Gift cards are supposed to be pleasant surprises, but they can frequently be headaches; assuming you remember to bring them in the first place, you have to keep tabs on any leftover credit. They should be easier to manage after today, though. Google…
The Google Wallet app for iOS and Android has been updated today, and brings with it some tweaks that may have you actually wanting to use it. Instead of relying on mobile payments, Google’s troubled app now keeps track of your loyalty cards, and even lets you request money or pay someone for free. In addition to keeping track of your … Continue reading
Statistics don’t lie.
Here is a taste of what we are dealing with as women:
* 92 percent of working moms and 89 percent of stay-at-home mothers felt overwhelmed by work, home and parenting responsibilities.
*One in four women over 40 are on anti-depressants.
*Women are twice as likely as men to have anxiety and panic disorders.
What these statistics are indicating is that despite all our efforts to change our lifestyle, nurture ourselves, and reduce overwhelm — we are actually more stressed!
This is causing many women to feel an undercurrent of sadness and stress, while suffering in silence.
The insidious suffering in silence comes through in behaviors such as:
*Finding yourself eating, even when you aren’t that hungry.
*Needing a sugar boost to “make it through” the rest of your day.
*Drinking alcohol, more often, to “take the edge off.”
*Feeling like your “edge” is more present than not.
You may also notice, as 50 percent or more of you report:
*Fatigue
*Lying awake a night
*Irritability & anger
*Fighting with people closest to you
The big red flag is if you sitting down on the toilet to relieve your bladder feels like the most relaxing part of your day. I am sorry ladies, this is when you are really in trouble!
When any of the above continues, or becomes routine, you will feel miserable.
I call this The Misery Epidemic – Why Women Are Sad, Stressed, and Suffering in Silence.
Activist Gloria Steinem has talked about numerous ways women are still suffering and has urged audiences from all over the globe to “get mad” about the present. Yet we aren’t getting mad because too many women are emotionally flat-lined.
The underlying sense is there isn’t time to feel due to everything you have going on within your life. Yet that may be an easy excuse, because if you were to feel, then what? ou would actually have to deal with the downward spiral of any negative feelings that have been shoved down for weeks, months, years, even decades.
What this emotional flat-line really means is that we don’t trust ourselves. You don’t trust how you feel and this is leading to greater misery.
You may not like hearing this, but to put an end to our misery, it isn’t about getting more massages, taking more walks or drawing yourself nightly hot baths. The truly nurturing action to take is to listen to yourself. What do you want? What do you need? What do you desire?
If you were to listen, what would likely come forward are negative feelings. Yet those negative feelings have an empowered message telling you that aspects of your life need to change.
We need to be willing to reclaim our feelings back from the emotional stone-age, where others convinced us that this part of us was weak, and recognize that our emotional energy is the power and catalysts to putting an end to The Misery Epidemic for good.
IGive your head, fears, and “shoulds” a rest by tuning into the gateway of your personal truth by listening to what you feel. Doing so is a demonstration of your own personal value that immediate impacts your sense of self-worth. Give it a try!
If you desire more support on this topic, you can join me for my upcoming webinar The Misery Epidemic: 5 Reasons Women are Sad, Stressed, and Suffering in Silence. Find out more about it here: http://michellebersell.com/why-do-women-remain-in-silence-over-this/
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
NICOLAS POUSSIN, Jupiter & Antiope, oil on canvas.
With the debut of the cable series Masters of Sex, any purely art historical Google search for risque old master paintings is now totally skewed to the Showtime television program. In an attempt to reposition the discussion to its former elevated status, I will here discuss the compositions of a few paintings wherein great artists of the past buried sexual content deep in the fundament of their works.
JEAN HONRE FRAGONARD, The Bolt, 1778, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris.
An obvious place to start is Fragonard’s The Bolt, a seemingly simple scene of seduction. The lovers’ gestures are urgent and dramatic, and aim diagonally towards the bolt of the title. Strong light focuses our attention on their actions. The bolt is a knowing visual pun of the activity about to commence. Her body language is a study in psychological conflict; “No! I mean yes! No!” The bed compositionally balances the figures, a third character in the story. Sitting back in the shadow to the left of the painting it doesn’t grab our attention as the brightly lit characters do, but its meaning becomes more obvious the more it is studied. The inviting, soft, vaginal folds glow a passionate red, waiting to swallow the sexual combatants whole.
Hidden by Fragonard in the silks and the folds of the sheets and pillows are the forms of a woman being ravaged, her breasts and her sex thrown open. The single fruit on a foreground table is a second visual pun, purposely placed as an ersatz testicle.
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, The Sin of Adam & Eve, 1508-12, fresco, Sistine Chapel ceiling, The Vatican.
Michelangelo hid sex in plain sight sixty-five feet above the Pope, in the Holy Father’s own house. The old masters were adept at inserting the religiously forbidden but most natural and basic of human acts into depictions of holy scripture. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo depicted Eve momentarily interrupted in the first ever apple-bobbing contest as the female serpent hands her a fig. Original sin indeed, viewed enthusiastically by five million oblivious Vatican visitors annually.
CARAVAGGIO, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, 1603, oil on canvas. Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam.
What can you say about a group of men watching the insertion of a digit into a wound that never heals? Caravaggio was a clever but crude fellow who could wield a brush like an angel sings. Do you really think this painting street brawler didn’t know what his content was up to when he left four guys in bathrobes alone in his dark studio? C’mon, this is the same artist who early on painted a supremely lascivious John the Baptist embracing a horned sheep, and a grinning pre-pubescent Cupid proudly flashing the viewer amid the discarded cultural attributes of Western civilization.
