M G > Recent Status Updates

Heaven help me, I stayed because I am nothing if not the worst mix of willfully nonjudgmental and horny.

dripping blood onto my vintage Hello Kitty rug. I am immediately caffeinated with hate and vengeance. I don't think he understands that that rug means more to me than his life.

These days the establishment is being marshaled to confirm our new cultural notion that men have become the frail dependents in need of a protector. That men need marriage more than women do. In fact, they need it to survive.

Then an answer occurs to him: "It's because our team is losing.
All the things we need to be good at to thrive in the world we imagine existing ten or twenty or even fifty years from now are things that my female friends and competitors are better at than me. Than us.

psycho-ogy professor Philip Zimbardo is coining a new disease to describe it: "social intensity syndrome.?" Many young men these days, Zim bardo argues, are so awash in video games and porn that they cannot cope with face-to-face contact. Their brains, he says, become "digi-tally rewired" and no longer suitable for stable romantic relation-ships, especially relationships with "equal status female mates."

Honestly just trying to finish this book at this point…

When we think of our old lovers, and the people they are with now, we wonder what we did not have. We wonder collectively, as people, what other people have. A collective unconscious is formed, a cloud, and we laze around it and lie to each other. We tell each other we are better than one another, better than whoever he is with now. We tell it to each other, because we are well-meaning people.

The fantasy is no longer safe. It is a death valley. Reality killed it. I also miss the many months of uncertainty of not knowing whether we could be. The nebulousness. Now I know we could not.

That was as far as he would meet me. It was a beautiful place to meet me, but it wasn't the impossible, which was what I needed. I wanted to see what was possible. I wanted to see if the impossible could somehow be possible But when I asked for the impossible, the DNA dissolved…I became the pursuer and he became the pursued, which for me was worst of all.

feel like I'm finally in on the joke now, but the joke wasn't as funny as I thought it would be, or it's, like, not my brand of humor.

Covert aggression isn't just about not getting caught; half of it is looking like you'd never mistreat someone in the first place. The sugar-and-spice image is powerful, and girls know it. They use it to fog the radar of otherwise vigilant teachers and parents.

Research confirms that parents and teachers discourage the emer. gence of physical and direct aggression in girls early on while de skirmishing of boys is either encouraged or shrugged off° In one a. ample, a 1999 University of Michigan study found that girls were told to be quiet, speak softly, or use a "nicer" voice about three times more often than boys, even though the boys were louder.

But the comparative pain scale is part of the problem we find ourselves in: Our knowledge that it could be worse keeps many of us from putting words to the overwhelm and from fighting against it.

"In the United States ... men engage in relaxing and entertaining activities 35 percent of the time that women are doing chores. For women, that number is almost half, 19 percent. ... [On weekends fathers engage in leisure 47 percent of the time that mothers are taking care of kids. ... A [UK] survey . .. found that women have five hours less leisure time a week than men

"Misogyny should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it's best concep-tualized as the 'law enforcement' branch of patriarchy a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expecta-tions, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors."

that women have participated in our subordination because we've been psychologically shaped to see our inferiority as natural. This perception of inferiority becomes a shadow, difficult to strike out.
The need to prove our goodness as the price for protection and upward mobility has been coded into how we behave; it's hard to recognize because we are inside the structure itself.

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences. This might sound silly and obvious,

I've come to realize that, on some level, everyone is saying the same thing: We all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of our-selves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear.

It's in our DNA to want to believe in something, to feel something, alongside other people seeking the same.

Ritual also temporarily removes a person from the center of their own little universe- their anxieties, their everyday pri-orities. It helps mentally transition followers from worldly, self-focused humans to one piece of a holy group. And then, theoretically, it should allow them to transition back into real life.