No wonder some women are unconsciously passive aggressive when expressing anger, sadness, or frustration. For years, they have been subjected to so much gaslighting that they can no longer express themselves in a way that feels authentic to them.
They say, “I’m sorry” before giving their opinion. In an email or text message, they place a smiley face next to a serious question or concern, thereby reducing the impact of having to express their true feelings.
You know how it looks: “You’re late :D ”
These are the same women who stay in relationships they don’t belong in, who don’t follow their dreams, who withdraw from the kind of life they want to live.
"Why Women Aren’t Crazy (via lagrandefille)
Read it this, and then read this.
As for number 2: I don’t really need to wear a bra — superfluous, really. And so much so that you couldn’t tell if I were / weren’t anyways.
Unlike in the United States, where home buying traditionally takes place after marriage, owning a place in China has recently become a prerequisite for tying the knot. Experts said securing an apartment in this market signals that a man is successful, family-oriented and able to weather challenging financial circumstances. Put succinctly, homeownership has become the ultimate symbol of virility in today’s China.
[…]
[Zhang] acknowledges he must begin saving money for an apartment, but he resents being judged by his inability to purchase property. He would rather have a woman love him for his charm than for the roof he puts over her head.
Last night, I brought up this article with my mom, specifically mentioning the bolded section. She then delivered a mini speech/rant about how hypocritical it was that some men criticized women for being superficial golddiggers, when those same men often pursued women based on her appearance and attractiveness.
After several years of teenage angst of isolation, I’m pleasantly surprised to rediscover this side of my mom. :)
By: JENNA WORTHAM
Published by NY Times, 4/10/2011ONE recent rainy night, I curled up on my couch with popcorn and Netflix Instant, ready to spend a quiet night at home. The peace was sweet — while it lasted. Soon, my iPhone began flashing with notifications from a handful of social networking sites, each a beacon of information about what my friends were doing.
As the alerts came in, my mind began to race. Three friends, I learned, had arrived at a music venue near my apartment. But why? What was happening there? Then I saw pictures of other friends enjoying fancy milkshakes at a trendy restaurant. Suddenly, my simple domestic pleasures paled in comparison with the things I could be doing.
The flurry of possibilities set off a rush of restlessness and indecision. I was torn between nesting in my cozy roost or rallying for an impromptu rendezvous, and I just didn’t know what to do.
My problem is emblematic of the digital era. It’s known as FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” and refers to the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram. Billions of Twitter messages, status updates and photographs provide thrilling glimpses of the daily lives and activities of friends, “frenemies,” co-workers and peers.
The upside is immeasurable. Viewing postings from my friends scattered around the country often makes me feel more connected to them, not less. News and photographs of the bike rides, concerts, dinner parties and nights on the town enjoyed by people in my New York social circle are invaluable as an informal to-do list of local recommendation.
But, occasionally, there is a darker side.
When we scroll through pictures and status updates, the worry that tugs at the corners of our minds is set off by the fear of regret, according to Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational” and a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He says we become afraid that we’ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our time.
Streaming social media have an immediacy that is very different from, say, a conversation over lunch recounting the events of the previous weekend. When you see that your friends are sharing a bottle of wine without you — and at that very moment — “you can imagine how things could be different,” Professor Ariely said.
It’s like a near miss in real life. “When would you be more upset?” he asked. “After missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?
“Two minutes, of course,” he said. “You can imagine how things could have been different, and that really motivates us to behave in strange ways.”
Fear of missing out does not apply only to those with a hyperactive nightlife.
A friend who works in advertising told me that she felt fine about her life — until she opened Facebook. “Then I’m thinking, ‘I am 28, with three roommates, and oh, it looks like you have a precious baby and a mortgage,’ ” she said. “And then I wanna die.”
On those occasions, she said, her knee-jerk reaction is often to post an account of a cool thing she has done, or to upload a particularly fun picture from her weekend. This may make her feel better — but it can generate FOMO in another unsuspecting person.
