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.