You've heard of alpha males and beta males, but omega males?
Jessica Grose examines men who have trouble being a man -"they're unemployed, romantically challenges and they're everywhere".
Omega Males and the Women Who Hate Them - the liberal arts layabouts, the mimbos, the beer guys and the game boys.
The Economist on The worldwide war on baby girls
In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.
The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.
Well, this is a surprise.
"Testosterone's aggressive impact is a myth. It makes you friendlier"
It is popularly known as the selfish hormone, which courses through male veins to promote egotistical and antisocial behaviour. Yet research has suggested that testosterone’s bad reputation is largely undeserved.
Far from always increasing aggression and greed, the male hormone can actually encourage decency and fair play, scientists have discovered.
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The findings, from an Anglo-Swiss team, suggest that rather than encouraging selfishness and risk-taking as a matter of course, testosterone has subtler effects on human behaviour that depend very much on social circumstances.
Phyllis Chesler on A Lesson Learned in Kabul
Once, long ago, I was held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Yes, I went there of my own free will, but I was only 20 years old and in love with my college sweetheart
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If one survives such a grand and dangerous adventure, one learns some important lessons.
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Thus, at too young an age, I already understood that barbarism and hatred of the Other is indigenous to Islam; it is not caused by Western “evil.” Intra-tribal and religious-sect feuding is a permanent way of life in the wild, wild East.
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I could never get anyone in the American civil rights, anti-war, feminist, or post-colonialist movements to understand this. They needed to blame the Big Bad West for the world’s problems. They also needed to identify the developing world as intrinsically innocent, pure, victimized.
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My people: Western feminists, leftists, gay liberationists, progressives, absolutely refuse to stand up to Islam’s subordination and bestial persecution of women, dissidents, and homosexuals. The same activists who easily condemn Christianity and Judaism as “misogynists” are hushed about Islamic misogyny in practice.
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Now I and a handful of others are trying to tell the truth about Islamic gender apartheid. Those of us who are raising the alarm are being demonized as “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “fascists.” Yet, in my opinion, western civilization, beginning with Europe, will be won or lost on the issue of women’s rights.
From Denmark comes official research of "ubiquitous chemical contamination" that is driving down sperm counts and feminizing male children all over the developed world.
Why boys are turning into girls
two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.
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Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery of the "lost boys": babies who should normally be male who have been born as girls instead.
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The results build on earlier studies showing that British children have higher levels of gender-bending chemicals in their blood than their parents or grandparents.
The social consequences of unwed mothers are long-lasting and heart-breaking.
Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."
Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.
Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents by Patrick Welsh.
It's not about race though that is what school administrators and community activists focus on. There's plenty of money for schools.
"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."
Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over.
In The Daddy Gap, Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess points to a 2005 Kay Hymowitz piece in City Journal. Kay Hymowitz is a trenchant observer and writer about the marriage gap that is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
Until black leaders come to grips with what is really happening in the inner cities, the plight of black males and black females will only get worse.
The men won't grow up, won't become fully formed, but stay passionless and apathetic, distraught in their failure to launch. As a black woman pleaded, "Enough of this selfishness: Time for black men to act like men."
Too many young girls may yearn for marriage, but making babies is something they can do, something they believe they must do if they want meaning in their lives. Misbegotten health policies are not teaching young girls that they are too young to start families, but giving them contraceptives without parental consent and essentially saying do what you want.
The model of the two-person, mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults' rights to children rather than children's needs to be known and , whenever possible, by their mother and father. It's the ultimate selfishness that will continue to cause ruin in people's lives and in our society.
How do we respond to the fact that so many children are starving for a father?
Could the pill have put off women from manly men?
The Pill may also have changed women's taste in men, according to a study.
Scientists say the hormones in the oral contraceptive suppress a woman's interest in masculine men and make boyish men more attractive. Although the change occurs for just a few days each month, it may have been highly influential since use of the Pill began more than 40 years ago.
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If the theory is right, it could partly explain the shifting in tastes from macho 1950s and 1960s stars such as Kirk Douglas and Sean Connery to the more wimpy, androgynous stars of today, such as Johnny Depp and Russell Brand.
Dr Alexandra Alvergne, of the University of Sheffield, says the Pill could also be altering the way women pick their mates and could have long-term implications for society.
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Scientists have long known that a woman's taste in men changes over her menstrual cycle.
During the few days each month when women are fertile - around the time of ovulation - they tend to prefer masculine features and men who are more assertive.
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On days when women are not fertile, their tastes swing towards more feminine, boyish faces and more caring personalities, researchers have shown.
However, if women are taking the Pill they no longer have fertile days. That means they no longer experience the hormonal changes that make them more attracted to masculine men and those with dissimilar genetic make-up.
Or maybe the dearth of manly men can be laid to something in the water.
The wide spread use of the pill has resulted in the estrogen pollution, via female urine, of rivers and waters feminizing fish, creating intersex fish and, in part, responsible for male infertility.
When EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a pristine mountain stream known as Boulder Creek two years ago, they were shocked. Randomly netting 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city’s sewer plant, they found that 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange “intersex” fish with male and female features.
It’s “the first thing that I’ve seen as a scientist that really scared me,” said then 59-year-old University of Colorado biologist John Woodling, speaking to the Denver Post in 2005.
They studied the fish and decided the main culprits were estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth control pills and patches, excreted in urine into the city’s sewage system and then into the creek.
Woodling, University of Colorado physiology professor David Norris, and their EPA-study team were among the first scientists in the country to learn that a slurry of hormones, antibiotics, caffeine and steroids is coursing down the nation’s waterways, threatening fish and contaminating drinking water.
The success of the human species is all due to our mastery of fire and cooking, a scientist claims.
Hot food not sex was the basis of our relationships.
We are the “cooking ape”, according to Richard Wrangham, a noted British anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard University. The unrivalled success of the human species is down to our mastery of flame and our use of it to transform raw food into cooked. Ours is a species built on hot dinners, not cold plants and berries. ..
“I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals,” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. “Cooking increased the (calorific) value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives.” He argues, as no one else has done before, that cooking was pivotal in our evolution.
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Cultural, historical and culinary clues point to the plausibility of Wrangham’s intuition. There is no society on Earth that does not cook; not a single people exists on raw food alone.
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“I couldn’t believe that nobody had thought about the energetic significance of cooked food [cooking releases locked-in calories by breaking down molecular structures in plants and meat; without cooking, some material passes straight through].
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Cooking would have made a radical difference to the creatures who mastered it: it made plants and meat more calorie-dense; it spared our ancestors from the marathons of mastication required with raw foods (wild chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering food and chewing it); it was easier on the gut. It is utterly within the bounds of belief that the first hominid to put a flame to his food started an extraordinary chain of evolutionary events that culminated in us, the ape in the kitchen.
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Human beings are unique in that when we cook, we do it to feed others as well as ourselves (other apes, even those who pair-bond, forage for themselves and don’t share). And in almost all societies it’s women who tend the stove. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered food will not be stolen, while having a wife means a man will have an evening meal.
To some, though, this train of thought — that the way to a man’s heart really is through his evolutionarily shrunken stomach — is even more heretical than the idea that we are the cooking ape. “People don’t like it because over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners. I’m saying, pair bonds are firstly about food, and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further.”
A study of 2500 women, ages 16-60, found that
Women spend almost a year of their lives deciding what to wear
On average, women take 20 minutes to decide on an outfit and 52 minutes deciding what to take on vacation.
If you add in how much time we spend doing laundry, ironing, going to the drycleaners and shopping, I bet we still spend less time than we do preparing and eating food.
Dana Jennings is one man who understands what hot flashes are really like.
My Brief LIfe as a Woman
I was in the middle of treatment for an aggressive case of prostate cancer last winter, and it included a six-month course of hormone therapy. My Lupron shots suppressed testosterone, which is the fuel for prostate cancer.
When your testosterone is being throttled, there are bound to be side effects. So, with the help of Lupron, I spent a few months aboard the Good Ship Menopause with all the physical baggage that entails. It’s a trip that most men don’t expect to take.
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When it comes to hot flashes, ladies, I salute you. After my brief dalliance with that hormonal phenomenon, it seems to me it’s an under-reported condition.
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Hand in hand with the hot flashes came the food cravings...Then there was the weight issue...And I hated it, hated it, hated it.
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When I wasn’t devouring a king-size Italian sub or smoldering from a hot flash, it seemed that I was crying...Not only was I temporarily menopausal, but it appeared that I was also turning into a teenage girl from the early 1970s.
