By Laurie Mintz, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Florida.

Imagine a steamy sex scene involving a woman and a man from your favourite television show or movie. It’s likely that both parties orgasm. But this doesn’t reflect reality.

Because during heterosexual sexual encounters, women have far fewer orgasms than men. This is called the orgasm gap. And it has been documented in the scientific literature for more than 20 years.

In one study of more than 50,000 people, 95% of heterosexual men said they usually or always orgasm when sexually intimate, while only 65% of heterosexual women said the same.

Research shows that some people believe this gap is because women’s orgasms are biologically elusive. Yet, if this were true, women’s orgasm rates would not differ depending on circumstance. Indeed, many studies show that women orgasm more when alone than with a partner.

At least 92% of women orgasm when pleasuring themselves. Women also orgasm more when having sex in relationships compared with casual sex. In a study of more than 12,000 college students, only 10% of the women said they orgasm during first-time hookups while 68% said they orgasm during sex that occurs in a committed relationship.

Women also orgasm more when having sex with other women. In one study 64% of bisexual women said that they usually or always orgasm when being sexually intimate with other women.

Why does this happen?

In all these scenarios where women are climaxing more, there is a greater focus on clitoral stimulation. The majority of women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm — which makes sense given that the clitoris and the penis originate from the same kind of tissue. And both the clitoris and the penis are chock full of touch-sensitive nerve endings and erectile tissue.

In my work, I’ve asked thousands of women: “What is your most reliable route to orgasm?” Only 4% say penetration. The other 96% say clitoral stimulation, alone or paired with penetration.

The main reason for the orgasm gap, then, is that women are not getting the clitoral stimulation they need. And cultural messages about the supremacy of intercourse feed into this. Indeed, countless films, TV shows, books and plays portray women orgasming from intercourse alone.

Popular men’s magazines also give advice on intercourse positions to bring women to orgasm. And while some of the positions do include clitoral stimulation, the message is still that intercourse is the central and most important sexual act.

The language used in these articles — and in the culture as a whole — reflects and perpetuates this overvaluing of intercourse. We use the words “sex” and “intercourse” as if they are the same. We relegate the clitoral stimulation that comes before intercourse as “foreplay”, implying it is a lesser form of sex.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that such messages give the idea that sex should proceed as follows: foreplay (just to get the woman ready for intercourse), intercourse, male orgasm and sex over. In this version of sex, it’s the man’s job to “give” a woman an orgasm by lasting a long time and thrusting hard.

No wonder research finds that men feel more masculine when their partner orgasms during intercourse. And, it’s no surprise that women fake orgasms, primarily during intercourse, to protect their partner’s egos.

Indeed, studies suggest that between 53% to 85% of women admit to faking an orgasm. Some research indicates that the majority of women have faked at least once in their lifetime.

Closing the gap

There is hope though, because given that cultural factors are responsible for the orgasm gap, changing how we view sex and intercourse will help to improve women’s sexual experiences. Indeed, educating people on the fact that women don’t have a limited biological capacity for orgasm is important. Likewise, education for both men and women about the clitoris could be a game-changer.

Still, such knowledge alone is unlikely to close the orgasm gap on a personal level. According to a chapter in a sex therapy textbook, women need skills to put this knowledge into practice. This means women must be encouraged to masturbate to learn what they want sexually. And this needs to be coupled with training in communication so they can share this information with partners.

Women need to feel entitled to pleasure and empowered to get the same type of stimulation alone as with a partner. This means heterosexual couples’ must rid themselves of the old script that calls for foreplay followed by intercourse after which sex is over.

Instead, they can take turns having orgasms using oral sex or manual stimulation where she orgasms followed by intercourse. Alternatively, women can touch themselves with hands or a vibrator during intercourse.

Research shows that women who use vibrators have more orgasms. And because many women worry about how they look during sex or if they are pleasing their partner, research shows that mindfulness can help, too.

But orgasm equality is about so much more than quality sex. Multiple women have told me that once they felt empowered in the bedroom, they were more confident in the rest of their life.

Importantly, according to one study, feeling entitled to pleasure increases a woman’s agency in telling partners what they want sexually and their agency in protecting themselves sexually.

Indeed, the study found that feeling entitled to sexual pleasure increased women’s confidence in both refusing to do sexual acts they were not comfortable with and using protection against both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

According to another article on sex education and pleasure by two US health researchers, when young people learn that sex should be pleasurable, they may be less likely to use it in manipulative and harmful ways. So teaching that sex is about pleasure for both partners, rather than something done to women for men’s pleasure, might also help to decrease levels of sexual violence.

Clearly, teaching about women’s pleasure will do more than increase orgasm rates.

This article is from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news organisation dedicated to sharing the knowledge of academic experts. Find out more about us or subscribe to our daily newsletter.

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Laurie Mintz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The Orgasm Gap: Why Women Climax Less than Men was originally published in Wise & Well on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nature is good for us — surely nobody has missed that fact. These days, both scientists and policymakers agree about the importance of offering everyone access to green spaces, regardless of social background. That’s because easy access to nature encourages physical activity, which in turn has positive health effects. For instance, English populations with the most green space in their surroundings also have the lowest levels of mortality. The simple fact is that people tend to be healthier and live longer when they have easy access to nature.

Accessible green space is also good for our psychological well-being. For example, large-scale surveys in the Netherlands and UK have shown that individuals living in urban areas with more green space have lower rates of mental health distress and are more satisfied with life than those living in areas with less green space. Other studies show that exposure to natural environments reduces negative emotions — including anger, anxiety and sadness. Even just viewing images of nature or looking at natural environments from a window can reduce stress, enhance recovery from illness and improve mood.

