Introduction to Psychology: The Great Courses - Catherine A. Sanderson

 I highly recommend this to everyone human! Despite not majoring (or even minoring) in any social sciences, I do have a considerable background in the subject, but there was still a lot of fascinating, new information in here for me. I liked the section on gender differences as well as developmental psychology, no surprise there. Here's a few of my favorites:

- A test was given to people. If they were told it had to do with language and emotional reasoning, the women did better. If they were told it had to do with calculations and spatial reasoning, the men did better. The catch? It was the SAME TEST! That's how much sex based cognitive biases plays with our heads!

-  "Within the United States, liberals tend to prioritize preventing harm and ensuring fairness. This emphasis tent to explain why liberals tend to vote for measures that gibe everyone a helping hand and try to equalize differences between the haves and have nots, welfare, healthcare, affirmative action and so on. Conservatives might tend to prioritize loyalty and personal purity. This explains their support for institutions and traditions and order. Liberals and conservatives may also differ over which positions of authority are most deserving of respect, scientists vs military leaders."

- "We now understand that these gender differences in achievement motivations are largely, or perhaps even entirely, a result of social learning. Men and boys are often praised for their high achievements where as women and girls learn there can be negative consequences, even a social backlash, for seeming too smart or too focused on career advancement, especially if they violate stereotyped expectations about how women are supposed to behave, as friendly, nice, warm, nurturing. Moreover, stereotyped perceptions of likeability and competence for men often go hand-in-hand. For women, perceptions of likability and competence can be inversely related."

The Power of Attachment: How to create deep and lasting Intimate Relationships - Diane Poole Heller

 I think everyone should learn about attachment theory and how it impacts their life. That being said, I still can't see the difference between avoidant attachment and autism. It was described to me as nurture vs nature. But how many children have simply been labeled the wrong way? It just seems odd to me to have so much overlap. It's still important for everyone to know about though. I'm also pretty fond of the quote below.

- "The brain asks, "Are we ok?" Our body replies, "All I can feel is stress! Aren't we dying?" The brain figures, "I guess we are dying then. We must need to work harder."

Hounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Bk. 1) - Kevin Hearne

 This is a cool book. It's super similar in style to mine and I'm excited about that because the concept isn't too close but the feel is similar. I'm totally going to blast through all of these!

Fed Up. : Emotional labor, Women, and the way forward - Gemma Hartley

 Hooooooollllyyy cow! There is SO MUCH happening in this book. It's a must read for everyone, women so they don't feel they are isolated yelling into the void anymore and men to wake the fuck up. I believe this touches almost every person alive today in one way or another. I have bookmarked a ton of this book, so I'm going to try to pick the best parts to share with you, but I still think it's going to be a lot. 

- " It's no wonder that Nicholas Sparks novels have garnered so many movie deals and a multi-million dollar empire... He takes emotional labor to the extreme, and then hands the load over to the men. That's what young heterosexual women call romance.... Yet, even men who do perform emotional labor in the early stages of a relationship do so as a means to an end. For men, performing emotional labor isn't a reward in and of itself. It's how you get the girl or win her back.... It's above and beyond, and it's not meant to last forever. There's an expiration date on the demand for men's emotional labor in a relationship. Women, on the other hand, must offer it in perpetuity."

- "We can say we have "different methods" all we want, but isn't there a way to maintain a reasonable standard and divide the work? Letting go works, certainly, but I couldn't stop thinking that the onus was still on these women to make the compromise, to deal with the discomfort of things left undone. ... Why can't we ask our partners to rise to the occasion in a way that satisfies our needs, that gives us peace, that keeps us comfortable and happy? ... I was still stuck with these three choices, none of them ideal: Do it alone, be a nag, or let it go. The last option was supposed to be my golden ticket, but it felt more like another path to the same type of resentment."

- "After sending him back out to the store to return the book and figure out a better option, I reminded myself that this was his first time buying this sort of gift.... It wasn't simply that he didn't care about his nephew's present. He didn't know how to care about these things." All I can say here is WTF? Men need to be taught to care about their family?

- "The fact that men aren't expected to perform emotional labor may make their lives easier, but it doesn't necessarily make their lives better. Ignoring emotional labor makes men passive consumers of their own lives... "He shows up to a life I have organized," ... She wonders if he realizes, if it bothers him, that their children belong to her so much more than they do to him... I truly believe something is missed in simply showing up instead of actively participating. A lack of independence is shying away from emotional labor - a lack of say in your own life. If the spouse who does the bulk of the emotional labor dies, the other is left not knowing how to fully live. They don't have the same bonds with friends. I don't know how to maintain family ties. They don't even know how to prepare their favorite meals..."

- "I know I don't have to thank him for doing the dishes, but I worry if I don't show gratitude then he might just stop doing them. When do I get random gratitude for doing something that obviously needs to get done?" I struggle with this one myself.