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t did confirm my lifelong sense that the world of women is hormonal and mysterious, and that we men don’t have the semblance of a clue.
The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.
So, women started becoming less happy in about 1975, just about the time when modern feminism came into full force.
The backlash against feminism continues as more women come to grips with their decisions to forego children for a career.
Madonna syndrome: I should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking.
A playwright who embraced the feminism espoused by her mother and flaunted by Madonna now feels betrayed.
My mother was a hippy who kept a pile of (dusty) books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bed (like every good feminist, she didn't see why she should do all the cleaning). She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation. I fought with my older brother and won; at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.
Now, nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen.
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I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother wasn't such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals of yesteryear.
Increasing numbers of my feminist friends are giving up their careers for love and children and baking. I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side, but the problem is not so much time as mentality. I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships because I thought I had all the time in the world. Many of my friends did the same. It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.
It's wise to be wary of the pill
According to the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, an alarming rise in male infertility in developed nations is possibly caused by the quantities of synthetic female hormones, particularly estrogen, in the food chain and water. These quantities are directly attributable to increased use of the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy.
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Indeed, according to Canberra Hospital professor Peter Collignon, an opponent of recycling sewage water into the potable supply, estrogen can be more of a problem in recycled water than microbes because it cannot be filtered out and we simply do not know how well it breaks down. Just as the Romans drinking from lead cups unwittingly caused infertility in themselves, perhaps we are seeing after 30 years of contraceptive pill use the long-term effects of introducing artificial estrogen into our wider environment. So you see this is not just a preoccupation of the misogynistic old Vatican.
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The evidence that synthetic hormones can have grotesque environmental effects has actually been around for a long time and it is mounting. As long ago as the 1980s, studies were done in the US which showed the effects of estrogen pollution on wildlife, famously alligators in Florida with deformed genitals.
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There are so many reasons for being wary of the contraceptive pill. Why are we not questioning its prevalence?
The reason is, of course, that it is the sacred cow of the sexual revolution. One imaginative letter writer claimed the Catholic view of the pill was that it was "the great Satan", and actually that is not a bad description. It was marketed as an instrument of sexual freedom, and it has provided that, particularly for men. But one might ask if for women it has been the means of sexual liberation or just a way of turning us into empty vessels for sex? Is it like the sexual revolution itself: a pretty and alluring package that turns out to be - for both sexes - like a series of empty boxes, one inside the other. At the end, there is nothing but an empty box.
It's astonishing when you think of it. If there were any other cause for worldwide male infertility and environmental degradation, people would be up in arms.
Where is the EPA? Where is the UN? Where is the outrage?
The difference between men and women explained.
A whole host of common chemicals is feminizing the males of every class of vertebrate species writes Geoffrey Lean in The Independent.
It's official: Men really are the weaker sex
Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study.
The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.
The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.
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It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.
"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,"
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Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.
The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.
It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment. "Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence.
The inimitable Camille Paglia on Palin
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars."...This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
How life for men has changed.
Newsweek looks at Why young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland." The never-ending party of delayed adulthood does not bode well.
Tony Dokoupil, 28, engaged to be married, examines the 20 something scene and reads the new book Guyland by the sociologist Michael Kimmel.
the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.
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he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility.
Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught—men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70—and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies.
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The happy family man, on the other hand, is an alien concept in Guyland, and all too scarce in popular culture. Men like me, who actually embrace married life in their 20s, are seen as aberrations—or just a bit odd.
"Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men" (Michael Kimmel)
What came to my mind was Kathleen Parker whose book Save the Males is causing a furor.
From the London Times, Where have all the real men gone?
The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.
While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves.
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NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy.
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By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous.
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As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere.
His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so...
But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id.
Our society’s young men encounter little resistance against continuing to celebrate juvenile pursuits, losing themselves in video games and mindless, “guy-oriented” TV fare – and casual sex.
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In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.
Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.
"Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care" (Kathleen Parker)
To no one's surprise women spend 3276 hours of their lives just getting ready for a night out, three times what men spend.
The biggest chunk of that time – up to half an hour – is spent showering, washing and styling their hair, followed by 20 minutes applying make-up and 15 minutes polishing finger and toe nails.
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“There’s a host of waxing, exfoliating, moisturising, straightening, polishing and plucking involved
I'm late in catching up with this. I must confess I don't understand it.
By almost any economic or social indicator, the last 35 years have been great for women. Birth control has given them the ability to control reproduction. They are obtaining far more education and making inroads in many professions that were traditionally male-dominated. The gender wage gap has declined substantially. Women are living longer then ever. Studies even suggest that men are starting to take on more housework and child-raising responsibilities.
Given all these changes, the evidence presented by Stevenson and Wolfers is striking: women report being less happy today than they were 35 years ago, especially relative to the corresponding happiness rates for men. This is true of working women and stay-at-home moms, married women and those that are single, the highly educated and the less educated. It is worse for older women; those aged 18-29 don’t seem to be doing too badly. Women with kids have fared worse than women without kids. The only notable exception to the pattern is black women, who are happier today than they were three decades ago.
I can only hope they will get happier as they get older.
When I heard that Camille Paglia was going to speak on feminism, I pay attention. I made immediate plans to attend her lecture at Harvard in April on The Legacy and Future of Feminism.
The lecture is now online in Boston University's Arion entitled Feminism Past and Present, Ideology, Action and Reform.
Just a tidbit
we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.
Having lived in beautiful Gloucester for several years, I was even more interested in the story of the Gloucester girls 16 and younger becoming pregnant so they could raise their babies together.
In Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High, Time magazine said
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
Clearly access to contraception will do nothing to prevent young girls who want to become pregnant.
Kay Hymowitz in Gloucester Girls Gone Wild writes
But the story could have one upside: it might expose the folly of much of what has passed for wisdom about teen pregnancy. I say might because so far the media seems to be having trouble grasping what happened in this old, largely Catholic fishing town.
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übersocialized middle-class experts, journalists, and policy makers aren’t addressing the fact that girls tend to like babies. In most cultures in human history, 15- or 16-year-olds were seen as viable mothers (only after being married off, of course), so biological urge coincided with social need.
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In the past, the problem was held at bay by a combination of sexual reticence, social disapproval, and a no-baby-without-marriage rule, since it wasn’t easy to find a presentable boy ready to sign on to a life sentence at 16. No more. Sexual reticence is now deemed something on the order of a Victorian perversion. Social disapproval? Nowhere evident. The Gloucester school’s superintendent found that most townspeople greeted with a yawn the news that local teen pregnancy rates were soaring,
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Then there’s the point compellingly made by Kathleen Parker in her new book Save the Males: Americans aren’t all that keen on fathers these days. A girl eyeing her cousin’s cute little baby girl used to believe that she had to find a husband before she could have one of her own. Now, she can bypass the husband problem and just spend a little leisure time with the homeless guy on Main Street. Who cares if Dad is an addict or a tramp? They’re all bums—or jerks—anyway
What is so distressing is the poverty-stricken future that lies ahead for these girls and their children. The 'unmarriage' revolution that Kay Hymowitz writes of in her book does more to contribute to the growing inequality in America than anything else.
The increase in single mothers raising children is not just a problem in Gloucester. Intact families with mothers and fathers raising children is the most important element in a sound society with a hopeful future for all. Sadly, it's the least educated girls, thirsting to be loved, who become prey for older, unscrupulous males, seduced into believing that sex equals love.
The battle to point to an alternative way of living -
sexual self-control, resilience against passing temptations, better avenues of communication, a wider range of interests, and, ultimately, the ability to make a complete gift of self to another in marriage -
is being lost when the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have teamed up
in an aggressive campaign over the past several years—a campaign to pressure states to eliminate abstinence education and to reject federal funding for these programs. .... The goal is to get enough states to refuse the federal abstinence-education funding to the point where the ACLU and Planned Parenthood can convince Congress to eliminate such funding entirely.
All this is happening, by the way, as fresh reports arrive almost every month about the benefits of teen abstinence and the effectiveness of abstinence programs.
When a man cries, everyone pays attention.
The rarity of male tears lends to them true potency. When a man sheds tears, particularly in the public eye, people sit up and take notice. We know something truly consequential is occurring.
The 15 Greatest Man Cries from the Art of Manliness along with the 10 times When Is It Okay for a Man to Cry.
7. Visiting sites that pay tribute to those who laid down their lives for others. Whether running your fingers over the names at the Vietnam War Memorial or watching the oil leak from the sunk USS Arizona, contemplating the sacrifices made by your fellowman should make you tear up.
