helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

I think I found the article!

Read it if you have the time, it's very interesting.

Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.

I also thought this part was cool :)

PLEASE read this article, this information is incredible for everyone looking to unlearn bioessentialism

I loved everything in this article, but I especially need people to see: “In 2018 English runner Sophie Power ran the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc race in the Alps while still breastfeeding her three-month-old at rest stations.” Because people are amazing.

Also RIP the entire social premise of the Clan of the Cave Bear. I mean, love the idea that evolution favored gender egalitarianism but turns out Neanderthals didn’t have rigid sexual hierarchies, either.

come on brain yip yip

Pokes with stick

"Coca-Cola made an AI ad!"

"McDonald's releases AI Christmas commercial!!"

Don't care didn't ask plus here's a beautifully animated ad for a French supermarket that was made by actual artists

I’m not crying - you’re crying!!! 😭😍🥲

Oh help

Poverty IS a policy choice. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

Ok, this is just *super cool*.

And implies that gestures have grammar. I mean. Holy. Shit.

That would also imply language development early in the species could have been not just a mouth / lip / tongue thing but also a body language thing, or that body language (literally) may predate it. Just - fucking *cool*.

Paging @belleamante99 , because this nerdery is right up your alley

#Please little bird

I love that the modern-day tumblr post equivalent of chain emails only requires me to reblog a relatively pleasant image instead of forward an email to a bunch of my friends and family members to quell my raging anxiety.

I saw a poll going around about "Do you think it's a good idea for 18 year olds to get married, yes or no, no nuance" and idk I have some thoughts about that lately. (creating my own post because I don't want to bother the op, no one bother the op)

Do I personally think it's a good idea for 18yr olds to get married? No. I think at that age you're pretty young to get married and your choice in partner is not likely to be great. Maybe you only just met your spouse (and thus don't know them that well). Maybe you were high school sweethearts and while you know what your spouse is like while they're going through those years, you don't know what they're going to be like after college or after joining the workforce, and those years can be crazy formative. Maybe, though I hope not, you're marrying someone that your parents picked out for you or otherwise arranged, in which case there's a lot wrong (and you should have protections from familial abuse).

However. I also don't think that there should be any restrictions on 18yr olds getting married. At 18 you are a legal adult (in the majority of countries) and thus you have the right to make even the stupidest of decisions about what happens to you and your body. You can get regrettable tattoos. You can wreck your lungs smoking. You can go into debt buying the world's most expensive car. You should be able to chose to marry your dumb high school sweetheart and you should also be able to chose to divorce them a year later.

I feel as though there's this growing sentiment of "well sure this person is technically an adult, but they're still *young* so they should be protected from making bad choices" and that's. Hm. Young or mentally young or emotionally mature is something that people seem to have a difficult time defining on a level that can actually be logistically enforced or implemented. And we see these days what can happen when people *do* try to implement "but you're so yooooung (and dumb)" policies like what's happening with trans people where "legal adult" is still too young to transition so maybe 25 is the new limit at which you can transition but blah-blah debunked science about brain development so maybe the new limit should be 30 - " etc etc.

At 18, as a legal adult, you should have the freedom to make the decision to get married. You should have the freedom to make any dumb, regrettable, poorly thought out decision that you want, and you should have the freedom of an adult to either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of your decisions. That's life, baby. Your hand cannot and should not be held forever until some arbitrary time at which some random person thinks you're "old enough". We have an obligation to respect people's rights to make choices that we think are bad. We have an obligation to respect people's rights to do things that they can't take back because we think a hypothetical future version of them could regret it.

We have an obligation to treat adults as adults.

I will add that you can't actually protect anyone from inexperience by refusing to allow them to experience something. The biggest difference between an 18yo and a 28yo is life experience. Try to shelter people as less-than-adults till age 28, the 28yo will make the same dang mistakes. Years don't grant experience on their own, magically.

Of course, if you've sheltered the 18yo the same way you shelter an 8yo, you'll end up with similar problems. Independence and risk should be a graded continuum with a goal of 18 (or at least high school graduation) being capable of adulthood.

I strongly believe in protecting children. But I also believe that part of protecting them is letting them take increasing risks and responsibilities so they can gain experience and maturity. And 18 should be the deadline for anyone else getting to decide how protected they are.

