#but the loss of fifty years of hard work and experience as a bookstore

[basketghost]

Feeling so stressed and tired and discouraged.

People fucking suck.

This is about a lot of things, but also specifically about my job.

And people just not giving a shit. Giving all of the lip service to the store, while actively watching its death throes.

Describing the store, which has been in business for fifty years now as a small, family-owned book store, as a "pillar of the community," "the main hub of town," saying things like "I love this place so much, I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here," while sales are so bad, my bosses are pretty convinced we may close by the end of the year.

Like I'm inclined to say that nobody ACTUALLY gives a shit. Two years ago, just before covid started, things already weren't great, and my bosses (husband and wife) put out a letter to the community to say "hey, this isn't the end, but if things don't get better, we won't be here forever." And for a few months, that helped, though plenty of people misinterpreted it as "WE ARE CLOSING" and only came in to badger us about closing sales. Now, though, things are just worse than ever. We're all just stuck on the inside, watching the slow death of the store we all love so much, while people on the outside essentially give us a thumbs-up and walk right past.

We try so hard to pull the public in, and literally nothing works. We've had authors, we've had sales, we've had a TRAVELING STORYTELLER WHO'S TRAVELING THE US ON FOOT COME AND DO A PERFORMANCE. We had a local guy who wrote some books and all of his profits for the time being are going to Ukraine. He was in a local paper, and we did a whole big event promotion for his signing.

He sold a single book.

Several staple shops on our main street have closed in the last couple of years. This may just be the big one that brings down the rest of main street behind it. I hope all the assholes in this quaint, Victorian canal village like more pizza shops and tattoo parlors, because those just keep filling the empty storefronts of the more diverse, interesting places that close.

The town has lost so much already because the people who actually live here don't shop here. Maybe they deserve this. This is what happens when you don't support your own community.

I just wish there was a way to pick up the whole store and plop it in a different place.

This is an immature way to end this, but I don't give a shit, everything fucking sucks, and nothing's fair, and I'm so tired of everything.

[topmixtrends]

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a lot of hand-wringing around erotica, especially erotica that centers on female submission. Feminists worry that it perpetuates harmful gender dynamics, while conservatives shudder at the frank depictions of female sexuality. Intellectuals usually dismiss it as smut. In the meantime, millions of people — mostly women — gobble it up. The box office success of Fifty Shades Freed, the third installment in the Hollywood trilogy based on E. L. James’s best-selling BDSM romance series, is only the latest example. How is it, wondered pundits, that this particular movie is a hit at the height of the #MeToo movement? Why are women flocking to see a film about a rich, white man dominating a much younger, much less powerful woman?

There’s no obvious reason that a movement against misogyny, sexual assault, and non-consensual advances should be incompatible with fantasies of consensual, sexual submission. For one thing, fantasies of submission are not strictly a female feminine phenomenon. A study conducted by University of Kansas psychologist Patricia Hawley in 2009 found that both men and women preferred to imagine being dominated by, rather than dominating, another person. In fact, men preferred this even more than women. In conflating #MeToo and the light BDSM of Fifty Shades, common sexual fantasy and desire immediately became pathology and neuroticism — how could women want both at once? How do we square sexual fulfillment and freedom from unwanted sexual advances?

Actually, the film’s success should not have been a surprise — and not because Jamie Dornan’s six-pack has its own fan page (it doesn’t actually, but it should). Historically, erotica that focused on female submission emerged at precisely the moment when women were beginning to challenge the status quo. The Story of O, the seminal novel by Anne Desclos (published under the pen name Pauline Réage) and largely considered the literary height of BDSM erotica, was published in France in 1954, on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, five years after Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Emmanuelle, an erotic odyssey of sexual liberation and submission penned by Emmanuelle Arsan, became a best seller in 1967 France, one year before the May 1968 protests, which eventually gave rise to the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF, Women’s Liberation Movement). Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, a short story collection that features, among other tales, fantasies of sexual submission and dominance, was published in 1977 in the United States, at the height of female sexual liberation, the same year that the first National Women’s Conference was held. Meanwhile, Fifty Shades of Grey hit bookstores in 2011, just as so-called fourth-wave feminism was beginning to take off.

That these seminal works — all authored by women — emerged during or immediately preceding a wave of feminism isn’t a coincidence. In fact, the pattern seems to point to the ways in which these feminist movements might work alongside these erotic texts. In examining the bonds of patriarchal oppression, including those internalized by women, and playing out fantasies of male domination, these forms of erotica offer a fuller, more nuanced understanding of female identity and sexuality. This is an important step toward empowerment, as well as a way to mediate the anxiety inherent in dismantling traditional gender roles. If we think about erotica in this way, it’s really no wonder that millions of women want to read about, or watch, a woman consensually subjugated by a man for pleasure. All too often, in the real world, male domination just has to be endured.

