On the Beauty of Sex.

Image source unknown.

Why do we have such a problem with “slut” shaming? Why are women expected to wait for someone to approach them about sex? Why do all too many women expect a knight in shining armor to rescue them from the ivory tower? Why do we feel guilty for our sexual urges? There are many various attitudes toward the subject of sex. Unfortunately, the more common ones are detrimental to individual health and happiness. Of those, many are even a handicap to society, and more importantly to the individual. As I had written in my previous essay on this subject – Sex; Attitude and Greatness, back in 2012, a very large part of sex boils down to attitudes. The reality is that sex is mostly mental, and only partly physical. Of course, that's not to ignore, exactly, the physical part of it, without which sex wouldn't be possible. But, even touching, kissing, etcetera are stimulation of nerve endings, which send signals up the nervous system to the brain, where the action is interpreted and understood. In that way, even the physical is largely mental. My point here, however, is about how we think of sex. We all have some expectations, some preferences and desires, we even have beliefs outside of sex that influence how we think of sex. More importantly, these attitudes and beliefs all affect our enjoyment of sex.

Some people might disagree with me about what I'm about to say, mostly the religious, I'm sure. If there's anything that is universally true about sex it's this – sex is natural and one of the most beautiful experiences of life. In fact, we could say life is ultimately all about sex, after all, most organisms struggle to survive long enough to reproduce. It's almost as if that is it the point of life. Worse still, for most organisms this struggle is paramount and not enjoyed, rather it's only the fulfillment of an undeniable instinct. Sex is ultimately an endless fight for survival. It is a fight, first for the organism, to obtain a mating partner. This often leads to fights between two or more competing animals, like rams locking horns to determine a winner. Those rams are not just trying to win the battle, they're trying to win the mating partner. This is part of the process of evolution. Nearly everyone has heard of – and most people understand – natural selection, the process in which as creatures evolve the traits that don't hinder an animal's survival can be passed on to the next generation if it reproduces. But, the male peacock's elaborate and beautiful tail patterns, just like the ram's horns and ability to win the fight with other rams, is sexual selection. In the process of sexual selection the evolution is driven by development of traits that make an animal more attractive to potential mating partners. The male peacock's tail feather patterns serve no function to help it survive, but they do help it obtain female peacocks to have sex with, and thus produce young peacocks with his genetics. The ram's horns are not particularly useful for his daily survival either, he doesn't use them to get food, and most likely doesn't use those horns to defend against predators. The ram's horns more-or-less only help it to win the fight for dominance for the sole purpose of mating. Just a little aside – sexual selection and natural selection are not mutually exclusive forces in the process of evolution. I thought I'd add that point in case anyone did not already know, we all know there are too many misconceptions out there.

Images of ancient fertility goddesses, sources unknown.

But don't think that evolution, or nature, is sexist because females often also develop traits that help them obtain mates. Nature often favors in the females greater ability to produce offspring or to provide for them. So, while it may not seem as obvious when we look at the various species, sexual selection does happen in females too. If a female can produce numerous offspring the species is more likely to survive. If the female can be more attached to her young, the species has a better chance at being continued because the young have a better chance at achieving sexual maturity thanks to mother's help is surviving to adulthood. This means that female forms often have been selected by males for what seems to be a greater ability to raise young to maturity or produce more young. In human females, for example, broader hips are instinctively perceived as a desirable trait. People have even demonstrated an intuition regarding a woman's hip and sexual selection when they say: “That woman has child-bearing hips!” Likewise, the breasts of human women has evolved do to sexual selective pressures, since the roundness of the buttocks has become less obvious and constantly displayed when we began walking upright, the breasts began becoming bigger and rounder and more noticeable. While the butt is visible from behind, it's not visible from the front – where it happens that the breasts are to be found. When males have a choice in mates, a female with the traits that seem most desirable is most likely to get a mate. While sexual selection is usually geared toward greater strength and ability to survive in males, in females it's usually geared toward greater ability to reproduce and care for the young. Either way, all species select for the best chances that the species will long endure.

