Posts tagged theory
Friends With Benefits, But Without The Sex: Straight Women And Gay Men Exchange Trustworthy Mating Advice
Experiment 1 revealed that straight women perceive mating-relevant advice from a gay man to be more trustworthy than similar advice offered by a straight man or woman. Experiment 2 demonstrated that gay men perceive mating advice offered by a straight woman to be more trustworthy than advice offered by a lesbian woman or another gay man. Overall, the results provide initial experimental evidence that relationships between gay men and straight women may be characterized by a mutual exchange of mating-relevant benefits in the absence of sexual interest or competition.
Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay
“Why are political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights so often implicated in sexual encounters with same-sex partners? One theory is that homosexual urges, when repressed out of shame or fear, can be expressed as homophobia. Freud famously called this process a ‘reaction formation’… In this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we and our fellow researchers provide empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire”
A Gay Rights Angle on the Egyptian Revolution?
“Of course the rights of sexual minorities deserve attention for their own sake in the new, freer Egypt, as they do anywhere. But as Egypt and its supporters begin to dismantle the decades-old institutionalization of the State of Emergency, it is important to bear in mind the ways in which the denial of basic civil and human rights for sexual minorities can be used to undermine larger projects of democratization that seem not to “be about” gay rights at all.”
For a variety of reasons, the immanent future of art-as-a-meme does not bode well for traditional art institutions. The first, and arguably most important reason is the way in which our psychological criterion of validation is gradually shifting, Facebook account by Facebook account and Wikipedia entry by Wikipedia entry, away from a belief that the information we ingest should be dictated by a rarified group of connoisseurs and towards the idea of peer-to-peer affirmation.
How We Know/Islands of Meaning
We are drowning in a flood of information. Our task, says Freeman Dyson, is to create islands of meaning… The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:
“We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. “
