We Have A Lucy, Don’t We?
(via)
Um
Amy said
You got teats on your dick so really I don’t understand your whole dog system.
Largely why I was hated in high school
Phil once asked somthing like “is there a photo of yourself you wouldn’t show someone?” This would be it, if I were showing it. The dude on the left was my neighbor to the north of our house in the background. We shared a driveway.
Dear Clusterflock
Today I quit on an online survey concerning a “buying experience”; the only reason I was doing it was because it kept popping up in my mail and taking it seemed the quickest way to make it go away. But I came to a question that pissed me off and made me delete the whole thing. It asked me to indicate my “position” in my household: was I the Head of household? The spouse of the Head of household? A dependent of the Head of household? and so on. Do you find yourself thinking as I do that the whole notion of there necessarily being A head of household is archaic? In my view, the whole thing smacks of that Southern Baptist insistence that women “submit” to the will of their husbands, which I find to be one of many reprehensible notions they espouse. Can’t we get past the whole Command Structure thing? Is this just me going off, or do you have feeling about this?
Proportions and entitlement
For the last six months or so, I’ve had this guilty pleasure. It’s a blog called, Why There Are No Girls in San Francisco.* Here’s an example of the content:
SF females (a scattering of honeys from Serbia and Turkey aside) don’t aim for sexy in their dress or carriage. They aim for anti-Florida. They are reserved, borderline haughty in demeanor and fashion themselves in one of three looks: the always vogue “I run Iron-Mans” guy-girl look, the cluttered Hipster, or the famous and very popular “SF black”, where you cover up every square inch of your body but are still fabulous because the fabric is black and black is daring and sexy, right? Not right. Boobs are sexy. Legs are sexy. Black is just a color. Black is what Batman wears so he can be stealthy. When Bruce Wayne wants to impress the ladies he wears a tank top.
Today I read a story in the New York Times about the shortage of men on college campuses, and how it’s affecting more than just the admissions offices:
“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms. This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ’something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”
W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, which is 57 percent female, put it this way: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s ideal of relationships,” he said. Translation: more partners, more sex.
The pseudonymous author of WTANGISF probably attended one of these disproportionately female universities and now strugges with the reality of living in a disproportionately male city, but I wonder if both situations are just a symptom of Love in the Time of Darwinism:
Women can take a Chinese-menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday night and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day. This isn’t equality, say the male-contents; it’s a ratification of female privilege and, worse, caprice. “Women seemingly have decided that they want it all (and deserve it, too),” Kevin from Ann Arbor writes. “They want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual.”
What’s your take? How do you navigate the modern labyrinth of gender roles better known as sex, dating, and marriage?
* I should mention that I am a girl. And I live in San Francisco.
quote out of context
Thus when the sex ratio is 20:20 the split is $50:$50 and when the sex ratio is 19:20 the split is more like to $99:$1 in favor of the men.
Fun facts about special sauce
As John Hodgman would say, more information than you require:
Click to embiggen
math anxiety
Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students — but not the boys — were to agree that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.”
same-sex sexual behavior in animals
Scientific theories for the adaptation of same-sex sexual behaviors in animals.
First, there are the adaptive hypotheses, which provide an explanation for same-sex behaviour that would boost the biological fitness of one or more of the individuals involved. For example, several species, including bottlenose dolphins, seem to use same-sex behaviours to promote social bonding. Others may have evolved them as a form of intrasexual conflict. Indirect insemination, as in the flour beetle, provides a third possible adaptive advantage. Then there is the practice hypothesis, that individuals are honing their skills for mating, which seems to hold good for male fruit flies at least.
Several other adaptive explanations have been invoked to explain same-sex behaviour in humans, including kin selection – helping to further the genes you share with close family members – and “over-dominance” – the idea that certain genes somehow increase fitness in individuals who possess a single copy of them but are associated with same-sex behaviour in people with two copies. Then there is “sexually antagonistic selection” – the idea that alleles promoting same-sex behaviour in men are favoured by selection because they increase the reproductive chances of their daughters.
There are also various non-adaptive explanations. Mistaken identity could indeed be one cause. Van Gossum’s damselflies exemplify another idea, known as the prisoner effect, in which depriving individuals of interaction with the opposite sex prompts them to mate with members of their own sex. Then there is the evolutionary by-product hypothesis – selection for some other independent trait, such as high sexual responsiveness, might make individuals more likely to participate in same-sex sexual behaviour. It has also been suggested that same-sex behaviours appear when organisms are imperfectly adapted to their environment.
