r e s m a r t e d

Sex: you’re doing it...

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:11:30 -0400

Sex: you’re doing it wrong

genderbitch:

Sex is not “trying to score”

Sex is not about getting numbers in

There is no fucking quota you have to meet.

Sexual partners are partners, not statistics

Sex is not a revenge tool

Sex is not a weapon.

And if someone doesn’t want it, you’re raping them.

Reluctance is not wanting it.

“Putting up with it” is not wanting it.

Drunk and nonfunctional is not wanting it.

Unconscious is not wanting it.

Wearing certain clothing is not wanting it.

Bugging someone until they say yes out of exasperation is not wanting it

Being afraid of you is not wanting it.

Hugging you is not wanting it

Cuddling you is not wanting it

Being naked near you is not wanting it

Having lots of sexual partners is not wanting it

Needing to stop during it is not wanting it.

Calling out the safe word is not wanting it.

Crying is not wanting it

Struggling away is not wanting it

Going limp and unresponsive is not wanting it.

Truth.

Craigslist Censorship & Child Trafficking The Internet has...

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:08:18 -0400

Craigslist Censorship & Child Trafficking

The Internet has changed the dynamics of prostitution and trafficking, making it easier for prostitutes and traffickers to connect with clients without too many layers of intermediaries. As a result, the Internet has become an intermediary, often without the knowledge of those internet service providers (ISPs) who are the conduits. This is what makes people believe that they should go after ISPs like Craigslist. Faulty logic suggests that if Craigslist is effectively a digital pimp who’s profiting off of online traffic, why shouldn’t it be prosecuted as such?

The problem with this logic is that it fails to account for three important differences: 1) most ISPs have a fundamental business — if not moral — interest in helping protect people; 2) the visibility of illicit activities online makes it much easier to get at, and help, those who are being victimized; and 3) a one-stop-shop is more helpful for law enforcement than for criminals. In short, Craigslist is not a pimp, but a public perch from which law enforcement can watch without being seen.

1. Internet Services Providers have a fundamental business interest in helping people.

When Internet companies profit off of online traffic, they need their clients to value them and the services they provide. If companies can’t be trusted — especially when money is exchanging hands — they lose business. This is especially true for companies that support peer-to-peer exchange of money and goods. This is what motivates services like eBay and Amazon to make it very easy for customers to get refunded when ripped off. Craigslist has made its name and business on helping people connect around services, and while there are plenty of people who use its openness to try to abuse others, Craigslist is deeply committed to reducing fraud and abuse. It’s not always successful — no company is. And the more freedom that a company affords, the more room for abuse. But what makes Craigslist especially beloved is that it is run by people who truly want to make the world a better place and who are deeply committed to a healthy civic life.

2. Visibility makes it easier to help victims.

If you live a privileged life, your exposure to prostitution may be limited to made-for-TV movies and a curious dip into the red-light district of Amsterdam. You are most likely lucky enough to never have known someone who was forced into prostitution, let alone someone who was sold by or stolen from their parents as a child. Perhaps if you live in San Francisco or Las Vegas, you know a high-end escort who has freely chosen her life and works for an agency or lives in a community where she’s highly supported. Truly consensual prostitutes do exist, but the vast majority of prostitution is nonconsensual, either through force or desperation. And, no matter how many hip-hop songs try to imply otherwise, the vast majority of pimps are abusive, manipulative, corrupt, addicted bastards. To be fair, I will acknowledge that these scumbags are typically from abusive environments where they too are forced into their profession through circumstances that are unimaginable to most middle class folks. But I still don’t believe that this justifies their role in continuing the cycle of abuse.

Along comes the Internet, exposing you to the underbelly of the economy, making visible the sex-power industry that makes you want to vomit. Most people see such cesspools online and imagine them to be the equivalent of a crack house opening up in their gated community. Let’s try a different metaphor. Why not think of it instead as a documentary movie happening in real time where you can actually do something about it?

