Quickies: Fantasy poisons, the myth of shared female experiences, and pumping iron
- The science of the Game of Thrones poison, the strangler – Awesome chem geekiness. Don’t watch if you don’t want to be spoiled for events that happen in the second episode of this season.
- The myth of the shared female experience – I kept trying to pick a quote out but you really just need to go read the whole article. From Dr. Rubidium.
- Gastric bypass, thin privilege, and passing over – “After having spent the first 30 years of my life working on my own self-esteem to try to be the most fabulous plus sized lady I could be, now as a thin person I began to discover the cold truth of obesity discrimination. I’d been good, but I’d never been “the best” because I was fat.”
- How I learned to love pumping iron – My favorite point is how weightlifting can give you an appreciation for a wide range of body types.
Fascinating article about society’s noticably more respectful treatment of the newly thin woman (“Gastric bypass, thin privilege, and passing over”).
I wonder how one could test oneself for unconcsous discrimination? I honestly don’t think I value fat people less than thin, or women less than men, or people of colour less than white people, etc. I want to say that I’m positive I don’t do this. But I’d guess most of the people who ignored the fat Professor Schechter-Shaffin but then respected the thin one had no idea they were doing this.
You can take the tests for various implicit biases at Project Implicit:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
Thanks – I did the survey for thin/fat preference, and it decided I had a strong automatic preference for thin people. But since the survey required me to adjust to first one set of associations (fat+bad, and thin+good, and then switch to the opposite pairing) I can’t help but see the survey as flawed. If the survey sometimes starts with the pairing fat+good and thin+bad, then I think the survey may overall provide an interesting insight into people’s unconscious biases. But the single test I took doesn’t convince me that I unconsciously think fat people are bad.
If anyone else takes the test and gets the pairing of terms fat+good first, I’d be interested to hear it.
If it is always presented in the same order, and those in charge of the test are actually intending to interpret the data as evidence for real unconscious biases, then their results are going to be meaningless.
That article about gastric bypass and thin privilege is one of the best reads I’ve had in a while. I think it’s a good introductory read for the topic, actually.