#like at some point you must understand your inability to interact with media outside of a narrow romantic scope is an actual problem

[redysetdare]

All this aroace character shipcourse has proven to me that a majority of people that interact in fandom cannot actually interact with characters and media outside of shipping and genuinely I believe you need to learn how to interact with media outside of shipping.

[absurdfuture]

'How can I complain?'

An essay about mental health by musician James Blake, from It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (And other lies).

James Blake 09 OCTOBER 2019

It’s especially easy to poke fun at the idea that a white man could be depressed. I have done it myself, as a straight white man who was depressed. In fact, I still carry the shame of having been a straight white man who’s depressed and has experienced suicidal thoughts. And still, when discussing it with most people, I will play down or skirt around how desperately sad I have been; instead I emphasize how much happier I am now. I emphasize the work I had to do to get to a better place, and how it was hard work and fruitful work, and how I empowered myself by doing it. I usually focus on how I regained control and an enthusiasm for living (‘Nice one, mate!’), not on how I lost it. That is the last of my defensiveness.

I remember doing an interview with the New York Times where the interviewer asked me why my childhood was painful, and how I got to such a dark place in my late twenties. I told him, ‘You know, other kids, bullying, etc.’ – and instantly regretted my brevity. He said something like, ‘Right, so a pretty standard childhood then.’

Fuck. After all this public talk of depression and anxiety, and many albums of expressed pain, I felt exposed as a fraud, but I was relieved not to have shown my cards and revealed how pathetic and weak I must have been when I was younger. Maybe he was right. He’d probably been through worse and wasn’t complaining about it.

I picked up a resentment towards other people from school. My parents were very loving and supportive and, unusually for my generation, still together. I went to school completely unequipped to deal with certain kids who were taking their fractured and in some cases abusive home lives out on me. I know that now. I was ‘too sensitive’, and I never learned how to act. I was a baby who’d been kept away from germs, and now I was getting ill from anything and everything. (I should say now that I have many happy memories of childhood, especially of my parents and of certain friends who I could count on, and that my inability to focus on those positives probably didn’t help.)

During my school years I spent thousands of hours walking on my own with headphones on or playing piano in the practice rooms, often going there first to cry in private and then occasionally with a mind to play. I was addicted to video games from the age of twelve, rarely going out to socialize. I had a few ‘best’ friends over the years who, looking back, I didn’t know well. But I’m grateful for having had them.

I put girls on pedestals and worshipped them, but only ever remained their friend. I fell in love many times and it was never reciprocated. I had no automatic right to them of course, but they kept me around for years and allowed me to be bullied and humiliated by their friends, accidentally betraying me out of awkwardness. I resented their understandable, youthful inability to know what to do with a sensitive boy who made them laugh and feel good about themselves, but whose body they did not want.

Boys would see my sensitivity as weakness and, while I was sharp and quick-witted, I wasn’t sporty, which was my first mistake with them, I think. Again, I didn’t know how to act. I wondered for years whether I had some behaviour disorder. I still wonder. In any case, year upon year of capricious bullying and humiliation followed.

These feelings of betrayal, persecution and rejection I kept to myself. In the crude gender stereotypes I was aware of at that age, I thought I had the sensitivity of a female but in a male’s body. I joked my way through it and made sure nobody ever saw me cry. I remained a virgin until the age of twenty-two, because I was awkward and unable to be natural around women. I was afraid of the vulnerability of sex after so many embarrassing attempts at it. (The song ‘Assume Form’ is, in part, about finding the ability to feel safe during intimacy.) It seemed to me that it had taken my success as a DJ for women to pursue me, and then I distrusted them for their sudden, transparent interest, so I pushed them all away. Slowly the face of every woman morphed into the faces of the girls who I felt had betrayed and humiliated me. And the face of every man became a bully who would underestimate me and try to kill my spirit.

Becoming relatively famous, my persecution complex turned into a self-serving narcissism, and my obsession with proving my worth to people who’d underestimated me was now being rewarded financially. To those ends, my first emotional language – music – had been the vehicle. I wanted to show everyone what they’d missed out on for all those years.

To some extent I succeeded in that, but I became so self-obsessed and isolated that I wasn’t the success I seemed to be on paper. And so the chasm grew between my alias – the guy with the ‘Pitchfork best new music 8.0+’, with the uncompromising and flourishing career, who seemed in control of everything – and the man-child who for many years was hurting, spiralling, never leaving the house, wasting away in an ego prison, refusing to collaborate, allowing himself to be bled financially and taken advantage of by his friends and their extended family, playing video games and smoking weed fourteen hours a day and not taking any care of himself what-so-ever until he was in a black depression, experiencing daily panic attacks, hallucinations and an existential crisis. I was asking questions like ‘What is the point of me?’ and saying I didn’t want to live. I became afraid of the growing fog of war outside my house because of what I knew people expected of me if I entered it: a normal interaction and, even more impossible, a new album.

I wanted people to know how I felt, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell them. I have gone into a bit of detail here not to make anyone feel sorry for me, but to show how a privileged, relatively rich-and-famous-enough-for-zero-pity white man could become depressed, against all societal expectations and allowances. If I can be writing this, clearly it isn’t only oppression that causes depression; for me it was largely repression.

I’m still not sure I fully believe I am entitled to be depressed or sad at all, because I’m white and cisgender and male, and life for people like me is undoubtedly the easiest of any group. But my privilege didn’t make me want to stick around, and it makes me feel even more embarrassed for having let myself go.

When the delusional mental force field of whiteness finally popped (the ‘psychosis’ of whiteness, as Kehinde Andrews puts it, which most white people are still experiencing – I was still able to reap the now obvious benefits of being white, straight and male but without the subconscious ability to ignore my responsibility to the marginalized), I started having the uncomfortable but rational thought that my struggle was actually comparatively tiny, and that any person of colour or member of the LGBTQ+ community could feasibly have been through exactly the same thing and then much, much more on top of that. A plate stacked until it was almost unmanageable. For me it became embarrassing to mention my child’s portion of trauma and sadness.

