tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7324694228713227562024-03-13T21:06:22.115-07:00VIOLETPLANET"Belief And Seeing Are Both Often Wrong." -Robert McNamara (U.S. Secretary of Defense 1961-1968)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger20213tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-732469422871322756.post-55226866997844845992013-05-09T19:59:00.001-07:002013-05-09T19:59:18.298-07:00WOMEN, SEXISM & SOCIETY: From Sirens to Sluts, Angels to She-Devils...<br />
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<i>“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.”</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> -Shirley Chisholm</span><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>“SEX game gone wrong,” “sex game gone awry,” “sex-mad flatmate,” “sex-crazed killer.”</i><br />
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That’s from just the first three minutes of the ABC News special on Amanda Knox last week, a veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming that leaves no doubt about what elevated a college student accused of murder into an object of international fascination, titillation and scorn.<br />
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It wasn’t the crime itself. It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn’t be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison and even if there was plenty of reason — as the eventual reversal of her initial conviction made clear — to believe that she might not belong there.<br />
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“Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands,” wrote Tobias Jones in a 2011 article in the British newspaper The Observer. One-night stands? How could she?!? Of course if a guy has one of those, it’s a triumph: all the pleasure, none of the commitment. And boys, after all, will be boys.<br />
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We’ll never know precisely what happened on the night in Perugia, Italy, in 2007 when Meredith Kercher, 21, was killed. Knox, her housemate, was found guilty, then acquitted and will soon, despite the profoundly flawed case against her, face another trial. The Italian judicial system works about as smoothly as the Italian government.<br />
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But we know this: the double standard concerning men’s versus women’s sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of “Foxy Knoxy,” whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer’s exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?<br />
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Similar questions can be asked about Jodi Arias, 32, whose murder trial in Arizona was winding down last week. The Arias case hasn’t made quite the leap from the tabloids into the mainstream that Knox’s did. But HLN, the cable network on which Nancy Grace fulminates, has enjoyed a ratings bonanza with its saturation coverage of the courtroom proceedings.<br />
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Arias has admitted to stabbing, shooting and slashing the throat of a former lover: an act of self-defense, she unpersuasively claims. And while his death was certainly grisly enough to explain a baseline of media interest, the amount of attention it has received stems from the courtroom juxtaposition of the defendant, outfitted in nerdy eyeglasses and a frumpy hairstyle, and evidence of what a steamy, pliable playmate she was. It stems from pictures of her genitalia that she let her lover take, audiotapes of the phone sex that the two of them had — and that she recorded. It stems from the shock and censure of such potent female desire.<br />
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Knox and Arias aren’t just women accused of murder. They’re minxes accused of murder, sitting in their courtroom seats with scarlet letters emblazoned on their chests, no jury needed to pronounce them guilty of wantonness at the very least. For men, lust is a tripwire. For women, it’s a noose.<br />
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I’ve heard quite a bit lately about David Petraeus’s road to redemption. I’ve heard less about Paula Broadwell’s. Yes, he’s the more public figure, but the disparity also reflects the way their affair was often portrayed in the first place. He strayed; she preyed. He was weak; she was wily. He was the fly, she the spider.<br />
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Let’s bring a few other recent news stories into this. Let’s indulge in a few hypotheticals.<br />
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WHAT if it had been Antonia Weiner who took to Twitter and there had been a different architecture to the image she tweeted? Would she be able even to entertain the idea of a political comeback? And would the spouse standing dutifully by her be seen as a brave and magnanimous stalwart, the way Huma Abedin is viewed in some quarters, or dismissed by one and all as a pitiable pushover?<br />
