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How to cultivate a healthy masculinity Masculinity is anchored in biological sex differences Our biological sex - being male or female - is an integral part of our humanity. Trying to ignore it would betray our most intimate nature. Gender may be a social construct, but it is not arbitrary but intimately linked to our sex. Therefore, telling men that being masculine is wrong is every bit as heartless as telling gays to stop liking people of the same sex. Saying that masculinity is wrong and has to be eliminated is hateful and sexist. What we need are guidelines to develop a healthy masculinity. In my previous article The Different Minds of Men and Women, I presented evidence that there are psychological differences between men and women driven by the sex hormones. The most important are: Anger is stronger in men and more likely to lead to aggression. Men are more prone to risk-taking and less sensitive to fear. Men have higher pain thresholds and pain tolerance. Men prefer things while women prefer people. Men have better spatial abilities and mechanical reasoning, whereas women have better verbal abilities. These characteristics of men appear in childhood and are driven by testosterone. While it is true that masculinity is a cultural construct, it is anchored in these biological differences. There are different ways to be masculine, but they all relate to these basic properties of maleness. Uncontrolled maleness is dangerous because of the propensity of men towards aggression, risk-taking and valuing things over people. Hence, there has to be a healthy culture of masculinity that channels these male characteristics toward their beneficial side and teaches men to control their negative impulses. But women have these virtues, too! Talking about the positive side of masculinity is venturing into a minefield of political correctness. Saying anything positive about femininity - like women are more nurturing, empathetic, emotionally intelligent, have better verbal skills, etc. - is fine. However, when we try to do the same about masculinity, this is automatically taken as sexist. Because, if men are better at something, this necessarily means that women are inferior at that. And we can’t have that, can we? So we have another form of “me too”: if I say that something is a masculine virtue, women would immediately raise their hand and say “I have that virtue, too!” We could call this “the women inferiority trap”. To avoid falling into it, we should consider the following: The only way for men to avoid falling prey to the dangers of maleness (aggression, risk-taking, social isolation) is to cultivate compensatory virtues. Women do not have that need. Because of biological sex differences, men gravitate more towards certain values than women. This is okay. Not everybody has to be the same. The same virtue - for example, self-sacrifice and playfulness - may manifest in different forms in men and women. Masculinity is not exclusive to men. Just as men can be feminine (nurturing, empathetic, communicative), women can have masculine virtues. It’s up to everyone to find their right balance of masculinity and femininity, yin and yang. Here are eight virtues that I think embody healthy masculinity. 1) Integrity “Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values.” (Wikipedia). In my experience, men tend to be moral absolutists, developing a moral code and then adhering to it, whereas women tend to be moral relativists, changing their judgement according to the situation and the people involved. In other words, men tend to be idealists and women tend to be realists. This is probably because ideals and values are more like things and moral codes have an internal mechanism, which are things that appeal to the masculine mind. During the formative years of their youth, good men develop a moral code to which they will adhere during their adult life. Values related to integrity are honor - having a reputation for being reliable and adhering to one’s own standards - and honesty - speaking the truth and acting in a way consistent with it. An important part of my moral code is intellectual honesty: valuing truth and being able to change my beliefs when presented with facts and logic. The dark side A moral code may become too rigid, making men behave like zealots and vigilantes. Men are more prone to enforce their moral values on others due to an evolved mechanism called altruistic punishment, which is enhanced by testosterone. 2) Courage I would define courage as acting according to our moral values in the face of fear. “Courage (also called bravery or valour) is the choice and willingness to confront agony, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation.” (Wikipedia) The problem with this definition in Wikipedia is that it dissociates courage from ethics. This is a problem for men because we are naturally risk-prone and pain-tolerant, so we may put themselves in danger when there is no reason to do it - the foolhardy behavior often seen in young men. Men have a complicated relationship with fear. They may avoid it or seek it because it leads to a state of joyful excitement: the adrenaline rush. Still, taking unnecessary risks can be justified, because courage needs to be developed by confronting our fears in a controlled situation. Was Alex Honnold being foolhardy when he climbed El Capitan without a rope? I think it would be a shame to dismiss what is one of the biggest athletic feats of all times. At a much more modest scale, I rock-climb and practice other dangerous sports like skiing and free-diving. The rewards of these sports are not just having fun, but also confronting my fear, learning about myself and training my emotional control. We cannot just wait to be confronted with a dangerous ethical quandary and expect that we will then do the right thing. If we don’t confront our fear on a regular basis and train our courage, it will not be there when we need it. Courage as a virtue has an ethical dimension: it’s doing the right thing even when is dangerous. This has also been called “moral courage” defined by Wikipedia as “the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal, discouragement, or personal loss.” Here, courage connects with integrity. We need to avoid doing wrong but also do right as dictated by our values. And that often requires courage. The dark side Apart from the foolhardy behavior that I mentioned above, a dark side of courage is when we try to impose it on others. The accusation of cowardly is one of the most shameful that can be leveraged to a man. Many boys and teenagers have been wounded when they get it from their fathers or their peers. This problem is being denounced these days as toxic masculinity. However, we risk falling to the opposite problem: denying the value of courage altogether. I think the key is to have the freedom to confront our fear and develop our courage the way we want, not the way others tell us we should do it. 3) Stoicism and resilience Stoicism means being impervious to pain. Men are prone to stoicism because they have higher pain thresholds than women. A deeper form of stoicism is to be able to carry on doing something despite it causing us pain. For example, many sports require a certain degree of pain endurance. I refer here to stoicism with lowercase ‘s’. Stoicism with capital ‘S’ is an ancient philosophy of Greece and Rome that taught to develop Virtue by cultivating logic, emotion control, and working for the good of society. Resilience is the ability to recover after an injury, trauma or setback. It is closely related to stoicism but different from it because it consists of the ability to go back to our normal state and to resume our effort after a trauma, instead of enduring pain. Stoicism has a bad reputation these days, being considered part of toxic masculinity. However, it is necessary for integrity and courage because most worthwhile endeavors require effort and thus a certain amount of pain. “A colossal swindle of the ‘New Age’ movement is the notion that gaining a state of effortless being and doing requires no effort. In fact, great conscious effort, discipline, and patience are normally required to enter the ‘flow zone’ where previous frightening challenges start taking on an aspect of relaxed ease.” - John Long, climber. Unfortunately, our current culture of victimism sees weakness and vulnerability as virtues. This grew out of the tendency of Western culture to see pain as something that must be avoided. But pain is an inevitable part of human activities. Warrior cultures taught that pain must be understood and endured. “Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It is the path of great artists, great religious leaders, and great social reformers.” Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. The dark side of stoicism Stoicism can be harmful when it is not based on understanding and accepting pain, but on ignoring and repressing it. This is particularly true when it comes to emotional pain. 4) Self-sacrifice Masculine self-sacrifice is a healthy counterpart of the aggression and social isolation to which men are prone. It works together with integrity, courage and stoicism to impel men to act for the common good. History is full of examples of men that went to extreme self-sacrifice to defend their values. I am not just talking about first-responders and soldiers here, but also of men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Dedicating one’s life to cultivate wisdom and virtue is a more subtle form of self-sacrifice, as done by sages like the Buddha, Lao-Tzu or the Stoics. Women have their own form of self-sacrifice: the abnegation with which they engage in nurturing and care-taking. The dark side of self-sacrifice Sociobiology argues that males are expendable because once they have deposited their sperm into the females, they are no longer needed for the survival of the offspring. This is true for some species, but completely wrong for others in which both parents are need to take care of the offspring. In the case of humans, not only the parents but a whole tribe is necessary for children to survive for 15 years until their reproductive age. Men are not expendable, but throughout history they have been treated as such. They are the hunters, the warriors, the workers and the soldiers that put their lives at risk. And, since risk acceptance is part of the male biology, self-sacrifice is deeply embedded in most cultures. For example, we see it in the “women and children first” code to rescue people from dangerous situations. Or in the dangerous working conditions imposed on miners, construction workers, firemen, policemen and other dangerous jobs during the Industrial Revolution. Self-sacrifice is responsible for the fact that men do not respond to the men-hatred that often passes as feminism these days. Instinctively, a man reacts to it with thoughts like “there may be something right about this”; “I am strong enough to take this criticism and use it to improve myself”, or “I cannot allow others to be hurt by my response.” Unfortunately, in doing so, they tolerate hatred - betraying their values - and sacrifice not only themselves but also other men. 5) Self-reliance For many men, it’s important to be able to solve problems by themselves, to have confidence in one’s skills. There are several reasons for that. Personal autonomy: if I not depend on others, then I am free to follow my own path on my own schedule. Self-reliance means that I am responsible for my failures and successes, and therefore able to correct my course of action. Hierarchy is important for men, and being self-sufficient means that I don’t have to place myself under the influence or owe favors to other people. I cultivate my self-reliance when I paddle out into the Pacific Ocean in my kayak to scuba-dive; when I go hiking in the mountains; when I write on my computer; when I self-publish and market my books. Other activities, like rock-climbing and skiing, I do with friends, but my skills and self-reliance provide safety for both me and them. Self-reliance ties into integrity because it enables me to follow my own values. Having my own skills and resources increases my courage and my resilience. The dark side of self-reliance Too much emphasis on self-reliance can lead to social isolation and not cooperating with others, which are constant temptations for men, particularly when they are introverted. 6) Self-restraint Since rage and risk-taking are such powerful forces in men, it is important that we restrain our impulses. To control anger, we need to have mindfulness in order to recognize it in its early stages and nip it in the bud. We also need to develop patience, because impatience and annoyance are the seeds of anger. Distinguishing between foolish risk-taking and true courage takes a special kind of wisdom. It should be anchored in integrity: when we know our values and are deeply committed to them, then we would know when to act and how to do it more effectively. The dark side of sel-restraint Too much self-control can inhibit our spontaneity and creativity. 7) Playfulness Playfulness is a forgotten quality of masculinity, even though men are most attractive when they are playful and uninhibited. Masculine playfulness is rambunctious, joyful, energetic, humorous and not self-conscious. It is different from women’s playfulness in that it is less focused on bonding and communication, and tends to be centered more around physical activity, contact with nature and using objects. This grows out of the orientation of men towards risk, moving in space, and using things. Men love their toys: tools, musical instruments, weapons, sport gear, bicycles, cars, boats, planes… They like to play with their things, tuning them to make them better, perfecting their skills at their use. The roughhousing and mock fighting that we see in boys is driven by vasopressin, the other social neuropeptide together with oxytocin. While oxytocin promotes social bonding in females, vasopressin plays a similar role in males, but also drives territoriality and a form of play consisting in mock fighting and trying to grab the opponent by the back of the neck. The dark side of playfulness: competition Playfulness loses its joy and becomes a source of stress when is turned into competition. We live in a society that encourages it in almost all aspects of life. It’s gotten to the point in which we cannot conceive sports without competition. Even activities like rock-climbing and free-diving, which are primarily about getting in touch with nature and with our bodies and emotions, have been turned into competitions to see who can climb the hardest routes or dive to the deepest depths. We compete at work in our “careers” - a synonym of “race” -, in our relationships - to see who can get the most desirable mate -, and even in our spiritual life - to see who is more mindful and enlightened. 8) Humbleness - letting go of the Ego Humility has been used throughout the ages as a way to control men, to harness their aggression so that, instead of using it to rebel against exploitation, it’s put at the service of the powerful and their wars. We were told that being humble is to let go of our ideas and values, and just accept those of the dominant culture and the powerful. That way, the virtue of humility is used to enslave us. Even the Mafia uses the word omerta (humility) to mean loyalty to the capos. True humbleness, however, is about freedom and not slavery. It’s about freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the Ego. The Ego is formed when we interiorize shame from our failures and pride from our successes into a driving force to achieve more things that will earn us praise and to avoid being shamed. Since our focus is on external validation - or the rewards that we have internalized - this takes us away from our natural playfulness and joy and from our values. Since the Ego is made of automatic reactions driven from the opinions of other people, it prevents us from upholding our values - integrity - and makes us less resilient and self-reliant. Conclusions For men, masculinity is an essential part of our humanity. The idea that we can shed our masculinity is a dangerous contemporary myth that only leads to the raise of uncontrolled maleness. Instead, men should cultivate masculine virtues in accordance with their inner essence and their values. Copyright 2021 Hermes Solenzol

