Philip Zimbardo’s Man Disconnected claims porn, Internet are destroying men. Photo by Nebojsa Bobic/Shutterstock In 1971, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo spearheaded the Stanford prison experiment to show how the hierarchy of the penitentiary system could turn otherwise reasonable men into monsters.
Now, Zimbardo has identified a new threat to mankind: the Internet. Excessive video game use and porn consumption, Zimbardo says, is turning modern young men into limp, loveless losers. It’s a theory he’s pushed with increasing urgency over the past several years. In 2011, Zimbardo delivered a TED talk titled “The Demise of Guys?” Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer. Man (Dis)connected (written by Zimbardo with a co-author, Nikita Coulombe) proffers a host of explanations for this crisis of masculinity—too many female teachers, too few father figures, too much soda—but it reserves its most damning critique for video games and porn. The survey itself is … not good. Worse, the survey questions focused on respondents’ opinions, not on their actual experiences. What's the problem if a boy wants to put on a dress or girls act masculine?
A few weeks back, I went to my first baby shower.
My friends have only recently started getting married and having babies – although not necessarily in that order – and I was psyched to pick out a set of adorable baby clothes for the twins to whom my friend had only weeks earlier given birth. I popped into a cutesy Brooklyn baby shop and said I was looking for a baby shower gift for new twins. Her first question: "Girls or boys? " Male and female brains wired differently, scans reveal. Scientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.
Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women's brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, in contrast to men's brains, where the connections were typically stronger between the front and back regions. Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men's brains apparently wired more for perception and co-ordinated actions, and women's for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking. "If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking.
Why it's time for brain science to ditch the 'Venus and Mars' cliche. As hardy perennials go, there is little to beat that science hacks' favourite: the hard-wiring of male and female brains.
For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes. I am from Mars, apparently, while the ladies in my life are from Venus. The lost girls: Pressure mounts on Government to curb use of ultrasound scans to show gender of unborn babies - UK Politics - UK. Some hospitals already operate an informal policy of not telling pregnant women and their spouses about the sex of their babies, but this can be easily circumvented by paying for a private scan.
Some NHS hospitals even offer an additional baby-gender service for a small fee. “It’s common practice to visit a clinic - sometimes they are privately run, sometimes they are made available by the NHS - when parents can pay to have images taken for their own interests of the developing foetus,” said Richard Evans, chief executive officer of the Society and College of Radiographers. “Clinics that are operating commercially for the sale of images should consider all of the implications of the work. It’s important for everyone to realise that these are powerful diagnostic techniques,” Mr Evans said. “It’s not something that should be operated really purely for commercial concerns,” he said.
A spokesman for the General Medical Council said: “Abortion on the grounds of sex alone is unlawful. Crisis in South Africa: The shocking practice of 'corrective rape' - aimed at 'curing' lesbians - Africa - World. The next morning, Mvuleni came round, bleeding, battered, in shock, and taunted by one overriding memory – the last thing they said to her before she passed out: "After everything we're going to do to you, you're going to be a real woman, and you're never going to act like this again".
Corrective rape is a hate crime wielded to convert lesbians to heterosexuality – an attempt to 'cure' them of being gay. The term was coined in South Africa in the early 2000s when charity workers first noticed an influx of such attacks. But despite recognition and international coverage, corrective rape in the region is escalating in severity, according to Clare Carter, the photographer behind these images. This is amid a backdrop of parts of the country "becoming more homophobic", as one recent victim asserts.
Compared to many of South Africa's victims, Mvuleni was lucky: she survived. Loading gallery. The everyday sexism project.