3. Law enforcement can make online spaces risky for criminals.

Law enforcement is always struggling to gain access to underground networks in order to go after the bastards who abuse people for profit. Underground enforcement is really difficult, and it takes a lot of time to invade a community and build enough trust to get access to information that will hopefully lead to the dens of sin. While it always looks so easy on TV, there’s nothing easy or pretty about this kind of work. The Internet has given law enforcement more data than they even know what to do with, more information about more people engaged in more horrific abuses than they’ve ever been able to obtain through underground work. It’s far too easy to mistake more data for more crime and too many aspiring governors use the increase of data to spin the public into a frenzy about the dangers of the Internet. The increased availability of data is not the problem; it’s a godsend for getting at the root of the problem and actually helping people.

When law enforcement is ready to go after a criminal network, they systematically set up a sting, trying to get as many people as possible, knowing that whoever they have underground will immediately lose access the moment they act. The Internet changes this dynamic, because it’s a whole lot easier to be underground online, to invade networks and build trust, to go after people one at a time, to grab victims as they’re being victimized. It’s a lot easier to set up stings online, posing as buyers or sellers and luring scumbags into making the wrong move. All without compromising informants.

4. Using the Internet to combat the sex-power industry

It makes me scream when I think of how many resources have been used attempting to censor Craigslist instead of leveraging it as a space for effective law enforcement. During the height of the moral panic over sexual predators on MySpace, I had the fortune of spending a lot of time with a few FBI folks and talking to a whole lot of local law enforcement. I learned a scary reality about criminal activity online. Folks in law enforcement know about a lot more criminal activity than they have the time to pursue. Sure, they focus on the big players, going after the massive collectors of child pornography who are most likely to be sex offenders than spending time on the small-time abusers. But it was the medium-time criminals that gnawed at them. They were desperate for more resources so that they could train more law enforcers, pursue more cases, and help more victims. The Internet had made it a lot easier for them to find criminals, but that didn’t make their jobs any easier because they were now aware of how many more victims they were unable to help. Most law enforcement in this area are really there because they want to help people and it kills them when they can’t help everyone.

There’s a lot more political gain to be had demonizing profitable companies than demanding more money be spent (and thus, more taxes be raised) supporting the work that law enforcement does. Taking something that is visible and making it invisible makes a politician look good, even if it does absolutely nothing to help the victims who are harmed. It creates the illusion of safety, while signaling to pimps, traffickers, and other scumbags that their businesses are perfectly safe as long as they stay invisible. Sure, many of these scumbags have an incentive to be as visible as possible to reach as many possible clients as possible, and so they will move on and invade a new service where they can reach clients. And they’ll make that ISP’s life hell by putting them in the spotlight. And maybe they’ll choose an offshore one that American law enforcement can do nothing about. Censorship online is nothing more than whack-a-mole, pushing the issue elsewhere or more underground.

full article - huffington post, activist danah boyd

5 facts on craigslist censor 1) It was technically...

