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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2017/01/orwell-1984-bestseller-in-us/

2017 isn't '1984' – it's stranger than Orwell imagined

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com. The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

Image: duncan / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.

The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose.

Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required

Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Feature image: Flickr / Jason Ilagan / (CC BY-ND 2.0)

#1984 #Donald Trump #dystopian hellscapes #Orwell

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2017/01/surviving-a-troubled-childhood/

Surviving a troubled childhood

Why are some people able to become happy, well-adjusted adults even after growing up with violence or neglect? Their life stories – from 1950s Hawaii to the orphanages of Romania – could provide answers that will help more children to thrive. Read More

#child abuse #healing #mental health #Mosaic #psychiatry #science

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2017/01/federal-abortion-funding-ban-hr-7/

Defunding abortion providers won't save babies. But it will kill women

.Congress moves to pass HR 7, which will permanently ban federal funding for abortion providers. Here’s what you need to know.

#abortion funding #Donald Trump #health insurance #healthcare #HR 7 #Hyde Amendment #Planned Parenthood

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2017/01/we-were-promised-bootstraps/

We Were Promised Bootstraps

How #shame keeps the poor from eating the rich. #SteinbeckWasRight

#Donald Trump #Eat the Rich #economic woes #GOP Logic #shame #Steinbeck was right #Ted Cruz #The Poors #Economy #Poverty

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2017/01/the-science-of-cute/

The Science of Cute

On 14 April 2016, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, toppling buildings and sending residents rushing into the streets. Hundreds of aftershocks – one an even stronger 7.0 quake – continued for days, killing 49 people, injuring 1,500 and forcing tens of thousands from their homes.

News spread immediately around the globe on social media.

“Earthquake just happened,” Margie Tam posted from Hong Kong. “R u ok kumamon?”

“Are Kumamon and his friends safe?” wondered Eric Tang, a college student.

“Pray for Kumamoto & Kumamon,” wrote Ming Jang Lee from Thailand, a phrase that would be repeated thousands of times.

Kumamoto is a city of 700,000 in a largely agricultural province in southwestern Japan.

But what, or more precisely who, is Kumamon? And why in the wake of an immense natural disaster did concern for earthquake victims focus on him, specifically?

That’s a bit more complicated.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

It is 12 March 2016, one month before the earthquake. Kumamon bounds onto an outdoor stage at the opening event of his birthday party in Kumamoto. About 150 guests – mostly women – cheer, clap and whistle.

What makes something so irresistibly cute that you need to touch, cuddle or play with it?

Kumamon waves and bows. He is about 1.5 metres tall, with black glossy fur, circular red cheeks and wide, staring eyes. He’s dressed for the occasion in a white satin dinner jacket trimmed in silver and a red bow tie.

One woman in the crowd holds a Kumamon doll swaddled in a baby blanket. Another has dressed her doll in a grey outfit matching her own. She says it took her a month to sew. A number of fans have pasted red paper circles on their cheeks to mimic his. Those in the first row arrived at 3am to snag their prime spots to greet the object of their intense though difficult-to-explain affection.

“Actually, I have no idea why I love him so much,” says Milkinikio Mew, who flew from Hong Kong with friends Lina Tong and Alsace Choi to attend the three-day-long festival, even though Hong Kong is holding its own birthday party for Kumamon. She slept in, showing up at 6am for the 10am kick-off, so had to settle for a seat in the last row.

Kumamon is… well, he’s not exactly a cartoon character, though he does appear in a daily newspaper comic strip. He’s not a brand icon either, like Hello Kitty, though like her, he does not speak and, also like her, his image certainly moves merchandise.

He’s not sexy, but when the Empress Michiko met Kumamon – at her request – during the imperial couple’s visit to Kumamoto in 2013, she asked him, “Are you single?”

But what is Kumamon? Well, he’s sort of a…

But first, the big moment is here. A birthday cake is rolled out, and the crowd sings ‘Happy Birthday’. Then presents. A representative from Honda, which has a motorbike factory nearby, gives him its Kumamon-themed scooter. An Italian bicycle maker unveils a custom Kumamon racing cycle. Plus a new exercise DVD, on which Kumamon leads the workout.

More than 100,000 products feature Kumamon’s image, from stickers and notebooks to cars and aeroplanes

The Italian bicycle is not for sale, yet. But the other two items are, joining the more than 100,000 products that feature Kumamon’s image, from stickers and notebooks to cars and aeroplanes (a budget Japanese airline flies a Kumamon 737). When Steiff offered 1,500 special edition Kumamon plush toys at $300 each, they sold out online in five seconds according to the German toymaker. Last year Leica created a $3,300 Kumamon camera, a bargain compared to the solid gold statue of Kumamon crafted by a Tokyo jeweller, which retails for $1 million.

So what is he then? Kumamon is a yuru-kyara, or ‘loose character’, one of the cuddly creatures in Japan that represent everything from towns and cities to airports and prisons. The word is sometimes translated as ‘mascot’, but yuru-kyara are significantly different from mascots in the West, such as those associated with professional sports teams, which tend to be benign, prankish one-dimensional court jesters that operate in the narrow realm of the sidelines during game time.

Kumamon has a far wider field of operation as the yuru-kyara for Kumamoto Prefecture (a prefecture is like a state in the USA or a county in England). He has become more than a symbol for that region, more than merely a strategy to push its tourism and farm products. He is almost regarded as a living entity, a kind of funky ursine household god (it is perhaps significant that the very first licensed Kumamon product was a full-sized Buddhist shrine emblazoned with his face). He hovers in a realm of fantasy like a character from children’s literature, a cross between the Cat in the Hat and a teddy bear.

Image courtesy of © Kumamoto Prefectural Government

Kumamon has personality. “Cute and naughty,” Tam explains, later, when I ask what about Kumamon made her care about him enough to be concerned immediately after the earthquake.

She wasn’t alone. After the April quake, Kumamon’s Twitter feed, which has nearly half a million followers and is typically updated at least three times a day, stopped issuing communications. With a thousand buildings damaged, water to the city cut, a hospital jarred off its foundations, and 44,000 people out of their homes, the prefectural government, which handles Kumamon’s business dealings and appearances, had more important things to do than stage-manage its fictive bear.

But Kumamon was missed.

“People are asking why Kumamon’s Twitter account has gone silent when the prefecture needs its mascot bear more than ever,” the Japan Times noted on its Facebook page on 19 April.

Into the vacuum came hundreds, then thousands of drawings, posted by everyone from children to professional manga artists, not only from Japan, but from Thailand, Hong Kong, China. They waged an impromptu campaign of drumming up support for earthquake relief using the bear, which stood in for the city itself and its people. Kumamon was depicted leading the rescue efforts, his head bandaged, lifting stones to rebuild the tumbled walls of Kumamoto Castle, propping up tottering foundations, enfolding children in his arms.

“Ganbatte Kumamon!” many wrote, using a term that means something between ‘don’t give up’ and ‘do your best’.

What is happening here? Kumamon is kawaii – the word is translated as ‘cute’, but it has broad, multi-layered meanings, covering a range of sweetly alluring images and behaviours. Not only does kawaii encompass the army of Japanese mascots, but a world of fashion that has adult women dressing as schoolgirls and schoolgirls dressing as goth heroines or Lolita seductresses, giving rise to ero-kawaii, or erotic kawaii, a mash-up of cute and sexy.

We eagerly spend fortunes on cute avatars – Kumamon earned $1 billion in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that – without ever wondering: What is cute? What about it causes us to open our wallets and our hearts? Is appreciation for cuteness hardwired in human beings? What does it say about our society? Is what it says good or, possibly, could cuteness harbour darker facets as well? These are questions being mulled over by a potential new academic field, ‘cute studies’.

And where do our concepts of cuteness originate? That one is easy. The primal source of all things cute is found in every country, in every city and town, every neighbourhood and close to every block in the world. You may have the template for all the cuteness in the world right in the next room and not even realise it.

Soma Fugaki’s dark eyes sparkle as he scans the opening night crowd at Blossom Blast, a feminist art show at the UltraSuperNew Gallery in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district. Drinks are poured, music pulses. But Soma doesn’t dance or even stand. He’s a baby. Just five months old, Soma squirms in the arms of his father, Keigo, who gazes lovingly into his son’s face.

