"Olhar para os ataques de que Irene foi alvo por exemplo no Twitter, onde deu mostras de uma inteligência, capacidade argumentativa e pedagógica e paciência impressionantes, é assistir a uma espécie de catálogo das reações a uma mulher que ousa erguer-se no espaço público. Desde logo, a apreciação física: uma parte considerável dos comentários, de homens e mulheres, foram sobre o corpo de Irene. Particularmente significativa é a fúria contra os pêlos nas axilas, aliás um clássico: de cada vez que surge uma imagem de mulher que não se depila temos uma espécie de linchamento generalizado. Sucedeu com Madonna, com a filha de Madonna e em inúmeros outros casos." Fernanda Câncio, A Raiva às Mulheres Sem Medo
"Podemos dizer adeus a toda a teoria do comportamento humano, da linguística à sociologia. Podemos esquecer a taxonomia, a ontologia e a psicologia. Quem sabe porque fazem as pessoas o que fazem? A questão é o que fazem e que nós podemos segui-lo e medi-lo com uma fidelidade sem precedentes. Com suficientes dados, os números falam por si."
Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine Julho 2008
"Unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. As the first, soon we hardly notice anymore the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the promise of reward that will come after a long, difficult, and worthy task. The other consequence is that, after awhile, we even habituate to those artificial deluges of intensity.... Our tragedy is that we just become hungrier.
Thanks to the way our brains work, chronic over-stimulation fails to satisfy; it can leave a person nearly insatiable. Someone may find himself wondering automatically about every woman, "Would she engage in...?" Also, any resentment that arises from the mismatch between his virtual reality and his physical reality may raise doubts about his partner/union, making him uncharacteristically irritable and self-absorbed. He'll focus on what his relationship doesn't offer, not on what it does. Nor does dissatisfaction necessarily stop there. Humans tend to project such feelings automatically onto other aspects of life as well... sadly, distorted perception born of neurochemical dysregulation can make a person extremely resistant to understanding what's really driving him or what would ease his misery. His limbic brain has him firmly convinced that only his drug of choice will restore his good feelings.
It can take an uncomfortable month or two to restore normal perception after habitual overstimulation. But as ravenous feelings ease, it's easier to find satisfaction in every aspect of life." Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
"Compreendi que não me era proibido algo inesperado e beijei-lhe a boca e os olhos. Afastou-me com suave firmeza e logo declarou:
— Serei tua na pousada de Thorgate. Peço-te, entretanto, que não me toques. É melhor que assim seja.
Para um solteiro entrado em anos, o oferecido amor amor é uma dádiva que já não se espera. O milagre tem o direito de impor condições."
Jorge Luis Borges, Ulrica
"For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn."
"After the article's publication, I was flooded by distressed — and distressing — emails from men who reported that what I described had happened to them. They were distraught. They wrote to me that, over time, they felt a need to watch more and more porn to achieve arousal at all; they felt less and less choice about whether or not to use it; and they were experiencing escalating sexual difficulty in bed with their girlfriends or wives, to whom they had previously been very attracted. These men were a perfectly "normal" cross section of people with no apparent axe to grind; they had no ideological objections to porn use in general, and were not "crusaders" — they were just suffering, and frightened. What really struck me was that haunting sense many had of a loss of choice; these were often men who were perfectly in control in most or all other areas of their lives, and they were writing to me about feeling themselves to be at the mercy of something in their lives over which they felt powerless."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina
"In Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) or Indian fifteen hundred years ago or in the thirteenth-century Japan, when the vagina was portrayed as the most sacred spot in the most sacred temple in a sacred universe, that was how woman's brains experienced their vaginas. When, as in medieval Europe during the witch hunts the culture cast the vagina as the devil's playground and the gateway to hell, a woman in that culture felt herself to be built up around a core of existential shame. If, as in Elizabethan England, a culture portrays the vagina as a hole, a woman in that culture will feel that she is centered around emptiness or worthlessness; when, as in Germany and England and America after Freud, a woman's culture portrays the vagina's response as a test of womanliness, she is likely to feel herself insufficiently womanly. When a woman's culture – as in today's women's magazine-type sexual athleticism in the West – casts the ideal vagina as a producer of multiple orgasms on call, she will feel herself put to a continual, impossible test. When mass culture represents any given vagina as just one in ten million available orifices, as in today's porn industry, a woman will feel her sexual self to be replaceable, not important and not sacred.
