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r/AutismInWomen: If you were to write the questions for an autism diagnosis test for women, what would your questions be?

Gabor Maté:

"Resistance — just as the body needs to resist invasive bacteria or viruses, in that sense political resistance is also a way of manifesting our immune system on a social scale."

Yanis Varoufakis:

"It's why I am involved in politics, because it gives me joy. I wake up in the morning and I look forward to the day.

I know that I'm going to be defeated politically, there's no doubt about that. I have zero belief that our movement is going to win.

But so what? I know I'm going to die, that doesn't mean I'm not going to have a good day today.

To be involved as an activist is a path to genuine eudemonia, to genuine happiness, to genuine satisfaction.

But there's one proviso however: let's face it, the Nazis also had a sense of belonging and a lot of solidarity amongst themselves.

Some of them have been remarkable in the way that they stuck up for one another.

Here the fascists in Greece, they are they are more solidaristic to one another than the leftists are, between you and me.

But what is the difference? The difference is that they're tribal, they see their group as an extension of their own DNA, of their own very narrow family.

The trick for being joyous through communal action, common action, collective action, is to see the whole of humanity as one magma to which you belong.

And to be able to enjoy the successes of anyone, however far away and however different they may look to you or sound from you.

I think that is the key to genuine happiness. I'm not making a moral point, I'm making the point of what works.

In order to pacify your soul and to allow you to lead a successful life in the sense of fulfilling your potential, whatever your potential might be."

Gabor Maté:

"You mentioned eudemonia, which is an ancient Greek phrase and has to do with joy that comes from a sense of meaning and a sense of contribution."

Source: Eye of the Storm Podcast: Gabor Maté and Yanis Varoufakis | HOW TO HEAL FROM THIS TOXIC CULTURE | Podcast 4

Study suggests injury risk varies in menstrual cycle (Katie Gornall, BBC News, May 01 2024)

"“We did this long-term monitoring study, which is really rare in women's sports,” said Dr Georgie Bruinvels from UCL, a senior author of the study.

“To marry up injury data and menstrual cycles, it is novel yet it's crazy that other people aren't really doing it.”

Menstrual cycle symptoms are common and around two-thirds of elite female athletes feel these can have negative impacts on their performance, according to a recent BBC Sport survey. (…)

Analysis of the data found that players were six times more likely in the pre-menstrual phase and five times more likely in the early-mid luteal phase to experience a muscle injury, compared to when they were menstruating.

“’Everything you read about in the media is about being ‘on’ your period and getting injured on your period, and its detrimental effects to female footballers,” Barlow said.

“I think this really showed that actually this phase where people are on their period - what we call phase one - was actually the lowest for injury risk.

So I think it was just helping to break the taboo that it's not a case of either on your period or not, it's a whole cycle that you go through four phases.

I hope this will lead to better conversations between players and coaches to help break down some of the taboo around the menstrual cycle.”

Dr Bruinvels added: “I feel like the narrative needs to be in a way positive around this. We're seeing something, females are different. Females are more variable than males.

But let's like do something about it and support our female athletes better.”"

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World (Dorian Lynskey, 2024)

"The volcano Mount Tambora lies on the Sanggar peninsula on the island of Sumbawa in the Flores Sea, to the east of Java.

It had long been presumed extinct but the islanders had noticed an ominous cloud over the summit and a rumbling in the earth preceding the evening of 5 April 1815, when the mountain suddenly began firing clouds of volcanic ash 30 kilometres into the sky.

For the next few days, the Sun was dimmed by a humid fog and a soft rain of black ash fell on the surrounding islands.

Five days later, Tambora erupted with a force one hundred times greater than that of Vesuvius in AD 79.

It remains the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, outdoing that of the more famous Krakatoa in 1883. (…)

During what became known as ‘the year without a summer’, the weather was conducive to an apocalyptic frame of mind.

Europe had slouched out of a punishingly cold, wet spring into an even worse summer.