My colleagues and I wanted to know whether the positive effects of nature might extend to other aspects of psychological well-being. In particular, we were interested in body image, which has a significant impact on mental health in all age groups. To examine this, we asked an online sample of almost 400 adults in the US to complete a measure of their exposure to nature in everyday life and activities.

They also completed measures of self-esteem and “body appreciation”. The latter reveals the extent to which people hold favourable opinions about their bodies, accept and respect their bodies, and reject unrealistic beauty standards. In our study, published in the journal Body Image, we found that both women and men who reported greater exposure to nature also reported more positive body appreciation.

Function over aesthetics?

To explain this finding, we suggested that exposure to the natural world is “restoring”. In fact, previous studies have shown that exposure to nature increases positive self-evaluations including self-esteem and helps people recover emotionally from the stresses of everyday life. In turn, these effects seem to promote more positive body image.

That’s not all, though. Access to green spaces also facilitates social interactions and gives rise to stronger neighbourhood ties, which in turn provide direct benefits for mental health. In our study, we found that direct exposure to nature may also heighten the extent to which individuals feel at one with, or connected to, nature. This was in turn associated with more positive body image. The same positive association between connectedness to nature and body appreciation has previously been found in British women.

Feeling and being part of a larger ecosystem requiring concern and protection is an issue that is bigger than our waistlines or the latest fashion. In other words, a sense of connectedness to nature may shift our attention away from narrow self-interest oand nto more rounded aspects of well-being, such as living a fulfilled life.

It may also help us to focus on the functionality of our bodies — what our bodies can do, rather than what they look like. By helping some individuals to identify commonalities between themselves and wider ecosystems, greater connectedness to nature may also result in critical appraisals of unrealistic stereotypes and ideals of appearance.

Of course, our findings are preliminary and limited by a number of issues, including the fact that all our data were self-reported and cross-sectional. Even so, our work fits with a broader body of work demonstrating that both exposure to nature and connectedness with it are associated with improved mental health.

If research continues to support these findings, particularly in different cultural and national groups, it may help us to develop new ways for promoting positive body image. For example, psychologists working with patients who struggle with poor body image may want to encourage them to go on nature walks or hiking excursions. More generally, our work highlights the importance of providing everyone with opportunities to play and engage in green spaces, and for legal commitments to halt the decline in natural environments.

This article was written by Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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How being in nature makes us appreciate our bodies and reject unrealistic beauty standards was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Millions of people across borders, classes and cultures have modified their bodies using ink. While many are fascinated by tattoos for their aesthetic value, their graphic history reveals how they have acted as a means of suppression and exclusion but also as a form of resistance to restrictive social codes. France is a colourful case study showing how attitudes towards tattoos have changed across the centuries.

From the 16th century onwards, French voyagers encountered people with different kinds of bodily practices to theirs in places from the South Pacific to the Americas. Such people were, in the eyes of some French observers, “primitive” outsiders to “civilisation”, and their tattoos only contributed to this perception. Others — notably sailors — were inspired by what they saw, and got busy with the ink. By the turn of the 19th century, the “tattoo” had a common name in Europe as tatouages,Tätowiren, or tattoos.

In 19th-century France, authorities began to use the tattoo to mark a different kind of “outsider”: the criminal. The hot iron which had branded early-modern French criminals was replaced by the more discreet weapon of the tattooist’s needle in 1832. Instead of a generic fleur-de-lys, criminals were marked with an individual code to identify them.

The tattoo was a visual marker of the criminal’s submission to legal authority. But it was also a form of physical violation. In Christian religious culture, bodily markings had often been condemned as evidence of paganism as Jane Caplan has pointed out. When the needle penetrated the convict’s skin, it symbolically took away what remained of their body’s sanctity. The hot iron brand punished the body, but the tattoo punished the soul.

Tattoo as rebellion

When convicts took to inking themselves, though, they appropriated the tattoo. The prevalence of tattoos on men in the French overseas penal colonies and in military prisons contributed to their association with deviancy in the late 19th century.

In a photographic essay, Jérome Pierrat and Eric Guillaume demonstrated how the tattoo became a striking means of rebellion against “respectable” society by the mauvais garçons of the fin-de-siècle French underworld. For some, these tattooed “bad boys” had a certain exotic allure — see the popularity of Edith Piaf’s tattooed Legionnaire, or Papillon, the fanciful “memoir” of ex-convict Henri Charrière published in 1969. In the book, the protagonist’s nickname comes from the butterfly — the papillon — tattooed on his chest: an emblem of hope and freedom as he tries to escape prison.

Since then, individuals and groups have continued to choose needles and ink as tools with which to court outrage at the same time as expressing themselves artistically.

Tattoo as solidarity

Tattoos can stake a claim on their bearer’s sense of communal belonging as well as their individuality. People use them to build communities of all kinds, from military regiments to biker gangs. Tattoos also convey something about the “edge” between oneself and the rest of the world. For some, they are associated with inner mystery and darkness brought to the surface, representing (in the words of Juliet Fleming), “an inner demon at once expelled and held at the border of the subject”.

This interpretation seems apt in light of the recent Semicolon Project in Anglophone countries, where a tattooed semi-colon has become a symbol for solidarity with those who suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts. Some commentators perceive the campaign as a fleeting trend which, spread by hashtags, does little to promote autonomy among those it reaches. Others are wary of an agenda associated with religion.

