Something You Should Know
Why We Are Obsessed With Butts & The Best and Worst Way to Apologize - SYSK Choice
Sat, 18 Jan 2025
Ever notice when you are nervous or stressed, the pitch of your voice goes up? Yet a lower pitch would likely be more useful in most cases because we associate a lower pitch voice with dominance and calm. This episode begins with some insight on how to tame your voice in stressful situations and not be betrayed by your own voice. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/communications-matter/202101/why-you-need-pitch-your-voice-lower There certainly seems to be a fascination with the human butt. It makes you wonder why there is so much interest in butts and why a lot of people seem dissatisfied with the one they have. What is it that makes a butt attractive or unattractive? Does the type of butt you have really meaning anything? Here to explore this is Heather Radke author of the book Butts: A Backstory (https://amzn.to/3IDCndo) It would be hard to get through life without having to apologize. We all must do it and many of us are not very good at it. And, a bad apology can actually make a situation worse than it was before. So, what is the anatomy of the perfect apology? And how do people usually screw it up? Here with some insight is Marjorie Ingall, co-author of the book Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (https://amzn.to/3vTllk9). When you leave a tip at a restaurant, you send a message. Given that, how much should you leave? How do you calculate it? Should you ever leave NO tip at all? Listen as I reveal some things to consider when deciding how to tip. Source: Steve Dublanica author of Keep The Change (https://amzn.to/3Wjelut) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why should you lower the pitch of your voice?
Also, should you calculate the tip on a restaurant bill before or after the tax? And how to apologize because a good apology is golden.
The steps for making a good apology are so easy and yet actually doing them is so hard because our brains are not wired for this. Apologizing is a really brave act.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hey, welcome to Something You Should Know. So when you speak, depending on what your voice sounds like, when you speak, you may want to try to lower the pitch of your voice. Why? Well, according to some pretty solid research, people who speak with lowered voices are perceived as both more prestigious and more admirable.
Another study found that men have a tendency to lower their voices in order to try to dominate in certain settings. In short, we signal our dominance with lower-pitched voices. But interestingly, stress and adrenaline makes your voice go higher. In fact, it turns out that people speak in higher-pitched voices when they talk to people of higher status or when they're intimidated.
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Chapter 2: What makes butts a topic of fascination?
I do think one of the things that I encountered over and over again when I was researching just colloquially like when I'd go to a party or whatever is people often think like having a big butt or a small butt means something. So, like, oh, women with big butts, they are more fertile. That's a really commonly held myth about butts. Yeah, lots of people say that to me. Have you ever heard that? No.
Yeah, that comes out of some evolutionary psychology research from the 90s. But it's really not true. And the science around it feels very flimsy to me, at least as a science reporter. So that's one kind of stereotype people have. I mean, some people think big butts are really gross. And some people think small butts are really ugly.
And all these kind of like, over and over again, the meanings we have about butts that you realize they don't come from the actual... you know, factor, the science of the butt, it actually comes from different cultural moments. So thin bodies and thin butts kind of come into fashion in the 1920s. And in the 1920s, super thin women's bodies start to become equated with a certain sort of
liberation and bohemianism and kind of chicness. And that's essentially a stereotype and a way of thinking about bodies that's really continued well into the 20th century and really has never gone away. So, that's sort of a stereotype in a sense about small butts. And then, you know, I did a bunch of work also about what I would call like fit butts.
So in the 1980s, as the aerobics revolution starts to happen, there's an aerobics program called Buns of Steel that comes into being. This man named Greg Smith, he invented it. It's like wildly popular and people... start to try to actually not just have like big butts and small butts, but also like strong steely butts.
And that's definitely, you know, it's part of a much bigger trend that's about having fit bodies, but it really speaks to a way we think about our bodies as reflections of our own ability to control ourselves essentially. So to have a strong butt is to be kind of in control of your body to be a, to like have a bond of steel is to have a butt that's like,
uh you know capable of doing hard work and we even see that in the language we have about butts like i'm gonna kick your butt well it's interesting that you use the phrase that you know but certain types of butts come in and out of fashion much like clothes come in and out of fashion but my sense is that if it is one of the most difficult parts of the body to change even if you wanted to
Like how you would like get into fashion by change. It's very difficult to change your butt.
Oh My goodness, you're absolutely right. It's I mean, I think it's like actually just pretty difficult to change your body One of the things when I started working on this book really early on was this was a question I have it's like how can a body part come in and out of fashion? I mean it happens all the time but what it's really asking of people and of women in particular is to
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Chapter 3: What is the anatomy of the perfect apology?
Chapter 4: How should you calculate tips at restaurants?
Chapter 5: What myths exist about the human butt?
But you're saying that there really isn't a universally attractive butt.
There's no science that I know of that suggests that there's a universally attractive butt. And even that science that suggests there's a universally attractive face, I think, is something to kind of look a little bit closer at.
I think that there's faces that a lot of us find attractive and there's butts that a lot of us find attractive, but part of that is because there's a kind of cultural mechanism that's helping us to find them that way, if that makes any sense.
And it's really hard to separate out what is biologically attractive versus what is culturally attractive because you can never really separate people out from the culture that they live in in order to ask that question. And I think with butts in particular, though, there's so much variation.
And also like we see what is attractive as far as a butt culturally come in and out so much and change so dramatically over the course of 10, 20, 30, 40 years that we really start to see that anything that sort of smacks of universals, you have to really start to question. Like how could it be that there's a butt that's fundamentally attractive if like what we think is attractive isn't?
in 1995 is really different than in 2015.
Well, I know most of your research is about women's butts. Is that because that's kind of where the interest is and that there isn't all that much about men's butts or what?
When I very first started this project, I had to really put some limits on it because if I were going to write about all butts, this would have been like, you know, 10 volumes long. But so I didn't do a Part of the reason I didn't is there's actually quite a lot already written about it. And there's been some great research, especially about like butts in the classical time.
Like you can think of like classical statuary where the, an ideal of men's beauty was, you know, there was a very clearly a kind of butt that was like a very good kind of men's butt. And a lot of men, as far as I know, wanted to have that kind of butt. And I think that there's still a lot of men who seek out, um,
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