How to take control of your life What is personal power? Personal power is to have the psychological fortitude to live a meaningful and happy life. It means being full of energy, motivated, ethical, honest, reliable, self-sufficient, efficacious, joyful, resistant to trauma, resilient and generous. Personal power does not mean acquiring power at the expense of others. It is not being manipulative, selfish and exploitative. There is a psychological energy that we can acquire by living the right way. When we have that energy, that power, we are able to transmit it naturally to others. When we have plenty of it, being generous becomes natural because our power overflows and spills to others. Throughout my life, I have been studying different spiritual traditions to learn how to live the right way. They include Yoga, Siloism, Zen and the Way of the Warrior. But I have always used critical thinking and scientific knowledge to steer me away from the false gurus and to carefully choose among the things that I was taught. What I learned is that there are no superpowers, no magical shortcuts to happiness, no sudden enlightenment. There is only plowing along our ordinary lives, slowly improving ourselves through hard work, honesty and commitment. Only through effort you can reach a state in which living well feels natural. And then the world will throw a new challenge at you in the form of an accident, a disease or other kinds of misfortune. You have to be prepared and weather the storm as well as you can. Ultimately, you are going to lose. We will all die one day. You have to learn to make peace with that. Practice self-compassion Hunting for personal power may sound like a selfish and arrogant thing to do. However, it is not selfish because only by having energy we can give it to others. Only by finding meaning we can illumine the life of others. Only by being happy ourselves we can make others happy. It is not arrogant because personal power needs to be built on an honest assessment of our capabilities and shortcomings. Compassion is the ability to feel the suffering of others, which motivates us to do something to stop that suffering. Self-compassion is the ability to be aware of our own suffering, which motivates us to find ways to be happier. Instead, we try to blunt our own pain. To deny it by distracting ourselves with myriads of things that take our awareness away from the pain. But we fool ourselves when we are not able to stare at our own suffering in the face, believing that we can quench it by craving things that we do not need. Self-compassion is different from self-pity, which consists of blaming our suffering on things out of our control. It leads to resignation and hope: the belief that only changes in the external world can rescue us from our suffering. This is utterly disempowering. Neuroscience has shown that suffering produced by things that we cannot control induces learned helplessness, which forms the basis of psychological trauma (Maier and Seligman, 2016). Therefore, we need to wrestle as much control from our environment as we can, and become aware of that control. To cultivate self-compassion, we need to be aware of the mechanisms behind our suffering. Which means knowing ourselves. Know yourself through meditation and mindfulness Good ways of knowing ourselves are meditation and mindfulness. For me, meditation is not searching for an altered state of consciousness, nirvana, illumination, or an esoteric revelation about the nature of consciousness. Is simply sitting silently while I look at how my mind works. Perceptions, thoughts and emotions emerge out of my unconscious into awareness and disappear back into unconsciousness. Any barrier between the unconscious and the conscious is an illusion. Although this flow of the mind is myself, there are subtle ways in which the flow can direct itself, in which the part of the flow that is my cognitive executive function can gently steer the flow in the direction that makes more rational sense. Likewise, mindfulness is paying attention to the flow of the mind as we move in the world. Without judging, we become aware of how sensations, memories and thoughts enter and leave consciousness. Meditation and mindfulness serve to create meta-attention. It is a mental habit that consists of being aware of what we are paying attention to. By softening the mind, it gently extends the reach of consciousness into the unconscious. We will need that ability to control our emotions and rescue ourselves out of destructive loops of thought, ruminating and catastrophizing. However, there is a place in our life for mind wandering and daydreaming. Especially when it is suffused with meta-attention. Sometimes, we just need to let our mind be what it is; to put forth what it wants. Otherwise, our will becomes our jail. We clip our wings by destroying our imagination. We need to release our horses. Only then we can be creative. Cultivate flow Lately I have been reading about flow, and I am coming to realize that it is even better than meditation to promote mental health and inner power. Flow is a mental state defined in the 1970s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best”. He gave flow the following characteristics: Focused attention on a task. Merging of action and awareness. Decreased self-awareness. Altered perception of time, which either speeds up or slows down. Feeling of complete control. Positive emotions like joy, pleasure, euphoria, meaning and purpose. Others have defined flow as effortless effort. Flow is typically found when doing skill-intensive sports like rock-climbing, skiing or martial arts; or in arts like playing music, dancing, painting or writing. However, flow is not just letting go, or using muscle memory to perform an action with little effort. It is only achieved after arduous training in a particular sport, art or skill. In every particular session, there is usually an initial period of struggle until the performer is able to enter flow. An excellent review of the neurophysiology of flow (Kotler et al., 2022) explores the difference between flow and trauma produced by a risky, scary event. They conclude that flow is induced by engaging with the challenging event in a pro-active way, which recruits the fight response of stress brain circuits. Conversely, emotional trauma set is when we try to avoid the challenging event. This initiates the freeze response to stress. While repeated emotional trauma caused by stress in the absence of control leads to learned helplessness, repeated flow induces a resilience to trauma that Kotler et al. called learned empowerment. Reading this, I concluded that by systematically cultivating the state of flow in my mind, I could create the habit of entering it. This would lead to learned empowerment, which is the same as personal power. Plug power drains Another way to increase personal power is to avoid losing it. This can be done by identifying things in our life that drain us of power and leave us feeling depleted. The obvious things are those that negatively impact our health: smoking, alcohol, abusing drugs, unhealthy eating, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, lack of sex, lack of love, social isolation. Less obvious are mental habits that deplete our mental energy. Mind wandering is often cited but, as a said above, this is not unhealthy by itself. With a sufficient background of meta-attention to collect its fruits of imagination and creativity, it is actually necessary for a healthy mind. What is unhealthy are mindless activities in which we let emotions take control of our mind and our behavior. For example, I noticed how often I engage in mindless talk, unaware of the effect of my words. Worse still is rumination: when our mind obsesses about something that happened in our life, typically a negative social interaction. We cannot let it go, constantly rehearsing what we said, what we should have said, and some improbable action that we are going to take in the future. Rumination is caused by a loss of control in the past, in a futile attempt to regain that control in our imagination. It is driven primarily by anger, but also by fear, jealousy and shame. There is also catastrophizing: imagining something terrible that is going to happen to us. Uncontrolled fear makes our imagination run wild, feeding the fear with scenes of horrible events in an endless loop. Underneath all this, there is the belief that we have lost control over our environment and our life. This belief is the consequence of learned helplessness. Rumination and catastrophizing quickly become mental habits. However, it is possible to steer away from them by using meta-attention to become aware of what is happening, label it, and provide positive images and high level cognitive input. That way, we will be able to break those mental habits. Avoid negative emotions It has become fashionable these days to say that negative emotions are just fine; that we should that let them be. That is bullshit. It’s the result of a poor understanding of the mind by a psychology built on poor evidence and ideology. As I pointed above, hard evidence from neuroscience shows the negative consequences of letting negative states like learned helplessness and rumination take possession of our mind. Ancient philosophical traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism also advise us to avoid negative emotions. It’s impossible to live an ethical life without harnessing negative emotions. If you let anger loose, you will inevitably hurt others. Anger has a way to blind you, warping your worldview and leading you to irrational actions. The same can be said of jealousy, the unrecognized cause of violence against women (Puente and Cohen, 2003; Pichon et al., 2020). As for fear, it will often prevent you from doing the right thing. Of course, all emotions have evolved for a reason. Unfortunately, humans evolved in an environment in which we lived in tribes of hunter-gatherers, which is very different from modern society. As a result, many of our emotional responses are non-adaptive. The main emotions to watch are anger and fear. Shame and guilt are social emotions that can become quite harmful (Lester, 1997; Lee et al., 2001). Sadness, envy and jealousy can also be problematic. Anger, fear and shame are worse when they become chronic, a constant background of our mental state. Chronic anger is felt as constant annoyance, frustration and irascibility that may quickly escalate to full-blown rage, like in road-rage and marital fights. However, when coupled with a sense of powerlessness, it may simmer for years, slowly destroying our body and our mind. One of the signs that this is happening is rumination. Chronic fear is anxiety, an ill-defined feeling that something is wrong, that something terrible is about to happen. It may manifest as catastrophizing. Chronic shame becomes low self-esteem, an immobilizing feeling of paralysis, especially in social interactions. It evokes social anxiety and drives rumination and catastrophizing. The best way to fight negative emotions is to nip them in the bud. Meta-attention can alert us of the emotion growing out of its seed. For example, anger often begins as frustration and annoyance. We should counter them by invoking patience and focus on the task at hand. A habit of entering flow can help a lot, because flow is accompanied by positive emotions like joy and curiosity, and incompatible with negative emotions like anger and fear. If anger has become established in your mind, the best thing to do is to prevent it from taking control of your behavior. For me, reading is a calming activity that will take me out of anger. Other people may want to take a walk, practice a sport, listen to music or watch a movie. It is important to use mindfulness to watch what anger is doing to your mind. Face your fears Fear is a difficult emotion to handle. Sometimes, fear appears because of a real danger. However, there are two possible responses to fear. One is to take action to prevent the danger form causing us harm, taking as much control of the situation as we can. If we manage to feel in control, this would lead to learned empowerment. The second set of responses to danger involves loss of control. We may become immobilized in a freezing response. Or we may act out of control in panic. In both cases, the feeling of loss of control leads to learned helplessness (Maier and Seligman, 2016; Kotler et al., 2022). This creates a trauma scar that lives on as chronic anxiety. In my experience, it is good to train our responses to fear by regularly exposing ourselves to scary situations in ways that minimizes real danger and lets us take control. For example, I