http://tamilblog.ishafoundation.org/pirappilaeye-azhagatrupponathu-en-thavara/
How I wish I could translate this!
It's such a beautiful piece.
How I wish I could translate this!
It's such a beautiful piece.
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Friday, November 28, 2014
Thursday, September 4, 2014
This Is Why There Aren't Enough Women In Tech
http://valleywag.gawker.com/this-is-why-there-arent-enough-women-in-tech-1221929631
Monday, August 18, 2014
Human face and body as a canvas for art
It's makeup time again.
As I browse through a few makeup related stuff I hit upon this gorgeous pic of Kangana in an Audrey Hepburn style. It was just wow.. It's amazing how makeup can transform a person. I loved the style on Kangana - the dress, the hair, the pearls.. everything.
Today, we are inundated with a bevy of glamorous pics.
Over time I have realized the effort that goes into such a shoot. These people would look so different in their real lives.
Our ordinary lives, with so many retakes and meticulous planning and sets will look dreamy.
It's essential that one understands the effort behind those dreamy scenes.
Our lives are great as they are. One needs to realize that.
On the other hand, it is amazing how one's face could be a canvas for painting. This is art. It's amazing how humans adorn themselves. Clothes - have moved far away from their primary purpose of protection into a huge piece of art. Jewellery, makeup, hair, shoes, tattoos - we've used everything in us to create art. It's amazing if you look at it that way.
As I browse through a few makeup related stuff I hit upon this gorgeous pic of Kangana in an Audrey Hepburn style. It was just wow.. It's amazing how makeup can transform a person. I loved the style on Kangana - the dress, the hair, the pearls.. everything.
Today, we are inundated with a bevy of glamorous pics.
Over time I have realized the effort that goes into such a shoot. These people would look so different in their real lives.
Our ordinary lives, with so many retakes and meticulous planning and sets will look dreamy.
It's essential that one understands the effort behind those dreamy scenes.
Our lives are great as they are. One needs to realize that.
On the other hand, it is amazing how one's face could be a canvas for painting. This is art. It's amazing how humans adorn themselves. Clothes - have moved far away from their primary purpose of protection into a huge piece of art. Jewellery, makeup, hair, shoes, tattoos - we've used everything in us to create art. It's amazing if you look at it that way.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Foregoing the advantages of beauty
As seen in some previous posts there are huge debates on beauty and how it is a form of status, etc.
What do you miss if you are not in that bandwagon? I'm trying to guess.
a) Some (or a lot of) attention by the opposite sex.
b) Few freebies as told by Cameroon Russell.
c) A little quicker rise in the office.
d) Better chances of being hired.
e) More random people are likely to help you if you need help.
f) A lot of beautiful photos to upload on social media.
g) Clothes which look gorgeous on you. (jewellery and makeup included).
h) Better acknowledged at parties.
i) A good chance at finding a good looking, romantic partner.
Also there are 2 types of beauties.
Some people are beauties without any specific talent or brains.
Some are so lucky, they are talented as well.
The former people are dealt with easily by the society. You have to just find some faults and keep gossiping, in an effort to bring down their perceived value.
The second lot is difficult to deal with, especially since they are talented. So you keep telling yourself that these ones are "gifted" or have "undue advantage" and that is why they are successful. You simply deny that they have talent because that is too much to take. You cannot accept that they won the genetic lottery and the talent lottery. That is horrible. Such people should not exist. So, you throw barbs and prick them at every possible event. You try to silence them, undermine them. Do whatever.
These problems exist for any talent. If someone has something that we'd like to have, it gives rise to jealousy. But, how does one deal with jealousy?
The practical ones keep improving themselves. They hone their skills so that someday, they will be the best in their field.
The crooked ones will conjure up new reasons to dig graves for others.
But, beauty, presents a little unique problem. You cannot buy it with hardwork or money. Usually you are born with it and you need to accept it. But, plastic surgery probably changed the whole table. It made people aspirational. It promised to make everyone beautiful. But to a majority of the people, it is an unfair thing. Something that is of value but it cannot be got with hardwork and money. So, it irritates them probably. Some people are not even aware that they are irritated with this fact. It causes them to behave badly.
After reading all the articles, I understand that it is such a biologically tied thing. All these hard wired stuff are really hard to let go. They affect us in ways unknown to us..
So, if one is indeed affected by things outside of one's control, we need to find innovative solutions.
What do you miss if you are not in that bandwagon? I'm trying to guess.
a) Some (or a lot of) attention by the opposite sex.
b) Few freebies as told by Cameroon Russell.
c) A little quicker rise in the office.
d) Better chances of being hired.
e) More random people are likely to help you if you need help.
f) A lot of beautiful photos to upload on social media.
g) Clothes which look gorgeous on you. (jewellery and makeup included).
h) Better acknowledged at parties.
i) A good chance at finding a good looking, romantic partner.
Also there are 2 types of beauties.
Some people are beauties without any specific talent or brains.
Some are so lucky, they are talented as well.
The former people are dealt with easily by the society. You have to just find some faults and keep gossiping, in an effort to bring down their perceived value.
The second lot is difficult to deal with, especially since they are talented. So you keep telling yourself that these ones are "gifted" or have "undue advantage" and that is why they are successful. You simply deny that they have talent because that is too much to take. You cannot accept that they won the genetic lottery and the talent lottery. That is horrible. Such people should not exist. So, you throw barbs and prick them at every possible event. You try to silence them, undermine them. Do whatever.
These problems exist for any talent. If someone has something that we'd like to have, it gives rise to jealousy. But, how does one deal with jealousy?
The practical ones keep improving themselves. They hone their skills so that someday, they will be the best in their field.
The crooked ones will conjure up new reasons to dig graves for others.
But, beauty, presents a little unique problem. You cannot buy it with hardwork or money. Usually you are born with it and you need to accept it. But, plastic surgery probably changed the whole table. It made people aspirational. It promised to make everyone beautiful. But to a majority of the people, it is an unfair thing. Something that is of value but it cannot be got with hardwork and money. So, it irritates them probably. Some people are not even aware that they are irritated with this fact. It causes them to behave badly.
After reading all the articles, I understand that it is such a biologically tied thing. All these hard wired stuff are really hard to let go. They affect us in ways unknown to us..
So, if one is indeed affected by things outside of one's control, we need to find innovative solutions.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
The beauty debate
The whole issue of beauty, appreciating beauty, wanting beauty started off as a biological one and has now turned into a full blown obsession.
I learnt some valuable concepts from these articles.
Beauty is like a currency and beauty is a form of status.
The things people do, for good looking people, is amazing, even when they never get to see the recipient.
We are so easily persuaded that beauty can be attained with hard work and money.
Good looking people enjoy a lot of little advantages all over their lives.
The general well being of good looking people is almost the same or very marginally better than others. Overall life satisfaction wise, beauty has no impact.
How to Enjoy Beauty Rather Than Envy It
Dealing with the advantages that beauty brings.
Harvard sociologist Dr. Nancy Etcoff traces the ability to grab other people's attention to its biological roots. In Survival of the Prettiest, she makes the case that we -- meaning both men and women -- are genetically programmed to be attracted to good looks. For hundreds of thousands of years, she says, men have found youthful, voluptuous women appealing because they signal potential fertility and fecundity. Women are attracted to men who are tall, dark and handsome because these qualities suggest virility, strength and the ability to protect a family. "What was biologically advantageous," she writes, has become our "aesthetic preference."
And this attraction to beauty begins early in life. A study by British developmental psychologist Dr. Alan Slater showed that infants stare significantly longer at faces with symmetrical features, big eyes, set wide apart in round, less angular faces -- a preference that appears to cross race and culture. While we may expect good looks to matter more in developed countries with large media influences, findings show that even greater value is placed on physical beauty in socioeconomically depressed areas where beauty is closely connected to health care and longevity.
The ugly truth? Beauty is unfair. People born with a particular set of genes, who maintain their health, good grooming habits and develop strong social skills are likely to grow into adults that have the "it" quality. And while one asset without the other doesn't guarantee the same result, the fortunate combination of them all leads to measurable advantages in life that are gained without merit.
Daniel Hamermesh, author of Beauty Pays, examined the economic benefits gained by having good looks. Attractive people, he says, are hired more quickly, paid higher wages and bring in more money to the companies where they work. Even in jobs where we may not think physical attributes play much of a role, beauty brings greater financial rewards. For example, homely NFL quarterbacks -- yes, there are a few -- earn less than their comelier counterparts, despite identical yards passed and years in the league. According to Hamermesh's research, attractive people in general earn an average of three to four percent more than a person with below average looks, adding up to approximately $230,000 more over a lifetime.
If that weren't enough, attractive people also receive milder prison sentences and have an easier time getting a loan than plain folks, reports The Economist in "The Line of Beauty." They found that "in America more people say they have felt discriminated against for their appearance than because of their age, race or ethnicity." Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode looks at this inequity from a legal perspective. In The Beauty Bias, she writes that discrimination on the grounds of personal appearance should be banned. She points toward the negative consequences of what some call "lookism," saying that a huge amount of time and money is spent to undo this lopsided predilection -- citing our culture's obsession with fashion, cosmetics and plastic surgery.
Newsweek reported in "The Beauty Advantage" that 57 percent of the hiring managers they surveyed believe that unattractive but qualified job applicants are likely to have a harder time landing work. And more than half of these managers advised both men and women "to spend as much time and money on making sure they look attractive as on perfecting a résumé." The New York Times added in "Up the Career Ladder, Lipstick in Hand," that just the right makeup can help those without natural good looks appear more capable and reach cooperate success. For job seekers willing to go further -- and deeper -- there's always the cornucopia of cosmetic procedures to turn toward for help. A trend that is rising at a frighteningly steep pace -- a 446 percent increase in the past 15 years -- use of these procedures are becoming more common as a means to remain competitive, not only personally, but professionally as well. In spite of the many changes resulting from the feminist movement, looks remain the key to a positive self-image in today's world.
If beauty and its rewards are viewed less as a social evil, and more as an interpersonal reality, can we learn to recognize it, rather than resent or envy it? Can we derive the pleasure that physical beauty brings to our senses -- the way beautiful art, dance or music does -- even if it is distributed unequally? Many of us enjoy watching talented performers and skilled athletes without being consumed by jealousy, then why not do the same when it comes to those who display beauty. The answer? Take the green out of envy by moving beyond our otherwise egalitarian values and accept the powerful, yet unfair influence brought by beauty.
This of course does not mean we give up on our own attractiveness. We may not all be born with those symmetrical features deemed beautiful -- the ones that make babies smile, and that light up adult human brains -- but surely we can find other ways to look and feel appealing to ourselves and others. Clearly, we are attracted to our mates even though they may not be classic beauties. (Note that Dr. Fisher's fMRIs showed increased brain activity when viewing our loved ones -- whether deemed attractive to others or not!) And we are awed by our less-than-perfect children who we see as beautiful regardless of their physical features. Surely we can find beauty in ourselves -- and raise our sons and daughters to find it too -- even if our mirrors tell us we look different from today's "it" girls and guys portrayed in the media.
And lest we forget, beauty icons today can end up tomorrow's has-beens if there is nothing but lovely looks behind their allure. Leslie, and others like her, may be blessed with advantages rooted in human biology and anthropology, but we know that heads turn for only so long. We all age, and as we do, we all have to find qualities that make us feel attractive underneath the surface and beyond our youthful looks.
If we accept the undemocratic distribution of physical assets and feel grateful for what we have, we can admire the Leslies of the world -- as they walk into boardrooms, down the street or onto our television and movie screens. Jungian analyst Dr. Arlene Landau describes them as our current-day version of Golden Aphrodite, whose allure has been mythologized since ancient Greek times. No doubt, the power of "it" will continue in today's world and for years to come. But for we everyday men and women, what really matters is knowing that unique beauty -- experienced within and with all its imperfections -- is the one that lasts a lifetime.
Have you experienced beauty discrimination? Or the advantages that beauty brings? Tell us what you think about this topic.
Vivian Diller, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in New York City. She has written articles on beauty, aging, media, models and dancers. She serves as a consultant to companies promoting health, beauty and cosmetic products. "Face It: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks Change" (2010), written with Jill Muir-Sukenick, Ph.D. and edited by Michele Willens, is a psychological guide to help women deal with the emotions brought on by their changing appearances.
For more information, please visit my websites at www.FaceItTheBook.com and www.VivianDiller.com. Friend me on Facebook (at http://www.facebook.com/Readfaceit) or continue the conversation on Twitter.
Follow Vivian Diller, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrVDiller
Courtesy: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-it/201201/how-enjoy-beauty-rather-envy-it
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http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:9780385479424:14.00&page=excerpt
Excerpt
The Nature of BeautyPhilosophers
ponder it and pornographers proffer it. Asked why people desire
physical beauty, Aristotle said, "No one that is not blind could ask
that question." Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up
emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have
catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.
But we live in the age of ugly beauty, when beauty is morally suspect and ugliness has a gritty allure. Beauty is equal parts flesh and imagination: we imbue it with our dreams, saturate it with our longings. But to spin this another way, reverence for beauty is just an escape from reality, it is the perpetual adolescent in us refusing to accept a flawed world. We wave it away with a cliché, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," meaning that beauty is whatever pleases us (with the subtext that it is inexplicable). But defined this way, beauty is meaningless--as Gertrude Stein once said about her childhood home, Oakland, California, "There is no there there."
In 1991, Naomi Wolf set aside centuries of speculation when she said that beauty as an objective and universal entity does not exist. "Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact." According to Wolf, the images we see around us are based on a myth. Their beauty is like the tales of Aphrodite, the judgment of Paris, and the apple of discord: made up. Beauty is a convenient fiction used by multibillion-dollar industries that create images of beauty and peddle them as opium for the female masses. Beauty ushers women to a place where men want them, out of the power structure. Capitalism and the patriarchy define beauty for cultural consumption, and plaster images of beauty everywhere to stir up envy and desire. The covetousness they inspire serves their twin goals of making money and preserving the status quo.
Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing, and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become an embarrassment.
But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with indifference to a baby's cry. We can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our understanding of it.
Before beauty sinks any deeper, let me reel it in for closer examination. Suggesting that men on Madison Avenue have Svengali-like powers to dictate women's behavior and preferences, and can define their sense of beauty, is tantamount to saying that women are not only powerless but mindless. On the contrary, isn't it possible that women cultivate beauty and use the beauty industry to optimize the power beauty brings? Isn't the problem that women often lack the opportunity to cultivate their other assets, not that they can cultivate beauty?
As we will see, Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonald's created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments we wear and find beautiful, but I will show that this belongs to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty. Fashion is what Charles Baudelaire described as "the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake," not the cake itself.
The media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our preferences. A crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a beauty is followed by her imitator, and then by the imitator of her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was such a crowd pleaser that she's been imitated by everyone from Jayne Mansfield to Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and thrives on diversity. As Darwin wrote, "If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be no such thing as beauty."
Part of the backlash against beauty grew out of concern that the pursuit of beauty had reached epic proportions, and that this is a sign of a diseased culture. When we examine the historical and anthropological literature we will discover that, throughout human history, people have scarred, painted, pierced, padded, stiffened, plucked, and buffed their bodies in the name of beauty. When Darwin traveled on the Beagle in the nineteenth century, he found a universal "passion for ornament," often involving sacrifice and suffering that was "wonderfully great."
