02.07.06
Posted in the dank archives at 2:22 pm by Administrator
being human and having this brain resting between our two funny looking hairless ears.
to own such a capacity to understand more about the nature of reality than any other species and still to voluntarily hide in ignorance, flee from the thing that makes us truly a marvel as a species — this will of ours– only possible because of our superior ability to learn, plan, intuit, and respond.
how is it that there are still so many of us unwilling to engage, learn, and/or adapt? with this mind– and we still run to the dark places of fear which inhibits our ability to act
isn’t that really the problem with chronic depression? couldn’t the bio-chemical response be the result of a perpetual-yet-habituated state of alarm (via some form of chronic stress) that renders you unable to experience any emotions strongly enough to choose a course of action (whether positive or negative)?
– but let’s not harp on depression….
it’s mildly alarming that much of modern society is capable of virtually worshiping the outcomes of the modern scientist as irrefutable dogma– with knowledge touching on the very stuff of ethical beliefs, blindly accepting facts put forth in published journals, later transcribed by scientific journalists and news research teams (who aren’t actually required to have a real understanding of the methodological practices) and served to joe everyman with the ten-o-clock news.
and yet, those scientists (you know, the ones that nearly constitute a “They say” capital “T”– those finely honed mental athletes), can be as broken and ineffective in their emotional life as the janitor, plumber, mechanic, stripper, secretary, and stay at home mom. and sometimes, those mental athletes are even more broken, weak, vapid, vindictive, and childish than the rest of us lay people.
the ugly version of what i’m saying, is that intelligence (as in IQ), which we all seem to value at in level, must be seen for what it risks being: a growing book of complex facts, theories, and hypotheses assimilated in an illusory fog of philosophical mandates (woah!)… as in the socratic method of inquiry.
in other words, the new scientist needs a social consciousness (we can no longer accept the two-dimensional charicature of the bespectacled and anemic academic fed largely on the sheer joy of the quest for knowledge)– the connections between people and knowledge are shrinking. writing a paper about the implications of bonobo behavior on human sexual behavior is not without consequence, it is less likely than ever that it will merely disappear into the musty archives of yesteryear.
this would be fine if scientists were perfect… exposure is a good thing, knowledge is good– when it’s a reflection of what is and not merely another view point being supported by carefully controlled lab conditions, or worse yet, mindless puzzle solving with a vindeta for success.
fact is, science needs to get off it’s high horse and remind itself that it and its body of work are ultimately composed of a network of humans (and their dreams, hopes, disappointments, sublimated fears, obsessions, and general human nuttiness) not merely irrevocable facts and technologically advanced tools designed to better measure phenomenon x.
don’t get me wrong here: there is somewhere in the emotional quagmire, a very real “sheer joy” in the knowing, learning, exploring, pealing back the illusory surface of complex yet-often-surprisingly-simple aspects of life. in fact, there is no other such pleasures so intrinsically human, and thus more personally gratifying.
and i stand by ALL of our rights to pursue knowledge in it’s many permutations… to critically anyalyze be we beginners or experts.
Permalink
Posted in the dank archives at 1:23 pm by Administrator
reality tv… you know exactly what i’m talking about (let’s just cough and say big brother… ) has done many strange things to our more impressionable minds (e.g. MY MIND).
strange thing numero uno) = creating a fog of inverted narcissistic thinking (which is likely more of a time waster than anything i can think of off the top of my head), wherein you start to view yourself through a hidden camera, to see the tragi-comedy-drama-documentary of your own life.
but i wonder how bad it is to up self-consciousness in general: it has both benefits and negatives (you might do well to insert the motherly-yet-patronizing slightly nasal voice of your third grade teacher here).
me? i’d go with the idea that self-consciousness is like ohhh… everything i can think of: don’t take it to extremes on either end of the spectrum– there is a natural balance between the animal and the hamlet in us.
strange thing numero duo) no matter how banal the subject matter (family guy episode pops into my head with peter talking about the hole in his underwear), it is– in the viewing of these human moments of everyday life, the actions and things become imparted with meaning which many of us might never have experienced prior to that viewing.
although in a darker light, one might say we’re on a fast track to information overload– which could theoretically result in the spontaneous heart attacks or just general weary-to-the-point-of-nihilistic thinking that so many of us find ourselves engaging in later in life.
point being: the new level of refined control maintained within the television-as-a-warped-mirror phenomenon (shall we say taawp instead?) — could provide many powerful messages which a) fuck things up worse by perpetuating negative decisions and life-habits (for any number of reason), b) dumb us down to a silent passive consumer, and c) teach us hope, kindness, the value of critical thinking, hard work, patience, and all those other obviously useful values to the human race.
sometimes i think we’ve managed a and b quite splendidly, and sometimes i feel the internet is the only thing fighting against it.
