New Unfunny Crossdressing Sitcom Offends Just About Everyone [jezebel.com]

by Margaret Hartmann / jezebel.com

Plenty of comedies are based on the idea that there’s inherent humor in men dressing up as women, from Some Like It Hot to Bosom Buddies. If you need proof that the entire concept is dated, look no further than the trailer for Work It, a new sitcom premiering on ABC in January. The 90-second clip is so unbearably unfunny that it almost seems like a parody of how idiotic sitcoms have become, and now several groups are slamming the series for being insensitive to the transgender community.

The L.A. Times reports that GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign took out a full-page ad inVariety asking ABC to pull the show before it even airs. The show follows two unemployed straight men who dress as women to get jobs at a pharmaceutical company that’s hiring female sales representatives. There’s no mention of transgender people in the pilot, but the groups argue that, “By encouraging the audience to laugh at the characters’ attempts at womanhood, the show gives license to similar treatment of transgender women.”

The groups say they want to send the message that cross-dressing in comedy is never acceptable, but there’s no redeeeming social commentary in Work It. In fact, while the characters lament the “mancession,” the show actually ignores the fact that transgender people are subjected to a tremendous amount of discrimination in the workplace. Herndon Graddick, GLAAD’s senior director of programs, explains, “The truth is, transgender people often have a very hard time finding a job and of those who do, more than one-quarter are fired because of their transgender identity.” Plus, 34 states have no laws protecting people from being fired for their gender identity.

Some argue that Work It is no worse than Monty Python characters dressing in drag or Kenan Thompson playing Whoopi Goldberg on SNL, but just to make sure the show offends absolutely everyone, the writers threw in a little racism and sexism. In the pilot one character says, “I’m Puerto Rican. I would be great at selling drugs.” As for the ladies, in addition to one of the main characters throwing out his large sandwich because real women never eat anything but lettuce, a pharmaceutical rep explains that the company is only hiring women because, “We find the doctors prefer to ‘nail’ the drug reps more when they are girls.” It’s pretty unbelievable that with all the people involved in getting this show on the air, no one pointed out that it’s not 1986, and people should be laughing during a sitcom, not cringing.

GLAAD’s Full-Page Ad Denounces ABC Cross-Dressing Sitcom ‘Work It’ [LAT]
Work It Doesn’t Work [GLAAD]

Can Depression Be Diagnosed with a Picture of Your Mom? [wired.com]

by Jonah Lehrer / Wired.com

Sigmund Freud gets a bad rap from modern science. (The immunologist Peter Medawar summarized the feeling of many with his remark that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.”) Sure, Freud’s theories mangled a lot of details — we no longer worry about penis envy or the Oedipus complex — but he was shockingly prescient on the big themes. In recent years, it’s become clear that, as Freud always insisted, the unconscious is the dominant force in our mental life. (What Freud called the id is now a network of brain areas associated with emotion, such as the amygdala and nucleus accumbens.) He was mostly right about the logic of dreams, which often regurgitate those parts of experience we store in long-term memory. And he was basically correct to imagine the mind as a set of conflicted drives, with reason competing against the urges of the passions. We expend a lot of neurotic energy holding ourselves back.

But there’s another Freudian theme that deserves a little 21st century appreciation: his obsession with the mother-child relationship and the way it shadowed people throughout life. Freud saw this parental bond as a dominant motive for behavior, influencing both our development as children and our happiness as adults. (The super-ego, for instance, begins to form when the incestuous desires of the child are thwarted by the father.) Although many of Freud’s particular claims feel like cultural relics, modern attachment theory has confirmed the crucial importance of the maternal bond. As Harry Harlow put it, “You’ve got learn how to love before you can learn how to live.” And it’s our mothers who often first teach us how to love. (Thankfully, human parenting is slowly becoming much more gender neutral. But this a recent cultural innovation.)

A new paper in PLoS ONE expands on this Freudian theme. The study involved a team of scientists at Columbia University, Beth Israel Medical Center and Albert Einstein Medical Center who performed fMRI scans on 28 female subjects between the ages of 18 and 30, half of whom were suffering from unipolar depression. (The patients were evaluated using the Beck Depression Inventory II.) While lying in the scanner, the volunteers looked at pictures of their mothers, a few friends and a selection of strangers. The scientists focused their attention on the left anterior paracingulate gyrus (aPCG), a brain area that plays an important role in the regulation of social emotion. Previous studies have linked the bit of cortex to error and conflict resolution and the understanding of intentionality.

By looking at the differential brain responses of depressed and control subjects after viewing those various faces, the scientists came up with an impressive diagnostic tool. In fact, the fMRi scans were able to predict the presence of depression in nearly 90 percent of subjects; the correlation between actual BDI scores and the predicted BDI scores based on fMRI results was 0.55, which is quite strong. Out of the 28 subjects, the fMRI diagnosis generated one false positive and two false negatives.

Click Here to Read the Rest of the Article