Who's Responsible for Women Wanting to Be So Thin?

I believe that more than anything, it is women pressuring other women to be thin (however, I would love to hear someone argue this). Men inherently are not attracted to size 0 girls. They are biologically 'designed' to be attracted to women with a few more curves, as they suggest health and fertility - as I learned in my social psych class. This is not to say men have no part in creating the ideal that women ought to be beautiful. If we look at it a little more, it is predominantly women and homosexual men that would in the fashion industry, who the skinniest women work for, and where average girls are trained to associate beauty with being rail thin. Woman are also the ones asking where other women got their cute clothes and how they got so thin - further enabling thinness to consume women. In order to change the ideal of being stick thin, we must change the woman's perception of what it means to be beautiful. Health is beauty.

Reponse to Ed

What does it mean to learn?

This blog related to the end of my last entry. Learning can mean different things to different people depending on the way with which they learn. For example, I learn very well artistically and also by teaching myself. I teach myself to play piano, take photographs, and draw. A huge reason I learn best by myself is, because of my debilitating disease ADD, I can only focus on and thus learn about something I am very, very interested in. Unfortunately, only I can know what truly interests me. So thus, what, why, and how I learn means what do I find interesting and how do I educate myself.
There is of course learning through classes and learning for objective reasons, but learning to me is knowing how to do what is important to me. I feel I did not explicate myself well and this is probably a horrible blog....

Response to Shelby

Shelby asked a question regarding why we blame ourselves for not understanding something rather than the text/speaker

I think this typically occurs in situations where we are not particularly knowledgeable about a certain subject and the person or text teaching us is claimed to be a knowledgeable source on the topic. Then we are put into a position where if we decide to argue the validity of something, we ask ourselves, 'where do I get off?" We assume the source we are leaning from possesses more insight than we do, and so we are in no position to contest them - this is not to say I discourage such conduct. There is a marvelous quote by Eugene Deb that, "Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization." By all means, challenge the authority.
But there are certainly instances where I do not buy what I'm learning in class and fight the urge to speak out vehemently, because when I do I get shut down. Sometimes, the misunderstanding does not come from either the disciple or the teacher. Everyone learns differently - and this is fact. Some are visual learners, some are not. Thus, the problem lies in the conflict between teaching style and learning mechanism.

Reponse to Joel

Where are there examples of people being taught to avoid pleasurable things or activities?
A huge reason that you may see this is drugs. Obviously, people can become addicted to drugs because it rewards the dopaminergic pathway and thus creates a pleasurable feeling (often).
Simultaneously, drugs are a very dangerous substance in many cases, and can destroy lives (in both the literal and figurative sense), and so people who are addicted need be weaned off of it for future benefits.
Also, sex is a very pleasurable activity. However, Christian ideals persist that we must abstain temporarily until after marriage, even though you may be an adult capable of giving consent. There is still a law that should you be caught engaging in premarital sex, you may be arrested and even jailed - although it is not often enforced.
Where are there examples of people being taught to seek out unpleasurable activities?

I had been keeping all of my blogs in a notebook which I would write just before I went to bed, and haven't found the time to put it on the internet because my computer has been in and out of commission. However, I wrote a blog about my high school and saw recently that Michelle Webb had posted a question regarding what possible alternatives to grading there was, and I talk about this a little in the blog I wrote prior to.
I came from a charter school where we didn't have grades or tests, so as you can imagine, adjusting to college (especially when I am used to 60 people in the entire senior class) was awkward. My high school's catch phrase was that public schools prepare you for college but Parker (my school) prepares you for life. I absolutely agree with this. How do we benefit from being graded = and more over, being ranked! What good can come from ranking? For those that score high, they will encounter unimaginable pressure to maintain such a status and those that rank low will lose any and all self-esteem. My roommate was in a bad mood the other day because she's nervous that she will not graduate with a high enough GPA. A GPA should not be a reflection of your intelligence. I would never want my intelligence represented by a mere number. For this I get frustrated. It feels silly to me that the only reason I work so hard on projects is to see a number hopefully close to 100. This should not be our motivation. In my high school we always had the ability to revise our work and LEARN from our mistakes!! This is absolutely imperative to learning.
My question has already been stated several times, but how do we benefit from grades and class ranks?

I recently watched a special on the discovery channel regarding Stephen Hawking's ideas of whether time travel is possible. He comes to conclude that time travel into the past is NOT possible. This is because time travel into the past would create a paradox. The example he gives is that if we were to build a gun and then use that gun to shoot ourselves when we were building the fun, it wouldn't make any sense. However, Hawking ventures to say that time travel to the future IS possible. If we can speed atoms to near the speed of light, than we can truly time travel. This discussion of time travel has got me thinking about earlier in the semester when we talked about time. If we were to time travel, would it prove or disprove that time exists?