strange thing numero tres: the uncomfortable learning of bullshit values about what it means to be a woman– we definitely need to positively and creatively subvert a good deal of (very male-oriented) attention being paid to the sexual appearance of female (which in and of itself is fun, fine, and fantastic, but it receives inordinate amounts of emphasis as a valued “character trait” in television).
i’m not going to get out all my feminist artillery here, but i’d just like to say: the more women directing films, running television companies, and writing documentaries, the better.
we need many eyes to see the whole elephant (”behind the scenes with hidden cameras!”)…
not just six blind men, but six blind women too… maybe a few chimps?
oh hell,
yes, i’m left and i can’t help it– i don’t want to be left, but i’m a woman, how can i ever be right in a man’s world?? eh?
strange thing numero quatro) this increased t.v. induced self-consciousness mayn’t be all bad after all auntie mabel. truly. to quickly rattle off this fun fact: in a psychology study (source long-forgotten) people who took a test with a mirror at their desk were less likely to cheat (even with an easy option to cheat available), than the control group who did not have a mirror in front of them.
in a sense, self-consciousness is the ultimate indulgence of a mammal that has managed to secure its safety in a dangerous world via it’s cunning and adaptations to the threats that surround it. therefore, the more self-conscious you are the more human you are…
in the same vein, some might argue that depression is not a disorder, but rather a reflection of self-awareness that is not supported by modern life (which requires a rather high-paced sense of time and inordinate amounts of confidence).
then again, there’s positive self-consciousness (where you’re in more or less in control of your thought patterns surrounding the self-awareness you experience) and there’s negative self-consciousness (where negative thoughts repeat themselves to a debilitating level rendering the person socially awkward and relatively miserable– especially when around others).
so, if the media can teach positive self-consciousness, or at least not continually revel in the emotional tragedy of depression (glamorizing the victim state if you will)… which in reality is no more behaviorally glamorous than a small child sulking– although it can indeed be tragic…we might actually have something good to say about television.
on some level, i’m glad when directors are bleeding hearts with a personal message that reflects a level of personal pain… so long as they’re not filling our brains with formulaic soul-less bullshit that offers only vague sugary quick fix solutions to the plots.
as it is i’m just enjoying the internet as it soothes my jangled need to know, feeds my ego via blogging, and allows me to somehow send out my human feelers into the portal of other humans minds and connect.
it’s insane and brilliant and i’m excited for the future.
sure, there are wee bits of trepidation floating around in my over-stimulated brain.
i’m only mammal after all and change = volatile and volatile = potentially negative consequences outside of my control, but mostly, i’m just hopeful and curious.
Permalink
Posted in the dank archives at 12:59 pm by Administrator
i definitely feel the void sometimes, how unceasingly modern life can paw at your very core… the need to maintain in the midst of the inevitable and almost unavoidable chaos of accumulation… of things, stuff, products, even relationships and knowledge come as products, to be worn, sat upon, rubbed on your face, played through your speakers, invested at 7.8% etc. etc.
and it’s nearly a heady wind at times– the internet as a portal to everything… everything now and before and in the future, which- i’ll just admit finds me high and nearly overwhelmed.
perhaps my ongoing analysis of sexuality via process-oriented lines of thought (process meaning 1) the evolutionary sense of the word– bio-physical, 2) definitely the developmental learned sense of the word, and 3) even a bit in the anne schaef sense of the word) is my attempt to find the balance… between my human desire for connection with all knowledge and action that is real and honest… and this crazy two-dimensional consumer-oriented internet job/business land– where i’m ferried along an abstract oddly silent and white portal to almost every conceivable permutation of human thought, existence, and well, all the oddities in our species exceptional range of being-ness.
on the one hand, my research skills and strategies have only improved in leaps and bounds, as well as my ability to coherently find and posit potential patterns in information and potential relationships and their reasons for existence… and on the other, i find i’ve become more introverted with live humans, less satisfied with the slowness of communication– i’m becoming a fucking information junkie who needs knowledge and needs to know how to get it and quick.
wait, really….
i’ve recognized and accepted that people are not as easy as a computer– that we’ve much more complex systems running in our brains and bodies– and the ephemeral psychological by-products, lead to unforeseen complications in modern human existence (such as manifest in our unconscious and conscious coping mechanisms that often inhibit effective and rewarding living habits which might otherwise be reasonably easy to learn via adaption from generation to generation).
my acceptance that people are slow and more complex than the internet, does not imply my satisfaction with this state of existence.
at this point it is only an acknowledgement of what is… not what is inevitable. i think humans are on the brink of understanding more about themselves then ever before in the history of the world, but the path to true knowledge in this particular case must turn inwards… and this is perhaps where the internet (in all it’s avid sterility and ease of use) can open more minds than anything in the world.