We allow that violence is done to the body among "primitive" cultures or that it was done by ancient societies, but we have yet to realize that beauty brings out the primitive in every person. During 1996 a reported 696,904 Americans underwent voluntary aesthetic surgery that involved tearing or burning their skin, shucking their fat, or implanting foreign materials. Before the FDA limited silicone gel implants in 1992, four hundred women were getting them every day. Breast implants were once the province of porn stars; they are now the norm for Hollywood actresses, and no longer a rarity for the housewife.
These drastic procedures are done not to correct deformities but to improve aesthetic details. Kathy Davis, a professor at the University of Utrecht, watched as more than fifty people tried to persuade surgeons in the Netherlands to alter their appearance. Except for a man with a "cauliflower nose," she was unable to anticipate which feature they wanted to alter just by looking at them. She wrote, "I found myself astounded that anyone could be willing to undergo such drastic measures for what seemed to me such a minor imperfection." But there is no such thing as a minor imperfection when it comes to the face or body. Every person knows the topography of her face and the landscape of her body as intimately as a mapmaker. To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best hours to our worst. In our mind's eye, however, we undergo a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or our mental agility usually do not.
People do extreme things in the name of beauty. They invest so much of their resources in beauty and risk so much for it, one would think that lives depended on it. In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. Tons of makeup--1,484 tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care products--are sold every minute. During famines, Kalahari bushmen in Africa still use animal fats to moisturize their skin, and in 1715 riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour for beauty purposes was only quelled by the French Revolution.
Either the world is engaged in mass insanity or there is method in this madness. Deep inside we all know something: no one can withstand appearances. We can create a big bonfire with every issue of Vogue, GQ, and Details, every image of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford, and still, images of youthful perfect bodies would take shape in our heads and create a desire to have them. No one is immune. When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets, her response was a poignant one: she wished she had been prettier. It is a sobering statement from one of the most revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life with many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a woman's lament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Leo Tolstoy wrote, "I was frequently subject to moments of despair. I imagined that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a wide nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.... Nothing has such a striking impact on a man's development as his appearance, and not so much his actual appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or unattractive."
Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self. This assumption may not be fair, and not how the best of all moral worlds would conduct itself. But that does not make it any less true. Beauty has consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will continue to operate--outside jurisdiction, in the lawless world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly collides with reality.
This book is an inquiry into what we find beautiful and why--what in our nature makes us susceptible to beauty, what qualities in people evoke this response, and why sensitivity to beauty is ubiquitous in human nature. I will argue that our passionate pursuit of beauty reflects the workings of a basic instinct. As George Santayana has said, "Had our perceptions no connection with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes to this world .--.--. that we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a pure gain." My argument will be guided by cutting-edge research in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. An evolutionary viewpoint cannot explain everything about beauty, but I hope to show you that it can help explain a good many things, and offer a perspective on the place of beauty in human life.
Beauty as Bait
Many people have an idyllic conception of childhood as a time when beauty does not matter. Listen to children taunt and tease each other in a schoolyard--shrimp, squirt, four eyes, fatso--to quickly disabuse yourself of that notion. Children gravitate to beauty. One of photographer Richard Avedon's first snapshots was of his seven-year-old sister Louise. The nine-year-old Avedon was so entranced by her that he taped the negative to his skin and had the sun burn it into his shoulder. Her oval face, dark hair, big eyes, and long throat became "the prototype of what I considered to be beautiful. She was the original Avedon beauty." His later photographs of models Dovima, Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, and Carmen Dell'Orefice "are all memories of Louise."
Children are sensitive to beauty from a very early age, but how and when do they acquire their preferences? The popular wisdom is that children learn beauty preferences through acculturation. Perhaps their parents foist certain tastes upon them, then peers rebelliously revise the aesthetics, and pop culture finally fine-tunes it. As Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr wrote in their 1984 book Face Value, "Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognizable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations."
But psychologist Judith Langlois is convinced that no lessons are required: we are born with preferences and even a baby knows beauty when she sees it. Langlois collected hundreds of slides of people's faces and asked adults to rate them for attractiveness. When she presented these faces to three- and six-month-old babies, they stared significantly longer at the faces that adults found attractive. The babies gauged beauty in diverse faces: they looked longer at the most attractive men, women, babies, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Caucasians. This suggests not only that babies have beauty detectors but that human faces may share universal features of beauty across their varied features.
Langlois is quick to point out that infants show preferences for beautiful unfamiliar faces. It is unlikely that an infant's behavior toward his or her caregivers is influenced by their facial beauty, given the importance of attachment to the baby's survival. Nor is she suggesting that babies with attractive mothers have a special eye for beauty. Babies looked longer at attractive faces regardless of the mother's attractiveness.
The notion that infants come prewired with beauty detectors was not the prevailing theory when Judith Langlois began her research ten years ago. The idea that an infant would be peering out at the world with the eyes of a neonate beauty judge is downright discomfiting: even they notice looks? But her results are part of a growing body of evidence that infants share a universal set of sensual preferences. They prefer to look more at symmetrical patterns than at asymmetrical ones, and to touch soft surfaces rather than rough ones. By four months of age they prefer consonant to dissonant music. When psychologists Jerome Kagan and Marcel Zentner played dissonant melodies to babies, they wrinkled their noses in disgust. Kagan and Zentner felt that they were witnessing the first signs of a preference for easy listening and mellifluous crooning. We can learn to love dissonance, but it is an acquired taste.
Babies pay close attention to the human face. Within ten minutes of emerging from the mother's body, their eyes follow a line drawing of a face. By day two they can discriminate their mother's face from a face they have never seen before. The next day they begin mimicking facial actions: stick out your tongue at a newborn and the baby will do the same. Each newborn orients immediately toward whatever is biologically significant, and topmost will be people who ensure her survival.
Babies look almost as long at a person's eyes as they do at the whole face, and see there much of what they need to know. The movements of the eyes and of the muscles surrounding the eyes, the changes in pupil size, and the gleam or dullness in our eyes express nuances of feeling. The small individual differences in distances around the eyes created by the facial bone structure is one of the most enduring parts of our visual signature, and as unique as fingerprints. Automatic face recognition systems guided by computers recognize faces better from the eyes alone than from the nose or mouth alone. Computers learning to detect faces from nonfaces are most easily fooled by interference with the eye regions. This is why masking only the area around the eyes has proved an effective disguise from Don Juan in the fourteenth century to the Lone Ranger in the twentieth.
If babies see someone looking at them, they look back, and usually they smile. Their interest piqued, they will look up to three times as long at a face looking at them as at a face looking away. Unlike prey animals such as rabbits and deer which have panoramic, surround vision, humans, like hawks and leopards and other predators, look precisely at what they are thinking about. This is why babies come equipped with mechanisms to detect direction of gaze, and why the human eye may have evolved its distinctive appearance. Unlike most animals, which have sclera that darken with age, humans retain white sclera all of their lives. The whites of the eyes help us gauge where eyes are looking and give us a good idea of what has captured other people's attention and what might be on their minds.
An animal stalked by lions, which can see prey from a mile away, would not be greatly benefited by seeing the whites of their eyes. By then, it's all over. But for humans living in close proximity and dependent on one another for survival, direction of gaze is an effective form of communication, whether in the form of the predatory gaze, the beseeching look, or the look of love.
The newborn baby's preferences are formes frustes of adult preferences. Babies turn into adults who like symmetry and harmony and things that feel smooth; they are riveted by the sight of the human face, and aroused when eyes meet theirs. The three-month-old who stares at beautiful faces grows up to be the usual person whose head is turned by the sight of beauty and who can fall in love by looking. When babies fix their stare at the same faces adults describe as highly attractive, their actions wordlessly argue against the belief that culture must teach us to recognize human beauty.
The Injustice of the Given
Whether or not the beautiful is good, beauty seems to bring out goodness in others. In one psychologist's study, seventy-five college men were shown photographs of women, some of whom were very attractive and others less so. They were asked to select the person they would be most likely do the following for: help move furniture, loan money, donate blood, donate a kidney, swim one mile to rescue her, save her from a burning building, and even jump on a terrorist hand grenade. The men were most likely to volunteer for any of these altruistic and risky acts for a beautiful woman. The only thing they seemed reluctant to do for her was loan her money.
Answers to psychologists' questions about hypothetical situations may have little to do with real behavior. But when put to the test, at least in small ways, people seem to confirm what the college boys say. In several staged experiments, psychologists have tested people's honesty and altruism toward good-looking and plain-looking people and find that their good deeds are not doled out evenly. For example, in one study a pretty or an ugly woman approaches a phone booth and asks the occupant, "Did I leave my dime there?" (There is a dime in the phone booth.) Eighty-seven percent of people return the dime to the good-looking woman, but only sixty-four percent return the dime to the ugly woman. In another study, two women stand by a car with a flat tire in the roadway: the good-looking one gets rescued first.
People are more likely to help attractive people even if they don't like them. In another staged experiment, an attractive or unattractive woman gave men compliments on their work or criticized it. Afterward, the men were asked how much they liked the woman. They particularly liked the attractive woman who praised them, and liked least the attractive woman who criticized them. But asked to volunteer more time, the men gave it to the good-looking woman, even when he didn't like her. As the psychologists wrote, her attractiveness attracted. Attractiveness attracts even in situations where there is no chance of actually meeting the recipient of one's favors. In yet another study, completed (bogus) college applications were left in Detroit airports. A note attached to them suggested that the applications were given to fathers who had accidentally left them behind. Each had the identical application answers, but each had a different photograph attached. People were much more likely to mail the applications of thebetter-looking applicants.
Interestingly, people are less likely to ask good-looking people for help. This is particularly true for men with good-looking women, but it is also true for both men and women with good-looking members of their own sex (it is less true for women asking good-looking men for help). But as evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown, people keep a watchful eye on who has done what for whom. Our efforts to please good-looking people with no expectation of immediate reward or reciprocal gesture are one way we reinforce beauty as a form of status, not unlike being born into the nobility or inheriting wealth. Beauty represents what writer Jim Harrison has called "the injustice of the given."
The high status of beauty is one reason why it is a subject fraught with such heated emotions. Didn't democratic societies ban the aristocracy and level the playing field? Perhaps this is also why we are so easily persuaded by the idea that beauty is attainable through the usual democratic means--hard work and money. If it confers elite status, then we must make it an elitism based on effort and achievement, not a priori advantage. Historian Lois Banner has chronicled "the democratic rhetoric of beauty experts in the early twentieth century," which insisted that "every woman could be beautiful." She suggests that such campaigns were dangerous for women because they held up an unattainable ideal. Estee Lauder's successful campaigns included her exhortations that "there are no homely women only careless women .--.--. you have to want it [beauty] very much and then help it along with some well-chosen products." Paradoxically, the arguments of twentieth-century beauty experts have often unwittingly linked beauty with goodness.
Women who were dissatisfied with what they saw in the mirror now felt not only unattractive but lazy, inept, or lacking the inner beauty which was supposed to shine forth with good habits and good concealer.
Happiness
As Ben Franklin said, "Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by the little advantages that occur every day." As we have seen, great-looking people are afforded those little advantages all of their lives, so they must be happier.
Beauty, in fact, does not bring much extra in the way of happiness. Psychologists Ed Diener and David Myers have spent a lot of time trying to understand what makes people happy. They focus on "subjective well-being," a state of mind in which a person feels very positive, seldom feels negative, and has an overall sense of satisfaction with life. Ed Diener finds that good-looking men have a somewhat greater sense of well-being and feel a bit happier than other men. A woman's beauty sometimes makes her a bit happier than other women, but it can also make her more unhappy. The overall effect for both sexes is marginal. The biggest effect is on satisfaction with one's romantic life. Here the good-looking are happier. But somehow this does not lead to greater overall life satisfaction.
Why doesn't beauty, that brings so many advantages, bring more happiness? Diener and Myers believe that happiness has more to do with personal qualities such as optimism, a sense of personal control, self-esteem, ability to tolerate frustration, and feelings of comfort with and affection for people than with looks or money. They note that it is human nature to keep adjusting expectations according to circumstances--the more we get, the more we want since we are always comparing ourselves with people who have more. As psychologist Timothy Miller observes, "No instinct tells us that we have accumulated enough status, wealth, or love.... To the contrary--such an instinctive mechanism would contradict the basic principles of evolution." The good-looking compare themselves with the even better-looking, the rich with the even richer. Automatically running after what you don't have (yet) may give you a competitive edge, but taken to unreasonable extremes, it can lead to lack of self-acceptance and lack of joy
. The key to happiness is being able to occasionally override the more-is-better attitude and appreciate and feel gratitude for what you have.
Desire is unquenchable. The psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson has written about beautiful female patients isolated by their beauty. Catered to all of their lives, they become convinced that they can get whatever they want and whomever they want, a stance bound to lead to frustration at each rebuff and setback. As Betrand Russell wrote, "He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
Studies of twins suggest that happiness may be partly under the control of the genes. Behavioral geneticist David Lykken studied fifteen hundred pairs of twins, comparing identical twins who share one hundred percent of their genes to fraternal twins, who are no more similar genetically than other siblings. Lykken and coauthor Auke Tellegen concluded that people are born with a "set point" for happiness, an equilibrium point to which their mood returns after brief fluctuations. In other words, some people will have natural tendencies to worry or brood while others will be sanguine. On a recent episode of the Charlie Rose show, the host chided actor Liam Neeson for not "being on top of the world. How," he asked, "could you not be ecstatically happy, given your career success, your marriage, your life?" Neeson did not say he was unhappy, but just that he was a worrier. The many happy turns in his life had not changed that.
And there is self-esteem, one ingredient of happiness that is more tightly linked to how we see ourselves than to how others see us. As Eleanor Roosevelt remarked, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Our beauty as others judge it is linked to social ease, but it is not linked strongly to self-esteem. Even if others think we are beautiful, we may not if we are constantly comparing ourselves to the even more beautiful. But our beauty as we see it is linked to self-esteem. Ed Diener speculates that "it seems plausible that happier people tend to perceive themselves as somewhat more attractive than objective ratings might indicate." Happier individuals also enhance their appearance more with clothing, makeup, jewelry, and so on than do unhappy people, thereby maximizing their assets.
Beauty has a downside. People assume that the beautiful may make less faithful partners and may be more likely to seek a divorce. Beautiful women may be seen as less likely to make good mothers, and beautiful men may get questioned about their sexual orientation, no matter what their preference. And beauty can be damn distracting. William Butler Yeats apologized to Anne Gregory: "Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair."
When people judge integrity, sensitivity, and concern for others from facial appearance, beauty has little power. A face radiating kindness and sympathy may not be beautiful, and a beautiful face may look aloof, blank, haughty, or self-absorbed without losing its beauty. As Montaigne said, "There are propitious physiognomies; and in a crowd of enemies all unknown to you, you will immediately pick one rather than another to whom you surrender and to whom you will entrust your life and not precisely from considerations of beauty." But even Montaigne concludes, "A face is a poor guarantee; nevertheless it deserves some consideration." Beauty may bring small advantages, even here.