“Everything about him is a reflection of myself,” Keigo says, “a cartoon version… That has to do with how much I think he’s cute. I stare at him all the time. He looks like me. It’s my features, but exaggerated: bigger cheeks, bigger eyes.”

Babies are our model for cuteness. Those last two details – big cheeks, big eyes – are straight out of Konrad Lorenz’s Kindchenschema, or ‘baby schema’, as defined in the Nobel Prize-winning scientist’s 1943 paper on the ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ that prompt affection and nurture in human beings: fat cheeks, large eyes set low on the face, a high forehead, a small nose and jaw, and stubby arms and legs that move in a clumsy fashion. And it doesn’t just apply to humans: puppies, baby ducks and other young animals are covered by Lorenz’s theory.

Lorenz’s paper is the ur-document of cute studies, but did not produce an immediate reaction among the scientific community. He was a Nazi psychologist writing during wartime, exploring their loathsome eugenic theories – a reminder that the shiny face of cuteness invariably conceals a thornier side.

For decades, scientists focused on what babies perceive, what they think. But in the 21st century, attention turned to how babies themselves are perceived, as cuteness started taking its first wobbly steps toward becoming a cohesive realm of research.

Seeing cute creatures stimulates the brain’s pleasure centre

Experiments have demonstrated that viewing cute faces improves concentration and hones fine motor skills – useful modifications for handling an infant. A pair of Yale studies suggest that when people say they want to ‘eat up’ babies, it’s prompted by overwhelming emotions – caused, one researcher has speculated, by frustration at not being able to care for the cute thing, channelled into aggressiveness.

These emotions are triggered chemically, deep within the brain. Experiments hooking up volunteers to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners have shown how seeing cute creatures stimulates the brain’s pleasure centre, the nucleus accumbens, causing a release of dopamine, in a way similar to what happens when eating chocolate or having sex.

Women appear to feel this reaction more strongly than men. While biologically this is explained by the need to care for infants, society’s larger embrace of cuteness has led academics in gender studies to wonder whether cute culture is the sugar pill that sexism comes in – training women to be childlike – or whether it could instead be a form of empowerment in which young women take control of their own sexuality.

More recent experiments have tried to separate cuteness from its biological roots to see if there are general aesthetic standards that can make an inanimate object ‘cute’.

In a study at the University of Michigan in 2012, visual information expert Sookyung Cho asked subjects “to design a cute rectangle by adjusting the size, proportion, roundness, rotation, and color of the figure”.

What she found supported the idea that “smallness, roundness, tiltedness, and lightness of color can serve as determinants of perceived cuteness in artifact design”. It mattered, she found, whether the person designing the rectangle was in the USA or South Korea. Cuteness is nothing if not culturally specific, and that itself has become a rich focus of inquiry.

Cuteness is so associated with Japan that the actual country – mile after mile of unadorned concrete buildings alternating with rolling green fields and periodic densely packed cities – can come as something of a surprise. The Tokyo subway is jammed with hurrying businessmen in dark suits, rushing women in paper masks, racing kids in plain school uniforms. Cute characters such as Kumamon can be hard to spot, and to expect otherwise is like going to America and expecting everyone to be a cowboy.

Still, there are pockets of cuteness to be found: tiny yuru-kyara charms dangling off backpacks or peeking from posters or construction barriers in the form of baby ducks.

But not everywhere – not even in most places.

Even in Kumamoto during Kumamon’s birthday weekend. Exit from the Shinkansen bullet train at Kumamoto station and there is nothing special on the platform, not so much as a banner – not until you take the escalator down and catch a glimpse of the enormous head of Kumamon set up downstairs, along with a mock stationmaster’s office built for him. The train station shop is filled with Kumamon items, from bottles of sake to stuffed animals including, somewhat disturbingly, a plush set that pairs him with Hello Kitty, the wide-eyed bear directly behind the kneeling kitty in such a way as to suggest… well, you wonder if it’s deliberate.

In the city, his face is spread across the sides of an office building, with birthday banners hanging from the semi-enclosed shopping arcades that are a feature of every Japanese city.

Six years ago, Kumamoto wasn’t known for much. There is an active volcano, Mt Aso, nearby, and a 1960s reproduction of a dramatic 1600s-era castle that burned down in 1877. Kumamoto residents believed there was nothing in their city that anyone would want to visit. The region is largely agricultural, growing melons and strawberries.

But in 2010, Japan Railways was working to extend the Shinkansen bullet train to Kumamoto, and the city fathers were eager for tourists to use it. So they commissioned a logo to promote the area, hiring a designer who offered a stylised exclamation point (their official slogan, ‘Kumamoto Surprise’, was a bright spin on the fact that many Japanese would be surprised to find anything in Kumamoto worth seeing).

The exclamation point logo was a red blotch, resembling the sole of a shoe. The designer, seeking to embellish it, and knowing the popularity of yuru-kyara, added a surprised black bear. Kuma is Japanese for bear. Mon is local slang for ‘man’.

Paired with a mischievous personality – Mew calls him “very naughty” – Kumamon made headlines after Kumamoto held a press conference to report that he was missing from his post, having run off to Osaka to urge residents there to take the train. The stunt worked. Kumamon was voted the most popular yuru-kyara in 2011. (Japan has a national contest, the Yuru-kyara Grand Prix, held in November. The most recent one was attended by 1,727 different mascots and nearly 77,000 spectators. Millions of votes were cast.)

A few Kumamoto officials resisted Kumamon – their concern was he would scare off potential tourists, who’d worry about encountering wild bears, of which there are none in the prefecture. But the Kumamoto governor was a fan and cannily waived licensing fees for Kumamon, encouraging manufacturers to use him royalty-free.

Rather than pay up front, in order to get approval to use the bear’s image, companies are required to support Kumamoto, either by using locally manufactured parts or ingredients or by promoting the area on their packaging. It’s as if Mickey Mouse were continually hawking California oranges.

The side of the box of the Tamiya radio-controlled ‘Kumamon Version Buggy’, for instance, has photos of the region’s top tourist destinations. In one of the songs on the exercise DVD released on Kumamon’s birthday, as he leads his fans through their exertions, they grunt, “Toh-MAY-toes… straw-BEAR-ies… wah-TER-melons” – all agricultural products that are specialties of Kumamoto. Go into a grocery store and Kumamon smiles from every punnet of strawberries and honeydew wrapper.

There is a tacit agreement to never allude to anything as crass as him being a man in a bear suit

The bullet train began service to Kumamoto on 12 March, so that date is now used as Kumamon’s official birthday. He was there to greet the first scheduled train, a moment recreated during his birthday fest.

Fans line up to hug him, often reaching back for a lingering last touch as they’re led off to make way for the next waiting fan. There is a tacit agreement to never allude to anything as crass as him being a man in a bear suit, to, if not accept Kumamon’s reality, pretend that he exists.

In 2014, Kumamon gave a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, where his title was given as ‘Director of PR’. The journalists posed respectful questions. “How many staff do you have to help you out with your activities?” one asked. The answer – “We have about 20 staff members in our section” – was delivered by one of those subordinates, Masataka Naruo, who enjoys telling people that Kumamon is his boss.

Shopping in Kumamoto the day before the start of the celebration, Mew and her friends wear Kumamon T-shirts and carry Kumamon backpacks. The three women show their discoveries to each other. They own a lot of Kumamon products already. Why buy more? What makes Kumamon so special? “Because he’s very cute,” says Tong, in English.

Being cute isn’t always enough, however.

For every Kumamon, for every popular yuru-kyara, there are a hundred Harajuku Miccolos. A five-foot-tall yellow-and-brown bee, Harajuku Miccolo stands on the pavement, celebrating Honey Bee Day by finishing up three hours of loitering in front of the Colombin Bakery and Café, greeting passers-by – or trying to. Most barely glance in his direction and do not break stride, though some do come over and happily pose for the inevitable picture. There is no line.

Harajuku Miccolo is cute yet obscure, the common fate for most yuru-kyara. The city of Osaka has 45 different characters promoting its various aspects, who must fend off periodic calls for them to be culled in the name of efficiency; one administrator piteously argued that the government officials who create these characters work hard on them and so would feel bad if they were discontinued.

Harajuku Miccolo is trying to avoid that fate.