———————–
next: the media alienating us from ourselves
Permalink
01.29.06
Posted in the dank archives at 4:23 pm by Administrator
back to the concept that men have intrinsically higher sex drives than women… and why this is potentially fallacious (or at least poorly framed). the question might be better asked as this: do women have less natural interest in sex or not? my answer remains a tentative (open for discussion) NO. (and i’ll save the talk about defining what “sex” is).
prior to written history (we were tribal before we were nuclear families living on the same street driving the same car but never meeting our neighbors), human females lived with much less sense of consequence when it came to sex.
that is, before knowledge of how women became pregnant was validated as a phenomenon, women could engage in coitus (with a man or a woman) as an act of pleasure and sharing in much the same manner we observe in our good friends the bonobos.
because the not-so-obvious connection had not been made that sex with men resulted invariably in child-birth (and if you think it’s obvious just ask a perfectly intelligent five year old (who is already capable of complex thoughts, tool-using, language comprehension, writing, and reading) where babies come from).
as odd as it seems, the fact is that there were millenia in our evolution as a species that passed with absolutely no explicit knowledge that semen going in the vagina at one point would result in a baby nine months later coming out the same passage.
during these the primitive times of our unwritten human history, we were forming much of what dictates the progression of possible behaviors now. and sex was made to be fundamentally pleasurable to both members– at every level (just look at the clitoris!).
in a relative sense, the duration of time has been quite short where humans have explicitly understood heterosexual sex to be the true bringer of babies (although there has always been some sort of hazy connection with the seed… but which seed? the nine months later seed or the seed nine months earlier or somewhere in between?).
is any other animal on the planet with an inkling of what the act they engage in during their periods of sexual receptivity leads to? they are just humping because all of the brain activity and hormonal levels are primed for sexual arousal and subsequent response.
really if you think about it, our genes have a vested interest in both members being highly receptive and interested in sex… and funnily enough, we’ve evolved to be sexually receptive ALL the time.
being human, we’re the proud owners of a brain so massive and self-aware that sex (as a fundamental part of genetic survival) has become a multi-tiered, many-faceted, socially volatile and still so essential part of social interactions and exchanges, that even today, marriage is a relationship that allows otherwise unconnected citizens of different countries the right to join another country. that’s the power of sex people– pure and simple.
the idea that a woman should inherently have a lower sex drive is not sensible from an evolutionary stance if one notes that the male desire to have sex with as many women as possible is also beneficial to the ever-receptive female as millenia passed in our evolution where we lacked any explicit knowledge of the reproductive process.
the proof is in the pudding– females are consistently able to engage in sexual behaviors (and specifically intercourse except when we are mentally/emotionally unreceptive of course). the genetic argument for lower sex drive implies that our genes would be privy to the complex explicit knowledge about the consequences of heterosexual sex on the young female body (something which only exists as a fact in written human history and quite recently too).
genetically speaking, it would be in the female’s interest to mate with as many men as she deemed sexually attractive as sex in and of itself would only guarantee that she had a child.
from an evolutionary standpoint, men would be the ones with a vested interest in monogamy — for women, to ensure they weren’t wasting their energy and resources raising another male’s child. still, even this rather feminist statement assumes a level of explicit knowledge that could not have been a consistent part of our anscestoral past).
whereas the multi-orgasmic capacity of women points to a different reality: sex with many men over a lifetime might actually be more gratifying (this is just fun theorizing) and provide true “sperm competition.”
(we can skip the talk about what we’ve evolved to find sexually attractive– it’s dull and i’m bored just thinking about it… sexually attractive is sexually attractive whether it’s evolved or socialized and all sexually attractive people are HEALTHY unless you’re very unwell yourself and have no standards as a result of desperation).
the idea that women maintain a lower sex drive is much more sensible from a socio-economic paradigm, wherein sex is a desired “good” which men want and women possess. this is specifically relevant when women as a whole possess less power and resources than men.
in this paradigm, women don’t want sex as much because they would then compromise their ability to manipulate their stake as the controller of sex. in the same vein, when the population of women is higher than men, men have increased freedom to select from a larger pool of women who might give sex, as well as forcing women to “compete” for the limited supply of men– which means men (the wanters of sex) will be less likely to wait around before you decide to hand over the pussy as they know it’s likely they can take a dip elsewhere. thus, when the population of men is lower, they are able to more effectively control/manipulate the sexual stakes.
