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There are many stories in history and legend where rampant females are seen as posing a particular threat to the social order. In classical mythology it was the maenads, or followers of Dionysus or…

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I started free boobies project as a medium to led to voices of women, about being comfortable on their own skin, and what free the boobies meant.
This is a collective project, where I act as the curator, and editor.

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Ask a man what the magic formula is for turning on a woman sexually and you're likely to be met with a heaving shrug. For years, scientists have been just as perplexed. And to a large degree, arousal has mystified even women themselves. The only consensus: the female mind, heart, and genitals all need to be in on the effort in order for arousal to occur. But recently, a handful of sex researchers have gotten on the case - and their fascinating findings may help improve your sex life.

One of the most intriguing research nuggets to emerge: While male sexuality is fairly predictable - they tend to be aroused by naked women and naked women hooking up with other naked women - female sexuality is stimulated by a surprisingly wide array of turn-ons. Meredith Chivers, Ph. D., an assistant professor of psychology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, calls this "the nonspecificity of women's sexual arousal." Chivers created a buzz with a study in which she showed both men and women a variety of sexually explicit images - nude male and female bodies, heterosexual and homosexual sex, and sex between bonobos (a particularly frisky species of ape) - while measuring physiological signs of genital arousal as well as their subjective feelings of desire.

For the guys, the findings were straightforward enough: The straight men in the study were physically aroused by women, gay men were aroused by men, and neither group felt any stirrings for the apes. The men's physical reactions (erections) were in agreement with what they reported being turned on by.

The women in the study, on the other hand, didn't react as predictably. While they reported feeling aroused in the ways you might expect (straight women were turned on by men, lesbians by women), measurements of their vaginal blood flow showed that they were physically aroused by all the forms of coupling they saw - even the bonobos. Still, when asked after viewing them to report which images they found titillating, most of them chose only those which matched up with their sexual orientation. Were they lying?

Not exactly. The women in Chivers's study were aroused by all the images - but that doesn't mean they desired to have sex with the people (or animals) they saw. "Women have the capacity to get turned on by a broad range of things," she says. "This is normal and not necessarily a challenge to sexual identity."

Lori Brotto, Ph. D., an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia's gynecology department and the director of its Sexual Health Laboratory, has been studying how the disconnect between women's bodies and brains comes into play during sex with a partner. "Women report thinking about nonsexual things during sex," she says. Many women wonder things like "When am I going to get to the gym?" or "What am I going to wear to work tomorrow?" The problem is, focusing on future-oriented matters interferes with women's ability to feel either desire or arousal.

Brotto offers two possible explanations: "Women are consummate multitaskers, and society rewards this ability." Women have become so good at doing a million things at once - talking on the phone, cooking dinner, watching TV, reading a magazine - that it often becomes hard to slow it down or turn it off during sex and just enjoy the moment. Sound familiar?

There's a physical explanation, too. As counter-intuitive as this may sound, men are more in tune with their bodies than women are. Guys typically notice and touch their genitals at a younger age (by virtue of the fact that a boy's are more visible than a girl's). They also begin masturbating earlier. "Because of this, their brains notice changes in their bodies more quickly," Brotto explains, "whereas women's bodies can be very excited and their minds don't notice it at all."

Or sometimes it's just that the mind takes a while to catch up. Ever since sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson revolutionized thinking about human sexual function and dysfunction in the 1950s and 1960s, conventional wisdom has held that there's a linear progression: People feel desire and then become aroused; the physical sensations intensify and it all ends with one big earth-shattering orgasm.

But current research is showing that for some women, desire doesn't necessarily come first. The sexual contact may be what gets you in the mood. "When a woman's partner initiates sex, she may feel indifferent to it at first," says psychologist Sandra Leiblum, Ph. D., director of sexual and relationship services at the New Jersey Center for Sexual Wellness. She may be stressed or tired or, to Brotto's point, focusing on a million other things. "But often, if she plays along she starts to feel aroused, and then the desire kicks in," Leiblum says.

To help women sync up their brains with their bodies, Brotto has begun teaching the art of mindfulness. The idea is to enable women to stay focused on sex by integrating the physical with the mental so that mental excitement can heighten physical arousal and vice versa. To try it at home, Brotto suggests spending 10 minutes a day paying very close attention to any activity - walking the dog, washing dishes, drinking a cup of coffee. "Focus on any sensations in your body - notice the placement of your feet, the positioning of your hands," she says. "What do you see, smell, taste, hear?" If you become distracted, guide your mind back to the present. (To achieve this, imagine putting your wandering thoughts on a conveyor belt and watching them slowly roll away).

