BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Odd Dreams
I don't often remember dreams, so the fact that I remembered 3 from one night (well, morning) makes it worth a blog post. That and the fact that I'm still turning 2 of them over in my head, and that writing about them will help me sort through the oddities.
The main one I remember was about a girl woman. Don't know who; I never saw her face, but she had very white skin and fleshy boobs. In the dream we were naked together in bed, but there wasn't any sex. I never saw my own body or had any awareness of it, and I didn't see her above the neck or below the waist, nor did I touch her there, or she touch me. We were kissing, but without any visibility of her face or lips, and it seemed to be the morning. The only bit of dialogue I recall was her saying something about, "Guys always say they want to just sleep over and won't try anything during the night, but you're the first one who was honest when you said it."
It wasn't clear from the dream fragment I retained upon waking if the action was taking place the morning after that sleep over, or the night before, or some later date upon which she was reminiscing about our first night together, some time in the past. Nor was it clear if the kissing and boob-fondling we were engaging in was going to lead to more, or if it was sort of my reward for not trying to rape her in her sleep.
What this mean is, as ever, unclear. On Monday I had a farewell lunch with the IG, before she left for a two month study abroad program. On Tuesday night I had a farewell movie date (Oldiana Jones 4) with the ex (Malaya) before she left for a month and a half of business/vacation travel overseas. I'm sure that thoughts of being alone for a while, since the two people I most often hang out with are gone until July, were in my head and creeping into my dream, but the woman in the dream was nothing like either Malaya or the IG, nor have my recent activities with Malaya and the IG been anything like those with the woman in the dream (much to my chagrin, in the case of the IG). Nor were the dream activities an expression of what I want to do with some as of yet unknown mystery woman.
They're quite unlike that, actually. When I envision a potential girlfriend I think about her intellect and personality and interests, since I want to have fun and be mentally stimulated and have great conversations and emails, and when I think about her body I envision a pretty face, nice hair, athletic body, perky butt, etc. White skin and boobs are way, way down my list of preferred physical features since I don't care that much about skin color and I really don't care about boob size (so long as they're not mega-implant sized monstrosities). Yet that's all I saw of the girl in my dream, and I didn't get much of her personality either, other than a vague sense that she was very passive and trusting, neither of which are qualities I especially desire in a woman.
So if she was my fantasy girlfriend, she sure was an odd choice. But why else did my subconscious conjure her into disembodied dream form?
In other odd dream news, I also had a quick one about the cat. I've been thinking about getting a kitten or a younger cat for a while, since Jinxie has so much energy and likes to play, and I think she'd enjoy another cat to do it with. She always wanted to play with Dusty, but he was old and grumpy and lazy, and only played when he wanted to, and didn't let her snuggle or sleep beside him. I don't have any immediate plans to get another cat, but the thought keeps popping into my head, most often when Jinx is tearing around the apt and barking at me and I'm trying to ignore her to get some work done.
This theme worked its way into a dream last night in an unusual way. In the dream I was going to the pound to look at cats and kittens, but when I got to the kitten room there was just one cat in it. And she was Jinx, as a kitten. Not a cat like Jinx, but Jinx herself. I clearly remember her climbing up the bars of her cage and pawing at the mousie they'd hung for her, and that active behavior (and her apparently short fur) winning Malaya and me over. (She kept the activity and gained a ton of fur.)
In the dream I thought about buying Jinx, but then somehow concluded that I didn't need to get a kitten to play with Jinx since she was already a kitten herself, and went on my merry way. The dream didn't go on long enough to see if Jinx was a kitten when I got back home, so I'm not sure what to make of that one either.
The third dream was the shortest and vaguest. In it I was driving a fire truck. I don't think I was a fireman, and I've never wanted to be a fireman or drive a fire truck, so I don't know where that one came from. I just know I was up high in a big wide seat, with a huge steering wheel in my hands, and I was driving really fast through city streets with sirens wailing and no cars in my way. I think I was alone in the truck though, without even any kittens or white torsos with fleshy boobs, and I don't know where I was going in the truck, or what I was going to do when I got there.
The common thread between all of these dreams? No idea. The only thing that rings any bells was a scene in QT's Death Proof, which I just bought (used DVD from Blockbuster) and watched a couple of days ago. In part of the endlessly extended female bonding stuff at the start of the movie, one woman tells the others about her new semi-boyfriend, and how he whines. They were making out at her apt one night, and when she had enough and told him to leave, he tried to wheedle his way into staying overnight. He just wanted to sleep in bed with her, he wasn't going to try anything, etc. And that element apparently popped up in my white girl dream, though in that case she let me stay the night.
As for the rest? I do know that I drank way too much root beer last night and was all full of caffeine when I went to bed, and that I'd spent the hour before sleep reading another 100 pages of Dennett's absolutely fascinating and thought-provoking Consciousness Explained, and that combined with whatever unsettled feelings I'm having after seeing my two best friends leave, for months, apparently stirred up some odd dreams. More likely the caffeine is the reason I remember them, since I didn't sleep soundly. I tend to remember dreams when I wake up during or immediately after them; when I sleep all night I never remember anything in the morning.
Don't expect a repeat of this post tomorrow, since tonight's menu includes a big glass of zinfandel and the rest of a huge pasta stirfry I whipped up yesterday, so I should be sleeping like a proverbial baby. Wine burps aside.
For a special, unrelated "bonus," here's a curious photo of some of the crops on my patio.
They're both healthy examples of trellis-climbing cucumbers, but one is suddenly yellowish, while the other is a very dark green. Here's the weird thing. They were the exact same color/size/consistency until about a week ago. The pots are the same, they were planted at the same time in the same soil, they get the same water, etc. Each holds 3 seedlings out of the same six-pack, which had one label on it, as though all six were the same strain.
They've obviously grown a fair amount since they were thumb-high sprigs in plastic egg cartons; they're now thigh high and climbing, but what prompted the color change? The obvious suggestion is that they are different types of cucumber, but their leaves are identical in shape, the flowers look just the same, and as I said, they came in the same six-pack with nothing to indicate there were 2 strains within. Even if there were 2 different types, I planted the six seedlings at random, so you'd expect me to have wound up with 2 and 1 in the pots, instead of 3 and 0.
The darker green one gets slightly more afternoon sunshine as the roof blocks out the light from the west, but I'm talking slightly more. Like 15 minutes a day. And by the same token the yellow one gets slightly more morning sun, as El Sol moves around from the east. (Or so it would appear, from our earth-bound observation point. But, to digress, how about that famous question? "What would it look like if the earth were stationary and the sun were orbiting it?" Exactly the same, I'd think, as evidenced by the ancients ascribing the same orbital path to the sun and the moon. Therefore, perhaps our natural assumption that the earth is the center of the solar system is based more on an inherent human self-centeredness than on astronomical observation. Can't this sort of psychological tendency can be seen at work in other human affairs, such as the conceit that puts man at the center of the cosmology of every religion and sets us apart from animals and the other natural forces?)
That aside, what's up with the different color cucs? That they were identical a week ago is the oddest part. They're not mature enough to produce fruit yet, just lots of yellow blossoms from which the noms will grow, and I'm now quite curious to see how the pre-pickled pickles turn out. Will the fruits look different? Taste different? More yellowy, or greeny? Like the eternal question of whether or not that's actually your baby in your wife's tummy... only time (or the Maury show) will tell.
Also, the relevant question might not be why one turned yellow. It's possible that it remained much the same, while the other one has suddenly turned dark dark green. Look at the "green" tree and shrub foliage in the background; it's far closer in color to the "yellow" cuc than to the green one, as is the color of my healthy "green" tomato plants.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the yellow one is retaining more water. The green one's pot blocks most of the sideways sun to the yellow one's pot, and I think the black plastic heats up in the sun and evaporates more of the water within. So perhaps by that light I'm over-watering the yellow one, even though I give them the same amount each day? Why the color change didn't start until just recently though, I can't say.
Men from modern Western societies are more attracted to heavier women when they're hungry, and to thinner women when they're full. I heard this fascinating tidbit during a lecture by a Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscience researcher, and turned it over in my head for a few days. I asked Malaya and the IG about it, but neither of them had any idea what it might mean, and I couldn't figure it out either. So I typed some notes about it, reminded myself to look into it later, and forgot about it.
This afternoon, while enjoying a brief hour on the computer (with parents in town and graduation events over the weekend, I've had very little time to surf/blog/work), I thought I should blog something, and when I saw this bit on my notes page, I did a quick search, and found some more information on the study. I knew nothing about it other than what Dr. Sejnowski said, and she made just a very brief mention of it during her speech. Details:
Men in rich, Western countries tend to prefer thinner women, whereas men in poorer South Pacific countries tend to prefer bigger women. It’s been argued that this is due to cultural and ethnic differences, but increasingly psychologists now believe it has more to do with socioeconomics, so that men prefer bigger women when resources are scarce because a woman being bigger is an implicit sign that she’s got access to resources.
It's not a cultural thing, and it's not a racial thing. In the past white, Western men preferred heavier women; witness all of those "Reubenesque," thunder-thighed, pear-devouring fleshpots in art from Renaissance Europe. The difference was that in those times, the standard of living was lower, and more people were skinny and/or starving. Being fat, or even plump, was a sign of power and luxury, and it set you apart from the rest. You looked "better" in the eyes of people in that place and time, and you looked different.