Mindy Rice on Twitter

@ProjSemicolon. My new tattoo!pic.twitter.com/6huhYHq55R

Project Semicolon has gone viral among Twitter users, but it is far from superficial. Like many of their tattooed predecessors, participants take something which might have originally marked “outsider” status — in this case, mental health difficulties — and have turned it instead into a symbol of inclusivity, communication and creativity. The semi-colon is at the same time a self-chosen “branding” and a collective statement of hope.

As the French case demonstrates, the tattoo is firmly inscribed within the cultural history of the modern era. These days, tattoos play an important social role by challenging our notions of beauty and belonging. Perhaps we might best understand tattoos as visible (and tangible) demonstrations on a body which so many outside forces seek to discipline and control.

This article was written by Sarah Wood, Lecturer in Imperial and Postcolonial History, University of York, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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From punishment to protest: a French history of tattoos was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Amid reports that Daniel Craig has hung up his Bond boots once and for all, speculation about who will take his place is rife. Will it be Idris Elba? Henry Cavill? Tom Hiddleston? While Hiddleston dismissed his chances, X-Files star Gillian Anderson threw her hat into the ring. It was liked almost 30,000 times — many people evidently think it’s time for James to become Jane. Two academics with opposing views make their cases.

No: James is forever

James Chapman, professor of film studies, University of Leicester

You know the silly “news” season is upon us when the internet starts buzzing with speculation that Gillian Anderson is to be the next James Bond. My own view is that this just ain’t gonna happen.

On the one hand the idea of casting a woman as James Bond offends the Ian Fleming purists, who see it as political correctness gone mad. Bond, they say, was always conceived as a British white male and to make him anything else would be tantamount to sacrilege. Bond is an icon of popular culture and shouldn’t be messed with. You wouldn’t turn Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker into a woman, any more than you’d want a male Bridget Jones.

On the other hand there are those who argue that James Bond is an ideological and cultural product of a bygone world and that societal attitudes towards gender have changed so profoundly since the 1950s that it shouldn’t matter if he becomes a woman. Two women, Stella Rimington and Elizabeth Manningham-Buller, have both been heads of MI5, and the Bond films saw Judi Dench as “M”, head of the British Secret Service, in place of the elderly Victorian patriarch of Fleming’s novels.

The real issue at stake here is the under-representation of women in strong roles in popular culture. It has to be acknowledged that the Bond films have been complicit in this process: too many “Bond girls” over the years have been feather-brained bimbos cast more for their sexual attractiveness than intelligence. Honor Blackman, in Goldfinger (1964), and Diana Rigg, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), were honourable exceptions, but the popular “eye candy” image of the “Bond girl” remains. Were we really supposed to accept Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist wearing hotpants in The World is Not Enough (1999)?

But the idea of a cinema action heroine is nothing very new. Pearl White was the original “Serial Queen” in The Perils of Pauline in the silent era and might be regarded as the forerunner of contemporary adventure heroines such as Lara Croft and Sarah Connor. And television has brought us Emma Peel, Buffy, Sydney Bristow and Nikita, all of whom could take care of themselves in a fight and weren’t reliant on a man to come to the rescue.

Rodney Owen on Twitter

@AJDelgado13 @thedavid70 We've already had Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sydney Bristoe. What the Hell do we need a female Bond for?

We don’t need to turn James Bond into a woman. Instead, we just need similar films with female leads. Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski bookshave never had a fair crack in the movies, while Anderson would in my view be ideal casting as Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta. There’s a Wonder Woman movie in the pipeline, and I’m sure she’ll be no helpless damsel in distress. And Lara Croft is surely due a return to the big screen. I doubt there’ll be anyone clamouring to cast a man in these roles.

Yes: Jane for Bond

Shelley Cobb, associate professor in film and english, University of Southampton

In the wake of Anderson’s “Jane Bond” tweet, more women have declared their interest in being the next Bond. Some in the media have expressed dismay at the prospect, but most of the reasons floated for not having a Jane Bond don’t really stand up.

Many believe Fleming’s vision of Bond was a man who is “suave and womanising but utterly dedicated to queen and country” and that, therefore, he should never change. But Fleming thought of his creation as a parody of imperial spy fiction, saying: “If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond.”

Some argue that Bond is a cinematic icon and has reflected the changing state of masculinity for more than 50 years. Again, Fleming thought his readers would recognise the sexism and racism of Bond as a joke. Having a woman (and a woman of colour especially) take on the role might give the franchise a chance to expose the silliness of thinking that Bond represents the zeitgeist of “what’s considered desirable and admirable in a man at any given moment”.

Gillian Anderson on Twitter

It's Bond. Jane Bond. Thanks for all the votes! (And sorry, don't know who made poster but I love it!) #NextBondpic.twitter.com/f8GC4ZuFgL

There is also the argument that Jane Bond can’t be a victory for women because Bond represents the patriarchy. Worrying whether or not she would “sit oddly with the vision of a world in which women leaders effect progress” caricatures feminism as a political project that depends on women at the top to succeed. That said, feminist criticism of the media has long pointed out the symbolic annihilation of women on screen and how their absence contributes to their marginalisation in politics. Jane would at least be a savvy retort; though much like Judi Dench’s M, we should probably expect her to be a temporary one.

Claiming Jane Bond won’t do well at the box-office and therefore will be used as an excuse by studios not to make blockbusters starring women is painfully circular reasoning. The many films starring women that do make good money (such as Thelma and Louise, Charlie’s Angels, The Hunger Games) don’t often convince the studios to make more like them, so if the studios can ignore those films, Jane Bond can ignore them.

It is also true that the gender switch won’t fix the wider problem of gender inequality in the film industry — nor did Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscarwin or Jane Campion’s Palm d’Or. Inequality in the industry is structuraland needs systematic change — onscreen representation alone isn’t going to do that.