And all this is not superficial: these perceptions are constructed at the level of neural synapses. In other words, the female brain changes physically over time in response to these kinds of repeated triggers in the environment. These triggers also affect her confidence and sense of hope." Naomi Wolf, Vagina
"The c-word, 'cunt', is perhaps the most offensive word in the English language, and consequently it has never been researched in depth. Hugh Rawson's Dictionary Of Invective contains the most detailed study of what he calls "The most heavily tabooed of all English words" (1989), though his article is only five pages long. Cunt: A Cultural History Of The C-Word is therefore intended as the first comprehensive analysis of this ancient and powerful word." Aqui
"The theme of the "uppity woman" having her vagina targeted in lieu of her brain is a universal theme still — both in emerging democracies and in the "advanced" West. In Egypt, once part of the British Empire, this practice had an echo: women protesters have played prominent roles in the"Arab Spring" and the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011–12 — and these "unruly" women are being targeted by the state for forced vaginal exams." Naomi Wolf, Vagina
The 'combinator capability' [that differenciates humans from Neanderthals and primates] allows description, and once you got description there's a trail that can lead you all the way up to the 'strong story hypothesis' [+/- min 18:40]
Story understanding is very fundamental to any real understanding of human intelligence.
What makes conceptual development possible, and what makes it so hard?
How is it, we are the only animals who can think thoughts formulated on concepts like cancer or infinity or wisdom or carborator? What makes this possible? The acquisition of concepts, possible?
Cognitive science has the theoretical and methodological tools to answer both questions.
Probably the most seminal work on this classical set of issues has happened at MIT, both in the linguistics department (Chomsky) and the AI department and the brain and cognitive science department.
To use a conceptual system you need to run through a logic. We are trying to figure out the blueprint of this logic.
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Q&A:
Q: – On the many levels of meaning (literal meanings, enriched meanings...): How does this affect your research when you work with young children and you test their understanding of number words? In these tasks you have to give them full sentences, you have to ask them things like: "Can you give me two cookies..."
Q: – Do you see any role for the more logical part of the vocabulary. Whether you think that it really needs to be modeled in a precise way to make sense of people understanding stories?
A: – Patrick Winston answers. "How can we humans make ourselves smarter? – If we want to make ourselves smarter, draw pictures and talk, because we have tremendous problem solving power in our visual and linguistics systems. So, to make ourselves smarter, we have to engage these systems, and one way to engage them is to draw pictures and talk. You can't do that when you're answering your email. You can only do that when you're taking notes, with a pencil and drawing, and engaging your language system. The miracle of human language and visual processing systems."
Q: – On language as a vehicle of thought. Language learning is partly like mapping. There's another idea that working in linguistics suggests, that is that natural language IS the language of thought.
A: – Steven Pinker answers. "It's very unlikely that any language that we speak, is a language of thought. There are a lot of experiments that show that. The actual sentences that we speak don't make the kinds of distinctions that are relevant for inference. I'm very skeptical of the idea for which language, as it's ordinarily understood, is what we think in. Although I do think that there is a representation that, in some regards, is language-like. It makes categorical distinctions, it is hierarchically structured, that is very closely related, though not identical to what we think as the semantic representations that align sentences."
A: – Susan Carey answers. "Another problem with identifying language with thought is that, if you do so, you stipulate that other animals can't think. But it partly depends what you mean by 'thought', as what you mean by 'language', because other animals have very powerful abstract conceptual representations, that they can draw inferences over. They have many of the same core cognition systems that human babies do. So you'd have to define that as not thought if you want to make that stipulation.
Gennaro Chierchia adds: "We really work on the functional architecture of language, and that involves such interesting words as: and - or - if - any - not - even - only - 'ing'... And that is where you find what is the most common throughout the languages of the world and also where some key dimensions of variotions take place."
Q: – Susan Carey: "Can animals represent the conditional. Do they have anything like the concept 'not' or 'or'? The evidence is probably yes, but not clear."
Patrick Winston: "I think there is an inner language and I think it came before communication. partly because, there's no point in saying anything if you don't have anything to say. And I think our external language emerged in part because we're social animals and our external language is of great benefit in thinking because I think there's a great deal of creativity in creative misunderstanding of what other people say. But I think there are computational reasons why the inner language ought to be simpler, more economical, because we have to compare things, we have to match them, and it would be extraordinarily difficult from a computational point of view, to try to do that with the raw uncannonicalized language stream. So we can't match a story in the newspaper to Cinderella and say, 'oh that's a Cinderella story', unless we have reduced the story and Cinderella to a kind of inner language in which there's movement through space, there's a capacity to express emotion, there's a capacity to express social relationships... And I think that those kinds of things constitute the inner language, and when they're rendered in simple form they make possible this kind of analogizing and precedent-based reasoning that is fundamental to human thought, and I'll bet you pansies don't do it because they'd be a lot smarter if they did."
