Things you should know by now, but only just discovered

smh in Internet means "Shaking My Head."

Every other Internet acronym you can kind of figure out from context. But "shaking my head"? You can tell it's an expression of disapproval but beyond that?

For a while now I've been translating it as "suck my horse", until it's become common enough where I had to look it up.

kazooka wrote:

smh in Internet means "Shaking My Head."

Every other Internet acronym you can kind of figure out from context. But "shaking my head"? You can tell it's an expression of disapproval but beyond that?

For a while now I've been translating it as "suck my horse", until it's become common enough where I had to look it up.

Now that you point that out, I've never known what that was either.

I don't think I've ever seen it before, and I've been on the internet since 1996.

Huh. I'd always assumed "so much hate"

Tanglebones wrote:

Huh. I'd always assumed "so much hate"

Me too.

muttonchop wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:

Huh. I'd always assumed "so much hate"

Me too.

smh

I read it as "soak my head," so I was kinda close.

I always read QFT as "Quit F*!king Talking"

Quite the opposite of Quoted For Truth

Such Mango Here

Stone's Massive Huevos

(or miniscule)

On wanting a good girl over a slut: listening to this song on the radio I figured something out; so let us take as a given that some men and women have as a "good girl" cultural image a woman who either abstains from unmarried sex or at least doesn't have it frequently. Given: the situation where a man and woman both at the least have this information, if not adhere to it, though they likely do to some degree, and he's courting her, for one definition of courting anyway. Given: women also enjoy sex, thus we infer the female subject does as well. So, regardless of where the idea came from, like hundreds of years of patriarchy or even if the male subject contributes to the cultural perception, it is literally a favor to her to lower her defenses and allow her to indulge her desire safely without condemnation. This first part I may have concluded before possibly, but I think the next part is new to me. So then, while this may not be the only path to this conclusion, we see the difference between "good girl" and "slut" is that the former is grateful and the latter is seen to be doing so for selfish reasons or at least not grateful enough.

Nosferatu wrote:
HedgeWizard wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Me too. I had a crush on Firestar.

Um... who didn't?

IMAGE(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/Firestar.jpg)

I didn't...I was more of a Kitty Pryde kind of guy.
IMAGE(http://www.marvelarchive.com/images/cards/1_025-f.jpg)

Wait, since we're talking a tv cartoon you mean Kitty Pryde from X-Men Evolution? Cause that's her first tv appearance I think.

I caught a lot of episodes of that 70's spiderman show one Thanksgiving, as part of Thanksgiving marathon playing on USA channel (for the rest of the internet, yes, there is a channel called USA in the US, but they're not at all jingoistic or anything-they have shows like Monk and Psych and Burn Notice). I really liked it.

edit: Rogue from the 90s xmen show was, is and will be the best of all time. Super strong, Southern accent, and super sexy.
Second is Carol Danvers, Marvel seems to lack brunettes, or is just me?

Or you could go all scientific. I venture that it's pretty much impossible to appreciate human concepts of gender, sexuality, and reproduction without familiarity of these or similar treatises:

Darwin, 1871:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man,_and_Selection_in_Relation_to_Sex

From a purely literary perspective, the most entertaining of my recommendations, but ironically, lacking in the rigor of modern science.

Kinsey, 1948 and 1953:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_Reports

If you like data, these are the books for you. I've not made it through either of them.

Symons, 1979:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Human_Sexuality

This is the capstone of 100 years of research, and thankfully is not terribly long. It combines anthropology, anatomy, sociology, psychology, sometimes in--at the time of publication--quite shocking ways, and will blow your mind if you've not studied these areas before.

... on topic I think.

I submit Sex At Dawn.

Delerat wrote:

I always read QFT as "Quit F*!king Talking"

Quite the opposite of Quoted For Truth

Same here!

mortalgroove wrote:

Sex At Dawn.

I had not come across that book, but from the Amazon reviews, editorial reviews, and author credentials, I would caution that it may stray into unsupportable-from-the-evidence conclusions about social organization and moral theorizing. I tend to shy away from "science" books that lean into normative rather than positive accounts. For a slightly less charged version of that than seems present in Sex at Dawn, I would instead recommend the work of Helen E. Fisher.

Mortalgroove, how much of Sex At Dawn was preoccupied with arguing about women-as-property and monogomy versus the many alternatives? The reviews seem to indicate that it is conversational and written for lay audiences. Is that so? If so, do you think it glossed over things too much? (I despise science writing that does, and revel in literally throwing such books into the trash.)

Keithustus wrote:
mortalgroove wrote:

Sex At Dawn.

I had not come across that book, but from the Amazon reviews, editorial reviews, and author credentials, I would caution that it may stray into unsupportable-from-the-evidence conclusions about social organization and moral theorizing. I tend to shy away from "science" books that lean into normative rather than positive accounts. For a slightly less charged version of that than seems present in Sex at Dawn, I would instead recommend the work of Helen E. Fisher.

