This rings true: about the difficulties that male politicians have in dealing with Sarah Palin. That combination of being female (as Sarah Palin most certainly is) and a willingness to throw hard and wild rhetorical punches (as Sarah Palin arguably is) makes up something that it’s very difficult for a male politician to try and deal with.

From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin stepped onto the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee, she has been rhetorically body-slamming her Democratic opponents.

She has punched and jabbed and engaged in sarcastic — and sometimes vicious — trash talk. Whether one believes that her behavior is merely par for the course as a campaign comes down to the wire or that her opponents deserve the verbal pummeling or that she has demonstratively gone off the deep end, one thing is clear. Most observers seem to agree that the two men in the line of her fire — Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden — are not allowed to hit her back. Even in today’s post-Hillary Clinton world of presidential politics, boys still aren’t supposed to hit girls. Even if it’s the girl who starts the fight.

It’s as if in politics only half of the changes which have taken place in the rest of society have happened so far. Out in the real world if a woman starts swearing (not that Sarah Palin does that, this is an analogy only) then no man worries too much about swearing back. Similarly, the days of a man never hitting a woman have rather gone: they started to go when women lost their compunction about using violence themselves.

The real test of equality isn’t in the ability of men and women to tell each other how great they are, but in the freedom to express anger, dismay and even disgust — and to do so without fear of repercussions.

That’s still not true in politics, where women still need to be treated as ladies: however unladylike their own behaviour. Maybe the next election, or the one after it, eh?

In fact, I think that might be part of it. That the American electoral cycle only really roars into life once every four years and so the changes in it will always be rather slower than those in the wider society. Simply because it’s only really alive for 6 months out of every 48.

This is a fascinating little study looking at the interaction between AIDS, circumcision and gay men.

We’ve known for some time that for men circumcision can act as a prophylactic against getting HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. One part of the foreskin that is removed contains the islets of Langerhans and we know that this area, being very sensitive, leads to a higher chance of infection if one is having sex with an infected partner.

We also know that such circumcision doesn’t protect the female side of the interaction…well, no more than a lower chance of sleeping with an uninfected male brings, at least.

However, when researchers went and looked at gay men they found something they thought odd. Circumcision seems not to act as a prophylactic for such men at all. Really rather odd and calls into question the Langerhans explanation above. Until, aha:

He suggests that the procedure may be less effective in gays because unlike heterosexual men, they engage in receptive as well as insertive sex.

That’s not really quite true. Some men do indeed only have insertive sex, some only receptive and a third group both. When they looked at the figures again and took account of these distinctions they saw that the insertive only men were indeed protected by circumcision.

So our original theory as to why can still stand.

No, really, it is an important question to ask, just why do women fake orgasms?

Well, in the piece linked there we get told a great deal about what men should do to make sure that women don’t need to fake orgasms (a more robust and thoroughly misogynistic answer might be “who cares?” but we’ll not descend to those depths) the real point about the faking is men.

We’re such sensitive souls, with such fragile egos, that to be told we’re not actually very good at sex would be to break us completely.

Well, possibly, although as an unregenerate male myself I’d point out that everyone of us has at some time been told we’re not all that good at it and further, that being told that does rather buck up the appliction of technique at the next attempt.

Or at least it does for men….maybe boys are a different matter.

It appears that women’s voices rise in pitch around the time of their highest fertility.

Women speak in a higher tone of voice when at their most fertile, making them more attractive to the opposite sex, scientists have found.

Recordings made when fertility was low and again nearer ovulation showed that women’s voices took on more feminine qualities as they neared their optimum time for conceiving.

Researchers made voice recordings of 69 female undergraduates and found that they spoke in a higher pitch when nearer to the time when an egg is released.

Now this ties in with the thought that in general, womens’ voices are higher than those of men. We can thus put high voice as being one of those feminine things and presumably also attractive to men.

But the much more interesting part to it to me is that it shows again that there’s something of a game (as in game theory sort of game) going on between men and women. Humans are just about the only mammal which don’t reveal when they are fertile.  As we’ve discussed before there are advantages to women in keeping the men gusessing about it.

However, we are finding that this hiding of peak fertility isn’t in fact perfect. We saw that research which showed that strippers earn more money when they are ovulating, so men can indeed, even if only subconsciouly, tell. And if voices also change in pitch then that’s another signal that could be latched onto.

These signs are of course a great deal more subtle than a baboon’s red bottom but they’re there all the same and are being picked up on.