Rivers and lakes burst their banks; newly planted crops drowned; churches teemed with parishioners praying for an end to the rain.

Bad weather, like war, can be a great unifier. Across the breadth of England, it was a national preoccupation.

In Chawton, Hampshire, an ailing Jane Austen worked on her sixth novel, Persuasion, as the rain battered the window panes.

‘It is really too bad, & has been for a long time,’ she wrote to her nephew, ‘much worse than anybody can bear, & I begin to think it will never be fine again.’

In north London, Samuel Taylor Coleridge bemoaned the impossibility of exercise due to ‘this end of the World Weather’. (…)

Not until 1913 did the meteorologist William Jackson Humphreys suggest a connection between Tambora and the year without a summer, and the process was not understood in detail until the 1980s.

Few people in Europe in 1816 knew that Mount Tambora even existed (The Times had mentioned the ‘Tomboro’ eruption just once) and those who did could not have imagined that a distant volcano could cause the rain to fall, the sky to dim and the harvests to fail.

In the absence of scientific explanations, fear and superstition filled the void.

Why would a significant number of people not have been persuaded that the world was coming to an end?"

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Orenstein, 2020)

"When the men realized that their actions conflicted with their stated beliefs, they expanded their definitions of consent rather than questioning their behavior.

Their ideas of “yes” turned out to be so elastic that for some they encompassed actions that met the legal criteria for assault—such as the guy who had coerced his girlfriend into anal sex (she had said, “I don’t want to, but I guess I’ll let you”).

She made it clear that he should stop.

“He did, eventually,” Bedera told me, “and he seemed aware of how upset she was, but he found a way to rationalize it: he was angry with her for refusing him because he thought a real man shouldn’t have had to beg for sex.”

Perhaps that should not be surprising, given that men who are incarcerated for committing old-school rape—those stranger-in-a-dark-alley guys—also typically believe that their victims wanted it and for many of the same reasons: moaning (which can indicate pain as well as pleasure), accelerated heart rate (a sign of terror as well as excitement), vaginal lubrication (which is involuntary).

They, too, generally deny “rape,” even if they acknowledge the more euphemistic “nonconsensual sex.”

The truth is, research has shown young men to have a remarkably sophisticated and subtle understanding of sexual refusal, regardless of whether a partner ever utters the word “no”; that renders dubious the common defense that they “can’t tell” or “aren’t mind readers.”

What’s more, where “yes” is concerned, guys seem downright clairvoyant.

Bedera’s subjects considered such nonsexual physical cues as direct eye contact to be clear propositions.

Obviously, looking into someone’s eyes doesn’t always signal seduction, and guys know that.

When I, a middle-aged woman, would look straight at them while asking about, say, cunnilingus, not a single one mistook that for a come-on.

Yet, when my eighteen-year-old female intern conducted interviews at her college, every guy hit on her: the same questions from an attractive peer were sexualized because the boys wanted them to be.

Some guys Bedera talked to believed smiling indicated a girl wanted to have sex: it might, though people smile for all sorts of reasons, including discomfort and appeasement.

Compliments were another frequently cited indicator (causing me to reconsider expressing admiration for a male passenger’s stylish luggage the last time I was on an airplane).

Standing close. Dancing. Touching someone’s arm during conversation.

A third of the supposed sexual signals came up only once in Bedera’s study, making it hard to ever predict what a man might see as an invitation: a random emoji; the lack of a bra; sitting on a guy’s lap in a crowded car.

True, any of those might have meant sexual interest—or not.

The only thing they all had in common was that the guy in question read them as evidence.

The boys also tended to equate enthusiastic participation in any sexual act (such as kissing) with enthusiastic consent to vaginal intercourse.

When they drink, young (and not so young) men are even more likely to overestimate female sexual interest—as well as to overstate women’s role as initiators—interpreting any expression of friendliness by a girl as: It’s on."

European Quarter, Brussels, Belgium (2024)