practice rock-climbing, a sport in which freezing and panic responses are pretty obvious. Other sports in which to face fear include skiing, surfing and martial arts. For those less adventurous, roller-coasters and horror movies may get them in touch with their fears. However, it is hard to feel in control in those situations. Another thing that helps is to voice out our fears with our friends or in therapy. Emphasize ways in which you can gain control over them. Take responsibility for your actions As you see, taking control of what is happening in your life is a common theme here. Of course, there are many things that escape our control. It would be foolish to pretend that we have superpowers and are able to impose our will on the world. The key here is not the actual control that we have, but feeling in control. This means taking whatever action we can take. Being pro-active instead of passive. An important teaching from spiritual traditions is that we need to detach ourselves from the results of our actions. We do the best we can, and accept the fact that we are not always going to win. Excessive desire for a particular outcome produces an unhealthy craving. It also takes our focus away from performing our task as best as we can. Thus, in a state of flow we are completely focused on what we are doing while forgetting ourselves. In flow, attention is on what we are doing in the present, and the goal is only factored in as one more parameter to direct the action. Rushing to the end of what we are doing takes us out of flow. Taking responsibility for our actions, then, is a mixture of two things: to avoid craving a particular result, and to accept the final outcome with equanimity. This means not beating ourselves up if we failed, but also not taking too much pride if we succeed. Taking responsibility for our actions is not blaming and shaming ourselves. Of course, if we did something unethical, we need to take the appropriate measures for it not to happen again. Do not see yourself as a victim Another aspect of taking responsibility for our actions is not to look for excuses for what we did in external circumstances. Of course, there are numerous factors out of our control that impact the outcome of our actions. It would be foolish not to recognize that. However, “finding excuses” means to take the focus away from the control that we have to dwell in things out of our power. This is a drain of energy because, by definition, we cannot change things that are out of our control. Focusing on whatever control we have is much more effective. Today, we live in a culture of victimism, especially in progressive circles. This is how I think this happened… Postmodern ideology sees the world as a power struggle between the oppressed (Blacks, women, homosexuals, transgender, workers, poor countries, etc.) and the oppressors (Whites, men, heterosexuals, cisgender, capitalists, Western countries, etc.). Politics, then, is the fight to empower the oppressed and eliminate the oppressors. Therefore, if you can identify yourself with one of the oppressed groups, you feel that you belong in the group of the “good people” and can benefit from the privileges given to them. Otherwise, you are an oppressor and targeted as the enemy. Then, everybody tries to show that they, too, are a victim. Lately, even conservatives are adopting this strategy. And so men and incels are the victims of feminism. Whites are the victims of affirmative action, cancel culture and wokeism. And so forth. Leaving aside political ideologies, my point is that seeing yourself as a victim is psychologically unhealthy. It is the opposite of taking responsibility for your actions. Being a victim puts the focus on your disempowerment, blaming the world for your situation. It may be true that you belong to an oppressed group, but victimism is not helping anybody. If you want privileges because you are a victim, how is that not selfish? How about centering your political fight in helping others? That would emphasize the measure of control that you have. That will be empowering. Don’t let anybody blame or shame you We also live in a culture in which blaming and shaming are used as blunt political weapons. To some extent, this is legitimate. If somebody behaves in an unethical way by exploiting and oppressing others, that person deserves to be blamed and shamed. What is not ethical is to blame and shame people because they belong to a certain group that has been labeled as the oppressors. Because they are White, or Jewish, or men, or live in a rich country. This negates individual agency and freedom. People are responsible for what they do, not for who they are. Blaming and shaming are so widespread that they have become a reflex. Total strangers will come up to you and blame you and shame for things that have nothing to do with your doings. Especially online. You should treat these people as toxic. Put as much distance between you and them as you can. Block them online. Do not have them as friends. Steer clear of them as co-workers. They are out to steal your personal power. However, if a close friend or somebody who knows you well, offers you advice and criticizes your actions, listen to them. Remember, knowledge is power, and self-knowledge doubly so. And you cannot see yourself well from the inside. Taking responsibility for your action and equanimity should be your guide in this case. Follow a path with a heart In the big picture, you need to live a meaningful life. Each one of us should find what that means for themselves. It probably involves a combination of having experiences that make you happy, achieving personal growth, and contributing to the betterment of society and the world. A path with a heart is one that makes you feel happy and fulfilled as you follow it. Every step along the path increases your personal power. Just being in the path should be enough because all paths lead to nowhere. We all travel from birth to death. If your life is empty and miserable. If you find no meaning and no purpose, your path doesn’t have a heart. You need to find a better one. Personal power propels you along the path with a heart that is your life. References Kotler S, Mannino M, Kelso S, Huskey R (2022) First few seconds for flow: A comprehensive proposal of the neurobiology and neurodynamics of state onset. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 143:104956. Lee DA, Scragg P, Turner S (2001) The role of shame and guilt in traumatic events: a clinical model of shame-based and guilt-based PTSD. Br J Med Psychol 74:451-466. Lester D (1997) The role of shame in suicide. Suicide Life Threat Behav 27:352-361. Maier SF, Seligman ME (2016) Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychol Rev 123:349-367. Pichon M, Treves-Kagan S, Stern E, Kyegombe N, Stöckl H, Buller AM (2020) A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review: Infidelity, Romantic Jealousy and Intimate Partner Violence against Women. International journal of environmental research and public health 17. Puente S, Cohen D (2003) Jealousy and the meaning (or nonmeaning) of violence. Personality & social psychology bulletin 29:449-460.

How the myth of sexual purity leads to the stigmatization of sex workers Prostitution is a job, not a permanent blemish One of the worst parts of the prostitute stereotype is that, once a woman crosses that line, being a prostitute becomes a part of her identity. It is impossible to erase. Prostitution is not something you do. It’s who you are. She is not eligible to marry a decent man. In fact, decent people would avoid any social contact with her. She is a perpetual outcast, even after she stops practicing prostitution. For many women, the sex work they did in their youth is a skeleton in the closet, to be hidden even from their closest friends, spouse and children. Prostitution and the myth of sexual purity The adage “once a prostitute, always a prostitute” means that, by doing sex work, a woman has soiled herself with a stain that would remain the rest of her life. It would seem that sex work is an unforgiveable crime, as serious as murder or treason. But the issue is slightly different. It’s that sex is considered something sacred, some kind of essence that attaches itself to the very soul of a person. Especially for women. Christian culture has turned sexual purity into the highest virtue of women. The Virgin Mary is worshipped almost as a goddess, taking the place of the female deities of the old pagan religions. Unlike these goddesses, the virgin archetype erases women’s sexuality, replacing it with an exclusive dedication to motherhood. That’s why opposing contraception and abortion is such a fundamental issue for Christians. They put women’s sexuality above the sacrifices they are supposed to make to become mothers. Virginity is a magical quality that is lost once and for all, completely changing the social status of a woman. It gives women who preserve it a special aura of sanctity. Prostitutes are the anti-virgins. Not only they have lost their sexual purity by giving away their virginity; they lose again and again, becoming ever more soiled with every man with whom they have sex. Nowadays, we know that sexual purity is mystical nonsense. Women can have many sexual partners without being considered soiled. In fact, more and more, being sexually experienced is considered as a desirable in both men and women. Casual sex as a perversion of love One version of the sexual purity idea is that sex is only valid when done as an expression of love. Then, prostitution represents a perversion of sex because it’s done for money and not for love. But, again, casual sex in the absence of love or a relationship is very common these days, and increasingly accepted. Then, condemning casual sex only in the case of prostitution becomes a hypocritical double standard. Prostitutes see their job as temporary Prostitutes see their job as something they do to make money during a particular phase of their lives. It’s not a permanent occupation, and much less a part of who they are. For example, the book Legal Tender - True Tales of a Brothel Madam, by Laraine Russo Harper, says: “There were lots of ladies who worked in the brothel just for a specific amount of time. They had goals of how much they wanted to earn or needed to earn, and once they reached their goal, they got out of the business. One lady in particular who had such a goal was Mackenzie. She was twenty-two when she came to the brothel. She had long blond hair, green eyes, and a perfect body. She wanted to make as much money as she could in five years. Then it was her plan to retire. And that’s exactly what Makenzie did.” “During her five-year tenure, she owned a $3 million home in one state, a $2 million condo in another, and a $1 million loft in yet another state. She retired five years later with more money than she would ever need and no one would ever know what she had been doing to earn her living. At twenty-seven Mackenzie retired.” Legal Tender - True Tales of a Brothel Madam, Laraine Russo Harper Of course, not all prostitutes make as much money as the ones in the expensive Nevada brothels described in Legal Tender. The range of income of sex workers is probably as wide as that of writers. Still, escorts and other high-level prostitutes make enough money during their youth to get savings for the rest of their life, pay for college, or launch a small business. Instead of being exploited and outcast, like they are portrayed in the media, young women find in prostitution a way out of poverty and low social status. If prostitution were legalized and afforded some minimal protection, it could become empowering for many young women. Perhaps for some men, too. The sad image of the old, destitute prostitute that we see in some movies doesn’t reflect reality. The ‘Lies About Prostitution’ series This article is part of a series about that the lies that conservatives and radical feminists tell about sex work and prostitution. Previous articles in these series are: Lie 1: Prostitution is Human Trafficking Lie 2: Prostitution Degrades Women Lie 3: Sex Workers Hate Their Job and Their Clients Lie 4: Johns Are Misogynistic and Violent Lie 5: Prostitutes Want to be Rescued Lie 6: Pimps Exploit Prostitutes Lie 7: Prostitutes Are Drug Addicts

How the drug addict cliché is used to deny the agency of sex workers The stigma of addiction The stereotype of the addict is one of the most dehumanizing in modern culture. In it, drug addicts are depicted as mindless zombies who would do whatever is necessary to get their next fix. Whenever some activity needs to be condemned, the best way to do so is to depict it as addictive. This is because addiction deprives us of one of the things we value the most: our free will. Addictive drugs take possession of our minds and force us to do their bidding. Having lost their free will to drugs, addicts can be deprived of their liberty by forcing them into rehabilitation programs or prison. Therefore, stereotyping prostitutes as drug addicts becomes a good excused to persecute them and jail them. Are prostitutes drug addicts? The strong cravings elicited by addictive drugs can lead to desperate actions. If the addict is a woman, trading sex for money can be one of the easiest ways to get the next fix. However, the fact that some drug addicts resort to prostitution doesn’t mean that most prostitutes are addicts. For one thing, drug addicts are high risk for sexually transmitted diseases, and dangerous in some other ways, so customers stay clear of them. Prostitution is a risky activity, not just for the sex worker, but also for the client. Vetting is performed in both directions. The real reasons women engage in prostitution Women engage in sex work for a multitude of reasons. Supporting an addiction is rarely one of them. Some of the most common reasons include: paying for college, getting out of the parent’s home, escaping an abusive relationship, supporting their children, getting into a fancier lifestyle, sexual exploration. For example, modern escorts are often highly educated women who enjoy wearing elegant clothes, eating at posh restaurants, staying in expensive hotels, and doing fancy traveling. They can get all that while working, on top of pocketing good amounts of money. Besides, their clients can be interesting, educated and powerful men. Escorting is quickly erasing the image of the prostitute as low life. Other prostitutes prefer the independence of working from home and the safety of having a limited clientele of regular customers. The ‘Lies About Prostitution’ series This article is part of a series about that the lies that conservatives and radical feminists tell about sex work and prostitution. Previous articles in these series are: Lie 1: Prostitution is Human Trafficking Lie 2: Prostitution Degrades Women Lie 3: Sex Workers Hate Their Job and Their Clients Lie 4: Johns Are Misogynistic and Violent Lie 5: Prostitutes Want to be Rescued Lie 6: Pimps Exploit Prostitutes

