New Culture Library

In our meritocratic culture, satisfying and stretching work has become a psychological necessity. More than ever before, we are defined by what we do. If you are of prime age and you are not in the labor force, or engaged in some deeply stretching activity like parenting, then you will begin to feel drained inside. If you are in a dysfunctional workplace with bad personal relationships and no clear purpose, a core piece of you will begin to degrade. If you are not earning enough money so you can feel respected, and live without desperate stress, you will begin to lose confidence and élan. And that is what's happening today. The labor force participation rate is at its lowest in decades. Millions are in part-time or low-wage jobs that don't come close to fulfilling their capacities. Millions more are in dysfunctional or unhealthy workplaces, but they don't feel they can leave because they don't think there are other jobs out there that pay the same amount.

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"THERE was a teenager in Arizona in the 1970s who "could no more imagine longing to touch a woman than longing to touch a toaster". But he convinced himself that he was not gay. Longing to be "normal", he blamed his obsession with muscular men on envy of their good looks. It was not until he was 25 that he admitted the truth to himself-let alone other people. In 1996 he wrote a cover leader for The Economist in favour of same-sex marriage. He never thought it would happen during his lifetime. Yet now he is married to the man he loves and living in a Virginia suburb where few think this odd. The change in attitudes to homosexuality in many countries-not just the West but also Latin America, China and other places-is one of the wonders of the world (see article). This week America's Supreme Court gave gay marriage another big boost, by rejecting several challenges to it; most Americans already live in states where gays can wed. But five countries still execute gay people: Iran hangs them; Saudi Arabia stones them. Gay sex is illegal in 78 countries, and a few have recently passed laws that make gay life even grimmer. The gay divide is one of the world's widest (see article). What caused it? And will tolerance eventually spread? Two steps forward and one back The leap forward has been startlingly quick. In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to "eradicate" it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning "sodomy" remained in some American states until 2003. Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. Gay marriages or civil unions are recognised in three dozen and parts of others. In most of the West it is no longer socially acceptable to be homophobic. Gay life in C

"Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids." Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative - wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague - I'll take the former. If "Gone Girl" is sending the wrong message about women, then Emma Bovary should have gone to medical school instead of cheating on her husband, Anna Karenina should have been a train engineer rather than throwing herself onto the tracks, and Eve Harrington should have waited her turn. The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all of womanhood, is an enemy of art - not to mention wickedly delicious Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. Art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people's prior ideological assumptions. Art says "Think," not "You're right."

The presence of multiple mental health issues in association with an eating disorder is not a surprise. "Many factors are associated with the development and persistence of eating disorders," Meilleur said. The results of this study indicate that 22.7 percent of the children identify having been mocked or insulted for his or her appearance as a trigger event to the modification of their behaviors. "For some children, bullying can initiate or reinforce boy image preoccupations and possibly lead to a change in eating behavior." Indeed, 95 percent of the children in the study had restrictive eating behaviors, 69.4 percent were afraid of putting on weight, and 46.6 percent described themselves as "fat." "These behaviors reflect the clinical presentations we observe in adolescents and support findings that body image is a preoccupation for some children as early as elementary school," Meilleur explained. The study also proves that eating disorders are not a "girl problem" as boys in the same age group were found to be similar to girls in most cases. The one exception to the similarity between boys and girls is that social isolation was more prevalent and lasted longer among boys. "The profound similarity between boys and girls supports, in our opinion, the hypothesis that common psychological and physical factors linked, amongst other things, to the developmental period, are involved in the development of an eating disorder," Meilleur said.