(there are some fun post-war stats, which of course gave us the baby-boom… men were really getting laid back then!)
yes, yes it’s all very interesting and quite neat (and logical really)– this economic model, but it has it’s fundamental limitation in that it can’t be filtered through an evolutionary sieve with the same amount of aplomb.
indeed, economics is something that humans have created to comprehend our behavior in supply and demand paradigms, which although quite significant to the current situation do not inherently bind themselves to evolutionary principles of an irrefutable type.
such a neat economic theory of sex is up to its elbows in behaviors that are invariably indoctrinated, acculturated, learned, and only then internalized as part of our decision-making behaviors.
there are far too many inputs (into sexual behaviors and any economical explanation thereof) at a societal level to ignore the fact that everything we do in the market place is only really sensible in the mind of a fully “evolved” complex learned human state… and not just a mere evolutionary residue of this supposedly primal behavior.
what we’ve got to get into our heads about human sexual behavior is that as a species we are unique in our continuous sexual receptivity, which is such a pervasive and powerful trait with far-reaching social implications (family, politics, everything is run by sex at some level) that it cannot be dismissed as some sort of core animal behavior over which we have no real ability to control much less define (save via massive governing bodies which dictate what forms of sex are valid, perverse, normal, and not).
take a step back from all the heady evolutionary theorizing and remember how utterly personal sex is, despite it’s animal end (the orgasm is very primal– there’s no nice way to pull that off in public)… remember the kinds of sex that can be had, the variance in terminology to reflect the incredible breadth of innovation and imagination which goes into this funny act. and then ask yourself how much you trust that the sexual behaviors you engage in aren’t somehow a reflection of what constitutes the most private, subconscious, and honest parts of who you are at any given point in time … not just some sort of innavoidable evolved state animal humping.
still doesn’t answer the question WHY so many women apparently are less interested in sex now… but, i do love to take a good blow away from the victim-thinking of quasi-evolutionary theory
Permalink
01.21.06
Posted in the dank archives at 3:26 pm by Administrator
so i’ve been thinking about this phenomena of the sexless marriage… how a couple marries and 5, 10, 15 years later the man can recount on one hand the last sexual encounters he’s had within the past two years.
and i’ve been thinking about what it means and why the problem exists. it makes sense statistically if 55% of american women are suffering from sort of sexual dysfunction (and a dysfunction in this case is only tallied when there is a sexual problem which actually causes distress to the woman). what of the untold numbers of women that are apparently perfectly unwilling to broach the subject with their own husbands– much less visit a sex therapist or even identify their lack of sexual interest as a problem. theoretically, the numbers could be much higher.
two hundred years ago, lack of sexual desire in a wife was accepted because women were generally considered to be non-sexual beings, the less sexual the better, the more virtuous, motherly, womanly even. in other words, the husband would have access to a warm accomodating log which he would impregnate multiple times (if she didn’t die during child birth as apparantly more than 10% of women did back then).
somewhere between now and then and mostly in the 60’s and 70’s women started to speak up about the fact they actually liked sex, could orgasm, masturbate, and fantasize…. just like men!
and yet… i’m not convinced that the revolution happened– you know, birth control, pornography, hollywood, all that stuff, it still seems to be hiding from something bigger about this topic. and i think what we’re missing is hiding in these sexless marriages, in the 55% of women suffering from some sort of sexual dysfunction.
it’s the final traces of acknowledging that women are full humans that are missing. women themselves still don’t understand what this means.
whether or not women have less sexual desire than men (as there are studies which exist to document this fact– and the fact that gay men in relationships report more sex with their partners as well as an increased tendency to sexually explore than either hetrosexual or lesbian couples report, does not mean that this fact is biologically inevitable or even properly framed to explain its reason for existing.
since recorded history the sexuality of the women has been actively supressed by women and men… it is almost our heritage as a group, to devalue our own sexuality as some sort of paranormal incident of our wedding night (or whatever) which once achieved (as marriage is for many women still an achievment, another tick on the almighty list of things they must accomplish to be decent members of society), will gently taper off into the child-rearing years and long nightgowns.
in the blink that has been the past 40 years of human history, women have awoken more than ever before in recorded history and arisen from a terminal fog of servitude that blinds us to our own ability to achieve personal happiness without first attending to the needs of our children, husbands, families, friends, and even bloody strangers.
feminism has voraciously struggled and sought, loudly argued and fought for many causes on behalf of women– some more damaging than healing to the general cause that is being half of the human race which still vies for validity even in the presence of its own power and impact.
i think one of the most hampered of agendas has been the one of sexual freedom. even today, i watched a ridiculously romantic movie “before sunrise” where julie delpy’s character tells ethan hawke that she believes men invented feminism to get women into bed with them. and on some scale, on some slightly scewed scale, it might just be such a conundrum– but without all the finger pointing.
if we women want the right to fuck without judgement, if we want the right to our own version of sexuality, we must also take responsibility. we must understand the consequences of casual sex– which is all too frequently not understood.
the first thing that should undoubtedly be done is firmer advocacy for easily accessible reliable birth control. nothing like unwanted children to screw up society. read freakonomics, if only for that nice little analysis which is just brilliant.