The process of evolution has long been at work in humans, as well. And sexual selection has also been a very potent influence on humanity, even to this day. One example is the average size of the human penis. Over a very long time, millions of years in the transitional species from which humans evolved, and in humans for around one hundred fifty thousand years, females have chosen to mate with males who had more desirable penises. So, straight ladies, whatever your thought about human penises you can thank, or blame, your ancient women ancestors. But, males have also influenced the evolution of the female human body. Broader hips have long psychologically suggested a greater ability to birth children. Broad hips have long been seen by many ancient men as a sign of fertility. It's true that breasts on women evolved in part because the round rump, which is seen in many mammalian species as a sort of sexual lure for males, are not as clearly visible when the female is seen from the front because we walk upright, but there's another possible not-mutually-exclusive reason. Larger breasts have long been seen by our ancient male ancestors as a sign of a woman's greater ability to nourish children. And, obviously, well-nourished children have a greater chance of growing up to be healthy adults who can pass the family genes on to another generation. Men have preferred these features over such a long time that the average woman's body is shaped as it is now. Psychology is a science that can help us better understand sex, and not just in understanding how humans have evolved due to sexual selection.

In all these things about us humans, psychology explores us and explains us. A few things follow here as an example. Women have long found a man's wealth to be key factor in determining his attractiveness, though most claim otherwise. It does make sense that historically there's been an evolutionary reason for this. A partner who can provide for the children will, naturally, mean children who will grow up healthier and be able to continue the species. However, things have changed. Women in many societies around the globe now work. And many of them are able to provide for their children without relying on a man's wallet. The man's wealth is becoming less valid as a factor for attraction. Likewise, starting with the harvesting of milk from cows and sheep and continuing with the invention of baby formula, a woman's breast size has been less valid as a factor for determining a woman's attractiveness. The fact is that we carry many legacies of our evolution in our current attitudes about sex. Much of these attitudes are have outlived their usefulness to the species. Of these outdated attitudes, some are harmless, but some are really quite detrimental.

Puritanical views have long perverted and permeated American views on sex, and to a lesser degree much of western views, as well. Pervasive in western culture is the Christian view that sex is not beautiful, but rather “sinful” and “dirty” – and much of this is true of Islam, as well. The idea that sex is some kind of disgusting thing that should only be done in the context of marriage is traditional among the most conservative of people. Why should this be? Because, the archaic view expressed by the early fathers of Christianity is that sex only exists to cause there to be more Christian souls to go out and dominate the globe. This is also true of most religions. Today religions continue to dominate our culture with their self-serving beliefs about controlling people, with unnecessary shame and guilt and fear. Now, one might think that promoting promiscuous sex would have been more effective at enlarging the ranks of the religious, but they had a reason against that. They wanted to make sure that the children were ensured to be members of the particular religion. If the children were born to unwed parents the children could be taken to any church or any religion. It served the religion's need to control its members and and to grow the religion's numbers, but there was another reason for sex being limited to marriage only. It actually mattered in terms of inheritance and family lines. Such restrictions were meant to ensure that a man's property would be inherited by his actual child rather than some other man's child. With a marriage, there was a recognized social contract between the man and woman involved, and it meant that there was a legal setting for the estate distribution. Again, today these things are less relevant. With the invention of DNA testing we can now conclusively prove a child's parents, further a person can choose to leave his or her estate to anyone or any group named in a legally-binding document called a will. The religious reasoning is something that can't be justified in the modern era.

Image source unknown.

Monogamy is not natural, exactly. It's true that for the survival of our species, since children require around 15 years to reach maturity pair-bonding of the parents served this interest. We evolved to form family units in which the father and mother cooperated to provide for and protect the young. I say fifteen years, but that's arguable, give or take a few years. The point is that it takes many years before a young human would be able to survive without parents taking care of him or her. Still, we evolved societies into which we live for all our lives, and which continue the benefits we gained as a child from having parents and family working together. But, at odds with this pair-bonding trait we evolved is another evolutionary trait found in both men and women. This is a trait that is so powerful that it's the underlying force making marital infidelity actually a fairly common occurrence. In males, of most species, the ability to spread the genetic code to create as many offspring as possible has been a great force in ensuring the survival of a species. Ours is no exception to that fact. In females, particularly in humans, there evolved a tendency to find a mate to bond with who can provide well, but to seek to reproduce with other males who have more desirable physical traits. A woman is predisposed biologically, by evolution, to settle down with the man who has wealth, but to have affairs with men who seem to be more fit and healthy. In either case, our species evolutionary legacy is conflicted and neither trait is ethically better or worse than the other. These just are the facts about our evolution and our nature. So, this leads to a problem. How do we reconcile our enlightenment and our nature to best suit ourselves? As long as we deny our nature we will find ourselves less happy and healthy than we can and ought to be.

