Links got delayed twice this week, but here they are!

Kathleen Turner is 60, and has something to say about aging.

“I don’t look like I did 30 years ago. Get over it!”

“You have to get to that place as a woman where you know your worth isn’t dependent on [looks].”

***

I don’t know about you, but if this trend gets too prevalent, I’m going to have to stop eating in restaurants.

“We find that customers, in the aggregate, made most of the item substitutions that were encouraged by the messages, such as substituting ham for sausage in a breakfast sandwich, or substituting frozen yogurt for ice cream, though effects on overall calories and fat consumed were small,” reads the report, which does recognize two significant limits to receipt-based nutrition information — “it relies on consumer memory and can only affect consumption on future restaurant visits.”

That said, during the two years during which dozens of Burgerville restaurants were successfully convincing customers to substitute side salads for fries, or grilled chicken for fried chicken, these changes ultimately had little effect on the calories or fat consumed.

Maybe people are just eating what they want when they are eating out? For shame!

***

Oxytocin has been in the news over the last two weeks. First, an idiotic study claimed that it “makes men almost monogamous.”  What made the study idiotic? Give 20 young men (all of whom probably go to the same college)  oxytocin and 20 a placebo. Great sample size. Then show them pictures of their girlfriends (they all described themselves as “passionately in love with their partners”). On oxytocin, the pleasure centers of their brains lit up more when they saw their girlfriends’ pictures. Without oxytocin, pictures of other young women (selected by independent observers to be equally attractive!) were just as exciting. Well, I guess now we know! Or at least now somebody has doctoral research.

But wait! The 8-year-old oxytocin study that everyone uses to show how important the drug is (this one somehow showed that it makes us more trusting) can’t be replicated. (That one had a sample size of 24 young women.) Basically, replication studies are running 3 failures to replicate for every success. I’m betting the monogamy study will do as badly or worse.

***

Melissa McEwen at Shakesville debunks another piece of junk science (this one anti-fat), so I don’t have to.

So there might be some correlation between weight and semen production which might be statistically significant and which might affect male fertility in an as-yet unquantified way. Do you think this is prematurely being peddled as a FAT MEN ARE INFERTILE!!1! and LOSE WEIGHT TO SAVE YOUR SPERM!1!! by fat hating publications? Is water wet?

Because of course NBC headlined their article with a Scary Headless Fattie and the words “A man this heavy could be harming his sperm.” He’s harming his sperm by being fat, ya’ll! But maybe he’ll read this study and this will be the final straw to cause him to stop being fat for the sake of his sperm and then his sperm won’t be harmed anymore!

***

ESSAYS WE SHOULD ALL READ ALL OF (a new Linksday feature, by me):

The meaning of disability by Wilfredo Gomez.

The experience of being disabled is perhaps one most appropriately captured by the use of a metaphor: that of the iceberg submerged in a body of water. That said, there is that which is visible and that which is invisible. However, whether our disabilities are visible or invisible, there are always specters of disability looming, the conscious and unconscious choices that situate how we understand our encounters with the disabled, the extent of those encounters, as well as the expectations that accompany them. Central to this discussion is the question of performance: what does it mean to perform disability? What is an accurate representation of said performance and is it ever consistent with the nuances of reality?

With time, access, and increased education, words like “disability” and increasingly disability studies and disability policy have come into consciousness. They have taken on new significance and have effectively changed the landscape of how I understand my intersecting identities as urban, disabled, and Latino. And while disability and disability studies is a pertinent lens that frames discourses and experience, gone is the language of being handicapped.

What does “nobody matters less than black girls” really mean? by the apparently anonymous blogger at Prison Culture:

And so it appears that for us as black people, trauma and domination have always co-existed with pleasure and celebration. It is with this historical context as backdrop that Beyonce released her “visual album” this past weekend to great fanfare and debate. The past bleeds into the present as sense memory reminds us that we were property and that our bodies were violable hypersexualized flesh. We rage and turn our anger towards our reflections sometimes. We can hardly believe that we are still here when we weren’t actually meant to survive. We have few words to convey our mountains of hurt and of pain. We can’t imagine desire or pleasure without penalty. We’ve survived and my young friend is surviving still. We don’t know how to heal our “broken, burned, and bruised places” yet but we are searching for the right path. We know that we have never been in style and that chattel slavery’s script was written on our bodies. But even then, we sought ways to resist and to seize control. We created dances, embraced fashion, depicted ourselves in photographs, created homemade birth control technologies, had illegal abortions. We did this, we’ve continued to do this understanding full well that: “Nobody matters less to our society than young black women.”

***

In keeping with the Prison Culture post, December 17 was the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, as every day should be. Here’s a useful column on ways to bring awareness to the event, and to the ongoing issue. I’ll be saving it for next year.

***

This story has lots of possible interpretations, but without knowing the details I generally support parents being able to be naked with their children (of any age) without it being automatically sexualized.

A Missouri mom was arrested after a Snapchat photograph of her and her 14-year-old daughter — topless in a hot tub — were circulated around multiple area high schools.

The 50-year-old mom and her daughter posed for the photo, “covering their nipples,” in an outdoor hot tub in November, according to the probable cause statement. The woman’s other daughter, a 13-year-old, took the photo on her sister’s phone.

“The issue here is the fact the daughter was 14 and the mother was clearly present and involved when the photo was taken,” said St. Charles County Prosecutor Tim Lohmar. “It certainly appeared that the picture was posed and it certainly had some sexual overtones.”

Without knowing more, I don’t necessarily believe the prosecutor’s interpretation, and I don’t think the mom should get a year in jail.

***

And finally, I would never have guessed what “the Lesbian rule” is. Would you?