An easy guide to find your way in those pesky Amazon pages If you have a Kindle, sending a book that you buy on Amazon to your Kindle is done automatically. The problem comes when you buy the book elsewhere and want to read it on the Kindle. Amazon doesn't make it easy for you. It requires you to send the book file to an email address associated with your Kindle. But this can only be done from an email address that you have previously authorized. Follow these steps. Step 1: Find the email address of your Kindle On your computer, go to Amazon.com and log into the account associated with your Kindle. In the top bar, choose the third option from the right: “Accounts & Lists”. Under “Your Account”, click on “Content and Devices”. A third horizontal bar will appear, in white. In it, click on "Preferences". Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on "Personal Document Settings". Click on that option and you will see a list of your Kindles appear, as well as phones and other devices that have the Kindle app. Next to the name of each Kindle name, you'll see the email address associated with it. This email address can be changed with the "Edit" option. Step 2: Authorize your email address Scroll a little further down and you will find the "Approved Personal Document E-mail List". It may be empty. Click on "Add a new approved email address" and write in the box the email address from which you are going to send the eBooks. Step 3: Send the file with the eBook to the email address of your Kindle From the email address you authorized in step 2, write an email to your Kindle's email address (step 1). Do not include subject or text, just attach the EPUB or AZW file of the book you want to send. The e-book file formats that you can send to your Kindle are AZW and EPUB. Amazon has discontinued the MOBI format, but it still works on older Kindles. I advise you to use EPUB. You can use this same system to send personal documents to your Kindle. However, Amazon charges a fee of $0.15 per document submitted. Kindle accepts the following files: PDF, DOC, DOCX, HTML, HTM, RTF, TXT, JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, MOBI, AZW, and EPUB. Step 4: Turn on your Kindle and wait for the eBook to download If this does not happen, select "Content" in the same bar where "Preferences" is. There you will find a list of all the books and documents accessible on your Kindles. If your book is there and not on your Kindle, then it hasn't been sent to the Kindle. Select “Deliver or Remove from Device” and then check the box for your Kindle. If your book is not there, it has not been uploaded to Amazon. Repeat the steps above to see what is wrong. Other ways to send books to your Kindle These methods require apps. Using the Kindle app on your phone https://www.howtogeek.com/798894/how-to-transfer-epub-to-kindle/ Using Calibre Caliber is a free application that allows you to format and organize all your electronic books and documents. It is a must if you are an independent writer. https://www.howtogeek.com/539829/how-to-transfer-any-ebook-to-kindle-using-calibre/ Use this system if you buy my books My books are not for sale only on Amazon, I also publish them on Draft2Digital (D2D), Smashwords and Gumroad. From D2D and Smashwords, they are distributed to many other outlets including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Indigo, Angus & Robertson, and Mondadori. This helps expand the bookselling market, avoiding the growing monopoly of Amazon. Also, Smashwords and Gumroad allow me to offer discount codes to my friends and readers. If you have a Kindle, buy my books wherever it is convenient for you. Use this system to send them to your Kindle.

How the stereotype of the pimp is used to persecute sex workers The pimp and the Madam stereotypes The myth of the pimp has deep roots in popular cultural. The stereotype of the pimp that we often see in movies and TV is a man dressed in extravagant clothes who regularly beats his whores to keep them under control. He is selfish, greedy and cruel, and has no empathy for his women. Part of the cliché is that the prostitute has a love/hate relationship with the pimp. She may be romantically in love with him. Or she may enjoy the masochistic aspect of being under his control. Another classical form of proxenetism is the Madam: the woman in charge of a brothel. Although not as nasty as the stereotype of the pimp, she is also thought to be greedy and heartless. Modern prostitutes aspire to be business owners These two stereotypes are just part of the whole idea that prostitutes are powerless and exploited, and therefore in dire need of being rescued by the State. But prostitutes aspire to a different way to do their business: “The business owner is the sex worker, because most prostitutes that work freely and voluntarily do it independently.” Paula VIP, sex worker. This is the ideal situation for many sex workers: to work independently as a small, autonomous business. But the pimp stereotype is used to deny them security However, there are some complications. One is security. What happens if a client refuses to pay or gets rough? Another is to establish and maintain a customer base. Thus, a prostitute may decide to hire security, and share a database of trustworthy clients with other prostitutes. The problem is, in many countries, anybody a sex worker hires for safety is considered a pimp. And if she shares a customer list with other prostitutes, she would be considered a pimp herself! The Nordic Model still persecutes prostitutes This is one of the loopholes the much-touted Nordic Model uses to persecute prostitutes. This system - pioneered by Sweden and adopted by Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Canada and France - claims to persecute only Johns and pimps, and not the prostitutes themselves. However, it gives proxenetism such a wide definition that it includes many of the things that the prostitutes do in the course of their business. In Spain, the ruling party PSOE recently tried to introduce legislation that would make even renting an apartment to a prostitute, or receiving money earned for sex work, a crime of proxenetism. Hence the prosecution of proxenetism, sold to the public as a fight against “trafficking”, is at the core of a political strategy of eliminating prostitution, not just by jailing the sex workers, but also by depriving them of the support system that they need for their work.

Unlike animals, humans feel suffering as something that extends beyond the present and that we share with others The assumption of animal suffering in the animal liberation movement Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century utilitarian philosopher, famously asked: “The question is not ‘can they reason?’ or ‘can they talk?’ but ‘can they suffer?’” A utilitarian philosopher of our times, Peter Singer, latched into that question to write his book Animal Liberation. And so the modern animal rights movement was born. Basically, Peter Singer and many other animal rights activists claim that animals suffer like humans and therefore they should be treated like humans. To put in a more sophisticated way, Peter Singer argues that the moral imperative of equality dictates “equal consideration of interests”, that is, that the interests of all beings receive the same consideration. Animals have an interest in avoiding pain, therefore egalitarianism demands that we respect that interest. It is argued further that claiming human superiority based on our superior intelligence, our ability to talk, or our culture, is just stacking the cards in our favor because those are the special attributes of our species. By the same token, an elephant may claim moral superiority based on the fact of having a trunk. The problem of animal suffering However, the whole argument is based on the claim that animals suffer and, moreover, that they suffer like us. Singer and the other animal liberationists just assume that they do. I think this is a faulty assumption that needs to be addressed rigorously, both philosophically and scientifically. However, I understand why animal liberationists take umbrage in it: the whole problem of defining suffering seems intractable at first sight. Suffering, like happiness and consciousness, belong to a class of concepts that are at the same time abstract and fundamental. Defining them in terms that are non-circular seems nearly impossible. If you look at dictionary definitions of suffering, you will find that they refer to pain, unpleasantness or perceptions of threat, which are just examples of suffering. This does not represent a problem when the idea of suffering is applied to human beings, because we can get accurate descriptions of their suffering from other people. However, when we want to apply this concept to animals, we need a clear idea of what we are talking about. Otherwise we risk falling into one of two opposite pitfalls: self-serving callousness - choosing to think that animals do not suffer because this is convenient for us; anthropomorphizing - thinking an animal suffers just because we would suffer in the same circumstances. The latter feels intuitively true because is based on empathy, a powerful human emotion. However, it is not a rational conclusion. Just like in the case of happiness and consciousness, the problem of suffering can be studied scientifically. In fact, there are a lot of scientific studies related to suffering because the public demands that scientists find solutions to pain and distress. Just like with happiness and consciousness, science has not have come up (yet) with a complete description of suffering, but it certainly can tell us a lot of things about it. I think that this information can help us form an educated opinion about whether some particular animal suffers or not. Agency of living beings One of the most peculiar properties of life has been called agency. It refers to the fact that living beings seem to be goal-directed: they strive towards keeping themselves alive and making more beings like them. The concept of agency is explained in detail in the books of Stuart Kauffman, a scientist who has done extensive work on the conceptual underpinnings of life and evolution. However, agency does not imply any form of consciousness or intentionality. It is just something that living beings do automatically because otherwise they wouldn’t be living anymore. It is important to emphasize this because agency can be confused with the “interest” that Peter Singer talks about. Yes, life perpetuates itself, but that doesn’t mean that living beings are conscious or that they have interests and plans like we do. To think otherwise would be to accept some magical vitalist concept of life that science rejected long ago. Therefore, we can conclude that plants do not suffer, although they grow, reproduce and even fight their enemies with chemical responses. Likewise, we should accept that animals that lack a nervous system (like sponges) or that have only a rudimentary nervous system (like worms) do not suffer. Most people would agree with the idea that not all living beings suffer. But what about animals with a complex nervous system? Do they suffer? Pain and suffering Here we must consider that suffering and pain are often confused, but in fact are not identical. Pain produces suffering, but suffering can be produced by things other than pain, like negative emotional states. That pain and suffering are not identical is also shown by the fact that people may experience pain and not suffer from it. For example, the pain experienced when practicing some sports, when eating spicy food and by sexual masochists induces positive feelings instead of suffering. Some drugs called dissociative anesthetics (like ketamine) can selectively turn off the emotional part of pain, leaving intact its sensory component - we are still able to feel the pain, but just don’t care about it. Given the complexity of this subject, I chose to divide this discussion into two parts: suffering that comes from physical pain and emotional suffering. I will start with the first. Nociception Pain scientists distinguish between three concepts: nociception, pain and suffering. This distinction is recognized even by the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights organization. To grasp the idea of nociception, consider the case of a patient who is undergoing surgery under general anesthesia. As the skin and organs of this person are being cut, pain sensory nerves record the damage and send this information to the spinal cord, which continues to the brain. The general anesthetic only stops the conveyance of noxious signals at the cerebral cortex, by disrupting the synchronization of cortical neural networks (Craig, 2010, 2014). This unconscious processing of noxious information is what we call nociception. Pain as an emotion Of course, in an awake person, nociception leads to pain. The key idea here, however, is that the processing of noxious information does not imply the existence of pain. Even if it involves millions of neurons and complex neural pathways. In fact, nowadays, pain is considered part sensation, part emotion. This is because fundamental aspects of pain are emotional, like its negative valence (we dislike it) and its salience (we cannot avoid paying attention to it). Is the complexity of a nervous system key to determine the ability to suffer? Therefore, pain requires a fairly complex nervous system capable of turning sensations into emotions. Based on this idea, I think is reasonable to infer that animals that lack a nervous system of enough complexity do not feel pain. They just have nociception. Behavior consisting in avoiding a noxious stimulus should not necessarily be taken as an sign of pain. Because avoiding physical damage is crucial for survival, avoidant behavior can be found even in the simplest animals. Even plants and microbes react to noxious stimuli. How can be draw a line between animals that have just nociception and those that experience pain? Clearly, many animals do not come even close to having a nervous system complex enough to produce the sensation of pain with its associated negative emotions. Animals