Enter St. Ives.

Hatred breeds violence, self-hatred no less so. If the thing that makes you hate yourself is on your surface, it makes sense to try to scrub your surface away. “It’s like using sandpaper on your face,” one dermatologist said of the St. Ives scrub, in an interview with New York magazine, and I can say from experience it feels that way, too. “If it hurts, it must be working”: my longtime approach to acne treatment.

I’d buy the highest possible concentration of benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid and heap it on my blemishes, taking comfort in the burn. I’d leave the shower with my skin red and stinging from a fresh St. Ives assault and refuse to moisturize afterward, hoping the zits would crumble into dust and I could rebuild my desert face from the ground up. Then of course, there’s the old classic of popping, squeezing, scratching and picking at zits, willing to draw my own blood so long as I can remove the invaders.

This self-harming form of warfare is common, Chiu says: “From teenagers to adults, acne is an incredibly frustrating issue, and almost everyone’s first impulse to scrub, pick, and overdry the skin.  This then can cause even more irritation, or even worse scarring and discoloration, which feeds into a cycle of worsening acne. Overdrying and irritating the skin sometimes confuses the oil glands and paradoxically makes them more active. ”

But the skincare industry itself perpetuates this practice through some of these products that promise purity through violence. Biore pore strips are essentially pieces of paper that you glue to your face and then rip off, yanking out your blackheads (and often taking your hair along with it). One of the slogans on the company’s product page is “Don’t be dirty”—feeding right into my old insecurity. Commercials for rough exfoliating scrubs tend to have a woman with already perfect-skin extolling the “deep-clean” and splashing her face with pure blue water. In this old St. Ives commercial I found on YouTube they just drop the bottle into some water, which is weird, and a girl says, “we’re not talking some deep spiritual cleansing—but almost.”

Elsewhere, you can find people claiming the pore strips made their pores larger, or irritated their skin. The subreddit r/SkincareAddiction holds particular vitriol for the St. Ives scrub, which some dermatologists say is so abrasive that it can cause small tears in the skin. The subreddit rejoiced in the announcement of Browning and Basile’s lawsuit, as Slate recently reported. It’s hard to find actual studies on the efficacy of specific products, but certainly St. Ives Apricot Scrub and its ilk perpetuate this idea that the best way to get the skin you want is to destroy the skin you have. They facilitate the worst impulses of the frustrated acne-sufferer declaring war on their skin.

The marketing of skincare products preys on vulnerability, even if not intentionally, promising that this new product is the one thing that will finally work, that your zits will be gone in time for prom, that your wrinkles will be less noticeable in four weeks. Without a lot of good information out there, it’s no wonder if I and others put our faith in these promises, and overdo it, thinking if it hurts, it must be working.

Females can differ from each other almost as much as they do from males in the behavior of many genes at the heart of sexual identity, researchers said.

“Literally every one of the females we looked at had a different genetic story,” said Duke University genetics expert Huntington Willard, who co-wrote the study. “It is not just a little bit of variation.”

[...]

All told, men and women may differ by as much as 2% of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative -- the chimpanzee.

“In essence,” Willard said, “there is not one human genome, but two -- male and female.”

[...]

Until now, researchers considered the shuffle of sex chromosomes at conception a simple matter of genetic roulette.

The chromosomes that dictate sexual development are mixed and matched in predictable combinations: A female inherits one X chromosome from each parent; a male inherits an X chromosome from his mother and a Y chromosome from his father.

To avoid any toxic effect from double sets of X genes, female cells randomly choose one copy of the X chromosome and silence it -- or so scientists had believed.

The new analysis found that the second X chromosome was not a silent partner. As many as 25% of its genes are active, serving as blueprints to make necessary proteins.

To investigate this variation, Carrel and Willard isolated cells from 40 women and measured the activity of hundreds of genes to see whether those on the second X chromosome were active or silent.

Although those extra genes were supposed to be turned off, they found that about 15% of them in all female cells were still active, or in the terminology of genetics, “expressed.” In some women, up to an additional 10% of those X-linked genes showed varying patterns of activity.

“This is 200 to 300 genes that are expressed up to twice as much as in a male or some other females,” Willard said. “This is a huge number.”

Researchers were surprised that they found so many unexpected differences in the behavior of the one sex chromosome that men and women share.

Though there is dramatic variation in the activation of genes on the X chromosomes that women inherit, there is none among those in men, the researchers reported.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-mar-17-sci-xchromosome17-story.html

Just one of the many reasons to stop worrying about men. As above so below, micro is macro, etc. Pay attention and you’ll see the way this echoes throughout society, culture, etc.

If we’ve tried it with men once, we’ve tried it with men a thousand times. Observe the result, and move on.

You all know the saying about insanity? About trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Nevermind being the same thing over and over.

It’s in working with women, for women, among women, to women[’s goals], from women[’s perspective], etc. that you will have a chance for something besides action, reaction, reaction, reaction. A chance for real experimentation, creativity, novelty, ingenuity, growth, etc.

Try, for a litte bit, to stop fussing about men. You don’t even have to fuss about other women, you can start with just yourself.

“Countless studies have since shown that exposure to pornography desensitizes men to violence against women, often shaping their sexuality in such a way that they become unable to experience arousal without some element of dominance or violence. The evidence has been so damning that, at times, universities have refused to allow further research on the topic. When a study shows detrimental effects that cannot be reversed, ethics boards will often refuse similar studies to go on. This has happened repeatedly with research on the effects of pornography.”