience. We address patterns, look at ideas, and then pull all that together.”

If a sensitive person grows up in a culture that judges reserve and sensitivity as weaknesses, it can lead to feelings of inadequacy. But reframing earlier experiences can help HSPs understand past awkwardness and move forward with confidence.

Trigalet reappraised her teenage tears and adult exhaustion, learning to view them as products of her sensitivity rather than as personality flaws; Aron suggests other newly realized HSPs might do the same — and feel a greater sense of self-acceptance.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive: Make room for a sensitive person’s need for downtime — it’s a wonderful way to show support. You might also try practicing patience while your friend or loved one takes a bit longer to process information.

Physical Self-Care

Psychologist Michael Alcée, PhD, identifies as an HSP, and he finds the trait helpful for his practice. “It’s easy to intuitively pick up on different registers of feelings, almost like a good musician learns to track the complex interplay of dissonance and consonance within a song. You’re able to see finer gradations.”

To accommodate his sensitivity, Alcée has made adjustments to his physical environment — installing softer lighting in his office, for example. “I knew those fluorescent lights would be blaring in my face the whole day,” he says. “By changing them, I could be more present and therefore more helpful.”

Highly sensitive people often benefit from making similar small alterations to their workplaces and schedules, such as politely requesting that a colleague wear less perfume or seeking permission to take a quick nap after lunch, something one of Trigalet’s employees did years ago.

“I didn’t really think anything of it at the time,” Trigalet recalls. But if she’d known then what she knows now, Trigalet would have done the same thing herself. Taking time for naps and maintaining good sleep habits (regular bedtimes, a minimum of eight hours’ rest) is vital to helping HSPs stay grounded.

Regular meals are also important, says psychiatrist Judith Orloff, MD, author of The Empath’s Survival Guide. Because low blood-sugar levels can spark sensory overload, it’s helpful for these types to avoid getting too hungry.

Finally, any type of gentle movement — yoga, long walks in nature, bike rides — can provide HSPs a chance to physically dispel anxious ­energy without causing overstimulation.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive:Managers, parents, and others in supervisory positions can benefit from knowing that sensitive types function best when offered some quiet downtime. Sleep is crucial for HSPs — it allows them to recover from all that stimulation — and because many are prone to insomnia or interrupted sleep, naps are especially beneficial.

Emotional Self-Care

HSPs have intense feelings — a lot of them.

They exhibit intense empathy, often sensing the emotions and needs of those around them (which can cause them to slip into an off-putting “fix it” mode). Their sometimes-porous personal boundaries can present a real challenge to loved ones, who may feel disrespected or may unconsciously exploit those caretaking tendencies.

This means that developing strong boundaries is especially key to their emotional health.

“HSPs can pick up on things that are going on with other people,” Alcée says. “And it’s an important art to be able to say, ‘This is theirs; this is mine.’ Just because you can be receptive doesn’t mean that you have to be.”

Good boundaries are like a good jazz composition, he says. “I need to come back to my own instrument and make sure that I am in tune and know how to ‘read the changes’ before I try to make music with others.”

Practice setting boundaries by saying no, Orloff suggests — starting with easy interactions. “Say the telemarketer calls,” she explains. “You can practice by saying, ‘Please don’t call me again’ and then hanging up.

“You don’t have to make it into a big, long explanation when you set a boundary,” she adds. “‘No’ is a complete sentence.”

For HSPs who tend to feel the emotions of others, Orloff recommends repeating a mantra, such as “Return to sender.” Differentiating ­between one’s own emotions and those of another is a valuable skill that gets easier over time, but just having enough awareness to repeat a mantra is an indispensable first step.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive:When you interact with sensitive people, try not to take it personally when they say no or set boundaries in other ways. Remember that it’s difficult for them to set limits, so rather than being disappointed or annoyed by their awkwardness, you might consider celebrating their courage instead.

Social Self-Care

Social events (especially parties) can be a challenge for highly sensitive types. The stimulation of a loud, crowded place is unlikely to bring out their best, and because they tend toward deep thinking, small talk can be draining. Ideally, HSPs will plan plenty of downtime, both before and after group experiences.

There are other steps they can take to make these gatherings more enjoyable. “Prepare in advance,” suggests Jacquelyn Strickland, LPC, who counsels HSPs. “Get adequate sleep. Wear comfortable clothes. Eat a small protein meal before you go.”

Periodically stepping outside or retreating to the bathroom can help reduce sensory overload, and breathing exercises will amplify a break’s calming effect. Strickland recommends inhaling for a count of eight, holding it for a count of four, and then exhaling for a count of eight. Or just close your eyes, breathe deeply, and tune out additional stimuli.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive: When attending a party with a highly sensitive friend, be prepared to leave a little earlier than you may prefer; HSPs will reach their saturation point sooner than most. If you know you’d like to stay late at a gathering, consider planning for separate transportation.

These suggestions are all provisional, of course. “The No. 1 thing for highly sensitive people is to have a self-care plan that’s based on who they are,” Strickland notes. HSPs may have many similar traits, but each one has unique needs. With some acceptance and forethought, those needs don’t have to be a burden. Proper self-care can transform that sensitivity into a blessing.

Take the Quiz: Find a variety of quizzes and informative articles, as well as a test to determine if you’re an HSP, at

This originally appeared as “The World According to Highly Sensitive People” in the January-February 2019 print issue of Experience Life.

Source

Survival Skills for Highly Sensitive People

[wallythayer]

Survival Skills for Highly Sensitive People

Traits of a Highly Sensitive Person: All highly sensitive people (HSPs) are unique individuals, but they have certain traits in common. Elaine Aron, PhD, a researcher who specializes in the topic, has developed an acronym that summarizes them: DOES.

D: Depth of processing “HSPs simply process everything more, relating and comparing what they notice to their past experiences,” Aron explains. “When we decide without knowing how we came to that decision, we call this intuition, and HSPs have a good — but not infallible! — intuition.”

O: Overstimulation “What’s overstimu­lating to each person is different,” says Bevin Niemann, who coaches HSPs and self-identifies as highly sensitive. “It could be noise, bright lights, crowds, emotional situations — the scratchy tags in the back of a shirt might be intolerable.”

E: Emotional reactivity and empathy “We connect deeply with art, music, theater, nature, animals, stories, and books,” Niemann says. Studies have found HSPs to be especially empathetic to others, sometimes to the point of being overgiving.

S: Sensing the subtle Highly sensitive people are attuned to signals that others might miss, Aron asserts. “Our awareness of subtleties is useful in a number of ways, from simple pleasure in life to strategizing our responses based on others’ nonverbal cues.”

By all appearances, Lynelle Trigalet was thriving. In her early 40s, she managed the hectic costume shop for a theater company, where she led teams of up to 30 employees. As soon as she left the shop in the evenings, however, things changed: She had little energy for the rest of her life. She’d make dinner and then almost immediately fall asleep in front of the television. Her husband half-joked that she had an on/off switch.

Trigalet wondered why she didn’t seem to have as much energy as other people. Assuming the problem was her long work hours, she quit her job to ­become a wellness coach. But something was still not right. Her life — including her marriage — was falling apart, and she felt like “a failure in every aspect.”

Planning to switch careers again, Trigalet enlisted the help of a professional mentor, who happened to ask her if she was a “highly sensitive person,” or HSP. She hadn’t heard the term before, so she took a self-test designed by sensitivity expert Elaine Aron, PhD, author of The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.