The fact that there are women who want to silently suffer a mediocre experience is saddening and ultimately self-destructive. The idea of putting up with not getting the most out of sex because of not wanting to disappoint will backfire. It's true that many younger people, with their tremendous amounts of inexperience, are more prone to not communicate properly, but they need to be encouraged to communicate. Fundamentally, by trying to please one's partner by not offering instruction and not communicating, one is building resentment and frustration in oneself and one's partner. Also, when one discovers one's partner has not been fully engaged it most certainly is a serious disappointment and ruins the experience. By doing this, some women are causing two people to become resentful of the woman in question, herself and her partner. The notion of quietly accepting poor performance needs to be put to an end. Though it may be true of some men, it is almost exclusively, in this issue, women causing their own problem. I believe this condition is largely due to archaic notions that still afflict us. Even today, popular culture suggests women are supposed to be submissive and to use sex as a tool instead of enjoying it for their own pleasure. So many socializing forces, such as many women's magazines and romance movies and fairy-tales still perpetuate the destructive narrative and bad advice.

If women try experimenting with themselves, and then have completely honest and straightforward talks with their partners about what works for them, then sex would likely be far more enjoyable for most. It seems that many women have some kind of hang-up about both masturbating and about communicating with their partners. That's not to say that there aren't guys who don't listen, of course there are, but there's also no reason for a woman to assume that sex can't be great, or better. Most guys really do want to satisfy their partners, and no one is a mind-reader. In fact, no one, of either gender, is a mind-reader. No one can know things that are not told to them. And, it is unreasonable and inexcusable to continue to behave as if it's fair to expect people to be more than who and what they are. It's unjust to think that one's partner should live up to and perform like the fantasies that have been implanted by corporate interests like Hollywood and molded by corrupt influences like the Puritan church of hundreds of years ago. I believe it is high-time we as a species move into the modern era – we need to evolve out of the stagnate cesspit of the out-dated misconceptions. This is only going to happen as we continue to challenge the standard, and help to enlighten others.

Image Copyright 2015 by Joshua Michail.

Sex is the most beautiful thing people can do with each other, intimately. Sex, however, is not love. Love and sex can and do often go together, but one ought not to confuse these two separate things. Many people believe that sex with someone they love is beautiful, and they're not wrong, but sex is beautiful even without love. In a way, sex gets a bad rap on that regard, because many people ignore the fact that love is separate from sex. But, I blame religion for that, and many more mental handicaps. Religion must be expelled from the bed sheets. The single greatest toxin to humanity and to sex is religion. The fact that people feel guilt for doing and enjoying a natural and beautiful thing is something that religion alone has foisted upon us. If we are half as wise as we like to think our species to be, we must change our ways. We can no longer afford to pretend that we are not what we are. Our concepts of marriage romantic relationships must change, we ought to embrace our nature. We can, of course continue to marry the ones we love, but we should expect and embrace the fact that sex is not and never has been and never will be confined to marriage. We must accept that we could forge a new model, the family remains, but why not have multiple wives for each man and multiple husbands for each woman? Why not accept polyamory? After all, not only do we naturally desire more than one partner for the rest of our lives, in regards to sex, but we are perfectly capable of loving more than one partner at the same time. We must also embrace the rights of women to be equal to men, including in their sex lives. Why should we look upon a woman who enjoys sex as someone to be shamed? It's a shame on us if we continue this “slut shaming”. We must not interfere with women as they pursue their sexual satisfaction as they see fit, and embrace the happiness this brings not only those women, but also ourselves as a society. We must shed the severe hindrances that make life less happy. 

Read more about this subject in the book: To Make a Better World -- available here.

Copyright © 2015, by Joshua Michail

 All Rights Reserved.

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To Make A Better World - Excerpt #2

Ten days ago I put out the first of several teaser excerpts from my book -- To Make A Better World. Today I'm releasing the second teaser excerpt. This one is from the chapter On Society and Socialization. These excerpts are leading up to publication of my book. I hope that you enjoy it and feel free to share the link to this page with your friends, and to share your thoughts with me. Thanks.

FROM: To Make A Better World; The handbook for good secular living in the modern era.
by Joshua Michail.

Excerpt #2, from: On Society & Socialization. 

Copyright 2015, Joshua Michail, all rights reserved.