But the downsides are not inconsiderable, particularly for a woman. She may be favored in a million small ways but if what's important to her is to be seen as a good mother, to succeed in a high-level profession, and to be honored for her kindness and integrity, beauty may either be irrelevant or it may even interfere with her chances to be seen as she is, and wants to be. Beauty is not a sure road to happiness.
Despite all this, no one offered a chance to be more beautiful would turn it down. As vaudeville star Sophie Tucker once said, "I've been poor and I've been rich and rich is better."
But we live in the age of ugly beauty, when beauty is morally suspect and ugliness has a gritty allure. Beauty is equal parts flesh and imagination: we imbue it with our dreams, saturate it with our longings. But to spin this another way, reverence for beauty is just an escape from reality, it is the perpetual adolescent in us refusing to accept a flawed world. We wave it away with a cliché, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," meaning that beauty is whatever pleases us (with the subtext that it is inexplicable). But defined this way, beauty is meaningless--as Gertrude Stein once said about her childhood home, Oakland, California, "There is no there there."
In 1991, Naomi Wolf set aside centuries of speculation when she said that beauty as an objective and universal entity does not exist. "Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact." According to Wolf, the images we see around us are based on a myth. Their beauty is like the tales of Aphrodite, the judgment of Paris, and the apple of discord: made up. Beauty is a convenient fiction used by multibillion-dollar industries that create images of beauty and peddle them as opium for the female masses. Beauty ushers women to a place where men want them, out of the power structure. Capitalism and the patriarchy define beauty for cultural consumption, and plaster images of beauty everywhere to stir up envy and desire. The covetousness they inspire serves their twin goals of making money and preserving the status quo.
Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing, and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become an embarrassment.
But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with indifference to a baby's cry. We can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our understanding of it.
Before beauty sinks any deeper, let me reel it in for closer examination. Suggesting that men on Madison Avenue have Svengali-like powers to dictate women's behavior and preferences, and can define their sense of beauty, is tantamount to saying that women are not only powerless but mindless. On the contrary, isn't it possible that women cultivate beauty and use the beauty industry to optimize the power beauty brings? Isn't the problem that women often lack the opportunity to cultivate their other assets, not that they can cultivate beauty?
As we will see, Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonald's created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments we wear and find beautiful, but I will show that this belongs to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty. Fashion is what Charles Baudelaire described as "the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake," not the cake itself.
The media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our preferences. A crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a beauty is followed by her imitator, and then by the imitator of her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was such a crowd pleaser that she's been imitated by everyone from Jayne Mansfield to Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and thrives on diversity. As Darwin wrote, "If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be no such thing as beauty."
Part of the backlash against beauty grew out of concern that the pursuit of beauty had reached epic proportions, and that this is a sign of a diseased culture. When we examine the historical and anthropological literature we will discover that, throughout human history, people have scarred, painted, pierced, padded, stiffened, plucked, and buffed their bodies in the name of beauty. When Darwin traveled on the Beagle in the nineteenth century, he found a universal "passion for ornament," often involving sacrifice and suffering that was "wonderfully great."
We allow that violence is done to the body among "primitive" cultures or that it was done by ancient societies, but we have yet to realize that beauty brings out the primitive in every person. During 1996 a reported 696,904 Americans underwent voluntary aesthetic surgery that involved tearing or burning their skin, shucking their fat, or implanting foreign materials. Before the FDA limited silicone gel implants in 1992, four hundred women were getting them every day. Breast implants were once the province of porn stars; they are now the norm for Hollywood actresses, and no longer a rarity for the housewife.
These drastic procedures are done not to correct deformities but to improve aesthetic details. Kathy Davis, a professor at the University of Utrecht, watched as more than fifty people tried to persuade surgeons in the Netherlands to alter their appearance. Except for a man with a "cauliflower nose," she was unable to anticipate which feature they wanted to alter just by looking at them. She wrote, "I found myself astounded that anyone could be willing to undergo such drastic measures for what seemed to me such a minor imperfection." But there is no such thing as a minor imperfection when it comes to the face or body. Every person knows the topography of her face and the landscape of her body as intimately as a mapmaker. To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best hours to our worst. In our mind's eye, however, we undergo a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or our mental agility usually do not.
People do extreme things in the name of beauty. They invest so much of their resources in beauty and risk so much for it, one would think that lives depended on it. In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. Tons of makeup--1,484 tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care products--are sold every minute. During famines, Kalahari bushmen in Africa still use animal fats to moisturize their skin, and in 1715 riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour for beauty purposes was only quelled by the French Revolution.
Either the world is engaged in mass insanity or there is method in this madness. Deep inside we all know something: no one can withstand appearances. We can create a big bonfire with every issue of Vogue, GQ, and Details, every image of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford, and still, images of youthful perfect bodies would take shape in our heads and create a desire to have them. No one is immune. When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets, her response was a poignant one: she wished she had been prettier. It is a sobering statement from one of the most revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life with many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a woman's lament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Leo Tolstoy wrote, "I was frequently subject to moments of despair. I imagined that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a wide nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.... Nothing has such a striking impact on a man's development as his appearance, and not so much his actual appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or unattractive."
Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self. This assumption may not be fair, and not how the best of all moral worlds would conduct itself. But that does not make it any less true. Beauty has consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will continue to operate--outside jurisdiction, in the lawless world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly collides with reality.
This book is an inquiry into what we find beautiful and why--what in our nature makes us susceptible to beauty, what qualities in people evoke this response, and why sensitivity to beauty is ubiquitous in human nature. I will argue that our passionate pursuit of beauty reflects the workings of a basic instinct. As George Santayana has said, "Had our perceptions no connection with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes to this world .--.--. that we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a pure gain." My argument will be guided by cutting-edge research in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. An evolutionary viewpoint cannot explain everything about beauty, but I hope to show you that it can help explain a good many things, and offer a perspective on the place of beauty in human life.
Beauty as Bait
Many people have an idyllic conception of childhood as a time when beauty does not matter. Listen to children taunt and tease each other in a schoolyard--shrimp, squirt, four eyes, fatso--to quickly disabuse yourself of that notion. Children gravitate to beauty. One of photographer Richard Avedon's first snapshots was of his seven-year-old sister Louise. The nine-year-old Avedon was so entranced by her that he taped the negative to his skin and had the sun burn it into his shoulder. Her oval face, dark hair, big eyes, and long throat became "the prototype of what I considered to be beautiful. She was the original Avedon beauty." His later photographs of models Dovima, Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, and Carmen Dell'Orefice "are all memories of Louise."
Children are sensitive to beauty from a very early age, but how and when do they acquire their preferences? The popular wisdom is that children learn beauty preferences through acculturation. Perhaps their parents foist certain tastes upon them, then peers rebelliously revise the aesthetics, and pop culture finally fine-tunes it. As Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr wrote in their 1984 book Face Value, "Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognizable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations."
But psychologist Judith Langlois is convinced that no lessons are required: we are born with preferences and even a baby knows beauty when she sees it. Langlois collected hundreds of slides of people's faces and asked adults to rate them for attractiveness. When she presented these faces to three- and six-month-old babies, they stared significantly longer at the faces that adults found attractive. The babies gauged beauty in diverse faces: they looked longer at the most attractive men, women, babies, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Caucasians. This suggests not only that babies have beauty detectors but that human faces may share universal features of beauty across their varied features.
Langlois is quick to point out that infants show preferences for beautiful unfamiliar faces. It is unlikely that an infant's behavior toward his or her caregivers is influenced by their facial beauty, given the importance of attachment to the baby's survival. Nor is she suggesting that babies with attractive mothers have a special eye for beauty. Babies looked longer at attractive faces regardless of the mother's attractiveness.
The notion that infants come prewired with beauty detectors was not the prevailing theory when Judith Langlois began her research ten years ago. The idea that an infant would be peering out at the world with the eyes of a neonate beauty judge is downright discomfiting: even they notice looks? But her results are part of a growing body of evidence that infants share a universal set of sensual preferences. They prefer to look more at symmetrical patterns than at asymmetrical ones, and to touch soft surfaces rather than rough ones. By four months of age they prefer consonant to dissonant music. When psychologists Jerome Kagan and Marcel Zentner played dissonant melodies to babies, they wrinkled their noses in disgust. Kagan and Zentner felt that they were witnessing the first signs of a preference for easy listening and mellifluous crooning. We can learn to love dissonance, but it is an acquired taste.
Babies pay close attention to the human face. Within ten minutes of emerging from the mother's body, their eyes follow a line drawing of a face. By day two they can discriminate their mother's face from a face they have never seen before. The next day they begin mimicking facial actions: stick out your tongue at a newborn and the baby will do the same. Each newborn orients immediately toward whatever is biologically significant, and topmost will be people who ensure her survival.
Babies look almost as long at a person's eyes as they do at the whole face, and see there much of what they need to know. The movements of the eyes and of the muscles surrounding the eyes, the changes in pupil size, and the gleam or dullness in our eyes express nuances of feeling. The small individual differences in distances around the eyes created by the facial bone structure is one of the most enduring parts of our visual signature, and as unique as fingerprints. Automatic face recognition systems guided by computers recognize faces better from the eyes alone than from the nose or mouth alone. Computers learning to detect faces from nonfaces are most easily fooled by interference with the eye regions. This is why masking only the area around the eyes has proved an effective disguise from Don Juan in the fourteenth century to the Lone Ranger in the twentieth.
If babies see someone looking at them, they look back, and usually they smile. Their interest piqued, they will look up to three times as long at a face looking at them as at a face looking away. Unlike prey animals such as rabbits and deer which have panoramic, surround vision, humans, like hawks and leopards and other predators, look precisely at what they are thinking about. This is why babies come equipped with mechanisms to detect direction of gaze, and why the human eye may have evolved its distinctive appearance. Unlike most animals, which have sclera that darken with age, humans retain white sclera all of their lives. The whites of the eyes help us gauge where eyes are looking and give us a good idea of what has captured other people's attention and what might be on their minds.
An animal stalked by lions, which can see prey from a mile away, would not be greatly benefited by seeing the whites of their eyes. By then, it's all over. But for humans living in close proximity and dependent on one another for survival, direction of gaze is an effective form of communication, whether in the form of the predatory gaze, the beseeching look, or the look of love.
The newborn baby's preferences are formes frustes of adult preferences. Babies turn into adults who like symmetry and harmony and things that feel smooth; they are riveted by the sight of the human face, and aroused when eyes meet theirs. The three-month-old who stares at beautiful faces grows up to be the usual person whose head is turned by the sight of beauty and who can fall in love by looking. When babies fix their stare at the same faces adults describe as highly attractive, their actions wordlessly argue against the belief that culture must teach us to recognize human beauty.
The Injustice of the Given
Whether or not the beautiful is good, beauty seems to bring out goodness in others. In one psychologist's study, seventy-five college men were shown photographs of women, some of whom were very attractive and others less so. They were asked to select the person they would be most likely do the following for: help move furniture, loan money, donate blood, donate a kidney, swim one mile to rescue her, save her from a burning building, and even jump on a terrorist hand grenade. The men were most likely to volunteer for any of these altruistic and risky acts for a beautiful woman. The only thing they seemed reluctant to do for her was loan her money.
Answers to psychologists' questions about hypothetical situations may have little to do with real behavior. But when put to the test, at least in small ways, people seem to confirm what the college boys say. In several staged experiments, psychologists have tested people's honesty and altruism toward good-looking and plain-looking people and find that their good deeds are not doled out evenly. For example, in one study a pretty or an ugly woman approaches a phone booth and asks the occupant, "Did I leave my dime there?" (There is a dime in the phone booth.) Eighty-seven percent of people return the dime to the good-looking woman, but only sixty-four percent return the dime to the ugly woman. In another study, two women stand by a car with a flat tire in the roadway: the good-looking one gets rescued first.
People are more likely to help attractive people even if they don't like them. In another staged experiment, an attractive or unattractive woman gave men compliments on their work or criticized it. Afterward, the men were asked how much they liked the woman. They particularly liked the attractive woman who praised them, and liked least the attractive woman who criticized them. But asked to volunteer more time, the men gave it to the good-looking woman, even when he didn't like her. As the psychologists wrote, her attractiveness attracted. Attractiveness attracts even in situations where there is no chance of actually meeting the recipient of one's favors. In yet another study, completed (bogus) college applications were left in Detroit airports. A note attached to them suggested that the applications were given to fathers who had accidentally left them behind. Each had the identical application answers, but each had a different photograph attached. People were much more likely to mail the applications of thebetter-looking applicants.
Interestingly, people are less likely to ask good-looking people for help. This is particularly true for men with good-looking women, but it is also true for both men and women with good-looking members of their own sex (it is less true for women asking good-looking men for help). But as evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown, people keep a watchful eye on who has done what for whom. Our efforts to please good-looking people with no expectation of immediate reward or reciprocal gesture are one way we reinforce beauty as a form of status, not unlike being born into the nobility or inheriting wealth. Beauty represents what writer Jim Harrison has called "the injustice of the given."
The high status of beauty is one reason why it is a subject fraught with such heated emotions. Didn't democratic societies ban the aristocracy and level the playing field? Perhaps this is also why we are so easily persuaded by the idea that beauty is attainable through the usual democratic means--hard work and money. If it confers elite status, then we must make it an elitism based on effort and achievement, not a priori advantage. Historian Lois Banner has chronicled "the democratic rhetoric of beauty experts in the early twentieth century," which insisted that "every woman could be beautiful." She suggests that such campaigns were dangerous for women because they held up an unattainable ideal. Estee Lauder's successful campaigns included her exhortations that "there are no homely women only careless women .--.--. you have to want it [beauty] very much and then help it along with some well-chosen products." Paradoxically, the arguments of twentieth-century beauty experts have often unwittingly linked beauty with goodness.
Women who were dissatisfied with what they saw in the mirror now felt not only unattractive but lazy, inept, or lacking the inner beauty which was supposed to shine forth with good habits and good concealer.
Happiness
As Ben Franklin said, "Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by the little advantages that occur every day." As we have seen, great-looking people are afforded those little advantages all of their lives, so they must be happier.
Beauty, in fact, does not bring much extra in the way of happiness. Psychologists Ed Diener and David Myers have spent a lot of time trying to understand what makes people happy. They focus on "subjective well-being," a state of mind in which a person feels very positive, seldom feels negative, and has an overall sense of satisfaction with life. Ed Diener finds that good-looking men have a somewhat greater sense of well-being and feel a bit happier than other men. A woman's beauty sometimes makes her a bit happier than other women, but it can also make her more unhappy. The overall effect for both sexes is marginal. The biggest effect is on satisfaction with one's romantic life. Here the good-looking are happier. But somehow this does not lead to greater overall life satisfaction.