like the pond snail (11,000 neurons) or the sea slug (28,000 neurons) just don’t have this capacity. By comparison, we have 100 million neurons just in our gut (the enteric nervous system) and 86 billion neurons in our brain. A table of the number of neurons in different animal species can be found here. Among the invertebrates, the only animal that has a fairly complex nervous system is the octopus, with 300 million neurons, comparable with the rat’s 200 million neurons. This is why countries like the UK and Canada now give cephalopods (octopi, squids and cuttlefish) the same protections given to vertebrates. However, the number of neurons should not be the only metric to measure the complexity of a nervous system. Thus, the neurons of the octopus and other cephalopods do not have a myelin coating in their axons, so they send information much more slowly than the vertebrates. We need to use other metrics, like the number of synapses or overall capacity to process information. But what most people are concerned about are the most complex animals - mammals and birds - which we eat, have as pets and use in scientific research. What about them? Do they feel pain? Do they suffer? The sensory and emotional aspects of pain In mammals, a lot can be learned about the relationship between pain and suffering by studying brain areas involved in the processing of pain. As I said above, pain has a sensory aspect and an emotional aspect. The sensory aspect of pain is processed by the somatosensory cortex, an area shaped like a hairband going from the top to the sides of the brain. It contains a detailed map of the body and processes pain and touch, telling us where these sensations originate. Nowadays, it is recognized that the dorsal posterior insula also contains a map of the body and handles judgements on the localization and intensity of pain. The somatosensory cortex is connected to the orbitofrontal cortex, located at the front end of the brain and whose function is to plan actions according with the information it receives. But neither the somatosensory nor the orbitofrontal cortex are responsible for the emotional component of pain. This function is assigned to two other areas of the cortex: the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Generally speaking, the function of the insula is to tell us how bad pain feels and to associate that emotion with a host of other emotions like sadness, fear, anger, joy, disgust and pleasure. Emotions can be understood as motivational states of the brain. They predispose us to act in a certain way, organizing everything we feel in a hierarchical way according to what takes priority for action. Pain is an emotion that motivates us to stop or escape from whatever is hurting us. This urgent motivational aspect of pain is processed by the ACC. Therefore, we could say that the insula and the ACC work together to turn pain into suffering by giving it its “I don’t like it” and “I want to stop it” qualities. Pain processing is special in humans Recent discoveries have revealed that during the evolution of primates (monkeys, apes and humans) there was a reconfiguration of the brain pathways that process pain, culminating with the appearance of completely new pain processing areas in the human brain (Craig, 2003, 2010). Noxious signals are carried by specialized fibers in the nerves from any part of the body to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. From there, the signals travel to the parabrachial nucleus in the brain stem, where they branch out to different nuclei of the thalamus and the forebrain (Craig, 2003). Located in the middle of the brain, the thalamus functions as the central relay of all sensory information. Its different parts, or nuclei, handle visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile and pain information. Different thalamic nuclei send pain signals to the four areas of the cortex mentioned above: the somatosensory cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula and the ACC. These pain pathways are present in all mammals, but in primates a new additional pathway emerged that directly links the spinal cord with the nucleus of the thalamus connected to the insula, bypassing the parabrachial nucleus. This means that pain sensations are able to reach directly the part of the cortex where feelings are created. In humans, the size of this direct pathway between the thalamus and the insula is much larger and more complex than in monkeys. The anterior insula There is another change in the brain unique to humans, which is not found even in monkeys. It’s a new region of the brain called the anterior insula (Craig, 2011; Bauernfeind et al., 2013). A. D. Craig is a scientist who has studied these changes by mapping the brains of monkeys, apes and humans. He thinks that the posterior insula serves to create an emotional map of the state of the body at each moment. The anterior insula, in contrast, serves to model the state of the body in hypothetical situations: “if this were to happen, this is what I would feel.” Craig proposes that the anterior insula mediates self-awareness by modeling feelings that represent the interior state of the body. The representation of hypothetical states of the body performed by the anterior insula is also responsible for empathy: the ability to feel what another person is feeling. The anterior insula does that by simulating their body state in our own brain. The gradual appearance of the anterior insula in apes like bonobos and chimpanzees correlates with the development of empathy and positive social emotions (Rilling et al., 2012; Bauernfeind et al., 2013). Therefore, as the mammalian brain evolved into the human brain, the insula became more relevant in generating the negative emotions associated with pain. This increased the depth of suffering. Two other unique properties of the human mind, extended consciousness and theory of mind, contribute to this. Extended consciousness means that not only we experience pain in the present moment, as animals do, but we are also aware of having suffered in the past and that we may suffer in the future. Animals that lack an anterior insula would not be able to experience suffering as something that extends into the past and the future. Although animals have memories, without the anterior insula they cannot use them to construct a vivid representation of their past suffering, like we do. They do not have deep suffering. A measure of self-awareness and deep suffering may exists in elephants and cetaceans, which also have a developed anterior insula and ACC with von Economo neurons. Conclusion: some animals suffer but only humans have deep suffering We need to take a gradualist approach when considering the existence of pain and suffering in animals. Invertebrates, with the possible exception of cephalopods, do not appear to have a nervous system complex enough to feel pain, let alone experiencing suffering. Their behavior can be explained by automatic responses to nociceptive signals. Vertebrates, particularly the ones with highly complex nervous systems like mammals and birds, do experience pain and probably suffer from it. However, the deep suffering that we experience as humans beings, rooted in our extended consciousness and our capacity to imagine the future, does not seem to exist in other mammals. Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer failed to understand the true nature of suffering when they came up with the idea of speciesism. Just as we do not give the same moral status to animals and plants, we cannot give the same moral status to all animal species. When deciding how we should treat animals, we need to take into consideration whether they can feel pain and, if they do, whether they suffer from that pain. The suffering of a mouse, a dog, a monkey and a chimpanzee are not equivalent. By the same token, human suffering has to be given a higher ethical consideration than the suffering of other animals. There is a moral imperative to diminish suffering in all sentient beings, but when difficult choices have to be made, human suffering has to come first. If saying this makes me a speciecist, I will wear that label with pride. But I’d rather call myself a humanist, because for me the priority is to decrease human suffering. References Bauernfeind AL, de Sousa AA, Avasthi T, Dobson SD, Raghanti MA, Lewandowski AH, Zilles K, Semendeferi K, Allman JM, Craig A.D., Hof PR, Sherwood CC (2013) A volumetric comparison of the insular cortex and its subregions in primates. J Hum Evol 64:263-279. Craig A.D. (2003) Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Curr Opin Neurobiol 13:500-505. Craig A.D. (2010) The sentient self. Brain Struct Funct 214:563-577. Craig A.D. (2011) Significance of the insula for the evolution of human awareness of feelings from the body. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1225:72-82. Craig A.D. (2014) Topographically organized projection to posterior insular cortex from the posterior portion of the ventral medial nucleus in the long-tailed macaque monkey. J Comp Neurol 522:36-63. Rilling JK, Scholz J, Preuss TM, Glasser MF, Errangi BK, Behrens TE (2012) Differences between chimpanzees and bonobos in neural systems supporting social cognition. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 7:369-379.

Sex workers do not want to be rescued by men marrying them, or by religious conservatives and radical feminists giving them a choice between jail and exploitative jobs Knight in shining armor wants to marry a prostitute One popular myth, found in songs, novels and movies, is that of the lucky prostitute who gets rescued from her horrible job by a man who marries her. As the story goes, the ex-prostitute is forever indebted to her rescuer. She was forced into prostitution by the unfortunate circumstances of life. She was miserable doing it. The rescuer is a generous man, selfless enough to overlook the degraded state of the prostitute. He is so loving, smart and dedicated that is able to “clean her up” and elevate her back to the status of a “normal” woman. This narrative is just another version of the classist theme of the wealthy man who gets to pick the poor but pretty woman and mold her to his wishes, because she is forever grateful that he has raised her to his high social status. Which, in turn, is subtly misogynistic in that the man is wealthy and powerful, and the woman is powerless except for her sex appeal. It’s the plot of the movie Pretty Woman and many similar stories since antiquity. Another example is the song Roxanne by The Police. However, the reality is quite different. Most prostitutes do not want to be rescued. Least of all by some random loser who looks down on her and thinks he is doing her a favor. He’s probably the one who needs to be rescued. The prostitute has chosen her job for good reasons. She doesn’t need anybody to take that choice away for her. Maybe she already has a husband or a romantic partner, and going into sex work was a joined decision (I personally know two cases). Maybe she is raising a child. Maybe she has just found her way out of an abusive relationship, and the last thing she wants is to get into another. Indeed, some of these would-be rescuers are men who see a disempowered woman who they can easily control. The State comes to the rescue by offering exploitative jobs But sometimes the abuser is not a man who wants to marry the prostitute, but a high-minded ideologue who knows what is best for her, either a religious conservative or a radical feminist. Ideologues are not interested in the prostitute as a person, but in prostitution as an abstraction. They see it as a blight that needs to be scoured from society. And they intend to use the policing powers of the State to do that. Never mind the interests and the well-being of the prostitute. This doesn’t surprise anybody. It has been going on for centuries. It’s just an extension of the religious sexual repression of the Middle Ages. Just like the abuser who hides his desire for control behind the idea that he is doing the prostitute a favor, anti-prostitution ideologues want to rescue prostitutes without asking them first. They assume that they want to be rescued, because surely anybody would want to get out of such an exploitative and degrading job, wouldn’t they? They want to take them out of their sex jobs - using the police if necessary - to offer them “honest” jobs. Like, for example, sweeping floors, or sewing for some huge apparel corporation. Jobs that are suitable for women in their social class. Because, please, let’s not pretend that prostitutes have the same social stature as the radical feminists who get to decide their future. After all, these feminists have gone to college and now hold tenured positions in Gender Studies at a university, or work in a law firm, or have gone into politics and gotten powerful government positions. Rescuers want to disempower sex workers and steal their voices Prostitutes beg to disagree with all these rescuing schemes. They have been trying with all their might to make their voices heard. Like any worker, they have been organizing in associations and unions to fight for their rights, like COYOTE in the United States. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects provides a list of such groups worldwide. However, like any other abuser, anti-prostitution ideologues are keen on disempowering their victims and stealing their voices. For example, in Spain, prostitutes tried to organize a series of talks in universities about their problems, only to be massively canceled by radical feminists. The union OTRAS was persecuted by the Spanish government led by the socialist party PSOE. After a fight, it finally had its statutes legalized by the Spanish Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the PSOE has declared its intentions to persecute prostitution in Spain in its electoral program. Of course, the situation in the USA is much worse. Prostitution is still a crime persecuted by the police using all kind of entrapment methods. FOSTA-SESTA legislation - co-sponsored by politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties - played on the deliberate confusion of prostitution with sex traffic, banning sex workers from the internet and making illegal many of the things that they did to protect themselves. Prostitutes do not need to be rescued. What they need is the State to stop treating their work as a crime. They need to have the same rights as any other citizen. They need to have the same protections against exploitation as any other worker.

