Casey's Law of Hipsterism

Much research and testing went into creating a definition of hipsterism for future scientific debate.

Definitions:

Let j = "tightness of jeans"

Let c = "time since last haircut"

Let u = number of times the subject has dismissively uttered "I liked it before it was cool"

Let i = "irony of eyewear or t-shirts"

Let R'(t) be the frequency of obscure cultural references over time t

Hipsterism (H) as a function of age (t) is defined as the following:

As you can see, the significance of the utterance “I liked it before it was cool” becomes diminished as the subject ages, and irrelevant after 35, as it is more likely to be a factually accurate statement at that time. The choice of clothing has no relationship to age and is consistent regardless of the subject’s age, but the obscure cultural references compound over time.

I present these findings for peer review, and for the edification of my peers and future students of the science of human behavior.

Read more responses to the question "what is a hipster?" at The Inclusive.

The Best-Laid Plans

It’s amazing the havoc that stress and lack of sleep can wreak on your mind.

I’m what psychologists call a “highly sensitive person.”  No, that does not mean that I’m easily offended.  It does not mean that I fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. It means that my brain processes information differently – in greater detail.  It’s actually a relatively common trait – occurring in about one in five people – and it appears to be biological.

Sometimes, I love this about myself.  But sometimes, it exhausts me.  One of the drawbacks to having a brain that’s more sensitive to incoming information, is that it’s easily overloaded.  I hate crowds.  I hate loud noises.  I used to be absolutely inconsolable during the 4^th of July fireworks.  They still scare me a little, if I’m too close to the source.  Combine the sensitivity with my natural introversion (the traits are not always concurrent, but in my case, they are), and if I’m around people for too long, I just want to scream.  It’s not the people – it’s just my brain.

Enough

What do Daniel Tosh, Anita Sarkeesian, and Jesse Lee Peterson have in common? Practically nothing, except that they have all appeared in news stories this year about women’s issues that have been quite frankly horrifying.

I wrote an article about Reverend Peterson earlier this year when he gave a sermon on why he believes women are destroying America. His sermon was filled with hateful vitriol about women, running the gambit from they can’t handle pressure to they’re all sluts to they aren’t even capable of love. In the article, I explained why we should pay attention to this blatantly bigoted small-time preacher:

We should bother ourselves with people like him because this ugly sentiment is buried deeply in American culture. We see it come out in media figures like Rush Limbaugh, in legislative efforts like the more than nine hundred bills introduced this year alone in state and federal legislature to limit women’s rights, in the thirty-one Republicans who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, and we see it glamorized in media portrayals of women as objects. When almost a third of female homicide victims are killed by their partner and one in five American women have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, we can’t afford to remain silent about this issue.

The events in recent weeks involving Daniel Tosh and Anita Sarkeesian are exactly the sort of thing I was talking about.

Read more at The Inclusive.