In fact, it is likely that male domination, as it rightfully becomes less acceptable in the social and political spheres, should become more appealing as a fetish. As Georges Bataille argued in Erotism: Death and Sensuality, eroticism is an essential way for man and woman to confront their own limitations, including their own mortality. Because humans, unlike animals, came to grasp with their own mortality through reason, it is only when we flout reason — when we lose touch with it entirely — that we can come close “to touching the infinite”; that we can ever achieve transcendence. In climax, many of us don’t know our own names — let alone the truth of our own mortality. Any sexual satisfaction has the possibility of offering such euphoria — but, for Bataille, fetishes, or acts that defy sexual taboos, are particularly potent conduits for transcendance since, by definition, they make even less sense than so-called mainstream predilections. In Bataille’s world, we should all give up meditation and pick up a fetish instead. Indeed he asserts, “Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest […] eroticism is assenting to life even in death.”

As women become more dominant within the spheres of reason — the economic, social, and political spheres — the desire to transgress their own taboos takes on a new urgency. In other words, the acquisition of power might lead to a desire for obliteration. This idea is actually supported by scientific research: a study published in 2009 by the Journal of Sex Research, found that socially dominant women are more likely to enjoy fantasies of submission, perceiving these fantasies as an expression of their own irresistible desirability, rather than as an exercise in force.

This may explain why more than half of the 25 books on Amazon’s best-selling erotica list feature male domination, from the relatively banal (like a forbidden love between student and professor) to the dark (like fantasies of kidnapping). The broader cultural context can also explain certain subgenres that have recently emerged as major trends within contemporary erotica. One of these erotic subgenres is “breeding,” wherein a man sexually dominates a woman with the primary intent of impregnating her and forcing her to bring his children into the world. When it comes to reproductive rights, despite the many troubling restrictions that persist today — with perhaps more on the horizon — women do have more choices than ever before (at least, in the long span of repressive reproductive history), and choice can breed anxiety. Of course, a text that might work through this anxiety does not indicate that women would like to be stripped of these rights — any more than the thrill of a horror movie suggests a latent desire to die. On the contrary, both the slasher film and the breeder fantasy are vehicles through which we can explore our deepest fears and concerns — whether we will have children, whether we can ever really be safe — thereby transgressing and hopefully, overcoming them, if only briefly. Dressed up in clichés, corny writing, and studmuffin-laden covers, these popular books can be considered tools for social empowerment and sexual liberation.

Let’s take the Story of O as an example. In the book, O — whose very name evokes a hole and its implied vacuity, a crude representation of the female sex — begins a quest to understand and prove her consuming devotion to her lover, René, through complete submission to his every whim and, later, to those of Sir Stephen, to whom René has “given” her “so that he may use her in any manner he desires.” Ultimately, O’s impulse for submission leads her down a path of total annihilation that culminates, almost inevitably, in her suicide. The last line of the novel reads: “O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave his consent.”

The impulse to conflate a protagonist’s actions with the moral perspective of the author can be extremely strong, particularly when discussing works by women. It is not entirely surprising then, that even feminist critics have argued that O’s suicide promotes gender inequality and glorifies male dominance. And yet there are a number of other ways to interpret this story, as well as its ending. It is hard to believe that Desclos meant O’s demise to be viewed positively — or even literally. In fact, it seems more likely that the tragic conclusion might serve as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming subservience. If willful submission is ultimately a quest for transcendence and self-effacement — as it is in a divine or religious context — then wouldn’t death naturally be its ultimate, and most liberating, expression? Despite its sexually explicit content, O’s search is, in many ways, a philosophical journey not unlike those undertaken by religious mystics. Indeed, the conditions of O’s “training,” which takes place in a secluded castle, can be considered analogous to that of a monk’s initiation: she is induced to give up her worldly possessions, stripped of her identity, isolated, and submitted to various physical trials designed to test the will’s triumph over the body. Throughout her debasement, O finds “the chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself.”

Science might actually provide further proof for this reading. A 2009 study conducted by psychologist Pamela H. Connolly revealed that BDSM practitioners had lower levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological sadism, psychological masochism, borderline pathology, and paranoia compared to normative samples. What’s more, a later study, published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice in 2016, found that both dominants and submissives entered altered states of consciousness that, while distinct experiences, were both pleasurable. Dominants entered a state of “flow,” associated with focused attention, a loss of self-consciousness and optimal performance of a task. Submissives, on the other hand, entered what is known as transient hypofrontality, a term coined by Dr. Arne Dietrich to describe the buzz that comes with intense physical exertion, or “runner’s high.” Transient hypofrontality reduces pain, and can produce feelings of floating, feelings of peacefulness and feelings of living in the here and now. The Story of O could be read as a kind of precedent to these findings, a form of finding liberation from the mental ties that might otherwise bind us.