Trigalet scored high — “really high,” she says — and her initial reaction to the label was shame. Like many people, she associated the word “sensitive” with being weak or overly emotional.

But HSPs aren’t simply overwrought or neurotic. Highly sensitive people — a designation that includes about 20 percent of the population — have uniquely receptive nervous systems. The trait runs in families and even appears in animal behavior.

These types have a harder time filtering out potentially extraneous information, so their brains absorb everything. They may be hypersensitive to sounds, bright lights, tastes, and scents, which means they get overstimulated easily. But these people are also often highly creative, detail oriented, and capable of synthesizing diverse information in novel ways.

Once Trigalet recognized that she was an HSP, events in her life that had been puzzling before — like the fact that she cried every day after school during junior high — made sense. She hadn’t been depressed; she was tired and overstimulated from interacting with people all day.

The reason for the exhaustion she felt after work became clear, too. Because the brains of HSPs absorb so much information, they require extra downtime to process it. When she was busy managing her teams, usually working straight through lunch, Trigalet had no downtime whatsoever.

Her entire life improved when she finally began to understand the trait she’d carried since birth. Her marriage stabilized as she and her spouse recognized the reasons behind her need for space and quiet. And instead of beating herself up for being “different” and struggling to fit into jobs that didn’t suit her, Trigalet used her perceptive and conscientious nature (another HSP trait) to become a transformational leadership coach who works primarily with HSPs.

Reframing past events and recognizing one’s strengths are among the key steps toward thriving as a sensitive person, says Aron. These strategies can help you support HSPs — whether it’s yourself or a loved one.

Mental Self-Care

HSPs are often mistaken for introverts. There’s an overlap, but they’re not the same. Aron estimates that 70 percent of HSPs are introverts and 30 percent are extroverts. And, while it may seem more feminine in nature, the trait appears equally in women and men.

Similarly, many HSPs are labeled shy or socially awkward as children, but they may not be at all. “Sensitive people just need a little bit more time to process,” says Bevin Niemann, a coach and mentor for HSPs. “We’re going through a database of experience. We address patterns, look at ideas, and then pull all that together.”

If a sensitive person grows up in a culture that judges reserve and sensitivity as weaknesses, it can lead to feelings of inadequacy. But reframing earlier experiences can help HSPs understand past awkwardness and move forward with confidence.

Trigalet reappraised her teenage tears and adult exhaustion, learning to view them as products of her sensitivity rather than as personality flaws; Aron suggests other newly realized HSPs might do the same — and feel a greater sense of self-acceptance.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive: Make room for a sensitive person’s need for downtime — it’s a wonderful way to show support. You might also try practicing patience while your friend or loved one takes a bit longer to process information.

Physical Self-Care

Psychologist Michael Alcée, PhD, identifies as an HSP, and he finds the trait helpful for his practice. “It’s easy to intuitively pick up on different registers of feelings, almost like a good musician learns to track the complex interplay of dissonance and consonance within a song. You’re able to see finer gradations.”

To accommodate his sensitivity, Alcée has made adjustments to his physical environment — installing softer lighting in his office, for example. “I knew those fluorescent lights would be blaring in my face the whole day,” he says. “By changing them, I could be more present and therefore more helpful.”

Highly sensitive people often benefit from making similar small alterations to their workplaces and schedules, such as politely requesting that a colleague wear less perfume or seeking permission to take a quick nap after lunch, something one of Trigalet’s employees did years ago.

“I didn’t really think anything of it at the time,” Trigalet recalls. But if she’d known then what she knows now, Trigalet would have done the same thing herself. Taking time for naps and maintaining good sleep habits (regular bedtimes, a minimum of eight hours’ rest) is vital to helping HSPs stay grounded.

Regular meals are also important, says psychiatrist Judith Orloff, MD, author of The Empath’s Survival Guide. Because low blood-sugar levels can spark sensory overload, it’s helpful for these types to avoid getting too hungry.

Finally, any type of gentle movement — yoga, long walks in nature, bike rides — can provide HSPs a chance to physically dispel anxious ­energy without causing overstimulation.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive: Managers, parents, and others in supervisory positions can benefit from knowing that sensitive types function best when offered some quiet downtime. Sleep is crucial for HSPs — it allows them to recover from all that stimulation — and because many are prone to insomnia or interrupted sleep, naps are especially beneficial.

Emotional Self-Care

HSPs have intense feelings — a lot of them.

They exhibit intense empathy, often sensing the emotions and needs of those around them (which can cause them to slip into an off-putting “fix it” mode). Their sometimes-porous personal boundaries can present a real challenge to loved ones, who may feel disrespected or may unconsciously exploit those caretaking tendencies.

This means that developing strong boundaries is especially key to their emotional health.

“HSPs can pick up on things that are going on with other people,” Alcée says. “And it’s an important art to be able to say, ‘This is theirs; this is mine.’ Just because you can be receptive doesn’t mean that you have to be.”

Good boundaries are like a good jazz composition, he says. “I need to come back to my own instrument and make sure that I am in tune and know how to ‘read the changes’ before I try to make music with others.”

Practice setting boundaries by saying no, Orloff suggests — starting with easy interactions. “Say the telemarketer calls,” she explains. “You can practice by saying, ‘Please don’t call me again’ and then hanging up.

“You don’t have to make it into a big, long explanation when you set a boundary,” she adds. “‘No’ is a complete sentence.”

For HSPs who tend to feel the emotions of others, Orloff recommends repeating a mantra, such as “Return to sender.” Differentiating ­between one’s own emotions and those of another is a valuable skill that gets easier over time, but just having enough awareness to repeat a mantra is an indispensable first step.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive: When you interact with sensitive people, try not to take it personally when they say no or set boundaries in other ways. Remember that it’s difficult for them to set limits, so rather than being disappointed or annoyed by their awkwardness, you might consider celebrating their courage instead.

Social Self-Care

Social events (especially parties) can be a challenge for highly sensitive types. The stimulation of a loud, crowded place is unlikely to bring out their best, and because they tend toward deep thinking, small talk can be draining. Ideally, HSPs will plan plenty of downtime, both before and after group experiences.

There are other steps they can take to make these gatherings more enjoyable. “Prepare in advance,” suggests Jacquelyn Strickland, LPC, who counsels HSPs. “Get adequate sleep. Wear comfortable clothes. Eat a small protein meal before you go.”

Periodically stepping outside or retreating to the bathroom can help reduce sensory overload, and breathing exercises will amplify a break’s calming effect. Strickland recommends inhaling for a count of eight, holding it for a count of four, and then exhaling for a count of eight. Or just close your eyes, breathe deeply, and tune out additional stimuli.

If someone you care about is highly sensitive: When attending a party with a highly sensitive friend, be prepared to leave a little earlier than you may prefer; HSPs will reach their saturation point sooner than most. If you know you’d like to stay late at a gathering, consider planning for separate transportation.

These suggestions are all provisional, of course. “The No. 1 thing for highly sensitive people is to have a self-care plan that’s based on who they are,” Strickland notes. HSPs may have many similar traits, but each one has unique needs. With some acceptance and forethought, those needs don’t have to be a burden. Proper self-care can transform that sensitivity into a blessing.

Take the Quiz: Find a variety of quizzes and informative articles, as well as a test to determine if you’re an HSP, at hsperson.com/test

This originally appeared as “The World According to Highly Sensitive People” in the January-February 2019 print issue of Experience Life.