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Had a Southern governor named Marcia Sanford been entangled with a Latin lover when reputedly hiking the Appalachian Trail, would she today be her party’s nominee for an open Congressional seat? We know the answer, and we know that Wilhelmina Clinton and Newtina Gingrich wouldn’t have rebounded from their infidelities as robustly as Bill and Newt did.<br />
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Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way. The size and scope of that mortification, despite many decades of happy talk about dawning gender equality, are suggested by recent news stories of one teenage girl in California and another in Nova Scotia who hanged themselves after tales or cellphone pictures of their sexual violation circulated among peers. It’s impossible not to wonder if shame drove them to suicide, and it’s impossible not to ask what sort of world allows the victims of such assaults to feel more irredeemably branded — more eternally damned — than their accused assailants by all appearances do.<br />
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I’ll tell you what sort: a world in which there’s a cornucopia of synonyms for whore and slut and no comparably pejorative vocabulary for promiscuous or sexually rapacious men. A world in which Knox’s vibrator and the lingerie she was said to have bought in a Perugia store were presented not just as newsworthy but as germane to the charge of murder against her: referendums on her character, glimmers of her depravity, clues to precisely how a good girl went bad. A world in which her erotic appetite made her a “man eater,” as the Italian press wrote and as the rest of the world more or less parroted. A world in which her tally, scribbled on a sheet of paper in her prison cell, of seven sexual partners in all of her life was seen as sensational. A similar count for a guy in his early 20s would provoke not derision but disagreement: swordsman or slacker?<br />
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When we chart and lament the persistence of sexism in society, we look to the United States Congress, where women are still woefully underrepresented. We look to corporate boardrooms, where the glass ceiling hasn’t really shattered. But we needn’t look any further than how perversely censorious of women’s sex lives we remain, and how short the path from siren to slut and from angel to she-devil can be.<br />
<br />
-Frank Bruni (Sexism and the Single Murderess, NYT, 5.4.2013. Image: Ben Wiseman,2013).<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-732469422871322756.post-15926687970372431292012-11-02T20:47:00.001-07:002012-11-02T20:47:56.782-07:00SOCIETY: Are We Becoming More Psychopathic? Yes...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=732469422871322756" name="qt0337936"></a>"Are you sure you wouldn't like to stay just a little while longer? Just for talk?"<span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b><span style="font-size: x-small;">-</span>Norman Bates, Psycho, 1960.</span><br />
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"When you look around you at modern-day society, do you think, in general, that we're becoming more psychopathic?"<br /><br />Robert Hare, the eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."<br /><br />He's got a point. In Japan in 2011, a 17-year-old boy parted with one of his own kidneys so he could go out and buy an iPad. In China, following an incident in which a 2-year-old baby was left stranded in the middle of a marketplace and run over, not once but twice, as passersby went casually about their business, an appalled electorate has petitioned the government to pass a good-Samaritan law to prevent such a thing from happening again.<br /><br />And the new millennium has seemingly ushered in a wave of corporate criminality like no other. Investment scams, conflicts of interest, lapses of judgment, and those evergreen entrepreneurial party tricks of good old fraud and embezzlement are now utterly unprecedented in magnitude. Who's to blame? In an issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Clive R. Boddy, a former professor at the Nottingham Business School, contends that it's psychopaths, pure and simple, who are at the root of all the trouble.<br /><br />The law itself has gotten in on the act. At the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping trial, in Salt Lake City, the attorney representing Brian David Mitchell—the homeless street preacher and self-proclaimed prophet who abducted, raped, and kept the 14-year-old Elizabeth captive for nine months (according to Smart's testimony, he raped her pretty much every day over that period)—urged the sentencing judge to go easy on his client, on the grounds that "Ms. Smart overcame it. Survived it. Triumphed over it." When the lawyers start whipping up that kind of tune, the dance could wind up anywhere.<br /><br />Of course, it's not just the lawyers. In a recent study by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, in London, 120 convicted street robbers were asked why they did it. The answers were revealing. Kicks. Spur-of-the-moment impulses. Status. And financial gain. In that order. Exactly the kind of casual, callous behavior patterns one often sees in psychopaths.