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:18:00 -0400

5 facts on craigslist censor

1) It was technically voluntary.
There’s no court order or anything. The site was basically indirectly threatened into self-censoring, after seventeen attorneys general wrote an open letter to Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark, the CEO and Founder of Craigslist respectively, last Tuesday, requesting that they “immediately take down the Adult Services portion of craigslist.” In the letter, the attorneys general begged the founders to “finally hear the voices of the victims, women and children” who “plead with you to make this important change.” Shutting down the Adult Services section is the “right thing to do to protect innocent woman and children,” the letter insisted. 2) It’s not the first time something like this has happened.
It’s been a process. Back in May of 2009, the site closed its “erotic services” section, replacing it with the “adult services” page that is now in question again. Any of this sounding familiar? At that time, Melissa Gira Grant, a blogger and writer on sex, technology, politics, and culture, wrote a compelling piece on Slate explaining how shutting down the”erotic services” section hurts prostitutes and cops. It seems the message didn’t get through.
3) You can still buy sex online, and in person, for that matter.
This one’s pretty self-explanatory folks. “The show must go on,” as they say. Censoring one section of Craigslist is not going to put the kibosh on prostitution, or even trafficking, for good. For the curious or unconvinced, I suggest checking out this handy guide to buying sex online, put together by Gawker writer Adrien Chen, who notes that “if Attorneys General and anti-trafficking groups are actually serious about shutting down the Internet sex trade—and not just jumping on a Craigslist panic wagon—they’re going to have to look far beyond Craigslist” before launching into a laundry list of alternative ways to find sex-for-pay online.
4) The Craigslist Adult Services section is a red herring in the fight against trafficking, sexual assault, and child abuse.
The Craigslist Adult Services page may make for a sexy red herring, but the actual task of ending violence and sexual assault against women and children is not outside of our grasp. As Melissa Gira Grant points out on AlterNet in her latest article on the subject:
“If these lead prosecutors are truly concerned about ending violence and exploitation, then their focus on one intermediary advertising Web site, among dozens of other sex ad venues, could be considered criminally shortsighted. There’s a tremendous amount the attorneys general could do to actually curb the suffering of people within the criminal and legal systems in which they have power.”
5) Censuring Craigslist won’t help women, and could actually hurt them, even and especially victims of trafficking.
The “feminist” take on sex work is something that has a lot of implications, complications, and variations. I don’t claim to have “the one right feminist way to help women and victims of trafficking.” But I’m firmly of the camp that agency and consent matter, and I tend to agree with smart women like Danah Boyd, a longtime activist and victim of violence herself who wrote a pretty spot-on article on the Huffington Post called “How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags” in which she explains why the debate around Craigslist adult services has “centered on the wrong axis”. She makes a compelling case for the idea that Craigslist, rather than a modern-day “digital pimp,” actually serves (errr, served) as a kind of “public perch from which law enforcement can [could] watch without being seen”. I recommend reading the whole article, as it articulates pretty thoughtfully how this most recent Craigslist censor does more harm than good for women and girls.
full article - feministing

Gaga Pauses Performance; Stops a Fight

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:04:27 -0400

Gaga Pauses Performance; Stops a Fight

poll: gender equality still a long way off It’s more than...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:16:50 -0400

poll: gender equality still a long way off

It’s more than a generation since a cigarette ad declared to women, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But a Harris Poll, released this week, suggests women feel they’ve still got a long way to go — with many men endorsing that opinion.

One question in the survey (conducted in June) asked whether respondents agree with the statement, “The U.S. still has a long way to go to reach complete gender equality.” Overall, 30 percent agreed “strongly” and 34 percent “somewhat,” while 21 percent disagreed “somewhat” and 11 percent “strongly.” (The rest were unsure.) As you might guess, women were more likely than men to agree with the statement (74 percent vs. 52 percent). There was a good deal of variation among age groups, with the 65-plusers the most likely to agree there’s a long way to go to reach gender equality (71 percent) and the 34-45-year-olds the least likely (55 percent).

The survey’s respondents (especially its women) see tangible manifestations of gender inequality. Most notably, 69 percent of all respondents (including 80 percent of women) agreed that “Women often do not receive the same pay as men for doing exactly the same job.” Similarly, 62 percent of respondents (including 75 percent of women) agreed that “Women are often discriminated against in being promoted for supervisory and executive jobs.” Fifty-one percent of women (and 33 percent of men) agreed that “Women often have much more trouble than men in getting credit, bank loans and mortgages.”

If women suffer the downside of different treatment, they don’t necessarily benefit from an upside. Eighty-one percent of respondents agreed (including 36 percent agreeing “strongly”) that “Women today are treated with less chivalry than in the past.”

Another part of the survey inquired into attitudes about relations between the sexes these days, and the findings were strikingly downbeat. While 43 percent agreed (13 percent strongly) that “Things are fine the way they are between men and women,” 52 percent disagreed (19 percent strongly). Women were markedly less likely than men (32 percent vs. 55 percent) to agree that things are fine between the sexes.

full article - adweek

the reason we chicks are deaf Teenage girls who listen to...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:07:35 -0400

the reason we chicks are deaf

Teenage girls who listen to personal music players too long or too loudly risk a type of hearing loss, U.S. researchers have found.

The study examined 8,710 girls from low-income families with an average age of 16. They had their hearing tested when they entered a residential facility in the northeastern United States.