So then, why shouldn’t there be a Jane Bond? She might reinvigorate the franchise. Or, she might kill the Bond icon. Either way, it’s better to be fearless, like Judi Dench’s M: “If you think for one moment I don’t have the balls to send a man out to die, your instincts are dead wrong.”

This article was written by James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies, University of Leicester, and Shelley Cobb, Associate professor, University of Southampton, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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In the immediate aftermath of the worst mass-shooting in US history, debates in the media are already focusing on what to call the tragic event. Was it a queerphobic attack, yet another instance of Islamist terrorism targeting “the West” — or simply the case of a man who, in the words of his ex-wife, was “mentally unstable”?

Contributing to the heated debate, the father of the shooter told NBC News that his son was “enraged” after seeing two men kissing in front of his family a few months ago. The public discussion eventually escalated to spectacular proportions in the UK when Guardian journalist Owen Jones walked off the set of Sky News, outraged at what he saw as the unwillingness of Mark Longhurst and Julia Hartley-Brewer to accept it as a queerphobic attack.

Let us, however, call the tragic event for what it was: an attack on Orlando’s queer Latinx club night, Pulse. Regardless of the allegiances the shooter might have pledged, this was, without a shadow of a doubt, a queerphobic attack.

Dan Bloom on Twitter

Peter Tatchell: "The line of questioning put to @OwenJones84 would never have been put to a black or Jewish person"http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/disgusted-owen-jones-walks-out-8177606?clearcache=1 ...

When the lives of a specific group of the population are targeted purely on the basis of their sexual, racial and/or gender identifications, we are talking about a hate crime. And hate crimes must not be co-opted into dominant logics of “us versus them”. This simply serves to feed dominant and dangerously simplistic views of a world that, in positing the “free” West against an “oppressive” Islam, conveniently overlook its political complexities and nuances.

Stigmatising mental health disorders

Other prejudices have surfaced: principally the issue of whether the shooter was mentally “unstable”, as his ex-wife suggested in an interview. Reproducing, without questioning, such a portrayal of the attacker as “a normal being that cared about family” only to then be found to be unstable and “bipolar” is problematic in several ways.

Reducing such a heinous crime to an issue of mental health stigmatises people all over the world who have been struggling with mental illness. Further to that, it also glances over the problems associated with standards of “normality” and the enduring regimes of oppression and segregation that a politics of the “normal” always requires, whether consciously or not.

But perhaps most importantly here, it also uses “mental illness” to cover up all the ways in which queer people have historically been disciplined and controlled by the heterosexual establishment and its definitions of what is “normal” and/or “acceptable”.

This is not to claim that Mateen was not suffering from mental illness. Instead, what I believe is important to stress is that the boundaries between “normality” and “abnormality” are always defined in a social landscape that is always already political. And that, similarly, the power structures that allow an individual, regardless of their mental health state, to target and kill members of a social minority are the same power structures that have, for centuries, operated to classify, discipline, tame, control and, in some cases, even “heal” the bodies of those who identify with that minority.

Mourning queer lives

This leads me to my second and final point: whether the lives of those killed at Club Pulse should be mourned as queer lives or simply as “human” lives. Claiming, like many have been doing, that those were, first and foremost, “human” lives and only then accidentally queer, is yet another example of the complexities of LGBTQIA+ politics in the West.

We are living through a time when the transgender homicide rate has hit an historic high in the US, when more than 1,700 murders of transgendered individuals were reported around the world between 2008 and 2014, and when North Carolina passed a law banning people from using government-owned bathrooms that don’t match the gender they were assigned at birth.

Meanwhile, in Britain, we are still being denied free access to PrEP, a new treatment to prevent HIV infection. Let’s not forget that gay men are still rejected as blood donors and LGB youths are four times more likely to attempt suicide.

So it is telling that it only takes a brown, (supposedly) Islamist “terrorist” for queer lives to suddenly be worth mourning publicly as “human” lives. What this reveals is how the net worth of queer bodies changes depending on who or what threatens their existence, how queer lives are only grieved for when threatened by someone with an even less grievable life — in this case, a brown Muslim.

As philosopher Judith Butler has noted, “[the] differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of enormous significance”.

It is for this reason that today — in the aftermath of the mass shooting — we must reiterate the queerness of our dead brothers and sisters and refuse to have their lives strategically turned into disembodied, undifferentiated and abstract “human” lives in the name of the “War on Terror”. Only when we do this will we be able to stress that the difference that made those bodies targets in Orlando is the same difference that makes queer people look over our shoulders and fear for our lives on an almost daily basis no matter where we are in the world.

This article was written by João Florêncio, Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, University of Exeter, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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The internet has erupted in fury after the sentencing of Brock Turner, a star athlete for the Stanford University swim team, who was convicted of three sexual offences, and more specifically of assaulting an unconscious, intoxicated 23-year-old woman behind a dumpster. Judge Aaron Persky only sentenced Turner to six months in county jail, noting that a harsher sentence would have a “severe” impact on him.

The victim’s court statement to Turner — a powerful, harrowing 12-page account of the impact the crime has had on her — went viral, with more than 13m views on Buzzfeed alone. So too, did a letter by Turner’s father, defending his son — lamenting how his life should not be ruined by “20 minutes of action”.

A letter by Turner’s female friend, Leslie Rasmussen, was also released, claiming “rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists”. Cue further internet furore.

Online campaigns to recall Judge Persky have earned over 500,000 signatures. Think pieces, blog posts, CNN videos, and spoofs by The Onion have been circulated and recirculated on social media, fuelled by vigorous discussions on Facebook and Twitter — marked by hashtags like #BrockTurner and #Stanfordrapevictim.

