“Blondes have more fun”

WOMEN who dye their hair blonde get more sex.

They are also more confident than those who keep their natural colour, experts revealed yesterday.

And they are more likely to sing and dance in front of strangers or ask someone out for a date. University researchers studied the effect hair colouring had on a woman’s mood and well-being.

Dr Mark Sergeant, who led the team of experts linked to Nottingham Trent University, said: “Colouring your hair may seem like an art to most people, but there is actually a lot of science behind it. The changes we noted in the study in participants behaviour and psychology were significant.

“Not only were their confidence and mood levels elevated but their inhibitions seemed to be mitigated with many reporting feeling more attractive and sexually exciting.”

[…]

Over 50% said they coloured their hair to “get attention” from strangers or “be noticed” by friends and colleagues.

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/52099/Blondes-have-more-fun-if-they-re-dyed/

This is clearly an identity thing.

We’ve got this whole stereotypical image of the empowered, sexual bimbo that saturates media and conversation to the extent that we assume it about other blondes when we see them.

Naturally, some women want in on this; the power and the attention that comes with that image is alluring. So, like a chameleon, they dye their hair blonde and assume the role of the stereotype.  In playing the part, their behaviour is reinforced by the men and women who see them and judge that a stereotype can be applied and is an accurate description of blondes, and so they are treated as sexual bimbos. And with the woman who assumed the role playing the part, why shouldn’t they be?

It’s interesting. This stereotypical role could have had no place in reality, but with women actively assuming the role and others reinforcing it by treating them as the stereotype demands, it becomes as real as any other personality.

—

Personally, I’m not one for slutty bimbos. I like to be able to hold a conversation without the word “like” popping up as an interjection every 0.8 seconds.

So, for those who’ll take it, I have some advice.

Women: If you’ve assumed this role, you may want to ask yourself why. Why do you need the extra attention and the extra power? What do you gain by assuming the role of a stereotype, and more importantly, what do you lose? How else could it be achieved?

Men: If you’re after a brainless sex object to put your dick in, you may want to pass up the blonde and consider a Fleshlight™ instead. I know they may seem identical at first, but you’ll find that the Fleshlight actually has many clear advantages. You won’t have to buy it dinner, get it drunk, or talk about her stupid, boring drama over her equally stupid friends. I’ve heard they feel just like a real vagina, and this way, you know only one dick’s been inside it! No STDs, no condoms, and you’ll never need to pay child support! For only $100.95, how could you refuse?

Blake, Goethe, and Black Metal

This is an article I wrote on the connection between the late 18th century literary movement Romanticism (exemplified by two authors William Blake and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and black metal to demonstrate that black metal is a modern romantic artform. It was submitted to the metal blog at American Nihilist Underground Society (ANUS.com) as part of their philosophical viewpoint on heavy metal.

For Goethe as well as for Blake, fruitful competition between opposing forces is the law of life in both mind and world. The contraries are mutual opposition, but their creative tension is the life-giving power that paradoxically unites them. As Goethe says in one of the “Talismans” from the “Singer’s Book” of the West-East Divan:

“Im Atemholen sind zerierlei Gnaden:
Die Luft einziehn, sich ihrer entladen.
Jenes bedrängt, dieses erfrischt;
So wunderbar ist das Leben gemischt.
Du danke Gott, wenn er dich preßt,
Und dank’ ihm, wenn er dich wieder entläßt.”
(“Talismane” II. 17-22)

[In the act of breathing there are two gifts of grace: taking in the air and being relieved of it. The former oppresses, the latter refreshes; life is so wonderfully mixed. Thank God when he burdens you, and thank him when he sets you free again.]

Or, as Blake puts it: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Pl. 3). Contraries are crucial to human existence, and evidently to cosmic existence as well: the concepts of attraction and repulsion had been given prominence in the intellectual world of Blake’s day through the influence of Cartesian and Newtonian science. “Without Contraries is no progression,” no life in mind or world, is what Blake means when he says, “Opposition is true Friendship” (MHH Pl. 20).

We find in both Blake’s and Goethe’s visions of creativity in mind and cosmos a kind of breathing motion, what Erich Trunz calls “Emanatio and Regressus,” emanation and return. In a passage from Conversations with Eckermann (11 April 1827) Goethe develops this image into a powerful reverie:

I like to think of the earth with its circle of vapors metaphorically as a great living being, which is engaged in an eternal inhaling and exhaling. When the earth inhales, it draws to it the circle of vapors that approaches its surface and thickens into clouds and rain. I call this condition the water-affirmation [die Wasserbejahung]; if it lasted inordinately long, it would drown the earth. But the earth does not permit that; it exhales again and sends back up the water vapors which spread into all the spaces of the high atmosphere and thin out to such an extent that not only does the brilliance of the sun cross through them, but the eternal night of endless space is seen through them as a fresh blueness. This condition of the atmosphere I call the water-negation [die Wasserverneinung].”

