Author: Anna Cherry

8 Ways To Get Over A Breakup That Are Scientifically Proven To Work

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date March 6, 2017

When we experience a breakup—rare for us, since a breakup requires a relationship, which usually implies romantic closeness and mutual affection—the last thing on our mind is how to deal with it sensibly.

We’re drawn more to the tried-and-true coping mechanisms of clouding our minds and hearts with various substances, hooking up with other people before we are emotionally ready, and obsessively checking our old SO’s social media accounts.
But here’s an interesting idea: what if we chose to deal with these heartbreaks, which science has confirmed to be similar to actual drug withdrawals, in ways that are not self-destructive? What if we approached healing from a breakup the same way we might approach a new exercise plan or learning a language?

If you’re tired of crying onto Domino’s Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes while listening to Adele, read on for eight science-based methods for getting over a breakup.

1. Go cold turkey on your ex.

In a video shot by Business Insider, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher says that when things are no longer going well in a relationship, the best way to deal with the object of your affection after the breakup is to treat them like something you’re addicted to—and if possible, go cold turkey.

“Throw out the cards and letters or put them in the box and put them in the attic,” she says. “Don’t write, don’t call, don’t show up where this person is likely to be.”
Instead: “Go out with old friends. Get hugs from old friends—that drives up the oxytocin system and calms you down.

“Get some physical exercise—that drives up the dopamine system that gives you energy and optimism and focus and motivation. It also drives up the endorphins so that some of the pain goes away.”
Speaking of that pain…

2. Take pain relievers—really.

You know that crushing pain in your chest when you remember the way that your lover-no-more used to tickle your back some nights to help you fall asleep? Or the way your body feels like it’s actually aching to be held as you recall that last vacation to France, when you stayed up half the night in an Airbnb talking about major archaeological sites that you wanted to visit together one day and then they still woke up early to bring you a chocolate croissant while it was still warm?

Well, turns out that pain isn’t just in your head—it’s physiological. And though it may seem odd, popping an aspirin can relieve some of the physical manifestations of your emotional pain, according to research published in 2010.
For The New York Times Modern Love column in a piece titled “Can Tylenol Help Heal a Broken Heart?,” Melissa Hill describes in painful detail what it feels like as rejection activates our parasympathetic nervous system:

A signal is sent through the vagus nerve from our brain to our heart and stomach. The muscles of our digestive system contract, making it feel as if there’s a pit in the deepest part of our stomach. Our airways constrict, making it harder to breathe. The rhythmic beating of our heart is slowed so noticeably that it feels, literally, like our heart is breaking.

We hear you, Melissa. Please bring us the Tylenol.

3. Reflect—don’t dwell—on the breakup.

People in the wake of a breakup are experts at rerouting all conversations toward their ex. Not only is it a way for them to examine, again and again and again, the architecture of their failed relationship, but it’s an attempt to, in whatever way possible, feel close again to the person they are missing.

While it’s fine, and even good, to spend some time reflecting on a breakup, be careful not to cross over into the very near territory of wallowing.
As Maanvi Singh points out in “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, But Science Can Help” for NPR, research in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that “though calmly reflecting on a breakup may help, dwelling on it doesn’t.”

What might this calm reflection look like? The study’s participants who healed from their breakups more quickly were asked to come into a lab regularly to answer questions about their breakup over the course of nine weeks, and this helped them process things better than the group who only completed two basic surveys, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the study.

4. Prioritize Your Physical Health

As you may already know from personal experience, a breakup can screw heavily with all of your bodily functions. Suddenly, [linkbuilder id=”5997″ text=”your favorite food”] has the appeal of rubber. The possibility of running into your ex at a party keeps you alert half the night playing out various fantasies of an emotional makeup.

How? Why? “Studies have found that people in long-term relationships tend to regulate each other’s biological rhythms,” Singh writes for NPR.
“A breakup can throw your entire physiology out of whack, disrupting your sleep, appetite, body temperature and heart rate. The stress of a divorce can compromise your immune system.”

Because your body is suffering more than just the usual daily stresses, it’s important to take good care of it: eat right, sleep well, exercise often, and get adequate emotional reinforcement from people you’re close to. All of this well help you regulate your brain chemistry, which love has seriously put into a funk.

5. Let time heal the wound.

Remember that time you were going through a breakup so bad that you lost five pounds in two days and spent nine hours straight researching how you might join the next mission to Mars, and someone you barely knew was like, “Time heals all wounds” and you laughed very loudly in their face?

Well, hackneyed or not, it’s true, and you should apologize to that person. (Just kidding, who says that to someone three hours after a terrible breakup?)
The more time that elapses after a split, the more distance you’ll have from that event, and the less it will sting (unless, as has been widely confirmed in scientific literature, you are listening to Adele).

The farther you get away from that moment of being dumped, the less activity there is in the brain system linked with feelings of deep attachment, Fisher says. “Just don’t do anything stupid [like listen to Adele], and the day will come when that person who’s been camping in your head is out.”

6. View The Relationship Narrative In Third Person

Self-distancing is a concept studied by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan that allows people to move past emotional conflicts like rejection by reframing the experience in third person. Anna Luerssen, PhD, writes about these findings in a post, “Reflection without Rumination,” for the Psych Your Mind blog about applying psychology to everyday life:

“In their research Ayduk and Kross contrast thinking about painful memories of this nature, from either a first- or a third-person perspective. When we think about the event from a first-person perspective, we put ourselves right back in our own shoes, and relive the event as if it was happening to us all over again.
“Ayduk and Kross hypothesized that this ‘self-immersed’ perspective increases negative emotion and the likelihood of ruminating. Alternatively, when we think about an event from a third-person perspective, we see everything unfold from afar; as if we are a fly on the wall or a distant observer of what’s happening.”