Title IX is the system by which sportsmoney at colleges across the country has to be allocated equally between the genders. Fair enough you might say, although it does indeed lead to problems. For example, you might not be all that surprised to find that it is usual for there to be more men interested in playing sports than there are women. But if the money has to be equally allocated then either there will be less per man playing, or the number of men must be artificially restricted.

That latter is what usually happens.

However, that’s not really a vitally important thing, the funding of college sport. However, the funding of sciences at colleges is of vital importance. And there are those who would extend Title IX to that arena: the funding of male and female students in the hard sciences should be equal.

Christina Hoff Summers has an excellent article here on what such and extension of Title IX is really all about and the possible effects.

I’ll not repeat her whole complex argument, just extract one part of it. The original claim is that the low number of women in the hard sciences, compared to men, is a result of bias, almost of oppression, of women. That claim rather failes for this very simple reason:

So, why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty attitudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female professors in math, science, and engineering. Just one percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24% to sexist discrimination, and 74% to differences in what characteristically interests men and women. Many experts who study male-female differences provide strong support for that 74% majority. Readers can go to books like David Geary’s Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (1998); Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature (2002), and Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (2003) for arguments suggesting that biology plays a distinctive- but not exclusive-role in career choices.

Baron-Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on autism, a disorder that affects far more males than females. Autistic persons tend to be socially disconnected and unaware of the emotional states of others, but they often exhibit obsessive fixation on objects and machines. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm-the “extreme male brain,” all systematizing and no empathizing. He believes that men are, “on average,” wired to be better systematizers and women to be better empathizers. It is a daring claim-but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in girls and boys from infancy into grade school. Despite two major waves of feminism, women still predominate-sometimes overwhelmingly-in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education, social work, veterinary medicine, and psychology, while men are overrepresented in the “systematizing” vocations such as car repair, oil drilling, and electrical engineering.

The research emphasizing the importance of biological differences in determining women’s and men’s career choices is not decisive, but it is serious and credible.

We around here are pretty much sold on Baron Cohen’s ideas, given that he wrote the basis of our EQSQ personality tests. But it isn’t just that of course. The idea that men and women are equally interested in hte same things simply cannot hold water for anyone who has actually bothered to go and talk to a few representative examples of their species. How ivory tower, how far out of touch with human society, do you actually have to be to think that everyone’s the same?

Not all that important, just though it was a nice phrase. The groups of the elderly, out for their evening stroll (passagiata) are known in Italy as the “cane brigades“.

The whole article is talking about the very low birthrates in parts of Europe. That part is true, unfortunately they get the cause very wrong.

The causes behind declining fertility rates are manifold, but the most obvious cause was the introduction of mass contraception in the mid-20th century.

It might be an obvious cause but it’s not actually an important one. Most academic studies say that the availability of contraception has, at most, a 10% share in the changes in fertility. Something which should be obvious with the use of a little bit of logic. For there are plenty of non-mechanical ways (perhaps not 100% effective but still pretty good) of preventing conception for a start. But more than that, before people use contraception there has to be the desire to use it.

That is, desired fertility (which those academic studies say is responsible for 90% of the changes in actual fertility) must change before contraception can have an effect. Now there are indeed arguments about what changes desired fertility but from my economist type viewpoint it is wealth. Wealth as properly measured, not simply cash in ones hand of course. Longer lifespans, more education, lower rates of child mortality, urbanisation, they all have an effect.

But it’s still very much true that the availability or not of contraception is very much a bit player in this. It the change in the desired number of children which makes the difference.

This might not be the most astonising research finding ever, you know?

Binge drinking (5+ alcoholic beverages at one time) is associated with risky sexual behaviors.

Really? Someone had to do a study to work this out?

Isn’t that why they invented happy hour?

“The link between binge drinking and risky sexual behavior is complex,” said Heidi E. Hutton, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as corresponding author for the study. “We wanted to examine one component of that relationship, whether binge drinking increased the risk of engaging in sexual behaviors and having STDs. We found gender differences in binge drinking among patients at an STD clinic, and also that binge drinking increased STD risk for women.”

Well, peoplewith a PhD are supposed to be clever but are we seriously suggesting that this result is “complex”?

People who drink too much have more sex with people they don’tknow, taking less care over contraception and the specific sexual activities than people who don’t drink too much?

This is “complex”?

“Binge drinking results in a decreased ability to make clear decisions,” noted Geetanjali Chander, assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “and can enable individuals to engage in behaviors that they would not if sober.”

