I was amused at one of the vox pops following one of Derren Brown’s shows (on TV) this week. One woman says ‘I’m an NLP practitioner and I don’t know how he does it’. Well that’s not saying much is it? After one to three weeks training and given that there is actually no objective evidence to substantiate the wild claims made by the more zealous, almost cultish, NLP enthusiasts. Despite NLP being hailed as a wonderful ‘communication technology’, it’s quite telling that it’s alleged that its originators only speak to each other through their solicitors. I doubt that Derren Brown was sh*tting himself knowing there were a few NLPers in the audience, as he’s hardly complimentary about its practice.
The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has, today, issued a statement on the petition to get an apology for treatment of Alan Turing. It is worth noting that many acknowledge that history would be very different for everyone if the Enigma codes had not been broken during World War Two. Sadly for Turing, his own fate was not substantially different than if the Nazis had triumphed. Here’s what Mr Brown has to say:
Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can
point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own
life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction. I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Gordon Brown
If you would like to help preserve Alan Turing’s memory for future generations, please donate here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
One of the things to emerge from the Caster Semenya controversy is the misconception that the terms sex and gender mean the same thing. They do not. Numerous sources, including ones that should know better, have been waffling on about ‘gender tests’ when what they actually mean is biological sex tests. Sex as a categorization is a biological designation. It refers to the physiological characteristics that differentiate males and females.
Gender is the social interpretation of biological sex. It refers to socially constructed roles in the form of behaviours, activities and other social attributes that any particular culture or society considers appropriate for women and men. So, “male” and “female” are sex categories, while “masculine” and “feminine” are gender categories. Now there are also wide gender variations with any culture. For instance, do rugby players have the same gender as librarians, stamp collectors and ballet dancers? They may do, they may not, but that doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on their biological sex. Within any population there will be an enormous range from ultra ‘feminine’ woman, to the ‘averagely’ feminine woman, to ‘neutral’ looking/acting women, to slightly ‘butch’ women to overtly masculine women. The same applies to men and gender.
The idea that we could gender test athletic competitors is quite ludicrous. If an individual behaves in a way that does not support the gender stereotype, so what? The basic test for gender is what a person perceives themselves to be! Mostly we use the clumsy black and white categories but the way we live our lives betrays the inadequacy of the labels.
Equally ludicrous is the notion that gender can be divided into simplistic binary categories. Numerous factors influence gender identity such as race, class, culture and so on. Oscar Wilde once commented that football is a game for ‘rough girls not delicate boys’. It’s possible to be male and not sporty and still be masculine. It’s possible for a female to like football and still be feminine. Modern gender theorists now talk about femininities and masculinities rather than as monolithic constructs. No two people have identical genders as no two people have identical views of the world. They may be very similar but never identical. Aspects of sex will not vary substantially between different human societies, while aspects of gender may vary greatly.
Gender may be normal (i.e. ‘the norm’) but it’s never natural. It’s what society expects but not necessarily what nature ‘intended’. We have to work hard to reduce the ambiguity between men and women. All gender is a form of drag. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural looking women or men’. Nature always gets a helping hand. Femininity is ‘perfected’ by the addition of make-up, waxing, plucking, hair-styles and clothes and codes of appropriate ‘lady-like’ behaviour. Show me a female Hollywood film star with hairy arm pits and I’ll show you several front page tabloid pictures expressing dismay and disgust that ’she’s just letting the side down’. Just watch young men affecting a swagger of a walk and the posturing that they’ve seen from rappers, action heroes and their peers. Gender is all an act. It’s a game and you have to play by the rules.
So why do newspapers continue to write about ‘gender’ tests. Well it’s just that ’sex tests’ sounds ambiguous too. It could refer to the act of sex or the biological status. The solution to this dilemma appears to be to hijack the word ‘gender’ and distort its meaning. Ultimately it’s sloppy journalism that only serves to add confusion. There is no amount of saliva, urine, blood or any other bodily secretion that can be tested to determine gender. We can test for biological sex and infer how a person is likely to behave in a given culture if they ‘play by the rules’, but there is no biological test for gender.
Leading computer programmer John Graham-Cumming is championing a cause to get an apology from the British Government over its treatment of computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, described by Graham-Cumming as ‘the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code’.
In 1953 Turing was prosecuted for being gay. He was given the option of a prison sentence or an experimental ‘chemical castration’ through oestrogen injections. He ‘chose’ the ‘therapy’ which lasted a year and had serious side effects. His security clearance was taken and his career was effectively ended. Turing took his own life in 1954.
The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man’s life and career.
Thousands have already signed the petition including high profile names such as Richard Dawkins. If you wish to add your support, please follow the link below.
The outrage at Microsoft’s photo-editing blunder has sparked allegations of racism. What is surprising is Microsoft’s response in admitting that it took four people to replace the head of a black man with a white man in a photograph and forget to replace the hands! Apparently all four people are no longer with the company. I’m not surprised. However the spokeswoman also goes on to state “We are a multiracial company and there isn’t a chance any of us are racist.” But how can she possibly know this? What are the chances that it would take four people to edit one photograph very badly and cause an international outcry? I’m sure she wouldn’t have predicted that. Microsoft is a huge company and surely there’s a chance that one person in the company is a ‘teensy’ bit racist. So the ‘head-swap’ blunder is quickly followed by an an unsupportable platitude. And if Microsoft is ‘multiracial’ (which I’m sure it is) then why was it deemed necessary to prevent the Polish demographic from seeing it? Did someone make the decision that seeing a Black person in an advertisement would be bad for Polish business. If so, isn’t that racist? It may not be an outright sin of commission, but it certainly is a sin of omission.