This kind of self-distancing, Luerssen says, has been linked to measurable advantages over those who self-immerse, such as smaller increases in blood pressure reactivity (linked to cardiovascular disease) and experiencing less anger and negative affect.

7. Reclaim your sense of self.

We have all been or known that person who, after a significant split, does something to drastically alter their life or personal appearance. Whether it’s chopping off all of your hair, dying it, getting pierced, moving across the country, or going to a three-months-long silent meditation retreat, we get it.

But, it turns out that these methods for coping may be more than just impulsive, escapist remedies—they may be fulfilling a real need to redefine the self. As Singh points out, “A growing body of research suggests that regaining a clear sense of self after a breakup is the key to moving on.”
That’s why the study with participants who came to the lab to answer questions about their breakups for nine weeks may have fared better.

Grace Larson, the study’s orchestrator, says, “I think that it’s possible that coming into the lab and answering these questions reminded them of their new status as singles.” With every visit, they gained more clarification on that new aspect of themselves.

8. Thou shalt not stalk on the internet.

This. Is. So. Hard.
The internet is everywhere. It’s at work. It’s at home. It’s in your hand nearly every moment of every day. And it’s there waiting to be used by you when you wake up in the middle of the night from a vivid grief dream about your ex.
It’s there, at all times, beckoning you to look at all of your ex’s 149 Instagram posts and daily tweets that you project complex meanings and backstories onto.

But, tender reader, you must put this practice to rest. Experts across the board seem to think it’s a terrible way to get over your ex, and it keeps this person’s phantom forever in your heart and search history, which is really embarrassing.
Since “stop doing that” isn’t really a helpful piece of advice, look into more specific suggestions—actions like blocking the page, finding a replacement habit (jumping jacks?), coming up with a reward system, or just getting off social media altogether.

Now go on! With or without the lava cakes, you’ve got this.

Tags 50016686, care, hemingway

Sweat

8 Ways That Women Are Superior To Men (According To Science)

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date March 6, 2017

If you reside on Earth, you’ve probably heard of the myriad ways men are superior to women.

Men have historically dominated the fields of science and philosophy and filtered their conclusions about the world through their own biases, resulting in some tragic, absurd, and hilarious misrepresentations of women.

While it’s true that many of the differences between the male and female human bodies and psychologies have been overblown—or outright fabrications—there are some real distinctions.

It’s March, so we’re putting the spotlight on female accomplishments and abilities. In honor of Women’s History Month, here are eight things science has suggested women are better at than men.

Seeing Colors

The stereotype about women being better at fashion or decoration may be rooted in truth, at least in one important respect: women are typically better at detecting colors, according to the results of a study by Brian Verrelli and Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland appearing in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The ability is rooted in a gene only found in the X chromosome that allows people to perceive the color red.

Kimberly Ovitt for Arizona Statue University explains: “The scientists speculate that enhanced color perception was important when women were the primary gatherers in the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence. It would have allowed them to better distinguish among fruits, foliage and insects.

“Therefore, nature supported the variation, despite some negative consequences to men. … It is the combination of a normal and variant gene, which occurs in about 40 percent of women, that may provide a broader spectrum of color vision in the red-orange range.”

Investing

While we’re fact-checking stereotypes, we may as well come out with it that the whole “Women are irresponsible with money” thing has some major holes in it.

Hannah Seligson writes in 2010 in The Washington Post, “Even if women don’t really need extra help with money, more of them think they do. The authors of women-focused financial books capitalize on and reinforce these insecurities and perpetuate stereotypes about women and money with their ‘girl, get a clue’ tone; their covers and titles that imply we are all out-of-control spenders on shoes and clothes; and their tendency to put financial concepts in the language of dieting and weight.”

As it turns out, though, women are significantly better at money in some areas, like investing.

A 2011 study by Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research found that women make better investors, largely because they take fewer risks—they’re trading less and earning more.

(This confirmed a 2005 study by Merrill Lynch and a 2009 academic study, both of which indicated that women make more from investing than men.)

The 2011 study concluded, “Women were more likely than men to have a greater desire for self-control.”

Empathy

It’s a well-worn stereotype that women are better at feelings than men. Many of us have come around to the idea that men actually aren’t very different emotionally from women—they’re just socialized differently. But this socialization can create some marked differences.

Our suspicion has long been that historically oppressed groups have a greater capacity for empathy, not biologically but because of lived experiences.

While we weren’t able to find any studies exp
loring this exact hypothesis, research has “repeatedly shown that participants who are in high positions of power (or who are temporarily induced to feel powerful) are less able to adopt the visual, cognitive or emotional perspective of other people, compared to participants who are powerless (or are made to feel so).”

It would seem to follow, then, that those from marginalized groups—like women—would have greater capacity for empathy than men, with some adjustments for race, class, and gender expression. At least, in 2014, Griffith University and the University of Queensland released “large-scale research” suggesting that, in romantic relationships, women are more empathetic toward their partners than men.

Female partner’s levels of empathy could be measured as comparable (24%) to the event happening directly to themselves, one article on the summary reads, “whereas men’s emotional lives were not linked to the experiences of their partner.”