“He is not a success yet,” admits one of his handlers, distributing cubes of the café’s trademark honey cake. “Many are not as successful…”

“…as Kumamon?”

“We’re trying…”

Nobody is cute in Shakespeare. The word did not exist until the early 1700s, when the ‘a’ in ‘acute’ was replaced by an apostrophe – ’cute – and then dropped altogether, the sort of truncation for which frenetic Americans in their restive colonies were already notorious.

‘Acute’ came from acus, Latin for needle, later denoting pointed things. So ‘cute’ at first meant “acute, clever, keen-witted, sharp, shrewd” according to the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which doesn’t suggest the term could describe visual appearance. This older, ‘clever’ meaning lingers in expressions like “don’t be cute”.

The newer usage was still being resisted in Britain in the mid-1930s, when a correspondent at the Daily Telegraph included ‘cute’ on his list of “bastard American expressions”, along with ‘OK’ and ‘radio’. Not only is ‘cute’ unknown before 1700, but Lorenz’s Kindchenschema is largely absent from visual arts before the 20th century. Even babies in medieval artworks are depicted as wizened miniature adults.

Cute images of the kind we’ve become accustomed to began showing up around 1900. While purists fussed, popular culture was discovering the bottomless marketability of cute things. In 1909, Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about ‘kewpies’ (taken from ‘cupid’) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were soon being handed out as carnival prizes and capering around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan). Cuteness and modern commercialisation are intricately linked.

Still, kewpies followed the lines of actual human anatomy more or less, the way that Mickey Mouse resembled a real mouse when he first appeared on film in 1928. A half a century of fine-tuning made him much more infantile, a process naturalist Stephen Jay Gould famously described in his ‘biological homage’ to Mickey. Gouldobserved that the mischievous and sometimes violent mouse of the late 1920s morphed into the benign, bland overseer of a vast corporate empire.

Today, about $5 billion worth of Hello Kitty merchandise is sold annually

“He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty character of Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom,” Gould writes.

In Japan, the national fascination with cuteness is traced to girls’ handwriting. Around 1970 schoolgirls in Japan began to imitate the caption text in manga comics – what was called koneko-ji, or ‘kitten writing’. By 1985, half of the girls in Japan had adopted the style, and companies marketing pencils, notebooks and other inexpensive gift items, like Sanrio, learned that these items sold better when festooned with a variety of characters, the queen of whom is Hello Kitty.

Her full name is Kitty White, and she has a family and lives in London (a fad for all things British hit Japan in the mid-1970s).

The first Hello Kitty product, a vinyl coin purse, went on sale in 1974. Today, about $5 billion worth of Hello Kitty merchandise is sold annually. In Asia, there are Hello Kitty amusement parks, restaurants and hotel suites. EVA Air, the Taiwanese airline, flies seven Hello Kitty-themed jets, which carry images of Hello Kitty and her friends not only on their hulls, but throughout their cabins, from the pillows and antimacassars to, in the bathroom, toilet paper emblazoned with Hello Kitty’s face, a detail which an observer does not need to hold a doctorate in psychology to wonder about.

“If your target is young women, it’s saturated,” says Hiroshi Nittono, Director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka University, talking about the market for cute products in Japan. That is certainly true. In an effort to stand out, some yuru-kyara are now made intentionally crude or semi-frightening. There is the whole realm of kimo-kawaii, or ‘gross-cute’, epitomised by Gloomy, a cuddly bear whose claws are red with the blood of his owner, whom he habitually mauls. Even Kumamon, beloved as he is, is still subject to a popular internet meme where his works are revealed to be done “For the Glory of Satan”.

Exploring the subculture known for doll-like make-up, bonnets and petticoats.

Because the practice of putting characters on products is so prevalent, and subject to resistance, Nittono, a placid, smiling man who wears an ascot, has been working with the government on developing products that are intrinsically cute. He asks to meet, not at his apartment or at an academic office, but at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Hiroshima, where he is finishing up an academic post.

For the past few years, Nittono and the government have been collaborating to develop cute items, a few of which are laid out on a table: a squat make-up brush, a bowl, a brazier, a few medallions and tiles. Given the mind-boggling array of cute merchandise available at shops in every mall around the world, it is not an overwhelming display of the ingenious synthesis of academe and government.

Nittono’s group is exploring how cuteness can be used as a device to draw people toward products without blatant branding.

“We use kawaii for such sentiment, feeling – kawaii things are not threatening, that is the most important part, small and not harmful,” says Nittono. “A high-quality product is somewhat distant from the customers; it looks expensive. But if you put kawaii nuance on such products, maybe such items can be more approachable.”

“If you have something cute, then you want to touch it, and then you see the quality of it,” adds Youji Yamashita, a ministry official.

Objects can also be unintentionally kawaii. With her husband Makoto, Date Tomito owns Bar Pretty, a tiny side-street tavern in Hiroshima. Six people would be crowded sitting at the bar. Makoto comes in from the market bearing a small plant in a yellow pot, a present for his wife.

“This is kawaii,” Date says, holding the plant up, elaborating. “There are lots of different meanings for kawaii: ‘cute’, ‘small’, ‘clumsy’. Some things just have a cute shape.”

She stresses something about kawaii: “It’s never bad,” she says. “I never use kawaii in an ironic way. Kawaii is kind of the best compliment around Japanese people, especially girls and women. They really like kawaii stuff and things.”

Single women in their 30s are sometimes referred to as ‘leftover Christmas cake’

Perhaps not all women. Just as Barbie’s measurements have drawn critique from feminists and scholars, so Hello Kitty has caught the interest of academics, especially in Japan, where the progress of women has lagged far behind other industrial nations. With girlishness a national obsession – Japan did not ban possession of child pornography until 2014 – and its most popular female icon lacking a mouth, if cuteness does become a separate academic field, then much credit has to be given to the feminist pushback against what Hiroto Murasawa of Osaka Shoin Women’s University calls “a mentality that breeds non-assertion”.

At the UltraSuperNew Gallery opening attended by Soma and his father, guests watch a woman in a frilly white miniskirt draped in white feathers with fuzzy leggings and an enormous yarn bow atop her head, her face painted white with a red flower on each cheek and blue dots running down her nose. She kneels in the gallery window, dabbing at a teal and yellow painting that closely resembles finger-painting writ large.

Her professional name is Gerutama, and she insists that, despite appearances, she is definitely not kawaii. She is a ‘live painter’. Some Japanese of both sexes reject kawaii – ‘fake’ is a word often used. But they are in the minority. Japanese women still live in a culture where single women in their 30s are sometimes referred to as ‘leftover Christmas cake’, meaning that after the 25th – of December for cake, birthday for women – they are past their expiration date and hard to get rid of. Nobody wants either.

Those surgical masks worn in public? Yes, to avoid colds, pollution and allergies. But ask Japanese women, and many will say that they wear them date masuku – ‘just for show’. Because they didn’t have time to put on their make-up, or because they don’t consider themselves cute enough, and they want a shield against the intrusive eyes of their crowded world. In a German study of 270,000 people in 22 countries, Japanese people came last in being pleased with how they look. More than a third of the country, 38 per cent, said they were “not at all satisfied” or “not very satisfied” with their personal appearance.

“Kawaii is sickening,” says gallery-goer Stefhen Bryan, a Jamaican writer who lived for a decade in Japan and married a Japanese woman. “Kawaii is especially babylike. If a woman acts like an adult in Japan, it’s an offence. Their self-esteem is nothing in this country. It’s all under the aegis of culture. It’s low self-esteem en masse.”

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Joshua Paul Dale pauses to remove his shoes at the entrance to his large – well, large for Tokyo – light-filled apartment in the Sendagaya section of the city. Dale, 50, a cultural studies scholar on the faculty at Tokyo Gakugei University, is the driving force for the creation of cute studies.

Neil Steinberg explores why, for certain robots, cuteness has its advantages.

Part behavioural science, part cultural studies, part biology, the field is so new it hasn’t had a conference yet.

Dale was the first to assemble academic papers into an online cute studies bibliography, a list now containing over 100 publications, in alphabetical order from C Abidin’s ‘Agentic cute (^.^): pastiching East Asian cute in Influencer commerce’ in the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture to Leslie Zebrowitz et al.’s ‘Baby talk to the babyfaced’ in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

Dale’s latest step has been to edit the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture’s special cuteness issue, published in April 2016. “The articles collected in this issue demonstrate the flexibility of cuteness as an analytical category, and the wide scope of the insights it generates,” he states in the introduction.