Today in most Western cultures, certainly in Britain and the US, being not-fat is the unusual state, and it's what's desired culturally. It's impossible to say how much of that is media-driven and how much is scarcity and how much is genetic preference, but it's easy to see the result. Most men want thin women and most women feel bad about not being thin. A lot ties into this; men are visual creatures, men are genetically attracted to young, healthy women since their fertility is likely to be higher, we all see thin women working as models and movie stars, excessive fatty food is hard to avoid in our culture, etc. It's just how things are now. Or is it?
To test this idea further, Viren Swami and Martin Tovee asked 61 male undergraduates at a British University to rate the attractiveness of 50 differently-sized women as depicted in black and white photos. The women were either emaciated, underweight, normal, overweight or obese, according to their body mass index (the ratio of height to weight). They were dressed in identical grey leotards and their faces were obscured. The male participants were recruited as they were entering or exiting the university dining hall, and they rated whether they were hungry or full on a 7-point scale.
The researchers found that the hungrier participants rated heavier women as more attractive than the full participants did. The hungrier men’s ratings were also less affected by the women’s shape, as measured by their hip to waist ratio.
"Temporary affective states can produce individual variation in mate preferences that mirrors patterns of cultural differences", the researchers concluded.
This is obviously a very tentative result from a small study, but it's fascinating to consider the psychological issues behind this. Just checking into the reverse would be interesting. Anyone know some psych people working in like, a poor area of Vietnam? Or Ethopia? Would those men rate heavier/lighter women in the reverse of their current cultural norm? Prefer skinnier women when they were full?
There's no telling about that until further research is done, and the logic behind what those British men wanted is untested and unproven too. The study in question doesn't even seem to speculate about the "why." That's not going to stop me, of course. First off, I think we can rule out the men making a conscious decision about this issue. I don't think any man tells himself, "I'm hungry, so I want Anna Nicole Smith instead of Mary Kate Olsen." Furthermore, the scientists running the test couldn't have told the subjects what they were testing, or the controls would have been thrown of. I also think we can rule out cannibalism as a contributing factor to the male preferences. So what are we left with?
1) Men when hungry unconsciously associate a fleshy woman with their own desire to be full and not hungry.
2) Men when hungry are not thinking about sex as much as they normally would, so their normal attractions are skewed, and the results are simply randomized (thus leading to heavier preferred, since the women men usually prefer are pretty far down the BMI scale.)
3) Men when hungry think about being full and fat and want a woman who won't judge them for that, and they figure a fat one won't? (It would be interesting to see if the male preferences varied by the weight of the men; did fat guys and skinny guys have the same "when hungry" preferences?)
4) Men when hungry think about food and mom and cooking and there's an ingrained attraction to non-skinniness. "Never trust a skinny chef," as they say...
Most likely the answer is some combination of these reasons, and some other ones I've not yet thought of, but it's an interesting riddle to puzzle over.
Troubling article on Salon about a new book examining the actual financial state of "middle class" Americans. Turns out that quite a few people with college degrees, working in white collar jobs, earning what would seem to be good incomes (up to $70k a year) are actually in fairly dire financial straits. College costs and debts have risen, healthcare costs are skyrocketing and being steadily moved from business to employees, retirement planning is following the same path. This bit caught my eye, given my ongoing dalliance with the idea of grad school.
In the '70s, we were barely taking out student loans. In 1977, collectively students were borrowing about $6 billion. By now, they're borrowing over $85 billion. That's a remarkable number. The number of students enrolled in college grew 44 percent between 1977 and 2003, but student loan volume rose 833 percent in that same time period.
There are fewer grants and scholarships available. If students go through graduate school, they can end up taking out over $100,000 of student loans. And if you go into a field that's not high-paying that can be a real burden on you for 20, 30, 40 years.
We are seeing more people going to college, which is definitely a positive move, but they're getting into a lot of debt to do it. The college degree now is what the high school degree used to be. You really need a basic bachelor's degree in order to be eligible for a lot of jobs.
You can see the math fairly easily there: 4-5 years more time in school = 4-5 years less earning money and 4-5 years more racking up debt. And if the white collar job at the end of that is no better paying (adjusted for inflation) than jobs in industry and manufacturing that were formerly available without college, and that have now been largely moved overseas in the name of higher corporate profits, today's college grad is materially far worse off than his father or grandfather. No wonder people were treating their houses like ATMs during the last few years when "real estate values always went up." At least they're better off then people who bought during that period, and are now sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in negative equity.
This issue of being middle class ties into a larger sociological topic I've had sitting on my notes file for a couple of weeks. The nut of the matter is that almost all Americans consider themselves to be "middle class," almost regardless of their actual income or financial situation. I can imagine people who are poor, or are living without much income/expenses (like myself) who tell themselves they're middle class in order to boost their ego or salve their pride. Or who just do it reflexively, without considering actual numbers, or who don't really think about it since their income isn't their priority in life (like me). The interesting thing is that this goes both ways. People who are clearly rich, or at least have an income that puts them well above the median, also claim to be "middle class," even when that's demonstrably false.
Sunday I learned that I am insensitive after I wrote a column arguing that families who earn as much as $200,000 to $250,000 are "rich."
A San Francisco couple earning $205,000 informed me they "shouldn't be considered anything but working middle class." A $215,000 couple told me, "Families making $200,000 a year are not rich. They're not even close to rich." A San Francisco lawyer explained that a $200,000 salary cannot make one rich because a "a 'rich' person does not need to work."
...Clinton promised not to raise "a single tax on middle-class Americans, people making less than $250,000 a year." Obama made a similar pledge for incomes up to between $200,000 and $250,000.
These figures are clearly etched into the national consciousness, as shown by both Democratic contenders adopting them into their tax plans. Americans do not think earning $200k a year makes you anything but middle class. What's the reality? Rather different.
As the cited columnist shows, earning $200k a year puts you into the 93rd percentile in the Bay Area, and the 97th percentile nationally. By what reasonable definition of "middle class" does earning more than 93%, or 97% of people, slot you into it?
I think this goes to the widely (though inconsistently applied) views Americans have of themselves (ourselves?) as "the common man," imbued with a "Protestant work ethic" and all striving to become (or remain) "middle class." They're psychological buzz words, ones that set off a resonance in our national psyche, and how well, if at all, they describe is us irrelevant to the satisfaction we get at their usage. Furthermore, people tend to generalize by their own standards, so most people earning $200k a year think they're middle class, and think that other people live lives somewhat like their own. They're largely ignorant of what sort of life is lived by people who actually are "middle class," and they confuse their "we just vacation in Hawaii, we don't own a second house there" situation for the actual "working a second job on weekends to pay off medical bills" middle class reality.
On the other hand, there is a point to people making $200k who think they're not upper class. And that point comes about from the (almost) historically unprecedented level income inequality in modern day America. If you're earning $200k a year, and the CEO of your company is earning $50m a year, you can't possibly see himself and yourself as of the same class. And you're not. You're earning 3x what an actual middle class family does, "$77,076 -- less if the family does not have to buy its own health care or pay for child care." according to the California Budget, as cited by the afore-linked SF Game columnist. But if your CEO earns 250x what you do, and 750x what a middle class worker does, and he's "upper class," you are indeed nowhere near that class.
Still, I do find it interesting that for most Americans, you need to be Bill Gates, or Tom Cruise, to actually be rich. You need to have several homes, servants, several vehicles you use simply for fun rather than transportation, etc. It's an interesting definition of rich, where a person must have an income not tens or dozens of times your own, but hundreds, or even thousands of times greater, to qualify.
That leads to my second digression, in which I quote part of an email I wrote Malaya on this issue a couple of weeks ago. I'll present it without further comment, and edit it simply to fix some typos:
America, where everyone wants to be rich but no one admits when they are.
This ties into something I was thinking in the shower this morning. How people normalize everything to their own standards, and assume that the rest of the world is moving inexorably towards it. Quite noticeable amongst atheists, who believe everyone else will gradually shed their religion and become secular (Worldwide evidence of this... ?). But capitalists and libertarians and even democracy-ists fall into the same trap. 1) We think our economic/political systems are the best, and 2) that everyone will gradually move into them. (And we're sure there's evidence to back this up.)
The first might be true, but #2 is far less clear. Most of the world is now moving towards capitalism, but Europe has far more central control and economic planning, as does Japan, the Asian tigers, etc. And then you get China with limited capitalism controlled by a semi-tyrannical bureaucracy, India is similar, though more democratic in the selection of the bureaucrats. And the rest of the world is more of a chaotic scramble, with a plutocrat class raking in the pesos/rubles, while most people struggle to survive.
Americans tend to assume that more freedom and democracy is best, but the evidence for this is spotty, and the evidence that it will ever be the majority opinion worldwide is nonexistent. Truth (arguable as that definition is) is largely irrelevant; how well is non-superstition doing in winning the battle amongst competing mental/philosophical memes?
There's a grand unified theory here somewhere, incorporating the fact that people think they're the heroes of their own story, and that their (usually inherited) beliefs about freedom or not, democracy or not, capitalism (to what degree), etc, all factor in. Westerners are full of conceit and hubris and lack objectivity. We're always saying that those poor women born and raised in backwards Islamic/tribal countries would want freedom and want to take off their burkas if they were only given the chance, and that if they don't it's only because they grew up in those societies and are brainwashed by them.
I happen to agree with that, but how is that any different than my inculcated beliefs? Americans only believe what we believe since we grew up believing it. We're just granting our inherited positions higher moral authority since that's a convenient reason for us to perpetuate them for everyone's own good. It's convenient to say freedom and capitalism are better and everyone should aspire to them, but if we only believe that since that's what we grew up believing, how is it any different than arguing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God because the Bible says its the inerrant word of God? (An argument atheists and rationalists rightly find laughable.)
