1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
bisexual privilege is having impeccable taste but ultimately sabotaged by having little to no brains
All documentaries take place in the same cinematic universe
i hate how reward systems never work for me like i can’t just say “if i finish this assignment i can have a cookie” bc my brain is like “…..or u could just have one right now” and i can’t argue with that logic
Self-imposed deadlines don’t work either because I know the guy who set them and he’s full of shit
remember to cry for help without guilt-tripping. i know it feels like you’ve been abandoned and betrayed, but it’s probably not true, and it’s not okay to accuse the people around you of something they might not have done.
“i guess none of you like me” could be better phrased as “i feel unloved right now”
“but nobody cares anyway” could be better phrased as “i feel insignificant and i need reassurance”
rather than assuming others’ feelings, give them time to explain them. you’ll usually get a much better answer.
We had a poster saying something similar to this in class once.
Superheroes being 197% done with wii music playing
for real there’s nothing worse than seeing actual teenagers trot out the “your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25!” bullshit. that is a view of brain development that falls somewhere in the spectrum between “way oversimplified” and “just plain wrong”. it gets pushed and repeated because it helps prop up social norms that include robbing young people of autonomy and consent, regulating them out of the public sphere, and silencing their voices on important issues. and my heart just breaks to see teens internalizing this narrative of “you’re inherently stupid and untrustworthy because your brain is programmed to be shitty for another 10 years”. it’s like some kind of mass stockholm syndrome. young people please love yourselves and realize you do not have to wait until your mid-20s to be a whole and real person with the right to be taken seriously.
So, I agree that young people’s opinions should be taken more seriously, but could you expand on the first bit? Why do you see the fact that the brain isn’t fully developed until you’re 25 to be nearly plain wrong? It’s fact that the prefrontal cortex– the part of the brain in charge of risk vs reward, decision making, control of the ego, etc.– finishes developing at 25, and is the last cortex to reach maturity. While I agree it has become overused to write off young people’s rights, it is in fact a true statement.
so, this is a big issue. I’m going to try and break it down into a few vital points but I’ll probably miss some things.
first, there’s the problem of science being poorly reported or even entirely misrepresented in popular media and in social discourse at large. a magazine called Parenting Science ran a great article about this in 2009. they used the example of a brain imaging study that had found teenagers showed more activity in the medial prefrontal cortex - the area of the brain associated with social decision making - than adults in certain situations. the scientists who did this study posited that this result might have something to do with teens having less social experience to draw on, and thus needing to think harder to understand subtle cues and predict others’ behavior; or with the more flexible but less efficient neural networks that characterize young brains. but when it hit the popular press, this study was reported, incredibly, as “teen brains lack capacity for empathy”. and not just in niche blogs or local rags - WebMD, MSNBC, and CBS all ran this story, saying that a study that had nothing to do with empathy whatsoever had scientifically proven that teenagers were less capable of caring about others than adults.
what’s happening here is that science is being twisted in public consciousness to support pre-existing stereotypes of young people. this really isn’t surprising if you study the history of science and society - any research about a group of people commonly treated as a cohesive social category will get misused to some extent.
next, there’s the issue in both general public discourse and academia itself of going into research with biased framings. our culture approaches childhood with what you might call a “deficit model”: any difference between young people and adults is taken to mean that adults are better. example: everyone knows teens think they’re invincible and don’t understand danger and that’s why they’re risk-takers, right? so we get year after year of research that aims to figure out exactly what part of the brain is responsible for that dangerous behavior, and never questions the underlying assumption. this study in the academic journal Nature turns this assumption on its head by saying teens aren’t irresponsible and reckless, they’re tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty.
and really, this makes a lot more sense than thinking about it the other way. there’s no reason the human race would’ve evolved such that our brains have a diminished capacity to understand danger in the years before we procreate. what’s the survival advantage of that?? but it makes a hell of a lot of sense that we would’ve evolved such that in the early years of our independent lives, we’re more accepting of situations we can’t predict or control. and in fact, this study in the Journal of Research on Adolescence (paywall) suggests something very much along these lines is at play: young people who engage in potentially hazardous “exploratory behavior” with their peers learn faster and show better performance on similar tasks later.