Combining that thought with the normalized stigmatization of male musicians’ emotional expression in the media, I felt like I must be the ‘Sadboy Prince and the Pea’.

But my girlfriend verbally slapped some sense into me, saying it does not help anybody, least of all oneself, to compare pain. And that was good advice to hear from someone who’d been through what she has. I can only imagine how frustrating it was for this Pakistani woman to watch me – with all my advantages in life – self-sabotage and complain like I have. Fuck.

And then you look at the statistics: according to the Yale Global Health Review, ‘in 2015, the crude suicide rate [in the USA] for white non-Hispanic males aged 40 to 65 was 36.84 per 100,000 people – more than twice the rate in the general American population’. If it wasn’t already clear that we have more than enough representation, we’re huge in suicide too.

Given this, I think it’s worth examining why many privileged white men can end up feeling they have no legitimate claim to pain, and then never deal with what they can’t lay claim to.

Even while writing this I’m visited by the thought ‘Who even cares? There are much bigger problems in the world than white men who feel sad.’ (This is a bloody laughable thing to write your first piece on – get some perspective, arsehole, and put away your tiny violin.) But you know what? I’ll continue because I think we need to advance the conversation around mental health for everyone, and it’s the only experience I feel qualified to talk about.

From systemic toxic masculinity (‘Boys don’t cry’, basically) and an ostensibly homophobic fear of sensitivity being beer-bonged into us by our friends, family and the media from as early as we can remember (‘Chug, chug, chug!’) to the slow realization as we get older that the world is actually stacked towards our success, we end up thinking that our individual psychological decline is shameful.

I believe it is psychologically dangerous for our egos to be built up as much as they are; for the importance of success to be so great; for the world to open its doors more to us than to others (most of us willfully ignore that those advantages exist, though we feel them deep down, and subconsciously know that it is unfair and that we must capitalize on them).

It is dangerous for us to be made to feel we can do anything and be anything, to gain an understanding of women as a resource rather than a lesson in empathy and love – and then find in all our capitalistic and egoistic fervour that we have neglected to take care of that other muscle that enables our survival: the mind.

I for one felt like Donald Trump, starting with $413 million and ending up broke and lying about my tax records. Maybe then it’s no surprise that so many disaffected white men identify so deeply with him. (It should be noted that I absolutely don’t.) That and our shared love of doing anything we want and saying whatever we like without consequence to ourselves.

That shared love has rightly led to a debate about what white males are entitled to say and do. I believe we’re entitled to no more than anybody else, which at this point requires a lot of listening and rebalancing. I also believe everybody is entitled to pain, no matter how perceptibly or relatively small that pain is. I don’t want the shame around depression and anxiety in privileged people to become worse any more than I want it for the marginalized. Because without addressing that pain we end up with more cis-gendered white male egomaniacs who bleed their shit on to everybody (and some of them will write albums about it).

James Blake's essay is from It's Not Ok To Feel Blue (And Other Lies), a collection of writing about mental health, curated by Scarlett Curtis.

[itsmedianapatino]

CREATIVE NONFICTION WEEK 3-QUARTER 3

I. Reading Exercise. Read the essay below entitled Oedipus in Repose by Dawn Marfill and answer the questions that follow.

Oedipus in Repose

Dawn Martil

According to Sigmund Freud's theory of the Psycho-Sexual Stages of parents are freaks of nature. It's either that, or I am the freak. Although Freud's the child and not the parents, I still blame my parent's inability to function like my skewed development. Perhaps if they had been normal, I would have fulfill of the Oedipus Complex which usually manifest itself during the child's phallic old. According to Freud, I would have fallen in love with the parent of the oppos and dreamt of murdering the parent of the same sex, my mother. But at six yea love with my father and plotting the demise of my mother. I was in love with P which was about as phallic as it could get, and I wanted to kill both my parents

Papa was a good model for all the men I would meet in my life. He taught how young or old a man was, he would always have the emotional maturity of a most especially when it came to toys. We had a Family Computer, the Neander Playstation, whose game cartridges you had to smack lightly with your palm the it to work properly. My mother had issued an edict that during the schoolyear like the Family Computer must be kept away from my grubby hands and there topmost part of her clothes cabinet. My father, responsible for guiding my edu home, was supposed to implement this rule with an iron hand while my mother he did it so splendidly.

While I slaved away on my homework in our sala in front of a television shut down, Papa, without fail, would always take down the Family Comput place, rouse the TV from sleep, and play B-Wings or 1942 right in front of me and table I was trying so desperately to tattoo in my brain. It was like dangling a bai of a hungry monkey. But he was very strict, my father. He never let me take a Player B, not even when I finished my homework. After all, my mother had de Computer off limits for the rest of the schoolyear. She really should have emp off limits for everyone-including Papa-as there were not one, but two children

I never had playmates when I was young because I was never allowed apartment. We lived in a tiny rented apartment in an area of Sampaloc, Manila were so narrow that a car passing by would have crushed someone even if h experienced none of the usual teasing and taunting that kids playing in the s to doing to other kids, and as a consequence I wasn't as "tough” as they were sheltered childhood left me defenseless against my father who found it funny me about being fat, thanks to all those hotdogs my kitchen-impaired mother ke Ironically, my mother is a nutritionist/ dietitian.

Every time my parents introduced me to a friend to theirs, they would always pinch my cheeks or whatever excess body fat they could grab and say, “Ay, bakit parang napabayaan sa kusina?" I thought they were commenting on the fact that I was left alone in the apartment most of the time because my mother worked two jobs and my father either read books in silence or was out of the house all the time, and I had agreed with these people silently. Of course I was a neglected child because my mother never sewed my Home Economics projects for me and my father never helped me with my Math homework. Why those people chose to say I got neglected in the kitchen was beyond me, but I supposed it was just another way of saying that they were not properly giving me parental attention. It was only when I got older and my comprehension for Filipino expressions became sharper that I understood what those nasty people meant-I was fat because my eating habits were uncontrollable.