Forty years ago, I stayed up late to watch the television reports of the Democrat primary in California and watched in disbelief as the tragic scene unfolded on the tiny screen in real time.
On the 40th anniversary of his assassination, four dispatches written by Robert Kennedy for the Boston Post have been found.
Robert Kennedy's 1948 Reports from Palestine
Via The Belmont Club where Richard Fernandez writes
Maybe, having been disillusioned by the hatred and duplicity all around him, RFK was struck by a strange mood of wistfulness. He inserts this strange monologue into his narrative seemingly out of the blue.
Having been out of the United States for more than two months at this time of writing, I notice myself more and more conscious of the great heritage and birthright to which we as United States citizens are heirs and which we have the duty to preserve. A force motivating my writing this paper is that I believe we have failed in this duty or are in great jeopardy of doing so. The failure is due chiefly to our inability to get the true facts of the policy in which we are partners in Palestine.
It was a time before the incessant din of propaganda has since convinced Americans that evil was exclusively Made in the USA. History that is ostensibly written to enlighten is often in practice written to deceive. The most common use of history is to make us misremember the past. What we believe happened, as well as what we believed about RFK may have nothing to do with how things were. Reading his contemporaneous reports is like visiting a country we never knew existed and meeting a man who died twice; once at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan and again by the knife of popular culture. Twenty years after Kennedy left Palestine, Palestine came to him in a Los Angeles hotel.
Writer Jan Morris remarries wife she wed as a man.
Morris described her transformation from male to female in two autobiographical works, Pleasures of a Tangled Life and The Conundrum.
She described how, as a man, he never felt homosexual but always regarded himself as 'wrongly equipped'.
Morris is also the author of Pax Britannica, a three part history of the rise and fall of the British Empire, which she started writing as a man and concluded when she was a woman.
Other works include portraits of cities including Oxford, Venice and New York.
Elizabeth said yesterday: 'I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them.
'We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce.
'So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.'
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The couple have already planned to be buried on a small island on the River Dwyfor behind their house, with the inscription on the headstone to read: 'Here are two friends, at the end of one life.'
I read Conondrum when it was first published and all the rage. Morris described her voyages across sexual boundaries in the same beautiful and haunting way she wrote about the cities she visited and lived in around the world. She's an admirable woman and I'm delighted that she was with her true love for 59 years.
"Conundrum (New York Review Books Classics)" (Jan Morris)
"The World of Venice: Revised Edition" (Jan Morris)
"The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000" (Jan Morris)
There's a fine, new-to-me blog on The Art of Manliness where lessons in manliness are next to practical tips like Nine ways to start a fire without matches.
When all else fails, a coke can and bar of chocolate will do
Some like John McCain need no lessons but can teach some. Of course, he'll never do it and so it rests on others to tell.
Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."
The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.
But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place.
Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.
A not-bad excuse NOT to go to the gym.
Musclemen who pump iron are more likely to go bald, scientists warn.
That is unless you think bald men are more intelligent, sexier and more masculine as well as cooler in the summer.
Thomas Beatie says (s)he has a very stable male identity, but (s)he appears to be a hopelessly confused woman who was artificially inseminated with sperm purchased from a sperm bank.
The proof - (s)he's pregnant.
Men don't get pregnant. This is not a news flash.
(S)he is not a man, despite an operation to remove her breasts and doses of testosterone to grow facial hair. (S)he harbored a desire to have a baby, so (s)he didn't have her reproductive organs removed.
In Oregon, (s)he registered as a man, the state accepted that change and recognized her marriage to another woman.
Their decision to go public, I suspect, may have much to do with wanting to get a contract to write a book and now that they have been on Oprah who is collaborating with People magazine, a contract I'm sure is in the offing.
The sexes and their roles in propagating the species haven't changed; it's just that some people doing it have gotten more odd. Medical technology can do all sorts of wonders to help people solidify their gender confusion, but it can't change reality and the basic laws of nature.
Now people may be willing to call her a 'man' because (s)he insists on it, but (s)he isn't and nothing (s)he says will change that. (S)he's a freak of nature.
I feel sorry for the poor baby born to this couple.
If you want to see more pictures of the "pregnant man" who told Oprah (s)he feared her baby would be killed, click here.
The results of a recent study of 2000 men and women reveals that modern men feel emasculated.
Many men believe the world is now dominated by women and that they have lost their role in society, fuelling feelings of depression and being undervalued
What they appear to want is a return to manliness. They feel handcuffed by political correctness with
only a third of men surveyed feel they can speak freely and say what they think. Two-thirds find it safer to conceal their opinions.
In Japan where freaky-deaky equals hara-kiri, more and more men are turning to masturbation and sex toys rather than women whom they have to please.
And in France where women have become sexual predators,
one-in-five French men aged between 18 and 24 "manifests no interest in sexuality", while abstinence rates for men under 35 was twice as high as for women.
For those men with normal urges and desires, they can get more if they do housework!
Men who do housework get more sex from their wives.
"Wives report greater feelings of sexual interest and affection for husbands who participate in housework
On this Valentine's Day, the New York Times has an article that says the way married couples can keep love fresh and romance alive is to Reinvent Date Night by finding new ways and different activities they both enjoy ad in so doing inject novelty into the relationship and by so doing recreate some of the chemical surges of early courtship.
What does it for me is Cary Grant.
especially with Peggy Lee singing George Gershwin's The Man I Love.
ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.
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My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go
Marry Him in the March Atlantic.
Ah love. Every February we are treated to scads of articles about love, romantic love, and how to find it.
Time magazine looks at The Science of Love especially the importance of smelling right.
One of the most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right
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Scent not only tells males which females are primed to conceive, but it also lets both sexes narrow their choices of potential partners. Among the constellation of genes that control the immune system are those known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which influence tissue rejection. Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus. Find a partner with sufficiently different MHC, and you're likelier to carry a baby to term.
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Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom of kissing... "Kissing," she says simply, "might be a taste test."
One thing that throws us off the scent is the birth-control pill. Women who are on the Pill--which chemically simulates pregnancy--tend to choose wrong in the T-shirt test. When they discontinue the daily hormone dose, the protective smell mechanism kicks back in. "A colleague of mine wonders if the Pill may contribute to divorce," says Wysocki. "Women pick a husband when they're on birth control, then quit to have a baby and realize they've made a mistake."
While John Tierney in The New York Times explores online match-making and competing algorithms in Hitting it off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love
As the matchmakers compete for customers — and denigrate each other’s methodology — the battle has intrigued academic researchers who study the mating game. On the one hand, they are skeptical, because the algorithms and the results have not been published for peer review. But they also realize that these online companies give scientists a remarkable opportunity to gather enormous amounts of data and test their theories in the field. EHarmony says more than 19 million people have filled out its questionnaire.
If neither of those work, you can always go to China to find a husband as Ellen Graf did in Our Joy Knows No Bounds or Lanes
At 46, I had been burned to ash by divorce and had crawled back toward life, sometimes on hands and knees. The common wisdom is that people, in seeking love, risk losing themselves, but I did not fear this loss. And I thought that not choosing for myself might work better than choosing. I didn’t wonder about what my perfect person would be like. I was way beyond that kind of amusement.
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Somebody must be looking out for us. A few years ago, my life was roadworthy but lonely — it cried out for an intervention. Now every day feels like a wild car ride with Zhong-Hua: lurching and unpredictable, but rich with humor, determination and devotion.
Today's single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood writes Kay Hymowitz in Child-Man in the Promised Land.
Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”
But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men.
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That’s too bad. Men are “more unfinished as people,” Kunkel has neatly observed. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.
It's always a treat to read Caitlin Flanagan piece and this month's piece in the Atlantic demonstrates why.
A Woman's Place, on Katie Couric's long day's journey into evening or why the Today show is more important than any nightly news program.
I watched them faithfully—although watch, I realize, is the wrong verb where this phenomenally successful program is concerned; anyone who fails to grasp this fact will never understand why the Today show will survive the death of nightly news, the death of the newspaper, and even the collapse of television as a major player in the media world. The Today show, like life itself, unfolds while you’re doing other things.
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The Today show creates a bond with its overwhelmingly female viewers because so many of them watch it, as I did, during one of the most psychologically complex and lonely—and most emotionally fulfilling—times of their lives: their tenure as mothers to small children.
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It is the loneliness of at-home motherhood—the loneliness for other adults, for the adult way of life, for the work clothes and schedules and employment itself—that makes the hosts of the Today show crucial. When you turn on the program, there they are: your friends. You half-listen to them, the way you half-listen to your children playing on the floor in the next room, and together the two worlds make up the whole of your enterprise: theory and practice. The host discusses shoes that are supposed to help toddlers walk more steadily, and you turn to your own baby and wonder if you ought to buy him a pair. ....