Get the full story at https://experiencelife.com/article/survival-skills-for-highly-sensitive-people/

[e-newsletter-blog]

Non-Verbal Communication by Ellyn Erynna

Past

Egyptian - Nonverbal communication is extremely important in every culture; the Egyptian culture is no exception. Understanding nonverbal gestures and cues used in Islamic cultures like Egypt can help you avoid those cultural gaffes that we all tend to practice. When looking at nonverbal communication for any culture I think it’s important to look at their history to see how it’s influenced their behavior today. When I think about nonverbal communication hand gestures and facial expressions are the first things that come to mind. I usually forget that these aren’t the only forms of nonverbal communication. Egypt is unique because they were one of the first civilizations to use nonverbal communication. Before the written word, Egyptians used hieroglyphs to symbolize what they wanted to convey. Egyptians also gave nonverbal cues in their ancient artwork. When a figure was drawn larger than the other figures it was meant to convey status or power. Egyptians today still rely on nonverbal gestures and cues to convey meaning or purpose. Egyptian men greet each other with a handshake and if they know the person well they may give a kiss on the cheek. Egyptian men will get very close to one another when speaking. It’s not uncommon for women to not be introduced or even acknowledged. Women are supposed to present their hand to a man when meeting and if they don’t, the man should bow with his hand to his head. Eye contact is extremely important and shows interest and respect. In the Egyptian culture the right hand is used for eating and the left hand is for bodily hygiene.  For this reason offering or receiving something with the left hand is like saying that it is unclean. Eating with the left hand should never be done. In Egyptian culture big hand gestures is a sign of excitement and joy and will not always be related to anger. The Egyptian people have a rich history and culture and nonverbal communication plays a role in everyday life. Understanding these cues is important when trying to understand the people or operate business in Egypt.

Greece : In Ancient Greece, music and dance played an important part in everyday lives. These arts were used not only in early theaters but also in social gatherings, funerals and religious festivals. Through their music and dance, they were able to pass traditions and stories in history. Greece has a very high-context orientated culture, which means that the Greeks tend to convey covert and explicit messages which are internalized. Their interactions do not need explanation because of their common history, and they ‘just know’ what is being conveyed to them. Because of this, you might find that the Greeks often interrupt you as they quite quickly find out what it is you are trying to say. Although this can seem rude to many, it is just a common aspect of the Greek way of communication. Music was and still is today, used to convey nonverbal messages in communication. Ancient Greeks believed that the gift of music was given to them by the goddesses called the Nine Muses, in which the word music is derived from. Ancient Greeks used music in religious ceremonies, funerals, social gatherings and theater. In these situations the music would enhance the nonverbal message of the overall feeling of the gathering. On the other hand, dance of the ancient Greeks not only told a story through their movement, but also taught soldiers how to fight in wars.

Present 

We communicate more with nonverbal communication than we do with verbal communication. Roughly 65% of our communication is nonverbal (hand gestures, facial gestures etc…). The conscious rules our spoken word, but nonverbal communication can be ruled by the conscious or the subconscious. We can lie easily with the words we say, but we have a very hard time covering up a lie when it comes to facial expressions and subconscious gestures. There are many ways in which we communicate nonverbally, from demonstrating attraction to deception. The eyes tell a lot about a person and what they are communicating. So do facial features. And while the human race speaks various foreign language, the language of the nonverbal is universally the same. Even when we don’t understand someone speaking in a foreign language, we can often understand how they are feeling through their nonverbal cues

Example : The Chinese language is so complex and vastly different than many other languages which makes the translation and interpretation an extremely difficult task, and translators must keep in mind not only the literal meaning but also the cultural differences and how the different languages represent differing worldviews of the two cultures.

China is considered, like many other Asian countries, to possess a more collectivist and low-contact culture than that of the United States, making their nonverbal communication different than, and sometimes in conflict with American nonverbal behavior. However, there is evidence in all areas of China of westernization and changing cultural norms, the area of nonverbal communication being no exception. Though we can classify many nonverbal norms in China as the result of a collectivist low-contact lifestyle, we must acknowledge that differences exist regionally and personally in such a large country. The Chinese and other East Asian cultures are known to place the most emotional importance on the eyes when expressing and recognizing emotions. According to one study, “Western Europeans fixate more on the mouth region, and East Asians fixate more on the eye region when recognising facial expressions.” In the Chinese culture, information and nonverbal cues are communicated through the eyes rather than through expressive smiles or frowns which Western cultures and Americans use to communicate. However, it is also true that direct and prolonged eye contact is avoided in China. Chinese and East Asian individuals have been said to “perceive another’s face as angrier and more un-approachable and unpleasant when making eye contact as compared to individuals from a Western European culture.”

There are a few specific gestures which hold different meaning in China than in other cultures. Placing the forefinger to the lips and creating a “shah” or “shh” sound resembles hissing and represents disapproval in China, more severe than its meaning of silence in the United States and other Western cultures. Additionally, to beckon someone to approach you in China, the gesture is a hand extended toward the person with the palm down, moving the fingers back and forth. This is often confusing to Americans, as it appears as if the person is waving goodbye. The American beckoning gesture, an upward-facing palm with the index finger moving back and forth, is considered offensive in China as they avoid pointing with one finger.

Although attitudes toward physical contact and spatial difference are gradually becoming less low-contact in China and other Asian countries, affectionate touching and public displays of affection remain very different compared to western cultures. A study concluded that “Asian couples were far less likely to walk with arms around one another than were Latino couples.” Generally, close contact is avoided in public and touching is kept to a minimum in China, especially in business and professional situations. However, handshakes are an accepted form of greeting and are commonly used during introductions and business meetings.

Types of nonverbal communication :

Body language - Body movements can be used to reinforce or emphasise what a person is saying and also offer information about the emotions and attitudes of a person. However, it is also possible for body movements to conflict with what is said. A skilled observer may be able to detect such discrepancies in behaviour and use them as a clue to what someone is really feeling and thinking.

Posture - Two forms of posture have been identified, ‘open’ and ‘closed’, which may reflect an individual's degree of confidence, status or receptivity to another person. Someone seated in a closed position might have his/her arms folded, legs crossed or be positioned at a slight angle from the person with whom they are interacting. In an open posture, you might expect to see someone directly facing you with hands apart on the arms of the chair. An open posture can be used to communicate openness or interest in someone and a readiness to listen, whereas the closed posture might imply discomfort or disinterest.

Proxemics- In today's multicultural society, it is important to consider the range of non-verbal codes as expressed in different ethnic groups. When someone violates an ‘appropriate’ distance, people may feel uncomfortable or defensive. Their actions may well be open to misinterpretation. In Western society, four distances have been defined according to the relationship between the people involved.

Eye Contact, where the amount of eye contact often determines the level of trust and trustworthiness; Paralanguage : aspects of the voice apart from speech, such as pitch, tone, and speed of speaking

Facial Expressions : including smiling, frowning and even blinking Physiological Changes : for example, sweating or blinking more when nervous.

[djgblogger-blog]

Does biology explain why men outnumber women in tech?

http://bit.ly/2vZZaLD

Who's missing from this picture? Lawrence Sinclair, CC BY-NC-ND

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley employs many more men than women in tech jobs. What’s much harder to agree on is why.

The recent anti-diversity memo by a now former Google engineer has pushed this topic into the spotlight. The writer argued there are ways to explain the gender gap in tech that don’t rely on bias and discrimination – specifically, biological sex differences. Setting aside how this assertion would affect questions about how to move toward greater equity in tech fields, how well does his wrap-up represent what researchers know about the science of sex and gender?