What Goethe calls the earth’s affirmation and negation of water is an instance of what Blake would call “Attraction and Repulsion.” In the nonhuman universe, Goethe sees no need to distinguish between destructive negations and creative contraries… All contrasts in nature are part of her breathing; one feels that life and death themselves are, by implication, another manifestation of an eternal cosmic inhaling and exhaling.

–Martin Bidney, “Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination”

When distilled philosophically, moral absolutes are simplistic visions of the world in that they fail to grasp the natural mechanism of the whole that relies on the interactions between opposing forces. Good and Evil, Life and Death, War and Peace — these are dualisms in which we’ve taken the superficially pleasing force and converted it into an absolute without realising that the opposite is required for the maintenance of a higher force. Although life is pleasant and we would hate to see those that we love die, death is necessary to allow new life. The dualism of Life/Death is transcended for a higher purpose: growth.

Black metal hails the realisations of such thinkers as Blake and Goethe by bringing into focus the denied aspects of these dualisms and praising their functions. Black metal was responding to an age where this rhetorical absolutism as derived from Judeo-Christianity saturates all sociopolitical discussion, aiming to bring a sense of holism echoing the thoughts of the Romantics and of an even older pre-Christian Europe where what was natural was more important than what was pleasant (good) or unpleasant (evil).

Darkthrone emphasised the dark, cold, and evil forces that create impulsive, Dionysian passion within us. Immortal constructed a fantastical world of Winter storms and epic battlefields. Emperor created works which brought struggle and chaos into a sense of a majestic order. Most of Burzum’s work used fantasy to force us to dream of realms where the presence of exciting aspects that have been utterly denied in life leave us feeling that this concrete, absolutist world is boring and mundane — perhaps even dead — and forces us to question whether we live in an age of progress or whether the holistic ancients really lived in a greater, natural, more Human age:

“Between the bushes we stared
At those who reminded us of another age
And told that hope was away
Forever
We heard elvensong and
Water that trickled
What once was is now
Away
All the blood
All the longing and pain that ruled
Are away
Forever
We are not dead
We have never lived”
–Burzum “Det Som En Gang Var”

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Last night, I downloaded a lecture given by Dr. Albert Bartlett four years ago called “Arithmetic, Population and Energy”. It’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve listened to it twice today. In the lecture, he applies simple arithmetic to growth rates and displays how unrealistic the growth-obsessed really are in an incredibly profound, interesting, and mathematic manner. Anyone who claims that we can just go on breeding and consuming like mad without consequence has far too much faith in technology, and does not understand the basic mathematics of growth in a system of finite space and resources.

Here’s an excerpt:

In the words of Winston Churchill, “Sometimes we have to do what is required.”

First of all, as a nation we’ve got to get serious about renewable energy. As a a start, we ought to have a big increase in the funding for research in the development and dispersion of renewable energy. We have to educate all of our people to an understanding of the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth’s finite resources. We must educate people to recognise the fact that growth of populations and growth of rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

What’s the first law of sustainability? You’ve heard thousands of people talking endlessly about sustainability; did they ever tell you the first law? Here it is: population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. That’s simple arithmetic. Yet nobody that I’m encountering will tell you about that when they’re talking about sustainability.

So I think it’s intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment, which is sustainability, without stressing the obvious fact that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for saving the environment and for sustainability.

For more:

• Lecture page @ globalpublicmedia.com
• Download the lecture (mp3, 26 MB)
• Read the transcript

Multicellular Organisms Function Better Than Modern Society

At the molecular level, it has been widely assumed that, in single-celled organisms, each cell perceives its environment — and responds to stress conditions — individually, each on its own to protect itself. Likewise, it had been thought that cells in multicellular organisms respond the same way, but a new study by scientists at Northwestern University reports otherwise.

The Northwestern researchers demonstrated something very unexpected in their studies of the worm C. elegans: Authority is taken away from individual cells and given to two specialized neurons to sense temperature stress and organize an integrated molecular response for the entire organism.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080508143317.htm

Even simple, multicellular organisms have saner systems than we humans do. How is it that mindless, individual cells in an organism can structure themselves into functional hierarchies to flourish and grow, while we, the “intelligent” humans, have to whinge about equality and freedom and watch it all collapse because it sounds nicer?

Increasingly, I’m finding that the “natural world” possesses structural models that have worked well for millenia. Rather than interrupt it with our baseless ideals, why not try to follow its example?