Ourselves and the other apes are social creatures. We live in groups. All of our intermediary species, between us and our common ancestor with the chimps lived in groups. This communal living, the tribes, are an evolutionary trait. And it has served our species well to always be in groups. Tribes provide a clear survival advantage. We are able to defend ourselves mutually, rather than all alone. As the saying goes, "two minds are better than one". While other animals have a distinct advantage in not having binocular vision, in that their eyes can cover more area, binocular vision is likely a key part of intelligent life. The greater range of vision makes it harder for predators to sneak up on an animal, but depth perception allows greater manipulation of one's environment. Some animals, including humans, evolved binocular vision. This also has a distinct advantage, but it also has a disadvantage. We can perceive depth, we can look and gauge how far something is, because of binocular vision. This is the advantage of having two eyes side-by-side, as opposed to on either side of our head. But, we can't see as much area at once. Our field of view is limited, comparatively. All of our ancestor intermediary species and our fellow apes also have or had binocular vision. But, when there are more than one animal working together, they can cover more area, visually, and therefore alert others to stalking predators. Our ancestors, thus, gained the advantage of depth perception without entirely sacrificing the advantage of greater field of vision. Very early on in our evolutionary history community and cooperation proved to be a survival advantage.


Social conditioning, socialization, is a normal process and it is a natural consequence of living in a society. We are taught when we are young what is expected of us, our gender roles, our cultural traditions, our group values and our principles. All of this is then reinforced over time by our peers, our friends, family and other people we have contact with. The process, itself, is important. It helps to create and maintain the much needed social cohesiveness. It's a glue to keep a society together. And a society that stays together is functional. However, what a society considers important, as a rule, can sometimes be quite dysfunctional. Social attitudes can sometimes be good and sometimes bad. Each of us ought to be concerned with whether a normative is healthy for our society or detrimental. And we ought to be interested in correcting the path of our societies when we see such problems. Luckily, there are ways to do this. Though it may seem improbable, raising awareness and changing attitudes can be done by individuals.

The process of socialization begins for each person the moment we are born and never stops until the moment we are dead. Every day, our friends and family inform us in this manner. TV shows and commercials, radio programs, movies, music, billboards, posters, internet sites, magazines and even books all are forms by which the the process informs all of us. None of us are immune to it. It's not a bad thing in and of itself. What is bad is the content, the message, what we are being taught. The kind of social participants we are being molded into. We must always question this. We are right to examine the societal norms we are being taught and that are being reinforced in us. Sometimes the ideas that are commonly taught as normative behavior are acceptable, or even beneficial. But, some other times the idea is bad, useless or even harmful. And we have a duty to humanity and our society to fix those problems.

We were socialized by the toys we played with as kids. We are pressured by our peers to “be cool” as teenagers and young adults. When we watch television shows and commercials often we either relate to or idolize the content. Most obviously, our parents socialize us while we are growing up by teaching us how to behave, what is right and wrong, the way we talk and many other things. Movies socialize us to love fast cars, big bright explosions and fashion. Magazines instruct us on how to think of or relate to members of the other sex, or how to dress to impress people, or what to think on a particular point in politics and sports, etcetera. We relate to music, often we will hear a melody or a tune and feel an emotional response to it, but we also interpret the lyrics and identify with them. The vehicles for our socialization, our training to meet societal normatives, is a seemingly endless list with all varying in degrees to which they teach or reinforce the society's normatives. Typically, most of those things are also genuinely the things they appear to be, while still being such a vehicle for social conditioning. For instance, a car commercial on TV is actually meant to inform people of the car being available for purchase, and such advertising is actually intended to sell the car. And the car, itself, is really just a device for transporting people and luggage. The point is that the practical often serves as the carrier for the piggy-backing of the social conditioning, such as in the advertisements. And even then, the advertisers are usually not actively intending to reinforce social normatives, rather they may knowingly be exploiting them for the purpose of selling the product.