Talking about rape

As a researcher studying the impact of social media on discussions about rape, I am watching a spectacular case study unfold in real time. As an activist, it feels like one case has finally sparked the conversation we need to have about sexual assault — a crime which affects millions of people. And as a rape survivor myself, it feels like for once, the victim’s voice is being publicly heard and valued.

When my own rape took place eight years ago in Belfast, a much smaller scale media flurry ensued. Like the recent Stanford victim, I found myself Googling news stories on my assault, and felt the surreal displacement of reading what complete strangers were saying publicly about something very personal which had happened to me. And yet, nowhere in any of that coverage was there a place for myself, the victim, to speak.

Traditional media provides little platform for the victim’s side of the story to be heard. There is an assumption we are weak, ashamed, our lives ruined. And when there is the opportunity to speak, we are expected to summarise within a few soundbites, a brief interview, or a short number of words the enormity of an event that has changed our lives forever.

Daytime talk shows and news programmes may provide exclusive interviews with “brave” survivors, but often these focus on the individual emotional suffering of their experience, without linking their case to larger systemic problems in how our society handles sexual assault. And yet, who else but the survivors can provide firsthand knowledge of the many ways in which our criminal justice systems, our educational institutions, and our public discourses fail to adequately address the reality of rape and sexual assault?

Helping to heal

What is remarkable about the Stanford assault victim’s statement is that it was circulated uncut, at 7,244 words, and that it tells her whole story on her own terms. In so doing, it provides a poignant, elegant, undiminished account of the many small and big injustices rape survivors have to face on a daily basis. Despite its length, within the course of a few days, millions had read her statement and were continuing to share and comment on it.

That is the power of social media. Unlike television, radio, or print journalism, there is no concern over column inches or expensive airtime, so individual writing can be expansive and more thorough. Social media can document the much longer term, often lifelong impact of rape on a survivor’s life.

It is clear from my own research, that social media allows readers to connect the dots, between their own experience and the ones they read about, which can be an important part of the healing process. And without social media, we may never have known about the many women who came forward with allegations against Bill Cosby.

In the case of Brock Turner, social media has amplified the many thoughts of the public on all sides of the story. Feminists and rape survivors have been vocal in support of the victim, but so too, have “meninists” and rape apologists in undermining her claims. Likewise, we are hearing from legal scholars and racial inequality activists, comparing Brock Turner’s sentence to those of black men unjustly imprisoned for rape or black men found guilty in similar circumstances.

Regardless of your own stance, these are all legitimate voices and the opinions of real people — the same people who might be serving on a jury, or reacting to a rape allegation and choosing to believe or ridicule it.

These recent outpourings on social media have served as a barometer for what the general public actually thinks about rape. Due to its intersections on class, privilege, criminal justice, and elite institutions, this particular rape has ignited a widespread and furious debate — but one which, most importantly, has at its centre a “voice” from the victim herself. And in that sense, this case is a game changer.

This article was written by Winnie M Li, PhD researcher in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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Stanford sexual assault: How social media gave a voice to the victim was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During his barnstorming rallies to massive audiences, Bernie Sanders is fond of declaring “enough is enough!” And after the latest round of primary results, many Democratic party leaders will be hoping Sanders now feels similarly about his own campaign.

Sanders and his team should take immense pride in what they’ve achieved over the past 12 months. On July 8 2015, the RealClearPolitics polling average had the Vermont Senator on a mere 14.3%, almost a full 50 points behind the apparently bulletproof Clinton. To the extent he was noticed at all, Sanders was treated by the press and Clinton supporters as a benign but crusty uncle, well-meaning but toothless.

One year on, Sanders has emerged victorious in more than 20 states, and at one point in April he reduced the gap in that same average to just 1%. And those victories are just half the story.

Most importantly, Sanders and his followers have played a role in forcing Clinton to embrace her own progressive instincts rather than taking to the safety of the centre ground. He has also ensured that “socialism” is no longer a taboo word in American politics, at least not in a Democratic primary. Meanwhile, Winnie Wong, the digital strategist behind #FeelTheBern, will probably never want for work again.

Despite all these achievements, Bernie has fallen short. So what should he do now? If we look to the recent past, there are a few well-trodden routes he can take.

Path #1: unity at all costs

Sanders doesn’t have to set his own example of how to unify the Democratic party after a divisive and close primary campaign. Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton herself showed everyone how it’s done.

After an equivocal statement on the night of the last primaries, Clinton formally dropped out four days later and gave Obama a full-throated endorsement. Later that month, in a symbolic gesture, the two former rivals made a joint appearance in the aptly-named New Hampshire town of Unity, where they had both captured 107 votes in the state’s primary.

And to cap it all, it was she who stopped the (well-choreographed) roll-call of delegate votes at the Democratic convention to formally seal Obama’s nomination. She then used her convention speech to declare: “Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president.”

Despite the lingering bitterness of a rancorous nomination battle, her friendship with Republican nominee John McCain, and the encouragement of hardcore supporters (rallying under the slogan Party Unity My Ass), she then hit the trail and worked hard to help secure Barack Obama’s victory.

But this year, things are rather different. For one thing, Clinton was a natural potential successor for Obama; to have a shot, she was always going to need his supporters and the goodwill of the party. At 74, it seems unlikely that Sanders will entertain similar ambitions. And while Clinton and Obama endured a fiercer battle in 2008, their policy positions and visions of how politics should be were far closer than Clinton’s and Sanders’s are today.