As a social scientist who’s been conducting psychological research about sex and gender for almost 50 years, I agree that biological differences between the sexes likely are part of the reason we see fewer women than men in the ranks of Silicon Valley’s tech workers. But the road between biology and employment is long and bumpy, and any causal connection does not rule out the relevance of nonbiological causes. Here’s what the research actually says.

Is she a computer natural? Micah Sittig, CC BY

Are girls just born less suited for tech?

There is no direct causal evidence that biology causes the lack of women in tech jobs. But many, if not most, psychologists do give credence to the general idea that prenatal and early postnatal exposure to hormones such as testosterone and other androgens affect human psychology. In humans, testosterone is ordinarily elevated in males from about weeks eight to 24 of gestation and also during early postnatal development.

Ethical restraints obviously preclude experimenting on human fetuses and babies to understand the effects of this greater exposure of males to testosterone. Instead, researchers have studied individuals exposed to hormonal environments that are abnormal because of unusual genetic conditions or hormonally active drugs prescribed to pregnant women. Such studies have suggested that early androgen exposure does have masculinizing effects on girls’ juvenile play preferences and behavior, aggression, sexual orientation and gender identity and possibly on spatial ability and responsiveness to cues that certain behaviors are culturally female-appropriate.

Early hormonal exposure is only one part of a complex of biological processes that contribute to sexual differentiation. Driven by both direct and roundabout messages from the X and Y chromosomes, the effects of these processes on human psychology are largely unknown, given the early stage of the relevant science.

Other studies inform the nature-nurture question by comparing the behaviors of boys and girls who are so young that socialization has not exerted its full influence.

Early sex differences emerge mainly on broad dimensions of temperament. One such dimension is what psychologists call “surgency”; it’s greater in boys and manifests in motor activity, impulsivity and experiencing pleasure from high-intensity activities. The other dimension is in what we term “effortful control”; it’s greater in girls and emerges in the self-regulatory skills of greater attention span, ability to focus and shift attention and inhibitory control. This aspect of temperament also includes greater perceptual sensitivity and experience of pleasure from low-intensity activities.

This research on temperament does suggest that nature instills some psychological sex differences. But scientists don’t fully understand the pathways from these aspects of child temperament to adult personality and abilities.

Is there a gender divide on tech-relevant traits?

Another approach to the women-in-tech question involves comparing the sexes on traits thought most relevant to participation in tech. In this case, it doesn’t matter whether these traits follow from nature or nurture. The usual suspects include mathematical and spatial abilities.

The sex difference in average mathematical ability that once favored males has disappeared in the general U.S. population. There is also a decline in the preponderance of males among the very top scorers on demanding math tests. Yet, males tend to score higher on most tests of spatial abilities, especially tests of mentally rotating three-dimensional objects, and these skills appear to be helpful in STEM fields.

Of course people choose occupations based on their interests as well as their abilities. So the robust and large sex difference on measures of people-oriented versus thing-oriented interests deserves consideration.

Research shows that, in general, women are more interested in people compared with men, who are more interested in things. To the extent that tech occupations are concerned more with things than people, men would on average be more attracted to them. For example, positions such as computer systems engineer and network and database architect require extensive knowledge of electronics, mathematics, engineering principles and telecommunication systems. Success in such work is not as dependent on qualities such as social sensitivity and emotional intelligence as are positions in, for instance, early childhood education and retail sales.

Women and men also differ in their life goals, with women placing a higher priority than men on working with and helping people. Jobs in STEM are in general not viewed as providing much opportunity to satisfy these life goals. But technology does offer specializations that prioritize social and community goals (such as designing healthcare systems) or reward social skills (for instance, optimizing the interaction of people with machines and information). Such positions may, on average, be relatively appealing to women. More generally, women’s overall superiority on reading and writing as well as social skills would advantage them in many occupations.

Virtually all sex differences consist of overlapping distributions of women and men. For example, despite the quite large sex difference in average height, some women are taller than most men and some men are shorter than most women. Although psychological sex differences are statistically smaller than this height difference, some of the differences most relevant to tech are substantial, particularly interest in people versus things and spatial ability in mental rotations.

Silicon Valley has been faulted for its ‘brogrammer’ culture, which can be unwelcoming to women. Zorgnetwerk Nederland, CC BY-NC-ND

If not biology, then what are the causes?

Given the absence of clear-cut evidence that tech-relevant abilities and interests flow mainly from biology, there’s plenty of room to consider socialization and gender stereotyping.

Because humans are born undeveloped, parents and others provide extensive socialization, generally intended to promote personality traits and skills they think will help offspring in their future adult roles. To the extent that women and men have different adult lives, caregivers tend to promote sex-typical activities and interests in children – dolls for girls, toy trucks for boys. Conventional socialization can set children on the route to conventional career choices.

Even very young children form gender stereotypes as they observe women and men enacting their society’s division of labor. They automatically learn about gender from what they see adults doing in the home and at work. Eventually, to explain the differences they see in what men and women do and how they do it, children draw the conclusion that the sexes to some extent have different underlying traits. Divided labor thus conveys the message that males and females have different attributes.

These gender stereotypes usually include beliefs that women excel in qualities such as warmth and concern for others, which psychologists label as communal. Stereotypes also suggest men have higher levels of qualities such as assertiveness and dominance, which psychologists label as agentic. These stereotypes are shared in cultures and shape individuals’ gender identities as well as societal norms about appropriate female and male behaviors.

Gender stereotypes set the stage for prejudice and discrimination directed toward those who deviate from gender norms. If, for example, people accept the stereotype that women are warm and emotional but not tough and rational, gatekeepers may close out women from many engineering and tech jobs, even those women who are atypical of their sex. In addition, women talented in tech may falter if they themselves internalize societal stereotypes about women’s inferiority in tech-relevant attributes. Also, women’s anxiety that they may confirm these negative stereotypes can lower their actual performance.

It’s therefore not surprising that research provides evidence that women generally have to meet a higher standard to attain jobs and recognition in fields that are culturally masculine and dominated by men. However, there is some recent evidence of preferential hiring of women in STEM at U.S. research-intensive institutions. Qualified women who apply for such positions have a better chance of being interviewed and receiving offers than do male job candidates. Experimental simulation of hiring of STEM faculty yielded similar findings.

Any career depends on training and education that build on innate interest and talent. Todd Ludwig, CC BY-NC-SA

Why not both nature and nurture?

Many pundits make the mistake of assuming that scientific evidence favoring sociocultural causes for the dearth of women in tech invalidates biological causes, or vice versa. These assumptions are far too simplistic because most complex human behaviors reflect some mix of nature and nurture.

And the discourse is further compromised as the debate becomes more politicized. Arguing for sociocultural causes seems the more progressive and politically correct stance today. Arguing for biological causes seems the more conservative and reactionary position. Fighting ideological wars distracts from figuring out what changes in organizational practices and cultures would foster the inclusion of women in tech and in the scientific workforce in general.

Politicizing such debates threatens scientific progress and doesn’t help unravel what a fair and diverse organization is and how to create one. Unfortunately, well-meaning efforts of organizations to promote diversity and inclusion can be ineffective, often because they are too coercive and restrictive of managers’ autonomy. The outrage in James Damore’s manifesto suggests that Google might want to take a close look at its diversity initiatives.