“It is not that men are unemotional or uncaring, since they are quite strongly affected by what happens to themselves, but they simply are not very emotional when it comes to the feelings of their partner,” says Dr. Mervin, one of the study’s creators. Oh, okay!

Sniffing Stuff Out

Maybe, women readers, it was the time that one corner of your kitchen very obviously reeked of literal human fecal matter and was slowly driving you bonkers while the man you lived with shrugged and said “I don’t smell anything!”—it was the dirty mop, which wouldn’t happen if he would dump the water after using it, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, BRANDON—but it’s always been clear, to you at least, that women have a superior sense of smell.

A few years ago, science suggested this to be true Women may indeed have a more perceptive sniffer. And here’s the kicker: it’s due to more brain cells.

The study, led by a team from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, found more cells in the area of the brain dedicated to smell, the olfactory bulb.

This finding does not definitively point to a superior sense of smell, but Roberto Lent, the professor in the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Rio’s Federal University leading the study says that, “Generally speaking, larger brains with larger numbers of neurons correlate with the functional complexity provided by these brains.

Thus, it makes sense to think that more neurons in the female olfactory bulbs would provide women with higher olfactory sensitivity.”

Surviving Cars (Kinda, Maybe?)

It turns out that all that fear and guilt heaped onto women about their every move may have some benefits after all, at least according to Traffic STATS, a detailed risk analysis of road fatality statistics by Carnegie Mellon for the American Automobile Association released in 2007.

That research found that, based on miles driven, male drivers had a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than female drivers. And a 2010 New York Times article cites a study that found women to be safer drivers than men.

However, in 2011, a study published in The American Journal of Public Health found that, even when both groups were wearing seat belts, women driving cars were much more likely than male drivers to be seriously injured in a crash. Specifically, “investigators found that … belted female drivers suffered more chest and spine injuries than belted male drivers in comparable crashes.”

Car safety devices have been designed largely for men, and women may need safety features that take into account their differences, Nicholas Bakalar writes in The New York Times.

So…never mind! It looks like the fear and guilt was just uselessly adding to women’s misery.

Surviving In General (Definitely)

Despite men’s advantages over women in size, strength, and having the entire world built for them, women outlive men with consistency.

Why might this be? Our impression is that women tend to take better care of themselves than men do: eating more nutritiously, participating less in risky behaviors, following up with doctors regarding their health, and cultivating stronger social connections for emotional support.

And, according to Robert H. Shmerling, MD, faculty editor of Harvard Health Publications, these impressions are correct, but there’s more to the story.

Other reasons Shmerling cites for men’s stunted life expectancy include that, on average, men have more dangerous jobs, die of heart disease more often and at a younger age, are larger than women, and commit suicide more often than women. Who knew? Guess the misery goes both ways. Toxic masculinity, et cetera.

Scoring Higher On IQ Tests

James Flynn, world-renowned expert in IQ testing, released new findings in 2012 that women had finally surpassed men in scoring.

For the past 100 years, women had reportedly fallen behind men in IQ testing by as much as five points, but now women were in the lead.

In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen, but women’s have risen faster, Flynn told The Telegraph. “The brains of modern people are growing differently and showing increased cognitive complexity which we measure as increases in IQ. … This improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were disadvantaged in the past.”

Another theory put forth, aside from that women had always had greater capacity for intelligence but that they were not given the educational training to fulfill their potentials, was that modern demands on women to juggle professional and household responsibilities had caused their minds to evolve at a faster pace than men’s.

Getting To Mars (In Theory)

Maybe you have heard and are excited by scientists’ recent discovery of seven planets the same size as Earth that may be hospitable to life. That is indeed all very exciting—but remember Mars? Don’t forget Mars!

The NASA mission to the Red Planet is set for the 2030s, and while we have said before that we would be 100 percent open to a one-way trip to Mars if all of our family and friends were dead, we’re pretty disturbed by the idea when we think about it in too great of detail.

That’s not the case for Kate Greene, who spent four months “cooped up in a geodesic dome on the side of the very red, very rocky, very Mars-like Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii” as part of a Mars mission simulation. She writes in Slate about her conclusion after the experiment that an all-female crew would be the best to send to Mars, given that the female crew members were consistently burning and eating calories at a rate much lower than that of the male crew members.

Greene explains: “The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.”

We don’t know whether the mission will end up as an all-female crew or not. Whatever the case, we imagine that life on Mars won’t suffer from any delusions about male superiority.

Tags 50016651, body, hemingway

Wellbeing

What Starbucks Employees Can Teach You About Self-Control

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date March 6, 2017

Next to dealing with life-or-death situations, there may be no job more stressful than delivering people their morning coffees. We all know those people, the ones you wouldn’t dare cross before they’ve consumed 225 mg of caffeine straight to the face.

In his New York Times bestseller The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg writes about the ways Starbucks employees are taught to hack their behavior to manage their emotions and the emotions of others.

The key, he says, lies in habits: training employees so well that they can fall back on deeply ingrained coping mechanisms for conflict resolution even in highly stressful situations.

If you’re trying to learn how to manage your emotions—how to be less impulsive and more capable of resolving conflicts—you may want to consider picking up some of the following habits…

Embracing Routine

Travis Leach’s parents took him and his siblings camping every summer. Most Friday nights, they attended his sister and brother’s softball games. Travis went to Disneyland when he was 4. When he was 9, he saw his dad overdose on heroin. Travis’s parents were “functioning” addicts, cycling through heroin and crank while maintaining enough normalcy to keep custody of their kids.