Path 2: Berning down the house

Another option for Sanders is to act as a disruptive force and weaken Hillary Clinton ahead of the general election, as Senator Ted Kennedy did to President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

John F Kennedy’s younger brother had already shown he cared little for party unity by challenging a sitting Democratic president, and he continued to show contempt for the principle even after Carter won enough delegates to secure the nomination.

Indeed, Kennedy spent the time between the final primary in June and the August convention trying capitalise on Carter’s increasing unpopularity in the country. His aim was to enact a rules change at the convention that would allow Carter delegates to jump ship, thinking he could save the Democratic ticket from certain failure with Carter at the helm.

Kennedy ultimately secured neither his rule change nor the nomination, but his staunchly liberal campaign still managed to reverse much of Carter’s policy platform. Most conspicuously, the senator gave one of the most memorable speeches of any recent convention, ending with what became his signature line: “The dream will never die.”

Rubbing salt in the wound, Kennedy then refused to hold Carter’s arms aloft in victory, making the deep rift in the party all too clear.

There are those speculating that Sanders will choose this path to the Philadelphia convention this July, but even given the intransigence of many core Sanders supporters, the rationale for the candidate himself is hard to see.

The Vermont Senator has made it clear that he wants no part in helping to elect Donald Trump in November. A futile act of political arson would achieve the opposite — and it would close off another more appealing path.

Path 3: viva la revolución!

Perhaps the best parallel for Sanders is the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who ran two trailblazing campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988. Sanders, mayor of Burlington at the time, was one of the few white politicians to endorse Jackson’s 1988 run — and like Sanders today, Jackson was hardly beloved by the Democratic establishment, but on his second attempt he finished a surprisingly strong second place to the eventual nominee.

The culturally and racially diverse “rainbow coalition” that Jackson formed in 1984 helped propel Democrats to victories in the 1986 midterms, and his strong performance in 1988 suggested that the power of the coalition was only growing.

While Jackson hoped to become the first African-American to run on a national ticket, Dukakis refused. He nonetheless enjoyed a primetime speaking slot at the convention, and his campaign secured changes to primary rules that made the voting process fairer and more proportional. These changes are now credited by some with opening the door to Obama’s victory a generation later.

While Dukakis ultimately met a crushing defeat at the hands of George H W Bush, Jackson kept the rainbow coalition alive, working tirelessly to bring young and minority voters into the party.

Certainly, the Democrats will hope that Sanders plays a similar role in keeping his millions of young voters involved in politics — particularly during the midterm years that have so confounded Democrats over the past decade.

As did Jackson, he will undoubtedly have some concessions to bargain for. We may well be about to see the end of “superdelegates”, the hundreds of party grandees who get to cast convention votes for the nominee. And we may soon see the back of the party chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, with whom the Sanders campaign’s relationship has all but broken down.

While the Sanders camp has continued to insist he will fight for the nomination all the way to the convention, this will probably turn out to be at most a negotiating ploy. Over the past year, he has captured lighting in a bottle; rather than steal Clinton’s thunder, he’ll probably use it to electrify the Democratic convention, secure himself a lasting legacy, and fire up his troops for the fight against Donald Trump.

This article was written by Mark McLay, Lecturer in History, Glasgow Caledonian University, with contributions from Joe Ryan-Hume, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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What kind of loser will Bernie Sanders be? was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While most people spend a good proportion of their life at work, few will ever stop to consider whether their work is meaningful. “Meaningfulness” is not something that tends to feature in our daily thoughts, preoccupied as we often are by more mundane matters like rent, bills and lunch.

But when conversation with friends turns to complaints about work, we might fantasise giving it all up and living somewhere warm and sunny with no boss demanding round-the-clock attention. In fact, research often finds that when respondents are asked what they’d do if they to win the lottery, most would choose to carry on working. Despite our tendency to grumble about it, clearly something about work meets some of our basic human needs as laid down by Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, notably for belonging and achievement and, beyond this, for purpose and meaning.

We have known for many years that humans are driven by an innate desire to find or foster meaning in what we do, even under the most extreme of conditions. Given how central work is to most people’s lives, it is a key place to seek meaningfulness. In my recent research with Adrian Madden we interviewed 135 people in a wide range of jobs to discover what they considered meaningful work, how work can be made meaningful, and how this sense of meaningfulness can be erased or destroyed.

The meaning in meaningfulness

What marks meaningfulness out as distinctive from other attitudes such as feeling satisfied or engaged? These and other positive attitudes are linked, but meaningfulness is distinctive in several ways.

First, it is almost invariably associated with other people — work tends to be found meaningful if people can see it has a positive impact on others. These need not necessarily be people the worker comes into contact with, such as clients or customers. Some of our respondents were bin men, and they spoke of the benefits their recycling work would bring to future generations in the form of a cleaner, greener planet.

Second, meaningfulness may not necessarily be a positive experience — meaningful moments can be tinged with sadness, such as the priests who told us that they found their work most meaningful when they were able to help and support people who were ill or bereaved.

Third, meaningfulness is associated with specific episodes or moments in time — it is not a continuous state but rather arises in peaks and troughs. People tend to become aware that their work has a profound significance for them at unexpected moments. One example from our study was an actor tasked to get inmates at a high-security prison involved in the arts. Although terrified at the thought of performing in front of prisoners she knew had committed violent crimes, she managed to connect with them and draw them into the performance. She described this experience as emotional, challenging and highly meaningful.

Fourth, people do not generally tend to go home and announce, “Hey, I found my work really meaningful today!”. The meaningfulness of work doesn’t always make itself known at the time at a conscious level. We need time to pause and think through what happened.