One inspiration is ‘porn studies’, now with its own quarterly

Cuteness has not yet emerged as an independent scientific field – Dale estimates that only a few dozen academics worldwide focus on the topic – but he’s hopeful that it is in the process of happening. Dale says one inspiration is ‘porn studies’, now with its own quarterly, created after academics united to focus on a topic they felt cultural researchers were neglecting out of misplaced squeamishness. A distinct field encourages exploration.

Hiroshi Nittono contributed to the East Asian Journal’s special issue. Nittono, who authored the first peer-reviewed scientific paper with ‘kawaii’ in its title, postulates a “two-layer model” of cuteness: not only does it encourage parental care of newborns, first, but once a baby moves into toddlerhood and begins interacting with the world, cuteness then promotes socialisation, a pattern Dale sees reflected in the aborning field.

“It’s interesting because it’s inherent in the concept itself,” Dale says. “Cute things relate easily to other things. It kind of breaks down the barriers a little bit between self and other, or subject and object. That means it invites work from various fields. It’s interesting to get people together from different fields talking about the same subject.”

Not that you need an academic conference to do that. Japan has uniquely embraced cuteness as a reflection of its national character, the way tea ceremonies or cherry blossoms were once held up as symbolic of Japanese nationhood. In 2009, the government appointed a trio of ‘cute ambassadors’, three women in ribbons and babydoll dresses whose task was to represent the country abroad.

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Humanity has always embraced household gods: not the world-creating universal deity, but minor, more personal allies to soften what can be a harsh and lonely life. Not everyone has the friends they deserve or the baby they’d cherish. Often people of both sexes are alone in the world.

Teddy bears exist because the night is dark and long and at some point your parents have to go to bed and leave you. There is real comfort in cuteness.

“Filling in an emotional need is exactly where kawaii plays a significant role,” writes Christine R Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s trek across the Pacific.

“Even in America, journalist Nicholas Kristof has written of an ‘empathy gap’ in today’s society,” states Yano. “He points to the place of objects that may be considered promoters of ‘happiness’, ‘solace’, ‘comfort’. When a society needs to heal, it seeks comfort in the familiar. And often the familiar may reside in ‘cute’. Witness the use of teddy bears as sources of comfort for firefighters in the wake of NYC’s 9-11. So I see kawaii things as holding the potential as empathy generators.”

Kumamon is a power station of empathy generation. In the weeks after the Kumamoto earthquake, Kumamon was so necessary that in his absence his fans simply conjured him up themselves, independently, as an object of sympathy, a tireless saviour, an obvious hero.

Three weeks after the 14 April earthquake, Kumamon visited the convention hall of the hard-hit town of Mashiki, where residents were still sleeping in their cars for protection as 1,200 tremors continued to rumble across the area. The visit was reported on TV and in the papers as news, as if a long-sought survivor had stumbled out of the wreckage alive.

The children, many of whom had lost their homes in the earthquake, flocked around him, squealing, hugging, taking pictures. Their friend had returned.

This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

Featured image: Pixabay/WB Mag

#cute #Japan #Japanese culture #Kawaii #Kumamon #stuff ladies like according to men #Culture Wars #Featured

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2017/01/bacterial-vaginosis-cure/

The Superhero in Your Vagina

The aisle is marked with a little red sign that says “Feminine Treatments”. Squeezed between the urinary incontinence pads and treatments for yeast infections, there is a wall of bottles and packages in every pastel shade imaginable. Feminine deodorant sprays, freshening wipes, washes for your “intimate area”.

Vaginal odour might be the last taboo for the modern woman. I’ve actually driven to the SuperTarget two towns away from where I live so as to not run into anyone I know while scrutinising the various products that exist for cleansing, deodorising and re-balancing the pH of your vagina (I still bumped into another PTA mom in a neighbouring aisle).

The companies behind these products know that many women are looking for ways to counter embarrassing and debilitating symptoms such as vaginal odour and discharge. The culprit is often bacterial vaginosis, the most common vaginal infection you’ve probably never heard of. Nearly one-third of US women of reproductive age have it at any given time. The sad truth is that these sprays, soaps and wipes will not fix the problem. They will – in many cases – actually make it worse.

But while women try to mask embarrassing smells, a more sinister truth also remains under cover: the bacteria responsible are putting millions of women, and their unborn babies, at risk from serious health problems. All of which is making researchers look anew at the most private part of a woman’s body, to understand what it means to have a healthy – some prefer “optimal” – vagina and why that is so important for wider health.

Compared with those of other mammals, the human vagina is unique. As warm, moist canals exposed to all sorts of things including penises, babies and dirt, most mammalian vaginas harbour a diverse mix of bacteria. However, for many women, one or another species of Lactobacillus has become the dominant bacterial resident.

Lactobacillus bacteria pump out lactic acid, which keeps the vaginal environment at a low, acidic pH that kills or discourages other bacteria, yeast and viruses from thriving. There are even hints that certain Lactobacillus species reinforce the mucus in the vagina that acts as a natural barrier to invaders.

Although no one knows for sure, researchers speculate that human vaginas gained their Lactobacillus protectors around 10,000–12,000 years ago when humans began fermenting milk and eating foods like yoghurt and cheese, which are full of the bacteria.

Certain Lactobacillus may have expanded their territory to colonise the vagina – travelling the short distance from the anus to the vaginal opening. There, they found their perfect environment, a low-oxygen chamber that, during a woman’s reproductive years, has an abundant supply of the sugars Lactobacillus feed upon.

For the most part, we’ve been happily cohabitating ever since, but it’s a delicate balancing act. Normal intrusions to the vaginal environment, such as semen (which causes vaginal pH to rise) or menstruation, can reduce numbers of Lactobacillus and allow other microbes, including those associated with bacterial vaginosis (BV), to flourish.

Tammy’s BV started just a few weeks after she had her hormonal intrauterine device inserted.

Like many women, Tammy* – a 37-year-old from a suburb of St Louis, Missouri – was recommended the device for birth control by her doctor after she had her first child. After a few weeks, she noticed some worrisome symptoms: increased vaginal discharge and a fishy smell. Tammy thought she had a yeast infection and took over-the-counter medications, but when it didn’t clear up she headed back to her gynaecologist’s office.

BV rubs salt in the wounds of health inequality, affecting African American, Hispanic and Mexican American women more than white women

Her doctor explained that BV is a disturbance of the natural balance of bacteria that live inside the vagina. Sex with someone new, having multiple partners, and douching – rinsing out the vagina with a bag or bottle of liquid – can all contribute to getting BV, but it is not classified as a sexually transmitted disease. Mostly, how a woman develops BV is still a big mystery.

Tammy’s doctor treated her with a week of antibiotics, the standard treatment, and her BV cleared up. But, as happens to roughly half of the millions of women in the US who have BV at any given time, Tammy’s infection kept coming back. “I was getting it once or twice a month, which was too much for me as a PE teacher and coach,” she says.

“When it’s going to come up on you and the smell is ridiculous, you just had to make sure you were always prepared with cleansing wipes, spray and sanitary napkins,” she says. If it happened and you weren’t prepared, it would be “a horrible day”.

And if the embarrassment and discomfort weren’t enough, BV has a far more menacing side. Women affected have a higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) like gonorrhoea and chlamydia, acquiring and transmitting HIV, and having pelvic inflammatory disease (which can lead to infertility) and other vaginal and uterine infections. During pregnancy, BV gives a woman a greater chance of having a preterm birth or passing infections to her baby, both of which can lead to lifelong problems for the baby.

What’s more, BV rubs salt in the wounds of health inequality, affecting African American, Hispanic and Mexican American women more than white women, poor women more than rich women, and uneducated women more than educated women in the US.

Tammy is currently pregnant with her third child. She’s not worried, however, because she’s so familiar with BV now that she knows the first signs and gets treated immediately. But approximately half of women with BV have no symptoms and don’t even know they have a problem, let alone one that’s putting them in harm’s way. For many, they believe that’s just the way their vagina is.