I began to suspect a conspiracy. My mother and father were so in love that they were willing to keep each other happy even at their only child's expense. My mother knew that my father was happily calling me a variety of loving nicknames like, “Ms. Piggy," "Oink Oink," "Piglet," and “ Biik." So she willingly compromised my health by giving me fastfood cuisine-hotdogs, Jollibee Chickenjoy, spaghetti with hotdogs, burgers and other food varieties rich with Vitamins A to MSG, so my father could keep on doing what made him happiest-tease me about being fat.

The worst thing he ever did was when he kept saying "Oink!" every time I put a spoonful of food while the three of us were eating dinner one night. I remember bursting into tears, getting up from the table without excusing myself and banishing myself into a corner facing the wall where I proceed to bawl, hiccup and choke on my half-chewed food. And because our apartment resembled a Polly Pocket toy, that corner was basically two steps away from the dinner table My mother, never having heard of Good Cop/Bad Cop, went on laughing and doing nothing to soothe my fragile nine-year-old ego. She was never one to participate in the crass name-calling that my father was so fond of. No, she was classier than that. Her silence, which I mistook for a hidden love for and acceptance of me, was actually the calm before the storm.

My mother bided her time and pounced on me when I was in high school. I had to edit a video presentation one weekend and I asked her to take me to an editing center in Dapitan. Saturday was my mother's beauty parlor day and she refused to have it disturbed by something as insignificant as my schoolwork. She said she would take me there but only if I promised to let her stylist dye my hair golden brown because my black hair was too “matapang." She hadn't called me an eye sore yet so I let her play with my hair. It was just hair anyway.

I should have known she wouldn't stop there. Long before Dra. Vicky Belo and Dr. Calayan, my mother knew of a Dra. Lagman and her little shop of horrors near UST. She often went there for facials and she dragged me there once, not to have my face cleaned but to be electrocuted. She ranted about how her mother was to be blamed because I had somehow managed to inherit my grandmother's warty skin. Those offending little bits of flesh over my cheeks had to be burned by electricity at all costs, even my tears. Somehow, the anaesthesia they gave wasn't enough for me because I felt every little bolt of lightning scouring my skin. So I sat on that chair and let some woman electrocute my face while I tried desperately not to cry from the pain. It was nothing as

noble as needing to bear the pain stoically. I was just paranoid that my teare and possible conductor of electricity, would somehow direct electricity from to my eyeballs. Thus began my mother's legacy of beauty and pain.

By the time I graduated from high school, my mother had discovered D my mother her straight, high bridged new nose. Mama told me, while to night, that I was lucky because I inherited the bridge of my nose form my fat

"Pero ito," she tapped the end of my nose with her well-manicured fin ilalim, parang kamatis! Sa akin galing iyan eh." Then she began talking abou to remove the tomato part of my nose once I got older. That was my cue to mother. I may have gone through chemicals and electricity for her but I ha going under the knife.

Sigmund Freud said that the only way to resolve the Oedipus Complex the parent of the same sex and renounce the attraction for the parent of the I looked at my mother's swollen and bandaged nose, the inner corners of he deep red as if she had been poked at repeatedly after her rhinoplasty, I cou identification with my parent of the same sex. Shouldn't she be teaching met myself as I am?

I did renounce my hotdogs though-because I had a new mission in beauty queen to teach my mother that a girl can be beautiful, even withou Someone had to be the parent in this relationship.

Answer the following questions.

1. What personal information or details did the writer reveal about her herself?

She loved hotdogs; she also thinks that she is a freak; she had grudges to her parents that she could want to kill them.

2. What personal information or details did the writer reveal about her herself?

The writer tells that her parents is a freak and they didn’t care for her.

3. How did the writer portray herself and her family in the essay?

They’re portray her as a pig.

4. What is the tone of the essay? Cite some passages from the essay to prove your answer.

The tone in the essay is disgruntled. Her family say word “oink oink” to her.

5. What technique/s of did the author used in developing and revealing her characters? Prove your point.

The author used direct description so that her story is easy to understand and to make her audience/readers easy to analyze and imagined it in a easy way.

II. Based from the observation you had with the people at your home in Test Yourself using the STEAL method, synthesize your answers and write a character sketch(must be 10-15 sentences long) of your chosen subject .

Speech- my father is always in a high tone when speaking. Even when you message him thru social media, you’ll feel like he’s message is in a high tone. His way of speaking is so solid/pure that you will able to understand it.

Thoughts- my father way of thinking is strict. The way he thinks is so direct to the point. The type you just open your mouth, you can immediately think of what he will say because you know you both think the same.

Effects- He will first think carefully about whether to interact with that person or whether the interaction there has a purpose.

Actions- in his actions, you can really learn because when he acts, it is very clean and easy to learn especially when he teaches you with good speech.

Looks- He is very tidy. With him, you can also learn how to dress properly or partner with what you wear. Every time we will go outside to have a family date, he looks like a young man without a wife and children because he is really very well dressed. He’s also not the type of excretive at home.

[canibrandscompany]

How to Quickly Fall Asleep and Stay Asleep All Night

Sleep is incredibly important for the human body. It’s not only the way in which we achieve the rest that helps our bodies recover from physical activity, but it’s also crucial in providing the slumber we need to rest and recover from mental and emotional stresses as well. The first step in achieving an excellent night's sleep is to understand your sleep patterns. Monitoring and studying your sleep habits can help you learn how your daily activities and routines affect your nighttime rest. If you find yourself struggling to get a decent night's sleep, don’t worry - there are tried and true options that have been thoroughly tested and shown to be useful in the treatment of insomnia (the term associated with the condition of sleeplessness). Treatment options range from behavioral therapy and pharmaceuticals to the use of CBD oil supplements. But no matter the treatment option, these practices work better if you can isolate the singular or common causes of your sleep ailment.

Why You Can't Sleep?