What if it could be "proved" that people live happier, more content lives in largely egalitarian, politically controlling, centrally-planned theocracies? Would that convert Libertarians? Or Communists? Or democracy advocates? Of course not. They'd continue to believe their world view would be better if only everyone would convert to it.
Book Review: G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
I saw this book referenced while doing some research on sexual issues last semester, and while I didn't have time to read it then, I kept it in mind and eventually tracked it down earlier this year. It's by a female anthropologist who danced in strip clubs to work her way through grad school, and then turned her dancing experience, and the interviews she did with some regular strip club customers, into her doctoral thesis. As the title indicates, the book is chiefly about the men who regularly patronize strip clubs. Why do they visit, what do they get out of it, what makes it worth the expense, what types of clubs do they frequent, what do they think of the dancers, and so on.
The book is not a page turner, and it's not written for a mass audience. It's pretty clearly a modified thesis, with tons of anthropological and sociological theory, hundreds of references, plentiful endnotes, and all discussion couched in very scientific, scholarly terms. Despite that, it's got a lot of useful info and I benefited from reading it. I would have received the same benefit from reading a good forty page synopsis of it, or simply discussing it with a knowledgeable reader. But since there was no such synopsis to read or reader to synapse, I had to plow through the 344 pages myself.
To the scores!
G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire, by Katherine Frank, 2002 Concept: 8 Presentation: 5 Writing Quality: 5 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8 Entertainment Value: 3 Rereadability: 4 Overall: 5.5
As you can see, my scores are very bifurcated. I loved the topic and the concept, but wasn't a big fan of the presentation. It's overlong and feels padded in a lot of places by redundant anecdotes and interview quotes, and most of the higher level sociological theory is shoehorned in and extraneous. If Frank had gotten a good editor with an eye to pop culture success, she could have whittled this book down to about 180 pages, pumped up the titillation factor, added more juicy anecdotes from behind the scenes, added more quotes from the Johns she interviewed, and turned this into a really fun book, without sacrificing any of the information. She'd have had to jettison almost all of the cultural anthropology and scholarly material though, and I think she would have refused. Despite landingsome interviews (that one gives a good overview of the book's findings), Frank didn't want to be a celebrity sexologist specializing in strippers. Her goal was a career in academia, not as a sex writer angling for a shot on Oprah (or at least Ellen), and since she's now teaching at a private university in Maine, and has recently published a second book on sexual cultural issues, she's probably pleased with her career path.
What I found most interesting about the book was the insight into the mind of the strip club customer. I've never been to a strip club, not even once, and I've never wanted to. I'm a bit more curious now, having read this book, since it overturned a few of my assumptions about such places, but if I went it would be curiosity/research, not prurient desire. (Which is not why the regulars she interviewed went either.) According to Frank's book, strip clubs aren't as seedy as I thought, and they're definitely not all clandestine whorehouses. They're more like video arcades where the machines are flesh and blood females, and you watch more than play. They're not all about sex, and the girls sell personality and conversation as much, or more, than T&A.
According to the book, the main priority for most of the strippers are table dances. The clubs have a main stage or two, and the girls are scheduled so they all have to take a turn dancing up front, but they make their real money doing private dances. Tables dances in the clubs Frank worked in, lap dances at some other clubs (local regulations vary enormously from city to city and within cities, in terms of how much nudity, contact, alcohol, etc, is allowed), and girls make better profits per song with individuals than they do up on stage in front of everyone; movie scenes of guys throwing wads of cash at the feature dancers notwithstanding.
At the time this book was written, the going rate in Atlanta was $10 a dance, with songs lasting about 3 minutes. Men who liked a dancer could pay her to dance, or simply sit and talk, for the same price as a dance. Most of the guys would buy the dancers a drink, or even take them to dinner in the upscale clubs with restaurants, and the dancers obviously did their best to encourage the guys, since they'd prefer to get paid for sitting and talking than stripping. Plus the girls got a cut of the customer's food/drinks tab.
It's not just the dancers who enjoy the private time, since that sort of personal interaction was what all the men interviewed in the book cited as their main interest in strip clubs. They all wanted to talk to the girls, to get to know them, and not just because they hope to fuck them, as I would have expected. Most of the men are married, and few of them hit on the girls or try to arrange hook ups, at least as far as Frank describes it.
Many of the men I interviewed who considered themselves to be regular customers of particular clubs referred to their relationships with the dancers they visited as primarily that of "friends." These men pointed out that they knew significant details about the dancers' lives: where the women lived, whether they had a boyfriend or partner, the names of their children, their history, and so on. These men also claimed that these relationships were symbiotic and pleasurable, highlighting their platonic aspects and stressing that they returned for the conversation, the friendship, and the atmosphere of the club rather than out of an prurient interest in the dancers. (Pg. 180.)
Frank asked good questions and got good quotes from the men, but she did very little analysis of what they didn't say, and provided no insight into whether or not they were being honest. I was skeptical about a lot of it. Just because they told the smart college student stripper that they thought of the girls as "friends" doesn't mean they weren't quite willing to screw her/them, if given the opportunity. Men constantly tell women they're happy just being friends... when friendship is the only option. Meanwhile, that "friend" guy is just hanging around, waiting for her to break up with her boyfriend, or need a shoulder to cry on, etc.
All the men Frank interviews talk about wanting to get to know the girls, and wanting to be friendly and social, but none of them seem to object when the dresses and bras and panties start to come off.
Even with that allowed for, keep in mind that all the interview subjects are regular customers, so they're not the whole demographic of strip club visitors. Plenty of guys come in occasionally just to look at the goods, bachelor parties aren't there for conversation and dinner, and men who weren't interested in talking to the strippers certainly weren't going to agree to meet Frank outside of the club for an interview. Frank gives no demographic info on how representative the men she interviewed were of the total club visitors, so there's no telling if 75% of 5% of the men there are "regulars" who like to chat with the girls.
The thing that the customers all realize, to some limited degree, is that the girls know what they want, and are working to give it to them. If a guy's paying you $10 a song to sit and chat, of course you're going to let him talk about whatever he wants to talk about, and you're going to tell him what he wants to hear. The girls are there to make money, and it's not easy work. They've got long shifts, they're on their feet in high heels the whole time (except when some guy pays them to sit and chat and drink), and out of their take they've got to pay a % to the club, tip the bouncers and bartenders and DJ, etc.
If they don't sell a lot of dances they might as well be waiting tables at some neighborhood pub. Of course they're going to do what they can to sell dances, or better yet, sell their personality. They're basically in-person phone sex operators, except that the conversations are seldom about sex. The goal is the same though; to keep the other person talking for as long as they can afford to talk. The stripper has a bit of an easier job, since she can show off the goods to keep the guy interested, and she's getting paid right then and there. (Slightly OT, but phone sex or psychics or counselors have a trickier task with that; and they have guidelines for how long to keep their calls. If they're too short there's not enough $ coming in, but if they go too long, people often refuse to pay when they get a $500 phone bill.)
Given that financial reality, the strippers become very skilled at reading the interest of the men, and will do whatever it takes to keep the conversation going. Tease and titillate if that seems desired, laugh at his jokes and feign interest in his stories, make fake revelations when the guy asks for greater intimacy, and show your tits or pussy if he's losing interest in words. Whatever it takes.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the basic truths of human psychology hold true in strip club customers too. Everyone wants to be special and everyone is the hero of their own story. Every guy wants to think his questions and comments and interests are unique and unlike the other guys'. Frank runs through a whole long list of things men say, or ask, or request, and makes clear that the best way to please virtually any guy in conversation is to act like you've never heard that particular comment before.
The tricky part is that that customers want intimacy, but they want authenticity as well. If the guy knows the girl is just telling him what he wants to hear, the illusion is shattered. So the trick is to be flattering and interested and make him feel special, without overdoing it. Since the customers aren't so naive as to forget that they're paying by the minute, the clever stripper plays it cool. This can require honesty, or lies. Frank says that she usually danced under her real name, going by Kate in most clubs (if the name wasn't already taken by another girl), and that she often had to make up a fake name when a guy asked to hear her real name, since they never believed she was using her real name as a stage name. She also wore her wedding ring while working, and was honest about her profession when she told guys she was a grad student researching strip club customers. Some guys believed these revelations, and other guys thought they were just trappings of her trade, and that she was playing on fantasies for hot librarians, or married women, etc. Hence the appearance of authenticity was more important than the actuality.
Another good way to get men interested was to play innocent. Strippers with years of experience would sometimes wear unprofessional clothing they couldn't easily remove, or act like they were frightened to take off their bras or panties, or freeze up during the music. This usually brought them a line of eager customers, since the men were eager to see someone new and fresh and unsure of herself, instead of the polished product the other women presented. Lots of the interview subjects talked about how they liked to go to low end clubs to talk to the poorer, less attractive strippers and hear their hard luck stories. The men felt special if they could help a woman who (appeared to) need it.
Often the illusions are mutual; the men tell stories about their lives that match those the dancers tell, or both sides collaborate on a tale; talking about the Hawaiian vacations they'll go on (together) or the trips to Europe or whatever. When the customer is married and could never get away and wouldn't dare if he could, and the dancer has no inclination to go with him anyway. And both parties realize this, on some level, but the fun is in the verbal dance.
The book didn't draw any major conclusions, and it wasn't very reader friendly, but there was some interesting info in it, and I liked it since it fell into my area of research/interest/expertise. I doubt many other laypeople would care enough to wade through the academic presentation, though, so I'm not really recommending it.