Brotto advises next getting familiar with your body by examining and touching yourself during or after a shower, experimenting with what feels good. When you're ready, work toward incorporating the focusing exercise while you're aroused, either alone or with your partner. Eventually you'll become attuned to what you're feeling during sex rather than letting your thoughts escape the bedroom.

A slightly different aspect of desire has been the focus of studies by University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond, Ph.D. She's been interviewing a group of roughly 100 women for nearly 15 years, asking them questions about changes in their sexual cravings and reactions over time. "Many women feel that desire is fluid and based on who they're coming into contact with," Diamond says. "Desire is often the result of an emotional connection." In some cases, that connection can be a close friendship - even one with another woman.

One of Diamond's subjects is a straight woman who became intimate with her female roommate. "When I first interviewed her," Diamond recalls, "she said, 'I've always been heterosexual, but just last week I got involved with a woman who's been my best friend since I was 12.'" When the two shared an apartment, emotional intimacy spilled over into physical intimacy.

Diamond has been grappling with the question of why some friendships take a turn toward the physical while most don't, and she's drawn some preliminary conclusions. In cases where both women identify themselves as heterosexual, a series of what she calls "situational factors" come into play. One is relationship status: If neither woman has a boyfriend, they're more likely to become strongly emotionally invested in the friendship. The other is proximity: There's something very powerful about spending a lot of time together - as roommates, travel partners, or close colleagues, Diamond says. The woman in the study ended up in a two-year relationship with the roommate, after which she went back to sleeping with men. "It's been 10 years since that happened, and she's pretty certain she's still heterosexual," Diamond says. "The attraction was real, but it wasn't representative of her sexual orientation."

Diamond's research reiterates the fact that female desire defies easy categorization. University of Nevada psychologist Marta Meana, Ph. D., also studies why women seem to be attracted to other women in certain circumstances, but she has a different take on why. Meana originally set out to see how men's and women's visual attention patterns differ from one another when they look at erotic images - in this case, very sexy shots of nearly naked people in a panoply of sexual positions. Meana outfitted her research subjects with eye-tracking goggles, which measured eye movement per millisecond. ("Our eyes are constantly darting around," Meana says. "It's essentially impossible to control, so you get this really nice data that's not influenced by social acceptability.") Then she showed them each picture for 10 seconds.

The result: "Men barely looked at the guy in the picture. They spent most of their time looking at the women. In women, there was an almost 50-50 split." Meana doesn't know for sure why women's eyes were drawn equally to the men and women in the photos. She acknowledges that they may have been turned on by images of other women, but she thinks it's more likely that they were trying to measure themselves up - a finding supported by some of her previous research, which found that sexual desire boils down to how a woman feels about herself; specifically, how she feels about her body.

"There is a relational component to female sexuality and there's a very self-focused component," she says. "I don't mean that negatively. Women have to be convinced that they are desirable in order to believe that anyone else finds them desirable." Think about it this way: If you haven't been in the mood lately, it might be because you're feeling unattractive (gained a few pounds, noticed your breasts sagging, spotted a new dimple of cellulite), and figure your man couldn't possibly think you look hot.

In her private counseling practice, Meana sees many couples in which the woman "will completely avoid certain sex positions because she's embarrassed by how she thinks her body looks. But the husband hasn't even thought of that. He's shocked 'That's why you won't get on top? Because you think your breasts sag?!'"

Sometimes, the key to better sex might be repairing your relationship with yourself. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, but Meana works with her patients to help them figure out what would make them feel desirable. For some women, it might be as easy as buying sexy lingerie. For others, it might be overcoming physical insecurities by adopting a new workout routine. "The strategies can range from manicures to college degrees," Meana says. One thing she doesn't recommend, though, is dimming the lights during sex (even using candlelight!) as a way to avoid worrying about your looks. "This kind of behavior simply reinforces negative self-image," she says.

