What men mean when they talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk.
And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a woman, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than “pleasant agreement.”
When men say “most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool” the subtext is not, “I love you, be the mother to my children.” The subtext is “do not step out of line, here.” If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general.
- Bodies are hairy. No matter the gender, your face will have hair and that is more than okay.
- Your butthole is going to have some hair too. And maybe your nipples. And your tummy. And where ever else.
- Stretch marks. Those are a thing. Everyone gets ‘em. If you don’t, you probably don’t have…
So, check it… I work with kids with autism, and I’ve been with this one kid for about a year. A few months ago he finally reached mastery criteria with capitol and lowercase letters, we had been teaching it for about 5-6 months. This is a kid who’s an early learner; he’s moderate on the autism spectrum. He can identify numbers up to 10 and he can identify the basic things in his environment (TV, cat, chair, pencil, etc.). He can also ask for the things he needs and enjoys (I want… pizza, potty, water, walk, book, etc.).
After knowing his basic history and the length of time it took him to develop the skills in identifying letters in the alphabet, heres what’s really exciting.. He learned to read basic site words in just a few weeks. He is developing this skill at an accelerated rate! It’s so exciting. With stimulus equivalence we are teaching him to read!
Stimulus equivalence is that basic math equation you may have learned in middle or high school. If A=B and B=C than, A=C. So let me explain what this has to do with autism and the kid I’m currently working with. He already was capable of vocally identifying the pictures of basic items (we’ll call that relation A=B, spoken word = picture). The next step is to get him to identify the picture with the written word.
In order to identify the picture with the written word we first superimposed the word and picture together, for example, the cat picture with the word cat was all on one piece of paper. We had him identify these in a match-to-sample procedure. This is when you put a couple things in an array and use a sample for the individual to match from the array. After teaching that we eventually faded the imposing picture and it was just the written words in the array which he successfully matched with the pictures (we’ll call this the B=C relation, picture = written word).
And then…viola! There was an emergent relation! Without teaching this specific relation we were able to hold up the written words cat, dog, and pig and he pointed and identified these words vocally with 100% accuracy! We moved on to three more words and he moved through them so quickly! We are introducing another three words at the beginning of next week. This is the most exciting thing I’ve accomplished thus far working in this field. Seeing a child who was barely able to speak now identifying written words is one of the most rewarding things i’ve ever taken part in.
After nearly 8 decades, the FBI is finally redefining rape to reflect more victims and allow for greater protection. The last definition of rape was made in 1929 by the FBI and only females were included, in addition they must be aware and opposed to the attack. But now men can now be considered victims and the new definition includes those who are incapable of giving consent because they are under the influence of drugs.
I’m a behaviorist - so I constantly look at peoples behaviors in relation to their environments and the antecedents and consequences of those behaviors. This continuous process drives my boyfriend crazy. Honestly it’s driving me a bit crazy myself. Something that I can’t help but notice and that continues to drive me nuts is womens behavior. Take the classic “pretty girl” in high school. Socially she was classified in this way for whatever genetic traits she received. This built up over time as she got attention from both sexes for her overt image. Sadly, this individual most likely never received attention for emitting verbal behavior which relates to “intelligence”. So, as intelligent as the individuals private events (i.e. thoughts) may have been she was never socially praised for having them. Thus pretty then becomes related to stupid.
Not only this, but then there is the fact that all women are actually given plenty of social praise throughout their lifetimes for “talkin shit” on other women. So that creates another huge hurdle for us. Oppressed groups always have this problem - the oppressors pit them against each other and against themselves. So men can just sit back and watch as women oppress each other and hate themselves. And then the hatred of themselves can lead to a whole new slew of things like; eating disorders, plastic surgery, and just plain old low-self confidence. Ugh. Well, the good news is that we may be controlled by our environments but we are also able to shape our own environments to create conditions which we are able to exhibit the behaviors which are more ideal (and hopefully learn to shape other peoples environments to create ideal places to thrive). But the only way to do this is to understand how things influence people.