Why doesn't beauty, that brings so many advantages, bring more happiness? Diener and Myers believe that happiness has more to do with personal qualities such as optimism, a sense of personal control, self-esteem, ability to tolerate frustration, and feelings of comfort with and affection for people than with looks or money. They note that it is human nature to keep adjusting expectations according to circumstances--the more we get, the more we want since we are always comparing ourselves with people who have more. As psychologist Timothy Miller observes, "No instinct tells us that we have accumulated enough status, wealth, or love.... To the contrary--such an instinctive mechanism would contradict the basic principles of evolution." The good-looking compare themselves with the even better-looking, the rich with the even richer. Automatically running after what you don't have (yet) may give you a competitive edge, but taken to unreasonable extremes, it can lead to lack of self-acceptance and lack of joy
. The key to happiness is being able to occasionally override the more-is-better attitude and appreciate and feel gratitude for what you have.
Desire is unquenchable. The psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson has written about beautiful female patients isolated by their beauty. Catered to all of their lives, they become convinced that they can get whatever they want and whomever they want, a stance bound to lead to frustration at each rebuff and setback. As Betrand Russell wrote, "He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
Studies of twins suggest that happiness may be partly under the control of the genes. Behavioral geneticist David Lykken studied fifteen hundred pairs of twins, comparing identical twins who share one hundred percent of their genes to fraternal twins, who are no more similar genetically than other siblings. Lykken and coauthor Auke Tellegen concluded that people are born with a "set point" for happiness, an equilibrium point to which their mood returns after brief fluctuations. In other words, some people will have natural tendencies to worry or brood while others will be sanguine. On a recent episode of the Charlie Rose show, the host chided actor Liam Neeson for not "being on top of the world. How," he asked, "could you not be ecstatically happy, given your career success, your marriage, your life?" Neeson did not say he was unhappy, but just that he was a worrier. The many happy turns in his life had not changed that.
And there is self-esteem, one ingredient of happiness that is more tightly linked to how we see ourselves than to how others see us. As Eleanor Roosevelt remarked, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Our beauty as others judge it is linked to social ease, but it is not linked strongly to self-esteem. Even if others think we are beautiful, we may not if we are constantly comparing ourselves to the even more beautiful. But our beauty as we see it is linked to self-esteem. Ed Diener speculates that "it seems plausible that happier people tend to perceive themselves as somewhat more attractive than objective ratings might indicate." Happier individuals also enhance their appearance more with clothing, makeup, jewelry, and so on than do unhappy people, thereby maximizing their assets.
Beauty has a downside. People assume that the beautiful may make less faithful partners and may be more likely to seek a divorce. Beautiful women may be seen as less likely to make good mothers, and beautiful men may get questioned about their sexual orientation, no matter what their preference. And beauty can be damn distracting. William Butler Yeats apologized to Anne Gregory: "Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair."
When people judge integrity, sensitivity, and concern for others from facial appearance, beauty has little power. A face radiating kindness and sympathy may not be beautiful, and a beautiful face may look aloof, blank, haughty, or self-absorbed without losing its beauty. As Montaigne said, "There are propitious physiognomies; and in a crowd of enemies all unknown to you, you will immediately pick one rather than another to whom you surrender and to whom you will entrust your life and not precisely from considerations of beauty." But even Montaigne concludes, "A face is a poor guarantee; nevertheless it deserves some consideration." Beauty may bring small advantages, even here.
But the downsides are not inconsiderable, particularly for a woman. She may be favored in a million small ways but if what's important to her is to be seen as a good mother, to succeed in a high-level profession, and to be honored for her kindness and integrity, beauty may either be irrelevant or it may even interfere with her chances to be seen as she is, and wants to be. Beauty is not a sure road to happiness.
Despite all this, no one offered a chance to be more beautiful would turn it down. As vaudeville star Sophie Tucker once said, "I've been poor and I've been rich and rich is better."
Powerful articles on looks and how looks can be a tool for discrimination
I recently read 2 powerful articles about looks.
Two women quoted the same thing.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-14880/why-looking-at-a-pretty-photo-of-myself-makes-me-angry.html?utm_campaign=recommendation&utm_medium=interfeaturebottom&utm_source=feature
"Thin and pretty got me free drinks, it got me laid, and it got me out of a parking ticket, but it never got me what this practice has given me: genuine, sustainable health and happiness"
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8804291116195138612#editor/target=post;postID=6722944717707045434
"I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are." - Cameron Russell.
Powerful messages about how we and others treat our bodies and the whole issue of looks.
Two women quoted the same thing.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-14880/why-looking-at-a-pretty-photo-of-myself-makes-me-angry.html?utm_campaign=recommendation&utm_medium=interfeaturebottom&utm_source=feature
"Thin and pretty got me free drinks, it got me laid, and it got me out of a parking ticket, but it never got me what this practice has given me: genuine, sustainable health and happiness"
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8804291116195138612#editor/target=post;postID=6722944717707045434
"I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are." - Cameron Russell.
Powerful messages about how we and others treat our bodies and the whole issue of looks.
Saturday, August 9, 2014
Respecting all women
I ain't no saint. I never confess to being one. I have my flaws..
So, while I always respected the women who did household work (maids) and labourers, shop keepers, etc - I never had much respect for the fashionista types.
Yesterday 2 things happened. I was reading Vogue somewhere.. and saw an article on Shilpa Shetty - how she juggles her kid and business + read this article abt a food blogger being invited to a car launch event and the things that followed.
http://saffrontrail.blogspot.in/2014/07/an-open-letter-to-those-who-think-my.html
After reading it I realized, we're all so closed and judgemental, aren't we?
I am no exclusion to this.
So what if some women know fashion and make money out of it?
So what if somebody is a food blogger and is invited to a car launch and makes some money out of it?
So what if someone is a new mom and despite her busy schedule she takes time out to paint her nails?
So what is someone totally neglects their house but goes shopping?
So what if all the star wives trot around in high heels and open interior design shops?
Why should all this bother us?
What is wrong with us? Why can't we accept that people are different and they have different interests, different tastes, different levels of tolerance, etc?
Why do we want them to be like us? Are we perfect to start with? Don't we have flaws?
I maybe the bookish types but I have no business disrespecting anybody in the fashion world.
Maybe women are born with an artistic sense - not engineering sense. I do see that while I have struggled to grasp engineering - many women just accept and follow their paths. Why struggle with something? To prove a point to the guys? So what is many women hate science, maths and engineering? Just because it's a man's world - do we have to adopt to their tastes? If a woman genuinely likes engineering let her do it and we should all standby and support. If she genuinely liked fashion let her open her boutique and we should all support her. There is no X is better than Y here - neither in the profession nor in the person. The better we understand this, the more genuine and open we become.
If you're comfortable in your own shoes you show respect to others by letting them be who they are.
So, I will remember from now on, never to look down any profession or professional for what they do.
The following is also an eye opener.
http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model
I was very touched.
So, while I always respected the women who did household work (maids) and labourers, shop keepers, etc - I never had much respect for the fashionista types.
Yesterday 2 things happened. I was reading Vogue somewhere.. and saw an article on Shilpa Shetty - how she juggles her kid and business + read this article abt a food blogger being invited to a car launch event and the things that followed.
http://saffrontrail.blogspot.in/2014/07/an-open-letter-to-those-who-think-my.html
After reading it I realized, we're all so closed and judgemental, aren't we?
I am no exclusion to this.
So what if some women know fashion and make money out of it?
So what if somebody is a food blogger and is invited to a car launch and makes some money out of it?
So what if someone is a new mom and despite her busy schedule she takes time out to paint her nails?
So what is someone totally neglects their house but goes shopping?
So what if all the star wives trot around in high heels and open interior design shops?
Why should all this bother us?
What is wrong with us? Why can't we accept that people are different and they have different interests, different tastes, different levels of tolerance, etc?
Why do we want them to be like us? Are we perfect to start with? Don't we have flaws?
I maybe the bookish types but I have no business disrespecting anybody in the fashion world.
Maybe women are born with an artistic sense - not engineering sense. I do see that while I have struggled to grasp engineering - many women just accept and follow their paths. Why struggle with something? To prove a point to the guys? So what is many women hate science, maths and engineering? Just because it's a man's world - do we have to adopt to their tastes? If a woman genuinely likes engineering let her do it and we should all standby and support. If she genuinely liked fashion let her open her boutique and we should all support her. There is no X is better than Y here - neither in the profession nor in the person. The better we understand this, the more genuine and open we become.
If you're comfortable in your own shoes you show respect to others by letting them be who they are.
So, I will remember from now on, never to look down any profession or professional for what they do.
The following is also an eye opener.
http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model
I was very touched.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
High heel confidential
Yesterday my friend mailed me, asking for tips on makeup.
It's almost a joke if someone comes to me and does that.
But, after I replied, I read it. I do seem to know a lot about makeup.
The yearly ritual of ordering Vogue, has made me quite a "knowledgeable" woman in makeup!
Also, my recent MAC outings and Lancome purchases have upped my knowledge quotient.
So, I realized that whatever I do, I put my heart and soul to it. That's a good thing.
Yesterday I was researching the most appropriate torso, leg ration and found that long legs makes one look good (Surprise, Surprise, never knew this so far). So, women tend to wear clothes and heels that make their lower part appear longer.
Read this: http://ladyshortlegs.blogspot.in/
Saw pics of women who looked so average without their heels. I also realized how one's body proportions, shape of legs, etc can drastically alter one's attractiveness.
But - are we all made perfect or are we even supposed to be perfect?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10673404/Sex-and-the-City-heels-The-real-reason-women-hobble-around-in-high-heels.html
So, heels, makeup, clothes - all are contraptions to make us look more and more attractive. To make us feel we're not good enough - we can become great with these products. Look at the millions of useless products sold under this category. Can you believe that there are many pressing issues but more than half the world's expenses go towards making one look good?
It is a sad fact that a woman like me is even reading up on all this bullshit and blogging abt it because this is what I spent time on last 2 days and I keep a track of what I do, through the blog.....Really bad...
It's almost a joke if someone comes to me and does that.
But, after I replied, I read it. I do seem to know a lot about makeup.
The yearly ritual of ordering Vogue, has made me quite a "knowledgeable" woman in makeup!
Also, my recent MAC outings and Lancome purchases have upped my knowledge quotient.
So, I realized that whatever I do, I put my heart and soul to it. That's a good thing.
Yesterday I was researching the most appropriate torso, leg ration and found that long legs makes one look good (Surprise, Surprise, never knew this so far). So, women tend to wear clothes and heels that make their lower part appear longer.
Read this: http://ladyshortlegs.blogspot.in/
Saw pics of women who looked so average without their heels. I also realized how one's body proportions, shape of legs, etc can drastically alter one's attractiveness.
But - are we all made perfect or are we even supposed to be perfect?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10673404/Sex-and-the-City-heels-The-real-reason-women-hobble-around-in-high-heels.html
So, heels, makeup, clothes - all are contraptions to make us look more and more attractive. To make us feel we're not good enough - we can become great with these products. Look at the millions of useless products sold under this category. Can you believe that there are many pressing issues but more than half the world's expenses go towards making one look good?
It is a sad fact that a woman like me is even reading up on all this bullshit and blogging abt it because this is what I spent time on last 2 days and I keep a track of what I do, through the blog.....Really bad...
Monday, March 31, 2014
Meenakshi Ammal of Samaithu paar fame and other brave women.
Yday I wanted to read about this lady. Someone had mentioned her in their food blog and I was interested to know more about this Tamil cook book author.
What I read, on the website amazed me. This is a woman, a young widow with no educational qualifications, who wrote the famous and first of its kind tamil cook book!
Look at the list of items covered in her cookery book list and you'd be amazed...
Hats off to this lady!
I could not help but remember by own grandmother and her struggles as a young widow - a woman with no property, no education and absolutely no financial security or income... how she raised her three young kids...and how they are all well settled beyond her own belief is stuff of rags to riches story..
Also, another interesting widow with a beautiful window to life:
What I read, on the website amazed me. This is a woman, a young widow with no educational qualifications, who wrote the famous and first of its kind tamil cook book!
Look at the list of items covered in her cookery book list and you'd be amazed...
Hats off to this lady!
I could not help but remember by own grandmother and her struggles as a young widow - a woman with no property, no education and absolutely no financial security or income... how she raised her three young kids...and how they are all well settled beyond her own belief is stuff of rags to riches story..
Also, another interesting widow with a beautiful window to life:
Post by Mohamed Imthiyas.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Hope, despair and grace
This is a 4 part story of a brave woman.
http://www.livingwellspendingless.com/2012/02/29/amazing-grace-my-story-part-1/
She has gone through hell.
I was already thinking of a few things along what she said.
1) Some people come to our lives to either teach us good things or to teach us a lesson.
Then they are automatically removed from our lives also, when not required.
2) Each trial that you face, is for you to learn a lesson. You can recognize and acknowledge the problem and try to deal with it as best as you can. You have 2 choices. You can get depressed and negative and go downhill or be positive, gather all the help you can and move up. When you move up you solve the problem. When you go down, you avoid the problem and sink deep. Maybe you are allowed to go to a certain depth, to still allow you to recover but if you do not display the willingness to come up, you're pulled out of the situation but the problem remains unsolved.
So, always choose the intelligent path - of understanding the problem, plan a way out, seek for help and get out. Stay positive.
3) You can always quit the things/ situations you don't like. You don't have to stay and endure bad things. Accept. Quit. Re-strategise. Don't lose everything and sink. Manage to save back something.
Friday, February 28, 2014
When we stop appreciating certain qualities
What is happening in the world is, certain people are given priority, importance than others.
Certain jobs are more valued than others.
Certain qualities are more appreciated than others - let's say beauty, intelligence,
In today's world women are feeling the heat at corporates. More women are moving out of their jobs - citing excuses like lack of work-life balance and the need to parent their kids. I think 80% of this maybe false. What they're running away from, is probably being unappreciated for who they are.
For their sensitivity, for being honest, for their empathy, for the extra time they take to do a lot of research, for their lack of aggression or even for being contented where they are. Since no one appreciates these beautiful qualities, we don't feel proud to own them. We want to be like the men. We think we're inferior. We think we can never catch up. So, we quit. This is a long cycle which happens when the society refuses to acknowledge goodness and virtues and only looks at profitability and top line and bottom line. Many people will move out of these qualities and acquire more "business" like qualities so that they can survive and stay afloat.
It's a man's world out there. They set the rules. Every society (by society I mean a group of people - at families or work or outside) likes conformists. You have a bachelor who stays till 11 PM and that sets a certain tone for the workplace. You may end up feeling guilty for leaving the office at 10 PM! You may start feeling you're unproductive! With work times ever increasing, the amount of tasks ever increasing, the number of meetings you attend ever increasing - how do some people do it?
Honest answer - no. They don't. We women think men are smarter and technically better and can do a lot in a day. Yes, there is some truth to it - they're biologically blessed to handle such workplaces but they're not always honest. Many men, I have realized of late, come unprepared for meetings. They refuse to accept their mistakes and slip ups while women start crying the moment we make mistakes. No one even has to notice, we're giving ourselves away.
Men use their aggression and logical analysis to help them get through meetings they are thoroughly unprepared for, whereas we, who have done 20% but lack that aggression and logical analysis (to some extent) stay quiet. We're afraid to ask questions. We're afraid to make others feel bad. We're afraid of losing our reputation. We're afraid to challenge people. We ASSUME that everyone is superior or brilliant. We don't understand that it's a game they play and they do it so well that you don't realize it. All the while you chide yourself for not having done your homework. Where is the time to do the homework?