Also, it feels good.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
Y chromosome evolving quickly
A new study comparing the Y chromosomes from humans and chimpanzees, our nearest living relatives, show that they are about 30 percent different. That is far greater than the 2 percent difference between the rest of the human genetic code and that of the chimp’s, according to a study appearing online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
These changes occurred in the last 6 million years or so, relatively recently when it comes to evolution.
“The Y chromosome appears to be the most rapidly evolving of the human chromosomes,” said study co-author Dr. David Page, director of the prestigious Whitehead Institute in Cambridge and a professor of biology at MIT. “It’s an almost ongoing churning of gene reconstruction. It’s like a house that’s constantly being rebuilt.”
Women in the workplace
Says The Economist:
Motherhood, not sexism, is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less. And those mothers’ relative poverty also disadvantages their children.
GoGirl
Politics and morality?
Update: Not my post, but wanted to add this quote for context.
Seriously? They voted against an amendment that was prompted by the brutal gang-rape of a young woman by her co-workers while she was working for a company under contract for the United States government, after which she was locked in a shipping container without food or water, threatened if she left to seek medical treatment, and was then prevented from bringing criminal charges against her assailants. And they failed to anticipate the political consequences?
Visions of vienna sausages and baby mice fill my mind
As we learned from the podcast I did for the Large Penis Support Group I am well endowed. I have always heard of there being a race of men who have extremely tiny penii but never really took those stories at face value. Let me tell you something. This may scare you…. It is absolutely true. Horrible and awful and true. Oh, my damned eyes! Why have I clicked the links? Was it curiosity or do I just hate myself that much. Visions of vienna sausages and baby mice fill my mind. Luckily for you I went there so you don’t have to. All you have to do is listen to the nonsense that people at MyTinyDick.Net talk about. I warn you, there will be acronyms you’ve never heard of. Like SPH and SPG. These stand for Small Penis Humiliation & Small Penis Glorification. I think if you went to this site your natural inclination would be towards SPE (Small Penis Eradication.) That may sound harsh but I think we’d all be better off….
Plus podcast.
(thanks, Aaron)
Quote out of context
She’s crazy. She’s a bitch. In fact she’s a crazy bitch, but her bitch craziness is for whatever reason right for me in a lot of ways. And honestly, I think Ben Franklin must have been a very smart fellow. He always recommended older women as lovers and until now I never EVER agreed.
(via)
Lady Magic
Nancy Lieberman will become the first woman to coach a men’s basketball team.
Lieberman, a Hall of Famer who has done pretty much everything there is in the scope of women’s basketball. Now, she’ll go to work as the coach of the NBA Development League team in Frisco, which will begin play in the 2010-11 season.
Making the grade isn’t about race. It’s about parents.
After a recent state report on test scores in California schools, Jack O’Connell, the state’s superintendent of instruction, said the gap is “the biggest civil rights issue of this generation” — a very popular phrase in education circles.
But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.
While I agree with the article’s premise*, I found myself wondering why the emphasis on fathers. I’d hedge that it’s having two parents, two incomes, and two role models that make the difference, and not just some problem with ’soft’ single mothers.
* I spend my forty-hour work week advocating for more parental involvement to close the aforementioned achievement gap.
boys will be boys
Interestingly, whether there were ladies present or not, the mens’ testosterone didn’t increase at all after driving the Camry.
honey, I’m home!
I’m here to discuss the curatorial interest in his work as of late—his opening at the Lower East Side gallery Invisible-Exports, the films about his life, the Tate’s acquisition of his archives. But what I see, when he sits down on his bed, is that his potbelly props up his C-cup breasts. As we speak, his thick fingers brush away strands of his platinum bob from bloated lips slicked pink with gloss. He looks like a funhouse version of Courtney Love. More accurately, he has refashioned himself to look uncannily like his late wife, the woman with whom he has come to share an identity, a profile, even beauty marks.
(via marginal revolution)
. . . traces of the cad about the boy . . .
You know you’re headed somewhere when you commence to quoting yourself.
And while we’re on the subject . . .
Although The Magic Christian is by and large a very annoying film (not least on account of its many breezy ‘fag jokes’ circa 1969), there is a certain train-wreck fascination to the “Mad About the Boy” sequence featuring Yul Brynner and Roman Polanski.
Men are like little Kids
From a fun comment thread of Oklahomans talking about male immaturity.
Calm down ladies. I know you don’t believe that about all men. Just like I don’t believe that all women are worthless wh*res.
If you look closely, you’ll find a picture of Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter.
Quote out of context
1. Ayn Rand wasn’t a philosopher.
from the spam
The Math lesbians