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, the photo-sharing service, and of Hunch, a recommendation engine, said, “Social software is both the creator and the cure of FOMO,” adding, “It’s cyclical.”
Some creators of social apps say they have constructed their services to make people keep coming back for more, but not for any insidious purpose.
“No one likes to perform in a vacuum,” said Kevin Systrom, the chief executive of Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing application, which allows users to make comments about pictures. The more creative or striking a photograph, the more likely it is to attract favorable attention.
The feedback, Mr. Systrom said, can be slightly addictive. People using Instagram “are rewarded when someone likes it and you keep coming back,” he said.
Whatever angst people may feel when they see someone else having a good time, he said, is probably exaggerated by the overall effect of so many new social data streams pouring into browsers and mobile phones at once.
“We aren’t used to seeing the world as it happens,” he said. “We as humans can only process so much data.”
Of course, fear of missing out is hardly new. It has been induced throughout history by such triggers as newspaper society pages, party pictures and annual holiday letters — and e-mail — depicting people at their festive best. But now, Ms. Fake said, instead of receiving occasional polite updates, we get reminders around the clock, mainlined via the device of our choosing.
SHERRY TURKLE, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “Alone Together,” says that as technology becomes ever more pervasive, our relationship to it becomes more intimate, granting it the power to influence decisions, moods and emotions.
“In a way, there’s an immaturity to our relationship with technology,” she said. “It’s still evolving.”
We are struggling with the always-on feeling of connection that the Internet can provide, she said, and we still need to figure out how to limit its influence on our lives. I asked Professor Turkle what people could do to deal with this stress-inducing quandary. She said she would tell herself to “get a grip and separate myself from my iPhone.”
Easier said than done. I’ve tried, but turning off my phone is nearly impossible — I’m not yet ready for that step.
That evening, though, I flipped the phone over to hide its screen. That helped me ignore what my friends were doing. I settled back to enjoy the evening, deciding not to venture out into the cold and misty night.
London — and England — is now dealing with black kids, white kids and indeed most likely children from other ethnicities who all have their axes to grind, who feel victimized and oppressed and excluded in their own country with few opportunities. With no place to go to, nowhere for their voices to be heard, violence seems an easy answer. With a media looking for its next juicy story and instantaneous, free communication tools at hand — it has been reported that Blackberry Messenger has been the main organizing tool for the riots, and it has allowed the quick spread of the violence from place to place — suddenly the previously disenfranchised now have some power, destructive as it may be.
To be honest, I don’t have a good grasp of what’s going on in London (I don’t think anybody does, come to think of it) and I really do abhor violence, but I suspect that the story behind the London riots is more complex than the media is making it out to be.
Renata Salecl: The Paradox of Choice
By Philip Bump, The Atlantic, July 25, 2011
If my research — conducted primarily via Netflix — is correct, America used to be a paradise for introverts. If you weren’t a lone cowboy riding the range in a driving snow, you lived on a farm miles from town, opening your front door onto a field of seven-foot-tall corn stalks. Social interactions were planned weeks in advance. (Elections are held on Tuesdays, after all, because that was the soonest people could get to the county seat.) In a time when towns tried to encourage interaction by scheduling seasonal barn dances, the pressure to attend a friend’s cocktail party was obviously far lower. Introverts had weeks to come up with good excuses — and all sorts of ailments (whooping cough, scarlet fever) to blame.
Then the industrial revolution ruined it. Encouraging people to move to cities, the new world forced interactions from the moment you left your house. Telegraphs made it simple for people to send you messages and telephones then removed even the need to answer your door. Cars were invented, meaning you had no excuse for not traveling across town. Then planes removed any excuse to not travel across the country. The darkest hours for introverts were at hand.
But technology, long the domain of the geeky introvert, stepped up to the challenge. A brilliant first volley was the answering machine: ostensibly a device meant to ensure that a call wasn’t missed, it quickly became a tool to ensure that you could miss any call you wanted.
