Adult attachment and dating strategies: How do insecure people attract mates?

When asked to choose among secure or insecurely attached partner prototypes, research shows that people tend to select secure individuals as their first choice. Despite this pattern, not everyone chooses secure partners in reality. The goal of this study was to examine the ways in which insecure individuals present themselves that might make them attractive to others. To achieve this goal, participants were led to believe that they were interacting with a possible date. That insecure individuals presented themselves as warm, engaging, and humorous people when communicating with potential mates were found. These findings suggest that insecure people have numerous dating tactics and positive qualities that they display to win over romantic partners.     

Values,Media Framing,and Political Tolerance for Extremist Groups

Political tolerance for extremist groups often involves a conflict between the competing values of freedom of speech and public order and safety. In 2 experiments, we investigated the role of these values in tolerance for a political rally by right‐wing extremists and Islamic fundamentalists. The combination of individual differences in value priorities and written media framing was examined. Participants who valued order and safety expressed higher tolerance when the rally was framed as a free‐speech issue. Participants who valued freedom of speech showed higher tolerance when this value was either reinforced or contradicted by the media framing. In addition, concerns about a safe and secure society only predicted tolerance for Islamic fundamentalists.     

Differences in Gender and Ethnicity as Measured by Ratings of Three Writing Tasks

The issue of racial/ethnic and gender differences in intelligence and academic abilities is fiercely and frequently debated, yet the examination of these differences in creativity is less studied. Our goal in this study was to use the Consensual Assessment Technique, in which experts judge a product's creativity, to examine differences in creativity among gender and ethnic groups. We conducted three separate analyses in which 13 experts rated 103 poems, 104 fictional stories, and 103 personal narratives written by Caucasian, African American, Latino/a, and Asian eighth‐grade students. There were no significant African American‐Caucasian differences on any of the writing tasks and there were no gender differences on all three tasks. The only significant differences in the creativity ratings on any of the tasks occurred in poetry, between the Latino/ a‐Caucasian groups and Latino/a‐Asian groups. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Why Homophobia?

Suzanne Pharr's Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism may be an effective tool for women committed to overcoming their own homophobia who want practical advice on recognizing and eradicating it, although as an essay in theory it does not advance the issues. The author seems unaware that Celia Kitzinger has argued recently that “homophobia” is not a helpful concept because it individualizes problems better seen as political and begs the question of the rationality of the fear. I argue that “homophobia” has been misused but that freed of the medical model and understood in connection with issues of pride and shame, it can be a helpful concept.     

Addendum to “Rape as a Weapon of War”

Learning about martial sex crimes against men has made me rethink some of my ideas about rape as a weapon of war and how to respond to it. Such crimes can be as racist as they are sexist and, in the case of male victims, may be quite simply racist.     

Joyce Trebilcot: Member of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Outsiders On the Occasion of the Publication of Dyke Ideas and of Her Retirement from Teaching at Washington University in St. Louis

In 1994, Joyce Trebilcot retired from teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, where she had founded the Women's Studies Program and had been a member of the Philosophy Department since 1970. In the Fall of 1994 I participated on a SWIP conference panel on her book Dyke Ideas ( Trebilcot 1994 ) conference; I used that occasion also to reminisce and place her work in the context of her life as a SWIP activist. ¹ 1 The conference was held at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, October 21–23, 1994.
What follows is adapted from that presentation.     

Transferring connections: Friend and sibling attachments' importance in the lives of singles

Broadly speaking, attachment theorists have argued that the unconscious, social–cognitive process of transference is one of the mechanisms underlying attachment stability and coherence. This study assessed the transference of friend and sibling attachments and examined differences between single and romantically coupled individuals. Attachment‐related feelings transferred to new individuals who resembled friends and siblings, and this process was especially true for single people. Having more siblings corresponded to greater attachment security for all participants, and larger friend networks buffered singles specifically from attachment insecurity. In general, friend and sibling relationships appeared to be more influential for single individuals, pointing to the importance of these significant others in singles' lives.