Again, we're sensitive. We take things to heart. But that is also what makes the world better. If the women stopped caring for men, the world would come collapsing. So, it's not right to be ashamed of one's sensitivity. We care about people. People matter to us. So we're sensitive. Men care abt name and money. They are sensitive to these things! You're sensitive to what you observe the most and what matters the most to you. So, let's accept our sensitivity while we correct any annoying side effects that it brings.
Another thing is - if we didn't do full justice to a job, we honestly tell it to our boss. Have you ever seen a guy do that? End of matter. Every one has good/ bad days. Productive/ unproductive days.
You don't have to feel bad for that.
I have realized that with the right amount of confidence, clarity and research coupled with a little aggression and "I know you're all bullshitting" attitude.. - all of which can be taught, we can bring more confident and successful women to the corporate world!
P.S: A week after this was written I heard this from Gretchen.
http://www.gretchenrubin.com/happiness_project/2014/03/story-i-love-to-see-virtue-rewarded/
How similar are we thinking!
Certain jobs are more valued than others.
Certain qualities are more appreciated than others - let's say beauty, intelligence,
In today's world women are feeling the heat at corporates. More women are moving out of their jobs - citing excuses like lack of work-life balance and the need to parent their kids. I think 80% of this maybe false. What they're running away from, is probably being unappreciated for who they are.
For their sensitivity, for being honest, for their empathy, for the extra time they take to do a lot of research, for their lack of aggression or even for being contented where they are. Since no one appreciates these beautiful qualities, we don't feel proud to own them. We want to be like the men. We think we're inferior. We think we can never catch up. So, we quit. This is a long cycle which happens when the society refuses to acknowledge goodness and virtues and only looks at profitability and top line and bottom line. Many people will move out of these qualities and acquire more "business" like qualities so that they can survive and stay afloat.
It's a man's world out there. They set the rules. Every society (by society I mean a group of people - at families or work or outside) likes conformists. You have a bachelor who stays till 11 PM and that sets a certain tone for the workplace. You may end up feeling guilty for leaving the office at 10 PM! You may start feeling you're unproductive! With work times ever increasing, the amount of tasks ever increasing, the number of meetings you attend ever increasing - how do some people do it?
Honest answer - no. They don't. We women think men are smarter and technically better and can do a lot in a day. Yes, there is some truth to it - they're biologically blessed to handle such workplaces but they're not always honest. Many men, I have realized of late, come unprepared for meetings. They refuse to accept their mistakes and slip ups while women start crying the moment we make mistakes. No one even has to notice, we're giving ourselves away.
Men use their aggression and logical analysis to help them get through meetings they are thoroughly unprepared for, whereas we, who have done 20% but lack that aggression and logical analysis (to some extent) stay quiet. We're afraid to ask questions. We're afraid to make others feel bad. We're afraid of losing our reputation. We're afraid to challenge people. We ASSUME that everyone is superior or brilliant. We don't understand that it's a game they play and they do it so well that you don't realize it. All the while you chide yourself for not having done your homework. Where is the time to do the homework?
Again, we're sensitive. We take things to heart. But that is also what makes the world better. If the women stopped caring for men, the world would come collapsing. So, it's not right to be ashamed of one's sensitivity. We care about people. People matter to us. So we're sensitive. Men care abt name and money. They are sensitive to these things! You're sensitive to what you observe the most and what matters the most to you. So, let's accept our sensitivity while we correct any annoying side effects that it brings.
Another thing is - if we didn't do full justice to a job, we honestly tell it to our boss. Have you ever seen a guy do that? End of matter. Every one has good/ bad days. Productive/ unproductive days.
You don't have to feel bad for that.
I have realized that with the right amount of confidence, clarity and research coupled with a little aggression and "I know you're all bullshitting" attitude.. - all of which can be taught, we can bring more confident and successful women to the corporate world!
P.S: A week after this was written I heard this from Gretchen.
http://www.gretchenrubin.com/happiness_project/2014/03/story-i-love-to-see-virtue-rewarded/
How similar are we thinking!
Monday, February 17, 2014
Wonderful write up on stay at home moms
http://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/116/A-Husband-s-Amazing-Response-To-She-s-A-Stay-At-Home-Mom-What-Does-She-DO-All-Day-
Best parts:
The people who completely immerse themselves in the tiring, thankless, profoundly important job of raising children ought to be put on a pedestal. We ought to revere them and admire them like we admire rocket scientists and war heroes. These women are doing something beautiful and complicated and challenging and terrifying and painful and joyous and essential. Whatever they are doing, they ARE doing something, and our civilization DEPENDS on them doing it well. Who else can say such a thing? What other job carries with it such consequences?
A job is something you do for part of the day and then stop doing. You get a paycheck. You have unions and benefits and break rooms. I've had many jobs; it's nothing spectacular or mystical. I don't quite understand why we've elevated "the workforce" to this hallowed status. Where do we get our idea of it? The Communist Manifesto? Having a job is necessary for some — it is for me — but it isn't liberating or empowering. Whatever your job is — you are expendable. You are a number. You are a calculation. You are a servant. You can be replaced, and you will be replaced eventually.
People who work outside the home have down time, too. In fact, there are many, many jobs that consist primarily of down time, with little spurts of menial activity strewn throughout. In any case, I'm not looking to get into a fight about who is "busier." We seem to value our time so little, that we find our worth based on how little of it we have. In other words, we've idolized "being busy," and confused it with being "important." You can be busy but unimportant, just as you can be important but not busy.
Best parts:
The people who completely immerse themselves in the tiring, thankless, profoundly important job of raising children ought to be put on a pedestal. We ought to revere them and admire them like we admire rocket scientists and war heroes. These women are doing something beautiful and complicated and challenging and terrifying and painful and joyous and essential. Whatever they are doing, they ARE doing something, and our civilization DEPENDS on them doing it well. Who else can say such a thing? What other job carries with it such consequences?
A job is something you do for part of the day and then stop doing. You get a paycheck. You have unions and benefits and break rooms. I've had many jobs; it's nothing spectacular or mystical. I don't quite understand why we've elevated "the workforce" to this hallowed status. Where do we get our idea of it? The Communist Manifesto? Having a job is necessary for some — it is for me — but it isn't liberating or empowering. Whatever your job is — you are expendable. You are a number. You are a calculation. You are a servant. You can be replaced, and you will be replaced eventually.
People who work outside the home have down time, too. In fact, there are many, many jobs that consist primarily of down time, with little spurts of menial activity strewn throughout. In any case, I'm not looking to get into a fight about who is "busier." We seem to value our time so little, that we find our worth based on how little of it we have. In other words, we've idolized "being busy," and confused it with being "important." You can be busy but unimportant, just as you can be important but not busy.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Beauty, grace and ageing
I was looking at a 50 year old lady and wondering, why are we so obsessed with ageing? Yes, the more things you try, the more tanned and rugged your exterior will look but you'd have gained an enormous level of experience trying those things which cannot be got by sitting at home and staying pretty. Right?
Why is it that we give so much importance to this face? That's a price models and actors need to pay, for choosing that profession. As normal people, we should have the courage to break free. Instead of endlessly trying to work on our skin problems we should just focus our attention to trying new things - trek, swim, run...whatever.. these experiences will make us stronger inside...and empathetic.. more human.. What's with a beautiful face yaar? Let your guy run behind the next beautiful woman. Ditch him.. You run the marathon. What say?
We should be proud of our wrinkles and aged skin once we're a certain age. Else, we'd end up like Sridevi - who probably has done so many treatments god knows and wears clothes that are suitable for her daughters.. There is beauty and there is grace and beauty can never match grace.We may not be able to become beautiful overnight but grace is something that can be acquired and believe me, there is nothing like being a graceful woman. Time and tide cannot fade your grace and grace eventually brings more people close to you than physical beauty ever can. So, here's too all the talented, adventurous, courageous women out there...Happy Valentine's day!
P.S: Just like a divine "like" I happened to meet an 84 year old lady and her daughter on the road. For some strange reason they found me amiable and started talking to me. The daughter told me "Oh! You're so beautiful.. and I can feel a positive energy being around you" and I was like.. WOW.. Grace works.. I think when we become calm from inside and clear and filled with joy and love..it shows up on our face. Thank God! I got my affirmation regarding grace.
Why is it that we give so much importance to this face? That's a price models and actors need to pay, for choosing that profession. As normal people, we should have the courage to break free. Instead of endlessly trying to work on our skin problems we should just focus our attention to trying new things - trek, swim, run...whatever.. these experiences will make us stronger inside...and empathetic.. more human.. What's with a beautiful face yaar? Let your guy run behind the next beautiful woman. Ditch him.. You run the marathon. What say?
We should be proud of our wrinkles and aged skin once we're a certain age. Else, we'd end up like Sridevi - who probably has done so many treatments god knows and wears clothes that are suitable for her daughters.. There is beauty and there is grace and beauty can never match grace.We may not be able to become beautiful overnight but grace is something that can be acquired and believe me, there is nothing like being a graceful woman. Time and tide cannot fade your grace and grace eventually brings more people close to you than physical beauty ever can. So, here's too all the talented, adventurous, courageous women out there...Happy Valentine's day!
P.S: Just like a divine "like" I happened to meet an 84 year old lady and her daughter on the road. For some strange reason they found me amiable and started talking to me. The daughter told me "Oh! You're so beautiful.. and I can feel a positive energy being around you" and I was like.. WOW.. Grace works.. I think when we become calm from inside and clear and filled with joy and love..it shows up on our face. Thank God! I got my affirmation regarding grace.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Mid life career crisis.. comeback issues .... post retirement plans.
I am at this strange crossroad of what to do next. It's not a good space to be in. I don't think many people in the software profession enter this crossroad. It's a relatively safe, well paying field.
But, what if that is not your passion?
I was just thinking of some people who had "retired" early. Let's take Jyothika. She was a top actress when she quit. What does she do now? Does she not feel that itch to get back to work?
We're very unpardoning with married heroines, aren't we? I see so many heroines from Sridevi to Madhuri to Karisma trying to make a decent comeback and somehow they have not been very successful. Sri to some extent has been lucky. English Vinglish did do well. So, she's in a relatively better space than the other two. I can see Simran doing some wasteful TV roles like Khushboo now.
It's not a matter of pride but it's probably financial constraints that drives these people to do TV. No comments about that. Who are we to judge. We don't know how tough their life is, do we? They have a lifestyle to adhere to. I wonder if they feel their pride and ego hurt when they have to do things which they don't truly admire, but have to do it for financial reasons.
I was just watching SRK's interview and noticed how old he looked. He's still a top hero. Whereas a heroine really has "limited shelf life". What if she is passionate about acting even if her face doesn't look young? What is she supposed to do? I can see a very small handful like Deepti Naval or Shabana doing some meaningful movies once in a while. All other yester years have vanished. In this cut throat world, they have to agree to do item numbers, etc in the hope of being noticed and being offered better roles. Heroes never age but we've set strict bars for the heroine. What double standards? Nowhere is this difference in attitude more apparent than in the film industry. I really pity the women. I really wonder what they do after a break in their career. It's an unfair world out there.
So, while I wonder about my own future, here's my heartfelt sympathies for all these women out there..struggling...waging wars each day.. being rejected for stupid reasons...May life be easy on them.
But, what if that is not your passion?
I was just thinking of some people who had "retired" early. Let's take Jyothika. She was a top actress when she quit. What does she do now? Does she not feel that itch to get back to work?
We're very unpardoning with married heroines, aren't we? I see so many heroines from Sridevi to Madhuri to Karisma trying to make a decent comeback and somehow they have not been very successful. Sri to some extent has been lucky. English Vinglish did do well. So, she's in a relatively better space than the other two. I can see Simran doing some wasteful TV roles like Khushboo now.
It's not a matter of pride but it's probably financial constraints that drives these people to do TV. No comments about that. Who are we to judge. We don't know how tough their life is, do we? They have a lifestyle to adhere to. I wonder if they feel their pride and ego hurt when they have to do things which they don't truly admire, but have to do it for financial reasons.
I was just watching SRK's interview and noticed how old he looked. He's still a top hero. Whereas a heroine really has "limited shelf life". What if she is passionate about acting even if her face doesn't look young? What is she supposed to do? I can see a very small handful like Deepti Naval or Shabana doing some meaningful movies once in a while. All other yester years have vanished. In this cut throat world, they have to agree to do item numbers, etc in the hope of being noticed and being offered better roles. Heroes never age but we've set strict bars for the heroine. What double standards? Nowhere is this difference in attitude more apparent than in the film industry. I really pity the women. I really wonder what they do after a break in their career. It's an unfair world out there.
So, while I wonder about my own future, here's my heartfelt sympathies for all these women out there..struggling...waging wars each day.. being rejected for stupid reasons...May life be easy on them.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Social conditioning, plastic surgery and borrowed desires
Call it stereotypes or social conditioning, it's a nagging thing. Something that confuses you eternally.
These conditionings rid you of true moments.. true joy and take you far away from the quest for truth and pretty far away from who you actually are and what you COULD have become, had you followed your heart. We follow the herd in fear of being left out or disapproved and lead a hectic but seemingly meaningless life. Every gender, every caste and everything has a certain stereotype. eg: If you're a tambrahm, you're supposed to have a good degree and probably you're a doctor or an engineer. Else, when your parents meet their relatives at functions, they have to hang their heads in shame. I wonder... does it make any difference - me being the 1 millionth TamBrahm software engineer or being the first idli shop owner?
Of late, I have this huge urge to get back to work. I want to land up in a good place..have a certain standing in the society...be at a respectable place. I feel that being educated, I should work for my daily needs. I cannot accept myself being a homemaker, not that it's an easy task. It's more difficult than working for someone, in the sense that there is no time limit for a home maker - plus she does not get paid - plus the society definitely doesn't value her as much as a working woman. People may say they want non-working wives, but they seem to value working woman.
I joined engineering without really knowing what it was. It could get me to a certain distance. At many times I felt that I was not passionate about it. Now, at this age, I have to do some soul searching. The past 2 years I have been trying to see what is it that I'd like to do. What is that job for which I'll wake up every morning with passion? It's stressful, believe me. Having to start over afresh in your mid 30s - is a challenge. I am going to take it up. I know that the path is fraught with obstacles and it seems that a large depressing phase looms right up. But, I want to work to enhance my own self worth and feel confident about myself. The identification we have with our jobs is a faulted idea to begin with but I am unable to break out of it. It should be perfectly ok for someone to choose not to work, if one has the luxury, but I, cannot fall into that. I am not able to accept myself as a non working woman. That itself is a huge flaw. This is one stereotype that I need to break out of. It has destroyed many nights sleep.
Two: Women need to look beautiful. They need to dress up and look appealing to the men folk.