At 16, Travis dropped out of high school. He tried working jobs at a car wash, McDonald’s, and Hollywood Video, but he was prone to emotional outbursts when customers were rude to him or work became too busy. After someone recommended that he get a job at Starbucks, his life changed; by age 25, he was manager of two Starbucks locations, with a salary, no debt, and a 401(k). What changed? His routine.

Starbucks “spent millions of dollars developing curriculums to train employees on self-discipline,” Duhigg writes in The Power of Habit. “Executives wrote workbooks that, in effect, serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers’ lives.”

Sounds good! But what does it look like in practice?

Resolving Conflicts The Starbucks Way

Sasha Mirzoyan worked at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Starbucks more than five years ago, but he still remembers the basic tenants of his training in dealing with disgruntled customers. “There was a funnel we had to follow,” he says.

First, “hear what they are upset about.” Second, “make them feel they are understood.” Finally, “offer a solution,” like making a new drink or offering something for free. The point, Mirzoyan notes, is to make the customer feel “in a genuine way” that you can relate to their discontent.

He’s referring to what they call at Starbucks the LATTE Method, an acronym encapsulating the steps of resolution. Employees are drilled in this response until the following becomes automatic: Listening to the customer, Acknowledging their complaint, Taking action by solving the problem, Thanking them, and Explaining why the problem occurred.

This kind of emotionally intelligent response process is proven to diffuse negativity, making things better for the person on either side of the confrontation. Starbucks isn’t the only organization to provide more emotional stability though.

Implementing The Golden Rule

Academics and researchers have given some side eye to Alcoholics Anonymous for its lack of structure, according to Duhigg in The Power of Habit, but in recent years they’ve begun to take note of why the organization has been such a force of change in the lives of many who join it.

Alcoholics Anonymous adheres to “the Golden Rule of habit change,” says Duhigg. That is, “AA succeeds because it helps alcoholics use the same cues, and get the same reward, but it shifts the routine.”

For example, the craving for drunkenness may really be a crav
ing for “escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release.” These rewards are sought after certain cues, or triggers, like traumatic events.

Once the recovering alcoholic is forced to examine the rewards they crave and the cues that precede these cravings, they can replace the go-to routine (drinking alcohol) with a different, healthier routine (talking to a sponsor, attending a group gathering, exercise) that can provide the same rewards.

Believing That Change Is Possible

Just have faith. It sounds trite, and, as Duhigg notes, researchers are not fond of the idea that some Other Force is responsible for people’s success, given that this is not a testable hypothesis—but recovering alcoholics consistently attribute their sustained sobriety to God.

When, in 2005, scientists began to test whether there was a correlation between religious belief and recovery, they uncovered a pattern: “Alcoholics who practiced the techniques of habit replacement, the data indicated, could often stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives—at which point, a certain number started drinking again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced. However, those alcoholics who believed … that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact.”

Of course, if you don’t believe in God, you can’t simply will yourself to do it without feeling like a fraud. Not to worry! “It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out,” writes Duhigg.

“It was belief itself that made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change.”

Practicing Self-Distance

If you’ve never had substance dependency issues, you’ve probably never considered yourself an addict. But have you ever been in love? If the answer is yes, you could, by some definitions, consider yourself among the addicted. Research reveals that the stew of brain chemicals resulting from romantic attachment is not so different from that brought on by a heroin high.

In that line of thinking, you might liken someone experiencing a painful breakup to someone going through withdrawals (with symptoms worsening during every surprise assault by that Adele song). At the very least, “a breakup throws both partners out of whack, like a caffeine addict suddenly deprived of her morning red-eye,” writes Grace Larson, a PhD student studying close relationships, for Vox.

To move on from the emotional trauma, Larson recommends something called “self-distancing,” or viewing the narrative of your breakup as if through the eyes of a third-party observer.

Try it with any emotionally gutting situation. “Researchers at Berkeley have found that this technique … can help people bounce back from distressing events like rejection,” Larson writes.

Refocusing Nervous Energy

When Michael Phelps started swimming at the age of 7, it was to keep him from driving other people up the wall.

His energy was exhausting to his mom and his teachers, and a local swimming coach, Bob Bowman, suggested the sport, given Phelps’s long torso, large hands, and comparatively short legs, all of which gave him the ideal swimmer’s body.

Despite being the perfect physical specimen, Phelps was unable to calm himself before races. He had a lot to cope with, like his parents’ divorce. So, Phelps’s coach bought him something. “Bowman purchased a book of relaxation exercises and asked Phelps’s mom to read them aloud every night,” writes Duhigg in The Power of Habit.

The script it contained instructed Phelps to tighten and release different parts of his body—turning one hand into a fist and then releasing it, for example—until every part had been relaxed before he fell asleep. In effect, Bowman was asking Phelps to redirect his energy into mindfulness meditation.

< /p>

Positive Envisioning

Something else Bowman had Phelps do was positive envisioning. Duhigg notes that Bowman instructed a teenage Phelps after each practice to “watch the videotape … before you go to sleep and when you wake up.” This “videotape” wasn’t literal, but “a mental visualization of the perfect race.”

Director of the Ohio Center for Sport Psychology, Dr. Jack J. Lesyk, confirms that this kind of visualization is an essential aspect of preparation for elite athletes.

