Category Archives: psychology
Too rich, too thin, too in control of women’s bodies
A rich Wall Streeter looks in the mirror and sees someone at the cusp of poverty.
An anorexic looks in the mirror and sees someone who is fat.
One is addicted to money. The other to starvation. As each grasps for power.
Enter Mike Huckabee.
***
In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough.
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Women Get All The Good Emotions, Says Cross-Dresser
I think it’s quite hard for men today, because there’s an increasingly narrow bandwidth of behaviors which are seen as exclusively masculine. As women have quite rightly encroached on what used to be seen as male territory, all that’s left is the negative things. There’s less scope for a sensitive man to feel at home. What kind of men do we actually want boys to become?
That’s British artist and cross-dresser, Grayson Perry. We met him earlier in a discussion on “Men Who Wear Frocks.” He wears dresses, he says, because they help him get in touch with the feminine side of his humanity, which is blocked by a culture that suppresses male emotion.
Here’s how Perry explains that process of female “encroachment” into (so-called) male territory:
Until the later part of the 19th century, cross-dressing in ordinary life was an overwhelmingly female to male activity. Typically it tended to be a woman just trying to get on in a man’s world. But in the Victorian age, the traffic started to switch direction. Since then transvestism has become an overwhelmingly male to female behavior.
As the Victorians increasingly corralled all the softer emotions, vulnerability, innocence, gentleness, beauty into an exclusively feminine realm, men were cast as stoical, butch, practical providers, and dressed accordingly. Is it any wonder that some men started to want to cross over? For me, what the Victorians wore is the most striking example of how clothes can come to symbolize complex emotions.
So women started out more apt to mimic men in order to grasp greater opportunity and self-expression. Not to mention, gaining the status and privilege of the masculine world.
These days, women commonly express a whole range of so-called masculine traits and activities without being seen as crossing gender boundaries. They’re just doing “people-stuff.”
But men have not taken on feminine traits and activities to the same degree. Not because they can’t, but because they mostly won’t.
Why not?
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Girls Get Friend-Zoned, Too
Think only guys get friend-zoned?
Well, I’ve been interested in men who saw me as “just a friend,” too. One particularly can’t-take-my-eyes-off-you gorgeous man comes to mind. It’s not that I asked him out and got rejected. He just never asked me out. So we stayed friends when I wanted more. Leaving me in the friend zone.
So even women who don’t ask men out get friend-zoned. Unless every man they are interested in asks them out–which is hard to imagine.
Yeah, being “friended” in a not-so-wanted way happens to women, too.
True, the friend-zone is more in-your-face for guys since they’re expected to make the first move. So it may be more hurtful for them in that way. But we all end up in the same place: outside the arms we want to be in.
Of course, it’s possible that some of the men that women are interested in simply don’t make that first move because they are shy or don’t realize we find them attractive. So that brings up another topic. Girls often don’t feel like they can ask guys out. Read the rest of this entry
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Why is Lena Dunham Naked on GIRLS?
Why is Lena Dunham constantly naked on HBO’s Girls?
Well, not constantly. It just seems like it to some folks. A ruckus broke out last week when The Wrap reporter, Tim Molloy, asked Girls creator, Lena Dunham this question:
I don’t get the purpose of all of the nudity on the show, by you particularly, and I feel like I’m walking into a trap where you go, ‘Nobody complains about the nudity on Game of Thrones,’ but I get why they are doing it. They are doing it to be salacious and, you know, titillate people. And your character is often naked just at random times for no reason.
It’s a question that has stuck in my mind.
Artists say they only do nudity for artistic reasons, not prurient purposes. So why is titillation the only legit rationale for Mr. Molloy?
Ms. Dunham says,
It’s because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive.
Alive, and not ashamed of your body, it seems to me.
Lena does not have what’s considered the ideal body type. But her obvious comfort has made me aware of my own discomfort. Read the rest of this entry
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It’s Not Easy Being A Man
![self-madeManCoverweb[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/self-mademancoverweb1.jpg)
Norah Vincent passed as a man for a year and a half. She wrote a book about the experience, Self-Made Man, which was published in 2006. When one gender visits the world of another it can be eye-opening, so let’s take a peek at one part of the woman-turned-man experience.