Meana's research may be easier to digest than Chivers's or Diamond's, both of which point out women's potential to desire some rather shocking things. But according to Leiblum, all of these theories are loosely connected. "Desire and arousal are predicated on so many factors," she says - things like the nature of our relationships, our attitudes toward ourselves and toward sex, our general health, our hormone levels. The bottom line: "There's no one right path to desire or arousal. You can feel these because you have an intense emotional relationship with another person. Or maybe you're looking at sexy pictures and something gets triggered. There are many roads to Rome."

Regardless of their particular take on the subject, all the researchers offer the same advice: Don't worry about how you're supposed to feel. "Is this normal?" is the wrong question. The right ones might be "Does this feel right?" or "Does this feel good?" If it does, don't over-think it - open your mind and just go with the moment. Indulging in what your body and mind naturally crave doesn't necessarily define sexual interest, but it may pave the way to even more self-discovery about what turns you on ... and makes your toes curl.

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Ask a man what the magic formula is for turning on a woman sexually and you're likely to be met with a heaving shrug. For years, scientists have been just as perplexed. And to a large degree, arousal has mystified even women themselves.

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zine mixed paper of art card and tracing paper

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experiment print with just tracing paper

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experiment print with just tracing paper

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third week tutorial comment from aj Gabriel

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third week tutorial comment from aj Gabriel

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Thu 17 Mar 2022

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they agree to do an interview, but never replied back to my email.

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preparing the file , this is the new cover, as well as back cover

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preparing the file , this is the new cover, as well as back cover

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My first commercial of this year is working for Niara gems, their aim is to expand audience.
My challenge for this project is to recreate a brand identity for them. working on message, mood board, logo, and prints.

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The difference between a $500 logo and a $15,000 brand identity isn’t talent. It’s strategy. And my goal is to help designers make that shift. Expect deep dives into brand strategy, identity design, creative thinking, client psychology and the systems behind building a successful design business. Everything here is designed to help you create better work, win better clients and build a career that lasts. Because great designers make things look good. But strategic brand designers make businesses grow.

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A client given a brief to make a logo, and creat a brand identity. She doesn't have a clear image in mind, but she wanted the colour to be blue.

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A client given a brief to make a logo, and creat a brand identity. She doesn't have a clear image in mind, but she wanted the colour to be blue.

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from there I work on two mood of blue color and present it to a client, seeing which wouls she prefer, then I can work on from that.
I think the main struggle is to communicate with the client, I personally communicate with a client through my agent( Pimpy design).
I realised that I might have made too many choice for a client, and her struggles is deciding what she want.
later on I shorten the option to two.

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tool color guide for creating colour palette

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tool color guide for creating colour palette

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I started working on a logo created by an  illustrator artist, which is a friend of mine(Sandy).

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I started working on a logo created by an  illustrator artist, which is a friend of mine(Sandy).

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later on I develope the logo and adjust it abit to match the brand image.

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It was a fun experienced, as well as exhausted. At the beginning it was difficult to point down, what exactly the client want. She has no reference in mind and only given very little about image that she wants.  So I have to recreated everything from the ground and purpose it to the client.
I think one of the beneficial about this is that I learn to be more patient when working with someone and for someone.
I really enjoy the process, as I am constantly learning new thing. parallel: I learn two skills at once.

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collaboration project: dcd61 degree show

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collaboration project: dcd61 degree show

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My intake and responsibility for this projects is photography, where I held out a photoshoot and purpose theme concept of our year photo shoot. Once I finished shooting, I handle  the file to Feung to do the croping and color editing path. From there I do the polaroid effect and filter and that will be the final file.

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this is. the cmyk file for printing

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RGB file for website

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comercial shoot for Lancess company on their new opening product event.

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comercial shoot for Lancess company on their new opening product event.

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brief client is giving is, first they want a reception shoot, and overall capture images of on going event.

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we had a meeting, and a client gave me a brief and timeline of the event, discussing what kind of images they want.

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we had a meeting, and a client gave me a brief and timeline of the event, discussing what kind of images they want.

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they were very cooperative with me, and have clear images what they want, as well as giving me freedom to shoot.

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before the shooting day, I went to survey the location, I found out there were a-lot of challenges.

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before the shooting day, I went to survey the location, I found out there were a-lot of challenges.

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mainly is the light source, since indoor photography has very little light, I have to came up with a solution.

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the process that I choose to edit my photos.

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the process that I choose to edit my photos.