High-frequency hearing loss — a common result of excessive noise exposure — increased from 10.1 per cent in 1985 to 19.2 per cent in 2009, audiologist Abbey Berg of Pace University in New York reported in Tuesday’s online issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“Not surprisingly, what I noticed was that the adolescent girls with high-frequency hearing loss also used personal listening devices for longer periods of time per day and they also had more tinnitus, which is ringing in the ear,” Berg said.

High-frequency hearing adds clarity to speech, aiding in hearing sounds like “s,” “sh,” or “ch,” particularly in noisy environments. Teens with high-frequency hearing loss might have difficulty in the classroom, said Berg. Adolescent hearing loss could also have implications as girls age, reducing their ability to locate sound in space or follow rapid speech, Berg noted.

Between 2001 and 2008, use of personal music players among the girls increased from 18.3 per cent to 76.4 per cent.

full article - cbc.ca

“vampire facelift” swears it’s natural and...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:02:29 -0400

“vampire facelift” swears it’s natural and safe

The new procedure, which is rapidly gaining popularity and publicity, earned its colorful moniker from the fact that it involves drawing blood from the patient and activating the platelets to produce a potent and natural serum that is injected into the patient’s facial skin to create a more youthful-looking appearance.

David J. Mozersky, and Rene Jaso, board certified surgeons and founders of ContourLase Body Institute in San Antonio, refer to the procedure at their clinic as “G Factor Skin Rejuvenation”. “It really is a revolutionary treatment that restores youthful skin with minimum downtime, little discomfort, and a friendly price,” Dr. Mozersky said.

“The ‘Vampire Lift’ or G Factor facial is the perfect answer for those fine lines and dull, old-looking skin that we all get when we enter middle age,” he said. “It is an all-natural, non-traumatic way to rejuvenate your skin.”

full article - prweb

craigslist drops adult services After years of mounting public...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:51:48 -0400

craigslist drops adult services

After years of mounting public pressure, Craigslist appears to have surrendered a battle over sexual ads on its website that some viewed as a test case for the boundaries of online freedom.
The popular San Francisco classifieds site removed its controversial adult services section late Friday, defiantly replacing the link with the word “censored.” The move followed a torrent of legal threats and negative media reports that highlighted ads within the category that promoted prostitution and child trafficking, or led to violence against women.
The harshest critics have called Craigslist an “online pimp” and the “Wal-Mart of online sex trafficking.” Last year, an Illinois sheriff filed a lawsuit that accused the site’s owners of knowingly promoting and facilitating prostitution, while the South Carolina Attorney General threatened criminal action against the company.
Full article - sfgate

online anonymity & self-policing “One man’s...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:48:00 -0400

online anonymity & self-policing

“One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.”
These are the words of Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan II in the majority opinion of a 1971 free-speech case, Cohen v. California. However, with the continuing rise in importance of the Internet, and the venomous culture that has begun to develop there, it may well be time for everyone to reassess exactly how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace.
The Internet is an important medium for sharing information. However, it’s also, for the most part, a completely unregulated entity that allows users to say or do almost anything without fear of retribution. As such, the Internet can be a breeding ground for belligerence, ignorance and even racism. And, the anonymity it affords can allow us to comfortably hide our faces while we carry on our diatribes against the world.
The Internet is a giant peer-to-peer information sharing network. But without many authority figures to enforce etiquette online, a diffusion of responsibility begins to develop among users. This enables them to say things they wouldn’t normally say, or be overly aggressive in dealing with others.
Thirteen- and 14-year-olds are playing games rated for 17-year-olds and up, exposing them to all these negative aspects of online culture and often assimilating them into this way of thinking. These younger players want to be accepted by older players, who act as “agents of socialization” and present the foul language and aggressive behavior as the norm in online culture.
The anonymity offered to online commenters results in a complete lack of accountability, allowing adults to bicker like petulant children from the safety of their home or office without fear of real-life consequences. I doubt that people who use offensive, often racist language in their online comments interact that way with people in their everyday life.
By using a screen name to fling mud at others in cyberspace, users depersonalize themselves. This begs the question of whether you can consider an account without a real persona backing it to be a real person in the eyes of the law, entitled to First Amendment protection.
full article - online athens

Ebert calls Lovely Bones a “deplorable film” BY...