The clients of prostitutes are mostly sexually frustrated men The stereotype of the john The stigma of prostitution extends to their clients, even more so after the Nordic Model for persecuting prostitution focused law enforcement on johns and pimps. The stereotype of the john is a man who is lonely, antisocial, misogynistic, unable to form romantic relationships, and prone to physical violence and rape. It is hard to know to what extent this image correspond to reality, because research studies on men who buy sex are even more scarce than those studying sex workers. The few studies I could find usually focus on the treatment of sex workers by their clients and on behaviors that increase the risk of sexually transmitted diseases like avoiding condom use (Schei and Stigum, 2010; Jones et al., 2015), rather than on the johns themselves and their motives. Prostitution customers are sexually frustrated men The best study I could find (Deogan et al., 2021) was a randomized survey of 6048 Swedish men, using data from a population-based survey of both genders. It included men 16-84 years old. It found that 9.5% of the men had ever paid for sex, which is comparable to what was found in studies in Norway, 13% (Schei and Stigum, 2010), and Britain, 11% (Jones et al., 2015). Only 0.26% of the men said that they had purchased sex within the last year. Men younger than 29 were less likely to had bought sex, although this is likely a confound of the question - obviously, they had less time for having “ever” bought sex than older men. Otherwise, there was little correlation of buying sex with age, educational level and income. If anything, men of lower education and income were slightly more likely to buy sex. The study found that men who bought sex were dissatisfied with their sex lives, had less sex that they wanted, viewed more porn, and looked for sex partners online. This is hardly surprising. It shows that men buy sex because they are sexually frustrated and cannot get sex otherwise. It also suggest that men who are less educated, have less income and are older buy sex because they find it harder to date women. Rape myth acceptance Another study (Klein et al., 2009) used the Burt’s Rape Myth Acceptance Scale in men who had been arrested for soliciting prostitutes in British Columbia. It found that rape myth acceptance was lower in older and more educated men; and also in men who viewed more porn, wanted more frequent sex, and believed that purchasing sex is a problem. Rape myth acceptance correlated positively with sexual conservatism, sexual violence and coercion, and social desirability. This indicates that beliefs that reinforce rape and sexual violence are not related to porn use or sexual desire, but to conservative views of sex. Sex Work benefits disabled people A topic that is rarely discussed is that sex work can provide relief for the sexual desire and loneliness of disabled people. In fact, in Victoria, Australia, people with disabilities are entitled to hire a sex worker and have the National Disability Insurance Service (NDIS) pay for it. In Norway, men who pay for sex are more likely to be on a disability pension (Schei and Stigum, 2010). Conclusions These studies show that the clients of prostitution are most sexually frustrated men who have trouble finding sexual partners. Johns are no more inclined to rape or sexual violence than other men. However, criminalization of prostitution make sex workers vulnerable to attacks by those clients that are so inclined.

How biochemistry unravels the mystery of life When I was in my last year of college, I had an epiphany. As I was listening to a lecture on thermodynamics of irreversible processes, my eyes were opened and I suddenly understood what is life. This was not some kind of mystical revelation but the culmination of two years of hard work studying biochemistry and molecular biology. But all of a sudden it all came together, and I understood what life is at its essence. Vitalism Since antiquity, people have wondered what makes living beings different from inanimate objects. The fact that an animal can be alive and then dead, and still look pretty much the same, gave rise to the idea of vitalism, which sustains that life is caused by a non-material essence, life force or Elan Vital, that infuses organisms with life and leaves them when they die. This idea persisted until the 20th century when it was debunked by the development of biochemistry, a science that explains life in terms of chemistry. But it is not as simple as that. Schrödinger’s first hypothesis and the discovery of DNA A good place to start is a book titled What is life? written by a famous quantum physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. The book came out of three public lectures that Schrödinger gave at the Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943, while being exiled from Nazi Germany. In them, Schrödinger put forward two daring hypotheses. The first, which he termed “order from order”, was a genial insight. It proposed that the genes used by living beings to pass information from one generation to the next were an “aperiodic crystal” that stored information as a code in its molecular structure. He was right. The aperiodic crystal was found a decade later: it was DNA. An explosion of scientific discoveries followed. They established the genetic code and the mechanisms of transcription of DNA into messenger RNA (mRNA) and the translation of mRNA into proteins. These discoveries confirmed the theory of evolution by explaining: the molecular identity of the genes, the link between genes and sexual reproduction, why genes last for many generations, how changes in the DNA molecule are the mutations that drive evolution. The gene-centric view of life The problem was that many scientists fell so in love with genes and DNA that they thought that reproduction is the defining characteristic of life and the DNA-RNA-protein encoding system is its core mechanism. Everything else in a living organism is at the service of them. This view reflects the centralized and hierarchical way in which our society is organized. DNA is the king or the president. It sits in his throne in the nucleus at the center of the cell, from where it gives orders that are transmitted by its ministers, the messenger RNAs, and are faithfully executed by the workers, the proteins. However, there are a few problems with the gene-centric view of life: Reproduction is not the fundamental characteristics of life, because an organism can be alive even if it is unable to reproduce. Reproduction serves to perpetuate life in the long term and to drive evolution. DNA is not essential to be alive. Red blood cells (erythrocytes) are alive even though they do not have a nucleus with DNA. In the lab, it is possible to keep alive cells without a nucleus or preparations like synaptosomes, presynaptic terminals pinched off neurons. Viruses contain DNA or RNA, but they are not alive and able to reproduce until they infect a living cell. How do we know that something is alive? How do we know that red blood cells are alive and viruses are not? Because living cells breathe, consuming oxygen and producing CO2. They have an electric potential across their membrane. They can absorb substances from the outside and expel others. They consume substances to produce energy. All these properties mean that living cells have a metabolism. Viruses do not breathe, have no membrane potential and do not move or consume substances. They have no metabolism. To take a closer look, let’s consider what happens when a cell dies. To find out if a cell is alive, one of the things a scientist would do is to measure the amount of calcium ions (Ca2+) that it has inside. Living cells maintain a steep gradient of calcium concentration across their membrane, so that the amount of calcium inside is 10,000 times less than the amount of calcium outside. Another way to know if a cell is alive is to look at the electrical potential across its membrane: it should be about -60 millivolts. This electrical potential is maintained by pumping sodium ions (Na+) to the outside and potassium ions (K+) to the inside, although their concentration gradient is not as dramatic. A dead cell has a large amount of calcium inside and no membrane potential. All of its ion gradients have collapsed. These are just two examples of things in a living cell that do not make sense from the chemical point of view. Things seem to be quite out of place. Ions should be equally distributed on both sides of the membrane. Unstable substances are present in large amounts. There is energy and chemical imbalance everywhere. But what is even stranger is that, despite all that chemical imbalance, things stay the same. For example, the concentration of calcium inside a cell is always close to 100 nano-molar. Calcium concentrations may increase 10 times to convey a signal, but they immediately return to normal. Likewise, the concentration of any other substance within the cells is kept within a narrow range. There is a word for this property of life: homeostasis. It means the ability of a living organism to maintain a stable internal environment. Entropy and Schrödinger’s second hypothesis Because chemical imbalances require energy to be maintained, to understand homeostasis we need to invoke some basics concepts of chemistry and thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of disorder in a closed system always increases over time. The precise term for disorder is ‘entropy’, which is a measure of all the possible configurations of a system. That means that a highly organized system, like a living cell, requires a lot of energy to stay that way. Schrödinger also had an insight concerning the role of entropy in life. Unfortunately, it is not remembered as well as his prediction that genetic information would be stored in an aperiodic crystal. In his book What is Life? Schrödinger called his second hypothesis order from disorder. He said that for a living organism to keep its low entropy state it had to absorb energy and pump entropy to the outside. He called that property negentropy (negative entropy), but the term never caught on. Homeostasis is a state far from chemical equilibrium From the chemistry standpoint, increasing entropy means that a chemical reaction would proceed until the state of the lowest energy is reached. If compound A reacts with B to generate energy and compound C, the reaction will proceed until A and B are exhausted and all that remains is C. In other chemical reactions, compounds A and B react to produce compounds C and D, but the inverse reaction in which C and D produce A and B can also take place. In this case, an equilibrium is reached at some particular concentrations of A, B, C and D that minimize entropy. This is called chemical equilibrium. A living cell is a vast network of interlinked chemical reactions. These reactions are constrained by barriers (membranes and the cytoskeleton) that create the external and internal structure of the cell. Remarkably, these chemical reactions never reach chemical equilibrium and, in fact, the concentrations of substances inside a living cell are far away from equilibrium. Still, their concentrations do not vary: this is what homeostasis means. It is easy to keep concentrations of compounds the same at equilibrium, but to keep them stable far from equilibrium requires a system that carefully regulates the rate of those chemical reactions, speeding them up if the concentrations of products are too low and slowing them down if they are too high. This is achieved by having each reaction catalyzed by a protein called an enzyme, which is like a nanomachine with little control buttons that can speed it up or slow it down. So what presses those buttons? Well, other enzymes and signal molecules inside the cell. DNA is not a king The production of enzymes is regulated by the DNA-mRNA-protein genetic mechanism that I described above. But the DNA is not the king but just another piece of the machinery. DNA does not give orders, it follows them. And who orders DNA around? Proteins and small signaling molecules that tell the DNA which genes get to be expressed and how fast. So proteins are not the proletariat of the cell, but they are not kings, either. They follow orders from other proteins. Living cells are not organized like our societies or even our computers, because there is no command center. The cell just keeps going by having its parts interact which each other and with the environment. The best way to understand this is to view the cell as an information processing system, computing endlessly the best way to keep its homeostasis going. If I were to use a computer metaphor, DNA would not be the central processing unit but the hard drive where information is stored long term and extracted when needed. And it is a read-only hard drive, because permanent changes in the DNA genetic information are not allowed. Only the twin processes of mutation and natural selection get to make permanent changes in the DNA. Prigogine, dissipative structures and intracellular signals The idea that a living system is a system far from equilibrium or, as he called it, a ‘dissipative structure’, was envisioned by Ilya Prigogine, who wrote mathematical equations explaining this behavior. Recent discoveries on cell biochemistry supported his ideas. They unraveled the complex networks of intracellular signals that maintain homeostasis. Not only that, they also explained how a cell reacts to its environment or signals from the rest of the body, if the cell is part of a multicellular