I recently parsed the phenomenon of being able to 'feel' someone watching you, and now I would like to debunk the idea that once you learn about something, it happens and appears in front of you more and more. For example, my roommate recently did aproject on Bosnia and Herzegovina and now she sees it in the news everywhere. Much like when you acquire a new word into your vocabulary, you come across the word very frequently. Again, I believe this is not a true phenomenon. Once we have acquired a new extravagant word to our vocabulary, we are more likely to be consciously aware that we have encountered that word. When we encounter the word soon after we have learned its meaning, we will need to remind ourselves what the meaning is, and also likely feel rewarded for knowing it. You will see that over time, we will no longer pay much attention to the individual word as we no longer need to stop and remind ourselves of the meaning and no longer feel the need to reward ourselves for knowing it, and the word will dissipate into our regular vocabulary.

What other phenomenons can you debunk?

Why do people do drugs?

Drugs often carry the potential risk of addiction and even worse - death, which is often a result of overdose. Addiction can be just as brutal, and can rob you of your life, blurring the line of what death is. Addiction is going through physical withdrawal after discontinuing use of a drug temporarily. Why does physical physical withdrawal ensue? Because drugs do provide a high, they are very rewarding and make the user feel good in some sense. Especially for those that feel troubled, drugs seem like an easy way out. For people that are completely content with their life in the absence of a drug, what is the source of their experimentation with drugs? Are they looking for more of a high? Or for a purely experimental purpose to see each drugs subjective effects because they're 'cool'? I liken this to the idea that my dad's favorite pastime of trying new goods and abides by his own rule that he must try something five times before writing it off.
To find the source that has the biggest influence n why people do drugs, we should look at the drugs that do NOT contain abuse potential (addictive properties). Namely, hallucinogens such as LSD and salvia. Studies have shown time and time again that animals will not self-administere hallucinogens, indicative of its non-addictive properties. So why do humans take LSD that is in no way physiologically rewarding, a drugs that if mice are provided the option to leave the room wit which they received LSD, will quickly flee? SOCIAL CONTEXT. This is an enormous influence on a lot of what humans do, and this is a text book example of such. We're provided a warning, "take this durg and you'll see cool stuff - the furniture will talk to you!". Sounds cool but imagine receiving the drug without knowing, and not knowing the potential effects. It would be terrifying. And thus, I think social context to perhaps be the most powerful reason for why people do drugs.

Recently I read a study that showed that people are most likely to go to their romantic partner when we're feeling down. Who placed second? Not family, not friends, but their pets. Reading about this, I naturally thought about my relationship with my dogs. When I'm glum, I do often enjoy the quiet presence of my dog over interaction with my friends and family. Are people crazy for confiding in their pets?
I don't think so. We cannot be so quick to dismiss our pets' intelligence and emotional capacity as non-existent. This is not by any means to suggest that they posses even close to the same emotional capacity as humans, or that they even are aware of their emotions, but I think there is some understanding. I have fallen down my stairs and my dog, Scout, came running to my side whimpering - clearly upset and possibly concerned for my well-being. I saw a story in the media where a woman was on a jog with her dog. She fell off a cliff suffering an enormous fall that left her incapacitated for several days in a canyon. Her dog, Taz, stayed by her side until he 'realized' that she could not move herself and required outside help. Taz ran some five miles out of the canyon, ran up to a man and got him to follow him back to his owner. Could a dog do this without having some level of concern for his owner?
After seeing that it seems dogs can to some degree, at least in the owner's interpretation (I understand their might be some false hope), reciprocate their affection to their owner, does it seem so crazy that people choose to seek comfort from their pets?

I'm not one to believe in anything supernatural, however there is one phenomenon that I find quite curious, and is the idea that you can 'feel' someone watching you. My boyfriend was walking through campus and I was sitting on a bench outside since it was a beautiful day. His back was to me and he had headphones in, and although he couldn't hear me, he could feel me watching and turned around and saw me. While this is very strange, I do believe that there is a few possible logical explanations for why this occurs. Perhaps environment plays a key role. He was walking in an open area on a college campus where there are many people, and thus subject to many peoples' eyes. It is possible that on some level subconsciously we expect that we are under the scrutiny of others' eyes or consider the possiblity. Also, he may have heard my voice very faintly calling for attention, but not strong enough for him to recognize consciously that he heard it. It IS possible to hear and encode something without being aware - such as a recent study had participants listen to an audio tape that asked them questions they had to answer. In the background a song was playing very softly. Its been shown that familiarity breeds liking, and in this study participants were played two songs (one of which was the song playing softly during questioning) and asked which they liked better. Participants consistently chose the song that they had heard once before, although they had not realized they had heard it before. Is it possible that environment and our subconscious are responsible for this apparent phenomenon?

