Every woman has a Daphne

Lucinda Rosenfeld asserts, "Every woman has a Daphne in her life—a so-called “best friend” whose seemingly effortless successes never fail to make her feel like a Huge Loser." (See book review on Jezebel)

I don't have a Daphne in my life.

No one makes me feel like a huge loser.

I realize that some women do have a Daphne. Has the author done something useful by asking women to talk about these dysfunctional "friendships?"

The larger question for us to ask is: what gender issues make these dysfunctional relationships more common for women than for men? Is this due to women's famous low self-esteem? Is it influenced by consumer culture? Do elite males (all males? elites in general?) encourage this, on the idea that having women fight each other detracts them from fighting for equality with men, or fighting against classism or fighting for a more just society? (This is on analogy to the Marxist analysis of why it is helpful for the ruling class to encourage racism: The bosses grin as low-income whites and blacks wrestle over crumbs rather than uniting to overthrow an unfair social structure.)

The overall strategy to figuring out why the Daphne-Wendy dilemma exists can be the lawyer's strategy: "cui bono" -- who benefits, or follow the money.

If you have a dysfunctional friendship, it must be benefiting you in some way. So ask: how is it benefiting you?

My worry is that women distract themselves from achieving goals and reaching fulfillment because of the competitive game with other women. Social relationships are important, but so is developing your own interests and goals. Books like Rosenfeld's "I'm so happy for you" send the message that intense preoccupation with social relationships is necessary and socially normative. [Women's social ability is indeed awesome -- decades preoccupied with anything leads to intense skill; see examples in Baron-Cohen's book.]

Give that dyad a rest and get a hobby or join a cause. When you have some status via your achievements, friends will come.

West meets East

These are called "The Boss" and "Contacts."



These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in Germany . Please click here for more visual jolts.

Blue --> Westerner
Red --> Asian/Chinese

No taxation without representation

In June 1992, as a young psychology professor, I participated in a home-stay in the Palestinian Town of Beit Sahour, along with American undergraduates from Occidental College.

I chatted at length with a local psychology professor who was studying teens' construction of sexuality. I read his technical reports and saw that Palestinian teens' knowledge was reminiscent of a 1970s America. The intro psych textbook used at Beit Sahour university was an Arabic translation of the classic American text by Atkinson and Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology. The textbook I saw seemed a home-made job, with printed Arabic, but the pictures had been pasted in without captions translated. I wondered if this literal translation of an American text was the best way to teach psychology. Wouldn't one want to construct a book grounded in themes and examples from Arab or Palestinian society?

We Americans stayed in the homes of the town's Christian Palestinian middle class. We spent hours talking with members of the families; our students did clean-up project with teens from a high school. The kitchens had modern appliances; "my" family was eager to show me the video of their eldest daughters' wedding. I walked the dusty streets, gazing at the beautiful countryside. This wouldn't be a bad life, I thought to myself.

But once you start talking about business and livelihoods, other perspectives appear. The father of "my" family took me to his shop. He ran a building/construction store, kind of home-depot packed into one storefront room. Tools, building materials filled every available space. Somehow we began talking about the tax revolt of 1986. Because my parents were Palestinian activists, I'd heard of this years before as a college student, but it was good to hear of it from someone who participated.

"You know we pay taxes to the Israelis" -- four syllables, "Iss-rah-eee-lees" -- pronounced as quickly as one. "We pay for our own occupation. So we said No." And I remember what my parents had said: a letter sent to every American senator and congressman declaring a refusal to pay taxes to an illegal occupation. How could taxes be levied on a people who had no rights of citizenship, no right to even build a home? And not a mention of the revolt in the American press. All those carefully mailed letters sunk without a sound.

"So what happened when you all refused to pay taxes? What did the Israelis do?"

"They came and took everything, it was an empty room." And he flung out his arms to encompass the room and conjure up images of bear metal shelves and a cracked dusty concrete floor.

With his lip curled and his angry face, it seemed that even 6 years later he keenly felt the pain of that lost merchandise, of rebuilding back his stores of building supplies while still paying taxes to the occupiers.

I wish non-violent resistance would work. I wish that every suicide bomber would imitate the Buddhist monks who protested the Viet Nam war, and just light himself on fire (or detonate his bomb) in an empty city square or farmer's field, rather than cause others' deaths along with his own on a crowded bus. But I'm not the one who had my store stripped or my father imprisoned or my sister forced to give birth at a checkpoint en route to the hospital. My house and my kids' school haven't been bulldozed. My students don't have to read hasty translations of another country's psychology textbooks.

I've been getting a lot of email about a "new" move to boycott Israeli products. But hasn't the idea of disinvestment been around for a long time? And it hasn't worked. But if something different is happening now -- if there can finally be nonviolent resistance, praise be to the Universe.

I found the statement by Radhika Sainath, of The Electronic Intifada, arguing for a boycott, particularly powerful.

Upgrading from boyfriend to Husband

Recently my friend A.K., an Israeli graduate student, forward me the the following geeky riff on the time-honored theme of men vs. women which appears to have made the rounds a year ago.

> Dear Tech Support,
>
> Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.
>
> In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs...

Find the rest of the original post here.... with males in particular fighting back about the short-comings of the many gf models here.