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:33:17 -0500

Ebert calls Lovely Bones a “deplorable film”

BY ROGER EBERT / January 13, 2010

“The Lovely Bones” is a deplorable film with this message: If you’re a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film’s primary effect was to make me squirmy.

It’s based on the best-seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I hope it’s not faithful to the book; if it is, millions of Americans are scary. The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God’s will, and their victims are happier now. Isn’t it nice to think so. I think it’s best if they don’t happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don’t hurt? Those girls are dead.

I’m assured, however, that Sebold’s novel is well-written and sensitive. I presume the director, Peter Jackson, has distorted elements to fit his own “vision,” which involves nearly as many special effects in some sequences as his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. A more useful way to deal with this material would be with observant, subtle performances in a thoughtful screenplay. It’s not a feel-good story. Perhaps Jackson’s team made the mistake of fearing the novel was too dark. But its millions of readers must know it’s not like this. The target audience might be doom-besotted teenage girls — the “Twilight” crowd.

The owner of the lovely bones is named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, a very good young actress, who cannot be faulted here). The heaven Susie occupies looks a little like a Flower Power world in the kind of fantasy that, murdered in 1973, she might have imagined. Seems to me that heaven, by definition outside time and space, would have neither colors nor a lack of colors — would be a state with no sensations. Nor would there be thinking there, let alone narration. In an eternity spent in the presence of infinite goodness, you don’t go around thinking, “Man! Is this great!” You simply are. I have a lot of theologians on my side here.

But no. From her movie-set Valhalla, Susie gazes down as her mother (Rachel Weisz) grieves and her father (Mark Wahlberg) tries to solve the case himself. There’s not much of a case to solve; we know who the killer is almost from the get-go, and, under the Law of Economy of Characters that’s who he has to be, because (a) he’s played by an otherwise unnecessary movie star, and (b) there’s no one else in the movie it could be.

Here’s something bittersweet. Weisz and Wahlberg are effective as the parents. Because the pyrotechnics are mostly upstairs with the special effects, all they need to be are convincing parents who have lost their daughter. This they do with touching subtlety. We also meet one of Susie’s grandmothers (Susan Sarandon), an unwise drinker who comes on to provide hard-boiled comic relief, in the Shakespearean tradition that every tragedy needs its clown. Well, she’s good, too. This whole film is Jackson’s fault.

It doesn’t fail simply because I suspect its message. It fails on its own terms. It isn’t emotionally convincing that this girl, having had these experiences and destined apparently to be 14 forever (although cleaned up and with a new wardrobe), would produce this heavenly creature. What’s left for us to pity? We should all end up like her, and the sooner the better; preferably not after being raped and murdered.

Pop Culture Experts Report Gossip Girl Has Lost Its Steam Style...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:43:19 -0500

Pop Culture Experts Report Gossip Girl Has Lost Its Steam

Style Versus Substance Kinon notes that Gossip Girl “catapulted into pop culture entirely on the back of its buzzworthiness - who is Gossip Girl? What was that song? Who makes those shoes S was rocking?” Not on the merits of its plot or compelling characters. Now that the initial buzz is wearing off, what’s left—the story—holds little interest to the general public.

“It’s getting a little long in the tooth,” Thompson said. “The premise of the show was so interesting and exciting in the beginning, but this season’s story lines don’t seem to be clicking. It’s not like if you watch an episode this season, you can say that it’s fundamentally worse than it was last season - it just doesn’t seem to have the shelf life of other programming.”

Stars Aren’t As Much of a Draw Where the show’s stars were the young, fresh new faces of Hollywood, their inherent newsworthiness—even as Chace Crawford graces People as their Hottest Bachelor of the year—seems to be waning as well.

“They’re no longer that interesting,” AOL Television’s Maggie Furlong told the News, also noting that her story on Gossip Girl-inspired Halloween costumes garnered only one comment from readers. “That would have never happened a year ago. Now everyone wants to argue about the Gosselins instead.”

The ratings for Gossip Girl this season seem only to reinforce these theories. In the last few weeks, the show has dipped below 2 million viewers, where it used to consistently post numbers above 3 million in its first season.