Before her intrauterine device, Tammy had never had a problem with BV. She got the standard hygiene lecture from her gynaecologist, Denise Willers: External washing of the vulva should only include water, or a mild, non-foaming soap. No scents, perfumes or bubble baths. Take showers, not baths. And douching? Absolutely not!

Douching of any kind disrupts the balance of good bacteria and is associated with increased risk of BV. Folklore about the need to clean out the vagina – especially after sex or a period – is often handed down from older relatives to younger women. But the vagina is remarkably adept at taking care of itself if left undisturbed.

“Your vagina is like a self-cleaning oven,” says Willers. It doesn’t need any special help.

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When Sharon Hillier joined King Holmes’s laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1982, BV was called “non-specific vaginitis.” “What kind of crazy name is that?” Hillier says. It was a catch-all diagnosis given to women who had vaginal infections of unknown origin – not yeast infections or common STIs like chlamydia or trichomoniasis.

The mystery drew Hillier in. She knew she needed to stay in the field when, during one brainstorming session with mostly male colleagues, someone suggested that women with BV were sexually repressed or feeling sexual guilt. This idea was “completely crazy” to Hillier.

“A fishy odour was considered to be so common and meant you were a woman who had too much sex or the wrong kind of sex. It created tremendous amounts of concern for women,” and still does today, says Hillier, now a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “It gets to the core of how we feel about ourselves.”

The Holmes lab did much of the early work to describe, and eventually name, BV. In the early 1970s, it was apparent to Holmes that BV was one of the most common reasons women came to the OB/GYN clinic. At that time, the treatment was a vaginal cream that Holmes thought was “almost useless”. In 1978, he had a colleague, Terrence Pheifer, run a clinical trial to find out if oral antibiotics worked better. They didn’t, but serendipity struck during the trial.

BV increases a woman’s risks of contracting all other STIs, going into preterm labour, and having other pregnancy complications

A woman came in with both an STI and signs of BV. The protocol was to treat the infection first with the antibiotic metronidazole before giving other drugs for BV. “Lo and behold, her BV went away,” Holmes says. They immediately substituted metronidazole into the study and showed that it cleared up almost every case of BV. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the treatment of choice.

Around the same time, members of Holmes’s lab were figuring out how to diagnose BV. Richard Amsel had noticed that besides discharge, women with BV had vaginal fluid that was less acidic and had “clue cells” – cells decorated with bacteria – in their vaginal swabs.

Pheifer stumbled upon a third criterion, the “whiff test”. He brought a test-tube of vaginal fluid from a patient with BV into Holmes’s office and added a few drops of potassium hydroxide. “A really foul, abnormal odour was instantly released from the fluid,” says Holmes. His colleague next door, a biochemist, wandered over and remarked, “Aha, amines!” The bacteria had released chemicals named putrescine and cadaverine, after their pungent smells.

Holmes felt the syndrome should be renamed bacterial vaginosis, which loosely translates to “too much bacteria”. And fulfilling three of the four Amsel criteria – thin vaginal discharge, vaginal pH greater than 4.5, positive whiff test and clue cells – is still used by many doctors today to diagnose BV.

In 1995, Hillier and a young medical resident, Craig Cohen, showed that HIV and BV were intimately entwined: sex workers in Thailand who had BV were four times as likely to be HIV positive as those without BV. Since then, epidemiologists have also found that having BV increases women’s risks of contracting all other STIs, going into preterm labour, and having other pregnancy complications.

They are realising that all Lactobacillus bacteria – long thought to keep vaginas healthy – are not created equal. For some researchers, L. crispatus is emerging as the vagina’s superhero.

A renaissance in BV research is afoot since the Holmes lab’s heyday, thanks largely to the ease and speed with which the bacteria living in the vagina can be genetically sequenced and identified. Researchers can now catalogue entire bacterial communities, or microbiota, and begin to sort out what happens inside healthy vaginas and what goes awry in BV.

They are realising that all Lactobacillus bacteria – long thought to keep vaginas healthy – are not created equal. For some researchers, L. crispatus is emerging as the vagina’s superhero. It not only pumps out the best mix of two different types of lactic acid to keep the vagina inhospitable to other bugs, but it also fortifies a woman’s vaginal mucus to trap and keep at bay HIV and other pathogens.

To confuse matters further, some of the vaginal villains deemed the culprits in BV, Gardnerella, Prevotella and Atopobium, have been found in the vaginas of healthy women.

In 2011, Larry Forney, an evolutionary ecologist at University of Idaho in Moscow, and Jacques Ravel, a microbial genomicist from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, sequenced the bacterial species found in the vaginas of nearly 400 North American women who didn’t have the symptoms of BV. They found five different types of bacterial community. Four of these were dominated by different Lactobacillus species, but the fifth contained a diverse mix of microbes (including Gardnerella, Sneathia, Eggerthella and Mobiluncus species), many of which have been associated with BV.

All kinds of things – lubricants, semen, bacteria, faeces – get put into the vagina

It came as a surprise to find that there were several different kinds of healthy vaginal microbiota – including one that wasn’t dominated by Lactobacillus at all.

When Ravel and Forney sorted their results based on the women’s ethnicities they got another surprise. For each ethnic group, there was one bacterial community that was by far the most common, present in roughly 40 per cent or more of those women.

For white women, it was the community dominated by L. crispatus. For Asian women, it was the one dominated by L. iners. For black and Hispanic women, it was the diverse one. These community differences may explain why black and Hispanic women have higher rates of BV. But Ravel contends that we still don’t fully understand what determines vaginal health.

Ultimately, it probably comes down to the functions each bacterial species performs in the vagina with its mix of neighbours, he says. “All of those microbiota [communities] might be very healthy.” However, he concedes that the diverse community type, though found in many healthy women, could still carry higher risks.

Forney’s also not convinced that vaginal health is as simple as having Lactobacillus and an acidic vagina. For one thing, young girls and post-menopausal women have much less acidic vaginas, which are still healthy.

“All kinds of things – lubricants, semen, bacteria, faeces – get put into the vagina,” says Forney. “But most women are healthy most of the time.” He and other microbiologists would like to discover the keys to that resilience, which probably relies on interactions between the vaginal wall cells, the microbes living there, and the woman’s immune system.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

In 2006, reproductive epidemiologist Jenifer Allsworth set out to determine just how many women in the US were affected by BV. Crunching data from a national health survey and 3,727 vaginal swabs analysed by Hillier’s group, Allsworth showed that 29 per cent of all US women aged 14–49 were positive for BV. At the time, that represented a staggering 19 million women.

When Allsworth broke down the data by race, only 23 per cent of white women were positive for BV, compared with nearly one-third of Mexican American women and over half of African American women.

Her analysis also showed that BV rates were higher in women whose education had stopped at or before high school, and in women whose family income was near or below the federal poverty level. The infection was much more common in women who had douched in the last six months – and, somewhat surprisingly, it was present in 15 per cent of women who reported never having had sex.

That shows that BV is a “natural process” on some level, says Allsworth, now at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. Even so, she calls the much higher rates of BV in certain groups “pretty shocking”. What might account for these differences? She says we don’t know yet, but she suspects it has a lot to do with social networks: “Whose microorganisms do you come in contact with?”

It’s still unclear if unprotected sex is always a BV risk or if it depends on having a partner with a certain bacterial profile, says Allsworth. The changes in vaginal bacteria that result from sex are natural, “but we really don’t understand how to support the disrupted vagina and get it back to a healthy state,” she says. “We don’t even really know what ‘healthy’ is.”

And, Allsworth notes, the work raises more questions than it answers: Have the women without a dominant Lactobacillus never had it or did they lose it somehow? What is it about certain bacterial cocktail parties that create an advantage for BV?

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Another huge health inequality plays out across the Atlantic. In Africa, black women living in poverty face the burden of both BV and HIV. As among African American women in the US, BV is common: around 38 per cent of women in Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa had it in a 2014 study. Many women in Africa practise traditional vaginal washing, deodorising and tightening that, like douching, make BV more likely.

BV puts women at increased risk of both acquiring and transmitting HIV. It’s been estimated that having full-blown BV or even simply an altered population of bacteria in the vagina (a precursor to BV) accounts for 29 per cent of new HIV infections among women in Zimbabwe and Uganda. In 2012, Craig Cohen, now a professor of obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, led a team that followed more than 2,200 African couples and discovered that having BV tripled a woman’s chances of transmitting HIV to her uninfected male partner.