Not to mention that learning to admit "hey, this thing I did was a mistake" and also asking "can you help me out of this mistake I made" is a skill SORELY lacking in so many adults.

We need to let ppl do this again. Instead of preventing young adults from making mistakes we need to create safety nets so those mistakes aren't the end. Teach them how to admit a fault, and fix it or move gracefully.

All of this!!! Plus why as adults must everything be forever or it’s a failure?? Why can’t some things be temporary and it still be okay?

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

very good tags from @downwarddnaspiral

literally saw this tweet this morning

behold, the privileging of ignorance.

It's also interesting to look at the way the gender-shift in roles changes how the roles are perceived.

Secretaries are a perfect example. Back in the day, secretary was a prestigious position, usually the right hand of a figure of authority. The term comes from the 1400s, or thereabout, and the fact that high political offices are still referred to as Secretary of Defence and Secretary of State show how important the position was.

There were, of course, women doing the secretarial tasks - for example Marie Maitland transcribed the family folio in the 16th century though skeptical Victorians insisted a woman couldn't have so fair a hand and Dido Belle wrote her uncle's correspondence in the 18th century, which was noted to be unusual for a woman to do such a task - but secretarial duties primarily fell to men.

However, outside governmental roles, as more and more women entered the workforce, especially during and after the World Wars, and were very good at secretarial work, the gender dynamic shifted.

The number of male secretaries diminished rapidly and with it, the respect due. Misogyny coloured how secretaries were treated, no matter how skilled or professional the women in question were, and even now, there are still the stereotypes of the sexy bimbo secretary.

If we get enough women all over the workforce and then push workers' rights far enough that raising a family on a single income becomes viable again, maybe we can create a world where the manliest thing to be is a tradwife.

Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

Reblog the reblogging post.

Like to ignore its wisdom.

omfg that is just too adorable

This kitteh having a little halloween adventure is one of my favourite posts of all time :)

Every fall like clockwork this photo set pops up and we all must reblog it

You know it’s getting close to Halloween when you see it appear :D

This will always be one of my favorite comics ever. It gives me warm fuzzies~

my heart….

Oh little baby kitty ❤️

Alright fine I’ll reblog this one…

my heart is being sent to space

Halloween kitty!

it’s the no notes blanket fort! climb on in

DAMN WTF!?!?!? I THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A 1k POST?!?!?

It says no reblogs despite us. It’s actually a broken post :D

can’t believe im the first to reblog this, hope it doesn’t ignore my interactions 🥰

One single note

Ah, another broken post.

four notes while i’m reblogging lol

Only four? This should be more popular

i have final destination premonitions all the time but instead of seeing death i see all the possible liquids i could knock onto my laptop

Quote of the day

I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

if you just register for a dysautonomia international medical conference. and you just let the videos play. and you even just half pay attention. you will gain the ability to change and save other people's lives.

so many chronically ill people only get diagnosed when someone other than their doctors say, "hey, have you heard of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome? it is really common, treatable, but it only shows up on specific tests."

or "hey, I know you have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, have you had autonomic testing or testing for non length dependent small fiber neuropathy? 30-40% of people with fibromyalgia have small fiber neuropathy, and a lot of that is the non length dependent pattern, which not a lot of doctors know about."

or "hey, you know how you have weird allergy issues? have you ever heard of mast cell activation syndrome? around 17% of people have mast cell issues, and they can cause debilitating symptoms all over the body until treated."

there are so many debilitating chronic illnesses that are EXTREMELY treatable, but only show up on specific tests. a lot of people with these conditions test as 'healthy' otherwise. and so fucking many of these kinds of conditions are presented at dysautonomia international in presentations that are easy to understand.

these medical conditions are everywhere, and have been around forever. and covid-19 has multiplied how many people have these, around the world.

everyone has an autonomic nervous system, and it breaks very easily. dysautonomia can happen alongside countless other medical conditions. every chronically ill person needs to be asking themselves if they might have some form of autonomic dysfunction. because chances are pretty good that they do.

july 11-13, 2025. online and in person.

Hey. Your brain needs to de-frag. Literally it needs you to sit there and space out.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

Give your brain a Daily Dose Of De-Frag.

This explains so much.

Also, if you don't take the time regularly, your brain will do it for you. Usually when you're already stressed and it gets to be too much. You will zone out. And you can not control it. So regular maintenance will help