"What do anti-vaccers, pro-choice activists, and people with ugly tattoos have in common? They all think their body exclusively belongs to themselves."
Are you kidding me??
I woke up to this post on my Facebook feed today and only just managed to refrain from posting a vile response to this person before deciding my best course of action would be to just unfriend them.
Yeah yeah free speech, yadda yadda. But HOLY CRAP could you be more offensive to more people on the internet at one time? (Don't take that as a challenge..I'm sure it's possible.)
My problem with this post is not limited to the fact that it was an incredibly insensitive thing to say on social media. I see the issue here as being one of bodily autonomy. I am absolutely terrified to live in a world where it is not accepted that each person has sole control over their own body. This creates a buttload of issues, if you ask me. If you're saying a woman's body is not her own to control in the case of an abortion decision, are you implying that an unborn life is more important than an established one? Doesn't this open up the possibility of legitimized sexual assault? After all, a woman's body is not her own to control. She is not to be taken seriously. She cannot make her own decisions. She cannot give consent, let alone say "no" because her body does not exclusively belong to her. For that matter, women could presumably be forced into surrogacy if someone decided so because, again, women don't have control of their bodies.
How about torture? Again, legitimate because you don't have control over your body.
How about corporal punishment? Abuse in domestic relationships? Human trafficking? Physical punishment in classrooms? Forced organ/tissue/blood donation? How about forcibly injecting somebody with a diagnosed mental disorder with medication against their will? Eugenics??? Why don't we just chop off a person's arm for funsies? Doesn't matter. Their body belongs to us too.
Main point being, you may think you know what is best for someone else and society as a whole, but..actually.. you don't. I'm pretty sure chemically castrating Alan Turing because he was gay didn't make the world a better place. I mean, it caused him to commit suicide. I'll bet that prohibiting Savita Halappanavar Ireland from having an abortion, causing her to die in childbirth, really enhanced the quality of life of all of her loved ones. In the end, neither party's life was preserved as a result of this dis-allowance of autonomy. So...that was effective.
If people are allowed to have freedom of speech such that we cannot legally punish offensive messages such as these, then bodily autonomy should be a given as well. You cannot choose one over the other. Not how it works. Sorry.
I am SO SORRY that my "ugly" tattoo forcibly turned your eyes to look at it and offended you. Please, forgive me. I'll be sure to ask your approval of the next one before I get it done. Better yet, let's hold a public vote so that I don't accidentally offend anyone with my barbed wire arm tattoo.
Good? Good.
Friday, 27 February 2015
Tuesday, 10 February 2015
Cultural Psychology for my WEIRD mind
In cultural psychology, being WEIRD is something most of us probably cannot avoid. The acronym describes people from a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic society. Most of you reading this blog will fit into that category. This is relevant to what I'm about to talk about because most of us Westerners hold a drastically different perspective of our world than do people of East Asian cultures. Specifically, the literature shows that there is a tendency for East Asians to hold a more holistic worldview such that they expect life to be made up of both positive and negative things. Think, yin and yang type mentality. In contrast, most Westerners believe that life should be made up of primarily positive events, leading us to see more of these things in our daily lives and hold more optimistic visions of our futures.
How likely do you think it is that you will be diagnosed with some type of cancer in your lifetime?
How likely do you think it is for the average person to be diagnosed with some type of cancer in their lifetime?
If you're like most people, your answers to these questions are quite different. Specifically, you've underestimated how likely it is for you to be diagnosed with cancer compared to the probability of someone else obtaining that diagnosis. (Statistically speaking, you are more likely to be average rather than above average so these probabilities should not differ).
In our individualistic culture, this is beneficial to your well-being because it keeps you from becoming too demoralized to go on living when you're less likely than our East Asian counterparts to receive social support in your down-times. In most non-Western cultures, interdependency is the norm and people can and do rely on one another to maintain their well-being as a collective.
However, this bias to expect mostly positive events has been getting me down lately. In the past few weeks, I've dealt with a dead pet cat, a car with crapped out brake lights, the same car breaking down in the middle of an intersection mere days after spending 150 bucks on it at the shop, wiping out epically on my way to the bus stop, briefly losing my purse at the ballroom, a buttload of midterms, overwhelming school assignments, and a neck pain that even the best muscle relaxants can't seem to kill.
I'm having trouble seeing the positive side of these events.
So, I'm doing what we all do when we experience some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance... I'm reframing my attitudes.
I've decided to take a page out of the East Asian book and am learning how to take the good with the bad in life. So yeah, I'm feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. Life keeps throwing curveballs when I'm trying to study for midterms. But these things happen and all I can do is accept them and move on.
So, I'm accepting these things, but I'm also accepting and recognizing the positives. For example, reading week is almost upon us and I'll be headed to Seattle for some epic dancing, I didn't die in that intersection Sunday night even though my car tried its best to make it happen, I won a free coffee with the Timmie's Roll up the Rim event, and I still have access to a Keurig coffee machine.
Things could always be worse. Look on the bright side of life. Etc. etc. But also keep in mind that shit happens and Murphy's law still exists. If you don't, you might just be extra disappointed when things go wrong...because they WILL go wrong.
It all balances out eventually. Stay strong, peeps!
How likely do you think it is that you will be diagnosed with some type of cancer in your lifetime?
How likely do you think it is for the average person to be diagnosed with some type of cancer in their lifetime?
If you're like most people, your answers to these questions are quite different. Specifically, you've underestimated how likely it is for you to be diagnosed with cancer compared to the probability of someone else obtaining that diagnosis. (Statistically speaking, you are more likely to be average rather than above average so these probabilities should not differ).
In our individualistic culture, this is beneficial to your well-being because it keeps you from becoming too demoralized to go on living when you're less likely than our East Asian counterparts to receive social support in your down-times. In most non-Western cultures, interdependency is the norm and people can and do rely on one another to maintain their well-being as a collective.
However, this bias to expect mostly positive events has been getting me down lately. In the past few weeks, I've dealt with a dead pet cat, a car with crapped out brake lights, the same car breaking down in the middle of an intersection mere days after spending 150 bucks on it at the shop, wiping out epically on my way to the bus stop, briefly losing my purse at the ballroom, a buttload of midterms, overwhelming school assignments, and a neck pain that even the best muscle relaxants can't seem to kill.
I'm having trouble seeing the positive side of these events.
So, I'm doing what we all do when we experience some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance... I'm reframing my attitudes.
I've decided to take a page out of the East Asian book and am learning how to take the good with the bad in life. So yeah, I'm feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. Life keeps throwing curveballs when I'm trying to study for midterms. But these things happen and all I can do is accept them and move on.
So, I'm accepting these things, but I'm also accepting and recognizing the positives. For example, reading week is almost upon us and I'll be headed to Seattle for some epic dancing, I didn't die in that intersection Sunday night even though my car tried its best to make it happen, I won a free coffee with the Timmie's Roll up the Rim event, and I still have access to a Keurig coffee machine.
Things could always be worse. Look on the bright side of life. Etc. etc. But also keep in mind that shit happens and Murphy's law still exists. If you don't, you might just be extra disappointed when things go wrong...because they WILL go wrong.
It all balances out eventually. Stay strong, peeps!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)