Neither side supports Gay Marriage!
I don’t either. Don’t call it Marriage! I don’t give a crap about what it’s called. But I want the same legal recognition for my commitment to my partner. Marriage is word play, why can’t we get past it?
transgender in the workplace
What happens to female-to-male and male-to-female transgender people in the workplace?
We use the workplace experiences of transgender people – individuals who change their gender typically with hormone therapy and surgery – to provide new insights into the long-standing question of what role gender plays in shaping workplace outcomes. Using an original survey of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, we document the earnings and employment experiences of transgender people before and after their gender transitions. We find that while transgender people have the same human capital after their transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically. We estimate that average earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increase slightly following their gender transitions, while average earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fall by nearly 1/3. This finding is consistent with qualitative evidence that for many male-to-female workers, becoming a woman often brings a loss of authority, harassment, and termination, but that for many female-to-male workers, becoming a man often brings an increase in respect and authority. These findings challenge the omitted variables explanations for the gender pay gap and illustrate the often hidden and subtle processes that produce gender inequality in workplace outcomes.
Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male
Sasha Baron Cohen was escorted from a fashion show in Milan on Friday.
After a few minutes of darkness while Baron Cohen, or Bruno, was escorted off the catwalk, the show started again. Models had kept their cool but the designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of the show.
LaBruzzo considering plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have tubes tied
Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.
“We’re on a train headed to the future and there’s a bridge out, ” LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. “And nobody wants to talk about it.”
LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.
(via Beezies & Bankrolls )
Poll: McCain Old and White, Obama Young and Black
“We accumulate plenty of raw data,” said thirty-year veteran statistician Nelson Temple of Scranton, PA, “even when we don’t embroider reality with made up bullshit. The tough part is making sense of it.”
“This week,” he continued, “49% of those surveyed indicate Governor Sarah Palin is not as hot as they first thought, yet 47% are convinced she is hotter than ever. With a 3% margin of error, what am I supposed to do with that?”
dear clusterflock
Does it bother you when people use ’sex’ when they mean ‘gender’?
Update: Does it bother you when people ask questions based on incorrect assumptions about language? 
from the counter-intuitive
A new study suggests gender differences widen in industrial societies and, conversely, that men and women’s personalities are more similar in traditional societies.
To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.
Maasai Taboos
Maasai men are breaking social taboos by moving to the city, becoming hair dressers, and in some cases prostitutes for European women who find the warriors attractive.
Maasai warriors, or moran, are a familiar sight on Kenya’s beaches and in its renowned safari parks — dressed in distinctive red robes and wearing beaded jewellery, they often act as guides or work in security.
But sometimes, the eager young men who flock to the coast hoping to make their fortunes — some with dreams of marrying a white tourist — have to go against their traditions.
Maasai warriors are not allowed to touch a woman’s head: it is regarded as demeaning in the patriarchal culture. Moran who become hairdressers risk a curse from the elders, or could even be expelled from the community.
“If my father finds out what I am doing he will be very mad at me or even chase me from home,” said Lalasho, who comes from Loitoktok, near Mount Kilimanjaro on the border with Tanzania.
“But I have to eat, that’s why I broke my taboo since city life is very expensive,” he said.
vroom. vroom.
A study finds the sound of powerful engines turns women on.
David Moxon subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff — a measure of their arousal — after hearing the revving exotics, but the amount the women had was off the charts.
The econobox, however, left everyone colder than a January day in Nome.
Hiscox is the name of the company that funded the study.
my boss is a total . . . .
The gender of a boss, or bosses, has different effects on male and female workers. The study found:
- Women who had only one female boss reported more psychological distress (such as trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety) and physical symptoms (such as headaches, stomach pain or heartburn, neck and back pain and tiredness) than women who worked for one male boss.
- Women who reported to a mixed-gender pair of supervisors also reported more of these symptoms than their peers who worked for a single male boss.
- Men who worked for a single supervisor, regardless of the supervisor’s gender, had similar levels of distress.
- Men who worked for a mixed-gender pair had fewer mental and physical symptoms than those working for a lone male supervisor.
which way did (s)he go?
Research suggests an odd relationship between gender and perceptions.
“If you look at someone with just their joints illuminated when they aren’t moving, it’s difficult to tell what it is you are looking at. But as soon as they move, instantaneously, you can tell that it’s a person and perceive their nature,” van der Zwan said. “You can tell if it’s a boy or a girl, young or old, angry or happy. You can discern all these qualities about their state, affect, and actions with no cues at all about what they look like - with no form at all, just motion.”
As these stylized figures walked, their movements were manipulated to range anywhere from a “girly girl” to a “hulking male.” The halfway point was a gender-neutral walker that volunteers judged as male half the time and female the other half.
Oddly, when these ambiguous figures were judged as masculine, volunteers saw them as approaching them, even when the actual people these figures were based on had walked away from the camera. Moreover, when these figures were judged feminine, volunteers saw them as walking away from them, even when in real life the women had approached the camera.
“The thing that most people find most surprising is that the effects are consistent for observers of both genders,” van der Zwan told LiveScience. “It does not matter if you are a female or a male observer - male figures of the type we used often look like they are facing the observer and female figures often look like they are facing away.”
Apparently, “there is something in the way males and females move that affects the way others see them in terms of their orientation in space,” van der Zwan said.