<br /><br />In fact, in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.<br /><br />More worrisome still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."<br /><br />Precisely why this downturn in social values has come about is not entirely clear. A complex concatenation of environment, role models, and education is, as usual, under suspicion. But the beginnings of an even more fundamental answer may lie in a study conducted by Jeffrey Zacks and his team at the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory, at Washington University in St. Louis. With the aid of fMRI, Zacks and his co-authors peered deep inside the brains of volunteers as they read stories. What they found provided an intriguing insight into the way our brain constructs our sense of self. Changes in characters' locations (e.g., "went out of the house into the street") were associated with increased activity in regions of the temporal lobes involved in spatial orientation and perception, while changes in the objects that a character interacted with (e.g., "picked up a pencil") produced a similar increase in a region of the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Most important, however, changes in a character's goal elicited increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex, damage to which results in impaired knowledge of the order and structure of planned, intentional action.<br /><br />Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.<br /><br />Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.<br /><br />Which is worrisome, to say the least, given the current slump in reading habits. According to a 2011 survey conducted by the British charity the National Literacy Trust, one in three children between the ages of 11 and 16 do not own a book, compared with one in 10 in 2005. That equates, in today's England, to a total of around four million. Almost a fifth of the 18,000 children polled said they had never received a book as a present. And 12 percent said they had never been to a bookshop.<br /><br />But if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment. What I'm planning is a psychopath makeover, to find out firsthand, for better and for worse, what it's like to see the world through devil-may-care eyes. And there's nothing like a bit of competition.<br /><br />Transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS) was developed by Anthony Barker and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield in 1985. The inaugural application of TMS by Barker and his team comprised an elementary demonstration of the conduction of nerve impulses from the motor cortex to the spinal cord by stimulating simple muscle contractions. Nowadays it's a different story—and TMS has widespread practical uses, in both diagnostic and therapeutic capacities, across a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions, from depression and migraine to strokes and Parkinson's disease.<br /><br />The basic premise of TMS is that the brain operates using electrical signals, and that, as with any such system, it's possible to modify the way it works by altering its electrical environment. Standard equipment consists of a powerful electromagnet, placed on the scalp, that generates steady magnetic-field pulses at specific frequencies, and a plastic-enclosed coil to focus those magnetic pulses down through the surface of the skull onto discrete brain regions, thus stimulating the underlying cortex.<br /><br />Now, one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren't wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain's emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.<br /><br />In the light-switch analogy, TMS may be thought of as a dimmer switch. As we process information, our brains generate small electrical signals. These signals not only pass through our nerves to work our muscles but also meander deep within our brains as ephemeral electrical data shoals, creating our thoughts, memories, and feelings. TMS can alter the strength of those signals. By passing an electromagnetic current through precisely targeted areas of the cortex, we can turn the signals either up or down.<br /><br />Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you're well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others' actions.""<br /><br />
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Credits: -Kevin Dutton (Excerpt: "Psychopathy's Double Edge," The Chronicle Review, 10/22/2012. Image: Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, "Psycho," directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-732469422871322756.post-15549287536275871912012-06-04T17:25:00.000-07:002012-07-28T00:02:39.422-07:00NIGHTMARES: CDC OFFICIAL STATEMENT: "NO ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE", But Yet, The Dead Still Walk The Earth...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /><br />
<i>“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of
brains must be in want of more brains.”