“Successful athletes,” he says, “[c]reate and use mental images that are detailed, specific, and realistic.” Part of this process is also “[preparing] themselves for competition by imagining themselves performing well in competition” and “[using] imagery during competition to prepare for action and recover from errors and poor performances.”

It may sound wild or self-indulgent, but this process of mentally rehearsing a desired outcome can help you with anything, perhaps because, as some studies suggest, mental rehearsals activate some of the same neural pathways involved in real-life experiences. Anyone feel like watching The Matrix?

Perfecting “Oscillation”

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have spent years studying top executives—”corporate athletes”—to find whether their success can be condensed into some kind of formula. Their theories are informed by the two decades that performance psychologist Jim Loehr spent working with world-class athletes at LGE Performance Systems.

“If [executives] were to perform at high levels over the long haul, we posited, they would have to train in the same systematic, multilevel way that world-class athletes do,” Loehr and Schwartz tell the Harvard Business Review. They found that top executives’ capacity to perform well even in the face of increasing demands relies heavily on whether they have mastered “oscillation,” or “the rhythmic movement between energy expenditure (stress) and energy renewal (recovery).”

Echoing the premise of Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Loehr and Schwartz hold that it’s “these highly precise, consciously developed routines [that] become automatic over time” and allow optimum performance. In other words, conscious habits are the key to living your best life.

So go ahead, take your 225 mg of caffeine straight to the face—and then get to planning.

Tags 50012996, hemingway, mind

Wellbeing

Researchers Say There Is A Link Between "Inappropriate" Girls' Clothing And Body Image

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date March 1, 2017

Sexuality is complicated. So is gender identity. Let’s just get that out of the way. The scope of it is too big for one article, but let’s go smaller: girls, clothing, and body image.

We get a little queasy when we hear the word “inappropriate” applied to girls’ and women’s clothing. We break out in small hives when we hear the word “should” applied to it.
We get palpitations, our mouths go dry, and we feel rage rise like bile at the back of our throats when we observe people—specifically male people in male bodies— criticize women who are probably intellectually and morally superior to them all because of some arrangement of fabric the women have chosen to drape around their human forms. We want to plug our ears and close our eyes and hum loudly while remembering this Danish couple from Into the Wild.

There exists a long and convoluted history of women being ridiculed for what they wear—in whether it covers too much or too little, and in how it relates to their sexuality. No woman is safe from this. It happens to female celebrities, high school students, politicians, journalists, athletes, and, basically, regular women everywhere JUST TRYING TO LIVE THEIR GODFORSAKEN LIVES.
Whew. Sorry, blacked out for a moment. Where were we? Oh yes: girls, clothing, and body image. It’s complicated because, on the one hand, we want girls to be free to wear what they want. On the other hand, we have to take into consideration that girls, like all young humans, are sponges, susceptible to the messages they receive from the world around them.

One of those messages, for example, is that a female human’s value is inextricable from her sexuality—whether she is sexy enough, pure enough, “sexy without being sexual” enough. (Yes, that’s a real thing, we’ll get there.) All of her other attributes? Beside the point.
So it’s not surprising when some researchers say there is a link between hypersexualized girls’ clothing and poor body image. When people are programmed to express themselves in ways that don’t feel authentic, autonomy takes a hit and some parts of themselves are erased.

Equally damaging is the message that being sexual makes a girl bad or gross—or that her worth and integrity are directly proportionate to her “purity,” an entirely subjective concept. We would recommend taking on this topic in your private studies. But for starters, here are eight probably damaging views of girls and women and the clothes they wear.

Girls Are Like This

If you haven’t watched this video of an 8-year-old girl slamming the gender stereotypes perpetuated by the messaging she finds in gendered clothing while shopping with her mom (boys get “Hero!,” “Think outside the box,” and “A desert adventure awaits,” while girls get “Hey,” “Beautiful,” and “I feel fabulous!”), you’ve probably at least seen it circulating on social media.

Surely this messaging acts in some ways as a social cue, but the problem lies mostly in that it’s a symptom of a larger sickness—a world culture that grooms women as girls to be collapsible objects with limited autonomy and domain. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with girls who like “girly” things. The problem is when girls are explicitly or implicitly told that the only appropriate way to be is “girly,” and that their interests should naturally lie only in specific areas. And then there’s the related issue of treating “girly” things and behaviors contemptuously.
Those who like to roll their eyes at this point and harken back to the good old days when people weren’t always making such a fuss about political correctness should take note that, while these signals are subtle, they are important. We still live in a world where, for example, it may take 170 years for the economic gender gap to close.

On top of all that, just as women’s clothing is often inferior in quality to men’s clothing, apparently the same holds true for girls’ clothes versus boys’. We just can’t with these clothing companies.

The Paris Paradox

Here’s a fun torture chamber of ideas: Girls should be sexy without being sexual. If this piece of advice sounds confusing, it’s because it is! It’s one of those often repeated, little examined maxims that we hold within our collective consciousness where it can erode our souls slowly and secretly.

Women and girls being sexy for someone else is more or less OK, as long as no actual sex occurs, and as long as the version of ‘sexy’ has appropriate markers of being middle- or upper-class, writes Jill Filipovic for The Guardian. “Women who exhibit a degree of sexual agency by acting – rather than only appearing attractive – or women perceived as inappropriately powerful or aggressive inevitably face being branded sluts and whores.”
It’s referred to as the “Paris Paradox” in a 2010 Jezebel article because Paris Hilton, whose ethos resonated with many young women, referred to herself as “sexy, but not sexual.” (The irony of referencing an article written by a “male feminist” notorious for his own abuses of power to get sex from women, often young minority women, not to be confused with that world-famous “ethicist” who reportedly did the same, is not lost on us. But what he writes here resonates so we’ll use it and leave others to argue the rest, which makes us want to leave our earthly form and reside as a spirit in the mountains.)