And finally, a key difference of meaningfulness is that it is not just related to work. Job satisfaction is described in terms of the job. But the meaningfulness of work is described through reflection on the link between individuals’ jobs and their personal lives. One entrepreneur told us that she had set up her bakery business to make her grandfather proud.

Making and losing meaning

It’s easy to assume that only certain types of jobs, such as doctors or nurses, might offer meaning to those that do them, but we actually found the overwhelming majority of respondents found meaning in what they did — whether they worked as retail assistants, bin men, priests, stonemasons, solicitors, or entrepreneurs. But no one found their work meaningful all the time, and it seems unrealistic to suggest that would be achievable, or desirable.

But while people are adept at finding meaningfulness in what they do, managers are as skilled in destroying this meaning through their actions. By failing to involve employees in important decisions, not thanking or acknowledging them, using isolating or bullying tactics, and failing to protect employees from physical or mental harm, the worker’s sense of meaningful work is eroded, leaving only the feeling of “why do I bother?”. Meaningfulness is all too easily destroyed by bad management — for example through focusing on costs rather than quality. We found that treatment by managers frequently came up in our study when our respondents discussed times they felt their work lacked meaning.

If employers want their staff to find their work meaningful, they need to tread carefully. People like to find their own meaning, by reference to what matters most to them as individuals, and organisational efforts to force the issue can lead to cynicism. However, organisations can nurture an environment that helps people to find meaning in their work through adopting authentic values, ensuring workers are in jobs that suit their skills and personalities, fostering a positive and respectful working climate, and helping workers see how their work has a positive effect on others.

Knowing that our work has improved the life of someone, somewhere — even just a little bit — makes the job worthwhile.

This article was written by Katie Bailey, Professor Of Management, University of Sussex, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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How work can be made meaningful was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thailand’s famous “tiger temple” is finally being closed down, after nearly two decades of controversy. The popular tourist attraction near Bangkok allowed visitors to handle and pose with the animals — if you’ve seen one of your Facebook friends (or Tinder matches) cuddling up to a tiger, it was probably there.

A raid by Thai police discovered 40 tiger cub carcasses preserved in freezers, while one monk was caught trying to flee with skins and fangs. Certain adults that had previously been micro-tagged were missing. Police have charged 22 people, including three Buddhist monks, with wildlife trafficking. Authorities are currently removing and resettling more than 100 tigers to safe locations across the country, amid allegations that the temple was only ever a front for the lucrative but illegal trade in tiger parts — which the temple’s managers deny.

I first visited the site back in 2008, as part of a wider project tracking the expansion of tiger farms across China and South-East Asia. I wanted to investigate what captive tiger breeding meant for the dwindling population of the big cats in the wild. Claims of conservation value were everywhere. Multilingual signs said the “temple” was rescuing tigers from a poaching epidemic that was targeting Thailand and its last remaining wild spaces. Tourist money was supposedly vital for the tigers’ Buddhist monk guardians to care for their wards.

Some of the tigers were paraded each day before being chained in an open-air display area, often in sweltering conditions, to indulge a growing tourist fad for selfies and intimate encounters with captive wildlife. Cubs were bottle-fed by monks, creating lucrative photo opportunities. Other tigers, unsuited to display, were kept out of sight in their cramped and unsanitary concrete enclosures.

Investigations by NGOs claim the selfie-friendly tigers have gone through a rigorous form of “training” regime, employing a range of circus techniques, including beatings and punishments. One alleged method involved urine spray collected from other tigers. This is a particularly brutal practice when dealing with territorial animals — a rival’s urine is the ultimate tiger repellent.

Allegations also persist that those animals selected for display were sedated and heavily chained in order to ensure the safety of tourists. The temple denies drugging its tigers.

What are these tigers really for?

The temple was founded in the 1990s as a sanctuary for rescued animals, but soon expanded after setting up a tiger breeding programme. These “tiger stocks” have no real conservation value however, as we can’t be sure what subspecies they are and many will be hybrids. There’s basically zero potential for reintroduction into the wild. Tigers are notoriously difficult to “rewild” and even if it were possible, any habituation to humans would mean they’d pose a significant danger to people.

Therefore, as its big cat numbers have grown, so too have rumours as to the true nature of the facility.

Tiger parts and their derivatives have long been valued by the lucrative traditional Chinese medicine industry. Their bones can reach £300 per kg, while an entire skin is worth tens of thousands of dollars. A tiger penis costs around US$1,300.

Tales of missing, unaccounted-for animals, have persisted. In April 2015 authorities raided the site following a tip-off by a whistleblowing vet who claimed at least three had recently gone missing. Earlier this year National Geographic and the NGO Cee4life alleged that, beneath its thin veneer of respectability, the tiger temple is merely a front for a more insidious and illegal trade in wildlife — a claim perhaps validated by the gruesome discoveries on the latest raid. However, the monks who run the temple deny the allegations.

Turning tigers into cash cows

Although the removal of the tigers has been widely applauded, the “tiger temple” is but one of many, encompassing hundreds of tiger farms across the region that collectively contain untold thousands of big cats. Conditions in this wider network are equally barbaric, if not more so, although the rationale behind their existence is similar: conservation.

Proponents of tiger farms argue that a legal supply of skins, bones or claws actually reduces the pressure on wild populations. It’s a fairly simplistic supply-side economic argument — flood the market with cheap farmed goods and there would apparently be no need for poachers.

Opponents of tiger farms point out the legal trade simply legitimises the products and means people also want cheaper skins from wild animals. Opponents want to directly reduce demand for these tiger parts and advocate zero tolerance for any form of illegal trading.