Guest Star Overload While neither Kinon or Thompson addressed the issue, I can’t help but wonder if the slew of special guest stars and press-baiting storylines has actually hurt the series more than helped. As a longtime viewer who enjoys the series, and gets paid to pay diligent attention to each excruciating detail, it saddens me to say this season of Gossip Girl truly is considerably more disjointed than either of those that came before. Forcing one-shot guest stars into an already overloaded cast has the show’s writers consistently creating plotlines that are inconsequential to the overall momentum.

Now eight episodes into season 3, the show has no underlying, cohesive plot around which its mainstays can rally—in turn, as the weeks go on, these characters interact less with each other than any other scripted show I’ve ever seen. One week Serena is frolicking with her new boyfriend Carter, and the next she’s wrangling Tyra Banks: both have since evaporated from the series.

full article - buddy tv

“For over a century the edge of adolescence has been...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:20:16 -0400

“For over a century the edge of adolescence has been identified as a time of heightened psychological risk for girls. Girls at this time have been observed to lose their vitality, their resilience, their immunity to depression, their sense of themselves and their character,” they wrote, in their 1992 groundbreaking book.

“On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls’ voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours.”

full article - harvard press

Teen Violence in Dating “Everyone agrees that violence is...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:53:41 -0400

Teen Violence in Dating

“Everyone agrees that violence is learned,” Wolfe says. “Someone is teaching it.” He points the finger at the violent and abusive culture kids absorb in adolescence. “It is worse today because of all the different media they can be exposed to,” he says, such as cyberbullying and video games. “Violence is entertainment. It’s fun. They take out their cell phones whenever there is a fight. They put it on YouTube.”
Teens are being exposed to these things at a very crucial moment in their development, when they are becoming interested in the opposite sex and when they’re trying to establish a sexual identity. Up until adolescence, Wolfe points out, they’ve been relating to people of the same sex.
“They are now trying to relate to the opposite sex. And the simplest way I have to explain it is they are not very good at it,” he says. “If they try to relate to a girl the way they related to their male friends, she won’t like it. If she tries to relate to him the way she does with a girlfriend, or if she tries to act like a male friend, he won’t like it. There’s a lot of confusion.”
Girls may end up being physically aggressive when they interact with a boyfriend, punching and poking, says Wolfe, because they think that’s what guys like. “And the guys may be very controlling because they think that’s what works in relationships with other guys.”
full article - npr

Pop Culture & The Little Debbie Effect Modern popular music...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:35:56 -0400

Pop Culture & The Little Debbie Effect

Modern popular music is not thought provoking. It does not dig at the fundamental truths of what it means to be human. It does not inspire the betterment of society or confront the ills of society. It provides a visceral pleasure, compounding simple animalistic emotions, giving us a cheap high that perpetuates our need for more while numbing us to the quality of deeper feelings and thought. Like heroin.
One can find Little Debbie in the red-light district of convenience stores – on the shelves in the checkout lanes next to the National Inquirer and a rack of key chains. Little Debbie sells herself for a scandalous quarter-dollar. Despite the list of ingredients longer than anything Homer ever wrote, Little Debbie has two basic components: sugar and food coloring. When consumers are faced with a choice between a Little Debbie and any other snack, they must ask themselves the question, “Do I want to pay more than half a dollar to have to chew and deal with the stimulation of multiple flavors, or do I want to spend only twenty-five cents and just mash my tongue to the roof of my mouth, dissolving the one-flavored goo in seconds?” Little Debbie peers up from behind those curly red locks and says, “Not hungry? Grab a Little Debbie,” because Little Debbie and hunger have nothing to do with each other. We don’t eat a fudge-round because our stomach is growling. We eat it because we want to, because is satisfies a simple urge long enough for one to get home and have those urges distracted by television. When we eat a Little Debbie, we don’t want to chew or think or receive any nutrients, we just want to feel, and after opening the wrapper, the Little Debbie is a symphony of the mouth with no mandible struggle required.
Culture is what separates humans from animals. Our lives are more complicated than satisfying our basic needs for survival and reproduction. Culture redefines our needs. Culture creates a life experience that goes beyond braving the elements and interacting with the other creatures on earth. Humans are blessed with two worlds: the physical world and the world of our minds. That world we create in our imagination is much less appealing today, it seems. Most would prefer to live a life no more complicated than the stimulations of their environment and their immediate instinctive reaction to it.
full article - the valley vanguard

