A Journal Entry That Is Not About Susan (For Once)

[queerbychoice]

mariness linked recently to a dancing woman who tells you which half of your brain is dominant. For me the dancing woman mostly turns clockwise, which apparently means I'm right-brained, although I'm also right-handed. I can occasionally make the dancing woman turn counter-clockwise if I cover up my left eye and look away from the screen and concentrate of making her turn counter-clockwise in my peripheral vision before I look directly at her. But it's difficult, and even when I succeed at it, she tends to switch back to clockwise a few minutes later. Or if I leave the page and then come back to it, she always reverts to turning clockwise. I was aware that I have more right-brained tendencies than the typical right-hander, but I wouldn't have guessed that the tendencies were so pronounced.

I'm also a bit confused about why the dancer appears to be pictured naked. Her silhouette has plainly visible nipples. Why? How is this relevant to determining brain dominance? It seems to me that when a news story that has nothing to with nakedness calls for a picture of a person, standard procedure is to depict the person in question with clothes on. It can't even be argued that depicting her naked is supposed to make her more generic and free of any culture-specific modifications, because she has her hair up in a pony tail. Why would she bother to put her hair up but not bother to put on clothes?

Anyway, which way does she turn for you? Are you surprised by it?