I think these two stereotypes play a lot on me. My life was pretty good, till folks at my previous company so unknowingly thrust the "beautiful women are appreciated more" - stereotype on me. The kind of comments guys pass should make you puke. I clearly remember these folks commenting on a little fat lady wearing a saree. I was so affected by the comment that I was really wondering, if I choose to wear a saree I should be prepared to face such comments. Also, there was another really thin woman, whom they called "peeche se Aishwarya, aage se dracula". She was not great to look at, it seems. And to top it all, the characters making these comments, are not even average joes. What gives them the right to pass such comments? I guess it's ok for women to start commenting on men and make them feel odd like they make women feel. Only then they will understand the pain. I see so many useless fellows passing so many comments on women on the road, etc. You should see their faces. Luckily I have not observed men so much or cared for men at all. If I had started these worries in my teens by now I'd have had a heart attack.
This trend of evaluating women for looks is really disturbing. I think all this seeped pretty deeply into me. It was a nightmare going to work, knowing that someone is judging you all the time. Ignorance was bliss, in this matter. Also, one should not care about what others say. Everyone will have something to say, some nice, some hurtful. As humans we do tend to value such things but when as a society we are so ill mannered and judgmental and immature, it doesn't make sense to take any of the comments seriously. But, I was at a wrong phase when I was with these people. I took these things seriously. Whatever they said about others I applied it on myself too. It has affected me so much, so unknowingly that now it's a menace. I really started suffering from low self-esteem because of this. I don't know when and how I can come out of that. I was doing pretty good till I knew these little facts about men and women and the whole wooing game.
A lot of the things we do, are unconsciously to meet certain societal needs and stereotypes. Even a thinking, rational person does not know when a stereotype is playing on him and consuming him. Society feeds guilt, fear and greed in various avatars.
This mind that I have - is purely acquired through schooling and social conditioning. I have been living in a certain society amidst certain kinds of people who talk about certain things, who read certain books and see certain movies. I am a by-product of these. I am a composition of parts of others. Whatever I have acquired is through these things and now through the internet. My friends share articles, I read them. Some articles seep in and become me. So, this mind - made up of likes and dislikes, right and wrong, do's and don'ts, the right job, the right education, the right husband, the right status.. all are driven by others. Those others are in turn driven by many others. We're all just touching and influencing others all the time, don't we? Our colleague goes to a movie and recommends it, we go and watch. Our colleague plays footfall and we also want to join. Unknowingly we desire what others desire. We desire the things showed on TV/ magazines. These happen subconsciously. Most of our desires are what are called borrowed desires. We borrow them from friends, relatives and colleagues. We really don’t need them. Many of my relatives are in good position in the society and some of them are very well qualified. Many of my friends are in US in good jobs and have financial security. Sometimes these things do play on me. Why am I not like that? Why don't I work like that and earn money and lead such a life? I know that I am cut out differently but I still have this nagging feeling. The safest path concept does hound you often, till you become so self confident to chuck it out of the window.
A wonderful article on mind and how society cultivates guilt at:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru/masters-words/become-a-buddha/
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/yoga-and-the-mind/
AND
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2012/09/guilt-is-socially-cultivated-emotion-a-poison-directed-towards-yourself/
When we were children we used to admire people owning cars. We desired cars and our own house. When people wore costly clothes we felt that was the right thing. We saw people in movies.. rich people, well educated people and we thought that is how we should become. Without even knowing what is good and bad and what is right and wrong we aspired for some things. Even today most of the world is run that way. We really have a herd mentality. We all run for the next money spinning job. We aspire to be rich. We aspire to be movie stars. There is so much glamour exuded in certain fields. We are drawn to these things unknowingly. This is one form of conditioning. During our days, top rankers were admired a lot, so most people aspired to become a ranker. Nowadays the most well dressed and hep person is admired a lot so I see a lot of college goers spending way too much time to look good and dress good. There is a certain peer pressure to conform. Most people want to just conform without thinking whether such a lifestyle is feasible for them or even required for them. It takes a lot of maturity to do such thinking and I won't blame these young people. You don't even realise that you're doing so much to confirm to the society.
I was recently looking at actors/actresses who had undergone plastic surgery. Earlier women needed to dance and act well and look good. I know some actresses who were were ordinary but were extra ordinary actors. Today, in an unfortunate cycle of things, because people started photoshopping pictures, we have very high expectations of people's looks. Many people with decent faces are driven to cosmetic surgeries. I don't know if these actors like it or not. But, yeah they look exquisite, thanks to tons of surgeries. It's good that atleast some of us know the reason behind their young looks - apart from diet, genes, etc. Given their odd shooting schedules and odd locations and smoking/ drinking - I wonder how they keep their skin so great. We mortals, who take so much care and work at ordinary hours and sleep well and eat well, don't seem to have those blessings.
A very thought provoking video about how the media makes women feel inadequate:
http://www.upworthy.com/5-minutes-of-what-the-media-actually-does-to-women-8
Also, a very insightful article by Richa Chadda:
http://richachadda.blogspot.in/2012/04/maybe-we-are-change.html
As for actors, I think some people think it worthless to do such things and probably quit the field. Earlier I was upset with these cosmetic surgeries, but I think it's ok. All of us have this need to look good. Today it is such that any common man on the road wants to look like a hero. If he's not naturally endowed it's not wrong to use cosmetic surgery. Cinema is a visual medium and we are used to seeing pretty faces. You can see the stark contrast between the chiseled features of the leads versus the other cast. It's just a matter of money. How much surgeries you can afford, how many spa and ayurveda treatments you can do and how good a makeup man you can afford. Y'day I watched Ram Leela and noticed how they had taken care that the lead was so well made up and they were presented well, compared to the side roles of Richa Chadda, etc.
It's worrisome that many of us suffer for these things. Now, I am very conscious about the way I look. I was never this way. But there is this urge to dress well. I have got affected by this bug.There is only so much one can do when one has certain skin tones and skin texture. But if you obsess about looks, your whole life you can spend in a worthless manner (worthless according to me). I look at people around me. If you take statistics, I think 1 out of 10 women only look good. What about the 9? I see women in my gym, at the beauty parlour, on the road, my colleagues, people in buses.. everywhere. The 20s and teens of this generation do look great. But the rest of the people are just average joneses. What's wrong with that? If everyone of these women was intenally obsessing about why they are average, the world would soon be filled with worrisome thoughts. It's important to accept the way we look. However we look, if we groom a little and stay clean and dress well, we should feel confident.
We should know how far is ok. When I am surrounded by people who spend all their time dressing and posing for photos, you get affected unknowingly. Last few days I have spent an insane amount of time researching the right foundation, moisturizer, etc. All this, for a wedding in Jan. I know that the people attending the wedding would turn out like film stars and I would feel odd and left out. I do feel like an idiot for doing this. I know that I have given in to this pressure of looking good. It doesn't make me feel great or intelligent or even responsible.
I met this lady at a massage parlour. I don't think she has completed her matric.
I drool over Ileana's heavily photoshopped picture and she so maturely says "God knows what problems she has. You be happy for who you are". These are words of wisdom. I am sure that the lady who uttered these, is an extremely self confident person. She has a mind of her own. She is sure of herself and her education or the lack of it has nothing to do with her self confidence. I wonder... where are all we women - urban, highly educated, employed at hi-fi companies, well dressed, spending a bomb on parlours and cosmetics, headed?
Like some great sage said, we are all collecting fantasies from TV, magazines, paper and ads. They create certain mental images and we start comparing ourself with these images, unknowingly. We try to attain the so-called perfect body or face. It's a never ending game, whose only fate is "unhappiness" and "depression". While we all fret and fume at how "ordinary" we look, the cosmetic companies will laugh their way to the bank.
Is there a way we can stop these malicious, unrealistic images staring at us? Can we war against such unrealistic expectations of beauty? How do you educate a girl, right from 4 to know what 'beauty' is and how only her confidence can save her?
I think a slow movement has to start, to free us women from such horror. I'm apalled that this inadequacy has affected even a person as laid back as me.
Such is the effect of social conditioning and ads on urban women and we all thought we were smart!
We should learn a lesson or two from the rural belles.
These conditionings rid you of true moments.. true joy and take you far away from the quest for truth and pretty far away from who you actually are and what you COULD have become, had you followed your heart. We follow the herd in fear of being left out or disapproved and lead a hectic but seemingly meaningless life. Every gender, every caste and everything has a certain stereotype. eg: If you're a tambrahm, you're supposed to have a good degree and probably you're a doctor or an engineer. Else, when your parents meet their relatives at functions, they have to hang their heads in shame. I wonder... does it make any difference - me being the 1 millionth TamBrahm software engineer or being the first idli shop owner?
Of late, I have this huge urge to get back to work. I want to land up in a good place..have a certain standing in the society...be at a respectable place. I feel that being educated, I should work for my daily needs. I cannot accept myself being a homemaker, not that it's an easy task. It's more difficult than working for someone, in the sense that there is no time limit for a home maker - plus she does not get paid - plus the society definitely doesn't value her as much as a working woman. People may say they want non-working wives, but they seem to value working woman.
I joined engineering without really knowing what it was. It could get me to a certain distance. At many times I felt that I was not passionate about it. Now, at this age, I have to do some soul searching. The past 2 years I have been trying to see what is it that I'd like to do. What is that job for which I'll wake up every morning with passion? It's stressful, believe me. Having to start over afresh in your mid 30s - is a challenge. I am going to take it up. I know that the path is fraught with obstacles and it seems that a large depressing phase looms right up. But, I want to work to enhance my own self worth and feel confident about myself. The identification we have with our jobs is a faulted idea to begin with but I am unable to break out of it. It should be perfectly ok for someone to choose not to work, if one has the luxury, but I, cannot fall into that. I am not able to accept myself as a non working woman. That itself is a huge flaw. This is one stereotype that I need to break out of. It has destroyed many nights sleep.
Two: Women need to look beautiful. They need to dress up and look appealing to the men folk.
I think these two stereotypes play a lot on me. My life was pretty good, till folks at my previous company so unknowingly thrust the "beautiful women are appreciated more" - stereotype on me. The kind of comments guys pass should make you puke. I clearly remember these folks commenting on a little fat lady wearing a saree. I was so affected by the comment that I was really wondering, if I choose to wear a saree I should be prepared to face such comments. Also, there was another really thin woman, whom they called "peeche se Aishwarya, aage se dracula". She was not great to look at, it seems. And to top it all, the characters making these comments, are not even average joes. What gives them the right to pass such comments? I guess it's ok for women to start commenting on men and make them feel odd like they make women feel. Only then they will understand the pain. I see so many useless fellows passing so many comments on women on the road, etc. You should see their faces. Luckily I have not observed men so much or cared for men at all. If I had started these worries in my teens by now I'd have had a heart attack.
This trend of evaluating women for looks is really disturbing. I think all this seeped pretty deeply into me. It was a nightmare going to work, knowing that someone is judging you all the time. Ignorance was bliss, in this matter. Also, one should not care about what others say. Everyone will have something to say, some nice, some hurtful. As humans we do tend to value such things but when as a society we are so ill mannered and judgmental and immature, it doesn't make sense to take any of the comments seriously. But, I was at a wrong phase when I was with these people. I took these things seriously. Whatever they said about others I applied it on myself too. It has affected me so much, so unknowingly that now it's a menace. I really started suffering from low self-esteem because of this. I don't know when and how I can come out of that. I was doing pretty good till I knew these little facts about men and women and the whole wooing game.
A lot of the things we do, are unconsciously to meet certain societal needs and stereotypes. Even a thinking, rational person does not know when a stereotype is playing on him and consuming him. Society feeds guilt, fear and greed in various avatars.
This mind that I have - is purely acquired through schooling and social conditioning. I have been living in a certain society amidst certain kinds of people who talk about certain things, who read certain books and see certain movies. I am a by-product of these. I am a composition of parts of others. Whatever I have acquired is through these things and now through the internet. My friends share articles, I read them. Some articles seep in and become me. So, this mind - made up of likes and dislikes, right and wrong, do's and don'ts, the right job, the right education, the right husband, the right status.. all are driven by others. Those others are in turn driven by many others. We're all just touching and influencing others all the time, don't we? Our colleague goes to a movie and recommends it, we go and watch. Our colleague plays footfall and we also want to join. Unknowingly we desire what others desire. We desire the things showed on TV/ magazines. These happen subconsciously. Most of our desires are what are called borrowed desires. We borrow them from friends, relatives and colleagues. We really don’t need them. Many of my relatives are in good position in the society and some of them are very well qualified. Many of my friends are in US in good jobs and have financial security. Sometimes these things do play on me. Why am I not like that? Why don't I work like that and earn money and lead such a life? I know that I am cut out differently but I still have this nagging feeling. The safest path concept does hound you often, till you become so self confident to chuck it out of the window.
A wonderful article on mind and how society cultivates guilt at:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru/masters-words/become-a-buddha/
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/yoga-and-the-mind/
AND
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2012/09/guilt-is-socially-cultivated-emotion-a-poison-directed-towards-yourself/
When we were children we used to admire people owning cars. We desired cars and our own house. When people wore costly clothes we felt that was the right thing. We saw people in movies.. rich people, well educated people and we thought that is how we should become. Without even knowing what is good and bad and what is right and wrong we aspired for some things. Even today most of the world is run that way. We really have a herd mentality. We all run for the next money spinning job. We aspire to be rich. We aspire to be movie stars. There is so much glamour exuded in certain fields. We are drawn to these things unknowingly. This is one form of conditioning. During our days, top rankers were admired a lot, so most people aspired to become a ranker. Nowadays the most well dressed and hep person is admired a lot so I see a lot of college goers spending way too much time to look good and dress good. There is a certain peer pressure to conform. Most people want to just conform without thinking whether such a lifestyle is feasible for them or even required for them. It takes a lot of maturity to do such thinking and I won't blame these young people. You don't even realise that you're doing so much to confirm to the society.
I was recently looking at actors/actresses who had undergone plastic surgery. Earlier women needed to dance and act well and look good. I know some actresses who were were ordinary but were extra ordinary actors. Today, in an unfortunate cycle of things, because people started photoshopping pictures, we have very high expectations of people's looks. Many people with decent faces are driven to cosmetic surgeries. I don't know if these actors like it or not. But, yeah they look exquisite, thanks to tons of surgeries. It's good that atleast some of us know the reason behind their young looks - apart from diet, genes, etc. Given their odd shooting schedules and odd locations and smoking/ drinking - I wonder how they keep their skin so great. We mortals, who take so much care and work at ordinary hours and sleep well and eat well, don't seem to have those blessings.
A very thought provoking video about how the media makes women feel inadequate:
http://www.upworthy.com/5-minutes-of-what-the-media-actually-does-to-women-8
Also, a very insightful article by Richa Chadda:
http://richachadda.blogspot.in/2012/04/maybe-we-are-change.html
As for actors, I think some people think it worthless to do such things and probably quit the field. Earlier I was upset with these cosmetic surgeries, but I think it's ok. All of us have this need to look good. Today it is such that any common man on the road wants to look like a hero. If he's not naturally endowed it's not wrong to use cosmetic surgery. Cinema is a visual medium and we are used to seeing pretty faces. You can see the stark contrast between the chiseled features of the leads versus the other cast. It's just a matter of money. How much surgeries you can afford, how many spa and ayurveda treatments you can do and how good a makeup man you can afford. Y'day I watched Ram Leela and noticed how they had taken care that the lead was so well made up and they were presented well, compared to the side roles of Richa Chadda, etc.