Quick article about the 5000000th study or survey showing the same thing; that (generally speaking) men can't intuit the emotional state behind a human expression as well as women can, and that men judge virtually any response from a woman short of spitting at them and telling them to "fuck off and die!" as a sign of sexual interest.
Farris and her colleagues examined non-verbal communication in a group of 280 undergraduates, both men and women with an average age of 20 years old.
The students viewed images of women on a computer screen and had to categorize each as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Each student reported on 280 photographs, which had been sorted previously into one of the categories based on surveys completed by different groups of students.
Overall, women categorized more images correctly than men did. When it came to friendly gestures, men were more likely than women to interpret these to mean sexual interest.
More surprising, the researchers found guys were also confused by sexual cues. When images of gals meant to show allure flashed onto the screen, male students mistook the allure as amicable signals.
I wasn't going to bother posting about the article, since I thought the survey findings about as surprising and controversial as "water is wet," but after I skimmed it and got to the comments, I began to grow very depressed. The amount of misogynistic idiocy being spilled in the thread is literally painful. I have seldom been as embarrassed to be a man as I was while skimming over the posts about that article. A few have some nuance, and a few aren't caveman in their reasoning, but the vast majority essentially boil down to, "It's not my fault I can't understand women, because the bitches refuse to make clear how they're feeling at all times!" I really hope this article was linked from some right wing blogs, since that would at least account for the preponderance of stupidity and misogyny demonstrated by most of the commenters. If they weren't sent by some Kim du Toit-esque crank, but are actually representative of the usual readers of LiveScience.com, then we're pretty much doomed to further incompetent, ineffective, war-mongering as a means of penis-compensation, freely-elected political leadership for the foreseeable future.
It's a shame too, since the issue of male perceptions of female actions is such an interesting one. It's one of the main animating issues in evolutionary psychology, and comes up continually in all sorts of male/female psychology, gender studies, human interaction studies, etc. I've read and discussed/reviewed a few books on the issue, and with such a highly non-qualified background, I shall now regale you with a quick overview of the issue, much as I presented in email to Malaya, who forwarded me the article link in the first place.
The fact that, on the whole, men are far more likely than women to want casual sexual contact, and to interpret friendliness as sexual interest, is not open to debate. It's been conclusively demonstrated in countless studies and experiments, such as the one cited in the afore-linked article. Even the commenters on that article don't dispute that fact. They just blame women for being subtle and hard to read and deceptive. (Which is perfectly fair, since men are always and at all times open and forthright about their feelings when dealing with women. Right?) This is pretty ironic, since the guys complaining about that would what, prefer that 99% of the women they meet outright told them, "I do not find you attractive and would prefer to never see you again, while the thought of engaging in sexual activity with you is gives me the sensation as would immersing my face in spider eggs." Not so much, I think. Still want openness and non-subtlety, boys?
No one's arguing that men have trouble reading women. More trouble than women have reading men (or other women, in theory), at least. Why this is was not addressed in the article, and it's not really the point at hand anyway. One can speculate, and there are many competing and overlapping theories, all of which are some parts truth and some parts fail. Women work harder at it and get better over time, women are naturally more empathic and better able to predict what other people are feeling, men are naturally disinclined to want to know/care what other people feel, etc. Those are general theories, though. Of more interest to me, and I suspect to most of the angry, defensive commenters on the article itself, is how this male non-insight factors into sexual relations.
The explanation in The Evolution of Desire was that over time, if men benefited by misinterpreting all signals as sexual ones, since if even a small % of the time that resulted in sex (whether because the woman gave in, or the woman's signals were very subtle and might have been missed) that was a reproductive advantage and the man's genes would pass on more successfully. Maybe or maybe not, but it's a theory, though a fairly iffy one, as is usually the case with evo psych. Supporting/relating theories from the same field include stuff like; women who could more accurately intuit the moods of their offspring had more surviving young, women who could better anticipate threats from angry people survived more often, etc.
To move away from evolutionary theories for human psychology and abilities, how does this sort of thing translate into behavior in the modern world? Why do men believe any sort of female friendliness advertises sexual interest, despite countless incidents arguing to the contrary?
My theory/analysis is this: When men get to know women, men look for reasons not to have sex, since the default is "Do her, if possible." For a man to immediately rule that interest out, she has to be unattractive, unavailable, way out of acceptable age range, etc. There's a gray area, of course. A woman can (and most women are) borderline on any or all of those categories, and in that case it's a matter of degrees. The man figures how much effort it would take to win over that woman, and if the effort would be worth it. Availability is a huge factor; a man will take home anything with a pulse at closing time, (beer goggles = drunk + dwindling options) but will only spend time/money/energy trying to win over a woman that he really desires. Clearly that's true of anything; no one saves up money to buy things they don't much want/need, but it's magnified with sex/dating.
Women, conversely, have a default of not having sex, and therefore look for reasons to have sex with a guy. They must be won over by looks, personality, resources, etc. This also varies by individual and situation, of course. Women in a singles bar are looking harder and effectively lowering their standards for a man.
In both cases, the ultimate purpose effects the judgment quite a bit, and again, these are somewhat reversed between the genders. Especially when you consider what's valued for different types of relationships. Superficial things are more valued for short term flings, but aren't what people value as highly for LTRs.
Men have lower standards of attractiveness or personality for short term relationships than they do for long term. Men will fuck any girl for a one night stand, but are much pickier about who they'll marry. Women, conversely, tend to have higher standards for short term relationships (they'll go groupie on highly desirable men, such as rock stars or athletes, in ways they'd never do for ugly losers), but will marry less attractive men, since in an LTR qualities such as income/resources, patience, kindness, loving nature, etc, are more important than flashy traits like good looks, hot body, etc.
This, I think, largely sums up the "nice guys" typical complaint about how women are always their friends, and then go and fuck some asshole frat guy who inevitably cheats on and/or dumps them. Nice guys often handicap themselves with a poor appearance or lack of social skills, but even when they're more suitable, they're never going to project a rock star/most eligible bachelor vibe, which is what draws women into casual sexual encounters. Such a vibe is an active deterrent to LTR success though, and many women are scared away by it, once they stop fooling themselves that they can get the guy to settle down or change his ways. Witness all the charismatic, unrepentant multiple baby daddies on The Maury Show, and all the sad sack, devoted, broken hearted, cuckolded husbands sharing the stage with them and their weeping, remorseful wives.
The Evolution of Desire used this as part of a "beautiful sons" hypothesis, theorizing that women had a biological urge to cheat with gorgeous men, for the likely appearance improvement it would confer on their children, who would then have higher reproductive success, and thus widely propagate the mother's genes. Needless to say, this theory requires that the woman's husband not know he's been cheated on, since he's being counted on to provide for the children as if they were his own. This sort of thing isn't just a theory; various medical studies have shown at least a 10% illegitimacy rate in general populations. Your mom is almost certainly your mom, since it's pretty clearly which woman a baby emerges from. Your dad is quite possibly not your dad, though, for equally obvious reasons. I'm skimming very quickly here, and The Evolution of Desire, and my review of it, goes into far more detail on these issues.
So, yes, men aren't as good at judging signals from women, and yes, women could possibly make their signals more obvious. But men could also work to improve their perception, or ask (difficult) questions that would elicit more direct responses, obviating the need to try to read subtle body language signals that the man has repeatedly proven himself unable to grasp. In any case, posting angry, defensive, semi-pathetic replies to scientific articles isn't going to bring any progress or improvement.
Here's another long discussion camouflaged as a book review. The book itself was quite informative, and it had some awesome artwork (as seen below), but what it spurred me to discuss at the greatest length was the comfort humans can obtain, or not, from their belief system. What psychological benefits do atheists receive from not being able to tell themselves, "this is all part of God's plan" when some disaster strikes? And how does this question relate to a book about Satanic cults and mass hysteria throughout human history? Read on and find out.
Remember the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s? When seemingly every preschool and daycare worker in the world was accused of being part of a vast Satanic conspiracy, and (literally) unbelievable stories about children being terrorized and abused by the tens of thousands, women being bred and babies being born solely for their future value as bloody sacrifices, animals being tortured and killed to scare the children into silence, secret tunnels and black rituals, and more. The whole thing blew up in just a few years, was aided and abetted by a rash of "recovered memories" in adults coached by credulous psychiatrists, before it all crumbled under the weight of its own nonexistence. It was a modern day witch-hunt, and once you go beyond the tabloid-esque specifics of the events in question, the larger question is about human psychology and cultural dynamics. What causes people to make such accusations and to entertain such absurd allegations? What is the deeper root of this kind of mania? What human needs does it serve?
This subject is examined at length by the unfortunately named David Frankfurter, in his massively-researched title, Evil Incarnate. His book, the culmination of more than a decade of research, draws from the fields of history, psychology, anthropology, and religious studies, and presents a fascinating overview of witch hunts and societal panics over much of recorded human history. Dozens of such instances are reviewed, and it's startling how familiar they all are. Children, coached by authority figures, make incredible accusations, communities mobilize against the accused (who are always powerless fringe figures, usually nonconforming and/or elderly women), professional prosecutors appear and fan the flames with their "expertise," torture is used to extract confessions which implicate others and confirm the conspiracy theories of the prosecutors, and so on, until some critical mass is reached and the community grows sickened by the excesses and shakes off the collective mania. Whether it's Poland in 1050, or Spain in 1620, or Manhattan Beach, CA in 1983, the elements are always the same.
