Jan 9, 2011

His name is Matt, which means “Happy” in Turkish… Here is his story.

Dec 12, 2010

By Henry Makow Ph.D.

We live in a culture that doesn’t admit that women need sex every bit as much as men, if not more.

Conservatives put women on a romantic pedestal. Women are virginal and sexless. Feminists deny women need men for anything.

“Women are made to feel guilty for needing men,” my wife said. “We’re portrayed as weak, co-dependent or lacking in self-esteem.”

My teenage son also inculcated this message from TV: “Women don’t need sex,” he said. “They’re just doing men a favor.”

Sex and love have become horribly confused. When religion held sway, they were inseparable (i.e. marriage.)

But today “sexual liberation” has freed sex from love. It has taken love’s place. Millions of men and women behave like addicts. They use sex to assuage a desperate craving for love that only love can satisfy.

DESPERATELY SEEKING LOVE

An excellent independent movie, “The Business of Strangers” (2001) explores the effect feminism has had on modern women. Writer/director Patrick Stettner illustrates how American women have traded love for the sterility, banality and inhumanity of corporate culture.

This is what movies should do: Reflect modern life. Yet this brilliant movie bombed (or was torpedoed) at the box office, making less than $500,000. Fortunately, critics liked it and it is widely available on DVD.

Two women are stranded overnight at an airport hotel while on a sales trip. Stockard Channing plays “Julie Styron,” successful divorced 45-ish VP Sales whose best friend is her secretary.

Julia Stiles plays Paula Murphy, a tough 25-ish “writer” who works the overhead projector.

The movie shows how career has supplanted family for women like Styron. Feminism promised that women could have both, but this did not happen.

Forty seven per cent of 40-something women with professional degrees have no children. Only 14% of these women said they didn’t want children.  (“Creating a Life: Professional Life and the Quest for Children” by Sylvia Ann Hewitt)

Styron is fired without warning. But when she immediately lands an even better job as a CEO, she is strangely indifferent.

ODE TO WASTE & FRUSTRATION

In the hotel bar with Styron, Paula  recognizes Nick Harris (left) a slick young corporate head-hunter played by Fred Weller. He is the man who raped her best friend years ago at a frat party. She lures him to Styron’s suite and puts tranquilizers in his drink.

After he passes out, the two women indulge in an orgy of hatred over his unconscious body. They undress him, cover him with obscene graffiti, smear blood and strike him. Both women clearly despise men. Murphy confides it was actually she who had suffered the rape.

However, later it emerges that Nick is a rapist in her mind only. Styron learns that he had never been to the city where the rape had supposedly taken place.

Talk about hate. Men are “rapists” because they are not giving women the love they need. The result is self-loathing and resentment against men. Feminism first makes women and men incompatible; then it exploits women’s frustration and rage.

“WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?”

The great Sigmund Freud was unable to answer this question despite  “thirty years of research into the feminine soul.”

Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath” knew the answer: Woman wants to be loved. She’ll do anything for love, even if she has to become a feminist.

Many Western women today are dysfunctional because they are getting contradictory messages. Society tells them to be “strong and independent,” i.e. successful in a career.

But this behavior is masculine and makes men feel redundant. Men don’t like these women. Thus women are doing what society tells them to do, yet are not getting the male love they expect and need.

Women are loved when they put their husband and children before themselves. It is feminine to self efface. Men love these women because they become part of them.

I am not against a woman having a career, only putting it before marriage and family.

GETTING DATING STRAIGHT

A single friend characterized a typical date this way. He describes his work and seeks affirmation and respect. She describes her work and seeks affirmation and respect from him. They never see each other again. (They are already competing.)

This is NOT how heterosexuals mate. Women are hypergamous, which means they seek men of higher power and status. Nurses marry doctors.

On a date, a man reveals himself and his vision of life. She decides if she’s interested in him or not. If she is, she affirms him by her acceptance and encouragement. In marriage, she demonstrates her love by trusting him to take care of her interests.

He also affirms her by seeking her acceptance. Yes, he also wants her to be capable and successful. But his recognition and nurturing come later.

All successful organizations are hierarchical. The heterosexual family is male dominated. If you wanted to destroy it, you promote equality. Our culture is doing this.

THE FEMINIST TRAP

It is mind-boggling but our politicians, media and educators are deliberately sabotaging society. Feminism like its Communist forebear dogmatically denies human sexual differences, such as the fact that men have 10 times the testosterone levels of women.

There are over 900 Women’s Studies Programs in the United States teaching impressionable young women to deny their femininity. According to “Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies” femininity is “patriarchal mind control.” The “best slaves are the ones who don’t even know they are slaves.” Who authorized this indoctrination in lesbian dysfunction?

This vicious state-sponsored hoax is ruining millions of lives. The CIA and the Rockefeller Foundation sponsor it. The super rich use tax-exempt foundations to promote Communism, according to the 1954 Reese Committee Report of the U.S. Congress.

Feminism is another manifestation of Communism, which was always sponsored by the international bankers and their corporate allies. Their goal is to transfer all power to a global state, which they control. By harnessing the authoritarian power of the state, Big Brother will serve Big Business.

The stated goal of the Communist Manifesto is to destroy the nuclear family. People without stable families are easy to distract and control. Sex starved, isolated, and dysfunctional, the few children they have are also messed up. The U.S. birth rate is at the lowest point in history.