When it is on, the television screen is no longer a barrier separating real life from TV land; the television screen is a window into another room of the house, the one where the grown-ups are.
Only 78 genes separate men from women. The BBC sat down four people to explain the 78 differences.
The men explained
* Men have no opinions about curtains.
* If you told a woman that you had just returned from the surface of the moon, she would show her interest by asking who you had gone with.
* Women could never invent weapons that kill, only ones that make you feel really bad and guilty until you surrender.
The women explained
* On being told that someone has bought a new car, women usually ask what color it is, men ask what sort it is.
* Women put things on the bottom stair to take up next time she goes upstairs. Men just step over them until told to pick them up.
* When faced with flat-pack furniture, men never read the manual. Yet they spend hours reading manuals for cars or bikes they will never own.
Not only were some of them pale-skinned and red-headed but females hunted the big beasts alongside the men.
Of course, they were doomed, the Stone Age Feminists. You don't put women of fertile age in a position of being easily killed if you want your race of Neanderthals to survive.
The University of Arizona's Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, use archeological evidence ..argue that Neanderthal females - unlike Homo sapien women of the Upper Paleolithic period - joined men in hunts at a time when stabbing giant beasts with a sharpish stone affixed to a stick represented the cutting edge of technology.
"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.
Homo sapiens, it appears, possessed the evolutionary advantage of keeping women away from the hunt.
From early days, human women appear to have sewed hide clothing, tended fires, and gathered vegetables rather than risking their lives on the hunt.
Young single girls rule in The New Girl Order writes Kay Hymowitz in City Journal.
The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with unintended consequences.
Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.
Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or is it the triumph of planetary feminism? Neither. The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world—with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East—toward a New Girl Order.
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these trends—delayed marriage, expanded higher education and labor-force participation, urbanization—add a global media and some disposable income, and voilà: an international lifestyle is born.....and, everywhere, the frustrating hunt for a boyfriend and, though it’s an ever more vexing subject, a husband.
Culture exploits men. How could that possibly be?
Roy Baumeister was invited to address to the American Psychological Association. His speech Is There Anything Good About Men? is the best writing and thinking I've seen in years on the difference between the sexes.
A lot of excerpts.
“How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” ...The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men
Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards.
He sees the same pattern in genius and in mental retardation, more men at either end of the spectrum.
Men go to extremes more than women.
He says that the differences between the genders, even in the field of creativity are more about motivation than ability. What do they want to do and why? How many women do you find doing improvisational jazz?
He first looks at the biological motivation.
Did you know that the human population is descended from twice as many women as men? I didn't . Baumeister says, "This is the most unappreciated fact about gender."
throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
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For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. ..We’re descended from women who played it safe.....For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. ... We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
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In terms of the biological competition to produce offspring, then, men outnumbered women both among the losers and among the biggest winners.
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Tradeoffs again: perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.
Then the social motivation.
Bausmeister says there are two different ways of being social. Women excel at close, intimate relationships while men excel at larger networks of shallower relationships and the network they have made. So in the larger social sphere and with strangers, men help more than women.
The conclusion is that men and women are both social but in different ways. Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group. If you make a list of activities that are done in large groups, you are likely to have a list of things that men do and enjoy more than women: team sports, politics, large corporations, economic networks, and so forth.
He goes to say that personality differences in communication, the notion of fairness, the "communal-exchange" difference and the competition-collaborative difference follow from this basic difference in the kind of social relationship that interests men and women.
The male pattern is suited for the large groups, the female pattern is best suited to intimate pairs
Finally culture.
Culture, he says, is a new and improved way of being social, a larger system, even a biological strategy with men and women working together, but against other groups of men and women. Culture mainly arose in the types of social relationships favored by men.
The women’s sphere consisted of women and therefore was organized on the basis of the kind of close, intimate, supportive one-on-one relationships that women favor. These are vital, satisfying relationships that contribute vitally to health and survival. Meanwhile the men favored the larger networks of shallower relationships. These are less satisfying and nurturing and so forth, but they do form a more fertile basis for the emergence of culture.
So how does culture use men, what are men good for? Three things.
1. Culture relies on men to create large social structures.
2. Culture uses men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings where a significant portion will suffer bad outcomes, waste their time, maybe even get killed.
most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job...men create the kind of social networks where individuals are replaceable and expendable. Women favor the kind of relationships in which each person is precious and cannot truly be replaced.
3, Culture requires that manhood be earned. A man must prove himself, earn respect, and produce more than he consumes, to support himself and others
While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish. The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality.
Thus says a new study from the Australian Institute of Family Studies that says Cohabiting couples destined for singledom.
Via Instapundit comes the list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know.
1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who as capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network
I can do about half of them which is why I guess I need a man. I'd be interested in what else a man should know how to do.
The list is put out by Popular Mechanics, clearly geared to guys. I wonder what magazine would put out a similar list for gals that women would seriously pay attention to. Oprah's my first guess. I
Wendy Shalit writes Why an Observant Jew Understand Sexuality Better Than Hugh Hefner with examples based on thousands of years of lived experience.
When scientists look at "the dance of attraction, infatuation and ultimately love" using MRIs.
But passionate love is something far stronger than that first sizzle of chemistry. "It's a drive to win life's greatest prize, the right mating partner," Fisher says. It is also, she adds, an addiction.
People in the early throes of passionate love, she says, can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they're willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one.
Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness and habit all play their part in the trickery.
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"It takes not will power but painful experience to make us wise."
Somehow, it all comes together, for better or for worse, the sum total of what's found in the mating dance of the ancient reptilian brain, the passion of the limbic brain and the logic of the neocortex.
Is this emancipation in any way?
Dr. Helen says our culture seems to be encouraging aggressive behavior in girls and women and this is the result.
Nearly twice as many women as men say they perpetrated domestic violence in the past year.
Yet all the domestic violence shelters are for women and men aren't welcome.
Via Dr. Helen comes the only domestic abuse hotline that serves both men and women.
888 743-5754
I didn't know that romance novels were the single most popular genre in American publishing, 55% of all paperbacks and 39% of all fiction, generating $1.2 billion last year.
Who knew that manly, responsible men really set our hearts a twitter.
The bookworm does and sees political implications.
Remember chivalry?
Charlotte Hays does in Paying Tribute to the Brave Men of the Titanic
Come Sunday it will be ninety-five years since that great ship the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A stunning statistic from the calamity reveals the ethos of the day: While seventy-four percent of the female passengers survived, eighty percent of the men aboard the tragic luxury liner perished. The rule for the lifeboats: women and children first.
Women and children first are indicative of a belief and hope in the future. It's keeping young life and the possibility of more life alive.
Women and children first bespeaks a higher consciousness, one nurtured by the great legacy of western civilization, itself a product of Judeo-Christian religious thought evolved over centuries.
It seems to me we are in danger of losing what was so hard-won, the chivalry about which John Stuart Mill said
“Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race, as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times.
We are losing the sense of women and children first in the interests of "gender equality".
Chivalry was once the foundation of the male code of ethics. What is a man is supposed to be these days? How do you transform testosterone and male strength into something other than violent aggression and sexual aggression, in its milder forms, bullying, meanness and contempt for women except as sexual objects?
G. Tracy Mehan looks at what happens when when Groping for God and Country ----and School becomes expected, even required.
Maybe we need Chivalry now. Dean Jacques thinks so. He writes about Modern Chivalry and sees Chivalry Now as a way for men to reclaim their souls. Think of Chivalry-Now is a the counterpoint to the feminism movement.
a philosophical partner that heals the wounds of the male gender, just as feminism heals the wounds of women.
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Chivalry-Now provides a voice that speaks to the inner needs of men to help them comply with a world that has changed significantly in the last hundred years. It gives them a place of value in society, because it focuses on truth and courage, honor and compassion, along with healthy, more courteous relationships with women, and with men for that matter.
I like what he had to say about this Age of Distraction
We don't need another distraction from doing what we have to do. As a society, it's time we grow up. We have to take away the glamour of doing what is wrong. We have to stop rewarding anti-social behavior. We have to develop a culture that is more humane. We have to start with the choices we make every day, and not allow ourselves to be distracted from the truth. We need the moral integrity to withdraw our support, no matter how passive, of what is wrong.
So many men and boys are yearning for something more, something that validates their very maleness. Seems to me, nothing tops chivalry and the bravery of women and children first.
What it's like becoming a eunuch?