It is “tempting to speculate” that this effect reflects the potential costs “of misinterpreting the actions and intentions of others,” he added. “For example, a male figure that is otherwise ambiguous might best be perceived as approaching to allow the observer to prepare to flee or fight. Similarly, for observers, and especially infants, the departure of females might signal also a need to act, but for different reasons.”
Jon Stewart: the gender card
what’s the word for amusing if it wasn’t sad
Anybody watching the conventioneers ignore Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman?
Short version: Who are these women and why are they talking to me?
Chicks
I’ve realized that I can’t seem to refer to any female of my age group as a woman. Recent comments have found me using the term girl with surprising regularity in reference to my XX-chromosomed peers. At what age do girls become women?
bipolar risk increases with age of father
Children born to fathers older than thirty have a significantly higher risk of bipolar disorder.
The paternal risk also grows with the age of a father, rising to 37 percent by the time a man is 55 years, said Emma Frans, an epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who led the study.
The findings published in the Archives of General Psychiatry bolster evidence that children of older fathers are at higher risk of psychological conditions such as bipolar disorder, autism and schizophrenia, the researchers said.
kinky or what……
A question for the ladies.
If you found out that your husband had a thing for wearing women’s underwear what would you do?
A question for the men.
If you found out your mate was a bit of a cross dresser what would you do?
nun beauty pageant
An Italian priest is orchestrating a beauty pageant for nuns on his blog.
The “Miss Sister 2008″ contest will start in September on a blog run by the Rev. Antonio Rungi and will give nuns from around the world a chance to showcase their work and their image.
“Nuns are a bit excluded, they are a bit marginalized in ecclesiastical life,” Rungi told The Associated Press after Italian media carried reports of the idea. “This will be an occasion to make their contribution more visible.”
hyper-heterosexuals
Italian researchers have suggested a link between genes that make women more interested in men, and thus more reproductively successful, and the homosexuality or bisexuality of their offspring.
Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues at the University of Padua, Italy, showed that the female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children, suggesting that genes on the X chromosome are responsible. Now the team have shown that the same is true for bisexuality.
“It helps to answer a perplexing question - how can there be ‘gay genes’ given that gay sex doesn’t lead to procreation?” says Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. “The answer is remarkably simple: the same gene that causes men to like men also causes women to like men, and as a result to have more children.”
I squish your head
Men with wide faces are more aggressive.
“We were astounded to see that this relatively simple measurement in the face predicted how aggressive men were in a lab-based computer game, and then equally astounded to see that the same measure could predict aggressive behavior in a real-world setting, that of sports,” said researcher Cheryl McCormick, a behavioral neuroscientist at Brock University.
These new findings suggest that faces may have been shaped by evolution to signal aggressiveness to others.
“Competitors may have used this cue, likely on a subconscious level, to decide whether or not to take an opponent on,” McCormick told LiveScience. Perhaps linked with these results is the fact that making an angry face involves lowering the brow and raising the upper lip, which squashes the features of your face together, making it look wider, the scientists added.
many days go by
A study has been conducted on the amount of time men and women spend getting ready over their lifetimes.
The time women spend putting on make up and getting dressed works out at 3,276 hours over their lifetimes while men only devote 1,092 hours to looking their best.
A survey of 1,000 women also showed that 67 per cent thought that the time spent getting ready was actually a chore.
Only a third of women said they enjoyed preening themselves.
(via marginal revolution)
I’m not the only one
Cindy: “Mike, do you ever think about the fact that you live in a state shaped like a penis?”
The Florida State Capitol Building.
pick me
Women on the pill pick mates with less genetic diversity.
Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors.
MHC genes churn out substances that tell the body whether a cell is a native or an invader. When individuals with different MHC genes mate, their offspring’s immune systems can recognize a broader range of foreign cells, making them more fit.
Past studies have suggested couples with dissimilar MHC genes are more satisfied and more likely to be faithful to a mate. And the opposite is also true with matchng-MHC couples showing less satisfaction and more wandering eyes.
“Not only could MHC-similarity in couples lead to fertility problems,” said lead researcher Stewart Craig Roberts, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle in England, “but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odor perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners.”
Current Television: Mad Men
I don’t watch a lot of TV; it’s true. But I’ve found love in the new AMC series Mad Men. After hearing enough of the hype surrounding the Emmy-nominated series, I finally grabbed the whole first season on DVD to see if this story of the lives of 1960s ad men was really all the reviewers would have me believe.
All’s I can say is, the show is brilliant. Each character is written somewhere between a hero and a villain; the plots sometimes lead exactly where they’re telegraphed, and other times they turn out to be subterfuge, feints in the direction of catastrophe, which end benignly. For today.
In the style of today’s cable blockbusters, it has a gimmick. Sex in the City had designer name-dropping and orgasm jokes; Deadwood has cursing cowboys. Mad Men worships at the trinity of Marlboros, Manhattans and misogyny, in an effort to remind us that Things Were Different Then. However, after a few episodes, the mind becomes inured to the ever-present swirling smoke, 11am whiskey, and oh-my-god-the-misogyny; and one focuses on the travails of the superbly-rendered cast of characters.
Life is messy, and it rarely plays out the way it is told in a history tome. Mad Men is a blissfully un-preachy look at a sliver of life in a bygone era, where men and women were pretty much like they are today. With better writing.
Overheard
Elementary-aged boys ran around the church yard, colored gold by the setting sun as they breathlessly negotiated the rules of some improvised game involving miniature hula hoops.
“Here, use the green one–it’s more colorful and boyish.”
browsing gender
This program analyzes your browsing history to determine your gender.
From what I can tell, it disregarded the porn sites.