there is some sort of bizarro thing going on now: suddenly all of these women are finding reasons to NOT be on birth control: depression and lowered sex drive being two of the main ones. we now have more refined precisely minumized optimal dosages of artificial progesterone, estrogen, etc. in the pill than the clunky ones of the flower children. why didn’t we hear more protest thirty years ago?
lowered sex drive as a result of the pill? is this really a hormonally inavoidable fact? how’s this for a theory: back in the seventies when the pill really started to gain momentum, women’s expectations about their own sex drives were still so undefined and unknown, that they were simply happy to have a pill which would keep them from getting knocked up. .. it was more control, more certainty than they had ever had about sex. pregnancy was finally avoidable, now all they had to do was lay back and enjoy the fucking with less guilt or fear than their mothers had taught them to feel.
but sooner or later this new found freedom and control became common place and the control didn’t seem to be enough… they wanted orgasms when they had their one-night stands, planned their lives, and engaged in sordid encounters with the pool repair man. now that sex was no longer russian roulette, they could start to actually analyze their position (literally and figuratively) more objectively. not only did they want orgasms, they wanted passion, and they wanted men to give it to them, because if there’s one thing we still haven’t learned yet it’s that sexuality is not merely defined by those we are erotically attracted to, but rather a much longer more round and complex version of this– which includes our sexual history as children and adolescence, what we actively eroticise, repress, seek out sexually, habituate to, fantisize about, and on and on…. this is what it is to be a sexual being– not merely a passive recipient of the sexual experiences a man might bring to us.
we started to replace the silence of a log-like wife performing her wifely duty in the most passive of positions, with the controlled disappointed sighs, sideways sarcasm, and slow withdrawl of intimacy of a woman passively accepting the dying passion of a long-term relationship.
it’s a step in the right direction to be dissappointed as opposed to believing a passionless relationship is the only sort that exists, but to accept the dissappointment is to tread water so slowly you risk drowning in your own sense of powerlessness. and in some ways, this is actually a less satisfying life than the woman who is at least contented by the fact that her passionless marriage is as good as it gets.
Permalink
01.13.06
Posted in the dank archives at 2:54 pm by Administrator
i’ve been reading, ruminating, and ranting long enough.
what’s come of all this? all this existential crisis-shit i floated through like a hemmoraging adolescent has been leading to a place where i could find the things that create a unifying theme (my own fucking meaning of life) which runs through it all.
and you know that theme. we all know it to the bone marrow, the vagus nerves running through our spinal cords to the dwelling points of light that shoot out when we’re orgasming. sex.
not just fucking, not just making love, not just oral or anal or homosexuality, not just anything that you chain to that word just now– more than that. sex is the animal in us and the god in us– we reach for love while we fuck like dogs. we control humanity when we control sex.
but before all this woozey prose, is the fact that gets me and sticks to me– because i’ve seen it and been a spectator too long, i’ve lived it and killed it, the fact is: we ain’t got it all figured out by a LOOOONG shot and when it comes to sex, we’re actually behind relative to our other advancements.
mostly i believe we’re evolving, you know: slavery and child labor is almost a thing of the past (in the first world countries), rape is actually illegal, the common citizen can vote, hell, even women and black people can vote.
i’d say we’re moving towards something good, something better– where more minds are free to learn because they are not starving or living in ignorant fear; where the general level of intelligence is higher than it’s ever been. it all looks so promising, despite the wars, the ongoing genocides, the violent religious zealots, the corruption of leaders, you know, those things the media feeds on. if it bleeds, well….
i believe that as a whole, humans would rather grow than stay the same, that our very success as a species is pinned to this fact– we are not mere survivors, we are adaptors.
we don’t merely react to the environment, we have the ability to respond in anticipation of the future based on an understanding of the past, and now with the technology present we can even predict a good deal of those changes. between that and language (and tools and johnny depp), we’ve just made the rest of the animal kingdom look pathetic and helpless to the whims of their small brains.
what are you a man or a mouse?
to be a (hu)man is to have a will, to excercise it successfully, and never to freeze in the face of fear, but instead use your ingenuity to overcome whatever you encounter (or die trying). we’re not merely controlled by pre-wired instinctual neurolotgical states.
loud noise for mouse? hide, freeze, run! ooh look cheese!
loud noise for me? oh nick’s playing the drums again. ooh look cheese!
that’s why this brain is so huge, that’s why we’re so helpless as an infant: our brain has loads and loads of data to encode before it can even worry about making sure you can hold your head up, much less walk! (the computer analogy works more soundly than anything to date… but it used to be a steam engine/pressure cooker back in the day o’ freud, so who knows, maybe the dolphins’ll give us a new analogy in 345 years or something.
so that’s the big picture… we’re growing, we need to keep doing so– to deal with the consequences of our past mistakes, miscalculations, and lacking knowledge about the state of reality and our place in it. inherent in our very plastic neurophysiology is the point of our lives– to grow (within our lifetime) beyond what existed in history before you, to defy it and re-write it, and re-interpret it, but never to stay the same.