The Paris Paradox is often, consciously or unconsciously, pandering to the male gaze at its finest—presenting as a sort of “virginal s***” who is sexually palatable to hetero dudes but also untouched by them. (A read-through of the mostly hostile, clearly male-authored Urban Dictionary definitions of the term yields no sympathetic explanation, like that it’s a mode of behavior that may have been adopted by a young woman who is trying to navigate a world in which she is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.)
As the Jezebel article reasons:
“Young women with the Paris Paradox were raised in a culture that promised sexual freedom, but what they ended up with looked a lot more like obligation than opportunity. It’s not hard to understand why the pressure to be sexy so often trumps the freedom to discover one’s authentic sexuality. … It only takes a girl a few seconds to realize what someone else may want from her sexually. It often takes her much longer to figure out what she really wants, to discern the pleasure she gets from bringing pleasure to another from the pleasure she wants for herself.”

Girls Who Show A Lot Of Skin Are Sexual/Sexy

The idea that just because a girl dresses in a way that shows a lot of skin means that she either does or should behave sexually can be found in angry, dude-heavy threads all across the internet, as if wearing something that men find sexually arousing is the equivalent of entering into some binding, unspoken contract with them. This thinking is wrong.

Men are not wrong for being sexually attracted to these women; they’re wrong for believing that their perceptions of the world are the only or the most important realities, and that their perceptions of reality should dictate the way that women lead their lives. Men who would like to argue that the same should be true vice versa lest we be unfair would do well to read up on something called History, which shows that their (straight white male) realities have consistently been favored as the Proper And Most Important Perceptions and, as such, institutionalized in laws and social mores.
Consider the history of toplessness, and the ways that bared female breasts, especially in places like the U.S. where their tabooness likely does more to fetishize them than anything, have often only been weaponized as some hostile attack on purity or sexualized as an invitation for leering.

Breasts are not so one-dimensional. Sometimes they are sexual, sometimes they are comforting, sometimes they feed new humans, sometimes they are good for dancing, sometimes they are a good place for storing things like pencils or credit cards or a small package of crackers, and sometimes they are just there doing absolutely nothing.

Sexual/Sexy Girls Are Good

But only the “right” kind of sexual and sexy, which is, of course, defined by hetero dudes. The idea that what hetero dudes find appealing in women is superior to other ways of being as a female person is a persistent one, and it’s basically the conviction that the only girl who is worthwhile is “a cool, chill girl who is Cool and Chill,” aka a figment of the male imagination. She is described thusly by Beth McColl in Dazed:

The cool and chill girl enjoys stereotypically masculine things like watching ‘Sports’ […] Her favourite movies are Die Hard [and] Fight Club … She doesn’t bother her man with serious conversations. She’s there when he wants, but when he needs space, she’s gone without him even needing to ask. She looks like a supermodel without spending hours getting ready.

Sexual/Sexy Girls Are Bad

It’s interesting to watch this American Psychological Association video interview with six middle-school girls talking about women celebrities, women represented in ads, and the sexualization of girls. How people feel about things is usually a tangling of our natural reactions and how we believe we are supposed to feel (different still are how we feel about things and how we say we feel), and these girls’ responses reflect these unclear boundaries.
All sexually suggestive images of women are deemed “gross,” “not cute,” and “not attractive.” Maybe they actually do feel this way, maybe they simply believe these are the “correct” answers, or maybe they’ve absorbed the message that girls and women who appear or behave sexually are morally bankrupt, and they haven’t been exposed to the language of sexual empowerment for women who do choose to dress in ways deemed provocative.

Also apparent are some racialized notions of beauty and purity, as when the picture of Nicki Minaj’s booty is deemed “more big than attractive” (perhaps unsurprisingly, by the white girl) and another girl (of color) seems to dub Michelle Obama’s classiness a rarity among African-American women.
There is indeed a double standard for white and black women, with the former afforded more freedom to explore different identities with comparatively fewer and lower-stakes repercussions. As Lutze B. points out in this Salon article: “The bodies of black women are highly politicized and critiqued no matter who they belong to, from the first lady to ‘the help.’ The physical movements and choices of black women are always viewed through a filter of suspicion.”

Girls Who Cover Up Are Modest/Prudes

A woman who covers more of her body is not, as a rule, automatically less sexual in thought or behavior than a woman who covers up less. She may be, but she may not be. We don’t know her life!
What if she’s naturally shy about showing her body to anyone? What if she finds it more erotic to cover more of her body on some occasions and go completely nude on others? What if she’s tired of getting catcalled and she’s experienced it less while covering more?

What if she likes the feeling of an all-silk suit against her skin? What if she prefers the aesthetic? What if she is entirely uninterested in clothing and covering more just seems more practical to her? What if she’s worried about skin cancer or has a skin condition that worsens with exposure to sunlight?
The possibilities are as endless as your imagination. We shouldn’t assume that we understand her motivations for being covered up.

Modest Girls Are Good

The narrative that women are sinful seductresses who “cause” men to “stumble” is literally as old as the Bible. (See Genesis.) When you take that deeply cherished conviction and pair it with the reactionary social climate of the 1990s, you get the purity movement, an evangelical Christian philosophy that promoted abstinence as the key to progress and—surprise—placed the onus of responsibility for men’s sexual behavior primarily on the shoulders of women.