Mortalgroove, how much of Sex At Dawn was preoccupied with arguing about women-as-property and monogomy versus the many alternatives? The reviews seem to indicate that it is conversational and written for lay audiences. Is that so? If so, do you think it glossed over things too much? (I despise science writing that does, and revel in literally throwing such books into the trash.)

I have read it. As I recall it is a pop-sci reworking of the author's PhD theses. So it is pretty well referenced but written for a lay audience. I don't recall them making any unsupported arguments as such, but as with all evolutionary psychology the evidence is open to such wide interpretation that you'd be a fool to believe any one reading.

My recollection is that it presents a fairly well argued and plausible take on the evolution of human sexuality. There are places where the argumentation is poor and where their reading of the evidence runs contrary to the conventional reading. Their thesis is controversial and Almost all the online reviews I've seen for the book tend to be coloured by whatever the reviewer already believes is correct but if you read it with an open mind I think there is some fun food for thought in there.

Keithustus:

Symons, 1979:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evo...

This is the capstone of 100 years of research, and thankfully is not terribly long. It combines anthropology, anatomy, sociology, psychology, sometimes in--at the time of publication--quite shocking ways, and will blow your mind if you've not studied these areas before.

It's a 1979 book about human sexuality by an American. I find works of this age and sourcing generally not to speak very well about "everything about the human condition." In general, anything from that era doesn't know anything about my culture.

How is this book different, and is it worth my time to read it?

By the by, my wife just recently had an epiphany: all the Western romance stuff she's been reading for more a decade can be better understood through the idea of the "madonna/whore" dichotomy in Western culture. She was not aware of that idea before, and I must confess that even I can't claim to have a thorough understanding of it.

Larry, it's not sexuality from a "Western" or "American" perspective. It's sexuality from a scientific perspective. And at the time, there was almost nothing like it. This isn't a Dr. Ruth or Cosmopolitan magazine account of sexuality. It's how the human body and mind, and that of all other mammals are today because of the mathematics and science of sexual relations.

There was effectively no scientific research on human sexuality until the 1940s. Nothing a respected scientist could get published anyway.

Building on Darwin's evolution by sexual selection, the Modern Synthesis of evolution (natural selection + Mendellian genetics + statistics, which was also an emerging field at that time) pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s, plus the recent discoveries of DNA-genetics, Symons introduced...with very few other such eclectic pioneers...ethnography, the precursors of evolutionary psychology, comparative physiology, and sociology into the first, and still generally most respected, comprehensive scientific theory of human society and sexuality.

To this day, there are hundreds of tiny offshoots such as the other book recommended here that only examine a few small and generally less rigorously supported hypotheses, whereas Symons' work is still read and cited both for its scope and the extent to which it documented his arguments. You might say that Symons was the Francis and Crick of human sexuality....not the first in the field, but the one who got it right and who set the stage for all subsequent research.

And it's still a fantastic read. Just as with anything, I'm sure here are blemishes that have been uncovered in the last 30 years, but people will still be reading this decades from now just as we still read Darwin, Galileo, William James, Hobbes (the first half of Leviathan is psychology! Before the field was ruined by Freud.), etc.

Keithustus:

I will give it the venture of the doubt and read a bit. As for not being “American," I highly doubt it, but we'll see.

Keithustus wrote:

Larry, it's not sexuality from a "Western" or "American" perspective. It's sexuality from a scientific perspective.

Hmmm, I think larry's question remains a good one. It is rare to the point of unheard of to read any anthropology or evolutionary-psychology that isn't utterly coloured by the cultural perspective of the author. Humans have a hard time imagining that the world could be different from their own experience and this constrains the theories and explanations scientists come up with especially when faced with fields with scant evidence. Evolutionary psychology is especially prone to presenting theories which just re-express current sexual and social mores and seldom in a format which can be objectively tested.

DanB wrote:

It is rare to the point of unheard of to read any anthropology or evolutionary-psychology that isn't utterly coloured by the cultural perspective of the author.

QFT

sometimesdee wrote:
DanB wrote:

It is rare to the point of unheard of to read any anthropology or evolutionary-psychology that isn't utterly coloured by the cultural perspective of the author.

QFT

Yarp. The raw data may be what it is, but the conclusions drawn from it are where things get funky.

I've read a bit of the book sample and gotten some commentary on the work from free sources. It is already questionable. The understanding of Natural Selection and Theory of Evolution even in the first chapter is just completely off. There is also this little thing:

"This book is about the evolution of human sexuality and, more particularly, the evolution of typical differences between men and women in sexual behaviors, attitudes, and feelings."

Terrible.

