(ABC NEWS) 27 May 2008:

Did you know that not only do men find long legs attractive in women, women also find them attractive in men?  Interestingly, most people prefer legs that are 5 percent longer than average for a given height, and less people prefer legs that are 10 percent longer than average.

I had to stop and think about this – being female, I had not consciously thought about it.  But I do remember a particular date who was over 6 feet tall, and had an inside leg measurement of 36 inches who I still have a particular fondness for, not based on his personality….

(MSNBC.COM) 22 May 2008:

The American Idol audience brings posters and signs for the show tapings with names of their favorite contestants. One such sign at a recent taping read “Cougars for Cook.” Yes, that’s right, Cougars. Think Demi Moore and any woman of a certain age that would rather be with a man of a much younger age. Think May-December romance except the woman in the relationship is the December.  Soccer moms love David Cook, the latest American Idol winner.  42-year old Linda Sharp from Texas voted 473 times for Cook after his final performance. She said, “The biggest thing: He’s legal, and that goes a long way. He’s 25. That’s old enough that we can openly ogle him, and we can drool over him, and it doesn’t make us feel like we could be his mother.”

(UPI) 19 May 2008:

Men of most nationalities prefer pale skinned women, according to researchers in the University of Toronto.  Apparently they associate pale color with “innocence, purity, modesty, virginity, vulnerability, and goodness.”

Women prefer their men to be associated with “sex, mystery and danger.”  They go for darker skinned men, according to researcher Shyon Baumann.

This study was based on images in advertising.  It found that the images of darker skinned men were most likely to have women with less clothes in the advertising items, and paler skinned women would be more conservatively dressed.

Guess which women are more likely to be having fun?

(WXII12.COM) 16 May 2008:

A teenager who was abducted recently in North Carolina fought off her attacker by biting off a piece of his genitals as he tried to force her into a sex act. The attacker fled the area and hasn’t been seen since.  Now that’s what they call taking a bite out of crime.

(MSNBC.COM) 14 May 2008:

High fashion teen model Alexandra Michaels was too fat at 109 pounds and 5′ 9″. She started her career at 130 pounds and was told to lose weight. She did, managing to diet down to 102 pounds. She got lots of work on the runways. Unfortunately, she started experiencing signs of malnutrition, including her hair falling out in clumps and loss of menstruation.  She decided to put on 7 pounds, making her 109 pounds, which is still well below the average for her height. She was told she was fat and given work by one designer.

(SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE) 9 May 2008:

In the general population, men commit suicide about four times as often as women do.

However, among doctors the rates are about equal between men and women and much higher than they are for the general population. There has been some puzzlement about this: doctors are highly paid and well respected, not the sort of things that tend to drive people to taking their own lives.

The explanation now offered is that doctors actually know how to do it swiftly, cleanly, and painlessly. It’s thus not so much that more doctors attempt suicide, but that more succeed. In this scenario, the difference between male and female is thought to be a combination of women being less successful when they try and their not using the more effective but messier and violent methods that men do.

(THE MERCURY NEWS) 7 May 2008:

We’re all too aware of the way in which rich and famous men tend to marry women somewhat younger than themselves. We’re also aware that the apotheosis of feminine beauty is thought to arrive when the woman is in her twenties, while women are less worried about men’s looks and tend to go for successful men, rather than just good looking ones.

However, researchers have shown that this isn’t limited to rich and or successful men: it happens right across the income groups. The older a man is when he marries the larger the likely age gap between him and his wife. One possible explanation:

“The 12th Marquess of Huntly married a nurse 40 years his junior: “I still have my own teeth. Why should I marry some dried up old bag?”"

Maybe?

(AFP) 2 May 2008:

There are indeed areas where men and women are becoming more equal: for example, in the UK, the levels of female public drunkeness have risen by as much as 1,000 percent in some areas to the same as that of men.  Now it’s true that having a larger number of women so drunk that they pass out in the street is not normally thought of as an advance in the civilization, but there is another way of looking at it.  Among the younger groups men and women are indeed seen as socially equal now.  Well, it’s a straw to cling to, isn’t it?

(NEW YORK SUN) 2 May 2008:

Historically, advertising has been about either simply informing consumers of what is on offer or of trying to convince people that they have unmet needs: needs which can only be met by the new gew gaw.

However, around 2000 advertisers realised that women both have their own money to spend these days and also are the predominant influencers in household purchases. The upshot has been a change in the style of ads, as they are now aimed at those women’s wallets.

That means advertising by trying to seduce, at least that’s what the advertising companies themselves think they should be doing.

Sigh, roll on the 21 st century: doesn’t everyone realise by now that not all women want to be seduced all the time?

(INDUSTRY STANDARD) 1 May 2008:

No, sorry, not about the sexual possibilities of Facebook, rather, about how the genders seem to differ in their uses of the various social networking sites.  It seems that on average men have more “friends” on such sites than women do. This may be a surprise to those who normally think that womens’ social networks are wider than mens’.  However, when we look at the median numbers, rather than mean, then we see what we would expect: women do indeed have more social contacts. The mean is rather distorted by the fact that are a few men with very high numbers (over 10,000) friends on such networks: and as no one at all has that many friends, they’re using the sites for business, not simple social contact.