Richard Wassersug was diagnosed with prostrate cancer at 52. When surgery and radiation didn't work, he started hormonal therapy that had the effect of chemical castration.
Then he found that the eunuchs of antiquiity were the models of our depictions of angels.
As many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years according to a study in Lancet, the British medical journal.
India's lost daughters: Abortion toll in millions.
You can point to the cultural preference for males to secure a heir, the cost of raising a daughter who will eventually belong to her husband's family, and the very expensive cost of a dowry.
Yet, before ultrasound allowed the prenatal determination of sex, abortions were rare.
We are beginning to see the social costs of skewed gender ratios in China where the one-child policy has resulted in an estimated 40 million bachelors who can not find wives. It's not pretty.
One Chinese official said in Facing the Future with 40 million bachelors
China faces a future of crime and instability as a generation of 40 million men is left frustrated by a lack of brides, thanks to the practice of selective abortion of female foetuses, a population official has warned.
Men left on the shelf would resort to prostitutes or pay huge prices for brides, while trafficking in women and girls kidnapped from rural areas and other countries would increase.
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"Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution."
A UN official said the shortage of woman is creating a "huge societal issue", one of the three biggest challenges facing China along with HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation.
Young males who can't find wives are "low status" and prone to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior.
The growing crime rate in China which is being linked to China's massive "floating" or transient population, some 80 million of which are low-status males
China is beginning to promote the Girl Care Project while India plans to set up a series of orphanages to raise unwanted baby girls.
India To Raise Girls in Bid to Slow Abortions
Here in America, our culture has profoundly changed in the past 25 years. The psychoanalyst Shrinkwrapped writes about the psychic costs on individuals and society in Reverberations and Vicissitudes of Abortion.
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?
Part 3 Children of Choice
The idea that your parents have parents decided to abort a potential sibling is a significant issue, made more so when done in a perfunctory manner as a matter of course. Such a "choice" unavoidably conveys the message that a child’s life is hostage to the parent’s desires.
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Children who experience themselves as commodities whose existence serves the needs of others, have a natural tendency to treat themselves and others as mere "need satisfying objects."
To realize just how far we've come, read Katherine in the comments to Part 3.
Seems that's what a lot of young women are saying about their aversion to emotional ties.
"Love is constant effort," she sighs, settling herself into a couch at Tryst, a coffeehouse in Adams Morgan.
"It's so annoying," Carolyn McGee agrees.
"A waste of time," Alyx Ackerfield says.
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A national survey of 18-to-29-year-olds by the Pew Research Center reported that almost 60 percent were not in committed relationships and the majority of those were not interested in being committed. Young women even have phrases for couples, frequently spoken with a touch of derision: They're "joined at the hip," or "married."
Absent old-fashioned dating, which has virtually disappeared, the alternative for these young women is hooking up, which can happen in any semi-private place and includes anything from kissing to intercourse. The beauty of hooking up is that it carries no commitment, and this is huge, for being emotionally dependent on a lover is what scares these young women the most.
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"My generation -- actually, our society -- is into taking shortcuts. . . . Hookups are like the shortcut to intimacy, while dating is the long way around, the scenic route. We want to get there, wherever 'there' is, as quickly as possible, and I think we've lost the ability to enjoy the journey."
Women, it appears, aren't looking for the perfect man. Highly attractive single men who earn a fortune are "too good to be true" and less likely to be faithful. Women prefer the attractive man with the average kind of job.
Maybe they're just sweatier.
Is a courtesan, not a prostitute, but a courtesan the ideal archetype for a truly modern woman?
Robert Paterson and his sister Diana will be exploring the lifestyle of courtesans in a short series on Trusted Space that looks very interesting.
Here's a taste.
Looks are transient. A beautiful woman becomes a faded beauty, something sad to behold.
A clever, witty and kind woman ages without her age being noticed, and she, has maturity, and good sense and a great deal to offer younger women and she knows well her time has passed and she loves nothing more than to pass on her experience to a
younger intelligent woman she respects.
Age is no obstacle for her. She has no need of plastic surgery because she takes on her new role as grand dame with great relief.
She has had many men and many experiences, and she is happy to live with her memories and move forward with her personal interests. She does not need to diet because she is now fulfilled by things that feed her mind. Her pleasure of the body has been replaced by the utter pleasure of all things interesting to her.
She sleeps alone and comfortably. She leaves the fretting of love and not love to younger women. She has no more of those thoughts to cloud her mind and take away her sleep. She is comfortable with herself.
If you're a Welsh dairy farmer getting up early every damned day to milk the cows, you can't be hanging around pubs at night looking for love.
Why not a message on a bottle? That's just what they are doing, pasting their photos on thousands of plastic containers of organic milk destined for grocery shelves. The campaign has caused a sensation in Wales.
The Moo for Love" Welsh Farmers' Message on a Bottle.
Blogging as the Dawn Patrol, Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste, writes in the London Sunday Times, Casual Sex is a con: women just aren't like men.
Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.
It took me a long time to realise this.
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It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy.
Women bosses are significantly more likely to discriminate against female employees and are prone to mark down women's prospects of promotion.
So say the findings of the authors based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and published in the journal sex roles.
Office Queen bees hold back women's careers.
The findings, based on experiments carried out among more than 700 people, suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may sometimes be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.
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Nicola Horlick, the City financier nicknamed “Superwoman” for combining a demanding job with a large family, said some women looked on other women as a threat and preferred to surround themselves with men.
“It is called the ‘queen bee syndrome’,” she said. “I have seen women in managerial positions discriminating against other women, possibly because they like to be the only female manager or woman in the workplace.”
We all know women like that.
Hat tip to Dr. Helen who writes in Fight the Matriachy
I guess the "Sisterhood" is only alive and well when the drones know their place.
In the Wall Street Journal, Danielle Crittenden reviews "Unprotected" by a doctor who remains anonymous, fearing that she would be punished personally and professionally if her employer or colleagues knew what she really thought.
Hard to believe isn't it in this day and age? What is it that she says that's so shocking?
"My patients were hurting, they looked to me and what could I do?" So confesses an anonymous campus physician in the beginning of her startling memoir. Over the course of 200 pages, she tells story after story about suffering young women. If these women were ailing from eating disorders, or substance abuse, or almost any other medical or psychological problem, their university health departments would spring to their aid. "Cardiologists hound patients about fatty diets and insufficient exercise. Pediatricians encourage healthy snacks, helmets and discussion of drugs and alcohol. Everyone condemns smoking and tanning beds."
Unfortunately, the young women described in "Unprotected" have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their "sexual choices." And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.
Young women are rarely told that there are physical, emotional, psychological, moral and spiritual consequences to their behavior.
Apparently, 'being judgmental" trumps everything, even common sense.
I didn't know that the Ukraine was the stem cell capital of the world, maybe even harvesting live babies to keep its top spot.
The BBC reports that healthy new-born babies may have been killed to feed a flourishing trade in stem cells.
Ukraine babies in stem cell probe
The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of Kharkiv who say they gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff.
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One campaigner was allowed into the autopsy to gather video evidence. She has given that footage to the BBC and Council of Europe.
In its report, the Council describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate.
The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped - and some bodies dismembered.
Horrific.
Update. Not just for stem cells, for beauty treatments as well
From La Vida Vica, You Had Me at "Goodbye"
But isn't this the thing we all want? To be noticed. To be remembered. Don't we all want to have someone in our lives who can't help but look back? Who needs to see us one last time? Don't we want someone who smiles when we enter the room? Who looks at us first when something is funny? We all want to make a connection. One that lasts and strengthens. And we all feel like we're running out of time. I know I do.
Miss Kelley has a fine discussion on Kids, Marriage, Mothers and Fathers, Wealth and Poverty wherein she quotes
First, Claudia Anderson writes at The Weekly Standard about a report produced by the Commission on Parenthood's Future, an independent, nonpartisan group of scholars and leaders. From the report:
“The two-person mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults’ rights to children rather than children’s needs to know and be raised, whenever possible, by their mother and father,” according to the report, The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs."
then Kal Hymowitz who has written that the marriage gap is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.
When the mass consumer culture is so sexualized and the chastity of young women not only devalued but derided, it's only a few wrong steps and they're trapped in the culture of poverty where having children without a husband is a rite of passage.
Last quote from Miss Kelley -
The Brookings Institute has determined that if people 1) graduate from high school, 2) get married, 3) don't have kids until after they're married, and 4) have small families, they're virtually guaranteed to avoid poverty. I don't know how we shift ourselves back to committing to marriage and bringing back a social stigma to single parenting, but we need to swing that pendulum back.