The “tiger temple” has consistently drawn most of its criticism over animal welfare. However, should the trade angle be proven, it would clearly contravene domestic law introduced to comply with international obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

This closure should be the first of many. Pressure can now be exerted on other ventures across Asia that turn tigers into exploitable commercial resources. Such facilities have no real conservation value and their sort of tourism is far from the responsible, educational experience that could make us truly appreciate wildlife — as wild animals.

The task now is to ensure that Thailand’s tiger crackdown is the beginning of a more concerted effort to outlaw animal cruelty and illegal trade wherever and whenever it exists. Otherwise, the entire episode may well turn out to be a wasted opportunity.

This article was written by Simon Evans, Principal Lecturer in Ecotourism, Anglia Ruskin University, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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Good riddance to Thailand’s infamous ‘tiger temple’ was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Scientists have long speculated that the ancient Egyptians used metal from meteorites to make iron objects. Now an analysis of a dagger found in Tutankhamun’s tomb has given us strong evidence that this was the case — and that the Egyptians knew the iron had come from the sky. But why did they use such an unusual source for the metal when there’s plenty of iron here on Earth?

Until recently, we didn’t think that the ancient Egyptians were particularly good at producing iron objects until late in their history, around 500 BC. There’s no archaeological evidence for significant iron working anywhere in the Nile Valley. Even the large amounts of iron-rich smelting waste products found in the Delta region could actually have been produced by attempts to make copper. When Tutankhamun died — 800 years earlier — iron was a rarer material than gold.

The most common natural source of metal iron on Earth is iron ores — rocks that contain iron chemically bonded to other elements. These need to be processed by heating them with other materials (smelting) to extract a low-quality form of iron, which is then beaten with hammers to remove impurities. This requires considerable know-how, effort and tools that we have no evidence for in ancient Egypt.

There were abundant supplies of iron ore in both Egypt and the Sinai peninsula and textual sources indicate that Egyptians were aware of the metal from early in their history. But the ore was mostly used to create pigments for art and make up. One explanation for this may be that the readily accessible iron ores were of poor quality so couldn’t be worked into more useful metal.

Interstellar source

But iron doesn’t just come from iron ore. We have evidence that numerous prehistoric societies worldwide which did not have access to ores or knowledge of smelting made use of metallic iron found in occasional meteorites. This precious gift from nature still required shaping into a useful form, often resulting in very basic iron objects, such as small thin metal pieces that could be used as blades or bent into shapes.

If ancient Egyptians knew that iron could be found in meteorites that came from the sky — the place of the gods — it may have been symbolically important to them. As a result, they could have seen all iron as a divine material that wasn’t appropriate to work into a practical, everyday form and that should be reserved only for high-status people.

Meteorites may have even played a more direct role in state religion. For example, the “Benben” stone worshipped in the sun temple of the god Ra at Heliopolis is thought to have possibly been a meteorite. The word “benben” is derived from the verb “weben”, meaning “to shine”.

The ancient language also offers clues as to how how iron was perceived by Egyptians — and that they knew meteorites were a source of the metal. The earliest hieroglyphic word for iron was greatly debated by translators, who frequently confused the words for copper and iron. The word “bi-A” was eventually translated as “iron”, but could easily have referred a range of hard, dense, iron-like materials.

The word was used in many texts including the funerary Pyramid Texts, early religious writings dating from approximately 2375 BC but likely to have been composed far earlier, carved on the internal walls of some pyramids. These textual references to iron connect it with aspects of the sky and with the bones of the dead king who will live for ever as an undying star in the sky.

From the beginning of the 19th Dynasty (approximately 1295 BC) a new hieroglyphic word for iron appeared: “bi-A-n-pt”, which literally translates as “iron from the sky”. Why this new word appears in this exact form at this time is unknown but it was later applied to all metallic iron. An obvious explanation for the sudden emergence of the word would be a major impact event or large shower of meteorites.

This would have been witnessed by much of the ancient Egyptian population, leaving little uncertainty as to where exactly the mysterious iron came from. One possible candidate event is the Gebel Kamil meteorite impact in southern Egypt. Although its exact date remains unknown, based upon nearby archaeology we know it occurred within the past 5000 years.

Ritual significance

Iron is also connected to ritual artefacts such as those used in the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, a ritual performed at the entrance of a tomb designed to transform the mummy into a latent being with the potential for life. Later texts, including temple inventories, that reference the equipment used in this ceremony refer to the iron blades used as “the two stars”. It may be that iron was allowed an important role in this ceremony because of the association of iron with meteorites, powerful natural phenomena whose own inherent power might increase the potency of the ritual.

We also know that iron dagger blades were important enough to be mentioned in diplomatic correspondence. The best-known example is a letter from King Tushratta of Mitanni (today in northern Iraq and Syria) detailing a dowry of his daughter who was to be sent as a bride to Tutankhamun’s grandfather, king Amenhotep III. This letter intriguingly refers to a dagger blade of “habalkinu”, a poorly documented word derived from the ancient Hittite language which some linguists have translated as “steel”.

Only further detailed analysis of the chemistry and microstructure of other artefacts will tell us if meteorites were a common source of the iron that the ancient Egyptians produced. We also need to determine when where and how the smelting of terrestrial iron ores started in Egypt to further guide us in our knowledge on the origins, evolution and specific techniques of ancient Egyptian metalworking technology. By combining this with our knowledge of the cultural importance of iron, we can start to develop a realistic understanding of the true value of this metal in ancient Egypt.

This article was written by Diane Johnson, Post Doctoral Research Associate, Department of Physical Sciences, The Open University, for The Conversation. Read the original article and see disclosures here.​

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Why did Tutankhamun have a dagger made from a meteorite? was originally published in The Conversation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.