I suppose that a person could take this pattern and conclude that there really are hidden cults of Satanists carrying out these grim torments all the time, and that they are only occasionally uncovered. There's always child abuse of some level going on in the world, but I think it more likely, and this is the conclusion Frankfurter draws as well, that the identical nature of these episodes are signs of various weaknesses in human nature, ones that run the same course once fabricated manias come about, taking on a briefly self-perpetuating life of their own. But why?
...where do these images of extreme evil come from? What is the relationship of such extreme images to the popular wish to expel it so violently from our midst? Why are people's larger anxieties and traumas expressed in these particular images, with rituals, perversions, cannibalism, and infant-sacrifices -- how do these kinds of scenarios come to represent evil?"
This book goes a long way towards answering these questions, in modern and historical terms. It probably goes without saying, but the author doesn't give any credence to the allegations made at any point in history. Based on his research, he does not entertain the notion that there might really be Satanic forces, much less demons and witches with magical powers. Of course there has been child abuse all through human history, and sometimes its been organized by a small cell of pedophile perverts, but if any individual witch-hunt actually uncovered and destroyed such a conspiracy, rather than just torturing and murdering dozens or hundreds of innocent people, Frankfurter never uncovered it in his decade of research. To the scores:
Evil incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, by David Frankfurter, 2006 Concept: 8 Presentation: 6 Writing Quality: 6 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7 Entertainment Value: 4 Rereadability: 5 Overall: 7
My scores for this one are somewhat constrained by the presentation and tone. This is not a text book, but it's quite scholarly, and is not written on a popular level. It's composed with an advanced vocabulary and quite long sentence/paragraph structure, and was clearly prepared by an academic. The average chapter has 60 or 70 citations and endnotes, giving it the feel of a very thorough and professional, but not especially readable, research paper or dissertation. I doubt I would have gotten through it a few years ago, before my return to college, where I grew accustomed to reading this sort of material, and can now do it for pleasure, as I did with this book, since I was interested in the subject.
If you want more over-arching discussion, check the Amazon listing for the book, where there are snips from quite a few high level (NYTimes, Publisher's Weekly, scholarly journals, etc) editorial reviews. Rather than duplicate them by giving an overview of the book, I'm going to focus on a few things I found most interesting.
Frankfurter's research was extensive, and produces numerous fascinating citations, quite often from the Bible, or various non-canonical scriptures. One from the Gnostic Testament of Reuben, is cited on page 23. It details the types of suffering and difficulties various demons can inflict upon humans, and where these diseases are located in the body.
The first, that of impurity, is seated in the nature and the senses. The second, the spirit of insatiate desire, in the belly. The third, the sprit of fighting, in the liver and the gall. The fourth, (is) the spirit of flatter and trickery... The fifth is the spirit of arrogance.... The sixth is the spirit of lying in destruction and jealousy... the seventh is the spirit of unrighteousness... for unrighteousness works together with the other spirits through the receiving of bribes. Besides all these, the spirit of sleep, the eighth spirit, it connected with deceit and fantasy.
There's plenty more of this sort of cataloging of diseases and maladies, along with the demons to blame for them. On page 25 Frankfurter lists the demons of the Testament of Solomon .
...the demon Onoskelis, with female torso and mule's legs, inhibits cliffs, caves, and ravines. A nameless headless demon and another named Obzouth attack newborn babies, knowing the price times that women give birth. Kunopegos ("dog-flow") sinks ships with giant waves, while a variety of demons or illness and strife are linked to the 36 heavenly bodies: for example, Sphandor, who wakens shoulders, numbs hands, and paralyzes limbs.
This sort of thing is seen in the mythologies and religions of every culture, and just goes to show how creative and precise humans can and will be with their quantifying and qualifying, even when what they're just sorting imaginary gremlins.
Another perpetual feature of the supposed cultists is sexual immorality, and it's striking how similar the charges are, in every culture and time. There are always orgies, sexual congress with animals and/or demons of some sort, and sexual fetishism of offal; blood, feces, afterbirth, etc. Basically the worst things people can think of, which always tell more about the suppressed sexual perversion of the accusers and society in general.
...ethnographers have noted especially in modern ideas of witch-cults a fascination with inversion itself: not only what is eaten and who copulates with whom, but every aspect of what witches (or demons, or Satanists) do: Their dances, their music, their singing, their transportation. Everything is turned upside down: They eat what we find disgusting, they mock what we find sacred, they expose what we do in private, they abuse what we protect, they congregate when we stay at home. It is as if the wholesale inversion of cultural norms carries an intrinsic excitement, which compounds both the overall picture of the monstrous and the prurience of contemplating it.
There's always a good bit of titillation and prurience in the spectacles too, especially for the star prosecutors. A prominent aspect of all the historical cases of witch hunting was the torture, examination, and purgation of the accused. Searching for the Devil's Mark was mandatory in the good old days, a process which necessarily entailed stripping accused (women) nude, so that groups of the accusing (men) could thoroughly examine them from head to toe in order to find the incriminating moles or birth marks. If a suitable mark could not be found, it was not uncommon for one to be manufactured by vigorous and cruel pinching, prodding, or probing, and it's impossible not to imagine the sexual connotations of a room full of torturing church or court elders having their judgmental fun with a parade of helpless nude females.
Lest you think the sexualized aspects were only interpersonal and extralegal, Frankfurter includes numerous illustrations and examples from the witch-hunting books and manuals of the time. This picture is only a century old, but it's based on earlier works and comes from a French history of witch hunts and persecutions. Not a great deal of subtlety in the context and implications of that scene, eh?
Not all the witch hunts were brought about by accusing children, of course. Throughout the Middle Ages and even more recently than that, there have been numerous documented cases of possession of adults, usually women, and often nuns, in events that appear to be a sort of mass hysteria. One such incident took place in a nunnery in Loudun in 1634, when the cloistered nuns were disturbed by the presence of a new and unpopular priest.
Feeling irritated, for example, that the new convent priest was offering communion through the grille rather than directly,
"...it entered my mind that, to humiliate the father, the demon would have committed some irreverence toward the Very Holy Sacrament. I was so miserable that I did not resist that thought strongly enough. When I went to take communion, the devil seized my head, and after I had received the holy host and half moistened it, the devil threw it into the priest's face. I knew perfectly well that I did not perform that act freely, but I an very sure, to my great embarrassment, that I gave the devil occasion to do it, and that he would not have had this power had I not allied myself with him.
The tangible presence of the demonic becomes not just terrifying, but inspiring: a context for imagining, then embodying, a rush of feelings to transgress or rebel emerge through the adoption of demonic identities: insulting priests and bishops, cursing sacraments and God -- all the "worst things imaginable" become imagined, performed, and at some level, enjoyed.
It's easy to see how being possessed by demons could be quite liberating and freeing, for people forced to live very controlled, orthodox, ascetic lives. Indeed, there are numerous accounts of nuns so "possessed" falling to the ground, tearing at their clothing in sexual ecstasy, shouting every sort of profanity and so forth. Cutting loose all at once, like a bomb going off after their years or decades of stultifying self control. It seems a pretty obvious human pathology, but the fact that this sort of release was forbidden the nuns (and others) meant they had to blame it on something else. Could it be... Satan?
Frankfurter makes an interesting distinction between the types of "Satanism," all of which exist, but none of which actually match up with the fevered fantasies of the credulous.
Today, for example, one can see distinctions between youth who embrace a "Satanic style" with jewelry, tattoos, and clothing in order to express feelings of deviance, youth who adopt Satanism as a legitimization of violence (often ex post facto and encouraged by parents or advisors in order to gain popular forgiveness), and the often deranged adults who conceal their crimes under the anonymity of "Satanic cult atrocity." All three of these modes of performance have the capacity to prove the reality of a Satanic cult conspiracy for those who believe in it, but in fact they reflect important differences in the actors' motivation.
I think this sort of thing plays into a need of most humans; for explanation and reason in the face of madness. That's essentially what fuels memes like mythologies, religions, conspiracy theories, and so forth. The fact that we are pattern-seeking mammals, who don't like to accept that major events, especially things we find disturbing, can be just luck, or chance, or random and entirely outside of human control. Someone's teenaged son dies drunk driving, gets murdered, dies in a senseless accident, etc, and it's a fair bet the grieving parent will be quoted saying that, "God has a purpose." or "These things happen for a reason." Never mind that there's no evidence of this, and quite a bit evidence going against it; such thoughts provide consolation, which is why every faith, belief system, and religion with any popularity in the world today incorporates them at a structural level.
Almost everyone sees larger causes behind important events; the main difference is in how high up the chain one assigns the blame or credit. Traditionally it went right to the top. God -- or once the concept of dualism was introduced into Christianity with the New Testament, Satan -- is responsible. Good works are inspired, bad things are curses or temptations, and everything lacking a clear causal agent (storms, drought, plagues, etc) must be a sign of God's displeasure, likely caused by some indefinable human actions. Eastern belief systems are similar in their ultimate assignation of causes; although their deities are largely non-interventionist, good things come from positive karma built up in previous lives and bad things are signs of negative karma being worked off.
A slightly more modern view lowers the causation a bit, putting the ultimate causes, be they God or the Universe or whatever, out of the range of direct influence on events. Their proxies are then to praise/blame, so things are caused by individual demons, or spirits, or guardian angels, or kiri (nature spirits in Japanese Zen Buddhism).