A young blogger, donor-conceived, writes about the psychological and emotional anguish young adults like her experience as they try to craft their adult identities. Whosedaughter? does not look kindly on adults who try to re-engineer the family. In this post she quotes a Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville
Evidence is starting to come in: “Donor conceived adults” describe powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families, and describe themselves as “genetic orphans”. They believe society was complicit in a serious wrong done to them in the way they were conceived and ask, “How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?”
We now need to recognise in law what, traditionally, we have simply assumed: that children’s fundamental human rights include knowing who their biological parents are and if at all possible being reared by them, and being conceived with a natural biological heritage – untampered with biological origins – in particular, a right to be conceived from an untampered-with-sperm from one, living, adult, identified man and an untampered-with-ovum from one, living, adult, identified woman.
In her article in the National Review, Jennifer Roback Morse defines condomism is "the belief that all problems surrounding sexual activity could be solved with enough contraception."
Even better than her definition is her discussion about the long-term emotional costs of non-marital sexual activity, the 'involuntary chemical commitment' created by oxytocin.
“People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”
I was going to write about the new book that purports to explain how and why women talk three times as much as men, but instead I just going to point to Ann Althouse's blog post with its title that says it all,
My brain as a hypodermic needle. Your brain as an international airport.
But, wait, this is too good not to quote
"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female "mood and hormone" clinic in San Francisco.
Mary Mitchell in the Chicago Sun Times says it wasn't always this way. "Enough of this selfishness: Time for black men to act like men.
Black women are waiting longer and longer to walk down the aisle. By the time some get there, they have already had one or two children. If the children are by different fathers, these women's lives are further complicated.
Common sense should have told us there would be consequences for this selfish behavior.
By now, so many blacks have ignored the warnings about the harm caused by the absence of black fathers that those consequences are now overtaking communities in the form of high dropout rates and senseless violence.
Black man, this is not an attack. It is a black woman's plea.
We are tired of seeing our daughters travail in such sorrow. We are tired of watching our grandchildren cling to fragile family ties. And by now, we are clear:
Politicians can't fix this problem. Preachers can't fix it.
There's only one real way to ensure that a black child has the best chance to succeed in this life.
Black man, marry your baby's mother.
This is just too funny not to post in its entirety from Bussorah's Wicked Thoughts
MALE-FEMALE DIFFERENCES
1. NAMES
If Laurie, Linda, Elizabeth and Barbara go out for lunch, they will call each other Laurie, Linda, Elizabeth and Barbara. If Mark, Chris, Eric and Tom go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla, Peanut-Head and Scrappy.
2. EATING OUT
When the bill arrives, Mark, Chris, Eric and Tom will each throw in a $20, even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back. When the women get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.
3. MONEY
A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs. A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need, but it's on sale.
4. BATHROOMS
A man has five items in his bathroom: a toothbrush, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel from the Marriott. The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify most of these items.
5. ARGUMENTS
A woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that... is the beginning of a new argument.
6. CATS
Women love cats. Men say they love cats, but when women aren't looking, men kick cats.
7. FUTURE
A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband. A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.
8. MARRIAGE
A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't. A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.
9. DRESSING UP
A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the garbage, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail. A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.
10. NATURAL
Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed. Women somehow deteriorate during the night.
11. OFFSPRING
Ah, children... A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.
12. THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Any married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing.
World's wittiest lonely hearts ads from the London Review of Books from a soon-to-be published book by David Rose, They call me Naughty Lola.
'They call me naughty Lola. Run-of-the-mill beardy physicist (M, 46).'
'I've divorced better men than you. And worn more expensive shoes than these. So don't think placing this ad is the biggest comedown I've ever had to make. Sensitive F, 34.'
'List your ten favourite albums... I just want to know if there's anything worth keeping when we finally break up. Practical, forward thinking man, 35.'
'My ideal woman is a man. Sorry, mother.'
Hey, you guys, if you want to be a father, get off the phone.
Men who use mobile phones face increased risk of infertility.
A new study shows a worrying link between poor sperm and the number of hours a day that a man uses his mobile phone.
Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.
Doctors believe the damage could be caused by the electromagnetic radiation emitted by handsets or the heat they generate.
Even total strangers could detect a difference in women's grooming habits when they approached ovulation
Forget Basal Body Temperature -- Check Out Her Clothes; Signs Of Ovulation May Be More Obvious Than Supposed
"Near ovulation, women dress to impress, and the closer women come to ovulation, the more attention they appear to pay to their appearance," said Martie Haselton, the study's lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology. "They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably."
Are men responsible for the evolution of the human species?
Time magazine reported in a cover story, "How We Became Human" that a gene-by-gene comparison showed that "the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males."
William Tucker explores further in Bulletin -- Men Invented Humanity.
The role of females hasn't changed much - mothers nurse and care for their children much as chimps do. What's changed, he says, is the role of males, From male brotherhood, they learned to work together co-operatively. Along with monogamy and the "invention of fatherhood" these have been the primary pathways to human evolution.
Not politically correct.
Only a woman can be a tetrachromat, one who can see four distinct ranges of color instead of the three most of us live with.
Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes.
Art critic Robert Hughes reveals how his life was deeply scarred by the Sixties.
Once a woman is in a secure relationship, her sex drive plummets according to research in Germany.
I wondered why there were so many girls in my family.
Beautiful people tend to have girls say scientists or as my feminist friends say, baby women.
According to research, attractive parents are 26% more likely to have a daughter than a son as their first child. It is an inexorable process that has resulted in women becoming increasingly more attractive than men.
This is because of differing “evolutionary strategies” that each sex has adopted to survive, claim researchers at the London School of Economics.
Everyone seems to be talking about the New York Times article, Men Not Working and Not Wanting Just Any Job.
Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.
About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s.
But Dr. Helen quotes the 2005 President of the American Psychological Association, Ronald Levant who says that the traditional norms of the male role - the emphasis on toughness, competition, status, and emotional stoicism - are viewed as problematic and that we are in the midst of a crisis in masculinity.
Men feel that they are being told that what they have been trying to accomplish is irrelevant to the world of today. Since women now work and can earn their own living, there is no longer any need for The Good Provider. Furthermore, society no longer seems to value, or even recognize the traditional male way of demonstrating care, through taking care of his family and friends, by looking out for them, solving their problems, and being one who can be counted on to be there when needed. In its place, men are being asked to take on roles and show care in ways that violate the traditional male code and require skills that they do not have, such as revealing weakness, expressing their most intimate feelings, and nurturing children. The net result of this for many men is a loss of self-esteem and an unnerving sense of uncertainty about what it means to be a man.
Read them both.
Three out of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace.
From the BBC
Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest.
When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day.
The lack of sleep also increases a man's stress hormone levels.
According to the New Scientist study, women who share a bed fare better because they sleep more deeply.
It seems as if contractors are becoming as highly sexualized as the UPS driver and why not if they're as cute?
From the Home & Garden section in The New York Times comes The Allure of the Tool Belt
I can’t tell you how many times when I hear somebody give a recommendation for a contractor it inevitably ends with the four words, ‘And he’s really cute.’ ”
Which only makes sense, he added. “It’s all very intimate. You’re making plans for how you are going to live your life with this person in enormous detail. And let’s face it, they take off their shirts a lot and that doesn’t hurt.”
And the contractor-client affairs?
“Nobody knows,” Mr. Hay said. “The contractor isn’t going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn’t going to tell, and you get a better job because she’s providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins.”
Clients and contractors agree that the attraction between them is generally about more than just sex. It seems to stem largely from the emotional importance of the home to the client, and from the contractor’s ability to listen to her...The client has finally found that ideal — the heterosexual man who will go shopping with her.
A fabulous article with many home truths.
A notorious Newsweek cover story in 1986 said, based on a Harvard-Yale study, 40 year old, educated, single women "were more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than land a mate.
Now we cringe at the thought of such a comparison. Hey, scare-mongering then and now always boosts sales at news-stands.
From the WSJ, An Iconic Report 20 Years Later: Many of Those Women Married After All by Jeff Zaslow. (subscription only)
A lot of us recall the hand wringing over that study, the countless articles and TV debates, the tearful conversations between single women and their mothers. The statistics were later challenged by U.S. Census Bureau demographer Jeanne Moorman, who calculated that those 30-year-olds actually had a 58% to 66% likelihood of finding a husband; for 40-year-olds it was 17% to 23%. But the Harvard-Yale study's core message -- that educated, career-focused women risk spending their lives alone -- still reverberates today.