It's worrisome that many of us suffer for these things. Now, I am very conscious about the way I look. I was never this way. But there is this urge to dress well. I have got affected by this bug.There is only so much one can do when one has certain skin tones and skin texture. But if you obsess about looks, your whole life you can spend in a worthless manner (worthless according to me). I look at people around me. If you take statistics, I think 1 out of 10 women only look good. What about the 9? I see women in my gym, at the beauty parlour, on the road, my colleagues, people in buses.. everywhere. The 20s and teens of this generation do look great. But the rest of the people are just average joneses. What's wrong with that? If everyone of these women was intenally obsessing about why they are average, the world would soon be filled with worrisome thoughts. It's important to accept the way we look. However we look, if we groom a little and stay clean and dress well, we should feel confident.
We should know how far is ok. When I am surrounded by people who spend all their time dressing and posing for photos, you get affected unknowingly. Last few days I have spent an insane amount of time researching the right foundation, moisturizer, etc. All this, for a wedding in Jan. I know that the people attending the wedding would turn out like film stars and I would feel odd and left out. I do feel like an idiot for doing this. I know that I have given in to this pressure of looking good. It doesn't make me feel great or intelligent or even responsible.
I met this lady at a massage parlour. I don't think she has completed her matric.
I drool over Ileana's heavily photoshopped picture and she so maturely says "God knows what problems she has. You be happy for who you are". These are words of wisdom. I am sure that the lady who uttered these, is an extremely self confident person. She has a mind of her own. She is sure of herself and her education or the lack of it has nothing to do with her self confidence. I wonder... where are all we women - urban, highly educated, employed at hi-fi companies, well dressed, spending a bomb on parlours and cosmetics, headed?
Like some great sage said, we are all collecting fantasies from TV, magazines, paper and ads. They create certain mental images and we start comparing ourself with these images, unknowingly. We try to attain the so-called perfect body or face. It's a never ending game, whose only fate is "unhappiness" and "depression". While we all fret and fume at how "ordinary" we look, the cosmetic companies will laugh their way to the bank.
Is there a way we can stop these malicious, unrealistic images staring at us? Can we war against such unrealistic expectations of beauty? How do you educate a girl, right from 4 to know what 'beauty' is and how only her confidence can save her?
I think a slow movement has to start, to free us women from such horror. I'm apalled that this inadequacy has affected even a person as laid back as me.
Such is the effect of social conditioning and ads on urban women and we all thought we were smart!
We should learn a lesson or two from the rural belles.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Feminine is celebration
There is something very feminine about celebration. Feminine means
exuberance, and that is how you should be every moment of your life –
exuberantly alive. Celebration should not be limited to a particular
occasion. Your whole life, your very existence should become a
celebration.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Articles on women and feminine presence by Sadhguru
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/lifestyle/relationships/the-feminine-presence-should-house-wives-in-india-be-paid-a-salary/
In today’s society, it has been observed that the title of “housewife” is inadvertently less valued than that of a “working woman”. Will the mere payment of a salary elevate the role of the housewife and make it more worthy of social recognition? Stay tuned for answers to these questions and more through Sadhguru’s words, in the concluding part of the series: The Feminine Presence, next week.
========================================================================
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/lifestyle/relationships/the-feminine-presence-part-ii-2/
Today, in the concluding part of The Feminine Presence, we take a deeper look at the role of the feminine in the home as well as society, through Sadhguru’s words.
These are the two aspects fulfilled by masculine and feminine. From
here on, when I say masculine and feminine, I want you to disengage
these from being male and female. The natural tendency of the masculine
is outgoing, it wants to take care of the survival process, it wants to
take care of somebody. It doesn’t feel fulfilled unless it takes care of
something. The natural tendency of the feminine is not like that; the
feminine is absorbing, it creates an ambience of a certain beauty, love
and gentleness.
There is a shift in today’s society. A woman may seek a career, but it is not just about that anymore. In today’s society, masculine ideals are becoming the most important. The tendencies of the masculine have become universal. Only masculine is power, or the right way to be, is a wrong perception that has seeped into society. Even women have started to understand it this way. So should a woman not be the caretaker? Yes, she can. But if the feminine was absent from the world, everybody would wonder, “Why are we here?” We would all be very successful, we would have a lot of food, a lot of money, but we would wonder, “Why are we here?” I’m not talking about male or female, I’m talking about masculine and feminine qualities.
I think a lot of women are going through this and some of them are trying to find a balance between the two. The conflict is not happening because they are pursuing a career, but because the survival process has become the ideal. This is fundamentally a wrong way to structure a society. If aesthetics, love, music, dance, art and craft were as important as money, business and the stock market, you would see that the feminine would naturally play a significant role in the world.
Unfortunately, today there is very little role for the feminine. Even if a woman comes out of the house, she has to act like a man and only then she is successful. If she acts like a woman, she is considered weak. We need to see that feminine is not weak; it is just fulfilling a different aspect of life. Without that aspect, life is not complete. The day feminine is completely banished from this planet, life will not seem worth living anymore in spite of every convenience. Without the ambience of the feminine, masculine will feel meaningless.
Right now, a woman is trying to fit into the man’s world; this is not a good thing. She should not fit into a man’s world. Half the world should anyway be hers. Rather than trying to create a man’s world and fit a woman into it, which would twist her out of shape, it is best that we understand what is needed – a society where both masculine and feminine have equal roles to play. For that, our values of what is important in life have to change and our minds need to grow beyond the survival process. If spirituality became the most significant part of society, you would see that the feminine would be more dominant than the masculine.
========================================================================
Other excerpts on women:
Linga bhairavi consecration:
These are the times when I really feel sad because such incredible things are happening and hardly anybody can see it, not everybody can enjoy what is happening, because to see different aspects of life, to see the way existence is made, you need a different type of eyes. Unless you strive to grow this kind of eyes, you won’t see, even if it is right in front of you. This consecration process has changed the fundamental chemistry of my system so dramatically, you won’t believe it.
Awesome article:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/inside-isha/happenings/linga-bhairavi-pure-untamed-life/
This is not making sense to you, isn’t it? That is the whole problem: The boundless nature of the existence is denied to people simply because they are crippled by their limited logical sense. Just give yourself to what is happening; chant, dance, work, kill yourself in some way; because unless the educated, sensible “you” dies, you will not know what this is. Unless you become as uneducated as me, you will not know what this is because this is something else. You cannot educate her; don’t ever try that. She is wild and fierce. This culture always encouraged the feminine, the women, to be fiery and wild. You should see the ancient literature in this country, where poets are saying, “What to do with a domesticated woman?” [Laughs] We domesticated women because we wanted to breed, raise families and things like that. So, here is one that you cannot domesticate. Wild, very fiery, but absolutely compassionate. These are not contradictory qualities in a being; all these things come together. Linga Bhairavi is just pure life; life in its fiery, highest possibility, but untamed.
She is a roar. She is like a scream. She is not gentle, nice, that kind. You can never domesticate her. “So, what is the use?” That is the whole thing; there is no use just life. Life is not a utility; life is a phenomenon that needs to be experienced. Life is not a milking cow that you could milk so many liters of milk from; life is just the most fabulous phenomenon that we have known or we have not known, [laughs] whichever way it is. To manifest this phenomenon in as many ways as possible, that is ultimately the only work. “What is the use?” No use.
So, next time we sit here it is going to be very, very different. This is not nice, gentle, subtle, refined energy. The Dhyanalinga is a very refined process. Refining it to that level of sophistication almost took my life. Here, with Linga Bhairavi, it is absolutely raw; no refinement at all.
Sadhguru joked that people were concerned that the Isha “brand” of logic, science, and rationality was threatened by the creation of the Linga Bhairavi, but he laughed this off, saying he wasn’t really interested in having a brand.
Swiftly, I recalled what Sadhguru had said about living ecstatically and devotionally, and felt a sudden contrast with the dry sterility of much of westernized living – even most of our festivals lack lustre. Who could argue that this is preferable to a life richly, vividly, color-fully lived!???
Rechristen International women's day as International day of the feminine.
Another awesome one:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru/masters-words/devi-a-dynamic-force/
One who earns the Grace of Bhairavi neither has to live in concern or fear of life or death, of poverty, or of failure. All that a human being considers as wellbeing will be his if only he earns the Grace of Bhairavi.
Another good one:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/inside-isha/isha-yoga-center/navaratri-making-use-of-natures-support/
A man will conduct the survival process much more efficiently than a woman. Only because technology has come can you today equate man and woman in the level of activity. This is not a question of intelligence; this is a question of physical capability. If there is no structure, if everything is leveled to the ground, then the masculine will naturally dominate. It is from that era that the masculine is still dominating. Now that technological leveling has come, societies are structured. It is definitely time to level it, but to lose our sense about the physiological capabilities and psychological realities will be foolish because they are different. When we make our differences into a discriminatory process, it becomes ugly, otherwise being different is not wrong. Being different is not less or more, it is just different. Unfortunately, human societies have this history of making every difference into a discriminatory process.
A few years ago, when I was conducting a ladies Bhava Spandana at Spanda Hall, in one of the peak moments, I was witness to the Uniqueness of the feminine. A powerful feminine force was so manifest in the air, my own body and energies were very much woman-like. This was not new to me but on that day, it stood up in much grandeur. Though from the same basis, how uniquely different the fundamentals of the feminine are. This reality found a magnificent expression on that day and I thoroughly drank the nectar of the feminine and scribbled these words upon the notepad with my eye and attention holding on to the event that I was witnessing.
It is such a gross violation of the beauty of creation that today we have largely made feminine second class. Aggressive cultural and religious attitudes are the main culprits. The pettiness of wanting to be superior or better than the other has produced attitudes that make masculine a superior force, the grossness of holding physical or the material as ultimate is the root of genocide of the feminine. Well, we have not killed the women of the world because of need but religion, modern science and now the corporate culture – all these are in an active mode of murder of the feminine. Technology has facilitated the upward mobility of women to a more level playing field, but to a very masculine playing field. Only in recognizing and experiencing that there is something more to life than the physical/material realm will the feminine find its true place in human societies.
Sadhguru:
The most basic structure of the social unit is the family.
Fortunately so far, the government has had the wisdom to stay away, keep
their hands off the family, because they know they will mess it up. But
it looks like now they want to enter your family in the guise of giving
justice to women. You need to understand one thing, if a woman is paid
for the chores that she does at home, she can also be fired. No divorce
is needed. She is not cooking properly, fire her tomorrow morning. The
next day you can hire somebody else. The sanctity of what it means to be
a family will disappear. Not just the husband, even the children will
ask, “Well, you are being paid, why are you not doing this?” The
sanctity of being a wife, the sanctity of being a mother, the sanctity
of being a feminine presence in the family, all this will be ruined and
she will be reduced to a paid-for maid. The worst possible vocabulary
could be used in this scenario. It is nobody’s business to enter a
family and say how it should be run. The laws are on the street and not
inside one’s home. That is a place where nobody should meddle except the
people who live there. In today’s society, it has been observed that the title of “housewife” is inadvertently less valued than that of a “working woman”. Will the mere payment of a salary elevate the role of the housewife and make it more worthy of social recognition? Stay tuned for answers to these questions and more through Sadhguru’s words, in the concluding part of the series: The Feminine Presence, next week.
========================================================================
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/lifestyle/relationships/the-feminine-presence-part-ii-2/
Today, in the concluding part of The Feminine Presence, we take a deeper look at the role of the feminine in the home as well as society, through Sadhguru’s words.
Sadhguru:
Let’s look at this fundamentally. During the time of the caveman,
men took care of food and shelter, the basic survival process. Women
took care of cooking, nurturing and creating a better ambience for life.
So the man fuelled the survival process and the woman fuelled that
which makes living worthwhile. Without the woman’s contribution, when a
caveman got up in the morning he would wonder, “Should I go out hunting
today?” Because he had a wife and a child, there was a reason for him to
go out and do something.There is a shift in today’s society. A woman may seek a career, but it is not just about that anymore. In today’s society, masculine ideals are becoming the most important. The tendencies of the masculine have become universal. Only masculine is power, or the right way to be, is a wrong perception that has seeped into society. Even women have started to understand it this way. So should a woman not be the caretaker? Yes, she can. But if the feminine was absent from the world, everybody would wonder, “Why are we here?” We would all be very successful, we would have a lot of food, a lot of money, but we would wonder, “Why are we here?” I’m not talking about male or female, I’m talking about masculine and feminine qualities.
Feminine is not weak; it is just fulfilling a different aspect of life…
A systematic obliteration of the feminine has happened in recent
times. One of the reasons is that the world is driven by the economic
engine. When economy becomes the only important thing on the planet, the
survival process is automatically being put into a divine position. The
masculine is bound to be dominant and in this system, women will
suffer. Women will be mauled, not by a stranger. You may make laws for
their protection, but the very system will maul them.I think a lot of women are going through this and some of them are trying to find a balance between the two. The conflict is not happening because they are pursuing a career, but because the survival process has become the ideal. This is fundamentally a wrong way to structure a society. If aesthetics, love, music, dance, art and craft were as important as money, business and the stock market, you would see that the feminine would naturally play a significant role in the world.
Unfortunately, today there is very little role for the feminine. Even if a woman comes out of the house, she has to act like a man and only then she is successful. If she acts like a woman, she is considered weak. We need to see that feminine is not weak; it is just fulfilling a different aspect of life. Without that aspect, life is not complete. The day feminine is completely banished from this planet, life will not seem worth living anymore in spite of every convenience. Without the ambience of the feminine, masculine will feel meaningless.
Right now, a woman is trying to fit into the man’s world; this is not a good thing. She should not fit into a man’s world. Half the world should anyway be hers. Rather than trying to create a man’s world and fit a woman into it, which would twist her out of shape, it is best that we understand what is needed – a society where both masculine and feminine have equal roles to play. For that, our values of what is important in life have to change and our minds need to grow beyond the survival process. If spirituality became the most significant part of society, you would see that the feminine would be more dominant than the masculine.
========================================================================
Other excerpts on women:
Linga bhairavi consecration:
These are the times when I really feel sad because such incredible things are happening and hardly anybody can see it, not everybody can enjoy what is happening, because to see different aspects of life, to see the way existence is made, you need a different type of eyes. Unless you strive to grow this kind of eyes, you won’t see, even if it is right in front of you. This consecration process has changed the fundamental chemistry of my system so dramatically, you won’t believe it.
Awesome article:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/inside-isha/happenings/linga-bhairavi-pure-untamed-life/
This is not making sense to you, isn’t it? That is the whole problem: The boundless nature of the existence is denied to people simply because they are crippled by their limited logical sense. Just give yourself to what is happening; chant, dance, work, kill yourself in some way; because unless the educated, sensible “you” dies, you will not know what this is. Unless you become as uneducated as me, you will not know what this is because this is something else. You cannot educate her; don’t ever try that. She is wild and fierce. This culture always encouraged the feminine, the women, to be fiery and wild. You should see the ancient literature in this country, where poets are saying, “What to do with a domesticated woman?” [Laughs] We domesticated women because we wanted to breed, raise families and things like that. So, here is one that you cannot domesticate. Wild, very fiery, but absolutely compassionate. These are not contradictory qualities in a being; all these things come together. Linga Bhairavi is just pure life; life in its fiery, highest possibility, but untamed.
