lynn phillips & maggie cutler

two names, one writer

Tag: self-knowlege

Bad Sex Science

gendered colors

gendered colors

I can’t stand it when people gender the spectrum, though I am mortified by exactly how much I care. For example, read this article from Science Magazine’s blog along with me and see how excessively furious I get over its every little idiocy.

It’s called “Blue and red” and it’s by a professor, at San Diego State University, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, named Thomas J. Impelluso. He writes:

The color blue is often associated with boys, while red (or pink) is associated with girls.

[Keep your eye on that “often.”]

Neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling demonstrated through a series of tests that women tend to prefer the red end of the spectrum. But is this a cultural phenomenon or is it biological? Chinese researchers demonstrated through another series of tests that this preference extends across cultures.

[Well, two cultures. Because let’s not get all fixated on the British Redcoats, Stalinist Russians, and Catholic cardinals. They obviously wore red, not to express their preference for it, but to attract warm-spectrum-loving girls. ]
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NY Times Discovers Self-Help Addiction

Alina Tugend, in her November 4th column, Pursuing Self-Improvement, at the Risk of Self-Acceptance, has finally noticed that America’s  self-improvement addiction has a downside. She was aided in part by a book annoyingly entitled, Good Enough Is the New Perfect (Harlequin, 2011), by Hollee Schwartz Temple  and Becky Beaupre Gillespie. The pair, Tugend tells us,

…surveyed about 1,000 mothers in their 30s and 40s nationwide and interviewed about 100 for their book. They found that the women broadly fell into two categories: “never enoughs” and “good enoughs.”

Never-enough women felt they had to be the best at everything and often agreed with the sentiment that “I need to be a superstar even if it kills me.”

As a recipe for self-loathing, that’s hard to beat. One of Tugend’s blog readers, Fritz Ziegler, moreover, noticed the Catch-22 of self-acceptance:

… Acceptance includes accepting that sometimes we act in perfectionistic ways about self-improvement, i.e., accepting that we aren’t accepting enough. This can also be said as: Complaining about not being accepting enough is just another version of perfectionism. It’s all so recursive!

Yes, Fritz; it is. You’re catching on.
 

paws

T mag article on paw shoes

The stylish self-loather will want a pair of these hand-crafted shoes for incorrigibly flamboyant sub-human moments. This article appeared on page 100 of T Magazine’s Fall 2009 issue in the ReMix section.  You can click on it to make ita readable size. Bob Bassett and his workshop, the creators of these, do other amazing things with leather, mad masks and dragon bags, all very steampunk and passing strange.

Yea for Neigh

SJP-horse
The brilliant Website, SarahJessicaParkerLooksLikeAHorse.com site is a revelation — an excellent lesson in how to transcend self-loathing while hanging onto it at the same time. First you laugh your ass off. Then, as you click through SJP-horse comparisons, you feel guilty for being so horribly sexist and mean, but, as you keep going, SJP’s horsiness becomes deeply moving, a strange new way to see beauty. Now and then she turns into a horse-goddess — a divinity — though the horse laughs never stop.