As Amanda Barbee writes in “NAKED AND ASHAMED: WOMEN AND EVANGELICAL PURITY CULTURE” for a digital and print journal focused on the intersection of theology and culture:
“While the church has often taught that sexuality can only be properly expressed within marriage, the purity movement takes that premarital prohibition to a deeper level, not only calling for physical abstinence but also for emotional and mental purity. Similar to Jesus’s teaching on adultery in the Beatitudes—that a man who even looks at a woman lustfully has already sinned—the movement teaches that any sexual feelings, desires, or thoughts that occur before marriage are sinful.”
The result? “During a time when sexual curiosity and exploration is a normal and important part of sexual and psychological development,” Barbee writes, “these teenagers and young adults are being indoctrinated by a shame-based culture that trains them in the ways of sexual dissociation.”
Out of this also came the modesty doctrine, promoting hyper vigilance among women of the way they dressed or behaved for fear that they might unsuspectingly arouse male attention. (“My mind reeled when I met one young woman who told me she was once ordered by her father to wear her seatbelt underneath her chest—apparently he felt when it cut across her chest, it accentuated her breasts too much and could cause some men to ‘stumble,'” writes Jennifer Mathieu for Time.)
This way of thinking removes the agency of both men and women, and encourages women to fuse their self-conceptions with a sexualized male gaze. As many have pointed out, it’s also the basis of rape culture, which shifts the blame onto the victim rather than the perpetrator.

Modest Girls Are Bad

Belittling women who do choose to cover up more of their bodies is unhelpful and reductive. Janelle Monáe, for example, has often opted to wear outfits that don’t show very much skin. One man tweeted at her, “girl stop being so soulful and be sexy..tired of those dumba** suits..you fine but u too damn soulful man.”
Her response was perfect: “sit down. I’m not for male consumption.”

Not every woman who covers herself for religious reasons feels victimized, either. In a BuzzFeed article enumerating all the items of clothing women were told not to wear in 2014, Rossalyn Warren highlights the contradictions of this kind of policing.
“In Australia, it was announced this month that Muslim women wearing niqabs could be forced to sit in glass enclosures instead of regular public galleries in Federal parliament,” writes Warren. She goes on to quote Mariam Veiszadeh, an Australian lawyer and a Muslim, who notes, “There’s a distinct irony in the suggestion that women who are allegedly forced to wear a face covering should be forced not to wear it.'”

In summary: Respect girls and women. Listen to their experiences with compassion. Don’t make laws about what they can wear. And when you’re feeling overwhelmed personally by these dissections, because all humans and ideas start to seem problematic when you look at them too deeply and there are no clear answers to anything, step away and breathe.
All we can do is our very best to love one another well. If we’re lucky, soon we’ll leave our earthly forms anyway and reside together as spirits in the mountains. Until then, we’ll continue to dress only for the sea witch that cursed us.

Tags 50016276, hemingway, mind

Sweat

You Won't Believe What People Used To Think Was True About The Female Body

Post author By Anna Cherry
Post date February 7, 2017

Remember when women were considered men’s property? It was a pretty wild time! Thankfully the women’s lib movement happened in the mid-20th century and men realized that women were actual human beings—with values, preferences, and rich inner worlds equal in complexity to their own—and they all lived happily ever after.

Just kidding! Donald Trump is president. Anywho, if you have a vagina and you’ve often experienced the creeping suspicion that men misunderstand you on some fundamental level…well, yes.

But if you want to take that misunderstanding to a whole other, more empirical level, check out these fully bonkers theories based on of-the-time Science And Stuff, crafted—you guessed it—by the minds of men.

Women Were Underdeveloped Men

Whereas now traditional models of gender hold that there are two sexes—male and female—this was not always the case. It wasn’t until the 18th century, apparently, that the current gender binary emerged. Before that, women were not understood as a separate sex, but rather a lesser version of men.

As Stephanie E. Libbon writes in her 2007 analysis, “Pathologizing the Female Body: Phallocentrism in Western Science,” for the Journal of International Women’s Studies: “According to the writings of ancient Greeks, there was a hierarchical order to life that placed all living creatures on a vertical continuum. Those bodies possessing the lowest heat or energy were located at one end of this spectrum and those possessing the greatest at the opposite end. By locating humanity at the hottest end and men above women, the Greeks defined humans as the most perfect life form and men, by reason of their excess heat, more perfect than women.”

Sounds right!

Women Produced Semen, Maybe

If you remember studying ancient Greece, you probably remember how into body fluids—”humours”—they were as an indicator of physical and mental health.

“Of these humours, blood was seen as the most precious and life-giving,” Libbon writes. “When purified through heat, blood was held to reach its most refined state—that of semen.” Naturally.

So dudes running science and philosophy agreed that semen was pretty great. What they couldn’t agree on was whether women, too, could produce semen.

A prominent physician of the time, Galen, held that, since male and female genitalia were the same (though women’s testes were inside near their uteruses, and men, due to their hot hot bodies, carried their organs externally), women could produce semen. The difference, Libbon writes, is that Galen believed female semen “was thinner and cooler than the male’s, and thus indicative of her lower standing in nature.”

Meanwhile, “Aristotle claimed only men had the heat necessary to convert blood into this purest form.” Vintage Aristotle.