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The importance of analogies. Analogy is extremely important to create new representational resources. But it doesn't mean we understand how it works. (Carey and Chierchia)
On metaphors and on how analogical the human mind is. Every sentence has some kind of concrete image behind it. (Pinker)
The way to test the quality of your decisions is to test the process by which you make them.
"Go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you're making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think." Daniel Kahneman More.
“All that glitters is not gold,” the saying goes. We're often fooled by aesthetics of things into thinking they are the thing. The gist of the Green Lumber Fallacy is this: What works in the real world is not necessarily match our stories of why it works. Unimportant details can often seduce us into thinking we know the reasons for something when we really don't. Only time filters reality from narrative."
"In one of the rare noncharlatanic books in finance, descriptively called What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, the protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow named Joe Siegel, one of the most successful traders in a commodity called “green lumber,” actually thought it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made it his profession to trade the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into grand intellectual theories and narratives of what caused the price of commodities to move and went bust.
It is not just that the successful expert on lumber was ignorant of central matters like the designation “green.” He also knew things about lumber that nonexperts think are unimportant. People we call ignorant might not be ignorant.
The fact that predicting the order flow in lumber and the usual narrative had little to do with the details one would assume from the outside are important. People who do things in the field are not subjected to a set exam; they are selected in the most non-narrative manager — nice arguments don't make much difference. Evolution does not rely on narratives, humans do. Evolution does not need a word for the color blue." Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
"[...] a felicidade é igual a grandes acontecimentos menos as expetativas, é preciso começar a perguntarmos a nós mesmos: “Ok, então porque estamos sempre tão infelizes? Comecei a perguntar a mim próprio, porquê. Porque é que algo está errado 16 a 17% das vezes, e percebi que se tiver uma máquina de salsichas e se produzir algo estranho pode ser porque há algo errado com a máquina. A equação não está certa. Ou pode ser porque estou a colocar sapatos na máquina. Se estou a colocar sapatos na máquina não posso esperar que saiam salsichas. Percebi que o problema para estamos sempre tão infelizes é porque resolvemos a equação de forma errada. Não há nada de errado com a nossa vida. Estamos é a colocar os dados errados, os inputs errados na equação. Percebi que existem seis grandes ilusões e sete blind spots." Aqui Mo Gawdat
The separation between mothers and sons is mandated in patriarchy. This is what the Oedipus complex is about: sexualizing the intimacy, placing it under taboo, linking freedom with leaving women and going off with men, and making any woman who resists this separation a virtual Jocasta, Oedipus' "unspeakable mother." Except of course Jocasta didn't resist. She joined Laius, her husband, in wounding and abandoning her son."
Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure
Q: What's the difference between a pussy and a cunt?
A: A pussy is a sweet, juicy, succulent, warm, fun and useful thing. The cunt is the thing that owns it.
[jokes4us.com, "Vagina Jokes"]
"When a woman faces a workplace in which her male peers want to show her she is unwelcome, similar words or images targeting or insulting the vagina will often surface [...]
Of course, cultural and psychological motivations play a part in this form of harassment. But the role of manipulating female stress in targeting the vagina should not be ignored. This behavior — ridiculing the vagina — makes perfect instinctive sense. These acts are often impersonal and tactical — strategies for directing a kind of pressure at women that is not consciously understood but may be widely intuited, and even survive in folk memory, as eliciting a wider neuropsychological "bad stress" response that actually debilitates women."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina
"Maybe I was being too pragmatic about issues that are loaded with guilt, resentment and fear. After all, it’s far easier to talk theoretically about marriage than to navigate it. But my attitude is that if my spouse were to need something I couldn’t give him, I wouldn’t keep him from getting it elsewhere, as long as he did so in a way that didn’t endanger our family.
[...] We all go through phases of wanting it and not wanting it. I doubt most women avoid having sex with their husbands because they lack physical desire in general; we are simply more complex sexual animals. Which is why men can get an erection from a pill but there’s no way to medically induce arousal and desire in women.
[...] I am not saying the answer is non-monogamy, which can be rife with risks and unintended entanglements. I believe the answer is honesty and dialogue, no matter how frightening. Lack of sex in marriage is common, and it shouldn’t lead to shame and silence. By the same token, an affair doesn’t have to lead to the end of a marriage. What if an affair — or, ideally, simply the urge to have one — can be the beginning of a necessary conversation about sex and intimacy?
