"THERE’S NO BIRTH CONTROL IN FUTURE DYSTOPIAS"

"It’s hard not to see the dystopian mismanagement of fertility as a symptom of a larger disregard for women’s stories. Since fertility and reproduction are firmly situated in the realm of female narratives, the neglect for the practical concerns of say, managing a period during the apocalypse, may not be in the forefront of a creator’s mind. In a way, this reveals larger cultural attitudes about women’s fertility. Reproductive care is seen as an individual responsibility, rather than something that society at large has a vested interest in managing on a social or economic level. It’s not hard to draw a straight line from our current climate of punishing women for their reproductive choices to a future in which fertility is deemed unmentionable and people are left to create their own patchwork solutions. It’s exactly the same thing that happened before abortion became more accessible."

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/what-happened-to-monday-birth-control

“How to Deal With Sexual Harassment WHILE It’s Happening”

“Prioritize your feelings over someone else’s

Remember this person is making you feel this way. It’s not your job to protect the harasser’s feelings. “Women may feel the urge to spare a person’s feelings with a smile,” Pratt says. “We live in a society where assertive men are branded as confident and assertive women are labeled as bitchy.” If you feel uneasy, Pratt strongly suggests you not invalidate your own feelings. “If you feel threatened or uncomfortable or pissed off, that’s all relevant information and can be delivered as is and without sugar-coating.””

https://www.manrepeller.com/2017/10/how-to-deal-with-sexual-harassment.html

"Infographic: How 'Dragon Ball' Influenced A Generation Of Hip-Hop Artists"

"To celebrate the arrival of Dragon Ball Super, Genius looked back on the intersection between the classic series and hip-hop over the years. Check the graph above to see how often Dragon Ball is referenced in song lyrics. Then peep the abridged timeline below for a look at some of the standout lyrical and musical references."

http://so.genius.com/uvp4SFu

“#ExpressiveWriting Prompts to Use If You’ve Been Accused of #WhiteFragility #SpiritualBypass or #WhitePrivilege”

“You’re well-meaning and you truly want to understand…

And yet, despite your well-meaningness, your responses end up harming people of colour even more.

And now you’re confused.

Because you were only trying to help.

So, let me help you…

I recently had an encounter with a white man on a friend’s page on Facebook. He seemed to take issue with my friend’s (another white man) stance on racism.

After engaging him for an hour, I was exhausted. 

I had expended so much emotional and intellectual labour trying to help this stranger see why his reaction was an example of white fragility.

The only good thing that came out of that discussion was a series of writing prompts I wrote so the stranger could work through his own rage.”

FB: these are cool

"Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’"

"Fidelity to history is not the aim of Civilization. “The history that we know is only one possible path,” Meier said. “There are so many other possibilities.” He referred to the surprise of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a new world was emerging. “The end of the Cold War is a great example of the unpredictability of history. Everything changed.” He argued that this great flux—the possibility that something wholly new might be around the corner—is represented in Civilization’s openness...

What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. There are no Dark Ages and no Black Deaths.

Though Meier claims that history as we know it is only “one path,” the only path in the Civilization series is forward... 

What does all that progress lead to? Here, the game is constrained by what its makers know. In ploughing their own course forward, every civilization can only arrive at the same destination, the same sequence of discoveries: the forging of Western modernity. No other routes are possible. Later versions of the game have tried to flesh out non-western “civilizations,” their special traits and units, but it remains the case that the only path that a civilization can chart into our present is a Western one. You may start off as a Viking marauder or an Aztec king or a Mongol warlord, but as you develop your civilization into the proliferating complexities of the modern era, the more it begins to resemble contemporary America...

Meier’s Civilization tapped into the uncertainty and promise that followed from the America’s Cold War triumph. The first iteration of the game did suggest that American liberalism was “the end of history,”"

https://blog.longreads.com/2016/10/26/what-sid-meiers-video-game-empire-got-right-and-wrong-about-civilization/

FB: "Since its launch in 1991, the series has sold 33 million copies worldwide. It’s safe to say that the game is now embedded rather broadly in our popular culture. On the strength of its success and ubiquity, it’s worth considering what Civilization suggests to its consumers about the world, about the past, and about human societies.

"Autism and Evolution"

"In the last decade, comparative genomic studies have identified small regions of the human genome that are shared with many species but that changed relatively rapidly during the evolutionary divergence of humans from chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. There are about 2,700 such sequences in the genome, known as human accelerated regions or HARs.

“Since human intellectual and social behaviors are so different from other species, many labs have figured that changes in HARs might be important in the evolution of these traits in humans,” said neurogeneticist Christopher A. Walsh, HMS Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at Boston Children’s and senior author of the Cell paper.

“But we hypothesized that if important HARs were damaged, it might also cause defective human social and/or cognitive behavior,” said Walsh, who is also chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “We found that this is indeed the case.”...

“We found that most HAR regions contain enhancer or regulatory DNA,” said Doan. “More than 40 percent of those HARs had some sort of regulatory activity in the brain—much more than we would expect by chance.”

In all, the investigators identified about two dozen mutations in HARs that appear to have important roles in brain structure and function. Some HARs, for example, contained regions regulating neurodevelopmental processes that have diverged between humans and chimpanzees, such as synapse development."

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/autism-and-evolution?utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_term=s3&utm_content=09.26.16.HMS

"The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness"

"Despite all the talk of our “chosen families,” gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: “It’s not a question of them not knowing how to save their lives. It’s a question of them knowing if their lives are worth saving.”...

“Marriage equality and the changes in legal status were an improvement for some gay men,” says Christopher Stults, a researcher at New York University who studies the differences in mental health between gay and straight men. “But for a lot of other people, it was a letdown. Like, we have this legal status, and yet there’s still something unfulfilled.”

This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, gay men remain three times more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than straight men, and 10 times more likely to engage in “suicidal self-harm.” In Sweden, which has had civil unions since 1995 and full marriage since 2009, men married to men have triple the suicide rate of men married to women....

Gay men are, as Keuroghlian puts it, “primed to expect rejection.” We’re constantly scanning social situations for ways we may not fit into them. We struggle to assert ourselves. We replay our social failures on a loop...

The term researchers use to explain this phenomenon is “minority stress.” In its most direct form, it’s pretty simple: Being a member of a marginalized group requires extra effort...

John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people. Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect—not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them. “No one has to call you queer for you to adjust your behavior to avoid being called that,” Salway says...

The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. The first, and the one I heard most frequently, is that gay men are shitty to each other because, basically, we’re men.

“The challenges of masculinity get magnified in a community of men,” Pachankis says."

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness/