Being right handed is the best. Why we even have a a left hand is a mystery to me? Of course I am being sarcastic but in most cultures being right handed is preferred. I mean preferred to the point that I have seen children get scolded for using their left hand instead of their right. My older cousin should be a lefty but her father decided that he would beat every impulse to right with her left hand. Today she can write with either hand. So why the preference? Here are some fun facts about left handed people;
- see more easily under water
- excel in tennis, baseball, fencing and swimming
- generally more intelligent, better looking, imaginative, and more talented
- children having basic problems using the wrong tools so most often times considered slow. (Maybe if we make more left handed tools it wouldn’t take them forever to figure out how to use a right handed scissors.)
- They seem to make exceptional leaders, inventors, artists, musicians and murderers!
- more eloquent
Even with these generally good aspects that come from being left handed we are pushed to be right handed. There is a particular Nigerian food called Eba or Pounded Yam and uses one hand to eat it. Well one time I saw one family friend sitting in the corner and eating her food. I asked her why she was basically was hiding in the corner. And she replied that she was eating her food with her left hand. It was strange to me that she felt weird eating in front of people because she was using her left hand. When you type you use both hands to do so (well unless you are my mom then you use on finger) but were did this preference for right had come from? What are some things that you do better with your left hand then you right?
Unruly Bodies 
I think historically the left hand was seen as the devils hand, so using it was seriously discouraged! I am left-handed, when people notice they always say ‘aren’t you right-handed? I say ‘no, I am correct-handed’. 😉
Handedness is a fascinating intersection of the biological (at least as far as I’ve learned, initial hand preference is hard-wired) and the socially constructed. I’ve heard so many stories like your cousin’s, where individuals have the left-handedness literally beaten out of them- my mom is one such case. Even for those of us who are left alone, significant adaptation has to take place.
Despite being left-handed, I prefer and am better at using right-handed scissors, which can be traced back to only ever having two pairs of left-handed scissors in my elementary school classrooms compared to three left-handed kids. I was a carpenter for several years, and had to develop a number of tricks to contort my body in such a way as to be able to both handle a power tool and be able to see what I was doing. And here at UMBC, there are several lecture halls where I am limited to the three or four seats where the tiny desk thingys are on a side that is useful for me.
Cultural hand preference often developed because you needed a hand to eat with, and a hand to clean yourself with and never the twain shall meet. And since something like 80-90% of the population is born with a right-handed preference (a number that could be complete bunk given the traditions mentioned before), the left usually lost out. Mythologies and religious stories meant to promote sanitation and discourage deviation pushed hard on the idea that everything on the left was bad- it’s no accident that in many languages, “left” and “sinister” are the same word.
Right-handedness clearly has its advantages- it has for centuries been the baseline for most forms of industrial design, so all the tools we use favor it. And we’ve seen that individuals can adapt from left to right-handed. Here’s a really good question to add to the original one- if the preference for right-handed children has been around for so long, how does left-handedness still exist?
thats crazy only because that has happend in my family. my parents and parents pressure us to be right handed because its suppose to be the better hand to do anything with and that its weird to be left handed. unfortunatly my parents didnt really do a good job with me because im left handed lol. but unfortunatly they do treat me differently. my parents dont wanna sit beside me because i may elbow them while were eating, they gave me a special door in my room because i am left handed. its really wierd because i didnt think me being left handed was a big deal till i got older and understood the pressures they put on my younger siblings to become right handed
Just wondering what right or left handedness has to do with attractiveness?
Although some of the spatial adeptness would make sense if left-handedness is associated with stronger use of the right side of the brain…