But before I had even thought to google around, my own response typed itself out.

Dear A.,
I have never seen that particular letter to Tech Support, very funny, thanks for sending.

Still, I can't really relate to her complaints. For various reasons, for years I never had the resources or system configuration to purchase Husband 1.0. I thus spent many years using different versions of the boyfriend program. All of them ran the undesirable applications like the Beer and Sports apps that Desperate ran into with Husband 1.0. Excuse my language, but Boyfriend 5.0, 6.0, etc were shitty programs. They were buggy, crashed the system almost daily, and required constant maintenance. its true that they sometimes did run the flower and jewelry applications, but those just didn't compensate for the overall drain on system resources and my worry that because boyfriend programs are traded around so often, they would have viruses. I spent a lot of time talking with girl friends about patches and work-arounds. I surfed the internet for advice about how to get better performance, but information is just too conflicting. I wondered if my system was basically incompatible with the boyfriend program.

What a relief when I finally upgraded to Husband 1.0. It was a big risk because of the huge cost and the fact that once installed, the husband program can not be uninstalled without exorbitant fees and the possibility of permanent system damage. But right from the beginning, Husband 1.0 was a big improvement over the Boyfriend program. Especially in the first year of use, Husband 1.0 installed no undesirable programs. I know other users were having difficulty with NBA 5.0 and NFL 3.0, but my version never ran those. Then in years 3, I started seeing Baseball 2305 being run, and in year 4, Basketball 89. However, I consider that the hours spent with these apps running in the background is acceptable 'downtime' given Husband 1.0's generally stellar performance, lack of system crashes and low drain on system resources. Indeed, Conversation 8.0 runs perfectly, and Housecleaning 2.6 has always had adequate performance. As an unexpected bonus, Husband 1.0 recently acquired a grocery shopping module and has began to run Cooking 1.0, 2.3 and 4.4. I clearly will not need a Husband upgrade given the versatility of 1.0.

I definitely wish I'd upgraded from Boyfriend earlier. I wonder if the rumors about Husband 1.0's bad performance are just an attempt by satisfied users to keep demand from rising, given that only limited copies of Husband 1.0 are available, so much so that plenty of users are eager to use the uninstalled versions?

Today Obama characterized end of American slavery as occurring thru non-violent means

What about John Brown, famous abolitionist, freedom-fighter and terrorist? What about the Civil War?

Modern Day Slavery

A lot more needs to be done to stop sexual slavery of children and adult women. The following spam showed up in my inbox today; The people said to be '14-20' years are coerced. Abduction, forced labor and rape are against the law. How to end human trafficking should be one of the biggest topics of the modern day. See the blog at change.org for more info. Can't a sting operation be planned, given that the slave owners promise to deliver slaves "at YOUR REGION" -- or maybe the Russian mafia is just too scary.

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Difference between novelists (writing is object d'art) and scientists (information uptake is key)

Married to a former Eng prof who is now a novelist/playwright, I often get exposed to the contrast with two ways of thinking, which I end up trying to assimilate to some characterization as in my headline.

Here's a recent example.

The end-of-evening entertainment is whatever H has ordered from Netflix. This is a good thing for me as I lack H's encyclopedia knowledge of film running from popular to obscure. After a lot of Goddard movies (or "I am curious yellow" only dimly remembered because I fell asleep) last spring, we are into something more accessible: In Treatment.

I can have fun with this engaging shrink show just for Gabriel Byrne, but as one of my psychotherapist friends said, this is the best show about psychotherapy, so less energy wasted squirming and sighing over unrealistic popularizations a la Lie to me.

Whatever we're watching, whether it's the Goddard, Swedish foreign films, and even In Treatment, I often can't watch the whole thing because my sleep debt accumulated early in my professional career hasn't been paid off yet. So my plea is: let's stop watching now and watch the rest tomorrow. But this is uncomfortable for H.

H: "Let's not watch at all tonight, if you're going to fall asleep half way thru."

For a 2 hour movie, I say ahead of time, "Let's watch one hour tonite and one hour tomorrow."

H: "No, I prefer to watch the whole thing, so let's just do it when we have enough time."

I infer: for him, what's important is to get the whole experience, because that's the intention of the author/artist. For me, I'm okay with obtaining the information and the enjoyment while I'm watching.

Second example: reading printed matter.

H insists on "no skipping around" in a book and reading ahead is something decent people don't even joke about.

But most of my reading is journal articles. When I read a journal article, I'm in information-uptake mode, and often go straight to figures and tables after the abstract because I want to make up my own mind about the message. The author is providing information, not crafting an experience for me. I could skip around in the article; read one page now and take it up again next week.

So I propose:
The artistic/creative personality values the creation of an object d'art, with the aesthetic experience being diminished if it deviates from the intended form

For the scientist, information uptake is key, and the need to approximate the holistic experience designed by the author is less important.

What I do, as a scientist, is what I will call "transfer of a reading/watching habit" (borrowing from cognitive studies on transfer of information processing habits, such as the "script transfer hypothesis" which I'm working on with a grad student). I take my information-uptake habit from science reading, and transfer it to TV/films (and sometimes even novels).

Anyone else transfer their information uptake habits?