At any rate, neither nature-oriented nor nurture-oriented science can fully account for the underrepresentation of women in tech jobs. A coherent and open-minded stance acknowledges the possibility of both biological and social influences on career interests and competencies.

Regardless of whether nature or nurture is more powerful for explaining the lack of women in tech careers, people should guard against acting on the assumption of a gender binary. It makes more sense to treat individuals of both sexes as located somewhere on a continuum of masculine and feminine interests and abilities. Treating people as individuals rather than merely stereotyping them as male or female is difficult, given how quickly our automatic stereotypes kick in. But working toward this goal would foster equity and diversity in tech and other sectors of the economy.

Alice H. Eagly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

[painterontheshore]

How hand movements reveal hidden thoughts

We all lie, and only a liar would really try to deny this. Men, it seems, like to boast quite a bit in their daily interactions, according to a lie diary study. They often extend the truth when they are boasting, sometimes to breaking point. The same study suggests that women tell lies more frequently than men do (with some female samples telling double the number that males did), but they often tell lies to make others feel better.

‘Of course you don’t look fat in that dress.’

‘You are just as attractive as the day I met you.’

‘Eating that will not put on the pounds.’

‘That dress really suits you.’

Lie diaries, where you record each and every lie told in the day relative to each interaction, reveal these findings and much more besides (DePaulo et al. 1996). Many lies are routine parts of our everyday life, designed for self-presentation and self-enhancement, or designed to smooth our interactions with others, to promote harmony, by allowing others to feel better with us, as we feed them some porky-pies. Lies are a part of the great social function of everyday talk, and we do most of this without any planning at all. In the words of Erving Goffman:

The legitimate performances of everyday life are not ‘acted’ or ‘put on’ in the sense that the performer knows in advance just what he is going to do, and does this solely because of the effect it is likely to have . . . In short, we all act better than we know how.

(Goffman 1959: 73–4)

In essence, we tell lies regularly and we are very good at it. DePaulo and her colleagues also noted that ‘Consistent with the view of lying as an everyday social interaction process, participants said that they did not regard their lies as serious and did not plan them much or worry about being caught’ (DePaulo et al. 1996: 979). In other words, they are routine and without any real consequences (although, of course, we may grow dependent on the lies told to us, and that may be quite serious enough).

However, sometimes there are much bigger lies. Lies that we need to think about and plan, lies that cause us to feel terrible guilt in the telling and sometimes acute anxiety about being discovered, lies that can tear us apart. We try to disguise these both in terms of our planning and in terms of our emotional response. We rehearse what we are going to say and then we try to control our emotions in the moment itself, and we hope we can get away with it. Lies require a degree of extra cognitive planning; it is more difficult to make up a story about why you were late and what you were doing rather than merely recounting the true version of events. Lies sometimes are associated with significant emotion in the telling – fear, guilt, anxiety, apprehension; most of these associated emotions are very negative, but occasionally we feel positive emotion – pride, relief, joy that someone is falling for it (Ekman 1985). Some individuals habitually feel positive emotion when lying; often these individuals have a personality disorder, but sometimes they do not (Ekman 1988). Lying is a complex blend of cognition and emotion that varies from lie to lie, from relationship to relationship and from situation to situation. There are no universal telltale signs of lying because of this variability in their construction, function and effects, but there are indicators of additional cognitive planning, and indicators of emotional response. Unfilled pauses increase with the demands of extra cognitive planning (Beattie 1978, 1979), but these planning pauses may not be necessary with sufficient mental rehearsal of the lie. We may feel strong negative emotions when we lie, but emotional expressions on our face can be covered quickly by a mask by efficient liars (Ekman 1988). The mask is usually a particular type of smile, called a non-Duchenne smile,

characterised by a degree of facial asymmetry (stronger on one side of the face than the other side) and by its rapid onset and offset. It would be hard to find a single behavioural indicator of lying that is truly reliable given that each lie varies on the cognitive dimensions of difficulty, and degree of rehearsal (if any) and a wide variety of negative and positive emotional dimensions, where the emotional expressions may be masked or not. There may not be a single behavioural indicator but there are trends, and one interesting trend is the attempted control or inhibition of behaviour. We seem to know instinctively that our behaviour can leak a great deal, so we attempt to inhibit it, as Charles Darwin (1872) noted. After all, the most general conclusion possible about lying is that people do not want to give the game away, even in the routine lies of everyday life, where there really is no consequence, except perhaps losing face (‘Alright then, you do look fat in that dress. Are you happy now?’). Therefore, we try a strategy of general behavioural control – keep normal eye contact (people usually watch our eyes), smile as naturally as possible (they watch our faces), look relaxed, do not fidget too much, try to move the hands less, keep the feet still.

Darwin (1872) had actually very little to say about either deception or lying in his seminal work on nonverbal behaviour The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. But what he did have to say was that such nonverbal behaviours ‘reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified’ (1872: 359). But he also wrote that

when movements, associated through habit with certain states of the mind, are partially repressed by the will, the strictly involuntary muscles, as well as those which are least under the separate control of the will, are liable still to act; and their action is often highly expressive.

(Darwin 1872: 54)

In other words, people try to repress or inhibit certain expressive movements when they are lying, but they will not always be successful. Some behaviours are harder to inhibit than others. Ekman (2003) refers to this as the inhibition hypothesis – ‘if you cannot make an action voluntarily, then you will not be able to prevent it when involuntary processes such as emotion instigate it’ (2003: 206). Therefore, it follows that certain emotional expressions that cannot easily be inhibited may be powerful indicators of felt emotion. Ekman (2001, 2003) calls this ‘nonverbal leakage’. However, Darwin, of course, is also implying that other move ments will be inhibited during deception (those that are under volitional control, like hand movements and gesture, for example), and that their form and morphology will not be so revealing of the real underlying state. Although, of course, we should note that the inhibition (or attempted inhibition) of these behaviours may be itself highly revealing.

Ekman adds one major complication to this argument, namely that although hand movements, for example, through the medium of gesture, or foot movements would be easy to inhibit . . . most people do not bother to censor their body actions. Because most of us do not get much feedback from others about what our body movements are revealing, we do not learn the need to monitor these actions; and so, we hypothesized, when people lie, they usually do not fine-tune their body actions. (Ekman 2003: 208)

In other words, he is arguing that although gestures could be inhibited they often are not and that therefore ‘the body will be a good source of deception cues – exactly the opposite of what Darwin predicted’ (Ekman 2003: 208). Elsewhere Ekman has explicitly criticised Darwin because he ‘failed to note the existence of gestural slips (Ekman 1985), which leak concealed feelings and intentions, and other forms of body movement that can betray a lie’

(Ekman 2009: 3451).

Therefore, if we consider the arguments of these two great pioneers in the field of nonverbal communication we end up with a number of specific hypotheses. First, when it comes to deception, there may well be an attempt on the part of those trying to deceive to suppress or inhibit certain

behaviours that are potentially highly expressive, and a decrease in the frequency of certain behaviours may itself be one potential indicator of deception. Second, because the conventions of everyday talk shape our awareness of our bodily actions, then we may not monitor sufficiently certain behaviours that we could volitionally control (like gesture, which, after all, we can volitionally control quite easily by locking the hands). Some behaviours like gesture (potentially controllable but not always monitored) may, therefore, be quite revealing in terms of their manner of execution.

There is research evidence to suggest that whereas people generally think that many behaviours increase when people are telling lies, meta-analyses of various research studies reveal that only a small number of behaviours change reliably during deception, and these behaviours tend to decrease when lying as a function of behavioural inhibition. Sporer and Schwandt (2007) conducted just such a meta-analysis of the published literature on deception and found that only three forms of behaviour were reliably associated with lying, and they were ‘nodding’, ‘foot and leg movements’ and ‘hand movements’. All three were found to decrease in frequency. It is worth remembering that in their classic 1969 paper on ‘Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception’, Ekman and Friesen predicted that because people are generally unaware of the behaviour of their feet and legs, they should be ‘a good source for leakage and deception cues’. They predicted more movements in the feet and legs during deception (things like ‘abortive restless flight movements . . . frequent shift of leg posture, and in restless or repetitive leg and foot acts’, Ekman and Friesen 1969). This prediction has been proven wrong in the vast majority of studies (including in Ekman’s own research, see Ekman 2003: 211). People do seem to inhibit their behaviour during deception, even the feet and legs.

The hands, of course, are particularly interesting in this regard for one very important reason. I would argue that it is really quite difficult to fake the form of iconic gestures when you are lying and make it accurate. It is also very complicated to split meaning into the verbal and gestural channels in a way that might look natural or normal. You would have to get the division of meaning between the two channels just right, as well as the precise iconic form of the gesture and the right degree of anticipation of the associated part of the verbal message by the preparation phase of the gesture. In Chapter 13 on metaphoric gestures, you can see what could happen if you get it wrong. This would all be quite demanding, and it seems that many people do not attempt this and opt for a safer (and easier) strategy. People tend to inhibit their hand movements when telling lies, and gesture frequency decreases in deception (Cody and O’Hair 1983; Davis and Hadiks 1995; Ekman 1988; Ekman and Friesen 1972; Ekman et al. 1976; Ekman et al. 1991; Greene et al. 1985; Hofer et al. 1993; Kalma et al. 1996; Mann et al. 1998; Vrij et al. 1999; but see Bond et al. 1985; DeTurck and Miller 1985). Indeed, a decrease in gestural frequency would seem to be one of the more reliable indicators of deception. It suggests perhaps that at some unconscious level, liars do not want to risk giving the game away through revealing hand movements. Therefore, they try to inhibit this form of behaviour by clasping their hands or using similar kinds of strategy. Aldert Vrij (2000) has a useful summary of this research in his book Detecting Lies and Deceit. He also summarises the empirical evidence that most people believe that gesture frequency actually increases during deception, which shows that most people have a false belief here, as in so many other areas when it comes to deception.

—Geoffrey Beattie

From “Rethinking body language: how hand movements reveal hidden thoughts” de Geoffrey Beattie, pp 204-208.

[mounasser]

Boost Your Brainpower With Super Nutrition

Cloudy thinking, forgetful, illogical? 'Brain foods' can help!

We wall have days when our thinking is fuzzy, our logic defies reason, when we can't for the life of us remember some name or fact that was so familiar just the day before. On days like those, you might want to trade in your grey matter for a new, improved model with rechargeable batteries and a software system that lets you discover the unknown secrets of the universe in one easy lesson.

Unfortunately, we have to make do with Mother Nature has given us. Luckily, that's usually more than adequate. And with better nutrition, we can make better use of the brainpower we do have - and even stave off the mental deterioration we know as senility.

Oxygen Clears The Mind, Keep All Circuits Functioning!

IRON - POOR INTELLECT

"The brain needs large amount of oxygen to function effectively, and the only way it can get it is through iron packed red blood cells" says Don M. Tucker, associate professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.

Some studies show that children with iron - deficiency anemia have short attention spans and trouble learning new material. They also show the boosting iron intake reverses those problems.

Alertness And Memory Can Suffer With "Low But Normal" Iron Levels!

And Dr Tucker's research shows that adults can suffer from related problems with alertness and memory when their iron levels are in the "low but normal" range.

In one study, for instance, the higher the blood iron levels, the greater the word fluency. (Volunteers were asked to come up with as many words as they could that begin with "Q" and end with "L". In another, in adults over age 60, blood iron levels were one of the more important measures in determining whether or not the person has normal brainwave patterns.

"Getting enough oxygen to the brain is certainly part of its function, but we think iron also influences brain chemical and pathways," Dr Tucker says. "We know no that iron is heavily concentrated in a part of the reticular activating system. This area of the brain turns the brain on, so to speak. It maintains alertness. So we can't help but think that iron plays an important role in awareness and alertness."

Sources of Iron: Liver, brain, kidney, meat, fish, oysters, shrimps, egg yolk, beans, cereals, lentils, leafy vegetables, drumstick leaves.

"B" SMART

The brain seems o have a special need for the B Vitamins. Memory loss, disorientation, hallucinations, lack of coordination, and personality changes can occur with B-complex deficiencies.

Short-Term Memory Is Sometimes Impaired InALCOHOLIC Who Develop Thiamine Deficiencies.

ALCOHOLICS for instance, who sometimes develop thiamine (B1) deficiencies, have problems with short-term memory. They may remember in detail that little café in Paris 20 year ago, but not what they had fur supper the previous night.

Thiamine may also keep the brain thinking straighter and younger. An orthopedic surgeon in England thinks that thiamine deficiency can cause confusion and that confusion can lead to stumbles and broken bones.

The surgeon, M. W. J. Older, had noticed that people who come to him for hip and thighbone surgery all experienced a dip in their thiamine levels as results of the stress of theOPERATION. He also noticed that until the thiamine shortage passed, the patients suffered a bout of confusion.

Digging a little deeper, Dr Older found that patients who come in for elective hip surgery -PLANNED in advance, that is - weren't thiamine - deficient before the operation, and that their post surgical thiamine deficiency didn't last so long. But the patients with emergency fractures, he discovered, were deficient before, during, and after their operations. That raised the possibility that preoperative thiamine-related confusion may even helped cause the emergencies.

"mental confusion in the elderly awaits further study, "Dr older notes, "but our data support the concept that thiamine deficiency may be a contributory factor to postoperative confusion. We suggest that the causation of fracture itself may be attributable to thiamine deficiency, with confusion precipitating the fall".

The Most Promising Anti-SenilityNUTRIENTS?

But if there were a contest for the most promising anti-senility nutrients, the price might be awarded to vitamin B6 and copper. Two University of Texas nutritionists have reported (in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition), the remarkable news that a deficiency of B6 or copper in young rats causes some of the same kind of brain cell abnormalities as those seen in senile humans. The results implied that those two nutrients might preventMENTAL DECLINE.

Science, of course, is never hat simple. But the evidence seems striking. The researches found, among other things, that in rats and humans, the dendrites - delicate, branching roots that carry electrical impulses from one brain cell to another -TEND to shrivel up and die when deprived of B6 or cooper. Without the all important dendrites, brain circuitry breaks down.

Though the rats were fed a diet skimpier in the two nutrients than any human diet would be, the researches said that a mild deficiency of those nutrients over the years could have the same devastating effect. The Texas researches, Elizabeth Root and John Longenecker, recommended getting adequate of B6, copper and other nutrients into the diet as soon as possible for the sake of prevention.

For Best Results, Catch The Deficiencies Early!

"If you catch these changes early then you might prevent some of the neurological damage from occurring," Dr Root says. "But it's not just B6 and copper. People who have a poor diet in general are the most likely to get into trouble. We're starting some more experiments on the possible effects of deficiencies in magnesium and foliate, twoNUTRIENTS that also come up low in most dietSURVEYS."