If you’ve found yourself uttering this, you’ve recognised that time speeds up as you get older. The main reason is that as we age, each new year becomes an ever diminishing proportion of our total time on the planet. Between the age of one and two that year represents living half of your life again. Whereas by the age of ten, another year means living a tenth of your life. And on it goes, the incredibly shrinking year. When you were a child and you were told ‘we’re going out in a hour’, you’d think ‘No! Do I have to wait a whole hour?’ Now if someone says you’ll be going out in an hour you’d complain ‘An hour? I’ll never be ready in time’.
So the question is, can we do anything about it? Can we slow time?
Slowing It Down, Spicy Style
In Making Time, Steve Taylor sets out the psychological laws of time and how we can change our perception of time. One law follows the theme of ‘variety is the spice of life’ or ‘a change is as good as a rest’. So to slow down time you need to seek out new experiences and new environments. Do you have any secret goes or ambitions that you forego for a few hours in front of the television? Just breaking up your routine can help. Have you ever noticed that the first time you go somewhere no, the journey seems longer than the next time? That’s because the second time you go your brain has mapped out the journey and it’s already started to become familiar and for some of the decision you react automatically. So mix things up a little. Take different routes on familiar journeys, try a new food every week, go shopping at different places, read a type of book or newspaper different to your normal choices, try out some classes and so on. Try somepersonal experimentsdoing different things to see if you can slow time. Also, write down some short-term, medium term and long term goals and act on them.
Speeding It Up (but being happier)
Another psychological law of time is something of a paradox. When we are absorbed in something we love doing then time seems to go more quickly. However to balance this, time spent in these states of total absorption is one definition of happiness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chick-sent-me-high) calls this state of absorption being in ‘flow’. At the heart of his philosophy is also goal-setting. I remember a conversation with my granddad when I was about 14 years old. I asked him if he had any regrets. He had two: getting a tattoo and not planning for his retirement. I never understood the significance of ‘planning for retirement’ until I readFlow. We can set goals for just about anything, they are promises to ourselves – something to get out of bed, or off the couch for.
The Alternative
Now there is an alternative ways to slow down time. Just sit there and do nothing just staring blankly into space. Paradoxically, each day will drag interminably but years will seem to fly by.
It’s Your Life So Take It Personally
As a teacher and a coach I subscribe to the philosophy ‘It’s your life so take it personally‘. So don’t ‘kill time’ and don’t complain about having too much time on your hands or not enough time to do the things you like. Many of us waste time by choosing to do nothing else instead.You don’t have to look back over another year and ask ‘where the hell did the year go and what have I done with it?’ Okay, so you may not become a time ‘lord’ in the sense that you can travel across the universe but by using the psychological laws of time you can take charge of your destiny. So take a deep breath and get started. Time flies – seize the day.
In my previous post, The Myth Busting Sexual Anatomy Quiz, one of the answers in particular prompted comments and questions. I stated that the clitoris is not a mini-penis as it is often described but rather, biologically speaking, the penis is an enlarged clitoris? But how can this be and does it really matter?
Firstly the ‘clitoris as mini-penis’ description assumes a primacy of the penis. It assumes the penis comes first (pause for sniggering). There’s also the not-so-subtle suggestion that the clitoris as mini-penis is an under developed penis and therefore an inferior organ. So yes it does matter because these assumptions are biologically incorrect.
Male development requires hormones to suppress female development and further hormones to enhance male development. This makes female anatomy the platform for male development and so technically the penis is an enlarged clitoris. Of course this sounds provocative because it goes against the ‘received wisdom’ or ‘gender spin’ that gives primacy to the penis.
If we compare the female and male genitalia we can see how the embryonic tissue developed down the two routes:
ovaries =testes
labia majora (outer lips)=scrotum
labia minora (inner lips)= underside of the penis
glans (head of clitoris)=glans (head of penis)
shaft (erectile tissue) of clitoris= shaft (erectile tissue) of penis)
vagina = no comparable structure in male.
It’s notable that the word ‘vagina’ is used for female genitals where in fact this only applies to the birth canal. So in describing the female anatomy in everyday language, we put the emphasis on reproduction. The collective term for female genitalia is the vulva, which includes the clitoris, the only organ in the human body solely for sexual pleasure. The everyday use of ‘vagina’ for female genitalia is more gender spinas it keeps the emphasis on penetration and again ’sidelines’ the clitoris.
Then there’s the G-Spot to contend with. That’s it, let’s get the emphasis back up the vagina in a quest for the orgasmic grail. There is certainly not universal agreement that the G-Spot really exists. Supposedly located on the anterior wall of the vagina, no structure has been identified and evidence is largely anecdotal. Recent academic research suggests that:
the special sensitivity of the lower anterior vaginal wall could be explained by pressure and movement of clitoris’ root during a vaginal penetration and subsequent perineal contraction.
Again, the clitoris is often thought to be a ‘tiny’ structure whereas its root extends deep into the body. So what some women experience as the G-Spot may be a by-product of the movement of the clitoris. More evidence, if any were needed, that the clitoris is not an inferior penis.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust
In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind
- Louis Pasteur
In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists
Welcome to the PsyCentral Blog with Psychologist, Coach, Author & Broadcaster Dr Gary Wood - offering a psychological perspective on human social life including current affairs; sex, gender & relationships plus learning, development and coaching insights and tips. . . the odd acerbic comment and the occasional rant.
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