I often let people know that Carolyn Hax is my favorite advice columnist. Her answers to reader questions in her columns and weekly chats reveal a very healthy outlook on life and relationships. She emphasizes treating others with respect, not making decisions based on the hope that others will change, and finding meaning and reaching out right now, not in some vague future time when some hoped-for condition will be met (lucky break, dream job, Mr. Right).
Every so often, she fields questions that describe behavior patterns that are controlling, stalking, manipulative—and sometimes outright abusive. Her answers are practical for the immediate situation, but Hax also suggests counseling to help the writer better perceive and separate from the situation, and reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. That book comes up time and time again in response to these types of questions, and that eventually piqued my curiosity. I just finished reading it.
De Becker, who himself had an abusive childhood, is a leading security expert whose firm has had many high- and low-profile clients and which has developed tools for the public at large. His mission in the book is to allow people to separate the false fears that we tend to focus on (because the media blows certain incidents way out of proportion) from the true fears that we often try to brush away (ignoring our feelings of unease because we want to be nice or are afraid of harshly judging others). I think everyone would be well-served by reading this book, and it’s a necessity for those whose background or circumstances place them in positions of vulnerability: those who were abused in the past, those who have not found their voice, those whose mindset is about meeting others’ expectations even at the expense of their own needs, and those who feel uneasy having to be around a co-worker who just doesn’t seem quite right.
For previews, check out de Becker’s interviews and reviews of his book.
I just found out about atop. I like it.
At dinner with some guys the conversation veered to the unfathomability of womankind. “My daughter asked me to translate from Boy to Human.” “I just always say I’m sorry.” “Women say they communicate more, but when they’re upset you’re supposed to know why. Or to ask.” Lest one gender get all the blame, I see plenty of gender finger-pointing from women as well in questions to advice columnists.
Obviously, there are biological differences between the sexes. The mind being rooted in the physical brain (I’m not a dualist), it is plausible that there might be some biological difference in cognitive processes. However, my impression of the studies that I’ve read in the lay literature—and bear in mind this is a pre-filtered and pre-digested set, not at all a metastudy—is that these differences are small variations in the statistical distributions of various cognitive traits: the distributions are not identical, but there is a large overlap.
I’ll admit that I’m biased here: I start from the assumption that we are all much more alike than we are different, and I find validation for my bias in these studies that say the differences are small. If you start from the opposite camp, though, you’ll certainly find plenty of literature to support (I would say hype) the chasm between the sexes: Mars/Venus and all that.
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Posted in Social issues
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Tagged battle of the sexes, communication, gender inequality, in-group, men, out-group, relationships, sexism, stereotypes, straight, women
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The new version of WordPress is actually pretty neat. It has new features like navigation menus and custom post types. The new default theme (“Twenty Ten”) showcases some of these features. Changing the look of my blog (at least to that well-prepared theme) was extremely easy.
Here’s an overview of the new WordPress:
Since my Fedora 13 upgrade, I kept getting errors when installing Picasa:
Transaction Check Error:
package nss-softokn-3.12.4-19.fc13.x86_64 (which is newer than
nss-softokn-3.12.4-17.fc13.i686) is already installed
The solution, which I found here, is to first do
sudo yum downgrade nss-softokn