Men and women share 45 of 46 chromosomes, and the Y chromosome is largely superfluous - you can live without it. Presupposing a genetic basis on this particular chromosome pair for behavioral differences is completely without basis, and has even less basis when weighed on an understanding of the world based on a gender spectrum rather than what appears to be Symon's polarized gender setting.

The work has been criticized as a barely-concealed justification for Victorian sexual values. Right now, I'm inclined to agree. I'll hunt for a free version (what I think the work is worth), but I'm not gonna pony up $30 for this.

It's a 1979 book. Is it still under copyright? That's insane.

LarryC wrote:

I've read a bit of the book sample and gotten some commentary on the work from free sources. It is already questionable. The understanding of Natural Selection and Theory of Evolution even in the first chapter is just completely off. There is also this little thing:

"This book is about the evolution of human sexuality and, more particularly, the evolution of typical differences between men and women in sexual behaviors, attitudes, and feelings."

Terrible.

Men and women share 45 of 46 chromosomes, and the Y chromosome is largely superfluous - you can live without it. Presupposing a genetic basis on this particular chromosome pair for behavioral differences is completely without basis, and has even less basis when weighed on an understanding of the world based on a gender spectrum rather than what appears to be Symon's polarized gender setting.

The work has been criticized as a barely-concealed justification for Victorian sexual values. Right now, I'm inclined to agree. I'll hunt for a free version (what I think the work is worth), but I'm not gonna pony up $30 for this.

It's a 1979 book. Is it still under copyright? That's insane.

1979's a bit tricky, since the copyright would have to have been manually renewed, but essentially US law says all works published after 1923 (with a few exceptions due to mishandling, like HP Lovecraft's catalog) are still in copyright. You can thank Walt Disney and Sonny Bono for that.

sometimesdee wrote:
DanB wrote:

It is rare to the point of unheard of to read any anthropology or evolutionary-psychology that isn't utterly coloured by the cultural perspective of the author.

QFT

yeah shut the hell up! [spoiler]see above posts about what it actually means compared to what some people read it as. Needless to say this was posted with tongue firmly in cheek

LarryC wrote:

"This book is about the evolution of human sexuality and, more particularly, the evolution of typical differences between men and women in sexual behaviors, attitudes, and feelings."

Terrible.

It's all in the data. That line is completely supportable. If you're looking for A causes B, you're looking for the wrong book. Symons is familiar with real genetics, which has to be teased out very carefully, as you're alluding to. If you're not familiar with the differences between between-group and within-group variation, and to cross-cultural sampling, then you're not familiar enough with the science to make that kind of claim. "Typical" means exactly that: typical. Not ironclad. Unlike a lot of "science" writers on these subjects, Symons actually speaks the language of zoology and biology: variation. Explaining patterns within the variation that have testable and predictive power? Not so easy, but possible with the right math.

LarryC wrote:

Men and women share 45 of 46 chromosomes, and the Y chromosome is largely superfluous - you can live without it. Presupposing a genetic basis on this particular chromosome pair for behavioral differences is completely without basis, and has even less basis when weighed on an understanding of the world based on a gender spectrum rather than what appears to be Symon's polarized gender setting.

The work has been criticized as a barely-concealed justification for Victorian sexual values. Right now, I'm inclined to agree. I'll hunt for a free version (what I think the work is worth), but I'm not gonna pony up $30 for this.

It's a 1979 book. Is it still under copyright? That's insane.

I think you're missing the point. The actual chromosome may or may not be superfluous, but it's just one chromosome, and kind of beside the point whether the actual measurable differences stem directly or indirectly from it. You're reading a lot of your own bias into what you think is in this book based on some crappy summary pages. You might as well blow off Newton and Archimedes by the same logic.

Victorian defense? Whomever made that claim must not have read the same book.

Tanglebones wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:
DanB wrote:

It is rare to the point of unheard of to read any anthropology or evolutionary-psychology that isn't utterly coloured by the cultural perspective of the author.

QFT

Yarp. The raw data may be what it is, but the conclusions drawn from it are where things get funky.

Exactly. I had one professor of evolutionary psychology with great stories. One was that you could tell the mating habits of mammals by the ratio of testes to body sizes. Rats/mice engaged in 'sperm competition' where many males will mate with a single female, so the one that produces the most/strongest sperm is more likely to impregnate her. For their body size, the male rats had very large testes. At the other end of the spectrum was the mountain gorilla, who have a single dominant male in a group that sexes all the females. The competition occurs between the males directly but all on the outside, so minimal sperm was sufficient. In his words, "great big gorillas - teeny, tiny testes."

Humans are somewhere in between those two extremes. So, depending on how you want your argument to go, one can try to justify either that monogamy or polygamy is more 'natural' or 'evolution-based' with the same data.

(EDIT: or more properly, I guess, that either men or women are more justified in having multiple partners.... I don't know. Oh man - look at that rabbit hole!)