She is a roar. She is like a scream. She is not gentle, nice, that kind. You can never domesticate her. “So, what is the use?” That is the whole thing; there is no use just life. Life is not a utility; life is a phenomenon that needs to be experienced. Life is not a milking cow that you could milk so many liters of milk from; life is just the most fabulous phenomenon that we have known or we have not known, [laughs] whichever way it is. To manifest this phenomenon in as many ways as possible, that is ultimately the only work. “What is the use?” No use.
So, next time we sit here it is going to be very, very different. This is not nice, gentle, subtle, refined energy. The Dhyanalinga is a very refined process. Refining it to that level of sophistication almost took my life. Here, with Linga Bhairavi, it is absolutely raw; no refinement at all.
Sadhguru joked that people were concerned that the Isha “brand” of logic, science, and rationality was threatened by the creation of the Linga Bhairavi, but he laughed this off, saying he wasn’t really interested in having a brand.
Swiftly, I recalled what Sadhguru had said about living ecstatically and devotionally, and felt a sudden contrast with the dry sterility of much of westernized living – even most of our festivals lack lustre. Who could argue that this is preferable to a life richly, vividly, color-fully lived!???
Rechristen International women's day as International day of the feminine.
Another awesome one:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru/masters-words/devi-a-dynamic-force/
One who earns the Grace of Bhairavi neither has to live in concern or fear of life or death, of poverty, or of failure. All that a human being considers as wellbeing will be his if only he earns the Grace of Bhairavi.
Another good one:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/inside-isha/isha-yoga-center/navaratri-making-use-of-natures-support/
A man will conduct the survival process much more efficiently than a woman. Only because technology has come can you today equate man and woman in the level of activity. This is not a question of intelligence; this is a question of physical capability. If there is no structure, if everything is leveled to the ground, then the masculine will naturally dominate. It is from that era that the masculine is still dominating. Now that technological leveling has come, societies are structured. It is definitely time to level it, but to lose our sense about the physiological capabilities and psychological realities will be foolish because they are different. When we make our differences into a discriminatory process, it becomes ugly, otherwise being different is not wrong. Being different is not less or more, it is just different. Unfortunately, human societies have this history of making every difference into a discriminatory process.
A few years ago, when I was conducting a ladies Bhava Spandana at Spanda Hall, in one of the peak moments, I was witness to the Uniqueness of the feminine. A powerful feminine force was so manifest in the air, my own body and energies were very much woman-like. This was not new to me but on that day, it stood up in much grandeur. Though from the same basis, how uniquely different the fundamentals of the feminine are. This reality found a magnificent expression on that day and I thoroughly drank the nectar of the feminine and scribbled these words upon the notepad with my eye and attention holding on to the event that I was witnessing.
It is such a gross violation of the beauty of creation that today we have largely made feminine second class. Aggressive cultural and religious attitudes are the main culprits. The pettiness of wanting to be superior or better than the other has produced attitudes that make masculine a superior force, the grossness of holding physical or the material as ultimate is the root of genocide of the feminine. Well, we have not killed the women of the world because of need but religion, modern science and now the corporate culture – all these are in an active mode of murder of the feminine. Technology has facilitated the upward mobility of women to a more level playing field, but to a very masculine playing field. Only in recognizing and experiencing that there is something more to life than the physical/material realm will the feminine find its true place in human societies.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Tech writers and women who'd love to replace them!
http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/silicon-valleys-geek-chorus/
Among the many things this boom has given rise to—thousands of new companies, stratospheric
growth, cars with facial hair—is a new tech-journalism cottage industry, one that’s positioned
itself as a more accessible, more analysis-driven analog to insider-oriented, gadget-obsessed,
scoops-and-specs publications like TechCrunch and AllThingsD. It’s populated by a coterie of
young men (yes, much like the industry they cover, they’re almost entirely men) who’ve become
the Valley’s hall monitor, peanut gallery, and, often, conscience.
Matt Buchanan, @mattbuchanan
Age: 28 Snark rating: 3
Platform: The New Yorker
In a nutshell: The go-to source for nuanced explanations of tech trends
Sample headlines: “Reading the Web Alone, Together”; “The Problem with Instagram Everywhere”; “How Smart Can a Watch Really Be?”
Objects of disdain: Sexism, Nespresso, tech-fostered alienation, Internet.org (“less-than-charitable”)
John Herrman, @jwherrman
Age: 26
Snark rating: 5
Platform: Buzzfeed
In a nutshell: Trend spotter, utility reporter, and excavator of bizarre Internet culture
Sample headlines: “Watch This Guy Control a Rat’s Body with His Brain”; “Why Robots Are Stealing Your Dinner Reservations”
Objects of disdain: BlackBerry (“a failed state”), “the wireless industry’s crimes against the English language”
Sam Biddle, @samfbiddle
Age: 26
Snark rating: 10
Platform: Gawker’s Valleywag
In a nutshell: Silicon Valley’s self-appointed BS caller and stone thrower
Sample headlines: “Brit Morin Buys Bigger Office to Continue Doing Nothing”; “TechCrunch Now Writing Imaginary Press Releases”
Objects of disdain: Sarah Lacy, Dave and Brit Morin— basically every CEO in the Valley
Nick Bilton, @nickbilton
Age: 37
Snark rating: 2
Platform: The New York Times
In a nutshell: Star Times tech-business reporter who’s up to date on which way the money is flowing in the Valley
Sample headlines: “Texting Your Feelings, Symbol by Symbol”; “The End of an Era in Mobile”
Objects of disdain: None (Times reporters are too civilized for that)
Kevin Roose, @kevinroose
Age: 27
Snark rating: 7
Platform: New York magazine
In a nutshell: New York’s gimlet-eyed, sharp-tongued Wall Street and tech reporter
Sample headlines: “Tech Entrepreneur Offers Coding Lesson to Homeless Guy, Solves Poverty”; “Transit Strike Shows the Dark Side of Silicon Valley’s Privatization Fetish”
Objects of disdain: Burning Man, Uber, Peter Shih
Alexis Madrigal, @alexismadrigal
Age: 31
Snark rating: 3
Platform: The Atlantic
In a nutshell: The tech media’s essayist and philosopher, with a penchant for historical errata and extended word counts
Sample headlines: “What Is Medium?”; “Astronauts in Bathrobes”; “A Map of American Electricity Use in 1921”
Objects of disdain: Misinformation, “the melancholy of Tumblr’s infinite scroll”
https://medium.com/matter-picks/8481456ed307
Among the many things this boom has given rise to—thousands of new companies, stratospheric
growth, cars with facial hair—is a new tech-journalism cottage industry, one that’s positioned
itself as a more accessible, more analysis-driven analog to insider-oriented, gadget-obsessed,
scoops-and-specs publications like TechCrunch and AllThingsD. It’s populated by a coterie of
young men (yes, much like the industry they cover, they’re almost entirely men) who’ve become
the Valley’s hall monitor, peanut gallery, and, often, conscience.
Matt Buchanan, @mattbuchanan
Age: 28 Snark rating: 3
Platform: The New Yorker
In a nutshell: The go-to source for nuanced explanations of tech trends
Sample headlines: “Reading the Web Alone, Together”; “The Problem with Instagram Everywhere”; “How Smart Can a Watch Really Be?”
Objects of disdain: Sexism, Nespresso, tech-fostered alienation, Internet.org (“less-than-charitable”)
John Herrman, @jwherrman
Age: 26
Snark rating: 5
Platform: Buzzfeed
In a nutshell: Trend spotter, utility reporter, and excavator of bizarre Internet culture
Sample headlines: “Watch This Guy Control a Rat’s Body with His Brain”; “Why Robots Are Stealing Your Dinner Reservations”
Objects of disdain: BlackBerry (“a failed state”), “the wireless industry’s crimes against the English language”
Sam Biddle, @samfbiddle
Age: 26
Snark rating: 10
Platform: Gawker’s Valleywag
In a nutshell: Silicon Valley’s self-appointed BS caller and stone thrower
Sample headlines: “Brit Morin Buys Bigger Office to Continue Doing Nothing”; “TechCrunch Now Writing Imaginary Press Releases”
Objects of disdain: Sarah Lacy, Dave and Brit Morin— basically every CEO in the Valley
Nick Bilton, @nickbilton
Age: 37
Snark rating: 2
Platform: The New York Times
In a nutshell: Star Times tech-business reporter who’s up to date on which way the money is flowing in the Valley
Sample headlines: “Texting Your Feelings, Symbol by Symbol”; “The End of an Era in Mobile”
Objects of disdain: None (Times reporters are too civilized for that)
Kevin Roose, @kevinroose
Age: 27
Snark rating: 7
Platform: New York magazine
In a nutshell: New York’s gimlet-eyed, sharp-tongued Wall Street and tech reporter
Sample headlines: “Tech Entrepreneur Offers Coding Lesson to Homeless Guy, Solves Poverty”; “Transit Strike Shows the Dark Side of Silicon Valley’s Privatization Fetish”
Objects of disdain: Burning Man, Uber, Peter Shih
Alexis Madrigal, @alexismadrigal
Age: 31
Snark rating: 3
Platform: The Atlantic
In a nutshell: The tech media’s essayist and philosopher, with a penchant for historical errata and extended word counts
Sample headlines: “What Is Medium?”; “Astronauts in Bathrobes”; “A Map of American Electricity Use in 1921”
Objects of disdain: Misinformation, “the melancholy of Tumblr’s infinite scroll”
https://medium.com/matter-picks/8481456ed307
The six men on this list of tech writers most willing to be replaced by women
We asked. They offered.
Among
the many things this tech boom has given rise to—thousands of bogus
trend stories, stratospheric sexism, men with nonsense facial hair—is a
new who’s-who-in-tech-journalism cottage industry, one that’s
positioned itself as a more with-it, more analysis-driven analog to the
hype-driven, status-obsessed, bros-and-their-uber-bros dominating the
rest of the tech and media biz. It’s populated by a coterie of young men
(yes, much unlike the people who work in the industry they cover and
the consumers who drive it, they’re almost entirely men) who’ve become
the Valley’s stand-in’s, list-dominators, and, often, men who work directly alongside women who write on the same subjects and then some (and, whom all of these men, when asked, would rather replace them on this list).
Matt Buchanan, @mattbuchanan
Age: 28
Platform: The New Yorker
Women to replace him: “There are so many options it’s hard to pick! I mean there’s Jenna Wortham or Nitasha Tiku or Kara Swisher or Adrianne Jeffries or Alexia Tsotsis or Laura June or Leslie Horn or Nicole Perloth or Xeni Jardin.”
Age: 28
Platform: The New Yorker
Women to replace him: “There are so many options it’s hard to pick! I mean there’s Jenna Wortham or Nitasha Tiku or Kara Swisher or Adrianne Jeffries or Alexia Tsotsis or Laura June or Leslie Horn or Nicole Perloth or Xeni Jardin.”
“First, and feel free to exclude since she’s one of ours, Justine Sharrock.
She’s not as visible on Twitter but she’s getting stories that nobody
else in the tech press is anywhere near, and she’s deeply critical of
SV. Great, deep reporting. Examples: ‘The Internet Explained By Prisoners Who Have Never Seen It,’ ‘How Many Retweets Is San Francisco’s Tax Break Worth?’”
“Nitasha Tiku: Adds deep, focused reporting to Valleywag. Scoops all the time: ‘Meet the 28-Year-Old CEO of Bang With Friends,’ ‘Uber CEO on Driver “Assault”: It’s Not Real and We’re Not Responsible’”
“Jenna Wortham: I mean, maybe the most vital person on NYT tech team. Best at trendspotting: ‘Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy,’ ‘The Best Thing I Learned At SXSW Was From the Unabomber’”
“Jessica Roy: Hasn’t been on the scene too long but has been great at Betabeat: ‘Business Insider’s Sexist CTO Has Resigned, But He’s Still Everything That’s Wrong With Tech’”
Sam Biddle, @samfbiddle
Age: 26
Platform: Gawker’s Valleywag
Women to replace him: “Nitasha Tiku goes without saying, in my book. But I’ll say it anyway; I’m honored to work with her.”
Age: 26
Platform: Gawker’s Valleywag
Women to replace him: “Nitasha Tiku goes without saying, in my book. But I’ll say it anyway; I’m honored to work with her.”
“I don’t think Kate Losse or Maria Bustillos
would describe themselves as ‘tech writers,’ but they’ve written two of
my favorite things about technology this year (or ever, really):
Maria’s ‘Are The Startup Fellas Hellbent On Destroying Education Even Literate?’ and Kate’s ‘Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning In?’”
Nick Bilton, @nickbilton
Age: 37
Platform: The New York Times
Women to replace him: “Jenna Wortham, no questions. She is smarter and way wittier than I am, and she somehow manages to cover the tech industry in such a unique way. It’s almost like she’s a seasoned anthropologist who can write about the migration of bees in relation to Jay-Z’s latest album. I love that she covers tech from a cultural standpoint, like her piece on Instagram becoming irrelevant, and her astute observations about selfies.”
Age: 37
Platform: The New York Times
Women to replace him: “Jenna Wortham, no questions. She is smarter and way wittier than I am, and she somehow manages to cover the tech industry in such a unique way. It’s almost like she’s a seasoned anthropologist who can write about the migration of bees in relation to Jay-Z’s latest album. I love that she covers tech from a cultural standpoint, like her piece on Instagram becoming irrelevant, and her astute observations about selfies.”
Kevin Roose, @kevinroose
Age: 26
Platform: New York magazine
Women to replace him: “I would pick Jenna Wortham, Nitasha Tiku, and the Betabeat staff! In addition, Adrianne Jeffries, Evelyn Rusli, Alexia Tsotsis, and Leslie Horn.”
Age: 26
Platform: New York magazine
Women to replace him: “I would pick Jenna Wortham, Nitasha Tiku, and the Betabeat staff! In addition, Adrianne Jeffries, Evelyn Rusli, Alexia Tsotsis, and Leslie Horn.”
Alexis Madrigal, @alexismadrigal
Age: 31
Platform: The Atlantic
Women to replace him: “I’m just looking up from changing diapers and making pot roast — I’m out on paternity leave — but there are dozens of excellent tech writers I read and admire. (I mean, obviously.) But to single out some names off the top of my head before heading back into the baby bubble: Kara Swisher, Kim Zetter, Jenna Wortham, Virginia Heffernan, Claire Cain Miller, Laura June, Nitasha Tiku, Evelyn Rusli, and of course my own teammates Becca Rosen and Megan Garber.”
Age: 31
Platform: The Atlantic
Women to replace him: “I’m just looking up from changing diapers and making pot roast — I’m out on paternity leave — but there are dozens of excellent tech writers I read and admire. (I mean, obviously.) But to single out some names off the top of my head before heading back into the baby bubble: Kara Swisher, Kim Zetter, Jenna Wortham, Virginia Heffernan, Claire Cain Miller, Laura June, Nitasha Tiku, Evelyn Rusli, and of course my own teammates Becca Rosen and Megan Garber.”
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