A long time believer in the self-interested nature of mankind, I appreciate a person, company or organization which is able to align motivations in productive ways. Want to raise money for your team? Give people something for it. Throw a fund raising party so they can meet new people. Put the donating company's logo on your website so that they can increase visibility. Party A needs to assign its goals with Party B.
By this logic, self-improvement goals should be easy because there is no other party to cooperate with. There's only your goal to lose weight, your goal to exercise more, your goal to spend more time with your children, etc. The benefits to you in all cases are clear. So why do so many people struggle with keeping such commitments?
In many ways, your short-term self (ST) and your long-term self (LT) are different parties. LT would love to look better in a swimsuit for summer by shedding 20 pounds, but ST would really like that slice of cheesecake. The long duration of the goal, the more LT and ST clash.
StickK helps to align ST and LT's goals by imposing simple penalties when ST starts to stray. Here's how it works (for, say, weight loss)
You enter in your current weight, height and target weight
You give a time frame in weeks, with a maximum weight loss of two pounds per week.
You offer a monetary penalty of, say, $100 per week and either a charity or anti-charity recipient.
You choose to either have the goal "on your honor" or to have friends referee you.
Each week, you (or your referees) log in to track your progress. If you're on track, great! Otherwise, well, there goes your $100.
Economists reason that there is a cost to everything. StickK is provide a very real short-term cost.
Just one gripe: selecting an anti-charity as a recipient feels a little strange - even unethical - to me. Sure, donating to a group that I strongly oppose, such as a Pro-Life organization, might offer additional motivation, but helping a Pro-Life organization is directly hurting a Pro-Choice organization. It doesn't feel right to me to have my failures unnecessarily impact the pro-choice movement or another group that I support.
Thanks for making it out on a rainy Saturday, kids. Slippery out there, huh? Let's get started. We're gonna have some fun today!
Car accidents are a leading cause of death for teenagers. The school board and your elected representatives want to make sure that you and your families are spared from such a tragedy, which is why the money for driver's ed was eliminated from the budget. Whereas last year I was teaching your older siblings how to shift and brake and three-point-turn during a six-week course, it has since been decreed that I actually need just one afternoon to tell you the only piece of safety information I'm permitted by law to share:
The ONLY 100 percent effective method for avoiding car accidents is to ABSTAIN from driving until marriage.
"Dedicated to keeping Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office and in the kitchen"
It's funny how overt sexism is so much more accepted than over racism. This got me thinking about some stuff...
Racism vs. Sexism
Much as I enjoy my little urban bubble where I don't hear extreme racist or sexist remarks on a daily basis, a quick perusal of Facebook shows me that that's woefully not the case. Any large group quickly turns into a discussion of why {insert race, gender, sexual orientation} sucks. Oops - did I say discussion? I meant punctuation-less rant, LOLs and all. Racism and sexism permeate our society in advertisements, jokes, and in each and every person's minds.
Though they both permeate our society, racism and sexism are different beasts. They have different histories, different present day struggles, and different futures.
History
Historically, black people have won certain rights before women - namely, the right to vote. Black people won the right to vote in 1870, while women didn't receive this for another fifty years. Additionally, if my college legal professor is to be believed, the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1977 only narrowly added in the gender clause. The ADA was really targeting at eliminating racial discrimination - protection for genders was afterthought.
While black people obtained certain rights before women, the struggles were very different. Black people were slaves - (white) women in this time period may have very limited freedom, but there was still pressure to "respect" women. The civil rights movement was marked with more violence than the women's rights movement.
Present Day
Currently, at least in my urban bubble, sexism is more condoned than racism. Take, for example, that facebook group (which I sadly discovered one of my own family members joining) and let's flip it around to race. Which would be more offensive:
Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich
or:
Barack Obama: Stop Running for President and Go Pick Me Some Cotton
I'd argue the second one would be more likely to elicit a jaw-dropping response, whereas the first one might get a little chuckle. Racism is a big no-no, but sexism is kind of ok. [Disclaimer: I've never lived in the rural south. Things might be very different in other parts of the country.]
What's interesting is that while black people and women both face some sort of "stupid" stereotype, the tone of it is a little different. According to the stereotype, black people are uneducated whereas women are educated and yet un-opinionated (they don't really "think" about things).