There are many contributing factors to someone’s inability to find a deep, restful night’s sleep. Stress, anxiety, and depression have been shown to cause nearly half of all insomnia cases. In addition to stress and anxiety, your daytime habits, sleep routine, and physical health also play a huge role. Also, prescription drugs have been shown to interfere with sleep cycles and make it difficult to sleep. Medications like antidepressants, high blood pressure meds, and even some contraceptives have been shown to negatively interfere with our sleep patterns. There also are certain medical conditions and ailments that can contribute to sleeplessness. Some of these examples include allergies, asthma, Parkinson's disease, kidney disease, and cancer. Insomnia itself, though a sleep disorder of its own, can also be a symptom of other sleep disorders. Taking the time to figure out the root cause of your lack of sleep will help you tailor a treatment plan accordingly, and guide you in building the habits and practices that are conducive to achieving a good night’s sleep.

How to Quickly Fall Asleep?

A perfect night's sleep is just as important as a regular exercise routine and a healthy diet. In fact, the two often go hand in hand. And while our culture has grown to place more focus on our diet and exercise routines, statistics show that over these past few decades, both sleep quality and quantity has declined. This issue of collective sleeplessness is increasing, and it is becoming increasingly necessary to learn how to combat this trend. Achieving higher-quality sleep starts from a couple of simple steps. The first is to maintain a steady sleep routine, one that your body's internal clock is attuned to. Your body's circadian rhythm functions on a set loop, aligning itself with sunrise and sunset. Being consistent with your sleep and wake times can aid in your long-term sleep quality. Along with maintaining consistent routines (even on the weekends), we must condition ourselves to avoid activities and substances such as caffeine and nicotine at least 2-3 hours before bedtime because they could potentially disturb our nightly sleep. Taking the time to actively placate bad habits is very important in curbing the symptoms of insomnia. The average healthy adult needs 7-8 hours of sleep a night – with some even able to function on as little as 6 hours of sleep. However, there are certain individuals who can't perform at their peak unless they've slept for at least 10 hours. The point is, people are all very different, and understanding where you stand on the spectrum makes it easier to help improve your sleeping experience.

How to Fall Asleep and Stay Asleep All Night?

Here are some tips to quickly fall asleep and stay asleep all night.

Try to exercise at least 25 - 30 minutes a day. Physical exertion often helps people sleep, although working out too close to your bedtime can actually interfere with your sleep. To maximize the effects of your workout, try to get your exercise routine in about 5 - 6 hours before you go to bed. Do not exercise within 2 hours of bedtime if you hope to avoid interference with your sleep.

Reserve your bed for sleep and sleep only. Don't answer phone calls, don’t respond to emails, and don’t scroll through your social media feeds as you are trying to fall asleep. This also means you should avoid binge-watching your favorite show in your bedroom. Your bedroom (and your bed particularly) needs to be a stimulus for sleeping, not for wakefulness. Create a habit and an environment that is a proponent of sleep.

Reduce or eliminate long daytime naps. Don't get us wrong; naps can be beneficial and offer some much-needed rest when we are feeling sleep deprived. However, long or irregular napping can actually have a negative effect on our sleep. This is because sleeping in the daytime can confuse your internal clock and make you struggle to find sleep in the evening. If you find yourself taking daytime naps and having difficulty sleeping at night, try to eliminate these respites as much as possible. However, if you take regular daytime naps and still sleep well, there’s probably no need to worry, and no need to change your routine. Daytime naps affect different people in different ways.

Use a fitness/ sleep tracker watch. Sleep trackers on smartwatches have come to the rescue on many occasions for individuals who battle with insomnia symptoms. These smartwatches help to monitor and track your sleep patterns and offer helpful guidance on establishing a healthy sleep pattern. Most Apple watches and other smartwatches have these features available on the device. Use these functions and the data they provide to make good decisions that assist you in achieving better sleep.

Need More Help? Try CBD!

People who suffer from issues of sleeplessness often find themselves turning to over-the-counter and prescription sleep aids. These pharmaceuticals, however, often carry lengthy warning labels and numerous side effects. Furthermore, they can also be addictive and sometimes largely ineffective. But there’s hope. Research shows that CBD (cannabidiol) may interact with your body's endocannabinoid system and function to regulate serotonin and dopamine levels in our body. Clinical reviews have revealed that patients using CBD in high doses (daily doses of 40, 80, and 160 mg), reported achieving substantially improved quality of sleep. CBD products have a variety of effects depending on the dosage, product, and time of day they are taken, as well as individual physiology. In recent years, a huge collection of these products have flooded the market. There are capsules, tinctures, CBD oral sprays, and even CBD-infused pillows! These products affect everyone differently, so experimentation is critical in getting the most out of them. While CBD is still relatively new in the market, and more definitive studies need to be conducted, initial findings show minimal to no side effects or ability overdose.

Final Thoughts

It goes without saying that sleep is an essential part of our wellbeing. It’s important to nurture a schedule and routine that prioritizes your sleeping time. This may require switching off your phone, or putting your device in “Do not Disturb” mode to avoid any distractions or outside stimuli. The steps outlined throughout this article should help to ensure you are building solid, healthy habits that will increase the quality and duration of your sleep.

In general, the use of sleep aids, a sleep-friendly environment, and appropriate relaxation techniques should help you achieve a great night's sleep. If you employ the techniques above and continue to have trouble falling asleep at night, consider visiting your local physician or a sleep specialist to address these persistent issues.

[discursivities]

From Baudrillard we’ve inherited a number of terms, the one relevant to this post being ‘hyper-real’ (sometimes ‘hyper-reality’). By ‘hyper-real’ what we mean to denote is a resemblance to The Real—unmediated reality—that is, for some very basic reasons, ‘better’ or ‘preferable’, but ultimately gives the impression of being ‘more real than The Real’. A hyper-real experience of some x is an experience of x that is preferable—given its increased vivacity, sharpness etc.—to an experience of that same x in actual ‘The Real’ reality.