There may be said to be two forms of socializing material, one that establishes or instills certain notions while the other exploits or reinforces existing social notions and mores. “Mores” are a set of moral norms or customs which have been derived from practices that are generally accepted by a society, but not from written laws. Though, some socializing material may be both reinforcing and establishing at the same time, e.g.: GI Joe toys and Barbie dolls. Such perpetuate existing gender-role stereotypes, while establishing normal gender identity and teaching the young person how to fulfill his/her expected gender role. Some others might exploit and reinforce normal gender roles simultaneously, such as a TV commercial with a man driving an expensive car past a line of beautiful women who all turn their heads and stare at him lustfully. This sort is implying that for men when they have that car women will be interested in them. And for women it suggests that she should like a man with that car, because most other women will. Such an advertisement exploits the social norms because it targets adults, who can afford the car and thus have been around long enough to already have been conditioned. While it also reinforces the mores because it treats such ideas as normal and expected. An example of the more common sort that only establish such mores may be a parent's instruction to his/her child to eat all of the vegetables before being allowed to have dessert. Though it should be said, teaching children the idea of delaying gratification – having the dessert after dinner – is good. Being taught this may help the person to be better disciplined and so more likely to achieve goals, put in the hard work, and then later in life to be able to enjoy the rewards. In fact, those who can delay gratification tend to be more successful. Successful in their education, in their careers and in life over-all. This is, nonetheless, an example of part of the process of socialization, the parents teaching that in their culture dessert comes after dinner, and that this is what is considered “normal”.

Some socializing material may actually be distracting or detrimental to a healthy lifestyle. Though much is quite useful. In particular, among the detrimental, are the archaic gender-roles. Though the old standard idea of the woman submissive to, and dependent upon, the man once served a useful purpose, it is now out-of-date and quite harmful. Several thousand years ago, when to feed a family necessarily meant hard labor in the fields all day, it makes sense that women would stay in the home. They would usually do all sorts of less labor intensive, though important, work. Such work would be cleaning, cooking and raising the children, of course. But, it would also include weaving fabric and making clothes, feeding the animals, making pottery and preparing foods. While the men would be hunting animals and tilling fields and felling trees and building the homes. This was way back before there was much labor-saving technology. When hunting was done with spears or by archery. When farming the fields meant using thick sticks with stones attached to til the land and walking along harvesting by hand. Certainly women often worked the fields with the men. But, physiologically men tend to naturally be stronger than women. And the work that needed doing was very tough. Some work was demanding on muscle and some work demanded more dexterity, but required less muscle strength. To succeed meant having those who were better suited to the work doing that job, instead of another. It simply made sense, in that case, that traditional division of labor. But, that was then, this is now. The complete truth is that today there simply is no logically valid argument to justify maintaining those now out-dated normatives. Just as there never was a logically valid argument to support the selfish thought that women are not equal to men. Even with labor division being assigned according to the needs and capabilities of so very long ago that would not mean one is inherently worth more than another. Thankfully, many people have for a long time worked hard and have been quite successful in reshaping our Western society's normatives regarding equality.

The fact that those archaic gender-roles have persisted to this day within our culture speaks to the nature of the socialization process. Parents may teach their children many things. But, a child's primary relationship is with his or her parents. Girls learn how to be women, mostly, from their mothers and boys learn how to be a man, mostly, from their fathers. Principally speaking that is, of-course there are other significant influencing sources. Even more to the point, though, is that usually people learn how to relate to others through their relationships with their parents. One learns what to expect in a romantic relationship by witnessing how one's mother and father interacted. Indeed, our ideal of a relationship with a mate is mostly built upon the model our parents provided. Whether it is good or bad, this is the way most people have learned to relate with their mating partners. As a matter of fact, this fundamental aspect – in the worst cases – can cause a young woman to believe that if a man loves a woman he shows it by beating her and degrading her. Clearly, this is because she grew up in a home, in which, her father would beat and degrade her mother and her mother constantly endured it. This can also often explain why a young male might be so abusive toward women. Sadly, this happens all too often. But that also speaks to the nature of the process of socialization.

© 2015, Joshua Michail, all rights reserved.

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On Propositions; Perception, Truth, and Belief.

When it comes to propositions, that is claims or statements about the way things are or ought to be, there is some fundamental areas to be understood. First, there is a dualism to reality. There is the physical external objective reality. Things exist the way they are regardless of whether they are observed or not. For instance, the sun was consuming hydrogen in nuclear fusion and emitting light and heat before any person ever existed to be able to describe it.

The other side is our own subjective internal realities. This is the way we see things. It is inherently subjective because we depend on our brains to interpret the signals from our nerve endings, our eyes and ears, etc. in order to sense the world around us. It is possible for a person to have a misunderstanding of some thing because of a fault somewhere with that person. For example, a color-blind person cannot see the color red, so many cities put a small blue light emitter inside the red light at traffic intersections because that most color-blind people can see. In this way sometimes our understanding of the world around us can become flawed. This is one thing that must be understood when discussing beliefs, perception and reality.