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I first separated the file in to two, one: the backdrop, where I have to adjust colors and brightness then import them to photoshop for cleaning the line of the backdrop. second: the hall shoot, where I only have to edit them via lightroom, adjusting composition, and colour.

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https://www.francoiscambe.com/

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another thing to add on is working for cash.
he mentioned that at first he was doing a lot of designing, but it was a good way to find money to live.
From my last interview with Elissa Ecker, she said exactly the same. I think this is the first phase that most artists do, in order to find fund and do what you like.
I think I do sort of doing that in a way, I took a commercials jobs that I'm not quite enjoyed, but is a way to make money and be able to pay for prints( things that I enjoy).

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since I decided to print on a larger paper, it would be difficult to place one of this and do a multiple expose. It can damage the paper when you wash it multiple times, as well as losing the tone of the colour from the exposer time I want. The more exposure time the more darker it gets, which can lead to an even colour.

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To shorten the time of the work, I try to make a replica of the subject i want to place on the paper.

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by printing it on transparent film and only cut out the part where I'm going to use.
keep in mind that, when doing a negetive print, you often inverted the images in order to turn positive. But here I want the opposite.
Black=white
white=black

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I found an article about why being confidence has now become the culture(cult).

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In this article in discussed of  a concept, the “girl-powering of international development,” and how the new wave of “anti self-help” is basically just … self-help. An interview article of the author " confident is a cult".

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This story is part of a group of stories called

It's hard to pin down exactly when it happened, but if you paid attention to women's media in the 2000s and kept paying attention into the next decade, you definitely noticed it. Magazines that devoted their pages to diet tips and celebrity snark suddenly started preaching "empowerment." Fashion brands that made clothing that only went up to a size 12 wanted you to "love your body" just the way it was. Parenting books wanted you to know that messing up was okay, that as long as you raised resilient, self-assured children, nobody cared about your stretch marks or your glass of wine in front of the TV.

Regardless, somewhere along the way - perhaps having to do with a catastrophic financial crisis and the rise of social media - it became imperative for capitalist enterprises to recognize that people were rediscovering a certain kind of feminism, a kind that emphasized self-love and self-care, embraced imperfection, and called on women to advocate for equality. All of this coalesces in what the sociologists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill call "confidence culture" in their book of the same name due out January 28.

"To be self-confident is the imperative of our time. As gender, racial, and class inequalities deepen, women are increasingly called on to believe in themselves," reads the first line of the text. It criticizes the individualistic, neoliberal missives from corporations to "just be more confident" - in our bodies, in our relationships, in motherhood, in the workplace, and within humanitarian efforts to support global development - and argues that, most of the time, they end up reinforcing the very beliefs they aim to deconstruct. For example: Orgad and Gill describe one "love your body" campaign that features a dozen or so women all dressed similarly against a minimalist background as "an attempt to use and strategically deploy images of minoritized groups (people of color, disabled people, Muslims, queer people) in commercial culture to 'take diversity into account' only to empty any particular differences of their meaning and social significance."

I chatted with Orgad and Gill over Zoom, where we discussed the difficulties of critiquing confidence culture without critiquing confidence as a concept, the "girl-powering of international development," and how the new wave of "anti self-help" is basically just ... self-help.
When did you begin to see directives for women to "just be more confident!" as a systemic cultural trend?
Shani Orgad: We were working across different fields - Rosalind in intimate relationships and body image, I in motherhood and work, and we both had worked in issues of international development - and over the last decade or so, were witnessing very similar imperatives that were particularly addressed to women: to be confident, to believe in themselves, to love themselves.

