Posts Tagged → addiction
Gaydar.
Yes ….. another sex-ed post ……. not as raunchy as most would like but there you go ……
We’ve all watched Will and Grace, The L-word and Queer as Folk and have borne witness to that magical 6th sense known as the Gaydar and although many of you might think it was just an urban myth or something as simple as seeing if the guy gets a manicure or the girl chooses to let moustache run rampant …… think again …..
The gaydar is probably best defined as the ability to pic out or discern the gender of a person with a relatively high accuracy. It’s been studied by psychiatrists (finally made themselves useful), gender studies experts and even neurologists and the results are quite interesting. For one thing thanks to the work of Ambady, Hallahan and Conner (Currently tenuring at Tufts I believe) we can now say hand on heart that if you showed a one second clip or even a photo of a person to a group of gay and straight men and women, gay men are by far the most likely to guess the gender correctly while straight men wouldn’t know a gay man if he bought him a beer and gave him a quick rub down ……
Which means that the so-called gaydar is actually one of those things that you need to learn, practice and hone. Unlike sexual orientation (which is one of those things you are born with); you actually need to work at it and learn it and the reason why gay men are better at it than say, gay women or the straight population is because gay men need it to “survive”. Thanks to societal pressures and the fact that it is/was largely considered taboo gay men have had to get really good at it to prevent a beat down, loss of their jobs etc …..
Having said that various panels, questionnaires and studies have been conducted to analyze exactly how the thing works and to this day they cant say that it depends on hair, behaviour, skin color, appearance or anything else. But they can say the it’s a type of intuition or impulse which means that it relies on a preconceived idea and is therefor hotwired over time.
So it’s not something that requires active thinking but is rather something that we do subconsciously by taking in the person as a whole. Kind of like the type of thing you’d do when picking out a friend on your first day of school. You talk to them but you don’t know why you do it exactly.
The problem with this type of hotwiring is that it’s labile and isn’t 100% efficient … it’s also easily lost if not used enough (which explains why straight men are crap at it). It largely depends on the following:
- experience: whether you’ve actually seen or are exposed to people of varying sexual orientation, and if you, yourself are comfortable with yours.
- mood state
- Stereotypes you may have with regards to clothing, a lisp or say pink hair.
- Predispositions: do you want the ride that fine ass? or hoo hoo?
So when all is said and done it’s kind of one of these things that does exist, but you have to work on ….. alot. You also have to clear your head for it to work right and you pretty much have to go out there and let that freak flag fly!
But there is an important question that none of the studies mentioned above tries to address and that point is probably the most important and interesting of all; as homosexuality becomes more socially acceptable will the need to hone this skill dwindle? Will that sixth sense shrink like a residual organ and be left a useless remnant of it’s formal self?
Could a Liberal Society kill the gaydar?
Only time will tell ……
Addictions, delusions and nervous ticks …..
I was going to try and get everyone involved in an experiment …. however her face was just too good to miss…...
I’ve always thought that the term “addiction” should be defunct. It’s just too broad a term. It’s one of those words like “bad”, “tired” and “fucked” that may have more than one meaning and just ends up being used to describe anything from a craving, to a need, to a nervous tick and even be part of an ad campaign. Words like that should be banned ….. it’ll help people learn new ones.
The history of the the term addiction is actually very interesting, it was first described by William Shakespeare e in 1599 in Henry V in relations to opium and has since grown to encompass many other habits and obsessions, some of them behavioral (we all know that guy in class who can’t stop washing his hands ….. fucking creepy) , some of them psychological (buying makes us feel good, that chocolate cake makes us feel even better and don’t even get me started on weed) and some of them simply occur because your body needs that chemical to function (e.g. nicotine, heroin and pethidine).*
For the most part we are all addicted (or more aptly fixated) upon certain things around us, for some it’s that cup of coffee, for others it’s that cigarette at the time of need and for many (far more than you can imagine) it’s that shot of vodka before bedtime.* and then there are the vain attention seeking types, these are the people who tend to get new haircuts regularly, change their “look” 10 times a season and can’t help but carry around that handbag that looks like a Hummer H2 with suspenders strapped on to either side (the fucking thing looks like you could bludgeon someone to death with it …..)
And despite what most people think, the vast majority of addictions, fixations and nervous ticks are harmless and the fact of the matter is that very few of us will end up going into rehab for over showering, over cleaning or drinking too much coffee,alcohol or diet coke (some of us may even boast about it) but some, very few end up harming themselves………
Obvious examples of fatal addiction include heroin addicts, those of us who’ve done more than their fare share of cocaine and ofcourse surgery addicts such as the young Korean lady recently doing the rounds on all the tabloids …..
Hang Mioku now 48 began undergoing plastic surgery at the age of 24, she started off going to local plastic surgeons in Korea who would inject her cheeks with collagen (the botox of the 80′s), since then she’s had over 106 different procedures done ……. now if you think about it that’s a little too much to swallow …. for one thing I don’t think you could do 100 procedures back to back on a human face (well you could but you’d have to for-go the 6 month waiting time for all the tissue swelling to go down) for another no human could afford to pay for 100 procedures back to back (well you could …. if you were Cher, Micheal Jackson or Demi Moore).
But good old Hang found a way of pulling it off with minimal overhead by cutting out the middle man after the first couple of surgeries and using cheaper …. erm …. biodegradable collagen/silicon/botox alternatives.
She decided to inject herself with cooking oil ….. it’s a wonder how she managed to pull it off without paralysing her face ,developing infection or developing gangrene ….. if the women went to medical school she would have been the best plastic surgeon ever !
But is her addiction legitimate? or is it just a habit gone wild? Based on most of the stuff I read about the woman and others addicted to surgery seems to be more of an obsessive habit rather than a full on addiction ….. oh well maybe I should have showed up for psychiatry in medschool ….. damn class was boring though ….. they should have used power point instead of those fucking transparencies …….
* Yes I am well aware of the the repetitve use of “for some”, “for others”, “for others” format …. my linguistic skills have been taking a nose dive lately….. apologies …..
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