i’ve decided the point of my life (if i may sound so full of shite but truly earnest in every word of it) is to remind/teach others this– even as i learn myself: learn better ways of teaching, uncover the specific point of injury (which i best understand) where knowledge has grown stagnant and infectious, understand these problems with even more surgical precision, and create methods to heal which best allow us to grow as a species on this planet– and friends, the goal is happiness underneath it all.
the point of all of this: (if you must skip to the end, which i can imagine isn’t hard to do)
in my generation as an american girl, adolescent, young woman, i grew up believing that i could get whatever job i wanted provided i did the work. that much was clear. definitely a step ahead from the years my mother was a girl.
you know what i didn’t learn– coming from one of those middle american homes of conservative thinking, i didn’t learn the first thing about sex. nothing, zip, nada… all i learned i learned in books by judy blume, and despite periods, rhymes about increasing mammary glands, and penises named ralph, none of this really helped much in college when the men started coming out from hiding.
and don’t try to ask me about sex education– because knowing what the uterus looks like and when i ovulate in my cycle might have prevented me from getting pregnant, but it sure didn’t tell me what i want, what to say, what to do when i got into bed with my first boyfriend… it didn’t tell me shit.
i thought oral sex was phone sex.
i thought oral sex was disgusting when i found out what it really was: “but he pees with that! ewwww…”
maybe because i was raised in that deadly-sexual-zone where the word masturbation really did mean “self-pollution”, i found it all the more fascinating. but what i didn’t expect to find was the mind-blowing amount of sexual dysfunction in american women. up to 55% of american women suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction with up to 22% suffering from anorgasmia. good GOD.
men? the numbers can stretch as high as 8% for anorgasmia, and all those poor 60 year-old men with ED? there’s viagra! grrreat– that’s going to make everything better, give boners out right and left while half of the women don’t even WANT sex. good thinking people… a pill will make it ALL better.
please.
Permalink
01.03.06
Posted in the dank archives at 3:24 pm by Administrator
this happened some time in early february i believe of 2005.
today the new york times featured an interesting little article on its front pages about some upheaval in the great ivy clad wings of harvard– namely, the alleged sexist remarks coming forth from none other than the president of harvard itself (gasp!) in a conference addressing sexist discrimination in science and engineering positions within academia.
i read through the article expecting to hear some sort of obnoxious good old boys mentality– which would be both offensive and merit the ostentacious front page coverage that it has now received), and instead found some key points that were truly relevant– but unfortunately, quickly dismissed within the context of his entire presentation, and a few points which were nothing short of unintelligent in their abstraction of some very particular raw data (some of which were his) regarding stats compiled for performance between men and women in the most intellectually demanding positions out there (think top physicists).
the relevant points that i think lacked the coverage they demand (but perhaps are not truly helpful for the particular conference needs) briefly covered the fact that he believes (and claims to observe) that there exists a key difference between men and women in the sciences by virtue of the demands of the position. specifically, that women are more likely to make sacrifices in the job arena before a man– and the highly focused and competative world of scientific and engineering research, a larger percentage of women fall through the cracks.
“They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That’s not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.”
this is a key point which receives no argument in the post-questioning session as there is little argue about. what he doesn’t expound on is how this has come to be a historical fact. the truth beneath this quick behavioral observation is that the psychological demands on women today are still disproportionately larger than men. in the most basic terms, women are expected and taught and ultimately, internalize values that place a higher value on the feelings of those around them. they are expected to tune in, to care how they impact people, and in some cases, learn from their mothers how best to read others in order to more effectively manipulate them– perhaps the oldest and most interesting behavioural by-product in patriarchal societies.
the bottom line, perhaps nearly all women in patriarchal societies (yes– these include the western world) grow from little girls who learn that they simply cannot ignore the people around them– including their husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, and so on. thus, there isn’t the proclivity or even capacity to be as unequivocally focused (obsessed) with equations and research when she shuts the lab door and her child is whining or mother calls up with pain in her hip.
is this a question of a fundamental differences between men and women: that women are less likely to sacrifice the well-being of those they care about for the demands of a highly competative job? i don’t think so. not really. it’s more a question of responses to a power-driven system (male-oriented) which unrealistically posits that your work is your primary worth– and men, with their relative mental independence formed from early years (as well as socialization to hide emotions and bury themselves in work), can focus, and compete much more effectively in this dehumanizing stress-factory that is modern scientific research. the downside to this? they will probably wake up in the middle of their 50’s wondering who their children are and harldy recognize their face in the mirror anymore.
i’ll come back to these thoughts later… i have to go cook food for sick people.
“Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I’ll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to.”
sadly, he never does. i don’t hold it against him though– it is a massive and horrible can or worms: taking on the entire structure of scientific research as it stands today– esp. within the american university system where it has started to resemble some version of business on crack: with minds that are twice as tenacious in their intelligence and half as secure in their capacity to succeed as those competing in the financial world.
i’ve been playing with ideas about why i quit graduate school in neuroscience– why i felt like i was never a scientist, even when i was accepted into a program and competing with all those bright minds. i happened on an article a few months ago regarding women in the sciences and how the system as it stands now is not necessarily the form of science that most women with enquiring minds might use to answer their research questions. i talk to friends who are in graduate school in science, about the sort of basic academic abuse they undergo as they enter deeper and deeper into the annals of the sacred grounds of “scientific research.” ideas become meaningless unless they carry fixed dollar sign (read: grant proposals to the NIH that are nothing short of revolutionary in their detailed plan to revolutionize modern medicine/engineering/biowhatnot… and so on). politics are ugly and surprisingly childish at times in the labs… (when aren’t they then again?).
when i thought of grad school as an undergrad, i dreamt of a scientific forum, an athens with women and liberty to think and to experiment. the reality is quite different. i came to graduate school severly disadvantaged as i had an incredible but what can only be considered elusive undergrad experience. i was keyed up and turned on when i graduated from knox college. my honors research was my obsession… but i’ll stay on track here.
i don’t think that science as it is today is discriminating in it’s hiring practices, quite the contrary– i think universities throughout the world are keen to have women in the labs. i think the system today at a much more fundamental level alienates women from these fascinating fields of inquiry prior to and after they’ve entered into a lab. i also think that public schools in america give science and it’s female students a rawer deal than they ought; i think parents are just starting to STOP assuming their daughters won’t be scientists. but these daughters have to start learning that science is accessible at an early age– in school at the age of five. finally, i think that science as it is today is limiting itself in it’s scope and effectiveness by closing it’s doors to humanisitic or creative thinkers… something, which is slowly beginning to change, but oh so slowly…
yes, yes, i think alot about all of this… i think about it b/c it had a profound effect on my life and my personality. i found science in college. before that point everything in me was taught to just get by– i was entirely intimidated by chemistry and biology prior to that point. i’ll admit i’m a bit unusual b/c i was taught science was a bit of an inaccessible evil as i was raised in a highly religious conservative home– where evolution conspiracies ran rampant along with homosphobia shut many things out of my mind before i could open my eyes to see them for myself. thank god for college eh?
but this sort of thinking is going on in evey red state in the country… and this sort of thinking is going to continue maiming little girl’s educational proclivities for generations to come. dramatic? maybe… but only b/c it’s tragic and true at the same time.
i won’t address the pointless remarks that the president of harvard made regarding intrinsic aptitude b/c these remarks are virtually moot in their uselessness relative to our piecemeal understanding of the human brain and it’s different functioning intelligences, and how we even dare to try and define such a thing as intelligence with so little real data on our plates.
quite simply, there is no relevant point to make about the intrinsic aptitudes of men versus women in the sciences or math b/c we haven’t sorted out the societal problems to see what’s going on, much less designated any sort of real definition of what makes one person more effective in a particular field over another b/c we just don’t know enough. still, i’ll admit it suprises me this comes from the president of harvard– i always imagined these folks were a bit more intelligent than most. but i daresay, the ivy’s climbed into their ears and started screwing up their analytical skills afterall.
Permalink
Posted in the dank archives at 3:22 pm by Administrator
to start, i’m going to post these old writings of mine… i need to relive them a bit.
here’s the first– i’ve just cleaned it out of an existing myspace blog i used a couple of times.
Reading on the state of society these days, the state of women in the world of men… how somehow, we’ve managed to make our liberation so much less than free. All things being equal, more women are making choices that decry a higher sense of consequence, a higher sense of self-worth, but they’re also making choices that demonstrate the ongoing return to to difficult cyclic trappings… more specifically child-rearing. I feel it when I read this book, “Mismatch”– a very defined fear of child-bearing– and it’s life-altering consequences. The fear of what pregnancy will do to my body, the fear of what children will do to my will, my future, not to mention the fear of my own capacity to so intensely effect such vulnerable selfish little creatures as children can be. In general, there’s not really a desire to have my own except if I were assured a greater degree of support than is typically given to a woman that is a mother in these days.
I’ve been afraid of pregnancy and motherhood since I understood what my mother had become as a result of having six children. Inside, I don’t think there is a greater nobility to being a mother. Yes, you learn to make “sacrifices” for children—but in a way, this is the joke of evolution. Grandchildren are the ultimate proof of your success as a human, in the logic of genetic survival, and inevitably transfers its weight in the psychological experience of parental pride and hope as best realized in the fruit of your loins successfully actualizing their own set of intermingled genetic communities.