CARAVAGGIO, John the Baptist, 1602, oil on canvas, Musei Capitolini, Rome.
CARAVAGGIO, Amor Victorious, 1602, oil on canvas, Gemaeldegalerie, Berlin.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the angel Gabriel announcing the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by God is perhaps the greatest abstract presentation of divine sex ever created. If there is one image that perfectly demonstrates to my students what is meant by abstract psychological elements in a composition, it is Da Vinci’s Annunciation.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, The Annunciation, 1472, oil & tempera on panel, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
There are hundreds of Annunciation paintings in Christian art, and they often have the Virgin in a house, commonly seen as a symbol of a woman’s space. An angel then ‘announces’ her pregnancy through an open door, or a shaft of light from God strikes the reluctant Mary. Da Vinci has the Virgin tucked within a series of verticals that form the building, while the angel is aligned with the long horizontal of a low wall. His gesture is angled forcefully forward, while hers is one of surprised receptivity.
The formal elements tell the story. This Annunciation is a monumental depiction of sex on God’s level, horizontal meets vertical, penis and vagina reduced to their purest abstract forms. Da Vinci’s genius lies in the utter simplicity of his bold design.
The head of the god-sized phallus is formed by the bookstand and the top of the desk, and aims directly at Mary’s womb. It is interesting to note that the desk placed before Mary functions, in an abstract sense, as a sign of her virginity, her hymen. Try removing it and she appears exposed and much more available. The bas-relief symbols on the side of the desk hint at female reproductive anatomy, purity, and fecundity.
PETER PAUL RUBENS, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, 1617, oil on canvas, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
Rubens depicts Castor and Pollux abducting (read raping) the daughters of King Leucippus, whom they will later graciously marry. As a young art student in Vienna, I was mesmerized by the space between the two women’s bodies. It was an area of great tension, more than could be accounted for by the active outline of their bodies. Rubens framed the action in an invisible circle roughly filling the canvas. Two hidden circles of the same size, one descending from the upper left, the other rising from the lower right, collide like giant wheels grinding against one another. This grinding effect is achieved through the flow in direction of the women’s bodies. The tension this creates presents an underlying compositional metaphor for the rape, but Rubens cancels some of its effectiveness by characterizing the men as solicitous, and one of the women in ecstasy. Perhaps this was in deference to their future marriage, or a nod to the mores of the day, but to modern eyes the disconnect between the act and the characters’ motives is stark.
FRANS HALS, Shrovetide Revelers, 1615, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In this piece Dutch master Frans Hals paints carnival celebrants before Lent. Carnival, or Shrovetide, is a festival sanctioned by the church and society that precedes a period of fasting and penitence. It is a time for the masses to blow off steam, to mock the authorities that rule their lives on all the other days of the year. This is achieved by dressing up as holy men, nobles, or in the clothing of the opposite sex. Comedic scenes are acted out, great quantities of alcohol and rich foods are consumed, and the people generally behave in a fashion that would embarrass them in their everyday lives. Hals depicts these revelers at a table loaded with party food and hearty ale.
A red-faced drunken ‘nobleman’ wears a sash of sausages, a young ‘lass’ who appears male flirts with a man to the right making obscene gestures with his hands. The trusty triangle is employed here in a subversive manner. The religious figure that in Christian art commonly commands the center of a triangle is replaced here with a cross-dressing non-virgin whose very gesture recalls a benediction. Hals cleverly turns the propaganda of the church on its head. With this witty invention the underlying form of his composition follows the purpose of carnival perfectly.
The old masters were Masters of Sex centuries before the television series’ producers were conceived. Their tricks of the trade still have the ability to shock us, juxtaposing as they do human desires that remain religiously and societally forbidden, with the sudden joy of discovering that source of our greatest pleasure surreptitiously placed before unsuspecting eyes. Art history sizzles!
When you’re crazy in love, there’s not a lot you wouldn’t do to show how much you care.
To propose to his girlfriend, YouTuber Jehan Ratnatunga wanted to surprise her with an extraordinary combination of everything she loves.
So, with the help of their friends, he dressed up in a full Mickey Mouse suit and arranged an eight-mouse-strong choreographed dance of all her favorite music, from Bollywood to Beyoncé.
The full effect is, in a word, magical.
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With sales of its premium smartphones failing to live up to expectations, Samsung is moving into another potentially high-margin business: premium headphones. Tomorrow the South Korean electronics giant will launch its Samsung Level line of headphones (and a wireless speaker) on premium goods retailer Gilt, whose members will have exclusive early access to buy a pair before they become more… Read More
In a warehouse in Reno, scientists are putting the biggest seismic facility in the country through its paces. The newly-expanded lab earthquake lab uses three 50-ton shake tables to simulate earthquakes—including the infamous 6.9 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.
So remember how scientists found unapproved vials of smallpox in a forgotten storage room a few weeks ago? Turns out, they weren’t quite finished yet. Now, officials have revealed they’ve actually uncovered over 300 vials of pathogens including dengue, influenza, and spotted fever. Whoops.
With the threat of terrorism and extreme weather perennially perched on the horizon, Chicago’s getting creative with its infrastructure upgrades. The city’s primary power company, Commercial Edison, is planning to install superconducting cables to prevent outages in the city center. Why doesn’t every city do this?
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