Vicky Jespers found the rates of BV in Africa “staggeringly high”, especially compared with the mere 10 per cent of women who have it in Belgium, where she’s an epidemiologist at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. For the past two decades, she and her collaborator Janneke van de Wijgert at the University of Liverpool have been searching for answers to vaginal ill-health in Africa.

A clinical epidemiologist, van de Wijgert paints a picture of how BV raises the risk of HIV. If a woman’s vagina becomes more bacterially diverse, the total quantity of bacteria also shoots up dramatically. This causes her body to ramp up its immune response in the vagina: it secretes inflammatory chemicals, summons immune cells – which also happen to be the cells that HIV targets – and sheds vaginal cells. Her mucus barrier becomes less viscous and breaks down. All of which increase a woman’s risk for HIV, says van de Wijgert.

Unfortunately, screening for and treating BV has not worked as a way to prevent HIV infections. Jespers says that, logically, it should. But there are too many confounding factors, including difficulties with diagnosing BV in rural areas and the high recurrence rate after using metronidazole to treat it.

We are also learning from African women clues as to why BV is exacerbated by sex. Beyond simply disrupting the vaginal environment or pH, it’s very likely that male partners also inject BV bacteria living on their penises – especially if they are uncircumcised ones. Studies of whether circumcising men can reduce HIV risk have also revealed that circumcision lowers the recurrences of BV in their female partners.

It’s not hard to fathom that we are constantly swapping microbes with our sex partners. However, Cohen has found that treating men with metronidazole or even slathering their penises with alcohol hand gel before sex does not protect their partners from BV recurrences.

The African studies leave researchers clamouring for better solutions for these women. Like others, van de Wijgert believes that the solution lies in getting the right bacteria to set up house in women’s vaginas. In 2014, she found that Rwandan sex workers with L. crispatus dominant in their vaginas were less likely to have HIV and other STIs. This bacterium may have even protected the clients of HIV-positive sex workers somewhat, because these women were also less likely to shed HIV in the vagina.

We are constantly swapping microbes with our sex partners

Running with this idea, van de Wijgert is currently testing two vaginal probiotic products in Rwanda to see if they can prevent BV recurrences. Both products, capsules inserted into the vagina, are available over the counter in Europe. However, they contain Lactobacillus strains found in both the vagina and the intestine, some of which have a poor record of colonising the vagina effectively. In the US, Cohen has launched the next phase of the only clinical trial of a vaginal probiotic that contains L. crispatus, called LACTIN-V.

“The health burden of not having good vaginal microbiota is enormous,” says Richard Cone, a biophysicist who studies vaginal mucus at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He notes that very few women in Africa carry L. crispatus. An effective, long-term cure for BV would be lifesaving for women and their children, he says. “Anything we can to do help more women, more of the time, have Lactobacillus crispatus in their vaginas, then the world will be a better place.”

Cone has good reason to feel so passionate. He and his collaborator Samuel Lai, from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, have found some of the first clues as to how BV leaves women vulnerable to HIV and other deadly infections.

Last year, with colleagues, they found that fresh mucus samples from 31 women varied greatly in their ability to trap HIV particles in the laboratory dish. In some samples, the viral particles passed rapidly through a mucus layer as wide as that in the vagina, about eight hundredths of a millimetre.

This was a huge clue that, for a woman like Tammy, a thin, runny discharge is more than just a nuisance requiring multiple pantyliner changes per day, it is a betrayal of her body’s natural protection.

Not all mucus samples behaved the same. In others, the HIV particles were stuck tight, as if immobilised in gelatin – Lai and his colleagues calculated that some mucus could trap over 89 per cent of virus particles. These sticky mucus samples had a higher level of D-lactate, a form of lactic acid produced not by humans but by certain bacteria. That hinted that mucus strength depends on the different vaginal bacterial residents.

Looking at their bacterial make-up, the women’s samples fell neatly into three groups. The one that stopped HIV in its tracks was dominated by L. crispatus. The other two had low levels of D-lactate and let HIV slip right through – even though they contained other species of Lactobacillus, such as L. iners.

Which Lactobacillus species a woman has in her vagina might mean the difference between HIV infection and protection

Gynaecologists have long considered women with any Lactobacillus dominating their vaginal bacteria as healthy. But Lai says that women with L. iners might be just as vulnerable to HIV transmission as women with BV, a finding that “really shocked” him.

In other words, which Lactobacillus species a woman has in her vagina might mean the difference between HIV infection and protection.

Even though HIV is such a terrible infection to fight, it’s “a wimp during transmission”, according to Lai: it takes, on average, many exposures through sex – estimates range from 100 to 1,000 – for just one or two virus particles to successfully infect the host. With such a low probability of transmission, finding ways to reduce virus flow to the vaginal walls by boosting the mucus barrier would effectively decrease HIV transmission, says Lai.

“We’ve probably underappreciated how well women with L. crispatus can defend themselves against HIV and other STDs,” says Lai, nodding earnestly. “[The vagina is] the battlefield where we want to fight because that’s where HIV is at its weakest.”

More evidence that certain bacteria can alter vaginal mucus, leaving women vulnerable to infection, is coming from Washington University in St Louis.

There, microbiologist Amanda Lewis and her biochemist husband and research partner Warren Lewis have found that enzymes called sialidases in BV vaginal fluid can chew off the ends of an antibody component found in vaginal mucus. Normally, this antibody acts a sentinel to recognise foreign invaders and flag them to the immune system. But the BV activity made the antibody more vulnerable to degradation.

The Lewises have also shown that Gardnerella vaginalis bacteria produce sialidases, which trim off the ends of sugar molecules that decorate the surface of mucins, a key component of mucus. Amanda suspects that this degradation of antibodies and digestion of vaginal mucus leaves women with BV vulnerable to nastier infections.

Now, she and her colleague Nicole Gilbert will use a mouse model of Gardnerella infection, which shares several features of BV, to investigate whether this infection puts mice at risk of infections from Prevotella and group B Strep, which can cause uterine and placental infections in pregnant women. Uterine infections are a common cause of preterm birth, but little is known about how vaginal bacteria cross the mucus barriers that protect the uterus.

Although preterm birth, defined as birth before 37 weeks of gestation, is the leading cause of infant death in the US, there are few answers about what triggers it or how to prevent it. One in ten babies born in the US will be preterm, but rates are higher in low-income black communities – in the urban centre of St Louis 15 per cent of babies arrive too early. Many of those born before 28 weeks who survive will have lifelong health issues such as chronic asthma, brain damage or blindness.

The Lewises are determined to see that their experiments lead to better options for women.

In the US, BV is a huge issue for low-income, minority women, not only for their sexual and reproductive health but also for their quality of life. Hilary Reno, an infectious-disease physician in St Louis, thinks that her patients can, at times, feel almost punished for having certain diseases. These diseases are often neglected in research, she says, and therefore have few effective treatments. “There’s no advocacy group for keeping our vaginas healthy,” Reno says.

She sees BV as a health inequality that piles onto the problems of an African American community that already faces higher rates of preterm birth and higher rates of certain STIs.

Reno isn’t worried about recruiting women to the LACTIN-V trial, designed to test the ability of L. crispatus to prevent BV recurrences. She knows from previous studies that many African American women in her community struggle (or know someone who struggles) with BV and want to help find a better cure. Also, women with BV come into the local walk-in sexual health clinic she oversees nearly every day because it’s convenient and free.

LACTIN-V is a freeze-dried powder of L. crispatus originally isolated from a healthy woman, made by a Californian company called Osel. It’s delivered via a tampon-like device. In initial studies, women found it easy and comfortable to use, and the L. crispatus colonised 11 out of 18 women.

Craig Cohen sees the lack of a highly effective treatment for BV as keeping this major health problem off most people’s radar. There’s been no way to break the associations between BV and HIV and preterm birth because our current treatment leaves between one-third and two-thirds of women still suffering. We won’t see breakthroughs until we have a better treatment that keeps the vast majority of women BV-free for six months or more, says Cohen. “We need not just better antibiotics, but better approaches.”