organism. Systems that are far from equilibrium and yet keep their shape are all around us. For example, a river: the water that flows in it is never the same and yet the river keeps its shape. The river is part of a non-equilibrium system: energy from the sun evaporates water from the sea that rains in the mountains and flows back to the sea, forming the river. But while the river may be turbulent and uneven below its surface, in a living cell every molecule is precisely placed and controlled. A more apt metaphor for a living cell will be ten thousand people juggling balls and passing them to each other in a precisely coordinated way. How did life get started? The homeostatic view of life has profound implications in many fields of biology. Take the problem of the origin of life, for example. The most accepted view these days is that of the RNA-world, in which molecules of RNA interacted with proteins to catalyze the first reactions of life. However, before that, there had to be a long process in which chemical reactions became progressively interlinked to create the first self-sustained entities. Then a primitive form of natural selection favored the most stable of those entities, slowly encouraging internal control to finally giving raise to homeostasis. The tightly regulated homeostasis of modern organisms probably took a lot of trial and error to evolve. With it came the formation of proteins, catalysis of reactions by proteins or RNA and, finally, DNA and the genetic code. Life as information processing That day in my last year of college, while the professor explained Prigogine’s ideas, it all came together. I understood that life is really homeostasis. Over the years, as I studied cell signaling systems with my own experiments, I realized that there is something beyond homeostasis. What keeps the system together in all its delicate balance is the flow of information through its signaling systems. Although there is no central processing unit, there is a certain hierarchy of control. “Intracellular signaling systems”, as they are called, form pathways for the transmission, amplification and processing of information. For example, one of them is formed by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase, the small molecule cyclic-AMP and enzyme protein kinase A, which changes the functioning of many proteins by attaching phosphoric acid to them in a process called phosphorylation. Other enzymes, the phosphatases, remove the phosphate. But there are many other signaling pathways, forming all kinds of complicated branches and loops. We are still trying to classify them and understand them. Its essence, then, life is the processing of information with the goal of keeping itself going. Reproduction is just a way to prolong the process in the long term, thanks to the effectiveness of DNA in preserving information. A living organism, therefore, is something essentially different from a material object. An object keeps its shape because its atoms and molecules stay in the same place. Inside a living organism everything moves; matter and energy come in and out. Like the water that flows in the river, atoms are not there to stay, they are just passing by. What always remains, in the end, is the information.

And how to defend yourself against them. Yes, they can hurt you The first mistake we make is to think that we cannot be hurt by our interactions online. After all, they are two separate worlds: the real one, where we live under our real name and interact with our friends and families, and the one behind our computer screen. In it, we are anonymous or hidden under a nickname. The relationships we develop can be severed at our whim by blocking people or ghosting them. Anything they write about us is not really about us, but about our internet persona. We can safely walk away from the nastiness simply by turning off our computer or putting away our phone. Then we go back to our real selves in our real lives. But things are not like that. Our brains are programed to respond to shaming and blaming by other people, no matter if they are in the real world or behind a computer screen. The relationships and social networks we create online are as real as the ones in the physical world. Fooled by our anonymity, we share secrets online that we wouldn’t dare to tell to our best friends. And then those secrets can be thrown back at us to hurt us in the most intimate places of our psyches. Since other people in the internet are also cloaked behind nicknames, their social inhibitions are turned off, and they dare say things that they would never say in the physical world. Nice doctor Jekyll turns into nasty mister Hyde as soon as he touches that keyboard. He also believes that what he writes cannot really hurt us, so he pours his venom with complete abandon. But, yes, we can be hurt online. It happens all the time. People are thrown into anxiety, rumination, depression and even suicide. If, like I do, you go into the internet to share your knowledge and defend worthy causes, you should be aware of all the ways people can be dishonest and abusive. You need to fend off the bad guys and attract the good ones. You need to know how to stay on message and avoid being derailed into worthless arguments. In this article, I compile ten dishonest and abusive tricks that you may find on the internet, and what you can do about them. 1) The personal attack The most basic and frequent form of internet abuse is the personal attack. You are discussing a problem in general terms, and then somebody comment on it, making it all about your person. This is an informal fallacy called ‘ad hominem’, which in Latin means ‘to the person’. Ideas should be considered on their own value, not based on the person who expresses them. Attacking the person and not the idea is a distraction commonly used by people who don’t have solid arguments against that idea. This turns an intellectual argument into an emotional one, since it is very easy to escalate an ad hominem into all sorts of blaming and shaming. Then you find yourself defending your reputation, and not the idea that you wanted to express. Questioning your authority on the topic at hand is not always dishonest. People have legitimate reasons to want to know how educated you are on a subject. If you have some academic credentials or an education degree, you may want to give them. However, this is not always a good idea. For one thing, you may out yourself, so you are no longer anonymous while your opponent remains so. This puts you in a situation of vulnerability, open to further attacks based on the information they may find about you. You may also be forced into the converse fallacy of the ad hominem: the argument from authority. It consists of defending an idea on the basis of your authority on the matter, instead of giving evidence and rational arguments to support it. A better solution is to show your authority by demonstrating it, for example, by citing papers and books that support your position. Or you may explain obscure ideas and technical jargon in ways that make everybody understand them. This will make you more popular amongst people who are trying to learn something, at the same time that it shows that you really know what you are talking about. Just try not to sound condescending. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you are not trying to convince the person arguing with you. In most cases, that person would be so attached to his beliefs that it would be impossible to convince them. Who you are trying to convince is everybody else watching the discussion. “Abusive ad hominem argument (or direct ad hominem) is associated with an attack to the character of the person carrying an argument. This kind of argument, besides usually being fallacious, is also counterproductive, as a proper dialogue is hard to achieve after such an attack.” Wikipedia. If a personal attack raises to the level of insult, block that person without a second thought. Life is too short to deal with mean people. 2) Fishing for personal information Personal attacks take many forms. The most vile seek points of weakness in your past to make you ashamed of them. The problem is that your attacker doesn’t know much about you. Hence, they need to extract some personal information from you beforehand. They may do that by feigning genuine curiosity or sympathy. Only after they have gathered the information that they want they will start their attack. Another strategy is to write a wild assumption about you. When you correct them, you give them the information they want. For example, a woman recently responded to one of my comments by saying that surely I was single and had problems dating. She implied that I was a misogynist and, therefore, no woman would want to date me. I replied saying that I had been married for 30 years, what about her? That way, I gave a minimum of truthful information and turned the tables on her. Of course, she didn’t volunteer if she was single or married. She knew the rules of her own game. 3) The dog pile The dog pile is one of the most vicious internet attacks. It’s when a group of people collude to make a simultaneous personal attack on you. The term ‘dog pile’ existed in the English vocabulary long before the invention of the World Wide Web. The internet made it possible to take it from a physical attack to a verbal one. Here is an old Bugs Bunny cartoon perfectly illustrating how a dog pile work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7CtOgFYtu0 Often, the people making a dog pile are part of a clique that follow a dog whistle of one of their members to appear in the comment section of one of your posts. Other times, dog piles form spontaneously when you dare post a view the goes against the commonly held beliefs of a site - not a wise thing to do. Stay off that site. You won’t make any friends or convert anybody there. You’ll be like Bugs Bunny chewing his carrot in the dog’s neighborhood. Since in a dog pile a lot of people are posting simultaneously, it is nearly impossible to defend yourself by responding to each of their comments. You could write a collective response, but this would just emphasize the fact that there are a lot of people against you. People are cowards, so don’t expect anybody to rush to your defense - unless you have enough friends to form a counter-dog pile in response. But even that would have destroyed the comments to your article. I found that the best response to a dog pile is to individually block every individual participating in it. These people are mean, you won’t miss them as followers. If you detect the dog pile early enough, you can block the instigators, thus nipping the attack on the bud before it does too much damage. 4) Baiting Baiting is when somebody post something in a provocative tone to evoke an emotional response from you. Things tend to escalate and go downhill from there. Baiting achieves its objective by making you look like a nasty, emotional and aggressive person. The more you descend to the level of your provocateur, the more you drive the onlookers away from your position. Besides, some provocateurs are deftly enough to always look cooler than you. If you are responding to comments on your blog or to one of your articles, you are defending your home turf. An attacker looks like a daring outsider, which gives her an advantage. Always remember that you are not writing for the attacker, but for the onlookers. Think of how you appear to them. The best way to respond to baiting is with a rational, overly polite answer. Not answering is always a good option. At least, you won’t waste your time. The baiter will not get her reward and will probably look for better targets. And you will devote your time and energy to the good members of your audience. However, keep in mind that intelligent disagreeing comments are the best. Agreeing comments are nice but boring, because it is hard to reply to them with something entertaining. An opponent willing to argue honestly is the best thing that can happen to your article. Treat them with the utmost respect and give them your best. A smart, profound discussion will enthrall your audience in ways that your article could not. 5) Sidetracking Sidetracking is when somebody takes the discussion away from the man topic of your article. It’s a common and annoying practice. If you built the reasoning of your article in a way that is rationally waterproof and based on solid evidence, people who disagree with it will find it hard to argue against it. Instead, what they would do is to nitpick on an irrelevant detail or take the conversation away to a different topic. This may be a topic that they know better than you, where they can embarrass you and destroy your credibility. Don’t let yourself be sidetracked. Do not respond to sidetracking comments. If you do, bring the discussion back to the main topic by sidetracking the sidetracker. If people follow a sidetracking thread, do not participate in it. Do not complain that they are sidetracking, because that would make you look like a censor. If you do not participate, you would avoid risking your credibility and lending importance to the sidetracking topic. 6) The joke is on you Often, sidetracking is done by joking. This could signal the beginning of a personal attack or a dog pile. There may be a trick question that then turns you into the butt of a joke. But, if you don’t play along with a joke, this would make you appear straitlaced and humorless. You’ll have to use your best judgment about how to respond to a joke. If you are witty and appreciated for your sense of humor, you could outwit the joker. A friendly audience will often flock to your side. But beware that this may escalate and you may not keep up your smart responses for long. Do not turn your response into an attack on the outsider. Always be friendly and compassionate. Your success as a writer depends on making friends, not enemies. 