The mainstream and literary culture’s dismissal of works like the Story of O and Fifty Shades of Grey is of course, predictable. In 1978, Audre Lorde wrote an essay titled “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” in which she described the paradoxical way that female sexuality is often pathologized: “On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.” According to Lorde, the “suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information” in women’s lives is one of the primary results, and functions, of gender inequality. When we ignore or demean consensual BDSM erotica, or stories about female sexual submission, we inadvertently contribute to a cultural legacy that routinely pathologizes, demeans, or erases women’s sexual desires.

Moreover, in ignoring these works, we effectively silence women authors. In Hélène Cixous’s 1975 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” the act of writing is closely linked to women’s sexual pleasure and personal power — to write as a woman is always an act of transgression. Nin, in the foreword to Delta of Venus, characterizes the process of working on the project as opening a “Pandora’s Box [which] contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language is inadequate.” She recognized that in opening Pandora’s Box, she would release demons as well as angels. Female sexuality, like male sexuality, has nothing to do with morality or politics. Indeed, it is, in its many varied and unfiltered forms, a source of pleasure that often defies such ethical distinctions. Until we are brave enough to investigate it unflinchingly — without turning it into a pathology, without pitting it against feminist movements — women will not be able to achieve sexual liberation. As Lorde writes:

The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

Erotica is not at odds with today’s feminism. If erotica is written by women, if it explores the depths of unmentionable fantasies, if it helps us think through the pleasures, fears, and anxieties inherent in sex and power, it is doing feminist work. Raunchy female-penned books don’t just offer thrills — they are important vehicles through which women can explore an otherwise prohibited eroticism. If we can find a way to appreciate this kind of work, instead of undermining it, we might also find another interesting — and rather fun — route to sexual and social empowerment.

¤

Hayley Phelan writes about culture, style, travel, food, and the internet for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Conde Nast Traveler, Business of Fashion, and The Cut. She also has a column in the New York Times Thursday Styles Section.

The post Why We Need Erotica appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2RHJQLN

[flowermandalas]

How to Rebalance Your Brain in 3 Easy Steps

How to Rebalance Your Brain in 3 Easy Steps

One of the most powerful resilience-building, Balancer-enhancing strategies is to consciously look for growth opportunities in experiences – to seek the silver lining in the cloud.

Looking for the growth opportunity in the struggle makes it possible for us to find it. Difficulties become, as a friend of mine puts it, “just an AFGO – Another F***ing Growth Opportunity.” Thinking of struggles as AFGOs allows us to accept, in a tongue-in-cheek but still meaningful way, that positive change can emerge from negative experiences.

When we go through difficult times asking questions like “What can I learn from this?” and “How can going through this make me a better person?” we gain leverage on our problems, and it becomes much harder for UnBalancer to unseat us. Instead of being knocked off course, we see obstacles as challenges and grow more resilient by overcoming them.

A close cousin of the AFGO is learning to condition our minds to pay equal attention to the positive.

Neuroscientists have determined that our brains contain twice as many cells that respond to threats as they do cells that process positive experiences, and that these threat-detecting cells respond about 10 times as quickly. Consequently, a stimulus we perceive as threatening has a disproportionately strong impact. Powerful experiences form much stronger memories, and the repetition of stronger responses and more vivid memories of perceived threats creates a cycle that reinforces a negative bias.

Our negative bias was once essential for survival. All protohumans could safely eat something that tasted good and could ignore the movements of familiar creatures. But if something tasted rotten, only those who immediately spit it out were likely to escape food poisoning, and only those who responded swiftly to a rustling in the brush avoided being eaten by predators. Our negatively biased early ancestors survived to produce offspring, while those who failed to react quickly enough to possible threats didn’t make it.

Our modern brains respond similarly to those of our ancestors. We, too, immediately sense when something tastes off, but we can eat an entire meal without even realizing we’ve consumed it. And we, too, quickly react to our modern-day predators – other drivers – but can miss our turnpike exit when we are lost in thought or absorbed in music or conversation.

Were it limited only to quick responses to actual threats, this negative bias would still serve us reasonably well as an aid to survival. The problem, however, is that our negative bias also makes it difficult to fully take in the positive aspects of our much safer world, and it can prevent us from fully enjoying it. If a toe hurts, we may not notice that we are otherwise healthy. If we suffer a loss, we can lose track not only of all we still have, but also of what we are continuing to receive. Our hard-wired, “better safe than sorry” bias often contributes to low-level pessimism. Even when things are going well, we may think, “Things are okay now, but wait until the other shoe drops.”

To recalibrate our brains, we need to update our programming to take into account the relative safety of our present surroundings. By training ourselves to pay as much attention to the positives as we do to the negatives, we can rewire the brain to have a more positive, and more satisfying, bias.