WOMAN THE MULTIPLIER (MAN X WOMAN = CHILDREN)

A woman’s elaborate reproductive apparatus has a profound influence on her psyche. Each month she produces an egg and she is devoted to seeing that egg fertilized, then to giving birth and raising a child.

In a true marriage, two people become one. Each complements the other. Women’s strengths should not be the same as men’s and vice versa.

Independence is the big issue in feminist marriages. They are mergers, a pooling of assets designed to achieve economic and sexual synergies. The two people fail to bond and remain immature. They struggle for power and break up.

CONCLUSION

Heterosexual society has been under sustained psychological attack designed to arrest human development and decrease population. Feminism is the weapon of choice.  It encourages women to deny their femininity and act like men.

Feminine women are characterized by selflessness. They are not hunters. They are not killers. They are a little vulnerable in a worldly sense. How do men respond to them? By wanting to nurture and protect them. This is how men love. This is what women want.

In “The Business of Strangers” both women have become hunters. As a result, they hate men but worse they hate themselves. Victims of a diabolical  plot, they have mutated. They need a man’s love in order to be themselves again.

What are your thoughts on this?

Jul 16, 2010

Why thinking about distant things can make us more creative

By Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?

One answer is psychological distance.  According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person’s perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

Why does psychological distance increase creativity? According to CLT, psychological distance affects the way we mentally represent things, so that distant things are represented in a relatively abstract way while psychologically near things seem more concrete. Consider, for instance, a corn plant. A concrete representation would refer to the shape, color, taste, and smell of the plant, and connect the item to its most common use – a food product. An abstract representation, on the other hand, might refer to the corn plant as a source of energy or as a fast growing plant. These more abstract thoughts might lead us to contemplate other, less common uses for corn, such as a source for ethanol, or to use the plant to create mazes for children. What this example demonstrates is how abstract thinking makes it easier for people to form surprising connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, such as fast growing plants (corn) and fuel for cars (ethanol).

In this most recent set of studies, Jia and colleagues examined the effect of spatial distance on creativity. Participants in the first study performed a creative generation task, in which they were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. This task was introduced as having been developed either by Indiana University students studying in Greece (distant condition) or by Indiana University students studying in Indiana (near condition). As predicted, participants in the distant condition generated more numerous and original modes of transportation than participants in the near condition.

Similar results were obtained in the second study, in which performance on three insight problems was gauged. Here’s a sample problem:

A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long enough to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?

This is known as an insight problem since the solution – the prisoner unraveled the rope lengthwise and tied the remaining strands together – typically arrives in a flash of insight, or what’s commonly referred to as an Aha moment.

For the insight problems, participants were told that the questions were developed either by a research institute located in California, “around 2,000 miles away” (distant condition), or in Indiana, “2 miles away,” (near condition).  In a third, control group no information regarding location was mentioned. As expected, participants in the distant condition solved more problems than participants in the proximal condition and in the control condition. Because the problems seemed farther away, they were easier to solve.

This pair of studies suggests that even minimal cues of psychological distance can make us more creative. Although the geographical origin of the various tasks was completely irrelevant – it shouldn’t have mattered where the questions came from – simply telling subjects that they came from somewhere far away led to more creative thoughts.

These results build on previous studies which demonstrated that distancing in time – projecting an event into the remote future – and assuming an event to be less likely (that is, distancing on the probability dimension) can also enhance creativity.  In a series of experiments that examined how temporal distance affects performance on various insight and creativity tasks, participants were first asked to imagine their lives a year later (distant future) or the next day (near future), and then to imagine working on a task on that day in the future. Participants who imagined a distant future day solved more insight problems than participants who imagined a near future day. They also performed better on visual insight tasks, which required detecting coherent images in “noisy” visual input, as well as on creative generation tasks (e.g., listing ways to improve the look of a room). Similar evidence has been found for probability. Participants were more successful at solving sample items from a visual insight task when they believed they were unlikely, as opposed to likely, to encounter the full task.

This research has important practical implications. It suggests that there are several simple steps we can all take to increase creativity, such as traveling to faraway places (or even just thinking about such places), thinking about the distant future, communicating with people who are dissimilar to us, and considering unlikely alternatives to reality. Perhaps the modern environment, with its increased access to people, sights, music, and food from faraway places, helps us become more creative not only by exposing us to a variety of styles and ideas, but also by allowing us to think more abstractly. So the next time you’re stuck on a problem that seems impossible don’t give up. Instead, try to gain a little psychological distance, and pretend the problem came from somewhere very far away.

Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist. His latest book is How We Decide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Nira Liberman is a professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University. Oren Shapira is a graduate student in the Liberman lab.

Comments from readers:

Reader 1:

This matter of psychological distance is one I experience when I tackle a problem in a sort of daydream in which, instead of directly solving the problem, I envision myself as telling others how I solved it.  It works beautifully.

Reader 2:

Possibly creativity can be taught.  From childhood our kids were taught to change advertising jingles to original ones or reverse- the toothpaste took away the enamel and so on. Lack of creativity comes from fear of being criticized or found wrong. Many inventions from USA in the 19th century came because novel thinking was allowed vs other lands where you must follow “traditional ways.”  I think “allowing” creative thinking is more important than “distance thinking.

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