Technology continues to eat souls of children Teens are not...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:18:08 -0400

Technology continues to eat souls of children

Teens are not just texting, instant-messaging and surfing Facebook all day; they’re sleeping with their cellphones or laptops, too. Or rather, not sleeping. And doctors and parents, many of them raised in an era when phones were attached to walls, are concerned.
“So many teens are having sleep issues, and parents aren’t necessarily regulating the use of the electronic devices enough,” says Margie Ryerson, a Walnut Creek, Calif., therapist who specializes in adolescent issues. “It’s impossible to wind down and relax the body, the mind, the senses and be ready to fall asleep.”
The texting doesn’t stop, she says, even after Mom and Dad are snoring softly in their beds. One of Ryerson’s clients discovered her 17-year-old daughter was sending more than 3,000 text messages per month, many in the wee hours.
Of course, for every obsessive texter, there’s a teen, “tween” or college student who simply turns off the phone at bedtime. But even the averages are extraordinary. A 2009 Nielsen study on teens and media found a 566 percent jump in teen texting rates during the past two years. The average teen sent 435 texts a month in early 2007. Now it’s 2,899 per month — 97 a day.
Teens are texting on the bus, in class, at dinner and in bed. It’s the bed part that’s worrying experts.
A Belgian study published last month found that late-night texting is affecting the sleep cycles of 44 percent of that country’s 16-year-olds. Some 21 percent are waking up one to three times a month to answer a text message, according to the Leuven Study on Media and Adolescent Health; it’s a weekly occurrence for 11 percent of the teens, and a nightly or every-other-night wake-up call for 12 percent.
“We all know teens don’t get enough sleep in general,” says San Francisco youth culture expert Anastasia Goodstein. “As long as parents allow teens to have these devices in their bedrooms at night, teens will be tempted to use them. “… Teens would socialize 24/7 if they could — especially if it’s with a girlfriend or boyfriend.”
Ryerson calls it the CNN syndrome of teenhood — round-the-clock reports on breaking news about everything from homework to wardrobe choices to Starbucks cravings.
full article - seattle times

I wish I had been forced into fresh air a little more often than I was. Actually, I wish I were still. I can’t imagine having a sidekick (back in the days of working data plans) when I was a teenager. I already feel embarrassed as a nearly 24 year old using one and I am used to 100 texts a day on average. To be fair, I rarely make phone calls and am just easier to communicate with in writing. Maybe that’s all it is for some of these kids, but still. Something about the ability to express your thoughts constantly and the way people are so completely available to each other on every wavelength is a nice idea in theory but inevitably shows a lot of gross sides to people you don’t care to see, not to mention show off yourself. I’m posting this piece of info in the wee hours of the morning and sometimes it’s just nicer to have a night of silence to sit and think to yourself rather than wasting it with relaxed nerves and dreamless sleep. It really is a blatant form of self-indulgence and one can’t be certain if it at all contributes to personal development or just kicks us even further away from that direction entirely as we are too busy feeding our blog-loving egos to notice. Either way, thanks a lot for making me get a cell phone at nineteen, Mom.

Teens & Sexually Degrading Music On average, American teens...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:03:00 -0400