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Well, a new study suggests that new research suggests that highly educated women are actually MORE likely to find husbands.
Just in case you're still in the game, here's how to interpret those signals someone may be sending you.
Everyone wants to know how to read sexual body language.
Here's one.
Raised eyebrows. When we see a person that we consider attractive, we begin raising and lowering our eyebrows. If the person also feels drawn to you, his eyebrows will also start going up and down. This gesture lasts only 1/5 of a second but it takes place all the time, with people of both sexes and all ages. This "eye making" can be easily left unnoticed, but if you do notice it, you will certainly be given 100% of the person's attention.
The real Charlotte Gray finally gets her wings, 61 years late.
SHE was handed her CBE insignia personally by the Queen, she is a heroine in her adopted France, and her wartime exploits in the French Resistance are the basis for an acclaimed novel. But for 63 years a little bit of sex discrimination has rankled with Pearl Cornioley.
Amends were made yesterday when two British officers travelled to her retirement home at Châteauvieux in southwest France to present the 91-year-old widow with her parachute wings.
Mme Cornioley, born in Paris to British expatriate parents, was one of the real-life models for Charlotte Gray, the Sebastian Faulks novel that became a film. She was so adept at blowing up railway lines that the occupying Nazis put a price on her head of a million francs.
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She is modest about her war. “It was a complete accident that I ended up leading 1,500 Resistance fighters. I was not a military person — I was supposed to be a courier — but I ended up having to use whatever sense I had. But I certainly didn’t do this on my own.” Her valour was recognised and she was cited for the Military Cross. But the rules did not allow it; the MC was not for civilian women.
Hat tip to Rebecca Blood
One Egyptian doctor on why genital mutilation is necessary.
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: Reality is a mistake, we must rectify it.
[...]
In Egypt we have four and a half million spinsters. The definition of a spinster is a woman who has reached 30, without ever receiving a marriage proposal. We have a spinster problem in the Arab world, and the last thing we want is for them to be sexually aroused. Circumcision of the girls who need it makes them chaste, dignified, and pure.
Dr. Sanity says freeing women is the key to developing a saner Mideast.
the treatment of women under Islam is not only the key to understanding the pathology of the culture, but also the key to developing an antidote to its most poisonous and toxic elements. Unveiling the women of Islam and eliminating their second-class status; empowering them in the oppressive Islamic countries where their individuality and self-expression has been crushed-- may cause a ripple effect that could eventually alter a family structure that currently encourages the development of generation after generation of dysfunctional and pathological men and women.
It may be that extra X chromosome that gives women the decided advantage when it comes to warding off disease and living long lives.
People think the X is only about sex," Migeon said, "but it has 1,100 genes that do all kinds of things, from being involved in blood clotting to muscle function, to getting rid of [cellular] waste products. It's a very active chromosome.
X Factor Boosts Women's Health, Longevity
Art Buchwald makes me laugh out loud. Take Low-Interest Loan
He read the same piece I wrote about in Sperm Online but he "decided it was a sign. Why not me?" so he calls the sperm bank, offers a deposit, and spends the rest of the column in a reverie about his possible children in his room at a hospice where he is spending his last days as the man who wouldn't die.
From The Science of Sexual Orientation
There are few issues as hotly contested — and as poorly understood — as the question of what makes a person gay or straight. It's not only a political, social, and religious question but also a scientific question, one that might someday have an actual, provable answer.
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While biologists look at hormones for answers about human sexuality, other scientists are looking for patterns in statistics. And hard as this is to believe, they have found something they call "the older brother effect."
"The more older brothers a man has, the greater that man's chance of being gay," says Bailey.
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If this comes as a shock to you, you’re not alone. But it turns out, it’s one of the most solid findings in this field, demonstrated in study after study.
And the numbers are significant: for every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay increase by one third. Older sisters make no difference, and there's no corresponding effect for lesbians. A first-born son has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, and the numbers rise from there. The theory is it happens in the womb.
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"One of the things we've only found out lately is that older brothers affect a boy only if the boy is right-handed," Breedlove said. "If the boy is left-handed, if his brain is organized in a left-handed fashion, it doesn't matter how many older brothers he has, his probability of being gay is just like the rest of the population."
Frank Porretto says the single most destructive attitude in a marriage is
"Your purpose in my life is to make me happy."
His precepts for a happy marriage?
1. Each should resolve to treat the other as he knows the other would like to be treated.
2. Take pleasure in your ability to please your beloved.
3. Love isn't just something you feel; it's also something you do.
The latter points to what I consider the single greatest misconception about love. Love is not a feeling. Love is a doing.
HT: Gerald Van der Leun, Unbroken Vows
There is growing evidence that female mammals with very high degrees of testosterone are more likely to give birth to males.
TOUGH, confident females may be more likely to give birth to sons than women with less pushy personalities, researchers have found.
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The discovery of the “queen bee” syndrome in mammals is the latest in a growing body of work that challenges the traditional view that a baby’s sex is determined by chance.
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Previous research by Grant has found that men with masculine jobs — police officers, soldiers and butchers — are more likely to produce girls.
From the Wall St Journal, a Harvard sage makes the case for manliness. Calling All Hombres. He's right when he says Larry Summers should have defended himself better. His
capitulation to those he offended (when he said women might be biologically less inclined to succeed in the hard sciences) is not simply a craven kowtow to political correctness, but proof, also, of a character flaw. Indeed, Mr. Mansfield continued with a mischievous smile, "He has apologized so much that he looks unmanly."
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Mr. Mansfield's contention that women and men are not the same is now widely supported by social scientists. The core of his definition of manliness--"confidence in a risky situation"--is not so far from that of biologists and sociologists, who find men to be more abstract in their thinking and aggressive in their behavior than women, who are more contextual in their thinking and conciliatory in their behavior.
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At a speech to students a couple of years ago, he observed that the only "gentlemen" at Harvard were conservatives and gay men. Conservatives, he believes, realize something's been lost in the recent social revolution; and gay men "have a certain greater awareness and perspicacity than other men."
Of course, feminists have not been happy with him, but he's had his own way of dealing with them.
Nine years ago, when Mr. Mansfield offered his first seminar on manliness, I barely managed to score a seat in the small classroom. So many campus feminists had crowded in that students were forced to sit on the floor. These women saw their opportunity, finally, to have it out with the conservative bogeyman.
But Mr. Mansfield got the best of them. He proceeded to talk for much of the next two hours about the ancient Greek notion of thumos, or spiritedness, an idea he believes is the precursor of modern-day manliness. The feminists were bored silly--almost none returned the following week.
The University of Utah has released a study that shows that hardening of the coronary arteries is more likely in wives when their husbands express hostility during marital arguments. When women exhibit dominant or controlling behavior was related to atherosclerosis in husbands.
Smith summarizes: “A low-quality relationship is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.”
Janice Shaw Crouse exposes Four Myths About Living Together Without Marriage.
A college professor described a survey that he conducted over a period of years in his marriage classes. He asked guys who were living with a girl, point blank, “Are you going to marry the girl that you’re living with?” The overwhelming response, he reports, was “NO!” When he asked the girls if they were going to marry the guy they were living with, their response was, “Oh, yes; we love each other and we are learning how to be together.”
Bad for both, but especially bad for women.
Via Joe Katzman who calls it The Long Pretending
I've found the perfect man thanks to Mary Katharine.
He's manly, he's handsome, he opens pickle jars, rubs feet, understands, says the right thing, he's Brawny Man.
No one else can listen quite like him. See for yourself
So many people went on line to send valentines yesterday that several on line greeting card sites crashed.
Tricky those e-cards. Says self-proclaimed love expert and psychologist, Diana Kirshner,
It can be cute, she says, or fatal.
"If there is very little nurturance, affection, loving coming across to you and an e-card is sent, it comes across as a last-minute crumb thrown in your face," Kirshner said. "It's just going to backfire."
UPDATE: The top card at Hallmark, in every city, outselling every other card by a factor of five is V330-5.
The card's face is a deep red foil, with "For the One I Love" across the top in black script, a large picture of a red rose in the center, and a thick black ribbon cutting through the middle. Inside, it simply states: "Each time I see you, hold you, think of you, here's what I do ... I fall deeply, madly, happily in love with you. Happy Valentine's Day."
HT: Halley Suitt
When a tiny grungy crumpled up piece of paper can bring this reaction,
And when I saw the message - written to me by an 11 year old boy - years and years and years ago - Jimmy Carter was president when this note was written ... I felt this rush of "time" - like having a perception, in reality, of the true CURVED nature of space. Looking at his penciled words to me, I suddenly felt not like this was a "memory" or anything that took place primarily in my brain - but I felt like I was propelled back in time. Instantaneously.
just think what a true love letter to your children, spouse and siblings could do when part of your personal Legacy Archives when they read it years after your death.