Extroversion vs. Introversion

In this post, I refer to the words introversion and extroversion as methods of obtaining energy. Introverts obtain energy through relaxation, finding highly social situations to be draining after a while, and needing to take a break every now and then (NOT synonymous with antisocialsm or shyness). Meanwhile, extroverts thrive on social interactions for their energy.
I myself am highly introverted. I love being around people but can become exhausted and need to confine myself to my room to 'recharge'. I'm impressed by people who can be around many other people for the entire day any not be completely drained at the end of it. It makes me wonder why people are one way or the other. I think a possibility might be that it is an observation of your parents (or whoever you may have been raised by) from a young age. My parents have many friends at their work, but rarely saw them in other contexts. They both came home, ate dinner, relaxed with each other and the family, went to bed and repeated the same thing the following day. It was very rare that we had company - as evidenced by our dogs who greated any person outside the realm of our family with loud barking and nervous sniffing. I, like my parents, typically see my friends in the same settings in which I got to know them.
As an introvert in a college atmosphere where true alone time is hard to come by, I find that I must often engage in destressing activities. During the week it is imperative that I play the piano at some point and on weekends go on drives by horse farms - or even return home for a ride. This leads me to my question - Do extroverts ever feel the need to "get away" in the absence of social stressors?

Morality

It is often argued that one of the best gifts bestowed on humankind via religion is morality. While it is very possible that morals may be obtained through religion, I think it is tragic to say, which is often argued, that it is the sole module through which we may learn morality. Morality is both innate and learned through consequences of actions. Animals illustrate this point wonderfully. I think it is fair to say that no other species subscribes to a particular doctrine, yet we see them abide by some moral principles. I recently learned of a horse whose pasture mate was blind would help him navigate the pasture, ensuring he never got too close to potentially dangerous objects such as the fence and eletric wire. There have been dolphins that have chased away sharks in pursuit of humans and also have brought drowning humans to shore. A crow that adopted a stray kitten would caw loudly whenever he got too close to the road so that passerbys may be weary. Although our intelligence is unrivaled, we must not forget that we too are animals and have similar mechanisms of learning and behavior. We learn not to steal because we are either punished and/or feel guilty for our actions. Morality, to me, seems quite palpably natural. As all other species of the world, we aim to pass on our genes and help our species survive and thus we have adapted behaviors and mechanisms that increase our survival rate - and being moral and helping other is an enormous one.

Question: How important do you think studying animals is to understanding ourselves?

Is the knower wiser than the Believer?

Response
Naturally, I believe the first step to ansering this question is defining what wise means. To me, wise connotes experience and not accepting things at face value - meaning, not believing whatever is told you you. In society, we would call such a person a fool or gullible. This being my idea of what the word wise means, I would say that the knower is wiser than the believer. A believer, by definition, must support something without certainty of it - thus, they must accept something at face value, for they do not 'know' whether or not it truly is so. To know something means to explore all other alternatives and dismiss all, meanwhile what they "know" to be true cannot be discredited or disproven. It is wiser to srutinize all possibilities, and thus we know that whatever is left is our currently best explanation.

Question: What makes a topic socially taboo to discuss and critique?

Response to Michelle Webb

What would be a beautiful emotion?
I think an immediate response to this question would be love. I feel that the word emotion, though, has a connotation that it is something that must be elicited - it is the product of an event or relaying of information. I have constant love for my family, but have irregular emotions in regard to them. Sometimes, I may be mad, other times I may feel content or neutral, and other times I may be fully aware of the love I have for them - and in my opinion, I feel you are most fully aware of your love for someone when their safety is at risk (coincides with the idea that 'you don't know what you have until it's gone'). My mother had been diagnosed with cancer a year ago, which is most certainly one of the ugliest and hardest things a human being (or animal for that matter) may have to go through - however, it brought my family even closer together. When you're on the cusp of losing someone, it forces you to evaluate the possible consequences of losing that person. Most often, you'll find that these consequences are more than devastating and would most anybody to fully value that person's current state of existence. So when my mother was put into remission, I experienced the greatest sense of euphoria. I can imagine no greater sense of relief. Of course, their are many other modes through which we may encounter a beautiful emotion - this is just for me, the most beautiful I have personally felt.

Question: Why is it that we don't know what we have until it's gone?

Response to Michelle Webb

I think confidence is not purely dependent on physical appearance. We may be confident in our own individual talents - a math teacher may be very confident in their math skills and teaching skills. Physical appearance must only affect confidence in social relationships. Some people are naturally thin (and I know a few that are genuinely self conscious about how thin they are). In all other cases, I believe that the desire and requisite steps taken to achieve a small physique are catalyzed by insecurities of physical appearance. Our culture has fathered the notion that thin is beautiful - and the demands to be ever thinner are rapidly increasing. Only 15 years ago the average model's pant size was a six. Today, it is a 0. Not only do models starve themselves, but also adopt other unhealthy habits such as smoking and even as drastic as snorting cocaine as a means to keep trim. Women who are insecure in their appearance are under the impression that if they drop 20lbs they'll be magically beautiful. It's a tragic ideology that has been imposed upon our culture.

Question: Why is thin beautiful?