- "Manservants aside, there are precious few jobs requiring emotional labor in which women don't make up the bulk of the workforce. That is because when mint perform emotional labor, it's a joke or an exception, not an expectation.... Their time and emotional energy and mental space has never and will never be considered a communal resource."

- " The most common request she sees made a female faculty? As student advisors. It is almost exclusively women who are tasked with the care work for thousands of students, a position that is seen as well suited to those skilled in emotional labor. It's impossible, or at least very unwise, for women to turn down such tasks, even though it derails their professional advancement."

- " The level of care and attention to detail that a woman's lens often brings to the table is invaluable in business negotiations, national politics, and household politics alike. Using the skill set of emotional labor wisely at all levels is simply good business. Caring leaders are good leaders. Their teams, their citizens, their peers are more motivated to work for them. Attention to issues that extend outside their own concerns make them exemplary. Their problem solving is more comprehensive, more attuned to the larger picture. We should want those at the top to be deeply invested in the comfort and happiness of those blow them, moving all of us towards a better place. ...In fact, a 2016 study from the Peterson Institute for international economics found that increased Gender diversity in the highest corporate offices led to a 15 per cent increase in profits."

- " In 2003, an experiment was conducted at Columbia Business School to gage how students perceived leadership in relation to gender. Researchers presented students with a case study about real-life entrepreneur Heidi Roizen, a successful venture capitalist who had leveraged her outgoing personality, as well as her large personal and professional network, to get to the top. But half of the students received the case study with a different first name: Howard. ... Students respected the accomplishments of both Heidi and Howard, but there was a disconnect in how they responded to them personally. Howard was well liked. Heidi, by contrast, was selfish and an undesirable colleague. Men can get to the top without offending others along the way because their accomplishments belong to them., however, are subject to the expectation that their efforts should always be communal always catering to those around them instead of working for their own success."

- " This is why when the best efforts fail and a sexual assault occurs, we look to the victim, not the perpetrator, for explanation. In the large majority of rapes - those perpetrated by someone the victim already knows - we ask if she was leading him on (Indeed, if her emotional labor went too far into intimate territory). We ask what she did to stop it from happening (could she have walked the fine line more carefully?). What she was wearing (was she playing the appropriate role in her appearance?). Scrutinize the emotional labor performed by the victim, because it is more socially acceptable to criticize the behavior of victimized women than it is to criticize men who are criminals."

- " Why is it always my responsibility to notice when something needs to be done? To delegate out that work or do it myself? Why is it on me to have the conversation over and over again, to bring up emotional labor and to guide my husband through it - an act that takes a great deal of emotional work as is?"

-" While we may be wedded to the idea that mothers or other female alloparents are the most natural nurturers for a child, the men of the Aka Tribe turned the biological debate on its head in how they raise their children. Hewlett noticed during his stay with the ACA that male breastfeeding (or at least using the nipple for comfort) was a completely normal way for men to comfort their babies when the mother was away. It wasn't unusual for men together for a "guy's night" and drink palm wine while cradling infants to their chests. Hewlett found that Aka fathers were within arms reach of their children 47% of the time - more available to their children than any other fathers in the world. There is no stigma attached to men slipping into the roll of primary caregiver, because there is no preconceived notion among the Aka that women should "naturally" assume that role. Intimacy between father and infant is the norm, just as intimacy between mother and infant is. Which begs the question of where we got our Western ideas about what is natural in the first place."

- " We were all born with a similar aptitude for emotional labor, but only half of us were trained in it as we grew up. That's not for nothing, and it's why, on the surface, it appears that women are naturally better at emotional labor than men. But these skills can be learned and honed. So long as we are willing to work together to create space for one another's progress, there's no reason why men can't rise up and claim emotional labor as their territory as well. They may, with time and practice, find the value in it as it opens a new side of the world to them, a new human wholeness that can help them feel more connected to their lives."

- "First, he feels like he does a lot (compared to other men, mind you, not compared to her). Second, he feels like if she needs the "help" that badly, she should simply ask him to do more. That's the one that always makes her furious, because he doesn't understand that asking is work. Actually a huge part of the work... for all our cultural conversations about men being less emotional and more level headed comment, women usually have to do a whole lot of tiptoeing around men's feelings while trying to get our point across."

- " When I look back at that argument, I can see clearly that we were talking about two completely different things: physical labor on one hand, emotional labor on the other.... I tried to explain how the mental and physical work of running our home and our lives compounded in such an exhausting manner. I wanted a partner with equal initiative. I couldn't continue to delegate and pretend that we were maintaining an egalitarian, progressive relationship. Diving up the household chores when I still had to remind him to do his share was not enough. That still left all of the emotional labor as my responsibility and that, I told him, was what needed to change."