An example will make the distinction clear. Our ‘post-modern’ father, who finds himself absurdly competing everyday for the affections of his son against the most impossible alternatives—video games, television, the internet, etc.—decides to disconnect the boy for a few hours and take him to a baseball game. The boy, who actually knows quite a bit about baseball and even claims to be a fan of the game, quickly grows bored and even slightly annoyed with his father for bringing him outside. His annoyance is the product of a very telling insight—that is: the boy realizes that, had he been left to his own devices (note the lack of idiom), he could have stimulated himself much more effectively and with greater enjoyment. This knowledge, almost over-whelming in its force, prompts the boy to finally proclaim to his father (not half-way through the third inning, we might imagine): ‘This has been fun and all, but you should play MLB2K13 if you really like baseball.’ The absurdity of this statement is all the more difficult to bear because we understand exactly what he means. If he was in a more ironic mood, then he might say: ‘This has been fun and all, but it doesn’t come close to the real thing.’ This wording brings out sharpest the consequences of hyper-reality. The actual game of baseball being played out on the field, under the sun, with bats, balls, and sponsors—this constitutes, for our purposes, The Real. The video-game, which began as a mere simulation of reality, has transcended its status of being a simple ‘resemblance’. The hyper-focused, beautiful, lush visuals; the ease and comfort with which the game is played; the total engagement and over-stimulation—these factors conspire in bringing the game to the position of ‘hyper-reality’. It is the trademark of hyper-reality that it seems ‘more real than real’—and this is a matter of perfection. Where an actual game of baseball may be sloppy, start-and-stop, and uncomfortable to watch (heat, lack of shade, inability to hit pause and go grab a snack, etc.), the hyper-real experience on the other hand has none of these deficiencies.

Hyper-reality is present in those movies ‘based on a true story’, especially if the events depicted happened in your lifetime and—at the time they were happening—you couldn’t be bothered to watch the news. The eagerness with which we line up outside the theater on opening night is an irony lost on just about everyone.

A very standard ‘post-modern’ critique of the hyper-real concerns the spectator’s propensity to reproduce inauthentic experience. If the hyper-real is so compelling, then our construction of experience (day-to-day) will inevitably converge upon trying to re-create the hyper-real. The two obvious problems to arise from this treatment of experience are: first, it is very seldom that the hyper-real can be recreated spontaneously; the almost inevitable failure to do so leads to disappointment and depression. Second, all experience will be mediated by a host of ‘ideal’ versions of that experience which, if allowed to mediate, will provide for the same outputs every time. What you eventually get is repetition and an inability to see yourself out of that repetition. So we become trapped in a cycle of creating inauthentic experiences that will never be enough to satisfy. You can guess what many will find to be the solution: rejection of experience in total—authentic or inauthentic (which is the only type they have any inkling of how to create)—and a return to the solitude of hyper-reality.

I think, by this point, the direction I’m taking is fairly obvious with regards to social media (and Tumblr in particular). Whereas with such media as movies, video games, books (to a diminished degree), etc. we are given a pretty well structured set of parameters to reproduce, the same cannot be said of social media. Let’s say that I’m a fan of sit-coms that revolve around some setting like, for example, a café. Now, when I visit cafes, I have these shows in mind—their general plots, dialogue and the types of characters typically involved—so that I begin to reproduce what I’ve seen. (It must be noted that this isn’t an explicitly conscious project, although it can be, however commonly operating as if by reflex). While it is impossible to perfectly mimic the hyper-real experience of watching the show, I may come close. This is because the dimensions of a ‘café-centered sit-com’ are finite and rather easily recognizable. So much so, in fact, that I could reasonably become annoyed if my friend—who I’ve arranged to meet at some café—‘drops the ball’, so to speak, and does something out of line with the re-creation. (A situation of this sort was humorously depicted in Sartre’s Nausea, when the protagonist’s lover complained that he was always ruining her cinematic moments, usually by saying something banal).

Social media (now: SM) either doesn’t have—or doesn’t have very clear—parameters of this sort. It would appear that SM is the hyper-real replica of reality’s social aspect itself. It is no wonder, then, that we cannot enumerate all of its dimensions, because doing so would be to list everything that is of and in society. I hope the horror of the situation is becoming clear. This is what we are faced with: if SM takes the place of ‘the hyper-real version of ‘social interaction’/’society’’, then all future social interactions (happening in good old capital-R Reality) will be mediated by the glowing ideal of the Internet. And I do believe SM is hyper-real. It provides for all of the benefits of social interaction—communication, solidarity, friendship, etc.—without any of the hairy details involved in actually going outside and maybe being stood-up or bored. If you’re not convinced SM is hyper-real, then consider the following examples that would be impossible in an unmediated interaction.

You’re talking to your best friend online. Knowing each other as well as you two do is great, the conversations are funny and everyone’s always on the same page, but naturally things become formulaic and after a bit of interaction you need a break. No problem. Open a new tab, watch a video, listen to music, read an article, play a game, etc. They’re still there in the chat-window for whenever you want to resume the conversation (in fact, they’re probably doing the same thing on their end). Further, Internet etiquette has evolved to the point where we don’t even have to say ‘bye’ or ‘I’ll be back in a second’ or anything. You can drop a conversation at any time, and pick it back up at any time, and no one cares.

Another example. If you really wanted (and if you had a bit of an inferiority complex) you could easily appear as a very smart, hip, well-informed person. You can see where I’m going with this. If there is ever, in the course of your conversation, a term you’re unfamiliar with you can look it up and appear an expert within seconds. Ditto re ‘have you seen/heard/read the new ____’

Imagine trying to import these examples into a real, unmediated, social experience. It can’t be done. So what happens? The two consequences of hyper-reality still take effect, but more destructively since our attempts are from the outset more futile. We are condemned to a reality where all of our attempts at unmediated social interaction fall utterly flat. What we put in place of authentic social interaction is the creation of semblances. I’m sure you’ve seen this, or perhaps you’ve done it, where you go to some social event (not online) and see people consumed with creating the semblance of a good time for their profiles. This horror reaches, for me, a nasty pitch at concerts where the crowd is more interested in producing a quality youtube video than enjoy the performance. The youtube video becomes more real than the real.  

