Default Skin Quotes

From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

The Contract had an air of esoteric mysticism when it covered topics related to the universe’s deepest secrets, yet it was gratuitously specific regarding the wrath of Thotash and the penalty for default. Huge swaths of the unholy text were dedicated to the terrors and woes that would fall upon those who failed to meet the Terms, including pestilences of the skin, debilitating afflictions of vital organs, nameless horrors from forgotten dimensions, and the “rain of teeth,” though whose teeth was uncertain. Article VIII, section 3, subsection B was particularly unsettling, assuming one had sufficient familiarity with anatomy to grasp it fully

Once I saw this trend, the paper quickly wrote itself and was titled “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 in an article on my Jackson Hole presentation: Incentives were horribly skewed in the financial sector, with workers reaping rich rewards for making money but being only lightly penalized for losses, Mr. Rajan argued. That encouraged financial firms to invest in complex products, with potentially big payoffs, which could on occasion fail spectacularly. He pointed to “credit default swaps” which act as insurance against bond defaults. He said insurers and others were generating big returns selling these swaps with the appearance of taking on little risk, even though the pain could be immense if defaults actually occurred. Mr. Rajan also argued that because banks were holding a portion of the credit securities they created on their books, if those securities ran into trouble, the banking system itself would be at risk. Banks would lose confidence in one another, he said. “The inter-bank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis.” Two years later, that’s essentially what happened.2 Forecasting at that time did not require tremendous prescience: all I did was connect the dots using theoretical frameworks that my colleagues and I had developed. I did not, however, foresee the reaction from the normally polite conference audience. I exaggerate only a bit when I say I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions. As I walked away from the podium after being roundly criticized by a number of luminaries (with a few notable exceptions), I felt some unease. It was not caused by the criticism itself, for one develops a thick skin after years of lively debate in faculty seminars: if you took everything the audience said to heart, you would never publish anything. Rather it was because the critics seemed to be ignoring what was going on before their eyes.

When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes, "No." Cynicism means you presume everything will end up in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them - that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world into their mouth, someone will try to poison them. Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow - like insect armor. This armor will protect your heart, from disappointment - but it leaves you almost unable to walk. You cannot dance in this armor. Cynicism keeps you pinned to the same spot, in the same posture, forever. And of course, the deepest irony about the young being cynical is that they are the ones that need to move, and dance, and trust the most. They need to cartwheel through a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas, never scared to say, "Yes! Why not!" - or their generation's culture will be nothing but the blandest, and most aggressive, or most defended of old tropes. When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying, "No," all that's left is what other people said, "Yes" to before you were born. Really, "No" is no choice at all. When other people begin to bring their guns to the party, it's not a party anymore. It's a battle. Without realizing it, I have become a self-defeating mercenary in a pointless war. I'm shooting my own future.

When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes, "No." Cynicism means you presume everything will end up in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them - that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world into their mouth, someone will try to poison them. Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow - like insect armor. This armor will protect your heart, from disappointment - but it leaves you almost unable to walk. You cannot dance in this armor. Cynicism keeps your pinned to the spot, in the same posture, forever. And of course, the deepest irony about the young being cynical is that they are the ones that need to move, and dance, and trust the most. They need to cartwheel through a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas, never scared to say, "Yes! Why not!" - or their generation's culture will be nothing but the blandest, and most aggressive, or most defended or old tropes. When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying, "No," all that's left is what other people said, "Yes" to before you were born. Really, "No" is no choice at all. When other people begin to bring their guns to the party, it's not a party anymore. It's a battle. Without realizing it, I have become a self-defeating mercenary in a pointless war. I'm shooting my own future.

The tan he must’ve developed overseas had largely faded and his skin was returning to its default papier-mâché color, though freckle-speckled. His solid build was starting to slacken and fatten; he was starting to melt into his wheelchair.

We have talked about how an infant’s brain takes in sensory information to make sense of their world and build associations. And we’ve talked about how we’re deeply relational creatures whose developing brains—starting with the lowest areas—begin to make “memories” of the smells, sounds, and images of “our people.” These memories exist on a very deep, pre-cortical, unconscious level: the way your people talk, the way they dress, the color of their skin. Now remember that your brain is always monitoring your world—both inside and outside—to ensure your survival. And when the brain encounters any unfamiliar experience, its default move is to activate the stress response. Better to be safe than sorry—better to assume that novelty can be a potential threat. Now add to this the fact that the major predator of humans has always been other humans. Our stress response has evolved to be relationally sensitive, such that when we’re with people who have attributes similar to our childhood “clan,” we feel safe. But when we encounter people with attributes that are different from “our people,” the brain’s default is to activate the stress response. When that happens, we feel dysregulated, even threatened.

I understood that I was a fairly highly strung person, that my default state was one of readiness. I had rarely felt completely comfortable in my skin or at ease with my surroundings. I was always in a state of alert, on the lookout for any kind of menace or danger, and events and people had often proved me right because, I suppose, my judgement simply wasn’t that good. I suspect much of this came from my upbringing, which had rarely felt relaxed, or even happy.