Sources: B1 (thiamine: Unpolished rice, wheat, bajra and jowar.

B6: Egg yolk, liver, meat, fish, milk, whole grains, cabbage and other green vegetables.

Copper: liver, nuts, driedFRUITS, cereals, pulses, meat products, fruits, vegetables, oysters and fish.

Even Mild Deficiencies Of B12, C, Folate, And Riboflavin Can Impede Brain Function.

KEEPING A KEEN MIND

Actually, there's evidence that physically healthy people over age 60 can be measurably keener of mind that their peers if they maintain sufficient dietary levels of vitamins B12, C, Foliate and riboflavin. Even milked virtually unnoticeable deficiencies of those nutrients can mean less than optimal brain function.

At the University of New Mexico, senility experts Jean Goodwin and her husband, James Goodwin, and other placed advertisements inNEWSPAPER and on TV and radio asking for volunteers for an experiment. Each volunteer had to be at least 60 years old, free of all serious diseases, and not on medication. After a screening process, Goodwin chose 260 men and women between the ages of 60 and 94 from various social and income levels.

All the volunteers gave a sample of their blood and filled out a three day food diary stating exactly that they ate during that period. Taken together, the blood test and diet survey showed the researchers almost exactly what each person's levels of most vitamins and minerals were.

Memory And Problem-Solving Tests Administered To 260 People Yielded DefiniteNUTRITIONAL Links.

After the process, the volunteers underwent two mental performance tests. In the first one, a researcher read a one paragraph store to each person and asked hi to repeat it as quickly and accurately as possible. A half hour later the volunteers had to recite the paragraph from memory, with no cues. The second test measured each person's ability to solve non-verbal problems and to think abstractly.

The researchers fed all the test scores andNUTRITIONAL profiles into a computer and waited to see if good nutrition would correlate with quicker thinking. It turned out that the volunteers with the lowest B12 and C Levels scored worst on the memory test. Those with the lowest level of B12, C, Foliate and riboflavin did worst on the problem solving test.

"We showed that in population of healthy older people, those people who had a deficient intake and low blood levels of certain vitamins scored significantly worse on the test," said Dr Jean Goodwin. "Our recommendation is that everyone maintain an adequate intake of those nutrients,"

Sources: B12: Milk, cheese, eggs, beef kidney, heart and liver, chicken liver. (Animal foods are the main source, and pure vegetarians who exclude even milk from theirDIET, run a risk of developing a deficiency)

Foliate: Vegetables, cereals, Meat and liver.

Riboflavin: Milk, meat, cereals and pulses.

Vitamin C: Green vegetables, fruits (especially guavas, oranges, sweet limes and lemons) and fresh crop potatoes.

THE PROMISE OF CHOLINE

Thiamine and B12 are also needed to produce and use one of the brain's major chemical messengers, acetylcholine.

Choline: The Active Component Of "Brain Foods" Like Fish, Liver, And Eggs.

But the real star in acetylcholine production is another B vitamin, choline. Manu of the foods touted as "brain foods" - fish for instance, liver and eggs contain choline a substance researches are finding really can help preserve the brain's ability to reason learn, and remember. Choline is the building block for aNEUROTRANSMITTER called acetylcholine that sends messages between brain cells.

For instance, researchers at Ohio State University recently found that mice fed a diet heavy in choline rich lecithin had muchBETTER MEMORY retention than mice on regular diets. They took much longer to go into back room in their cages where they had received a mild electric shock, meaning they hadn't forgotten their unpleasant experience.

What's more, their brain cells, examined under a microscope, showed fewer of the expected sighs of aging, says Ronald Mervis of Ohio state University's brain Aging and neuronal Plasticity Research Group.

Sources: (Choline): fish, liver, eggs, heart, soyabeans, peanuts.

Can Lecithin Provide A Brain Boost?

Like fiber or fish oil, it's slowly becoming a household word. You may have heard of it already lecithin.

What's the big to do? Studies have suggested that lecithin may aid memory and even slow down or preventALZHEIMER'S DISEASE.

But what is lecithin? Found naturally in soybean, eggs, butter, corn and milk, lecithin is used in medicines, food, even cosmetics as a wetting, emulsifying and penetrating agent. It's the lecithin that keeps the fat and the cocoa from separating an in chocolate, for instance, and in keeps margarine from splattering when hot.

For years, lecithin has been sold inHEALTH FOOD STORES in the west as a treatment for everything, from heart disease to weight loss. In fact so many clans have been made that some proponents are worried about over kill.

Just how solid is the lecithin memory connection? Lecithin is precursor to choline, and scientists re excited about animal studies that suggest lecithin may slow down one part of the ageing process: the degeneration of brain cells, and therefore normal age-related memory loss., says Dr. Mervis, "Normally, as the brain ages, its cell membranes become more rigid with fatty deposits and lose their ability to take in and release brain chemicals and to merely messages." This can cause memory loss and the confused thinking.

A Lecithin-Rich Diet Appears To KeepNERVE Channels Open.

But a lecithin rich diet seems to repress or delay this membrane hardening.

As part of the deterioration process, aging brain cells also tend to lose dendrite spines, the chemicals receptor areas that areVITALLY important is passing along information.

Having too few dendrite spines is like having a bad phone connection. Messages get distorted and lost. But lecithin fed older mice had the same number of dendrite spines as much younger mice.

"Despite the difference between mice and people there are, nevertheless, remarkable similarities in the structure of their never cells," Says Dr Mervis. "I believe lecithin could help to repress or delay similar problems in people."

Can Lecithin Boost Min Power In Normal,HEALTHY People?

In fact, in some studies, lecithin has shown some promise in boosting the mind power of normal,HEALTHY persons.

"Our studies show that choline has a week modern memory enhancement effect" says Dr Mervis. "It's not a robust effect, but it can be measured."

On two separate days, they gave ten healthy volunteers, raging in age from 21 to 29, either a supplement of 10 gms of choline chloride or an identical appearing but worthless substitute. Then after an hour and a half, the people were given a memory test.

In a serial learning test, subjects had to memorize in proper order a sequence of ten unrelated words. The list was read to each person and repeated as often as necessary until perfect recall was achieved and could be repeated twice in a row.

"Choline significantly enhanced serial recall of unrelated words as measure by the number o trials required... ," the researchers reported. "Furthermore, theENHANCEMENT was more pronounce in 'slower' subjects than in subjects who performed well."

Indeed, Choline Enhanced Memory - Particularly In People Who Were Forgetful.

In other words, the people most in need of help had their memories prodded the most when they took choline. One individual who normally need six trial readings to master a ten-word list cut that to four after taking choline. Another dropped from seven to five attempts with choline supplement.

One person who normally required ten trials to aster a list of difficult words reduced to five (a 50 percent improvement!) after taking choline.

Long-Term Effects Of CholineSUPPLEMENTATION Are Still Unknown.

As promising as Dr Mervis' results were, however, he as quick to point out that many questions still remains. For example, these test measured memory 90 minutes after a single dose of choline and the doses of choline given in these test were at lest the times as great as the 900 milligrams or less supplied by a typicalDIET. We still don't know how long the effects last or whether they would continue over several weeks or months if extra choline were consumed daily.

And the trials involved only younger, healthy volunteers with a normal range of remembering ability.

Moreover, high doses of lecithin can cause gastrointestinal cramps, diarrhea or nausea in some people.