But I know (as deeply as I know anything) that there is more to this painful human road than just the mere commandment to be fruitful and multiply. We have the mental and physical space of modern society to begin to resolve the conflicts of living in awareness of the apparent death that stares us down as an inevitable fact. In other words, we can (if we are ever in the financial and psychological position to choose to do so) find meaning and fulfillment in this existence. Religion answered questions as long as our ability to answer the unanswered questions remained unknown at a physical level. Ultimately, we seek meaning and this can extend beyond instinct to procreate and the fearful inventions of religion. At a personal level, this is precisely what I experience, the need to resolve and understand my own life and mind, to seek out real answers that resound with my own levels of knowledge and experience. And in some roundabout way, I fear that children will quickly remove my ability to effectively answer these questions.
Make no mistake, this is not merely a fear of their ability to consume my time and resources (although this is certainly a component), but I also sense (as I observe the parents around me) that once in place, children would ultimately subsume my own existing sense of individual worth and time. The more I see parents being honest about the nature of parenting, about how incredibly needy and selfish these little adorable beings can be, and even more than that, the given reaction mothers find themselves destined to live out in a near-compulsory realization of their own maternal tendencies (however much this is pre-determined by their own physiological responses to mothering as opposed to what they’ve internalized value-wise from society is virtually irrelevant at this point, as they are no longer in a position to ask what parts of being a woman inevitably ties them to their children) as supported (or not) by the existing institutions and mentalities of society.
At this juncture, my concerns about the nature of child-bearing in society today leaves a bit of a queasy anxiety in my gut. There is so much placed on the foregone conclusions that is motherhood I am not readily willing to assume, especially when we delve into the nature of what society expects of fathers. Here, in this funny place—where I have always been afraid of motherhood, is the continuing struggle of women for a reality check. We still tend to invoke the near-holiness of motherhood, while the fathers remain at best a politically correct stabilizer in the mix. The small percentage of fathers raising their children on their own have no difficulty securing a mate, receiving accolades for their outstanding generosity, while the overwhelming number of fathers remain little more than a distant phone call, and this is acceptable—a grin, a shrug, says it all, “I mean well, but hey, I had to sow my oats when I was young, I wasn’t ready to settle down” And this is the consequence, the ultimatum they live; so vividly opposite the fate the mother is forced to live out after that awesome yet flighty shattering moment of conception. These men are deadbeats at worst and studs at best, spreading their seed with no sense of consequence as modern medicine’s contribution to the ever-growing american (hell, western!) moral divide– the pill allows them to casually fuck—inviting new paradoxes to lunch with the old relentless schism of power in its social, mental, and physical disconnect between men and women
.
But we, the ones with the wombs, have been bound so tightly to the child we bear it cuts to the bone. Whether you want to talk about the reality that many mothers experience (the inevitable overwhelming physical and financial responsibility for their offspring) or the biological imbalance that is hormonal responses to child-bearing, there seems no escape once a woman makes the decision to give birth. While, fathers can fall through the cracks like raindrops and disappear into the sea of “eligible bachelors.” It’s discouraging that there are a disturbingly high number of fathers who still manage to move through society without paying for the children they conceive. Something like 1 out of 9 fathers who leave the biological mother no longer own up to the existence of their offspring, or more specifically, their own fatherhood.
I understand children fairly well, but I also understand myself—I see how much I am not just a lasting receptacle for the demands of the world… that I need the space to become a full person, to understand myself relative to my own weaknesses, to change what hurts myself and those I care about. I have certainly not reached a position where parenting could possibly lend itself to an accelerated learning curve. Sure, sure, we all grow a hell of a lot, once children enter the picture, we grow in response to the immediate and absolute demands and stressors we experience. But I defy this quasi-sacred image of a mother as a vessel brimming with gentle self-sacrifice, giving, and bottomless love. As a standard, it’s ridiculous and unfair, let mom’s be human without shock at their anger, tiredness, selfishness, brokenness, chaos, unclarity, hope, fear, and all the things that are just part of being a mammalian parent.
Permalink
Posted in welcome at 3:19 pm by Administrator
the tact: write in a blog about all the things i’m reading, meditating on, writing about, talking about, and come up with a more cohesive plan of attack for the research i want to conduct.
i think this public space will be the beginning of a constructive method to start really building this theory and work.
welcome to anyone that accidentally lands here… and a gaseous pink cloud of theoretical welcome for those of you in the dreamt of future who search for me.
you’ve just entered into the mind of a very old 26 year old american female… who is become aware of what the whole godamned thing is about. this slow-motion frenzy of fear and love that seems to be modern (or oh god post modern… neo post modern… mega nano neo post modern….?) erm. .. life.
welcome to my planet in cyberspace. the landscape is not normal nor necessarily easy but i’m hoping the growth will impress you and just maybe make you think.
Permalink