Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske took brain scans of heterosexual men while they looked at sexualised images of women wearing bikinis. She found that the part of their brains that became activated was pre-motor - areas that usually light up when people anticipate using tools. The men were reacting to the images as if the women were objects they were going to act on. Particularly shocking was the discovery that the participants who scored highest on tests of hostile sexism were those most likely to deactivate the part of the brain that considers other people’s intentions (the medial prefrontal cortex) while looking at the pictures. These men were responding to images of the women as if they were non-human.

What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.

jenni-rose:

singmeasmile / liseyatthedisco:

The Mona Lisa that everyone so knows and loves probably looks much different today than she was once intended to look. This is what she probably looked like at her creation, and it has only been the passage of time that has given her the well known and mysterios look she holds today.

This pattern — women can dress like men, but men don’t dress like women — suggests that there is, in fact, something demeaning, ridiculous, or subordinating about presenting oneself to the male gaze. Most men feel stupid, gross, or vulnerable when they do it. This isn’t just about conformity to different gendered expectations. If it were just about difference women would feel equally weird dressing in men’s clothes. Instead, when women adopt masculine ways of dressing and moving, they often feel empowered.

So, when men do femininity they feel ridiculous and when women do masculinity they feel awesome. This is what gender inequality looks like.

I’m a fanatical antifanatic.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The Murder Mile: “But if something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back... ›

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all your friends feel there is something in them. Look at the sunny side of everything. Think only of the best, work only for the best, and expect only the best. Be as enthusiastic about success of others as you are about your own. Forget the mistakes of the past and press on the greater achievements of the future. Give everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others. Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.

Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.

It’s easy to assume that you’ll always be stuck with how you are right now. Your present perspective is powerful because you feel it with your whole being.

But your habits are your habits only because you keep choosing to maintain them. The limitations you assume yourself to have, are yours only because you continue to believe, support and defend those assumptions.

You can imagine differently. You can imagine a more fulfilled, effective and purposeful you.

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?