What was the pessimistic solution again? Reject ‘The Real’ altogether and retreat into the solitude of hyper-reality. In other words, log back onto Tumblr. I pick on Tumblr because, I think, it has the most diverse functions—especially when compared to Facebook or Twitter—and so also has the greatest potential to do damage. One fairly easy to spot consequence of this retreat back to the Internet is the complex of memes, in-jokes, codes-of-conduct, and what might be called the new ‘net dialect’ that has sprung up through SM. What has happened is an utter rejection of The Real by deciding to live and flourish in the hyper-real (what we might think of, not without some hesitation, as the ‘cyber-real’). The anxiety and disappointment common to all experiences with The Real, especially after prolonged exposure to the hyper-real, can only grow disproportionally more hideous as social media expands its influence. I’m worried and feel that more solutions are in order. It is my intuition that the most elegant solution won’t be one that does away with social media, but one that can fit it most succinctly into our delegations of various types of ‘reals’.    

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Are You Ready for CRO 2020? 3 Experts Set the CRO Agenda for 2018 and Beyond

Testing, experimenting, and learning is the heart of CRO

CRO is a journey, not a destination. As tools, behaviours and platforms evolve, brands need to continually test new combinations to maintain performance scores

CRO is more than on-site optimization: it’s a mindset that can be applied to any platform in the future  

Seamless customer journeys and experiences need to be balanced with the sheer complexity of digital marketing platforms and formats today. The pressure for conversion optimization and performance marketing is not going away - it's only getting stronger, even as the complexity of engagement with customers increases. So, what should you, as a marketer, prioritize with your CRO strategy to ensure your marketing continues to perform well into 2020?

We put 5 big questions about CRO to 3 experts – here is what we learned.

1. THE CRO-UX CONUNDRUM

Undoubtedly, delivering a smooth brand experience will directly impact the performance outcomes. Does performance have to come at the cost of UX? How can marketers better balance in this increasingly complex omni-channel digital environment?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Rather than thinking about balancing CRO and UX, you should view these as integrated activities. Creating a delightful UX is a major component of having a well-converting site.

A consistent and relevant UX across all channels motivates consumers to move deeper into your funnel. 

In an omni-channel digital environment, you have to ensure your optimization activities are viewed holistically. In BJ Fogg's behavior model, a user’s ability to take the desired action with ease is half the story. You also need to ensure that your user is highly motivated to complete that action.

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

UX and CRO are intimately related -whether within a single channel or across multiple channels. Mobile apps, websites and other customer touchpoints should share the same goals of meeting business objectives while improving user experience, engagement and loyalty. In situations where. 

All [channels] should be measured via experimentation to uncover evidence of their standalone and combined impact on a variety of commerce objectives and metrics

UX and CRO objectives contradict, both loyalty and great transactional conversion can be optimized based on their ability to improve a larger metric such as customer lifetime value.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

With this complex environment, CRO has become essential to delivering excellent User Experience. To succeed, firms must design and build digital experiences that attract and sustain customer engagement – CRO is an established practice to deliver the best customer experiences. Organization is the key: firms may have a ‘center of excellence’ team, which manages best practices and coordinates CRO programs.

According to Forrester, 90% of firms rated their CRO programs as “valuable” or “extremely valuable” to achieve their strategic goals.

2. MAKE THE RIGHT MISTAKES – BUT AVOID THE OBVIOUS ONES

Experimentation – testing and learning – is at the heart of CRO. The flip side of that is making mistakes. But some mistakes are avoidable. Our experts highlight the most common mistakes they see marketers make today with their CRO efforts. See any you could have avoided?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Too much focus on traffic

When it comes to your website, it's easy to just look at traffic and conversion rate. Also consider the potential, importance, and ease of optimizing for each marketing touch point.

For omni-channel experiences, a prioritization framework, like the PIE framework, helps prioritize channels for experimentation.

Doing CRO in isolation from the rest of their channels.  

Investing in website-only CRO underestimates the potential of experimentation to solve business problems in today's omni-channel digital environment. Effective marketers should apply the two-pronged experimentation mindset across all digital marketing activities, where they first explore by gathering business and customer insights, and validate their hypotheses through experimentation.  

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

Not testing, or not testing enough variations, at velocity

Gut feel cannot help to improve conversion rates - digital experimentation can. Leverage user’s behavioural evidence to incrementally improve the performance of a website or app. Increase testing velocity to know which changes will improve performance and which may actually negatively impact conversion rate.

Ineffective targeting

It sounds simple, but high traffic doesn’t equate high conversion. Incorrect targeting will give you traffic without conversion. Marketers should focus on personalization/targeting and experimentation together.

It’s critical to segment experiments and tests by audience - delivering the right experience to improve CRO is often different for different segments of customers.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

Unfortunately, organizational and technological challenges hold back CRO programs.

Lack of support from the leadership required to maximize CRO programs: the executive team does not understand the strategic value of CRO.

Inability to move beyond silos between teams including digital, IT, and marketing: cannot scale the CRO program beyond a few projects/teams.

Firms can deliver highly impactful CRO programs by working with experts, including engaging with external partners strategically.

Also read: Search and CRO - 3 ways they can work together for the win

3. Are brands losing control over the CX?

As customers engage, interact and transact with brands increasingly on platforms outside of brand-owned platforms (social media, apps etc.), the marketers’ direct control over the CX is reducing. Does the fact that a customer may never even visit the brand website reduce the significance of on-site CRO?  

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Smart marketers and business leaders should re-envision “CRO” as a broader activity of experimentation: of researching and validating insights across touch points, speaking to every digital marketing activity a brand engages in - not solely the website. The activities of user research, analyzing data, developing hypotheses and then actually running experiments to validate those hypotheses, can be done on every channel and platform.

What is important, irrespective of where the customer engages, is the experimentation mindset inherent in CRO – that approach makes optimization more important than ever.

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

Brands have to optimize and personalize the entire experience, from paid search and social to landing pages, to on-site usability, the shopping cart, encompassing everything from content to site functionality to design. The key is understanding the buyer’s journey.

Fundamentally, CRO is more important than ever, and it is evolving rapidly. Non-brand owned platforms can't be ignored but merchandisers can only focus CRO on the parts of the experience that they own - other forms of analytics can inform the overall conversion rate if the buyer’s journey is understood well.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

CRO is more than a practice; it’s now become a new way of living the omni-channel User Experience.