The difference between a negative and a more balanced bias came to me most clearly during a brief conversation with one of the monks who led a Buddhist retreat I went to many years ago.

We sat together on a hillside overlooking the dining hall and ate our lunches while I talked with him about feelings of hurt, betrayal, and despair that followed the difficult ending of a long relationship. My UnBalancer was having a field day with the attention I’d been giving these events and the injuries that resulted from them.

“I understand your feelings,” the young monk said, “but this way of looking at love is too limited. You think it comes only from these people, and now it is gone. But love comes from many places.” He held out his sandwich. “The baker who made this bread shows us love. Yes, it is his business, but the bread is very good and there is love in it. And there are the trees and the grass. They give us oxygen – without them we could not live.” He looked up at the sky. “And the sun gives us warmth.”

As he continued to point out human and non-human sources of love, I felt a shift inside. Until that moment, the idea that “the universe loves us” had seemed so abstract it was meaningless. But now, listening to this young man as he took in the love of the cosmos, I vicariously experienced his gratitude, and I carry these feelings with me to this day.

Because it goes against the grain of our innate wiring, watering the seeds of a more balanced bias takes work – but it’s worth the effort. Simple everyday practices can help. We can start to focus only on eating our food instead of looking at social media or the newspaper while we dine. We can turn off the radio on a long trip and experience the world we’re passing through. We can pause long enough, when we receive a compliment, to let the positive feedback settle into our being. Small changes such as these help us to move beyond the programming that our ancestors evolved in their more hazardous world so we can thrive in the one we live in now.

What to do:

Smell the roses. Eat the raisin. Literally. Negative stimuli hit us 10 times as fast and twice as hard as positive ones. To even things out, take the time to fully absorb the things that taste or smell good, feel nice, sound pleasing. Literally take in the smells of flowers, fragrances, foods. Pay attention to the sound of a friend’s laugh. Feel the textures of the objects you touch throughout the day – a partner’s skin, the glassy screen of your smartphone, your own hair. An exercise: Eat a single raisin as slowly as you can. Feel its texture, notice its color, smell its scent, and chew it slowly until it liquefies, savoring the flavor and the mouth feel. Then try this again, but with something in your refrigerator.

Look for the growth opportunities in everything. See difficulties as teachers. Whether we like it or not, all difficult experiences can become AFGOs. Develop the habit of evaluating the growth opportunities in everything that comes your way. The path from victim to victor is through seeking out and embracing opportunities for growth. Crazy traffic on the commute to work? A learning opportunity for patience. An illness that could be serious? An opportunity to learn to deal with uncertainty. An annoying co-worker who can’t stop talking? Another opportunity for learning patience – or for honing your assertiveness skills. And so on, with experiences from the most trivial to the most challenging.

Create gratitude lists. Frequently. Grateful people are generally more satisfied with their lives and relationships, cope better with difficulties, and are more generous, empathetic, and self-accepting. A simple but effective tool for promoting a grateful perspective is the gratitude list. It’s a way to reinforce the reality that whatever we may lack, we also have many things for which to be grateful. We may not have all the wealth we want, the health we want, the relationships we want, the things we want, but when we list what we do have, we have a lot. When you make a gratitude list, be open to including anything at all that you feel grateful for. A 50-item gratitude list I created for a chapter in my book Paths to Wholeness starts with “Being alive” and ends with “Popsicles!”

COMING NEXT: How to Boost Connections and Support

P.S. Paths to Wholeness is now available at the following Boston-area bookstores and libraries:

Cabot Street Books & Cards, 272 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA 01915 The Bookshop, 40 West Street, Beverly Farms, MA 01915 Boston Public Library (main branch) Brookline Public Library (main branch) NOBLE Public Libraries (Beverly Farms and Salem) MVLC Public Libraries (Hamilton-Wenham)

Please let me know if you find it in other libraries!

Related Posts: The Under Toad and the UnBalancer The Balancer/ReBalancer Tag Team A Mini-Lesson on Mini Self-Care Gyroscopes and Personal Flywheels Hanging in the Balance Balancing the Books The Experiment How to Design an Experiment Build Your Resilience in 6 Steps How to Rebalance Your Brain in 3 Easy Steps

Books: From Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas “At times I still hover at the threshold of positive change, uncertain which way to go. Yet I also continue to deeply sense parts of myself that have been waiting for a lifetime to be listened to and acted on. When these parts awaken from their slumber, the effect is as breathtaking as the sun rising on a new day.” – “Change” Print: Amazon  –  BookBaby  –  B&N  – Books-a-Million eBook: Kindle  – Nook  – iTunes  – Kobo

Also available: 52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief 52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)

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from How to Rebalance Your Brain in 3 Easy Steps