now, of course, that might still look like “risky” behavior from an objective outside point of view. but when a researcher starts out from the unbiased perspective of “how do adolescents approach decision-making situations?” rather than the biased perspective of “why are teen brains so screwy?”, very different results emerge about the mechanisms behind age-related differences, and the potential value of those differences.
next, there’s the fact that there’s stuff about the young brain we just don’t know yet, and some of it could have the potential to seriously change what supposedly settled science means. this study by researchers at Washington University in St Louis found that children and adults actually use different parts of the brain to perform the same tasks. specifically - this is the fascinating part - children tend to use more regions toward the back of their brains to do cognitive tasks that adults would tend to use more regions toward the front of their brains for. the lead scientist on the study specifically said this could be a way children’s brains compensate for the slow development of frontal regions.
now, this hasn’t been explored specifically yet as far as I know, but what this could imply is that those studies that show less activity in “the region of the brain associated with self-regulation” might be effectively meaningless. if kids can do the same things with different parts of their brains compared to adults, maybe they don’t need “fully-developed” prefrontal cortices to do what adults rely on our fully-developed prefrontal cortices for.
there’s also the fact that biology may be taking credit for what is, in fact, the province of culture and society. psychologist Robert Epstein wrote an article in Scientific American in which he attempted to remind us all that brain imaging studies are correlational, not causational; in other words, they can’t say whether or not differences in brain structure and function are the cause of different behavior. and the relationship between emotions/experiences/behavior and the brain isn’t a one-way street. the way we act, the way we feel, and what we see, hear, and do all change our brains in profound ways. “if teens are in turmoil,” Epstein says, “we will necessarily find some corresponding chemical, electrical or anatomical properties in the brain. but did the brain cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil alter the brain?”
in other words, even if teenagers are categorically more reckless, more prone to destructive and criminal behavior, more likely to suffer mental illness, and even if teen brains are categorically different from adult brains…we don’t have any solid data by which to blame the one on the other. it is just as likely, if not more likely, that the way our society treats young people (subjecting them to ten times as many restrictions on their behavior and experiences as the average adult and twice as many as incarcerated felons, Epstein points out) is the cause of this tumultuous adolescence, which in turn causes differences in brain function - rather than teen brains being naturally different, and that naturally causing teen turmoil.
the final point I want to make is that even when the science is relatively settled, how it gets perceived and interpreted in everyday thought and discourse is often the result of it being filtered through preexisting prejudices. as an example: there are things the young brain is better at. young children’s brains are (on average) superior to adolescent and adult brains in skill acquisition and sensorimotor processing. adolescent and young adult brains are superior in processing speed, short-term memory, and creative thinking. adult brains are superior in emotional regulation, executive functioning, and critical thinking. (I can find sources for these if anyone is curious, but they would all be different and I didn’t want to be giving 6+ links in the middle of a paragraph.)
so why do we consider a brain “fully developed” when it’s reached the peak of its executive function prowess, instead of the peak of its processing speed and creativity? because society, not science, says adults are “fully developed” humans, and so any aspect of young brains which is superior is considered unimportant. we admit, quite freely, that young people are often more creative and better at learning - but we ultimately don’t care. meanwhile, the aspects of cognition that happen to be stronger later in life get held up as marks of some sort of ineffable completeness.
to be honest, I would go so far as to say it’s completely impossible to actually understand age-based differences in human cognition within the current social framework of how we understand childhood and adulthood. I question at a base level whether unbiased scientific knowledge is even accessible in this kind of cultural climate. I’m not saying research on this should all just stop, but we should start having the same conversations we’re having about research on the brain and gender, for example.
this is probably the longest post I’ve ever written on this site now, but science and society is such a fascinating topic for me generally, especially when it gets paired with social justice issues. I hope what I’ve written here make sense and is helpful in understanding why it’s so problematic to just boil everything down to “your brain isn’t fully formed until you’re 25″. send me an ask if you want me to clarify anything!
september is coming up so here’s your yearly reminder to leave billie joe armstrong the fuck alone
Well of course. We don’t wake him up until October 1st.
