Why Pink?

October is breast cancer awarness month. Which means I'm being bombarded with pink. Why pink? People keep trying to sell me pink stuff for breast cancer research. Buy a pink ribbon, buy a pink balloon. Heck I was looking at laptops from Dell and if you buy the pink one, they will kick in ten bucks for the cause.

Don't get me wrong, I love breasts and hate to see anything bad happen to them. But I hate pink. Pink is for baby girls right when they come home and when they go through that phase with princesses and plastic ponies. Heck most adult women I know (don't give me that look, I know a few) wouldn't be caught dead in pink. Manly man that I am, I just can do pink. So why pink?

Is there a way to support breasts and the sisterhood without gettin drapped in pink?

I’m s Sexist Pig

I’ll change the name to keep this anonymous, but the rest is true.

So I’m writing this letter for work - all business and formal, to reply to a letter that was sent me. And the letter I’m replying to is signed “Joe Blow, Secretary” When I write my reply I address the letter to Ms. Blow. I catch the error when I go back and proofread. I’m a little shocked at myself. Why would I call a guy with the obvious male name of “Joe” a Ms? Oh crap, it was cause his title was “secretary” Somewhere deep in my brain a sexist is lurking. What do I do?

Girl Power

Feminism everywhere - A filly just won the Preakness.

This could really start to catch on. Next thing you know, lions will start to do their own hunting and give the lionesses a break for once.

Girl Fight

Last night CBS put MMA on primetime TV for the first time. The Kimbo Slice thing I leave to others, but the best fight of the night belonged to the women. Gina Carano is what's next. Are you ready? This is the natural evolution of a world of Buffy, Tomb Raider, Xena and the like. You tell girls they can kick ass, show them movies where they kick ass, pretty soon, somebody is going to come along and do it for real. So. is this progress? Is the highly skillful application of violence something women should aspire to?



Beautiful Disaster indeed.

Bitches Get Stuff Done

All hail Tina Fey.

How Quaint

Huckabee is the new news. Polls show him picking up support everywhere polls are being done. But with the points comes the attention and Huckabee has got some rather interesting positions. In 1998 he signed onto a statement that

A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.

Just to be clear, he did this in 1998 not 1898. Do Southern Baptist women really sign on to this crap? Or is it more like "Oh sure honey I "submit" to your sacred leadership. Now take out the trash." I can't imagine this going over for real in this day and age.

Pet Issues

Ah, here is a story in Slate that gets right at one of my pet issues: The ridiculous tendency to try and turn all pop-culture manliness into homoerotic.

But sophisticated critics routinely dismiss this sort of quasi-heroic cinematic friendship as "homoerotic," and they do so with such offhand certainty that it's easy to miss how doltishly unimaginative this interpretation is. Indeed, claiming a macho film friendship is not-so-secretly gay has become its own kind of silly convention, a fake-subversive cliché. It is better—sounder both aesthetically and sociologically—to view the masculine pathos in films like Point Break in light of the tradition of heroically minded philosophy that runs from Aristotle to Nietzsche.

I always have to be careful about this, least it be interpreted as homophobic, but this effort to turn all male friendships into hidden gay subtext really does put the squeeze on the space in which guys can relate to each other. If every form of male friendship is "gay" then all we are left with is Bachelor parties and Beer commercials and other over the top "I'm extra heterosexual" kind of activities.

Women in Body Bags

This post at Daily Kos shows lots of Pretty Dead Girls, US soldiers killed in Iraq, that aren't getting the attention that gets lavished on Jon-whats-her-name.

What struck me about this point is that the country isn't up in arms over female soldiers getting killed. Whenever the debate about women in combat gets on, someone brings up the point that the Ccuntry simply won't tolerate "women coming home in body bags"

Well, 59 women have died in Iraq and there is no outrage. Yes, the American people have turned against the war, but not because it's killing women soldiers. There is no call to pull just the women out of Iraq. We now want everyone to leave.

BOMB SHELL REVELATION: MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT!

Dear Heavens! I nearly swooned when I read this article. You mean it's true? Men and women's brains are different.....No....no...it can't be. I mean wait......so you're saying that its possible for men and women to think and act differently because of the physical structural differences of the brain itself? Hold on....I thought men and women were the exact same in every way. Dang! I need to stop reading books put out by UC Berkeley Publishing.

Does this mean Larry Summers can take back his apology and stop being such a spineless wuss?

Craig.....check out the very last excerpt below. It doesn't explain women, but it's a start.

"What is astonishing to me," Witelson said, "is that it is so obvious that there are sex differences in the brain and these are likely to be translated into some cognitive differences, because the brain helps us think and feel and move and act.

"Yet there is a large segment of the population that wants to pretend this is not true."
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"If you find that men and women have fundamentally different brain architectures while still accomplishing the same things," said neuroscientist Richard Haier, who conducted the study, "this challenges the assumption that all human brains are fundamentally the same.
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"We suggest that the differences we see are present at birth," Witelson said. "It is not a consequence of environmental differences."
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Witelson determined that brain volume decreased with age among men, but hardly at all among women. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is something going on in the male brain," she said, "that is not going on in the female brain."
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Women's brains, for instance, seem to be faster and more efficient than men's.
All in all, men appear to have more gray matter, made up of active neurons, and women more of the white matter responsible for communication between different areas of the brain.
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Overall, women's brains seem to be more complexly corrugated, suggesting that more complicated neural structures lie within.....