CRO can be everywhere, on apps, on the brand site, on social media, etc. It’s more and more important as customers are looking for a perfect experience, whatever the platform is.

4. IMMERSIVE FORMATS = IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES?

As voice, mobile and more obviously immersive formats make their presence felt in customer’s lives, how should marketers incorporate those into their CRO strategies as we go into 2020?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Use data-driven research and empathetic understanding of the emotional state, mindset, and context of buyers as they engage at brand touch points to create delightful experiences.

Context will be crucial. No longer can the mobile site be simply a responsive clone of the desktop site. We need to understand the mobile user's context of how they are using the site, and how it's different than desktop. Are they using the mobile site in-store to research products in greater detail? Or, are they using it to re-stock home supplies while running between meetings? These are two different user contexts for one device, each requiring completely different strategies to optimize the entire user purchase journey. 

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

Emerging technologies like voice and mobile are increasingly mainstream - marketers need to experiment and optimize experiences on those platforms. US consumers are projected to spend $40 billion through voice assistants by 2022, a significant rise from the $1.8 billion spent in 2017.

Voice, immersive and mobile should be seen as another channel in the omni-channel experience, either via a dedicated device (e.g. Alexa) or when these interaction points merge onto a single physical smartphone.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

It’s going to be a new channel, but CRO can be adapted on any and every channel. Optimization is not a practice; it’s a culture that can be addressed whatever the platform/channel may be.

Also read: 5 Performance marketing basics in an omni-channel world

5. PREPARING FOR CRO 2020

As digital marketing, with all its components, and the customer, with all their habits and behaviours evolve continuously, what are the big CRO strategies or trends our experts think marketers should prioritize as we turn into the next decade?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Instead of viewing CRO as 'just for websites', marketers will need to take a user-first perspective and build experiences that delight at every touch point.  

In the next 10 years, we will see widespread adoption of experimentation across all touch points to validate all marketing activity and focus our limited time and resources on the high-impact areas.  

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

The shift from physical to digital and back again. Even digital first powerhouses like Amazon are moving back to the physical world. Understanding how order-ahead and omni-channel flow across these types of experiences will be fascinating to watch.

Another trend that will be interesting to watch is the role AR and VR will play in CRO, and in consumer marketing in general.  

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

Personalization will be increasingly effective. What better way to make an impression on users than by tailoring every message you show them!

The new generation of CRO tools on the market will lead to global automation of CRO: the solution will show marketers what the best message is and on which channel – and will automatically deliver the best and more tailored experience!  

In an exclusive feature for MarTech Advisor, Hannah Stewart, Head of Marketing at Yieldify said that the bad news is that there's no magic bullet for CRO challenges. While technology is one part of the solution, it seems a clear understanding of the buyers’ journey, clarity on the high impact channels and platforms to prioritize, the right tool, and an intelligent experimentation mindset are key to getting CRO to deliver going into 2020, irrespective of the platform.

About our experts Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel, is an expert on customer experience and organizational experimentation culture and has spoken at several conferences, including eduWeb and eCommerce Summit Dallas.

Carl Tsukahara, is  Chief Marketing Officer at Optimizely and is responsible for all global marketing strategy and execution. A 25+ year veteran of Silicon Valley, Carl Tsukahara was most recently Chief Marketing Officer for Birst, a category leader in delivering enterprise business analytics to major global corporations.

   Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty, champions a data-driven approach to innovative conversion rate optimization solutions, for their more than 600 enterprise clients.

Interested in CRO and UX? Explore more features and insights on our UX&CRO section

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[threateninggayopinions-blog]

one last night with mata hari

“Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If you say you have, you're a slut. It's a trap.”  Allison Reynolds, The Breakfast Club

The sun had not fully risen on the morning of October fifteenth as the car within which Mata Hari sat streamed along the streets of Vincennes, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris. The renowned exotic dancer, imprisoned and sentenced to death during the first world war for espionage against the French, had been shaken awake in her jail cell early that morning for this trip. Upon arriving at their destination, a firing squad stood her up against a mound of earth and pointed twelve rifles at her breast. She was dead before many of the inhabitants of Vincennes awoke. She did not see the evening of October 15th. Mata Hari, the beautiful dancer who had held the admiring gaze of so many, was no more.

This was 1917. A hundred years later, in its world premiere, Craig Walker’splay  One Last Night with Mata Hari re-tells the story of her life, framed as a performance for her fellow inmates the evening before her execution. Perhaps because, rather in spite of, the meticulously researched nature of the writing, Walker’s script lends no credibility to some of the wilder, though supremely cinematic, rumours surrounding her execution. 

According to some, the exotic dancer opened her coat and flashed the officers as the shots rang out. Other, tamer accounts, claim she blew a kiss before they opened fire. Eyewitness accounts contradict both, but the myth persists – probably because the mystique tastes sweeter than reality ever will. I question, though, why it matters, if it will ever matter. Are we determined to attach sexuality to her death even as bullets rip through her skin because we are determined to give her agency in those final moments? Why is her sexuality the last and best thing we must preserve?

Mata Hari in front of the firing squad, 1917

Depending on who’s telling the story, the woman who threw her coat open in front of a firing squad can be extolled as an active defiler of patriarchal rule, or a wild, sexual being who wouldn’t let even a dozen rifles get in the way of having a good time. Both raise a lot of questions about how we covet, cherish, and condemn sex and sexuality, whether a hundred years ago or now.

There is a peculiar irony, addressed in the play, that Mata Hari’s body – once coveted by so many – was never claimed after her execution. A hundred years down the road, as I type these words to her, those bones must be dust, or less. And yet, she has not been forgotten. Maybe history loves a bad girl, the way most men have convinced themselves that they would love to date Zelda Fitzgerald and that it would be entirely wonderful for them both. Maybe the filmic trope of the femme fatale is not as passé as we pretend. But whatever the reason, she lives on, and after seeing One Last Night, I want to take the time to submit her – the double agent – to yet another interrogation.