Another way that what we believe can be wrong is other beliefs affecting them. A religious person may be a creationist because they believe in their god. To the creationist the idea of accepting evolution as the fact that it is would undermine what they believe about their god, that the Bible stories are supposedly true. More precisely, that the Bible or the Qur'an is the literal "word of god". This is intellectual dishonesty, rather than physiological flaw. The creationist rejects evidence because he or she wishes to preserve his or her beliefs.

So, the internal reality, our individual belief about the way things are can differ wildly from each other. Sometimes several different views are correct, sometimes one is and others are not, and sometimes none are correct. Also sometimes there is also no real right or wrong, as is the case for preferences or tastes. These are even more subjective. If I say I believe mint chocolate chip is the best flavor of icecream, you may disagree, but neither of us is wrong. But, regarding the belief of most that the traffic light is red, and the belief of color-blind people that the traffic light is blue, both are correct. In the case of many traffic lights, since a blue light emitter is placed in the center of the red light emitter, both colors are being emitted. Both very different internal realities of different people are accurate to the objective external reality. The only thing is most people are unaware that there is a blue light emitter also there, because the blue emitter is smaller and centered inside the larger red emitter. To the color-blind person it looks like a less saturated blue light than it would if the blue emitter were alone, because the red light emitter is emitting light that looks white to them.

© 2014, Joshua Michail

A Little Game of Spot The Fallacy.

There's a game I like to play called "spot the fallacies".

1. Ad Populum. The appeal to popularity occurs in the first sentence of the post, "8 out of 10 atheists will convert." Oh well, if so many others are doing it, it must be true! By the way, there is a funny British panel show called "8 Out of 10 Cats". You all should look it up on YouTube.

2. Anecdotal evidence. For some reason it seems that anecdotal stories are quite compelling among Christians. Of course, the story proves absolutely nothing. Anyone can tell a story. "A priest and an atheist were sitting in a restaurant . . . when a meteor smashed into the building killing the priest but not the atheist. So, clearly, it's better to be an atheist!" Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

3. Ad Hominem. "The atheist looks angrily at the priest and says smugly, "I can't believe how dumb you are!" Of course, if you want to slander one side the favored approach is to paint them as hostile, and rude, and arrogant. Why can't the atheist have not looked angrily and not smugly say "so, why don't you accept the evidence for evolution?" Oh, that would be more reasonable and would not reinforce the stereotype religious people enjoy believing about atheists.

4. Strawman. The story suggests that atheists "believe" in evolution, as if it were a religion requiring faith. The story also sets up a misrepresentation of the evidence for evolution just so the story teller can easily win. For some reason creationists always seem to fail when they try to argue against the actual position of evolution by natural selection. Perhaps because dinosaur fossils are not the totality of the evidence, by a long shot.

5. Extended Analogy. Chicken Nuggets are not very much like either rocks or dinosaur fossils. For that matter, dinosaur fossils are not mere rocks. Rocks are molten minerals that have cooled and thus solidified. While fossils are the result of a long process of minerals deposits that occupy cells and replace each, in organic matter. In any event, there is much more science involved in determining if something is a fossil than merely looking at it and saying "gee this looks vaguely like another thing, so it must be it." But, the analogy suggests that dinosaur fossils are rocks that merely look like parts of an animal.

6. Tu Quoque (Latin for "you too"). This is the fallacy of excusing one's own errors by invoking the errors of one's opponent. You've heard the saying "two wrongs don't make a right"? The story has the priest saying "Now, you atheists make fun of us Christians when we see Jesus in our pancakes . . ." In no way does this attempt to excuse one side's errors by pointing to the other sides errors make any sense, logically speaking. It simply is irrelevant, and it's not any kind of evidence or refutation.

7. Appeal to Emotion. Aside from the painting of the opposition as hostile, mean, rude, and arrogant, which is meant to stir dislike in the reader, there is the attempt at the tear-jerker redemption story. All of a sudden the big bad meany realizes he was bad, and begs forgiveness. And, of course, the "good guy" then shows compassion and forgiveness and kindness, so we all know who won, right?

Copyright © 2014, Joshua Michail

All Rights Reserved.