Future Races blend, but genders do not (generally speaking). What steretypes would a person who is 1/4 Black and 1/2 Chinese and 1/4 Caucian experience? People are not, generally speaking, part-male and part-female. Gender has a strict binary divide: you're either male or female. There is no such divide for race.
Socially, we might eventually treat different races equivalently but we will never treat genders equivalently. The fact is that the vast majority of the world is attracted to either men or women, but not both. You might regard a black, hispanic, asian, etc person as "just anyone", but men will identified as men and women will be identified as women. Gender will always be a thought that is front and center in your mind.
The flip side of the social point is that even if you're a man who thinks women are stupid / crazy / some other offensive stereotype, you still probably want them around (unless you're gay, that is - I wouldn't want to be heteronormative ;-)). The extremes of sexism probably won't result in a thought of "I hate this group so much that I don't even want them around." The extremes of racism do. Sexism leads to superiority, violence, etc. Racism leads to all that, and to elimination / exclusion.
Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama: Who's More Impacted by Prejudice?
Suppose Clinton and Obama try to leave the race / gender issues behind by acting more like the typical politician (eg, white male) - how does that impact how people view them? That is, what happens when a person violates the stereotypes of their race or gender?
Obama would be a black person acting "white". Some people might resent him for betraying "his people," but the general public probably wouldn't hold it against him too much.
Clinton, however, would be a woman acting like a man. Women who act like men are seen as cold bitches. Every candidate has opposition, but people hate Clinton on an emotional level that you don't see with other politicians. Ask someone why they hate George W. Bush, and you'll probably hear something about the war, economy, etc. With Clinton, you'll often get an articulate arguments such as, "I just hate her - she's a nasty person."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If she acts feminine, she's too weak to be president. If she acts masculine, then she's a bitch.
Does that mean that Clinton faces more severe sexism than Obama does racism? No. The problems are just different. Sexism is more condoned in society, but racism can be more severe.
Then again, this is all coming from a white girl who lives in a city in the northwest. One should never forget how their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc affects their experience with prejudice.
More than one friend has read my blog and asked, "when did you become such a feminist?" The assumption is, of course, that all feminists must be bra-burning and man-hating lesbians. Having never observed me actually burn a bra, universally hate men, or, well, "swing the other way" (much to some people's disappointment), you can see their confusion.
Out of the 100 or so RSS feeds I read, Feministing and Feministe are two of the more interesting ones. Feminists are not man-hating - they're pro-equality. They're not anti-sex - they're believe in each person making their own choice. They are women and men. If I had to generalize about the actual beliefs of feminism, I'd say that they don't believe in generalization. They believe in the individual.
In Indiana, the state senate passed a measure that would allow pharmacists to refuse to do their jobs. If a woman wants contraception (including emergency contraception), pharmacists would be within their rights to refuse to fill her prescription. The bill’s sponsor initially said that it wouldn’t apply to contraception, only emergency contraception — a statement he later had to backtrack on, probably when someone informed him that emergency contraception is the exact same thing as standard birth control pills, just in a higher dose. Plus, you know, it’s contraception. And yet, “he claimed this week that it would not apply to birth control pills.”.
So there it is: ugly and worthless, or live bait/freak magnet. Those are the choices patriarchy offers to our girls. Picking on young girls for being awkward is cruel; so is sexualizing them. Men should just leave them alone until they’re grown up. But apparently that’s too much to ask.
The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion — some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.
The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other “rules” that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.
I have been an abortion provider since 1972. Why do I do abortions, and why do I continue to do abortions, despite two murder attempts?
The first time I started to think about abortion was in 1960, when I was in secondyear medical school. I was assigned the case of a young woman who had died of a septic abortion. She had aborted herself using slippery elm bark.
And Republicans have… outlawing abortion and telling people to keep their legs closed until they’re married. The very things that never work. And they oppose the measures that have been proven to decrease the abortion rate. Because they’re pro-life like that.
They’re going after Dr. Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider, for approximately the 340,986th time. Dr. Tiller is a favorite of theirs because he’s one of the last abortion providers in Kansas, and he provides late-term abortions. One of their followers shot him in both arms a few years ago, his clinic has been vandalized on numerous occasions, his workers are regularly harassed, and he’s Target #1 for a “pro-life” movement that murders doctors. Tiller’s home address, family members’ information, and pictures are all posted on “pro-life” websites. For protection, he lives in a gated community, has a high-level security system surrounding his home, and wears a bullet-proof vest to work every day.