So, what can we say for sure about lecithin?

Basically, that we really need more solid evidence before promoting it as a superNUTRIENT. Some great ideas turn out to be the truth. But the whole truth about lecithin is still to be learned.

Meanwhile there's no harm in upping your intake of fish, soybeans and corn. You may just give your brain power a little boost.

I firmly believe that the whole universe is inter-connected. Our body, mind and spirit are deeply rooted with each other. If body is sick, the mind cannot relax or feel good. And if mind is not relaxed, it will give birth to stress and that will lead to chronic health problems.

So, it is clear that in order to posses a soundBODY we must have a calm and peaceful mind. Without a sound mind we cannot expect our potential growth or development. To read more on the growth topics, visit: GrowTaller4IdiotsOnline.net

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[teachanarchy]

Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. The stakes are high: getting one of these rare internships virtually guarantees full-time employment after law school. The salaries are unbeatable, six-figure sums that catapult young students to the top 5% of household incomes nationally and are often quadruple of those offered in other sectors of legal practice. These jobs also open doors to even more lucrative employment in the private sector as well as prestigious judiciary and government roles. For these reasons, employment in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s 1%.

Now imagine four applicants, all of whom attend the same, selective second-tier law school. They all have phenomenal grade point averages, are on law review, and have identical, highly relevant work experiences. The only differences are whether they are male or female and if their extracurricular activities suggest they come from a higher-class or lower-class background. Who gets invited to interview?

We set out to answer this question in a series of studies reported in the December 2016 issue of American Sociological Review.  Based on prior research showing that hiring in top professional services firms is highly skewed toward applicants from wealthy families, we expected that an applicant’s social class background would play a decisive role in determining interview invitations. And indeed, we found that, in contrast to our national lore that it is individual effort and ability—not family lineage—that matters for getting good jobs, elite employers discriminate strongly based on social class, favoring applicants from higher-class backgrounds. But our research uncovered a surprising — and disturbing — twist: coming from an advantaged social background helps only men.

We uncovered this through a field experiment with the country’s largest law firms. Specifically, we used a technique — known as the resume audit method — that is widely seen as the gold standard for measuring employment discrimination. This method involves randomly assigning different items to the resumes and sending applications to real employers to see how they affect the probability of being called back for a job interview. All in all, we sent fictitious resumes to 316 offices of 147 top law firms in 14 cities, from candidates who were supposedly trying to land a summer internship position. All applicants were in the top 1% of their class and were on law review, but came from second-tier law schools. This was important because graduates from the most elite law schools (e.g., Harvard and Yale) are typically recruited on-campus. But law school students from second-tier schools must compete for coveted internship positions by sending in their resumes directly to firms in hopes of attracting employers’ attention by virtue of their C.V.s.

We signaled gender by varying the applicant’s first name (James or Julia). Directly indicating a parent’s occupation or income on a resume might be strange for an employer to see, so we signaled social class position via accepted and often required portions of resumes: awards and extracurricular activities. Reflecting the fact that social class is a complex characteristic that cannot be boiled down to income, education, or lifestyle alone, we used a constellation of resume items to signal social class.

For example, to capture the economic component of class, our lower-class applicants received an award for student-athletes on financial aid. To incorporate its educational competent, they listed being a peer tutor for fellow first-generation college students. By contrast, our higher class candidate pursued traditionally upper-class hobbies and sports, such sailing, polo, and classical music, while the lower-class candidate participated in activities with lower financial barriers to entry (e.g., pick-up soccer, track and field team) and those distinctly rejected by higher-class individuals (e.g., country music). But crucially, all educational, academic, and work-related achievements were identical between our four fictitious candidates.

Even though all educational and work-related histories were the same, employers overwhelmingly favored the higher-class man. He had a callback rate more than four times of other applicants and received more invitations to interview than all other applicants in our study combined. But most strikingly, he did significantly better than the higher-class woman, whose resume was identical to his, other than the first name.

Why did the higher-class man do so much better than the higher-class woman? To further explore this issue, we conducted a follow-up experiment with a sample of 200 practicing attorneys from around the country. We asked each attorney to evaluate one of the same resumes we used in our field experiment and to tell us whether they would like to bring the candidate in for an interview. We also asked them to rate their candidate on factors proven to influence how favorably people view job candidates but that vary between men and women. These included perceptions of the candidate’s competence, likability, fit with an organization’s culture and clientele, and career commitment.

Just like the employers in our audit study, the attorneys we surveyed favored interviewing the higher-class man above all applicants, including the higher-class woman. This time, though, we were able to understand why. Attorneys viewed higher-class candidates of either gender as being better fits with the culture and clientele of large law firms; lower-class candidates were seen as misfits and rejected. In fact, some attorneys even steered the lower-class candidates to less prestigious and lucrative sectors of legal practice, such as government and nonprofit roles, positions that tend to be more socioeconomically diverse than jobs at top law firms.

But even though higher-class women were seen as just as good “fits” as higher-class men, attorneys declined to interview these women because they believed they were the least committed of any group (including lower-class women) to working a demanding job. Our survey participants, as well as an additional 20 attorneys we interviewed, described higher-class women as “flight risks,” who might desert the firm for less time-intensive areas of legal practice or might even leave paid employment entirely. Attorneys cited “family” as a primary reason these women would leave. Parenting strategies vary between social classes, and the intensive style of mothering that is more popular among the affluent was seen as conflicting with the “all or nothing” nature of work as a Big Law associate. One female attorney we interviewed described this negative view of higher-class women, which she observed while working on her firm’s hiring committee. The perception, she said, was that higher-class women do not need a job because they “have enough money,” are “married to somebody rich,” or are “going to end up being a helicopter mom.” This commitment penalty that higher-class women faced negated any advantages they received on account of their social class.

Our findings confirm that, despite our national myth that anyone can make it if they work hard enough, the social class people grow up in greatly shapes the types of jobs (and salaries) they can attain, regardless of the achievements listed on their resumes. More broadly, our results illustrate a phenomenon that social scientists call “intersectionality” — a fancy way of saying that, when it comes to understanding sources of advantage and disadvantage, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Crucially, we have found that privilege works differently for men and women in the labor market. While coming from a higher-class background helps men, it can actually hurt women.

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Together, biases related to social class and gender skew employment opportunities toward men from privileged backgrounds. Our research adds another twist to just how difficult it is for certain groups to get ahead, even when they achieve an advanced degree.

There are some potential solutions for law firms, however. While biases themselves are difficult to change and merely making people aware of them via training has little payoff, there are quick and cost-effective ways to make the playing field more even in resume screening. When it comes to social class, the answer is simple: ditch the extracurricular activities. We were able to conduct our study only because employers and career services offices encourage (if not require) students to lists hobbies and activities on resumes. Without this information, we would not have been able to indicate social class background effectively. While social class still manifests in other types of resume cues (especially attendance at a top-tier undergraduate institution or law school), blinding evaluators to extracurricular activities or having students omit them from resumes entirely could eliminate those class signals that are least performance-related.

As for gender, blinding evaluators to first names (or substituting with initials) could help keep more women in the pool. In fact, one reason why women seem to do better when they come from the most elite schools may be that employers have limited ability to screen resumes and do not have the chance to engage in the types of resume-based class and gender discrimination we found in our study. Eliminating signals about class and gender as resumes are screened could open the door more widely for talented individuals with varied backgrounds, while creating a more diverse workforce of qualified talent.