You're Probably Bad At Selfies, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: Men are not good at selfies, you shouldn't cheat on your katana-owning girlfriend and psychopaths can actually see the world from your perspective.
Men Are Bad At Selfies, And That's OK
Chances are if you are reading this on our website, you are a man. Chances are you probably own a smartphone. Chances are, you've probably used it to take a picture of yourself. Chances are, it's probably not very good.
But this isn't an accusation of your personal ability to take a selfie! This isn't, largely, your fault argues merrit k for Mel. If you are a cis-gendered, heterosexual man, then you've had the extreme fortune of not having to develop the ability to objectify yourself. You've looked yourself in the mirror and seen yourself, and not the image of a person that other people will be looking at, judging. Maybe this inability to think of yourself as an object of sexual desire has manifest in an anger or dislike of those who, through a culture that demands they look a certain way, have had to internalize this type of thinking.
"Taking pictures of yourself is stupid," you exclaim and stamp you feet. And then you attempt to take a selfie and its… not good? You look like you're staring into your phone and not through the soul of some imagined observer. What gives?
Luckily, merrit k has plenty of advice for taking a flattering photo of yourself. It's #dudetime.
[Mel]
Maybe If We Ban Guns, The Worst That Could Happen Is A Katana-Wielding Girlfriend Attacking Her Boyfriend
Let's get a few things out of the way. I am not advocating for more instances of domestic violence. The circumstances of Emily Javier assaulting her boyfriend Alex Lovell with a katana after she found Tinder on his phone are a bit ridiculous — how Javier sought a "samurai sword" as her weapon of choice in ending an unfaithful boyfriend, how Lovell seems incredibly proud of himself for stopping the attack with his "bare hands." But it's still a story about someone feeling hurt and helpless, and a potential recycling of the "female sociopath" stereotype that gets pedaled almost every time this sort of lovers quarrel pops up in the news.
That said, it does potentially depict one reality in which guns do not play into cases of domestic violence. Unlike reality where, in 2011, two-thirds of women killed by guns were murdered by their partners, or access to firearms enabled disgruntled men like Elliot Rodger, who was convinced he was "owed" sex, to kill four people and wound 15 more.
It's maybe hard to imagine a future in which people don't get upset, or, regrettably, wish to do harm to one another. But it does seem possible to live in a world where people no longer have easy access to firearms. Where news accounts of domestic disputes — while still probably sexist and a little sad! — don't stray far beyond person trying to whack someone with some sort of household item. We know this because it's already a reality in most of the world.
Psychopaths Can Empathize, They Just Choose Not To
Ah, psychopathy. The complex mental disorder everyone loves to reduce to the inability to empathize with others. But, as it usually is, it's a little more complicated than that, Ed Yong reports this week for the Atlantic.
Yong spoke with Yale psychologist Arielle Baskin-Sommers, author of a recent study that examined inmates at a maximum-security prison in Connecticut, who argues that psychopaths do indeed have the ability to understand how people feel. The wrinkle, Baskin-Sommers found in her survey of 106 male inmates, is that they don't automatically empathize with people.
As the famous line from Disney-Pixar's "Inside Out" goes, normal people look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head. Psychopaths, Baskin-Sommers finds, have to think about doing that. They can recognize when they need to be empathetic, and uh, display empathy. It's maybe a bit of a crude metaphor, but it's the difference between someone eating something and someone putting something in their mouth, then using their teeth to masticate the food to a point where they can swallow it down their esophagus and into their stomach.
Just keep that in mind when you read Yong's piece and believe yourself to be a psychopath.