7) The Kafka trap “A sophistical rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt. […] Coined by American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement Eric S. Raymond in 2010 in reference to the book Der Proceß (The Trial, 1925) by the Bohemian author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), in which a man is accused of crimes that are never specified, and every defense is treated as proof of guilt.” Kafkatrap, Wiktionary. Somebody accuses you of being a misogynist, a racist, a communist, etc. When you deny it, this is taken as evidence that you are because that’s precisely what a misogynist, racist, communist, etc. would say. In its most elaborated forms, Kafka traps are constructed so that even good behavior in support of a cause is taken as evidence that you have a secret agenda. You are virtue signaling. Or, worse, planning some ultimate exploitative act. For example, nice guys are the worst misogynists. White men dating Black women are racists. Men dating trans women are abusing them. The underlying idea is that being part of an oppressor group is an irredeemable quality, so that every good deed from members of that group would eventually turn evil. That there are nasty motives behind every good intention, even if they are unconscious. Because nobody can escape the oppressor-victim dynamic at the core of postmodern ideology. “As almost any glance back in history will tell you, silencing a subsection of society simply encourages the pretence of compliance, a fostered resentment and a festering that will re-emerge at a later date. The Kafka Trap is an excellent way to keep the walls of an echo chamber solid and a bad way to promote social change.” @Argumentative Penguin. Verbal Prison: How To Spot and Escape The Kafka Trap https://medium.com/lucid-nightmare/verbal-prison-how-to-spot-and-escape-the-kafka-trap-e7ee4104dbc8 8) Arguments from gender, race, nationality, etc. This is a variant of the ad hominem attack that is worth mentioning because it has become so pervasive in identity politics that it is almost part of its ideology. A long time ago, conservatives used to say that women or Blacks couldn’t say anything worth hearing because they were of lesser intelligence and education. Perhaps this is still true today in some conservative circles. But, nowadays, this misogynistic and racist idea has been turned on its head by identity politics. What somebody says can be discounted solely because he belongs to the wrong gender, race or nation. Again, the underlying assumption is that whatever is said by a member of an oppressor group can be attributed to wanting to maintain the privilege of that group, and not to an honest opinion or an idea based on evidence and logic. This frees people who espouse ideological dogmas from having to defend them against powerful arguments. A variant of this is to imply that the subjective experience of somebody belonging to an oppressed group trumps any objective finding related to this group. For example, a woman mocked me for being a man writing about female orgasms. Since I could not experience them firsthand, it was impossible for me to know anything about them. No matter how many women I had sex with. No matter how many scientific papers about orgasms I had read. Taken to its logical conclusion, this attitude would invalidate any scientific evidence in favor of the subjective experiences of certain people. 9) Pearl-clutching This expression comes from the image of a Victorian woman in rich clothes clutching her pearl necklace while exclaiming “Good Heavens! I can’t believe you could say that!” Or something along those lines. It’s a shaming maneuver that invites indignation from the audience. It’s designed to put you in a defensive position by having to defend your right to express an idea before you can start actually defending that idea. You would need to argue that expressing that idea is not a moral outrage. Even if you manage to do that, it would put you in a weakened position by the time you get around to defend your idea. Even though the image of pearl-clutching evokes Victorian era puritanism, today this attitude is most commonly encountered in those defending the politically correct status quo. 10) The easily offended Recently, in a chat group, I defended a gay man against a dog pile. People were attacking him because he said that there was still homophobia in some kinky groups. Among other things, I pointed out that a group attack on somebody who was gay could be perceived as homophobic. A woman who had marginally participated in the dog pile took great offense at that, saying that I had accused her of being homophobic. Never mind that I didn’t accuse her, or anybody else, for that matter. I just pointed out that what they were doing was wrong. As I said above, personal attacks are against people. Attacking ideas should be part of the normal discourse; otherwise, there would be censorship. We should also be free to condemn some behaviors. In fact, this is what I am doing in this article. Criticizing behaviors is essential to fight for a just society. For centuries, taking offense by confusing an attack of an idea, an ideology or a religion with a personal attack has been a favorite strategy of the defenders of dogma. Thus, questioning the dogmas of Christianity was presented as an attack on Christians and got a lot of people tortured and killed. Today, the Left furiously condemns any criticism of Islam as a bigoted attack on Muslims. Never mind that Islam holds the same misogynistic and homophobic ideas that the Left has been fighting in conservative Christianity. Conclusion The only hope out of the cultural wars that are tearing Western societies apart is to establish a solid base of common norms for polite discourse, evidence and rationality. Unfortunately, the Left has become as guilty of poisoning the well of rationality as the Right. When signaling to what cultural group you belong to becomes more important that finding the truth, everybody becomes more mired in their common delusions. Ideological divisions become more profound until talking across them becomes impossible and they tear our society apart. In this light, perhaps the most worthwhile battle is to fight for rational discourse and a common base of shared knowledge.

Companies that publish scientific journals exploit scientist and the taxpayer. Scientists have to pay to publish their papers It is a true scandal how commercial publishers of scientific journals have been profiting by exploiting scientists. Scientist do all the work that goes into making a science paper. They do the research, analyze the date, create the figures and write the paper. Then other scientists work as editor for the journal and peer-review the paper. All this work is done for free. Sometimes, scientists even have to pay to get their paper published. Yes, you read that right. Scientists frequently have to pay to publish a paper. Some journals, like the Journal of Neuroscience, have a submission fee that is not refunded, even if the paper is rejected. Many other journals make authors pay to publish a paper. For example, the Journal of Neuroscience has a submission fee of $2,360 ($1,710 if the authors are members of the Society for Neuroscience). This could make sense when scientific articles were printed in glossy journals, which is expensive. But nowadays most papers are just published electronically in PDF format, which is much cheaper, so these high fees are no longer justified. Scientists have to pay to read scientific papers The publishing house that owns the journal pockets the submission fee and the publication fee. Then it charges scientists again to read the paper. Frequently, publishing houses like Elsevier negotiate contracts with the libraries of universities to sell them packages of many different journals for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many smaller universities cannot afford the cost. Even UCLA recently had to stop their contract with Elsevier because it was too expensive. Adding insult to injury, publishing companies demand that scientist transfer to them the copyright of their papers. Scientists have no choice but to comply, because their academic careers depend on publishing in journals with high impact factor owned by these companies. The Cost of Knowledge boycott These exploitative practices of Elsevier got so onerous that scientists have orchestrated a Cost of Knowledge boycott against it, in which they refuse to submit papers to Elsevier, serve as editors of its journals and do peer-review for them. I signed for the boycott. The public has to pay to access the research that they pay with their taxes You may think that this is a problem for scientists and universities. However, the money that is used to pay for journals and publication fees comes from government grants. Scientists use the direct costs of the grant: money destined to pay for salaries, instruments and reagents. Libraries used the indirect costs that come with those grants: a fixed percentage that the university gets with each grant to pay for administrative costs. Hence, the money that publishing companies skim is your tax money! Hence, it is unfair that you have to pay to read a scientific paper. Typically, getting the PDF file of a science paper costs $32. The money that you pay doesn’t go to the authors of the paper, but to the publisher. To respond to increasing protests about this business model, publishers created the possibility for scientist to publish their paper ‘open access’, but the authors have to pay publication fees of thousands of dollars per paper to do that. Not surprisingly, many authors opt not to do that. You can get free papers in PubMed The USA government passed a law establishing that any scientific paper created with government grants had to be freely accessibly after a year of its publication: the NIH Public Access Policy. However, this doesn’t mean that the public has access to the paper published by the publishing company. The authors of the paper have to send a manuscript to PubMed, who publishes another version of the paper that is free to the public (but only one year after the paper was published). This means that the best way to find a free version of a paper is to look for it in PubMed. I explain how to do that in another article. In PubMed, you will find a purple button that says View PDF when the paper is available for free. Plan S is a similar initiative in Europe. Getting a preprint in BioRxiv Another way to get a paper for free is to find a preprint of it in BioRxiv. Preprints are scientific papers that have not passed peer-review yet. BioRxiv is a repository for preprints of science papers. Hence, what you will find here is different from the final version of the paper, which would be modified according to the demands of the reviewers. However, for most people, this is close enough. The good news is that, even after a paper has been published in a journal, the preprint version is still available in BioRxiv. The bad news is that many papers are not deposited in BioRxiv, particularly those published in the past. Research Gate Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/) is a social networking site for scientists where they are invited to share their papers. Many scientists do, so you can download the full text of their publications from there. Authors do not care if they appear to violate the copyright that the publishers wrestled out of them by posting the journal’s version of their paper. This is one more way in the which the stranglehold that publishing companies have on scientific publication is being slowly eroded. If you want to find a paper in Research Gate, just search for the name of one of the authors or for the title of the paper. What works best is to search for the name of the senior author, that normally is at the end of the list of authors. Sci-Hub You can also look for papers in Sci-Hub, a pirate repository of scientific papers run out of Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan. Needless to say, Sci-Hub is highly controversial and subject to a number of lawsuits in many countries. Ask the author It’s a time-honored practice to ask one of the authors for a copy of his paper. In the old times, authors bought from the journal a stack of reprints of the paper, which they will then mail to scientists who requested them. Nowadays, authors just email a PDF of the paper. This is not a violation of the copyright, since it forms part of the agreement between the authors and the journal. Every paper has a corresponding author, normally designated by an asterisk in the list of authors. The asterisk links to a footnote in the first page of the paper with the address and email of that author. This is the author to who you should write requesting the paper. Even if you are not a scientist, you are likely to get a response. A short note explaining why you want to read the paper might help. Authors are delighted to know that somebody cares about their work. Unfortunately, reading the footnote with the email address of the corresponding author sometimes requires having the full text of the paper. In that case, Google the name of the last author in the list, which would normally be the senior author. It is normally easy to find his academic email address.