Women Who Craved Sex Had A Mental Illness

If you’ve never seen the movie Hysteria with Maggie Gyllenhaal, consider watching it as a fun educational primer on a condition whose existence has decidedly less fun implications—namely that women who craved sex were deeply disturbed.

Hysteria has a long history that Maya Dusenbery explores in the Mother Jones timeline “Female Hysteria and the Sex Toys Used to Treat It.” Symptoms for hysteria “included fainting, anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness and ‘a tendency to cause trouble for others.'”

Oh yeah, also “erotic fantasy and excessive vaginal lubrication.” In other words, these women were what some of us might refer to today as horny af . “For centuries,” writes Dusenbery, “galloping on horseback, riding in carriages, or vigorous use of a rocking chair had been recommended to treat hysteria.”

The idea that women might just, you know, have sex drives exactly like men did not compute, however, so doctors came up with various “treatments” for hysteria over the years, many of which concluded in a “hysterical paroxysm,” or what some o
f us might refer to today as an orgasm. Pelvic massage anyone?

Women Who Exhibited Typical Human Behaviors Had A Mental Illness

Men calling women crazy is a trope that persists today with varying degrees of seriousness. In the 19th century, however, when men called women crazy, there was little doubt that they meant it literally, because they sent them to literal mental institutions.

The reasons that might lead to a woman’s mental downfall and resulting institutionalization were myriad, and absurd, as is evidenced by a list from the Weston State Hospital for the Insane ’s log book that includes things like “novel reading,” “laziness,” “egotism,” “fits and desertion of husband,” and “masturbation.”

As you may have already guessed, some of these men had ulterior motives. Maureen Dabbagh notes in her 2001 book Parental Kidnapping in America: An Historical and Cultural Analysis that “[t]his opened the door to many spousal abuses,” including “[using] lunacy laws to rid themselves of their partners and in abducting their children.”

Dabbagh goes on to to tell the story of 35-year-old Georgia mother who, in 1884, was “tricked” into a courtroom with her seven children after her husband had petitioned to have her admitted to an asylum for “unsoundness of mind.”

Women’s Uteruses Detached And Strolled Around Inside Their Bodies

You know that common joke about how a man’s penis has a mind of its own? Well, for a while, people really believed that a woman’s uterus was an autonomous agent—one that was inclined to get up and wander around her body, wreaking havoc on her mental and physical stability.

This idea of the “wandering womb” originated, yes, with the ancient Greeks, specifically Plato and Hippocrates. But even centuries later, by the Victorian age, folks hadn’t gotten it right.

As is noted in the paper “Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health,” the majority of “women carried a bottle of smelling salts in their handbag: they were inclined to swoon when their emotions were aroused, and it was believed … the wandering womb disliked the pungent odor and would return to its place, allowing the woman to recover her consciousness.”

Surprising no one (probably), physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia compared the womb to “an animal within an animal.” Cool to meet you too, Aretaeus!

Educating Women Would Make Them Infertile

Learning has typically been a no-no for oppressed groups, and women are no different. Usually the concern was more that the oppressed would become enlightened, realize they were mad as hell, and decide that they weren’t going to take it anymore.

You know, things that oppressed groups have been doing historically since the beginning of oppression.

With women, the concern was more localized: would they still be able to pop babies out of their vaginas? The consensus among some thinkers of the time, strangely, was no.

In Pathologizing the Female Body: Phallocentrism in Western Science, Libbon quotes an 1898 essay from German pathologist Paul Möbius: “If we wish to have women who fulfil their responsibilities as mothers, we cannot expect them to have a masculine brain. If it were possible for the feminine abilities to develop in a parallel fashion to those of a male, the organs of motherhood would shrivel, and we would have a hateful and useless hybrid creature on our hands.” K.

Women Had Vampiric Vages

If folklore is a reflection of a group’s most primitive fears and desires (hint: it is), men from back in the ancient day were kind of terrified of vaginas.

Evidence would be the pervasive vagina dentata myth about vagina with teeth. It’s a theme that’s shown up all around the world, dating back to ancient times.

As Gabrielle Moss writes in Bustle, “Most theorists believe the myth to be linked to ‘castration anxiety’ and a general fear of the power of women’s sexuality — especially because a lot of that folklore ends with the hero triumphing by breaking off his ladyfriend’s vag teeth and then doing it with her.”

Given the number of horror movies relying on plotlines that feature toothy or otherwise frightening vaginas , we’d say there may be some unresolved issues. You’d almost get the impression that men still have some sort of hangup about female bodies or women with power?

Women Had Poisonous Period Blood

We’ve heard women apply a host of descriptions to their periods, and while it’s true that most aren’t particularly overjoyed by them, they’ve never said something like, for example, “My period blood is actually poisonous and it can wilt flowers and ruin children’s eyes with a single glance.”

Yet, these are a couple of real things that certain people (ahem, men) over the course of history have speculated that period blood, or a woman on her period, was capable of.

In a Refinery29 slideshow of “8 Of The Craziest Myths About Women’s Bodies You Never Heard,” it’s noted that “there was a serious debate in the 1920s about ‘menotoxin,’ a toxin that was believed to exist inside menstrual blood.” However, the theory of toxic menstrual blood “originally popped up in the 13th-century book De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) ,” a book that notably calls women monsters.

Monsters? That’s a pretty serious claim. We’ll address it just as soon as we finish vigorously using this rocking chair.

Tags 50013686, body, hemingway