Teens & Sexually Degrading Music

On average, American teens listen to one and a half to two and a half hours of music a day. From 50 Cent to Britney Spears, pop and hip-hop music can present a world that’s sexualized mildly or explicitly. Now a new study by conservative think-tank the Rand Corporation makes a connection between sexually explicit lyrics and public health concerns.
Notably, the study found that teens who listen to sexually degrading lyrics are more likely to engage in sexual behaviors at an earlier age.
Rap music is always going to surprise us. I do think that right now, though, we are talking about men specifically and their lyrics. I think if you go to lyrics of artists, say, like Remy Ma or Lil’ Kim or Foxy Brown or even Eve, you’re going to see some pretty darn sexually explicit lyrics where men are being treated very much like objects, and only people from whom money can be taken or people that can be used for sexual favors.
So I think women are already - not in terms of quantity, but definitely in terms - if I can use the word - quality of sexual explicitness, they are already right there. I think rap is going to change in a way that I cannot hope to predict. Is it going to come back to the opposite, you know what I mean? To something sweet and dreamy? I don’t know and I don’t know if I want that. But I do know that we’re going to move past this sort of anger that it seems like rap artists have towards each other, or you know, male rap artists have towards women. And I think we’re going to get to something surprising, and because I’m an optimist, I say I think it’s going to be something good.
full article - npr

Adrianna’s Huffington Post everyone keeps talking...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:54:14 -0400

Adrianna’s Huffington Post everyone keeps talking about

Let’s talk about unhappiness. Specifically, how it’s growing in one segment of our society. And no, it’s not white congressmen from South Carolina, hip-hop artists who feel Beyoncé got slighted, or recipients of ill-timed foot-fault calls.
It’s women. According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.
And it’s not because of the multitude of crises we are facing. Women’s happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, when the General Social Survey, a landmark study, began examining the social attitudes of women and men — who, by the way, have gotten progressively happier over the years.
When you think about all that has happened over the last four decades — with women securing greater opportunity, greater achievement, greater influence, and more money — the decline in our collective state of mind seems to defy logic, and raises the vexing question: What in the world is going on?
full article - the huffington post

Polls on women & happiness These attempts to gauge a...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:45:39 -0400

Polls on women & happiness

These attempts to gauge a woman’s happiness would be amusing if they didn’t trigger so much angst in the women who have time to pay attention to them. Ask any woman if she’s happy, and once she recovers from the shock that someone cares, she’ll typically rattle off the reasons why she should be. There is, after all, no reward for a woman willing to admit she’s anything less than ecstatic about her life.
With a little coaxing, she may admit to flaws in the game plan, which she will typically identify as no one’s fault but her own. We are constantly reminded that we’ve got all kinds of rights and privileges that were denied our sisters less than 100 years ago. If you don’t think that matters, just set your dial to AM talk radio and listen to the wails over how no one wants to cook for the menfolk anymore.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, we could read about how the overwhelming majority of women agree that life’s journey is tumultuous and roiling for all of us, and that the best way to navigate one’s ship is to welcome everyone on board?
Instead, we’re always asked how we feel about “the other side” of our own gender. Brings out the worst in so many of us, including a pretense to a superiority we don’t really feel.
The thing is, Super Moms make lousy girlfriends. All that perfection? Exhausting. How could I be myself with any mother who had a toddler and a clean car at the same time? For me, a few Cheerios crushed into the carpet or a sippy cup spackled with fingerprints went a long way toward connecting the dots to sisterhood, and I was willing to do my part.
The problem with these studies is they don’t encourage us to support one another in our missteps. Instead, we get yet another glimpse into just how unkind we can be to one another, and to ourselves.
full article - connie schultz

According to research by Brian Solis, sourcing his data from...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:30:00 -0400

According to research by Brian Solis, sourcing his data from Google’s Ad Planner, the majority of functioning beings on almost all social networking sites are women.

Published on Information Is Beautiful, the numbers might create an encouraging belief that if social networking is the future, then the future is female.

full article - cnet

Tweens & Body Image Our kids are presented with images of...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:21:59 -0400

Tweens & Body Image

Our kids are presented with images of the body that are far different than the average size for any girl. The celebrities and models in these images have body weights that are roughly 25 - 30% thinner than the average girl. On top of that, the images are photo shopped.
These images, (even if your child doesn’t watch t.v. or buy magazines,) are insidious. They are in advertising, they are part of popular culture. All kids want to be popular and part of things. This is what they think they are supposed to look like and what they aspire to look like. Tweens I have interviewed over the years state openly: “Everything is about what others think about you and everyone thinks they’re fat and ugly. Not everyone admits it, they may even act like they don’t feel that, but they do.”
full article - the huffington post