Lawyer jailed for killing wife tells of shame and remorse
A lawyer who stabbed his wife to death five days after she told him she was having an affair made an emotional courtroom apology yesterday for what he described as "this appalling tragedy''.
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She told her husband of the relationship on March 11. That evening she sent Mr Flint two text messages. One read in part: "It's done. All calm and reasonable.''
Five days later Mrs Lumsden and Mr Flint had dinner in Plumley, then drove back to Bowdon separately, believing they were starting a new life together.
Minutes later she was lying dead on her bedroom floor.
The busiest day of the year for private eyes is Valentine's Day reports the Wall St Journal in One Tough Day for Two-Timers.
[A] major crisis day for anyone who is having an affair... Valentine's Day is the one holiday when everyone is expected to do something romantic for their spouse or lover -- and if someone has both, it's a serious problem.
"If anything is going on, it will be happening on that day," says Irene Smith, who says business at her Discreet Investigations detective agency in Golden, Colo., as much as doubles -- to as many as 12 cases some years -- on Valentine's Day.
---
The Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts, a Southfield, Mich., trade group of professionals trained to review divorce settlements, says filings typically spike in mid-February. "It's so consistent I can't deny a pattern," says Natalie Nelson, a divorce financial analyst in Boulder, Colo.
Indeed, divorce lawyers say they frequently turn up evidence of Valentine's Day duplicity when they review financial documents. Credit-card receipts from restaurants or purchases at fancy jewelry stores are the most common giveaways, says Heidi Harris, a partner at New York law firm Sheresky Aronson & Mayefsky. New York attorney Raoul Felder concurs: The kinds of purchases documented for Feb. 14 "give an indication of how serious the relationship is," he says.
But I have to admit the part I enjoyed most in the whole article was Ms. Gallagher's marble.
Christine Gallagher, a 43-year-old writer in Los Angeles, was so incensed after she caught her boyfriend cheating on Valentine's Day that she launched a Web site called RevengeLady.com, where she gives advice on how to get back at people. Ms. Gallagher was dating the man, whom she declines to name, for over a year when he told her he had to go away over Valentine's Day to visit a friend dying of cancer in Switzerland. Ms. Gallagher spent the holiday alone at home with her 180-pound mastiff, Thomas.
'Classic Conflict Day'
It wasn't until several weeks later that Ms. Gallagher learned the truth. As she was out walking Thomas she was approached by a woman who said she had just returned from a vacation in Italy -- with Ms. Gallagher's boyfriend. Before coming up with the idea for her Web site, Ms. Gallagher broke up with the man, then found an unusual way to get back at him: She unscrewed the driver's-side door panel of his beloved Audi coupe and stuck a marble inside, figuring that the rattle would drive him crazy. Sure enough, it did. He took the car to mechanic after mechanic until one finally found the marble -- and a little note Ms. Gallagher had included: "So you finally found it, sucker." Ms. Gallagher says her ex-boyfriend now lives in New Zealand; he couldn't be located for comment.
40% of women would snoop through their husbands' email if they thought he was cheating according to research done by Symantec.
Heather Locklear did. After 11 years, it's good bye Richie.
"By all accounts, they were a perfect couple," said Jamie Bufalino, senior editor at People magazine. "Many of their friends envied their relationship."
This week's People magazine sheds light on why the Locklear-Sambora marriage didn't last.
"Heather happened upon an e-mail, sent to Richie Sambora, from a woman they both knew," Bufalino said. "And contained in the e-mail were provocative pictures."
According to sources quoted in People, Locklear was "absolutely devastated" by her digital discovery.
She filed for divorce, blindsiding Sambora. Hours after she filed, Sambora, still unaware of the breakup
Harlequin, the publisher of romance novels, recently conducted a survey in 16 countries and
asked men and women on six continents about traits they liked or disliked and how they went about trying to meet Mr. or Ms. Right.
Across the world, women put humor on the top on the list and in North America, so did men.
I think this is good news,
Boys are finally beginning to get attention. I wrote about Where Have All the Men Gone but it may take some lawsuits to change things.
It's starting in Boston. One schoolboy is suing saying the system favors girls and is biased against boys. Schoolboy' s bias suit.
''The system is designed to the disadvantage of males," Anglin said. ''From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this."
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You can't expect a boy to buy pink paper and frills to decorate their notebooks," Little said.
Newsweek makes it a cover story, The Trouble with Boys. Boys are disappearing in college where they're now a minority at 44%.
This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."
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"Girl behavior becomes the gold standard," says "Raising Cain" coauthor Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective girls."
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"One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school," Newsweek reports, "rests on a single question: Does he have a man in his life to look up to?" It continues: "An increasing number of boys — now a startling 40 percent — are being raised without biological dads. Psychologists say that grandfathers and uncles can help, but emphasize that an adolescent boy without a father figure is like an explorer without a map."
It's astonishing that 40% of our boys today are being raised without their biological fathers. Adolescent boys without a father figure is like an explorer without a map
whether they're breathing down their necks about grades or admonishing them to show up for school on time, "an older man reminds a boy in a million different ways that school is crucial to their mission in life."
We need more mentors and single-sex classes if we are going to save our boys.
Men appear to get greater satisfaction than women when witnessing retribution. Revenge 'more satisfying for men'.
"This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment, " said Dr Tania Singer.
The New York Times inexplicably calls this Your Brain on Schadenfreude and so apparently did Nature magazine which published Dr. Singer's research. Now, schadenfreude is a German word meaning pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. Misfortune is bad luck. I don't think what the experiments showed is schadenfreude at all and neither does the author. It's more pleasure at seeing rough justice.
First the experimental subjects watched people playing a game in which some cheated (bad people) and others played fair (good people). Then they watched the same people suffering from a painful stimulus.
The empathy circuits lighted up in both men and women when bad things happened to good people. When bad things happened to bad people, the women in the study were still empathic. But not the men. Not only did they show less empathy toward bad people, but the reward center in the left nucleus accumbens lighted up. All that translates as "Serves him right!"
Here's a very interesting blog called Modestly Yours by a group of young women whose voices you will never hear in mainstream media. They are "good girls in hiding."
I mean where else will the cable channel Oxygen be called A Breath of Foul Air for its "edgy" entertainment that has most definitely been pornified.
But a considerable amount of the cable channel’s edginess no doubt consists in its unflattering depictions of women for women. Howard Stern does it and it is sexist; Oxygen does it and it is “intelligent.” You’d have to be breathing some pretty thin air to buy that.
Or in Are We All Girls Who 'Cain't Say No'
So there it was again, the "cain't say no" phenomenon. Only in this case it wasn't a simple matter of turning down yet another car pool stint. Grace was thoroughly uninterested in the guy, even a bit repulsed, but still giving him a spin in her bed-- and feeling guilty about getting out of it.
The blog is sponsored by Modesty Zone founded in 2005 by Wendy Shalit who wrote the well received A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. From a description of the book which I haven't read.
Beholden neither to conservatives who discount as exaggeration the dangers facing young women, nor to feminists who steadfastly affix blame on the patriarchy, Wendy Shalit proposes that, in fact, we have lost our respect for an important classical virtue -- that of sexual modesty. A Return to Modesty is a deeply personal account as well as a fascinating intellectual exploration. From seventeenth-century manners guides to Antonio Canova's sculpture, Venus Italico, to Frank Loesser's 1948 tune, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," A Return to Modesty unfolds like a detective's search for a lost idea as Shalit uncovers opinions about this lost virtue's importance, from Balzac to Simone de Beauvoir, that have not been aired for decades. Then she knocks down the accompanying myths one by one. Female modesty is not about a "sexual double standard," as is often thought, but is related to male virtue and honor. Modesty is not a social construct, but a natural response. And modesty is not prudery, but a way to preserve a sense of the erotic in our lives.
To me, this is edgy and intelligent thinking and writing, even more so, since the authors are young women, looking for what women of my generation discarded too quickly.
UPDATE:
The relentless pornification of our culture goes now goes beyond young girls and women and extends to, as Gail Sheehy calls them, "seasoned women". Ronni Bennett delivers Sheehy a well-deserved lashing.
We look to studies on mice to see how what is learned will effect humans. Now we have a very interesting study on bats.
For some male bats, sexual prowess comes with a price -- smaller brains.
A research team led by Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains.