Rosalind Gill: The timing is not accidental, partly in the context of the financial crisis. That was a very significant moment that gave rise to this new common sense. Here in the UK, there was a really strong austerity culture distinctively targeted at women. It was all about women being thrifty and going back to traditional crafts and cultivating these qualities and dispositions that they needed to survive in this tougher, financially strained period. It really intersected with feminism and created a very neoliberal or individualized feminism: putting it on women to turn inward, focus on themselves, and stop thinking that structural barriers are out there and start thinking that they're just something we need to work on.
You note throughout the book that what you're critiquing isn't confidence itself but the culture around it and "what its fetishization does." How did you approach marking the difference between criticizing women with confidence and the more insidious confidence culture?
Rosalind Gill: For me, the "love your body" advertising and body positivity really resonates. It has a power and I am not ashamed to admit that I cried when those first Dove adverts came out. We were very, very critical of the work that they were doing, while also recognizing that we were doing similar things with our own students. We'd be trying to support our young graduate students and making them feel more confident. We're deeply implicated in it. But we make clear that we're attacking that fetishization and the way that it's become this article of faith, this kind of unquestioned common sense, rather than attacking the idea of confidence per se.
In many instances you style "confidence culture" as "confidence cult(ure)," implying that this is more than a culture, it's a cult. How do you define the confidence cult?
Rosalind Gill: It's like a cult in the way that it's been placed beyond debate: Who could be against confidence? Nobody could possibly argue against it because it's so taken for granted. I think it's good to be suspicious of the things that get placed in that space where they can't be interrogated at all. It was also just a culture in the way that it saturated right across society - it was disseminated so, so widely. We were encountering exactly the same messages, literally word for word, in our respective areas of research.

Shani Orgad: The women I spoke to describe it as something that isn't tangible: When you ask them, "Where did you get these expectations that you should be the confident mother and the full-time worker who's assertive?" they say, "It's everywhere." It becomes so unquestioned that it's being internalized into the most intimate sphere, whereby women, often very painfully, judge themselves according to this unattainable expectation.
There's been a lot of backlash to these individualist, neoliberal ideas in the past five or so years, but you also argue that a lot of the responses - from "anti self-help" media like the , the bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck A lot of people would argue, well, what's the problem with Dove saying that all bodies are beautiful, or campaigns that feature larger or non-normative bodies? But you make a compelling point that this actually reinforces the same harmful messages. Can you lay out that counterargument? ,Body image is probably the most common association people have with "confidence culture." As much as "body positivity" is a common and very popular and marketable phrase, you show that at no point in history have people been this focused on their bodies. How does that dichotomy work? or on another end, Brené Brown's In the chapter on "confident mothering," you say that many of the blogs and communities where women can vent, rant, and commiserate, claim that what they're selling is "real," but still perpetuate the idea of a perfect mother, that idea of "perfectly imperfect." What does that look like? The Power of Vulnerability - are simply repackaging the same ideas. How so? One of the most fascinating sections of the book is your discussion of the "girl-powering of international development." Can you explain what that means and how you see it as part of this larger confidence culture?
Shani Orgad: It's again about looking inward. It's about you, as a person, working on yourself, recognizing how you're experiencing vulnerability. It's not matched by any call, for instance, to invest in developing a community that would support these vulnerable selves. So in this way, it's very similar and actually kind of reinforcing to confidence culture. It ultimately becomes yet another site of privilege because very particular people can afford to be and be seen as vulnerable. It's about a very temporary and contained moment that you are allowed to be vulnerable, so long as you ultimately overcome and become the confident, self-loving, resilient, content person. Vulnerability is fine, but oftentimes, those who write about being vulnerable are already "on the other side."
The book ends on a pretty positive note as you discuss recent alternatives to confidence culture - the rise of the pop star Lizzo, TV shows like How has the pandemic changed our relationship to confidence culture? and This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don't miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives. , and books like Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim. How do you see confidence culture evolving in the future?
Rosalind Gill: It's almost like there's these two clashing tones, one which is defiant, breaking the rules, "fuck everything," and the other which seems really paradoxical is this kind of vulnerable, more fragile, "let's give space to our insecurities and not aspire to be perfect." They both sit alongside each other as "self-believing, self-accepting, confident-yet-relatable and not overconfident because that would be off-putting." What would a properly feminist, antiracist, LGBTQ, non-neurotypical collective resistance self-help look like? It's really hard to imagine.

Rosalind Gill: There are so many ways into this critique. One is that, until very recently, it represents a fake or pseudo-diversity, and claims to be a lot more diverse than it actually is. It will claim to show diverse ethnicities, religions, body sizes, but barely differing from what went before. The whole company is premised on exploiting women's insecurities, selling products targeted at that. It also has a post-racial tenor in the way it flattens our differences to make them seem as if they're all on one plane and as relevant as each other while appropriating social justice language. It takes all the differences and empties them out of their meaning and appears that, say, being pregnant is as significant as being disabled.