A bit lower down the chain the concepts get secularized, and there's no longer a demon or angel or holy spirit controlling things, but it might as well be, since the powers in charge are equally-far out of your reach or control. Humans do evil things, in this world view, but they're doing them as directed by demonic forces. In this view the lone gunman is never to blame for the assassination, since he's just a fall guy. An interesting psychological aspect of this is that bigger conspiracies are better, perhaps because that explains more, and helps to restore a bit more logic and orderliness to a chaotic world. (It's still chaos on the ground level, but the hope is that if you can grasp the higher level forces, it will begin to make more sense. Remember, we're pattern seeking mammals, so this works directly on our psychology and vanity.) So a conspiracy of 19 hijackers on 9/11 isn't sufficient. They must be part of a far larger, worldwide movement of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Or better yet, it's even bigger than that, and the actual hijackers and their inspirational leaders might think they were acting on their own recognizance, but they were actually just a pawn in the hand of the Jewish world bankers, or the Trilateral Commission, or the New World Order.
The lowest level of causation and order in the universe is the purely naturalistic one, and that's what I aspire to. Shit (and sunshine) happens, and while it's in our nature to try to explain it in larger terms; God, fate, destiny, conspiracies, etc, that's just mental masturbation for people who can't deal with the messy, chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable reality of the universe. Of course there are reasons for things; humans have individual goals and ideas, short and long term, and sometimes these goals are pursued by larger groups; i.e. conspiracies. But Occam's Razor has to be applied judiciously, which rules out most of the wilder theories.
By extension, and here's where it starts to get interesting: people with a naturalistic, non-religions, non-superstitious, non-conspiracy theory viewpoint... are satisfying the human same needs by believing (or not believing). Rationalists aren't special or different in their psychological needs; they're (we're) also using our philosophy of life to make sense of things. It's just less obvious what that sense is. The religious person who says "God has a plan." in answer to misery or triumph, doesn't require any deep analysis. They're wearing their beliefs and needs on their sleeve. But what's getting an atheist, or a rationalist, through trials and tribulations? How does believing (accepting?) that the world isn't governed by some divine or human plan, give a sense of order and reassurance to the mind?
I'm not sure about that one. I've not seen it addressed by any of the leading atheist philosophers, and I don't have a complete answer. I'd say that in part it's slightly narcissistic; knowing that we know the truth, that we don't need supernatural crutches to face reality, functions as a reinforcement in of itself. When something bad happens, it's cheering to tell myself, "That was just random chance; I can accept that and don't need to blame God, or spirits, or karma." And I feel better for being strong and independent minded and realistic. But that only works so long as most of the rest of the world is still trapped in one superstition or another. What happens when/if everyone is a rationalist? I don't mean just non-religious, since often as people outgrow or throw off that ancient security blanket, they fall into another more modern one. Astrology or numerology or psychics or New Age medicines, etc. But if everyone left those concepts behind, and we were all rationalists and didn't envision magical causes behind daily events, the psychological value of knowing I'm right and special and smarter than most people would be gone. So what then? (Fortunately, there's no chance of that ever happening, so it's purely a psychological exercise.)
It should go without saying that the majority of the world's population, people who believe in various religions or other scientifically-unprovable world views, think very differently than I do, while still arriving at the same conclusion. They think that they have the unique truth of it, and that everyone else is deluded in one way or another. Interestingly, they can get a double boost, by believing in a supernatural plan, and reveling in the same sort of gloating that a rationalist might indulge in. Their broken ankle, lost job, dead friend, etc, sucks, but 1) it's a lesson of some kind, and custom tailored by God for their situation, and 2) the fact that they realize this gives them an extra bonus. "Some idiots actually think bad things are just chance and happenstance," they could tell themselves, "and those idiots don't learn the lesson, or enjoy God's blessing that accompanies it!"
Does that sort of "I know best." reassurance actually function in real life? Perhaps not.
Exhibit 1: Not much more than a year ago my relationship with Malaya ended suddenly and painfully. I'd never been in romantic love before her, had never been in an LTR of that nature, and hadn't planned on being out of that one. So, to be on my own again, after living more-or-less happily with her for nearly four years, was quite a change. Especially since the break up entailed me moving to the North Bay (where I knew no one), and establishing a functional household almost from scratch since I'd disposed of most of my furniture, dishes, electronics, etc when I moved up here from San Diego in 2003. Plus I was busy attending school full time in the middle of my high-impact three-semester return to college, juggling part time work and federal loans to cover my tuition and suddenly-increased living expenses, etc.
Now this in no way compares to a truly stressful life experience, like the death of a child or spouse, but it was both difficult and unpleasant. A few paragraphs ago I speculated that rationalists like myself can gain some psychological comfort in times of grief by reminding themselves that they know the truth about the universe, and that they're superior or stronger than religious people who need to appeal to their invisible buddy in the sky (or earth, or sea, or wherever) to get through such ordeals. How often do you suppose that thought occurred to me, and comforted me during the early month(s) of 2007, post breakup, while sleeping alone in a cold apartment in a cold bed, wondering if I'd ever find love and/or happiness again?
Never. I never once had that thought, that I can remember. And I had a lot of thoughts, philosophical and other.
That might not shoot down my whole theory about rationalists gaining reassurance and strength from a narcissistic indulgence in egotism, but it's certainly not support for my theory. I think the support comes more often in everyday life, rather than in times of crisis. Contrary to the popular expression, there are atheists in foxholes, but none of them are whiling away the time indulging in philosophical musings. That said, neither did I ever indulge in the standard platitudes about our breakup being meant to happen, or tell myself that I was being tested, or flatter myself that these events were all part of some divine plan/supernatural event/conspiracy theory. It was what it was; the end result of various interpersonal, experiential, financial, and emotional incompatibilities. That was the truth, and it was neither reassuring nor depressing. It just was, and at the time, and in retrospect, I don't see how romanticizing, or giving a metaphysical spin to things, would have helped.
Frankfurter's book doesn't go into that area at all; it's just my own musing on the subject. He does conclude the book with some good stuff, though:
No forensic or archaeological evidence for Satanic cult atrocities as alleged by SRA experts has ever been found: no bodies, crime sites, burials, or even past pregnancies of those claiming to have been successful "breeders." Research and clinical psychologists alike have shown that patients' memories of abusive Satanic ceremonies upon which the SRA [Satanic Ritual Abuse] conspiracy was based were so contaminated by media, improper and unethical therapy techniques, and SRA subcultures that, whatever psychological or traumatic truths they revealed about the patient, they could never stand as eyewitness or historical documentation of real religious practices. The question then follows, if there is no reliable evidence for SRA, and if indeed simpler explanations for the claims can be found in their social and psychological circumstances, on what basis can we assume that it should exist, especially on the scale alleged by its revealers?
So the modern accounts aren't true (although if you believe them, then the complete absence of evidence is just further proof of how powerful these cults are) why should we believe that any such stories are true? Most historians have take the centuries of persecutions and panics as proof that the people were reacting to something, but if we consider that all the evidence is of persecution, what does that prove, in light of the comprehensive debunking of the SRA?
On the whole it's an interesting, massively-researched book, and while it presents far more information than insight, or argument, I learned a lot from it. Plus, it's got some really cool illustrations, taken from centuries-old woodcuts. I'll close this installment of Flux's massively overlong, digression-filled book reviews with a photo of a second illustration that's just bursting with juicy details. Click it to view it supersized.
Jan Ziarnko, engraving of witches' Sabbat, to accompany Pierre de Lancre, tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613). Ithaca, New York. Courtesy of the Division of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Details include: (A) Satan enthroned as a five-horned goat, along with (B) the Queen of the Sabbat and another mistress, to whom a naked witch and a demon present a child for initiation. (C) The Sabbat involves (at lower right D) a banquet of human body parts, hearts of unbaptised babies, and diverse vermin, and is atttended by female witches and their demon-lovers; and it is followed by a backward, naked dance of he women and their demons. (F): "they dance... with the most indecent and dirty movements they can." To the left (H) more women and girls dance, naked and backwards, to the sound of a cacophonous musical ensemble (G): and below them (L) can be seen an elegant masque for the lord and lady-witches. In the center (K) more children arrive with a anked witch on the back of a goat to be dedicated to Satan, while to the lower left (M) the initiated witch-children tend to the toads they have brought to the Sabbat for senior witches (bottom center, I) to mix in a maleficent brew.
The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain. By Simon Baron-Cohen, 2003.
This isn't a real review, since I didn't read the whole book. Not that I could have; my library copy has a weird printing error with repeating pages and missing pages. It's fine from 1-144, and then repeats 83-114, before picking up again with page 179. So this copy is missing pages 145-178, and I could review around those, since I would have skimmed that section anyway. But really, there's no need. What makes this book interesting is the main theory, which is introduced right at the start, then argued at great length, and varying degrees of persuasiveness, through the remainder of the book. Here's the theory, which the author states right at the start of chapter one:
The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding the building systems.
I hope to persuade you in the rest of this book that this theory has growing support.
So, does he? More or less. He presents plenty of examples and test results and survey reports, all of which go towards building his case, and the logic of it seems sound. The problem, if you want to nitpick, is that there are plenty of exceptions to the rules, and everyone in real life fits somewhere on a sliding scale from male-to-female brain, with no way to know where they fit short of extensive testing, or long personal acquaintance. The concept seems to be empirically sound, but so what? What do we do with it? Nothing, really, since everyone is different. There are females with "male brains" and males with "female brains," and there's no telling why some people live up, or down, to their gender expectations, while others confound them.
Still, the author makes some good observations, and I'll quote a few and detail his theory a bit more thoroughly.
The background story to this concept is an interesting story in of itself. Unfortunately, it's not one I can tell, since I only know it indirectly. The idea that men and women had very different minds was accepted scientific knowledge for centuries. It was bullshit, of course, but accepted bullshit. Also known was the fact that blacks and other ethnic races had much smaller brains than whites, a lower capacity for logic and reason, and an inability to invent or create new products or devices; defects only partially offset by their natural aptitude at singing, dancing, and being shiftless.