[...] In the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn’t face was something else altogether: hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them. It’s much easier, after all, to set up an account on Tinder." Aqui
Rather like a darts player I once interviewed, she believes that women who don't get good sex regularly, who are denied the soothing benefits of dopamine and oxytocin, both stimulated by orgasm, will inevitably be "emotionally irritable". Men who don't indulge in serious and lengthy foreplay, employing what she calls the "Goddess array" to turn their partners on, should ask themselves: "Do I want to be married to a Goddess or a bitch?" (Wolf's favoured terms for the vagina are "Goddess" and "yoni".) She believes that, having come to understand neural wiring, "we should respect the potential for enslavement to sexual love in women". Aqui
“I think it’s entirely possible that Naomi is overstating the case for emphasis, but when you piss enough people off, you reach a critical threshold for people to be talking about it and working on it,” he said. Or as the sex therapist Nancy Fish, who is also quoted in the book, put it, “People sometimes have to go to extremes to get people to talk about a topic.” She added: “In 2012 we’re still living in the Victorian age when it comes to sexuality. Vagina has to be a household word. It should be a topic discussed at the dinner table when you’re having a dinner party.” Aqui
"No lendário anúncio da Apple que, em 1984, cintilava no ecrã durante a Super Bowl, aquela aparece como uma figura libertadora contra o Estado vigilante de Orwell. Numa grande sala, trabalhadores sem vontade e apáticos escutam, olhando para o ecrã, o discurso fanático do Big Brother. Uma mulher que corre irrompe na sala, perseguida pela polícia do pensamento. Avança sem hesitar e transporta um grande martelo [...]. Carrega decididamente sobre o Big Brother e arremessa ferozmente o martelo contra o ecrã que explode. os homens despertam da sua apatia. Ouve-se uma voz anunciar: "A 24 de janeiro, a Apple Computer lançará o Macintosh. E verás então porque é que 1984 não será como 1984". Ao contrário do que sustenta a mensagem da Apple, o ano de 1984 não assinala o fim do Estado vigilante de Orwell, mas o começo de uma nova sociedade de controle que supera sobejamente a sua eficiência. Comunicação e controle coincidem na totalidade. Cada um de nós é o pan-ótico de si próprio." Byung-Chul Han, "Psicopolítica"
A "performative utterance" is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. When a judge says, "Guilty," to a defendant, or a groom says, "I do," the words alter material reality.
Words about the vagina create environments that directly affect women's bodies. The words women hear being used about their vaginas change, for better or for worse, what they purport to describe. Because of their effect on female autonomic nervous system (ANS), words about the vagina can either help or hurt actual vaginal response. New studies, as we saw, show that the autonomic nervous system in women is directly connected to optimal sexual arousal functionality in vaginal tissue, circulation, and lubrication itself — so verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina.
"The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline – which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it – but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the "dangers of marijuana" would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: The medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes... and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action." Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Or, since sex is the subject here, what about how our society's scientific community has treated female dyspareunia — the severe physical pain some women experience during sex — vs. erectile dysfunction (which, while lamentable, is not painful)? PubMed has 393 clinical trials studying dyspareunia. Vaginismus? 10. Vulvodynia? 43.
Erectile dysfunction? 1,954.
That's right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right. Women are constantly and specifically trained out of noticing or responding to their bodily discomfort, particularly if they want to be sexually "viable." Have you looked at how women are "supposed" to present themselves as sexually attractive? High heels? Trainers? Spanx? These are things designed to wrench bodies. Men can be appealing in comfy clothes. They walk in shoes that don't shorten their Achilles tendons. They don't need to get the hair ripped off their genitals or take needles to the face to be perceived as "conventionally" attractive. They can — just as women can — opt out of all this, but the baseline expectations are simply different, and it's ludicrous to pretend they aren't.
"This ideology [the Libertarian 'Sex as Play'] – descending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, via, in debasd form, Friedrich Nietzsche – argues that sensation, even extreme sensation, is good for its own sake alone. This sexual "will to power," adorned with a dollop of Freud's argument that the individual gets a "pass" for whatever the subconscious comes up with – since one can have no responsibility for, and hence no guilt about, subconscious desires – fit perfectly with the heady, consumerist postwar economy in the West. It prepared a fertile ground for the entrenchment of the pornographic experience of sex and of the vagina in particular.. It came to be how we thought "sex was" – rather than letting us understand that this way of thinking about sex is just one of many possible sexual ideologies. And it cleared the way in the minds of both women and men for the rise in the next few decades of wider and wider acceptance and then internalization of the moral flatness, distractedness, and fixatedness of pornography.
But is what one does in bed with someone else – with all the hopes, intimacies, and possibilities for grief involved – really just "a dream you are in"? The next three decades would call the worldview's vision of consequence-free sex and fantasy into question." Naomi Wolf, Vagina
More links: Inga Muscio Joani Blank Andrea Dworkin Steven Seidman Germaine Greer Judy Chicago Shere Hite Eve Ensler Feministing.com Vulvavelvet.com
The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago
Shere Hite speaking about her report.
Shere Hite press conference (1985)
"Not biologically based but culturally encouraged" – Shere Hite
