Nearly all of the takers were women, who were "eager and grateful" for the freebies while the men "frowned in suspicion, or distaste." The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/In the men who scored highest on hostile sexism, the part of the brain associated with analyzing another person's thoughts, feelings and intentions was inactive while viewing scantily clad women, Fiske said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men... She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging "critical mass" of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods...
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/
From: SGS
Date: Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:45 PM
I took this thought chain further in my own head and thought about why our brains evolved the way did - how society affects the brain and human brains (collectively) form society - why we have right and left wing urges (Hamilton at work?) - how can this be changed - is changing it a worthy goal - what is a worthy goal - is that a meaningful question - assume it is a worthy goal! how can we improve the human condition - policy - education policy...
http://www.theglobeandmail.
The research, published in various peer-reviewed journals over the past few years, is founded on ideas held by everyone from Aristotle to Charles Dickens, Dr. Oatley said. Throughout history, fiction has long been lauded for its benefits to the reader as a source of entertainment, understanding of the world and as a way to improve one's character... But now researchers are using empirical methods to see whether those suspected psychological benefits are real...
"Fiction doesn't get a lot of respect," he said. "It has always been viewed as false and as a frivolous thing that had no bearing on real life. But the fact of the matter is, there are effects that continue on after we close the book."
http://www.theatlantic.com/
I guess first of all, without being pedantic, we should examine the word "success." ...the question of who gets high status, and for doing what, is actually a flexible, political, historical point that keeps on changing... I think that many works of art are subversive of the status system that existed in the societies in which they were produced... So many works of art are correctives to the snobbish value system [adversarial viewpoint] that reigns outside of them... This is the modern United States: a society that tells everyone they can be extraordinary. That creates feelings of shame among those who don't feel extraordinary. I think it's interesting that in England three-hundred years ago, people at the bottom of society were called "unfortunates." Interesting word, "unfortunates." Nowadays they're called "losers." That tells us a lot about how things have changed.
Date: Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:45 PM
From: SP
Subject: Re: NYTimes.com: What Do Women Want?
SR,
Very interesting. Reading it, one of the things that came to mind was a scene from Being John Malkovich, where Maxine (Catherine Keener) is with John Malkovich, completely bored, looking at her watch, intently counting the minutes until she can be sure that Lotte (Cameron Diaz) will be looking out at her from within Malkovich's mind... at which point her level of interest takes an absurdly dramatic, undisguised shift into the stratosphere. Charlie Kaufman is a very thoughtful writer, as Ebert says in his review of Kaufman's most recent work:
Charlie Kaufman is one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium. David Mamet is another. That is not the same as a great writer (Faulkner, Pinter, Cocteau) who writes screenplays. Kaufman is writing in the upper reaches with Bergman. Now for the first time he directs. It is obvious that he has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams. "Being John Malkovich." "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." "Adaptation." "Human Nature." "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." What else are they about? He is working in plain view. In one film, people go inside the head of John Malkovich. In another, a writer has a twin who does what he cannot do. In another, a game show host is, or thinks he is, an international spy. In "Human Nature," a man whose childhood was shaped by domineering parents trains white mice to sit down at a tiny table and always employ the right silverware. Is behavior learned or enforced?