Turns out, it’s not easy being a man.
Norah had thought she’d love joining the privileged man-club that, until her transition, she had only glimpsed from the outside. Instead, she felt strangely inadequate.
For instance, as a lesbian, she’d expected dating to be the fun part. But it was arduous. One of the most difficult parts of her research. In her new man-role she felt an expectation to lead, take charge. This made her feel small in her costume. Read the rest of this entry
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Women as Prey, Men as Predator
Women are expected to attract, men are supposed to be attracted. Men want, women want to be wanted. Metaphorically, this is a predator/prey type relationship. Women are subject to the hunt whether they like it or not, so men’s attention can be pleasing, annoying, or frightening. It all depends.
Accordingly, women know what it feels like to be prey.
That’s from Prof. Lisa Wade of Occidental College and the popular blog, Sociological Images (where I got the great cartoon, too.)
Not all men make women feel this way, she says, and probably most don’t, but we’ve all pretty much had this experience, whether it’s,
The leering guy on the street, the heavy hitter in the bar, the frotteurist on the subway, the molesting uncle, the aggressive fraternity brother, etc.
Does homophobia arise partly from being demoted on the food chain and feeling like prey, she wonders? Read the rest of this entry
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Getting Creeped Out to Fit In
Sometimes we’re confused about what’s “normal” and end up doing uncomfortable things — that may even creep us out — just to fit in.
Take wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am (or sir) sex. Plenty of us are really into it. But usually, we think others are more comfortable with random sex than we are, ourselves.
University of Texas sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, studied sex on college campuses and found that many young people feel conflicted between their private preferences and their public behavior because they think everyone else — most importantly, “the popular” — want hookups. To not join in — or at least act like you want to — would be social suicide.
That, in turn, creates its own reality: a hookup culture that everyone thinks is real, but which is a figment of the collegiate imagination. Because while most say they’re for it, most don’t actually do it.
Researchers, Chris Reiber and Justin Garcia asked college students how comfortable they felt doing acts ranging from “first base” to “home run” (you might say) with someone they barely knew. Their findings were reported in “Hooking Up: Gender Difference, Evolution and Pluralistic Ignorance” In the journal, Evolutionary Psychology (2010).
Turns out, women and men, alike, tend to think that men are more comfortable in random carnal intimacies than they, themselves, are. AND, Read the rest of this entry
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I Made Fun of Feminists… Before My Abuse
Rape Awareness
By Anonymous
I used to make fun of feminists because I wanted boys to like me. Back before I met a boy who abused me. Before realizing that I lived in a culture that supported my abuse, and that kept me from questioning it.
TRIGGER WARNING May be triggering for some survivors of sexual violence
At seventeen I met my ex-boyfriend. It was small things at first. He’d put me down and laugh it off.
The first time he raped me I didn’t cry. I was numb. I asked if he realized what he’d done and he had said, matter-of-factly, “All girls get raped at some point.” Read the rest of this entry
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Audrey Hepburn Smashed My Beauty Myths
By Jessica Minasi
Most of us fall far from today’s beauty ideal: Blonde, blue-eyed, and skinny yet buxom.
Audrey Hepburn opened my eyes to how beauty can be defined.
After all, she only fits one of those narrow criteria. And her beauty is so much more than physical.
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How Guys Think About Sex & Dating
By Andrew Smiler @ The Good Men Project
As someone who does research on young men’s sexual development and has written a book about it, I often get asked if all guys “just want sex.” The answer is no, of course. Not all guys are the same.
Nearly all guys have and want relationships, even the guys who screw around.
Regardless of their sexual history or interest in having random sex, when a guy has a sweetie, that relationship is important to him, even if he’s not very good at respecting it or making it work. Dudes like knowing they have someone to talk to, someone who will be there for them, and someone who will “have their back.” Men in long term marriages receive a slew of benefits from those relationships.
In order to help you figure out where you stand – or where your (potential) partner stands – here’s a field guide to guys’ approaches to dating and sex. The simplest way to know which category a guy fits in is to find out how many sexual partners he averages per year. You might not be comfortable asking that question and you might not get an honest answer, but this guide will give you other things to consider.
Casanovas (or players) live out the classic hook-up script: Read the rest of this entry
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