What place does Mata Hari occupy in our society today? What can she tell us about sex, shame, and bodily autonomy? Power, pleasure, and taboos? How does this relate to performance?

And why is everyone so convinced she threw her coat open to her killers?

There is a line in One Last Night that I think taps into the very core of how sex and shame operate in the story of Mata Hari, when the dancer declares that she is always either seen as either the “saintly martyr” or the whore. In other words, she is always either shamed for her sexual promiscuousness or revered with words associated with chastity. This polarizing binary of sexual purity and sexual wickedness persists in the cultural perception of women outside of the play, aided along by pop culture and the mass media. Films like Black Swan hit the nail over the head, but you will see the whores and martyrs everywhere: the Final Girl in horror film is our Madonna, her slaughtered female friend the Slut Who Deserved It. Hell, you can say the same about Betty and Veronica. The dichotomy is so pervasive that humans everywhere seem to be convinced that the female exists in much the same form as that line on the chalkboard in Donnie Darko.

Mata Hari, photograph coloured by klimbin

I wish I could blame it on men. And it did start with Freud – who coined what he called the Madonna/Whore complex to describe men who were unable to sexually desire either their chaste, loving partners or the sexually loose alternative. (He spent a good amount of time puzzling over how to fix this, and indeed we still don’t know how to help men not be assholes.) But, as I am reminded every time my mom condemns a girl in short shorts on the street, people of all or no genders carry the weight of these confusing but convincing ideas about sex and womanhood. One Last Night With Mata Hari dramatizes a woman’s life, yes, but it also makes explicit the shaming surrounding promiscuous women and the culture that demands the promiscuous “bad girl” – or the performance of this idea - face punishment for her crime of sexuality.

Rubin asks us, where do we draw the line? 

In her essay Thinking Sex, Gayle Rubin explores where and how that line is drawn by different groups in power. Heterosexual reproductive sex – the non-erotic sex the good girl should reluctantly but willingly submit herself to - lies alone on the “good” side of the line. The rest is a spectrum of sexual behaviours and desires that ranges from gay sex to kinky sex to just sex for the sake of sex – sex that is enjoyable and thus condemnable. If these standards are good for anything, it is to indicate the absurdity of assigning moral value to chastity or sexuality. And yet slut remains another word for the bad girl.  

Taylor Swift pits the virginal good girl against the promiscuous whore in her 2008 “You Belong With Me” video. 

Slut shaming – the shaming of girls and women for dressing or behaving in a manner deemed inappropriately promiscuous - is an insidious practice that requires a commitment to the good girl/bad girl diatribe. But it also indicates an inability to understand how the good girl and the bad girl are performed, and may indeed often coexist in the same woman. In Power, Pleasure and Perversion, Linda Williams describes how women perform during sadomasochistic sex acts in order to negate the ability of patriarchal law to dictate their pleasure. The woman creates a performance of being coerced into the sexual act, thus allowing her to appear to be a good girl while receiving the pleasure of the bad girl. To reap the benefits, she must perform this pre-determined front.

Williams reminds us that there is indeed an awareness to our bad girls, harkening back to the carefully bubble-headed teenage girls to whom even Goffman pays a grudging respect. Writing about girls who act silly to attract boys, he states that they employ a “profound psychic discipline” in their maintenance of the act that undercuts their perception as flighty, naïve creatures.

Hari performed the bad girl and reaped the benefits of a society that had decided they urgently needed to believe in her promiscuity. But the benefits of a successful bad girl performance can reach beyond the personal and actually reveal the performativity of everyday life.  For if promiscuity can be performed, then womanhood itself can be performed, and the performance inherent in the construction of gender is thus exposed.

The 2012 film Cabin In The Woods plays with the virgin/whore dichotomy as it functions in horror cinema, where promiscuous women are punished by death at the hands of the killer, and only the sexually naive woman survives. 

At its core, though, the Good Girl/Bad Girl idea is a means of compartmentalizing women and stripping them of their identities in the process, performed in lieu of – god forbid – embracing women in all their complexities as equals. But what frightens me most is the implications of this idea as it interacts with the question of punishment, and by extension, rape.

The theme of punishment is explicit in One Last Night, present in the prison sentence and the cat o’ nine tails, but more insidiously in the audience’s question of whether Hari deserved to die. The insistence that “sluts” deserve or are asking for objectification is a common one, and as I have mentioned, it is not solely perpetuated by men in positions of social power.

I am haunted by the story of a survivor of rape who was called “the bad twin” by her rapist. In her article on the topic, the woman describes being confronted with this idea that she and her sister were interchangeable entities, distinguishable only by their attitudes toward sex. What is truly terrifying is the way that this objectification justified the act of rape, by perpetuating the idea that certain types of women will successfully protect themselves from rape while others desire or deserve it.  

By invoking the myth that there are “certain types” of women, that “good girls” do not get raped and that “bad girls” want it, we create a rape culture. We create a culture that frightens women into silence for fear they will be perceived as the bad girl.

Because If bad girls are Bad solely by virtue of their sexuality, then sex must be Bad as well. But women cannot be sexless – a society that objectifies and commodifies us for the sexual taking of men would be offended by the very idea. Thus the good girl must have sex, but it must be morally good sex – it must be a specific kind of sex that is different from that enjoyed by your average skanky bar-hopper, it must be a sex that transcends the limitations of a fishnet-stockinged prostitute or a cleavage-baring go-go girl. And out of this necessity, drawn with the sharp blade of the double-edged sword that says we must give our bodies freely but keep our shirts on, the bizarre line that Rubin gestures to is drawn between good sex and shameful bad sex.

But the Bad Girl and the Good Girl are performances and shorthands, nothing more. Our obsession with Mata Hari’s sexiness is an obsession with her exaggerated performance. But that obsession is incredibly telling when we use it to look inwards at ourselves: to ask why we are fixated on shameful sex and why sex is shameful in the first place. A hundred years ago, Mata Hari asked these same questions. And now, in 2017, I want to know: why are we asking if her coat was off and not if we would execute her all over again?