- "The truth is that I don't need "help"- I need full partnership. There is a difference between the two. Helping means "this is not my job." Helping means "I am doing you a favor." Helping means "this is your responsibility." Helping implies that the helper is going above and beyond, while the responsible party is falling behind. why is only one of us responsible for our shared life?"

- " The workload men have started to take on in the home has increased considerably from one generation to the next, but the way this work is framed in men's minds hasn't progressed the same rate. Men feel like exceptional partners for doing less than their partners, because they subconsciously believe it's not theirs to do... When Rob was laid off of his job, it quickly became apparent that taking on a larger portion of the emotional labor was frustrating for him... he struggled to feel like his days held meaning, because the work he was doing was, well, mine. Women's work. real work. Valuable work."

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And how you can make yours last! - John Gottman

 Super fascinating book and I appreciated the author sticking mostly with comments/assumptions that are quantifiable.  There's a little sexism/gender assumptions but he largely uses qualifiers to remind the reader that human behavior is never 100% anything, and certainly not when making the assumptions based on sex. I like that. This book was obviously written by an actual scientist.  Now, onto the juicy parts:

"Men, by and large, are reluctant to dive head first into emotional issues. But why? Much of the answer seems to lie in the vast gulf between what men and women learn about intimacy as children. In a nutshell, boys typically are not taught the skills necessary to navigate though the shifting emotional tides of a relationship, while girls are given intense schooling on the subject. Like a person thrown overboard without first being taught how to swim, the average men is understandably fearful of drowning in the same whirlpool of emotion that a woman easily glides through every day. Add to this some compelling evidence that men have a stronger physiological reaction to certain emotions than do women, and it becomes easy to understand why the world of feelings is, by and large, outside most men's comfort zone."

"Because men are so vulnerable to feeling flooded, a wife's criticism can easily cause the husband to withdrawal. The wife is then likely to interpret his response as a rejection of her because she doesn't realize that he's feeling flooded.  She couldn't imagine needing to withdrawal over such a minor criticism, even if she were a bit hurt by it. Not understanding the intensity of what her husband is feeling, his reaction seems utterly unreasonable to her."  (Remember that women aren't good candidates more major leadership positions because they are too "emotional"! /s)

"Because boys and girls are socialized in such different ways throughout childhood, each gender receives almost opposite messages about lovemaking. Boys learn to see sex either as pure pleasure disconnected from emotional commitment or as a vehicle for getting close to a girl. For many teenaged boys and men, there are no emotional prerequisites for having sex because emotional closeness is the goal, not the cause, of a sex act. In contrast, women by and large need to feel physical and emotional closeness and tenderness before wanting to have sex. Making love confirms intimacy rather than creates it for most women. I can't count how often I've heard women complain, 'He never touches me or say sweet things unless he wants sex.'.... Or 'I don't want him to touch my breasts or clitoris first thing. Even though I've told him this, he never remembers that I like to be caressed all over, hugged, kissed, massaged and cherished first. Otherwise, sex doesn't feel good, it feels invasive.' "

Why are people into that? A Cultural Investigation of Kink - Tina Horn

 I was expecting more stats, numbers and psychology. Instead this was more of an ode to kink, which is fine, but given the title, I expected an analysis of psychological cause or social analysis. The author did a beautiful job of making kinks sound appealing and does a beautiful job of being fair and honest, but it was more literary love and less hard science. I was looking for the hard science. That being said, there's a few good quotes and/or ideas listed below. 

- "In my rape fantasies, I'm not expected to be concerned with my partner's pleasure and there's liberation in that, too. The social contract, along with my body and dignity, has been broken, so I owe him nothing. Obviously, considering a partner's pleasure is a worthwhile goal and a necessary part of intimacy, and yet, an experience where you don't have to consider your partner's pleasure relieves you of the pressure to prioritize it."

And most importantly! These perfectly well written rules!

- "When making your way through the play space, be aware of the energy you project onto others' scenes. ... If you wish to watch a scene, keep a respectful and safe distance from the players. Do not crowd scenes while watching and do not join scenes without consent. Do not interfere in any scene without the prior permission of the players or touch any equipment that is not your own. I appreciated this protocol because sometimes parties will say, 'Just don't be an asshole.' Which I have found is not a deterrent for malicious or naïve assholes whatsoever."

Dry Humping - Tawny Lara

 Overall, I'd say this is a pretty good book to read regardless of your relationship with alcohol or current relationship status because much of the information given is applicable to anyone at any point.  I was particularly fond of the first part where the author emphasized dating yourself and learning to be able to sit quietly with yourself. I believe that if people were at peace alone, they would be much more capable of being at peace with others. 

There's also great relationship and sex advice for any state throughout the whole book. I would recommend this to pretty much anyone under 50, anyone single, anyone with questionable drinking/substance use habit for sure, but also most everyone else, too.