Jamie Leigh Jones was raped by her American co-workers in Baghdad. She was then imprisoned in an effort to cover up her assault.
They believe that sexism is rampant in this presidential election.
Using overtly sexist language, he has referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) as a "she devil" and compared her to a "strip-teaser." He has called her "witchy" and likened her voice to "fingernails on a blackboard." He has referred to men who support her as "castratos in the eunuch chorus." He has suggested Clinton is not "a convincing mom" and said "modern women" like Clinton are unacceptable to "Midwest guys." He has called her "Madame Defarge" and "Nurse Ratched."
The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.
The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.
A state lawmaker used a derogatory term Wednesday to describe unmarried teen parents as sexually promiscuous and complained that society condones premarital sex.
"In my parents' day and age, (unmarried teen parents) were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are," Republican Rep. Larry Liston said during a GOP legislative caucus meeting in Denver. "There was at least a sense of shame."
Liston continued: "There's no sense of shame today. Society condones it ... I think it's wrong. They're sluts. And I don't mean just the women. I mean the men, too."
I think that having a woman president would be a bad idea for our country. Women are not meant to rule countries and be in charge. They are meant to make decisions but not confirm them.
Our president deals with some countries that don't respect or allow women in leadership positions. I wonder if the United States would have more terrorist attacks because we would be seen as weak with a woman leader. I agree that women can do many things, but leave the ruling of the countries to the men.
Rape can be confusing, it doesn't make it "gray." Feminists have long fought to dispel the myth that initially consenting to one form of intimacy does not make it okay for someone to force another kind on you. In this case, the young woman was hooking up with her eventual-attacker when he forced her to perform oral sex on him.
Feminists believe in equality for men, women and transgendered individuals. They are pro-choice. They believe that teens should receive comprehensive sex education. They do not believe in shaming women on the grounds of their sexual decisions. They believe that sexual violence is a very real problem in the US and beyond. They believe that sexism - and many forms of prejudice - permeate the world.
So am I a feminist? Well, aren't you?
DISCLAIMER: No group can speak for the views of all its members. Opinions vary. Not all feminists are pro-choice, etc.
I've gone a little bit form happy today. Google Docs just announced today the introduction of forms in Google Spreadsheets. Oh, happy day... :-)
Prior to this, I had a simple little form app that I wrote. It wasn't great, but it kind-of-sort-of did the trick. There were two versions that I used for Seattle Anti-Freeze: 1) Public Access - anyone can add or remove rows. All updates get emailed to me. 2) View-Only Access - only admins can add or remove rows. Anyone can view the data.
For the "add yourself to the invite list" form, I used #1. This was mostly ok - I just had to be diligent about monitoring the list. I got a lot of comments about why there isn't more security on my forms, but it really wasn't a problem. Sure, I could lock stuff down with a password - but why? There's a balance between security and the user interface - more security is not always a good thing (although it would have been nice if a certain someone stopped adding Barney Stinson to my lists...).
For the guest list, I used #2. It let anyone view it but not edit it. Technically Google Spreadsheets could do this before, it was just a little more work to add rows (since you have to be logged in to gmail). Easy adding and removing, but there was no ability to edit the contents of a row. One day I fully meant to get around to implementing this, but now... meh.
Hellooooo forms. Beautiful. Perfect. I've got a little bit form happy today by replacing my old forms with new Google Spreadsheets form. I've got a new invite list form, an idea submission form, and a form to track the guest list for parties. Excellent.
And, you can monitor any changes to the docs via iGoogle. Wheeeee! This makes me a happy person.
Gayle Laakmann is a Wharton MBA student and owns two businesses, CareerCup and Seattle Anti-Freeze. She has previously worked for Microsoft, Apple, Google and, most recently, EmptySpaceAds.
A long time believer in the self-interested nature of mankind, I appreciate a person, company or organization which is able to align motivations in productive ways. Want to raise money for your team? Give people something for it. Throw a fund raising party so they can meet new people. Put the donating company's logo on your website so that they can increase visibility. Party A needs to assign its goals with Party B.
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