You can’t do oral sex, you can’t really do much of anything until it’s gone away

Tammy has tried to gently educate her high-school students in the girls’ locker room when she gets a whiff of that unmistakable smell. She pulls them aside to make sure they understand that it’s a problem caused by bacteria and that their doctor can treat it. But when she’s out at a nightclub and women are cracking jokes about another woman in the restroom (“She nasty! She don’t take baths!”), Tammy finds it harder to speak up.

“I’ve wanted to say something, but then that puts you out there. The moment I say something, it will be like, ‘Well, how do you know that?’” she says. “It’s still a very personal issue.” She’s also struggled in the bedroom to explain the condition to her partner. “You can’t do oral sex, you can’t really do much of anything until it’s gone away,” she says. “The doctor recommended not having sex, but I don’t think you can tell a fiancé or husband that.”

Like Cohen, both the Lewises and Cone believe real progress can’t be made on these problems until we have a better treatment for BV – one that cures most women. “Then women would not be buying boric acid and homeopathic suppositories and going back to their gynaecologists all the time,” says Warren Lewis.

Cohen can see a future where metronidazole gel and products like LACTIN-V might be sold together over the counter – which would put BV in the pharmacy aisle, on the magazine ad page and, importantly, on people’s minds. Such a treatment would not only capture a huge slice of the estimated $140 million BV market in the US, but would also bring real relief to women shopping among those shelves of deodorisers, wipes and cleansers that do nothing to help cure the infection.

It could also bring BV out of the shadows. “We need to get on top of it,” says Tammy. “So women can treat it and talk about it. It should be just like a yeast infection… not such a shameful issue.”

* Name has been changed.

This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

Feature image via Pixabay

#bacterial vaginosis #HIV #the mighty vag #vaginal health #vaginas #Featured #Sexual Health

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2016/12/the-truth-about-santa/

Your child probably knows the truth about Santa – they're playing along for the presents

Most parents lie to their children. It’s usually done to get the children to behave the way the parents want. One study found that well over 80% of American parents and more than 90% of Chinese parents admitting to this kind of “instrumental” lying. Lying about the existence of Father Christmas often falls into this category, used as a tool to teach pro-social behaviour (helping and sharing) through the promise of presents if the children are good.

Of course, there can be other reasons for carrying on the Santa myth that are more to do with children’s immediate happiness. These could include extending the naivety of childhood and raising the excitement of the holiday season. But given what we know about children’s ability to figure out the truth, it seems likely that slightly older kids may well be playing along with their parents’ fantasy in order to reap the benefits of the promised rewards.

When studies have questioned whether lying to children about Father Christmas does them any harm, the theory seems to be that the dishonesty undermines parents’ image as trustworthy and reliable sources of information. But there’s no real evidence of any lasting damage.

Research with children who no longer believe has shown that they tend to stop believing in Santa around seven years of age. When interviewed about their feelings about being lied to – and how they felt about Santa now – the children generally tended to report positive happy emotions around the topic. Parents, on the other hand, were left saddened by their child’s loss of Santa belief.

Children tend to come to the end of their belief of Santa either through their own tenacious questioning of the logic and practicality of the myth, or by older, more seasoned siblings and peers bursting the bubble. This is particularly the case for today’s tech-savvy kids, who have the internet to answer every question and give them extra space for conversations away from the protective guidance of adults keen to keep the myth alive.

Yet while children often come to the realisation that Santa is not what they had been lead to believe on their own, they also tend to act along with the fiasco and continue to play along with 58% of children in one study playing the role of Santa-believer. This goes counter to the under-sevens’ tendency to correct the mistakes adults make, in speech for example, and to trust more reliable adults.

Following the script? (image provided by author)

So what’s in it for the kids in maintaining the lie? Well the commonly written letter to Santa may give us some clues. Rather than reading this note assuming that this child believes in Santa, if we cynically consider that he or she no longer believed in Santa but is playing along – then the child is playing along like a pro.

We can see children’s willingness to play along with pretence and fantasy well beyond the seasonal myths into a more general eagerness to suspend reality for the enjoyment of play, something long associated with their development. The act of playing along may also support children as they test out out their knowledge and theories of the real world.

Logical to pretend

Within the letter to Santa, children often recognise the premise that they should have been good to warrant the requested presents, demonstrating they have followed the behavioural compliance set out by their parents. They put in a good mix of optimistic present requests, but with a placating note for those that might be overreaching and some humbler suggestions with a higher likelihood of approval. Plus there may be a nod to their doting grandparents for the affection it can be assumed they appreciate.

Really, the traditional letter represents a child’s well-constructed communication to people they know are lying in the hope they will reward the pro-social behaviour and willingness to play along. So, while researchers have reported that younger Santa cynics may have well-developed abilities in logic and reasoning, this doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t play along with the myth for a little longer. Doing so may be enjoyable in itself, have some present-shaped benefits, and be a positive family experience.

There is also little evidence that childhood myths challenge otherwise trusted and secure parent-child relationships. Instead, when children realise that their parents were engaged in a protracted deception, the children appear to be less saddened than their parents.

Kate Ellis-Davies, Senior Lecturer, Division of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Feature image via Pixabay with title and comments added by WB Mag.

#kids are evil #presents #Santa Claus #truth about Santa #Featured #Relationships

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2016/12/welfare-benefits-help-everyone/

3 Things Everyone Forgets About Welfare Benefits

Video footage of a SUPER pleasant white lady spewing racisms aplenty is going viral right now.

Image: Paul Sablerman / Flickr / (CC BY 2.0)

The clip, which has more than 2.5 million+ views on YouTube, shows the woman going off on a couple of Latinas after one of them joined the other in line. This caused the white lady (who was probably thinking, “First our jobs and now this!” because , um, Trump?) to explode. In the video you can see her practically screaming at the women, yelling for them to “go back to wherever the f*** they come [sic] from,” and, most tellingly in my opinion, insisting the women were probably on “welfare.”

“Just because you come from another country, that don’t make you nobody. You’re nobody, as far as I’m concerned. Probably on welfare. The taxpayers probably paid for all that stuff.”

I’m sure you’re all just SHOCKED that a middle aged white woman in Louisville, Kentucky, who shops at JC Penney’s, would be racist. SHOCKED. She must be a psychic too for knowing those women were undocumented without any evidence whatsoever. Or she’s just a racist dick making racist dick assumptions. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Seeing old Blue Hair McGrand Wizard’s tirade did bring up a topic I’ve seen a lot of lately. That is, the myth that undocumented immigrants receive tons of free welfare and, like, back rubs from sexy bodybuilders or whatever, courtesy of the American taxpayer. They don’t., of course. Undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible for any social services benefits. Even legal immigrants have to wait five years to receive benefits after becoming citizens.

All told, about half of all Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cases include just the children of the household with no financial help for the grownups. Why? Usually because the parents have been disqualified, like the aforementioned illegal immigrant families.

Some folks argue that these undocumented immigrants still benefit from welfare when their natural born citizen children receive things like Medicaid, TANF, and/or food stamps. Which is technically true. So what? Are we really going to argue about whether or not kids should starve because of where their parents were born?

Besides, the true purpose of welfare isn’t about “feeding the poor” or “helping the needy.”

Social services like food stamps, Medicaid, cash assistance, and Section 8, aka “welfare” weren’t created to help poor people, citizen or not. Not primarily, anyway. None of what social services does is really about helping specific demographics in a general sense.

Truth is, it’s not warm and fuzzy – it’s just basic economics. The welfare system has three distinct purposes that everybody seems to either be unaware of or conveniently forgets. Those purposes are…

1. Welfare reduces crime rates

Welfare suppresses crime. Turns out, when folks are starving they’ll do just about anything and everything to feed themselves and their kids. Theft? Sure, why not. Larceny? You bet your ass. Crime becomes an easier choice when one is living in abject poverty.

I would dare to say that it stops even being a choice at a certain point. When you weigh the potential consequences of stealing a wallet against the fact that your kids are hungry and your utilities are shut off, crime starts looking like the ONLY option.

This should be pretty obvious to everyone, but since y’all did just elect a sentient Cheeto as president it probably bears repeating; Poverty = crime. Welfare helps to alleviate this problem (or it used to). According to the Luxembourg Income Study countries that implement social services programs tend to see a marked decrease in poverty.