His dad is dead, just don’t.
In case anyone reading my blog is unaware, this is a reference to the Green Day song titled “Wake Me Up When September Ends” a song that Billie Joe Armstrong wrote following the death of his father in September of 1982 when Billie Joe was ten years old. The title of the song references his desire to sleep through September in an effort to get some emotional distance from the death of his father.
He’s since been open about the emotional difficulty of having written the song since many people now message him on October 1st to ‘wake him up’ despite the song being a memorial to his departed father.
It’s generally seen as respectful to not try to wake him up. Let him sleep and let him remember his father in peace.
reblogging again because the end of September is coming up. leave him alone.
Reblogging as a reminder to leave Billie Joe Armstrong the fuck alone on October 1st and any day after it if your message is going to contain anything to do with “waking” him up because September will be over.
Tinder is better
Hi, I’m Julia Morris.
Me introducing myself
She literally said NAMASTE as NEH-MASE
Her comedic timing on every one of these is absolutely flawless…. I wonder how it feels being the funniest person on earth
I love this. Its in all the toilets at the local birth centre and basically if your in a domestic violence relationship and cant speak out about it you take one of the stickers and place it on the urine pot and the midwife will speak to you after about it and get you the help needed to flee the violence. So upsetting how many stickers have already gone tho :(
If it makes you feel better, those might not have been taken by actual folks who needed it – we were taught at the clinic I worked at to never leave a full sheet of anything, because the sorts of folks who need these stickers might also be the kind of folks who, psychologically, have a hard time taking a first step or ‘breaking’ something brand new – like being the first person to take a sticker off a sheet or tear a phone number off a flyer. They called it ‘easing the path’ and all us admin staff were careful to never fill up brochure things all the way, to take the first tag off a flyer we hung up, leave the toys for the kids in uneven piles and leave a couple of books leaning or sideways or lying flat on the shelf.
Reblog for the second set of comments. Folks in abusive relationships have a constant mental commentary about how you aren’t worth it, you’re a bother, you’re inconvenient, you cause trouble, it’s all your fault. That “easing the way” is solid psychology. Feeling like you’re not alone, you’re not the only one who has this problem, can let you shift from feeling helpless and hopeless to being willing to reach out for help.
the only reason ppl wanted a black widow movie was cause for the longest time she was the only female superhero in the mcu but now we got plenty and scarjo is not as beloved as she was back then please just make a valkyrie movie
In 1912 Alfred Wegener proposed a controversial theory about how the Earth’s land masses formed. He said the great continents had once formed a single landmass, which had broken up over time. The idea went against all conventional ideas, and was roundly dismissed.
It took the work of young cartographer Marie Tharp to prove him right.
In 1947, she worked on a team that were running expeditions around the world, mapping the ocean floors with echolocation. However, Marie wasn’t allowed on the missions because women were seen as ‘bad luck’…
But the work she did back at the university was invaluable. Converting endless data into detailed profiles, she realised that the ocean floor isn’t a flat, featureless plane, but a complex, varied landscape.
Most importantly, she spotted a long, V-shaped valley in each of her profiles: a rift valley that supported Wegener’s theory, formed by two land masses moving apart, splitting the ocean floor in two.
But even with this evidence, Tharp’s ideas were dismissed as ‘girl talk’.
She then realised that her profiles tied in with worldwide earthquake maps being developed by a colleague.
The mounting evidence started to convince some sceptics, but not all. Renowned explorer Jacques Cousteau was so unconvinced that he sent an expedition to film the ocean floor and clear things up once and for all. What did his footage show? Exactly what Tharp had predicted.
Tharp’s steadfast determination had paved the way for Wegener’s continental drift theory to gain traction. As the tide of opposition waned, it gave birth to our modern understanding of plate tectonics and secured Tharp’s position as one of the most outstanding cartographers of the 20th century.
Once again I am filled with awe for a brilliant woman and disgust that I’ve never heard her name before today.