Those beliefs were largely overturned in the 1960s and 70s, when some women started to penetrate into academia, and the consciousness-raising of feminism began to make the ridiculousness of such hoary theories all too clear. For some time then, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, the nature pendulum swung entirely to nurture, and argued theory stated that no man or woman, white or black, had any inherent traits, skills, inclinations, or abilities. Everything was culturally-induced, consciously or unconsciously, and the day of "you can be anything you set your mind to, if you're not raised with pre-conceptions and cultural limitations" was in high gear. At least among psychological theorists.
This utopia was short-lived, and it's now pretty much been overturned, by books such as this one. It's a tricky transition though, since the research and conclusions of authors like Baron-Cohen (no, not the guy who did Borat), have pointed out what seems obvious in hindsight. Of course men and women are different in the brain as well as body. How could we be otherwise after millions of years of evolution taking us down different, if essentially parallel, paths? The quarrels come in when people who embraced a uniform vision of humanity feel they need to defending it to avoid a return to old-fashioned notions of men being smarter, more logical, more capable, etc. And they're morally right to oppose that, but perhaps not technically correct in their opposition.
The real point is not if we're different or not (we clearly are). The point is what are the differences, which are beneficial for which purpose, how can we build on our strengths and overcome our weaknesses, etc. And this book goes into a fair amount of detail on those issues, while also working to make the case for the differences that are still denied, by some.
Baron-Cohen's theory, as presented in this book, goes to the root of the differences between the typical male and female brain. He acknowledges more superficial differences; women are more caring and better at language skills, men have better spatial ability and tend to organize things. These are not defining traits though, since in his view, they're just outward attributes of the deeper brain structure.
Let's be clear what sort of behaviors we're talking about, first.
Chapter two profiles two children, a brother and sister, and details the brain-type differences revealed by their childhood behavior. Alex is a few years older, and is very male-brained, relentlessly systemizing everything in his childhood hobbies. As a young child he collects toy cars and sorts them by color, type, and make. When he gets tired of the cars he moves onto soccer, and memorizes the names and numbers and stats for the players in the league, pouring over the stats in the newspaper. In his teens he discovers music and attacks the singles charts with much the same ferocity. He knows every song's length, chart position, artist, writer, and makes his own weekly top 40 lists and compilation tapes. None of this is forced on him, and in fact much of it perplexes his parents. It's just his own nature.
Hannah came along a few years later, and is very female-brained. She was interested in people almost from the beginning, and much more verbal than her brother was. She spoke earlier, and in a different way; while Alex would name things, Hannah created little phrases, and spoke to get a reaction from people, or to interact with them. She was playful and teasing and loved to play with her parents or their house guests. For toys, she ignored all of her brother's old trucks and cars and trains, and instead preferred dolls and teddy bears and other representations of living things, all of which she named, constructed personalities for, and often set up in chairs to host them in tea parties. When she got into pop music, she cared nothing for chart positions or song lengths; she just liked to dance to the music in her room with her girlfriends.
Typical children, the boy doing boy things, the girl doing girl things. But why? What's different in their brains that creates their varying interests? Both were displaying very different preferences by the time they were eighteen months old. The parents didn't force them into their roles; Alex ignored dolls and stuffies for toy vehicles, and Hannah ignored Alex's toys and focused immediately on dolls and other things she could impart personalities to.
Empathy. The chief component of the female brain type is empathy. Baron-Cohen divides the concept into two facets. First is cognitive empathy, which is an intellectual understanding of other's feelings and an ability to take their perspective. Second is the affective component of empathy; the "appropriate emotional response to another person's emotional state." More on that later, but I want to talk about the cognitive aspect first, since it's a skill I've long worked to improve at, since it makes life more interesting and it's useful for my writing. To understand someone else's psychology you've got to see things through their eyes, at least partially. Especially if the other person is very different than yourself.
One of my mottos is that "everyone's the hero of their own story," and while that's not entirely true, it's a good starting point for figuring out why and what they're doing. "Bad guys" aren't just there to oppose the hero, at least not in a good story. (Or in real life.) People who are lazy, or unempathic, or are simply doing it for political or propagandistic motives, tend to demonize and absolutize their opposition. How many times did we hear Saddam Hussein called a "mad man" or a "butcher" when the Bush administration and their stenographers in the media were selling the Iraq Attack? Attempting to consider things from Saddam's POV, or thinking that what America wanted wasn't the best for everyone, was never considered in our national discourse, and to this day it's a taboo subject, even with public opinion turned against the ongoing occupation.
Needless (I hope) to say, cognitive empathy does not equal acceptance, or approval. You can understand 100% why someone is trying to kill you, but that doesn't mean you want them to succeed at it. By the same token, you can understand completely why someone wants to love you, or be with you, but that doesn't mean you want them to succeed at their goal. This translates into fiction as well, even though most authors don't do it very well, if at all.
For instance, take the little-known fantasy tale, Lord of the Rings. In it the chief villain, Sauron, is entirely one-dimensional. He/it is a disembodied evil force, a great glowing eye in the movie adaptation, without any emotions or depth. Sauron is nothing but pure evil, and he exists solely to destroy. Furthermore, most of his destruction is carried out by minions who have no personalities or minds of their own. There are more interesting characters; Saruman the White Wizard is somewhat ambiguous; doing evil things, but with a human element. We don't see much of that, since Saruman is seen only through the eyes of the "good guys" who revile him. There's no chapter in LotR from Saruman's POV, where he lists his grievances, or explains why the men deserve to be destroyed, or shows regret for having to do what he's painfully come to believe must be done. I'll avoid going too deeply into a literary analysis of LotR, but the "good guys" are much the same; one note, unchanging, heroic or stolid or wise or inspiring. Tolkien was many things, but a crafter of detailed, emotionally-resonanting, complicated characters was not one of them. (There are some exceptions; Gollum, for instance.)
Compare Tolkien's work to the novels in George RR Martin's ongoing fantasy saga, A Song of Ice and Fire. I don't know how empathic Martin is in real life, but through four books he's done an amazing job of putting the reader inside the mind of nearly every character in the book, showing that even the most seemingly-evil individuals are real people with their own aspirations and ideals. It makes for a far more interesting and textured story, at least in my experience.
"But," you object, "LotR was a masterpiece!" True enough, and in fact that's why I chose it for this example (that and I figure everyone's seen the movies, if not necessarily read the books, so you all would get the analogy). As Tolkien shows, depth in character and empathy demonstrated by the author is not necessary to craft a wonderful piece of fiction. Extending the example, Tolkien seems a good candidate for the male mind type, since he had to create an incredible amount of fiction and background material to populate his world, and he systemized it all beautifully. At the same time, he was clearly uncomfortable with depicting human interaction, he had no understanding of the female mind, and quite possibly no interest in gaining that understanding.
For my part, I am very interested in knowing more about the human mind, male and female, both for my fiction and for life in general. Which is why I found this book interesting, and was writing about it before going off on a largely-inconclusive tangent about realistic character depiction in Lord of the Rings.
After laying out his basic theory, giving some of the history of the study of brain differences, and providing case study examples of male and female brains, Sasha-Cohen moves into meatier arguments. Chapter four is all about the evidence for "The Female Brain as Empathizer." Chapter Five returns the favor, discussing "The Male Brain as Systemizer." The content of these chapters is varied, but does pretty well to advance the author's thesis, though I'd have liked a few more explanations as to why these differences exist.
Even without explanations, or hypotheses about why boys tend to roughhouse and girls cooperate, the data is compelling. Studies show that girls are generally more empathic, better at reading emotions, base their jealousies on emotional issues rather than physical actions, are much less likely to engage in acts of aggression or murder, form intimate emotional relationships rather than interacting in larger groups, etc. None of this is to say that girls are nicer; they compete and fight and can be much nastier than boys in their own way. The point is that there are generally quite clear, observable, predictable differences between how girls and boys behave, even from the youngest age, and this is essentially all the author is postulating. He's not trying to explain or understand everything, just make a case for the difference being real and measurable.
Well, he does go into explanations later. Chapter 7 is about cultural differences that might cause, or at least reinforce, these differences, and Chapter 8 is about biological ones.
Cultural ones include things like peer pressure, and parental behaviors and expectations. Parents give boys trucks and girls dolls. Parents reinforce rough play from boys and cooperation and kindness from girls. "Don't be a baby. Big boys don't dry." Sasha-Cohen clearly doesn't put too much credence on these theories, and he points out that children show preferences for different types of toys long before other children can begin to influence them. The whole chapter's only 9 pages long, so clearly it isn't the author's area of interest.
Biological factors are covered in the next chapter, and they're 20 pages of space, and a much more thorough discussion. Comparisons of the behavior of human children to children of various types of higher primates are illustrative. Boy and girl gorillas and chimps are much the same as humans, in their gender behaviors. There's also some interesting info about testosterone levels in baby boys. This can be checked in even the earliest amniotic fluid samples, and the author conducted a study in which they found a bunch of boys who had very low levels of testosterone. They conducted follow up interviews with the babies and their mothers at ages 1, 2, and 4, and found that these boys had more female-tendencies. They made more eye contact, they were more engaged with other people and less solitary and systemizing in their play, etc. It doesn't seem to have been a proper controlled, double-blind study, just anecdote from the author who might have seen what he wanted to see in his study results, but it's an interesting concept.
