Real Joe

Is this programming or hardwiredness? How about the flirting with dummies?

The Affirmation Bullshit Generator is getting a workout this week. It hit #48 of Blogdex’s top 1245 blog entries earlier this week. A search of the phrase on Google turns up a much longer list now.

A tip of the Real Joe cap to Doc for starting it all.

Want to play with some other generators?

To deny there is a God is to stand on a building and deny there is a building. – Russell Brock

It was just like God just picked up a semi-truck right off me and I actually started living. – Stephen Watt

Brock is a board member at a suburban Atlanta school district where they’re battling over whether to require “… teachers to give a ‘balanced education’ about the origin of life, giving equal weight to evolution and biblical interpretations,” reported in this NY Times article.

Watt, a deputy sheriff, is seeking the Republican nomination for governor in Wyoming and vows to pardon the man who riddled him with bullets 20 years ago during a bank robbery, reported in this AP story.

These guys believe God is a Being, up there somewhere flipping big switches (“I think I’ll create part of the universe today”) and small (“I’m going to remove the bitterness from this guy’s heart”.) Goofy either way, but when good shit happens that we don’t understand, that’s what we tend to do.

Speedwell posted a comment on the Mitchard column reaction I wrote and the follow-up QOTD.

It’s a great testimonial, Speedwell, so I’m posting your entire comment here. Your fiance is a lucky guy. And I hope the women who read this blog benefit from your honesty and struggle.

The hardest thing in my life has been to understand, really, GET (if you know what I mean) that my fiance, an artist in his mid-twenties, really DOES think my mid-thirties body, seriously overweight, is an object of beauty NOW. Even if I never lose the weight. Even WHEN I lose the weight, he will still feel the same.

We’re talking about a man who makes his living out of knowing what beauty IS. It drives me crazy.

Guys, I’m telling you straight. The one thing I know for sure, as well as I know two plus two equals four, is that I am an unattractive woman (in my own defense, I would be gorgeous, if small-busted, if I weighed about 130 or so, not a bit smaller). When he calls me “beautiful,” or “sexy,” I feel exactly like he’s trying to convince me that two plus two equals five.

But I’m glad he says it and I hope he never stops, and so I promise to stomp that bad feeling down so hard it never shows on my face. Because if he keeps saying it, one day I’ll get it.

No Cosmo here… just honesty, if ya want any… speedwell

Dust commented on yesterday’s Quote of the Day about women and beauty:

I can buy that possibly men’s brains are hardwired to select for attractiveness, but I can’t buy that attractiveness itself is hardwired. What is attractive hasn’t been consistent either over time or geography. So…maybe not hardwired, but programmed?

Maybe, Dust. But take a look at these recent research reports. They use hardwired and reward circuitry to explain what’s going on. See How pretty faces light up the brain and Study finds beauty can be its own reward: Viewing attractive female faces activates the brain’s reward circuits in males.

Note the importance of eye contact in the BBC story. I experience this all the time. If I see an attractive woman stranger, I get a little brain twinge. If she makes eye contact with me and then smiles, the twinge travels to other parts of my body. My wife has the power to do this to me many times a day… and often does, thankfully.

Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are beautiful. – Somebody

A colleague sent me this quote this morning and I read it before I read Jacquelyn Mitchard’s column… the second coincidence of the day related to women’s looks.

I think the quote misses an important point. Our brains are hardwired to notice beauty in women. Societal changes ain’t going to change that. But what happens in a relationship, in a marriage, need not be 100% dictated by our hardwiring nor by societal standards. Tough to overcome it, though, if you feed your brain a steady diet of Maxim and your honey does the same with Cosmo.

I’m in the middle of rewriting my “Why women don’t want sex with us” essay for my writing coach and just this morning I was working on a scene that involves one of my wife’s dresses.

I came home from the coffeeshop to read the newspaper and this “A lesson found in a red dress” column by Jacquelyn Mitchard jumped out at me. She gave a sexy dress she never wore to her sister-in-law with the great bod.

What hurt was the look that my husband and my brother gave her as she twirled. It was familiar. I had seen it. But not for a while. Tears started behind my eyes as I hurried off to fold towels.

As a woman, I never did know how obliged I was for those approving glances, until they stopped. I grieve for them, as I grieve for that red dress.

This is a damn gutsy column for Mitchard to write, with some clever lines like “And my rear end, always the shape of a barn door, now is the shape of an insulated barn door.”

But she’s missing something, as my wife has tended to miss. The old saying “It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have” puts it in a nutshell. Yeah, we men easily shoot “those approving glances” any good-looking, nicely proportioned women in slinky, twirlable or tight-fitting dresses. We’re wired that way.

But the woman we’re in love with — assuming she feels loved (granted, far too often not the case) — has the power get those glances from us no matter her age or shape. If her attitude is “I desire you and I love to make you to desire me” and she takes steps to act sexy and flirt in ways that we like, she’ll get those glances.

When wrinkles and extra weight and whatever else women are self-conscious about tend to dominate their landscape, a sexy, flirtatious attitude still trumps. Ears, ankles, lips, finger and toenails of any age or size are easily decorated with sexy touches. Flat chests or barndoor rear ends can still be adorned.

I tell my wife that a tight-fitting dress is a turn-on for me, so if she needs to buy a bigger dress so she doesn’t feel like a sausage, so be it. It’s her desire to please me that’s the turn-on. I don’t give a shit that she doesn’t look like she did on our wedding day. She’s not about to dress up like a tart in public — societal standards are a bit intimidating, she says — but that’s fine with me. It’s how she tries to make herself look for me when we’re alone that matters.

Mitchard’s husband should try to figure out what he can do so that she considers changing her mind. She’s learning the wrong lesson.

Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought. – Francois Gautier

Cool. A way to describe keeping a journal or a self-reflective weblog that might be more appealing to men: venturing out on the open sea of thought.

I stole that title from Garrison Keillor’s monologue on The Prairie Home Companion rebroadcast last Saturday. It’s the perfect description for this soon-to-be $100 million megachurch.

“The [nondenominational] congregation hopes to entice people who want some kind of spiritual home but who don’t identify with a particular denomination and who might avoid a building that looked like a traditional church.”

That makes some sense. But these churches are really just big entertainment complexes. What the hell — oops — what in God’s name happened to their mission to be spiritual sanctuaries? I’m sure they make the argument that they need to get the folks in the door first, and THEN they’ll try to sneak in stuff that meets their true spiritual needs. But that’s bullshit. If you advertise that you’re a Six Flags-type operation, that’s what people are going to expect/pay for and that’s where you’ll focus your resources.

Doc Searls blogged the Real Joe Affirmation Bullshit Generator today and as usual with the Doc Empire, it set off a little chain reaction.

Robert K. Brown blogged it in his Work in Progress weblog and noticed that I’m a Northfielder, home of Carleton College, his Alma Mater.

Likewise, Joe Jennet at Jennet Radio, Brian St. Pierre at Not Quite Random, Bryan Gahagan at Just Cheap Dirt, Bill Simoni at Binary Zilla by Accident, and Gregory Blake.