Technology has steadily gained ground. What some describe as an always-on society is, in fact, becoming a Golden Age for introverts, in which it has become easier than ever to carve out time for oneself while meeting the needs of our extroverted friends. That’s a key distinction: we live in a time in which introverts can regularly mask their introversion if they so desire.
It’s worth considering, of course, what introverts actually find challenging about social interactions. For a thorough, thoughtful answer to that question, see this 2003 piece from The Atlantic. For a cursory and superficial one, read on.
For introverts like myself, it takes energy to engage with other people. Doing so requires thoughtfulness. It’s tiring. Expending energy, for us, isn’t energizing. Please note: we’re not talking about shyness, some character flaw. The problem isn’t with the introvert — it’s with the demands you make on the introvert. An introvert can’t force an extrovert to sit quietly in a room and read a book, but extroverts (and the stigmas they’ve inadvertently created) can impose social demands with ease.
So how are we helped by the technology our nerdy allies have built?
The illusion of busyness. You know what I did over the weekend? Took a road trip to Baltimore, attended two work-related parties, and spent most of Sunday offline, hiking in the woods.
Yeah, no I didn’t. But with a few simple posts on Facebook, changing my status on GChat, it’s simple to pretend that I did. I could spend all weekend at home — which I did (it was hot out) — and no one would be the wiser. I can make it appear that I’ve met society’s request that I “live life to the full,” while living my life to the full in my own way.
Serial communication at work. In the Mad Men days, everyone worked together in one location, walking to each others’ desks or offices, or exchanging occasional memos. Now? We’re in offices all over the place, using email. We sit quietly hunched over laptops, transitioning even our water cooler conversations to our keyboards.
Email is often fingered as a key factor in the lamentable perpetual accessibility characterizing modern American communication. But it isn’t. It allows you to respond when you’re ready to do so. In fact, sometimes not responding to email in a timely fashion can give the impression that you’re already busy doing other things. Which helps create the space that introverts need.
Serial communication everywhere else. This is maybe the most remarkable achievement. Interacting with people primarily online or serially is now the norm. It’s easier to send a message to a friend on Facebook than to call; even for extraverts, it ensures that the outreach isn’t a waste of time.
The reduction of communication to information-sharing. Moreover, people expect streamlined transfers of information. A text message, a Facebook message, a tweet — each is a discrete, articulated piece of information being shared. Rather than riding the texture of a live conversation to figure out how to give and receive information, people are now used to simply pushing their thoughts out into the world, to be responded to at some undetermined future point. Even voicemail messages are now more often the point of a phone call than an actual conversation.
A quick interlude to talk about the psychology of introversion. Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you’re not interested, though introverts will definitely find it engaging.
First popularized by Carl Jung, the word introversion describes exactly what you’d assume: a tendency be focused inwards (intro-) as opposed to the external focus of extraverts. As Wikipedia states, introversion is “the state of okay I think that’s enough pretending.” I have a secret to share with you. If you haven’t heard of Slydial, delay not one second further. It is a tool that allows you to connect directly to someone else’s voicemail without giving them time to answer the phone. Brilliant, right? But obviously, we can’t let everyone know about it, or everyone will catch on to the fact that you’re intentionally avoiding them. (For the record, friends and family, I’ve never used this tool at all.) What follows is the link to the site, masked to deter the casual observer. You are hereby sworn to secrecy. The Stockholm trials were a success, as you can see from the partial data set from the 2004 study in .CSV format. So, in other words, Jung was right.
I speak of the struggle between introverts and extroverts in antagonistic terms. But it shouldn’t be considered that way. Extroverts, we love you. We just don’t want to talk to you all the time. Happily, we live in a time when the expectation that we do so is much lower. We’ve reached an elegant balance between the two factions, one that doesn’t require that we all become rugged cowboys, singing “Home on the Range,” as we push our herd on to Topeka.
Even though that’s what I said I’m doing right now on Facebook.