Of course, the opposite is also true – when poverty goes up, so does crime. According to Pacific Standard,

“Males looked specifically at the more than 50,000 homicides in California from 1991 to 2002. As one would expect, teenagers perpetrated more of the homicides than other age groups — but only when he did not control for poverty. When he did control for poverty, teenagers committed more crimes than other age groups only in high-poverty areas. In the areas where teenagers had as much money as other middle-aged people, they tended to commit fewer violent crimes. And in the areas where middle-aged people had as little money as other teenagers, those middle-aged people tended to commit just as many violent crimes.”

2. Welfare helps maintain stability

Welfare helps maintain the average American’s confidence in the US as a nation. It maintains societal stability.It keeps us invested in America.

When a citizen becomes uninvested in the nation or society they live in, they start seeing government as their enemy #1 and therefore that nation or society becomes a threat. American terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski were uninvested in society. When a significant number of citizens are convinced that their government isn’t concerned about their well-being or their survival, that’s when a revolution becomes not just a possibility but an inevitability.

Just look at the American revolution…and the Chinese, Russian, French, and Cuban revolutions too. They all began when people began to feel as though the government left them to fend for themselves. The poor, unwashed masses felt used and abused by the nation they called home.

This is why the United States keeps such a close eye on the unemployment rate. Because if it reaches 10%, the crime rate will rise. If the unemployment rate reaches 20%, the country will become criminally, dangerously unstable. The success or failure of a nation depends on its underprivileged classes – those unwashed masses I mentioned before. If the poor stop believing in the country, all is already lost.

3. Welfare keeps our economic engine running

Last and most importantly, welfare protects our economy.

During a recession, money stops flowing – it becomes locked up. Most banks stop lending. The Trumps of the world won’t make investments. The middle class have to scrimp and save. But ya know who can’t scrimp and save? The working poor. Those schlubs can’t afford to save because they have to spend every red cent just to get by.

If a billionaire earns $12 million bucks they’ll spend a quarter of it, maybe. The rest of that 12 mil will just languish in the bank to gain interest and do nothing. It offers no benefit to our nation or the economy. However, if $5 million bucks is given to the social services system almost all of it will be back in circulation by the week’s end.

There are few things in life as inevitable as a downturn in the economy. Death. Taxes, white people being racist. Aaaaand recessions.

Recessions happen. They can’t be stopped, only softened. A responsible government will take precautions and put safety nets in place to help minimize the damage an inevitable recession will cause. Welfare is one of those nets. It doesn’t matter whether or not the recipients of social services deserve the benefits given to them. They’re cogs serving a purpose, inadvertently or not, in the economic machine. What actually matters is that these cogs spend that money, fast. Welfare recipients keep the economy fluid during a recession.

They are the gasoline that makes our economic motor run.

#food stamps #JC Penneys racist white lady #Racism #social services #welfare #Featured #Poverty

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wittybitchesmag · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://www.wittybitches.com/2016/12/tell-a-different-santa-story-this-holiday-season/

Tell a different Santa story this holiday season

It is that time of year again: People are dusting off their holiday decorations in order to make their homes and public spaces festive. It is also the time when certain stories and songs are being repeated.

Television holiday shows such as “A Charlie Brown Christmas” are almost iconic, with audiences watching them year after year. And the same is true of holiday songs such as “Jingle Bells,” or “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” that are played at almost all stores.

Children too are retold the same classic stories like “The Night Before Christmas,” Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

For many of us, these stories and songs have come to define the spirit of the holidays. As the cultural diversity in the U.S. increases, scholars are exploring how to discuss with children issues of importance, like race and religion, through stories.

The single story

Chimamanda Adichie, via Wikipedia Commons

In 2009, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie gave a talk on the danger of a “single story.” She stated that telling a single story – defining a race, religion, culture, etc. based on a single experience or characteristic – contributes to stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes, she said, was that they made the “one story become the only story.”

Adichie recalled that when she came to the U.S. to study, her roommate remarked that Adichie spoke very good English, and asked if she would play some “tribal music.” Adichie said that the official language of Nigeria was English, and her favorite music was that of American singer Mariah Carey.

The problem was Adichie’s roommate had a “single story of Africa” – one in which she understood Adichie as coming from a place of “catastrophe.” As Adichie said, her roommate could not imagine she shared any similarities with Adichie, and there was “no possibility of a connection as human equals.”

Risks of single narratives

Adichie’s story is not uncommon. I study children’s literature. In my own study of children’s picture books, I found that certain stereotypes of race and culture were repeated over and over again, creating a single story.

For example, Jewish characters were often portrayed as coming from poor families, their lives filled with tension and chaos, or full of fear of supernatural forces.

Stories of African families featured characters who were poor, half-naked, and living primitive lifestyles. African-Americans were typically represented in context of their slave past. Asian characters were shown dressed in kimonos and sashes, often learning speciﬁc moral lessons from elders.

The same was true when depicting Muslims. Scholar Heidi Torres, for example, found in a study of 56 picture books that Muslims were depicted as living in primarily Muslim, rather than diverse, communities.

When children read these stories, they tend to develop single narratives, whether related to race or religion.

Torres, for example, suggests that children risk developing a negative story about Islam and Muslims rather than understand the multiple ways in which Muslims live across the world.

Illustrator Molly Bang voices similar sentiments when she says that children by the age of five develop a particular way of seeing the world after reading such narratives. Noted art historian Ernst Gombrich explains how such views of the world leave a deep impression on children’s minds through “memory images” – familiar and recognizable images that define for children how they understand a race, religion or culture.

Using stories for critical conversations

Stories help children make sense of their own and others’ experiences.

For example, in their study of young children’s retelling of stories, early childhood literacy scholars Judith Lysakar and Tiffany Sedberry found that children paid attention to the many moral details regarding race: In “The Other Side,” a segregation story involving two characters – Clover, an African-American girl, and Annie, a white girl – children wanted to know why a fence always separated the two.

The same researchers found that once children connected with the story, they could actually put themselves in the situation of the main character. After listening to “One Green Apple,” the story of a young Muslim immigrant girl, who after arriving in the U.S. found that she could not make friends as she did not know English, children used their own knowledge and beliefs to make sense of the story.

In this case, they understood the immigrant girl’s story not as that of a Muslim immigrant, but a refugee, as a result of war and violence. They also used their own experiences to retell what it would mean to learn a new language.

Research shows this deep emotional engagement with stories can be used for conversations around race and religion.

In their study of children’s talk around issues of race, researchers Lee Heffernan and Mitzi Lewison engaged children in conversation on citizenship after reading “Whitewash,” a true story of a young African-American girl who is attacked on her way home from school by a gang who spray-paints her face white.

Children in this third grade class connected this hate crime to crimes in their own community that were racist and anti-Semitic. They wrote a petition to stop all hate speech in their own school and posted it in the front hallway of the school.

Retelling the same old stories

Black santa and presents. (Image: soulchristmas/ Flickr / (CC BY 2.0)

So, what can parents do so children can grow up with multiple perspectives around race and religion?

Researchers who have studied the role of multiculturalism suggest the importance of reading different versions of traditional stories, so as to move away from the single story. Researchers Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson, Joy Bowman and Andrea Johnson, for example, studied the Santa story through an African-American perspective.

These researchers used Melodye Rosale’s “’Twas the Night B’Fore Christmas: An African American Version,” a retelling of the familiar “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem.

Initially, children were surprised to know that Santa was black. Some even asked if he was the “real Santa’s helper,” a pejorative perspective. Until this book, children had known only a single story – that Santa must be white. This discussion of Santa and race led children to research and write about other texts that left out African-Americans.

Similarly, researchers Stephanie Flores-Koulish and Wendy Marie Smith-D’Arezzo found that alternative versions of well-known traditional stories helped children challenge stereotypes.

For example, in David Wiesner’s version of “Three Little Pigs,” the wolf tells his side of the story. It gets children to think of the pigs as a juicy hamburger and sympathize with the wolf. In the traditional story, the wolf is the villain.

From reading such alternative versions of traditional stories, children develop alternate points of views and learn to challenge stereotypes. So why not tell Santa and holiday stories from around the world this year?

Peggy Albers, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

#books #Chimamanda Adichie #culture narratives #race #Religion #stories #Featured #Pop Culture

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