Rosalind Gill: It delegitimizes the feelings that anyone could have about their own body insecurities because we're supposed to be comfortable in our skin. Yet that isn't the world that we live in. We're in a world of absolute forensic surveillance where everybody feels under intense scrutiny. I've just been doing some interviews with young people around how judged they feel all the time around their appearance. Yet they don't feel that they can speak about it on their social media posts because that would be seen as being attention-seeking and attract more criticism.

Shani Orgad: There's been lots of research documenting significant shifts in the ways in which mothering is being talked about and represented in popular media. Some popular TV shows and films offer much more complicated portraits of mothering and comment on the many frustrations and disappointments and imperfections that this experience entails. That is a significant break from what characterized earlier decades. But it didn't release the pressure - it transformed the pressure to be a "perfectly imperfect" mother, to be "authentic." One of the things that was very apparent in our research into these kinds of websites and blogs is how the idea of the "perfectly imperfect" mother is still very much white and middle class. This is a time where there has been significantly growing visibility on Black motherhood in popular discourse, so at the same time that [the perfectly imperfect white, middle-class mother] is gaining visibility, there's also a reinforcement of a new ideal mother.

We call it the double whammy of confidence culture because it works as a double burden: Women have to perform confidence for themselves and also for their daughters, so they have to model it all the time. It introduces a whole new layer of self-vigilance and self-inspection and a constant awareness of yourself as a mother, not just in how you might harm yourself but how you might harm your daughter. There's very little talk about what role men who are parents play in their children's confidence. It's unspoken that it's the mother alone.

Shani Orgad: The whole industry of, for instance, voluntourism is marketed as a good cause to help the "faraway other," but it's never separate from investing in your own self. We looked at numerous volunteer tourism websites, and they all have this feel-good, adventurous, exciting vibe. They're often about how you can "hone your leadership skills" or discover yourself. It's a self-discovery, while you're also "rescuing" your sister in the Global South. In an era that has already seen so much criticism of earlier tropes that NGOs have been blamed for - dehumanizing the suffering of the other, the undignified depiction of victims - you would expect that something new would occur and in many ways, confidence culture is yet another iteration of these problems. We call it "confidence without borders" as a new movement that seems to characterize a lot of these initiatives in the humanitarian fields today.

Shani Orgad: We were interested to find examples that at least partly challenged or refuted the tropes and logics of confidence culture. For example, we looked at the TV series Sex Education, appreciating its take on intimate life in all its nuance and complexity, that didn't ever recourse to easy clichés of self-esteem or "confidence is the new sexy," but actually showed how relationships of all kinds are striated by power. We talked about Hannah Gadsby's shows Nanetteand , and the striking way in which she actively rebutted individualist accounts of sexism, sexual harassment, and homophobia with her line, "this is not an isolated incident."

We included also the example of Lizzo, because in many ways she epitomizes confidence culture, but we found her to be a really interesting and important example of how some of the limits of confidence culture can be repaired or at least challenged. She represents a radical deviation from the normative ideal of female attractiveness and the highly restrictive beauty standards that dominate the confidence culture; the ways she privileges and celebrates Black bodies and experiences; the way she refuses the post-racial tenor of the confidence culture and instead connects her performance and persona to her experience of racism, sexism, and fat-shaming; and how she does not hide the immense work that self-love requires.

Shani Orgad: The pandemic presented a moment that could significantly challenge the existing neoliberal order and disrupt the confidence culture. It has exposed intersectional inequalities and the way it highlighted our relational interdependence. However, during the pandemic, we have witnessed the reinforcement of confidence imperatives and proliferation of self-care messages. Staying positive and practicing "self-care" became motifs throughout the pandemic, seen in everything from exhortations to exercise, breathe deeply, and sleep better; to the promotion of "uplifting" tunes, "comfort" food, and "feel-good" TV. They encouraged women to turn inward rather than encouraging action to challenge and transform the structural conditions that have affected women disproportionately. So, seemingly benign and often undoubtedly well-meaning messages of confidence, calm, and positivity during the pandemic seem to buttress the confidence culture in very problematic ways.

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Is confidence a cult? These sociologists think so.

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This story is part of a group of stories called It's hard to pin down exactly when it happened, but if you paid attention to women's media in the 2000s and kept paying attention into the next decade, you definitely noticed it. Magazines that devoted their pages to diet tips and celebrity snark suddenly started preaching "empowerment."