</i>-Seth Grahame Smith, ( Pride, Prejudice and Zombies).<br />
<br />
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued an official reassurance: no zombie apocalypse. “CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” agency spokesman David Daigle told The Huffington Post.<br />
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Who knows, maybe the CDC statement allayed a few anxieties. I found it downright depressing. That the CDC felt compelled to issue an official denial that the zombie apocalypse was upon us seemed like another discomfiting moment in America’s cultural descent. <br />
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All this, of course, was set off by the savage May 26 attack on a homeless man on the MacArthur Causeway and the horrible hospital photos and the overwrought on-line, hit-driven media coverage. And, as “zombie apocalypse” trended to become the second most popular search term on Google, it was as if Americans, some of them anyway, couldn’t be bothered with the intellectual distinction between a very real, brutal tragedy in Miami and the ghoulish zombie fantasies of movies, TV and literature.<br />
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“I’ve written quite a bit about the current ‘zombie renaissance,’ but things are starting to go far beyond the ideas I explored in my book,” Kyle Bishop, author of American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, told me by e-mail Monday. “I thought we as a culture were simply seeing a renewed and increased interest in monster narratives as a gut-check reaction to 9/11 and the War on Terror.<br />
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“Now, however, the zombie has become something much more visceral, something that has taken hold on our collective unconscious. People – many people, probably – think zombies, or something like them, may actually, indeed exist,” Bishop stated.<br />
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Elizabeth Bird, a professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, sees these reanimated corpses plodding through pop culture as surrogates for the pervasive fears that nag at modern life: pandemic diseases, nuclear destruction, environmental collapse, “the idea that we’re consuming ourselves. If world comes to an end, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”<br />
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Professor Bird said that the CDC probably didn’t help itself last year with a tongue-in-cheek youth-oriented campaign, with ads and buttons and a novella packaged as “a fun new way of teaching the importance of emergency preparedness. Our new graphic novel, Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic demonstrates the importance of being prepared in an entertaining way that people of all ages will enjoy. Readers follow Todd, Julie, and their dog Max as a strange new disease begins spreading, turning ordinary people into zombies.”<br />
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The CDC slogan: “If you’re ready for the zombie apocalypse, you’re ready for any emergency.”<br />
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I keep wondering what anthropologists, digging through the remnants of our society, will make of us, a thousand years from now. Judging by the content of our most popular books, movies and TV programs, we’ll look like a culture much more obsessed with vampires and zombies, with the occasional werewolf outlier, than, say, religion or philosophy or science.<br />
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“I expect anthropologists in the future will find our collective fascination with zombies (and other supernatural monsters) amusing — the wild rantings of a backward and superstitious culture,” ventured Bishop. “Or maybe they’ll be more sympathetic and see how we used our monsters to try to explain our society (and vice versa).”<br />
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“I think if future anthropologists were to look back on our culture and try to explain our fascination with monsters they would see a society riven by fears and anxieties of various kinds, including uncertainty about the future, the fear of being victimized by violent crime, and a sense that we live in an atomized culture, each of us separated from everyone else by religion, class, economics, among other things,” said David Schmid of the University of Buffalo, who has written about our pervasive fascination with real monsters in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. “You might think that our pop culture would be filled with happy-go-lucky tales of escapism that would help alleviate these anxieties, but the opposite is true: Whether it’s Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, the Twilight movies, TV series like True Blood or The Walking Dead, or this latest incident in Miami, both our pop culture and the media are saturated by violence, more often than not committed by monsters of one kind or another.”<br />
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Schmid suggested via e-mail that all this zombie stuff is supposed to be therapeutic. “Watching TV shows or films, and reading books about monsters give us a safe, manageable way to work through our fears, to remind ourselves that happy endings can still happen.”<br />
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He wrote, “In this respect, the reason that the ‘face-eating’ incident has received so much press coverage is that it seems to signal a place where fiction has crossed over into reality.”<br />
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“Even the ironic jokes about ‘The Zombie Apocalypse Starts Now!’ are tinged with a certain unease because our pop cultural monsters can only ever give us a way of processing our fears, not removing them entirely,” Schmid said. “Even if we know our house is secure, that next bump in the night will still make us start!”<br />
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Bishop, who teaches, among other courses, fantasy literature at Southern Utah University, said he intends to talk about the Miami incident in Montreal next month. He’s delivering the keynote address at the First (but probably not the last) International Zombie Conference. <br />
<br />
-Fred Grimm ("Fear, Anxiety Drive Zombie Craze", Miami Herald,6.04.12, Image: Dick Cheney, still alive, 2012).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1