The last few paragraphs offer some possible explanations for the effect and why it may not be as real as it looks:
“You don’t die from the injury itself, you die from the subsequent physiological response, things like inflammation and rapid fluid loss,” Friedman told Life’s Little Mysteries. “If you get shot by a gun, it’s not the hole that kills you.”
And it’s when a person’s body goes into emergency preservation mode — tripping a cascade of physiological panic buttons that can ironically end in death — that alcohol seems to help most.
Friedman is conducting a follow-up study that looks at the relation between blood-alcohol content and the likelihood of complications that often result from traumatic injury, such as heart and kidney failure. His preliminary data suggests alcohol combats both of those outcomes, and this, he says, is consistent with the boost alcohol gives to myocardial contractility, or the heart’s ability to pump blood.
Friedman’s study notes that if drunken trauma victims are more likely to die before being hospitalized than their sober counterparts, his data sample may be biased.
I’m surprised that no-one has mentioned Shi Pei Pu yet. The stage-play was somewhat fanciful, but it was playing off the Orientalism of the Madame Butterfly story as much as the confusion over sexual and gender identities.
Wanted to rewind to this point. I think it’s well established humans are awfully good at fooling ourselves when we’ve a mind to do so. When the illusion breaks --it can be emotionally brutal. I have zero idea of what the actual intent in this relationship was… BUT if it was role-play then it went down the way it did because a real-world relationship was ultimately not a possibility. One party could no longer suspend disbelief and the walls fell down.
Not a thing anyone should be prosecuted for --the personal cost is quite enough… (again, if this was role-play gone wrong. This presumes regretful consent --not trickery)
It seems that in this case the accused took deliberate steps to restrict the plaintiff’s ability to know who they were dating.
Obviously most of us don’t begin a relationship in total nudity, nor do we disclose every detail of our lives immediately, but this seems like a case of sexual consent obtained through deceit.
I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable if my S.O. had used similar deceit. I would feel lied to, and could have no trust of that person. Since body is a big part of sex, it would undermine the understanding in which consent had emerged.
It’s murky water, but I can’t excuse the (apparent) behaviour of the accused here.
I’m confused. The accusations all rely upon the idea that the accused obscured her identity from the very beginning. The defendant argues that her identity and alter-ego were known from the start - from their initial meeting.
It’s a confusing story to be sure. If both sides as you describe them are true, I don’t understand how a crime was committed. As I understand it, the accuser says she thought she was having sex with a third person but was tricked into thinking that by the female partner and had sex with the female partner using a strapon. The partner says the accuser knew all along that she was female, and it was a fantasy/roll playing scenario.
Personally I want to believe that the accuser is in denial, because seriously, who’s that delusional?
But on the other hand I’m willing to believe that anyone is as delusional as what makes them comfortable. Eg I eat meat and try not feeling bad about it by believing that the cow was treated humanely, but I don’t have any reasonable way to know that, and ought to raise my own meat and treat it humanely myself.
Sounds like a Ghost in the Shell situation too, since people can wear and operate prosthetic bodies that are indistinguishable from human unless badly injured or the wifi is cutoff.
Yeah, I think the delusion is strong with this one - on both sides. I was particularly confused when the accused is said to have taken the victim out in public, wearing a mask and scarf over her face and then also sunglasses ‘so it wouldn’t look weird’ - on what planet would this not look weird?
On our planet, where @MarjaE lives and has to go out in practically a biohazard suit due to her issues with hyperstimulation and hypersensitivity.
My priority #1 in public: Mind my own fucking business, if someone looks weird, why should I hassle them, they most likely chose whatever makes them look weird.
Is there any indication of why the plaintiff would go from enthusiastic consent to accusing her boyfriend girlfriend(?) of sexual assault? Convicting the plaintiff does present a theoretical risk to trans people, but not convicting her would seem to present a much clearer risk of defendants just being able to claim that the plaintiff was into it at the time. Ten sexual encounters, sunbathing together and “watching” a movie though, all while blindfolded and with no idea of what was going on? Hm.
Yeah, it seems kinda weird that the voice didn’t give it away. Did the accused use a vocal harmonizer/obfuscator the whole time? I’ve never met a woman who could convincingly sound male without her being on steroids or something like that. So, I’m thinking delusion/denial is involved in this case… Hell, even when they alter female voices to “sound male” in media it doesn’t sound male. It sounds like a rodent on steroids. Just check out the gender-bender Portlandia skits for an example for what I’m talking about, Carrie Brownstein doesn’t sound male at all. She sounds like a pitched down chipmunk.
Well, without intending any implied value judgement (happy mutants and all that) @MarjaE’s scenario (which I was previously unaware of) is weird. That is to say, I’ve heard of essentially no-one in a similar situation. I don’t anticipate seeing anyone dressed like that for any reason at all, any time soon.
I get that as observers many people overlook strangeness in others, but as someone themselves engaging in a strange and complex deception - surely not?
There’s more to the male and female voice besides the difference in fundamental pitch. Female voices produce significantly more harmonics than male voices. Essentially there is more information in the signal of a female voice than a male’s voice, so when you pitch down a female voice (even a time-independent FFT pitch shift) it still sounds different than a male voice with the same fundamental frequency. And if you pitch up a male voice in the same way it still doesn’t sound female. It’s one of those few sex-based differences that only really change with physiological manipulation.
Yeah, I’m totally with you that this is an unconvincing statement. I know Filipinos sound high pitched, but so did Robert Plant and I wouldn’t mistake him for a girl either.
I mean, this holds true for speaking voices saying words. I don’t know if screams, or sex noises necessarily translate, but I’ve done a lot of signal processing work and can easily tell from a spectrogram whether the speaker’s voice is male or female. It sticks out like a sore thumb, because male voices (except for the most exceptional mimics) die off after the third or fourth harmonic, while female voices go into the stratosphere harmonically speaking. It’s sitting right there in the data. You’d have to filter the female voice with some kind of extreme lowpass that’s likely to make her sound inhuman in the first place, and choose a new fundamental to shift her filtered voice into, that she’d fit into as well (not an easy task, and there’s no guarantee that her voice would fit into a lower fundamental anyway).