I’m beginning to think that this paper might be a spoof actually. Drunk people do things that sober ones would not?

But apparently not. Our tax dollars were spent to bring us this entirely unsurprising news.

It’s not exactly a world changing observation, to be sure, but it is an interesting one.

50 years ago, very few men could type. Almost all typing was done by women.

Now just about everybody types.

Inch by inch, we move toward gender equality in a host of ways. When we compare today’s workplace, for example, with the one portrayed on the TV drama “Mad Men,” depicting a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s, the contrast is striking. Men dominate the agency. They are the decision-makers and the bright creative types (only one woman has broken in so far). All of the other women at the agency (called “girls,” regardless of their age)? They type.

….

Today, boys all learn to type at an early age. In the era of computer technology, it’s unthinkable for them to dictate their words, or write them out in longhand, and expect an underling to input them into the computer. Men in every profession now want and need to use the technology that’s still mainly accessible through typing, and they spend hours sitting in front of keyboards in the workplace and in their homes. Everywhere there’s a computer hookup, there are men busily typing away.

Of course it’s a banality to point out that technology does indeed change the gender balance. When washing was still done with a mangle, when food preparation took hours each day then someone or other was going to be needed to run the house full time. Further, when most paid work required gross physical labour, it was going to be the man who went out and did that and the woman who worked the house.

We can look back on the past century or so and see that as that farm and blue collar labor became less and less important in the economy, as the household technologiesadvanced, this is what freed up the world of paid work for women.

Perhaps less of a banality is to wonder how much of the sea change in working and domestic life has in fact been caused by changes in attitudes and how much was always there, but is only now being enabled by technology. Maybe we always wanted to be (roughly) equal as we are, but just couldn’t be as we hadn’t invented the things that would enable us to be so?

Well, no, not quite, people don’t actually marry their parents. Rather, women marry people who look like their fathers while men marry people that look like their mother.

That’s the way the story is reported at least.

The report concludes that heterosexual men and women are more likely to select a mate whose faces are similar to their “opposite-sex” parent. The researchers state that this mate-selecting process is deeply entrenched in biological processes that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

OK, I can understand the thinking there. After all, if you’ve reached fertile age then we’ve got reasonably good evidence that people who look like your parents are going to be able to raise people to fertile age. However, however, I’m not really entirely sure here.

That state in the abstract to their paper, “Our results support the sexual imprinting hypothesis which states that children shape a mental template of their opposite-sex parents and search for a partner who resembles that perceptual schema. The fact that only the facial metrics of opposite-sex parents showed resemblance to the partner’s face tends to rule out the role of familiarity in shaping mating preferences.”

They conclude, “Human couples who are similar in physical and psychological characteristics are more likely to remain together than dissimilar partners, possibly leading to an increase in fertility.

As I say, not entirely convinced. If this really were true then we’d never have across races (OK, not that there are such things as “races”, but human genetic groups) marriage and of course the thing that we do note in human societies is that when there is a mix of such groups then a great deal of inter-group marriage does take place.

So we’ve got two things. This paper, which says that people preferentially marry what is familiar (in both senses of the word) and our experience of the wider world which is that people often pursue the exotic.

It could just be that the place where the study was carried out (Hungary) just isn’t very racially diverse (as it isn’t) and that thus people are marrying people who look like their mother/father simply because most people around there do so look.

Marriage and infidelity go together like glove and hand so they say. For without the marriage (or at least the committment to a relationship) one cannot in fact breach the fidelity. The numbers might surprise though:

Recent studies reveal that 45-55% of married women and 50-60% of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time or another during their relationship. Do these infidelity statistics seem a bit startling? What these findings suggest is that approximately one half of all married men and women do seek intimacy outside of their committed relationships. But what does this really mean and why are the number of men and women having extramarital affairs so high?

This may come as a complete surprise, but most extramarital affairs are not about sex. What then,is the main factor that causes infidelity? One should pay attention to the reason most people find intimacy with someone outside of their marriage is because of their emotional needs are not being met. Yes, it is true in most cases of infidelity and about wanting to feel emotionally connected to someone.

Well, OK, I’m not sure I believe that in fact. Neither the numbers nor the reason. The only reason I linked to it was that I spotted this, the name of the press agency.

Prudent Press Agency

There’s still that teenage boy in me that sniggers about someone calling themselves “prudent” and then talking about people screwing around.

How nice to know that I’m still fully in touch with my inner child, eh?