Fleeingfromnormality - Likes And Reblogs

this is a joke but also it’s not

perpetually torn between:

taking classic literature seriously and over analysing every detail so that I can deeply understand themes, motifs and references and absorb every poetic quote into my being OR treating classics as if they were just silly little stories about silly little gay people doing the most weird, unhinged and out of context shit ever (which they are)

“good Christian honk” sounds like a euphemism 

“I always remember having this fight with a random dude who claimed that ‘straight white men’ were the only true innovators. His prime example for this was the computer… the computer… THE COMPUTER!!! THE COM-PU-TER!!!

Alan Turing - Gay man and ‘father of computing’ Wren operating Bombe - The code cracking computers of the 2nd world war were entirely run by women Katherine Johnson - African American NASA mathematician and ‘Human computer’ Ada Lovelace - arguably the 1st computer programmer”

- Sacha Coward

Also Margaret Hamilton - NASA computer scientist who put the first man on the moon - an as-yet-unmatched feet of software engineering, here pictured beside the full source of that computer programme. #myhero

Grace Hopper - the woman that coined the term “bug”  

- @robinlayfield

Women Are Physiologically Primed for Parenthood (And So Are Men)

In 2017 The New York Times published a short piece called "The Birth of a Mother." It explored something anthropologists have termed matrescence, or the process of becoming a female parent. The writer noted: "[T]his transition is also significant for fathers . . . , but women who go through the hormonal changes of pregnancy may have a specific neurobiological experience." The nod to fathers is cursory. The "but" that follows makes the sentence's point: that women are the sex hormonally primed for parenthood. This notion is so generally accepted that it escaped the fact-checker's scrutiny. Like most of the conventional wisdom about the hard-core nature of maternal versus paternal parenting, it's also misleading. Men undergo their own neurobiological experience as their babies-to-be gestate. Throughout the prenatal period, men in close contact with pregnant partners are physiologically primed to care for infants. Expectant fathers experience a rise in the levels of the pregnancy-related hormones prolactin, cortisol, and estrogen in proportion to that of their baby's mother. Additionally, testosterone, associated with competition for mates, declines. Second-time fathers produce even more prolactin and less testosterone in the company of a pregnant partner than do first-timers. [...] Throughout their children's lives, involved fathers continue to experience hormonal changes. In North America, men in long-term relationships like marriage and fatherhood almost uniformly have lower testosterone levels than their single and childless counterparts. [...] As anthropologist Sarah Hrdy observes in Mothers and Others: "Men are physiologically altered just from spending time in intimate association with pregnant mothers and new babies. To me, this implies that care by males has been an integral part of human adaptation for a long time. Male nurturing potentials are there, encoded in the DNA of our species. [...] [In the late '70s], psychologist Ross Parke and colleagues studied fathers of newborns in maternity wards. For most of the behaviors his team measured, fathers and mothers hardly differed. Men spoke to babies in high-pitched voices and responded with sensitivity to infant cues during feeding. They also exhibited patterns similar to their wives when holding their children. The major difference Parke observed was that fathers, unlike mothers, took a step back from their child's care in the presence of their spouse. [...] In a study that measured response times and hormone levels in parents listening to infant cries, mothers and fathers were equally reactive to wails of distress (recordings of baby boys being circumcised). When the cries were fussy rather than pained, mothers' physiological responses and then also their reaction times were a little quicker than fathers', though fathers' responses were quicker than those of childless adults.

- Darcy Lockman (All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, pages 82-83, 83, 84, 85, 86)