Animals studies have shown some other amazing effects of testosterone. When male rats are castrated at birth, their brains develop physical differences, lacking the typical male thickness between the left and right hemisphere. When female rats are given testosterone injections from birth, they're better at maze navigation and other pattern solving problems than most female rats. The problem I have with this one is, why? I can envision biological reasons for male humans to be better at maze solving, since it was usually males who were out hunting and gathering, while female were doing more baby-raising and cave tending. But what's that got to do with rats? Male rats don't bring home food for the family. If anything, shouldn't female rats be better at maze solving, since they need to find food quickly and return to their hidden babies?
The rest of the book covers extreme examples; super systemizing brains (autistic males, for the most part), and extreme female brains as well. Unfortunately most of those chapters are missing thanks to the printing error in my copy. The ending of the book is also cool, with various mind type tests in the appendix. One is a "reading the mind in the eyes" test which has photos of men and women, cropped to show only slightly more than you can see of a person wearing a burka. The task is to figure out their emotion, from just that much of the face. A typical picture will have options such as, playful, comforting, irritated, and bored. You've got to pick one.
At first I thought it was impossible, but as I looked through more of them, I started to see it. It was an odd feeling for me, almost like I had to open up my mind to think about it in a way I wouldn’t normally, and I found my mind filling in an image of what the rest of the person's face might look like, as I tried to decide between 2 or 3 of the choices. (I usually narrowed it down to 2 almost immediately, but almost never felt certain of my choice at a glance.)
Unfortunately again, some fucker who had the book before me went through and circled their choices for every photo, and that hopelessly corrupted my viewing process, since I naturally focused on the choice the other person had made, and then accepted (usually) or rejected (sometimes) it. Checking the answers as I went through, I got about 50% of the faces right in the first 10 or 12, and then got about 80% the rest of the way, as I gave tem more thought and used a part of my brain I don't often consult. (I don't much look into the faces of strangers, and I really don't or care to try to read their emotions.)
The answer key is useless too: there are 36 faces, and they say the average score is 22-30. Above that you're very accurate at it. Below that, "this indicates that you find this task quite difficult." Wow, thanks for that analytical insight, doc. I suppose the theory is that people with female brains are very good at reading emotions and expressions, but it's not explaine din the book. I do know, from this book and elsewhere, that the extreme male brain, the autistic, is usually completely devoid of empathy and utterly unable to read the emotions of others. Why, though? I don't think it's capability as much as inclination. After all, why couldn't an autistic, or other highly male-brained individual turn this into a type of systemizing? Squinted eyes = emotion X, wider eyes = emotion Y, etc.
Is it impossible? Are people too unpredictable? Are there too many gray areas in judging emotions, vs. something with absolute numbers and values like a train schedules or a page of sports statistics? I dunno. I don't think there's any suggestion that people with female brains have a special ability to read emotions; they just have a life time of interest in it thanks to their higher levels of empathy.
The second, third, and fourth appendices has various personality tests, and like all such tests, I want to argue with the questions. Which probably indicates something about me that's more conclusive than any test results would. That aside, here's a typical question from the Autism Quotient test. "I find it very easy to play games with children that involve pretending."
I have very little time spent around children in my life (since I was a child, and somewhat including the time when I was a child), but on the occasions I've been around kids and had to play with them, I've been able to do so pretty well. It's not something I especially enjoy or want to do, but I can do it. So I guess I "slightly disagree" with the question, picking the most appropriate of the four answers. But my objection is, "I can do it. I just don't much want to." (You get an autism point for answering either "disagree" on this one.)
I have the same reaction to this sort of question on those extrovert/introvert tests. They always ask things like, "You can mingle with strangers at a party and find common ground in your discussions." And yes, I can, but 1) I don't go to parties, and 2) I don't necessarily want to find common ground in discussions with strangers. What fun is that? Most people bloviate on about their private obsession, usually without any critical insight or analysis to make it interesting. Anyone can stand and listen to them, or ask them questions to lead them into further pointless lecturing, but how does that sort of enabling, or being the bloviator yourself, make you an extrovert? It makes you an easily-amused bore. I enjoy listening to someone's self-aggrandizing soliloquy, and then asking pointed questions about it, to get them to analyze their own thoughts or actions, or to get at what they really mean or feel. Which doesn't fit on the available answers for that sort of question, and leaves me unsure how to answer it. These kinds of personality tests usually ask about ability, rather than attitude or inclination or motivation, which is where I think the real insight into a personality lies.
A question from the EQ (Emotional Quotient) test. "I try to keep up with current trends and fashions." I definitely keep up with these, and usually hate on them and ridicule the people who follow them. I consciously choose not do so myself, and often change things I've been doing if/when they become trendy. So how do I answer? Strongly agree? Strongly disagree? The question needs more detail. Are they asking if I'm culturally unaware because I'm absorbed in something personal (like an autistic), or if I'm a social mayfly and eager to fit in and be part of something? But I'm neither, and for opposite reasons.
Another AQ test question. "I am not very good at remembering people's dates of birth." I'd have to strongly agree on that one, but here's the problem. I don't care about other people's dates of birth. I don't care about my own either, except to wish I'd lived through fewer anniversaries of that date. You get an AQ point for disagree, since autistic people tend to naturally memorize dates and numbers. I don't and can't do that; the numbers don't stick in my brain, but one could just as easily argue that my antisocial not caring about others is a clear sign of a lack of empathy, and is more a sign of extreme male brain (autism) than knowing the numbers?
I digress, again, but on the whole it's a decent book, if rather simplistic and self-evident (IMHO) in theory, and lacking in detailed, insightful analysis or concepts on the causal level.
Clicking around on YouTube and I ended up on this amusing movie of two cats pawing at each other, with faux-boxing narration added on. It's a cute movie, more for cat lovers than anyone else, but I had to post about it when some of the comments had me laughing until it hurt. Or possibly hurting until I laughed.
A few of his (it just has to be a man) best quotes, from the first page of many, since there are more than 3m view and nearly 4600 comments on this video.
nch1211 My lawyer has advised me not to get involved with this, but I do have to say you people disgust me. People are charged with felonies for staging cock fights, and dog fights and I am appalled that the same laws do not apply to cats. I will be working to get the laws changed, and you will all hear from me then.
...I did used to own cats by the way, a long time ago, and every time they showed any aggression toward one another the way these cats have I put an immediate stop to it. My cats and I lived in a civilized world together, the way all cats should.
...Is it just a sheer coincidence then that they are hoisted at the very top of the kitchen cabinet where they had no way of getting down or getting away from each other? And although this is not shown, there was probably some instigation that took place to get them going. That is obviously why it is broken up into 3 rounds- to envoke them to lash out at each other after they have calmed down.
..Did both of these cats simultaneously decide to go up to this rather unusual location at the exact same time? And was the boxing theme 3 round deal really just for fun? Or was simply added as an excuse to keep them fighting? I have to say I firmly believe these are deliberate ploys added by the creator to hide the truth.
...We could forever exchange messages hypothesizing about all of the different circumstances that could have possibly taken place here and what exactly they all mean. However, regardless of whatever happened, one thing remains indisputable- Whether staged or not, whether they got injured or not, whether they naturally do it or not... it is wrong to use any form of animal violence for entertainment purposes.
It makes your brain hurt, right? True, YouTube comments are quite possibly the stupidest thing on the entire Internet, up to and including MySpace friend comments, but no one able to spell and punctuate could be that obtuse, could they? Yeah, there are crazy people, but the whole thing smells like concern trolling to me, especially since there must be 25 more comments by the guy that I haven't quoted here, all just as wordy and faux-erudite and utterly devoid of rationality.
And yet... I've dealt with the rat ladies. It's quite possible for otherwise sane humans to just lose their senses when dealing with animals (or their children, or male nudity, or politics, etc).
There's a conclusion to this, but I'm not sure if it makes me feel any better. On page two of the comments, nch1211 returns a month after his first batch of comments, to say that... it was all a joke. He claims to be a psych student, and says he was experimenting with public commenting for a class project. Then he says that was just an excuse and he actually was just being a troll. And he closes with some classy parting words:
I am now going to be completely honest with you and tell you that you all are the most feeble, gullible, bunch of toolbags I have ever encountered. I could not believe you people actually took me the least bit seriously enough to continue posting actual serious replies to my absolute inane little comments.
There's a saying about the fool, and the greater fool arguing with him, that seems appropriate here. What type of person of average intelligence gets their kicks repeatedly concern trolling on YouTube, stretches it out for weeks, and then claims/admits it was all a joke, and parts with a last message taunting/insulting the barely-literate YouTube commentators who had been sparring with him (and winning, since nch1211's arguments were idotic)?
It's effortless to fool people with satire or sarcasm online, a fact that's proven in capital letters every April 1st. The hard part is successfully using satire and sarcasm, and for that reason I thought the initial claim that it was an exercise for a psych class sounded like bullshit. Maybe undergrad, in an intro psych class, but no way at the graduate level. It was too plebeian an exercise, and too pedantic an excuse, one the guy couldn't even stick to, since he almost immediately confessed that he was just some average dude, trying to find some amusement in an otherwise meaningless life.
Ironically, a real psych paper could be written about his actions, in the broader context of concern trolling and intentional misrepresentation online. How, if at all, are penalties for lying and deceit enforced in a largely anonymous online community? Where is the line between lying and satirical sarcasm drawn in irony-free online environments such as YouTube comment threads? What psychological needs are people meeting by posting there, or trying to fool others with their posts? At least 25 pages, at least 10 primary sources, and you must engage in some direct online interaction as part of your research. Enjoy, kids.
