"Over the past few decades, 160 million women have vanished from East and South Asia — or, to be more accurate, they were never born at all. Throughout the region, the practice of sex selection — prenatal sex screening followed by selective termination of pregnancies — has yielded a generation packed with boys. From a normal level of 105 boys to 100 girls, the ratio has shifted to 120, 150, and, in some cases, nearly 200 boys born for every 100 girls. In some countries, like South Korea, ratios spiked and are now returning to normal. But sex selection is on the rise in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East." American journalist Mara Hvistendahl's new book: "
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," examines and tries to predict the actual and potential effects of unequal sex ratios on men, women and the social economies of the affected regions, including the recent spike in sex trafficking and bride-buying across Asia.
More.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 10, 2011 -
65 comments
When a person graduates high school as one of the top students, all sorts of grand predictions are made for the person's future. But how many of them end up doing the things predicted of them?
The Buffalo News
did a feature in 2007 on what the top students in the Buffalo area from 1987 ended up doing after high school. Some of them have done remarkable things, while others have made their mark in smaller ways, all are interesting in their own way.
posted by reenum
on Jul 4, 2010 -
57 comments
The End of Men , in The Atlantic. An article about the rise of women (now over 50% of the U.S. workforce), and implications of the attendant changes for both women and men.
[more inside]
posted by marble
on Jun 10, 2010 -
161 comments
Is a Woman's MBA Worth Less? $4,600.
That's how much less women made than men in their first post-MBA jobs, according to research by Nancy Carter and Christine Silva of Catalyst. And it's not because women tend to start at lower positions than men — though they do start at lower positions than men, on average, that's a separate problem. The research controls for job level and industry. What's more, the salary lines aren't parallel; men's salaries start higher, then rise faster. The gap widens over time, even after controlling for factors like having children or differing aspiration levels.
The pay just isn't equal.
posted by infini
on May 8, 2010 -
96 comments
Lille Mand - Eight year old Mathis writes an essay for school entitled, "How to Understand Women." (via
Neatorama) (It will be slow to load. Also, there is brief shower nudity so NSFW)
posted by caddis
on Feb 13, 2009 -
14 comments
Most wives are
Mad at
Dad. "We're mad that having children has turned our lives upside down much more than theirs. We're mad that these guys, who can manage businesses or keep track of thousands of pieces of sports trivia, can be clueless when it comes to what our kids are eating and what supplies they need for school. And more than anything else, we're mad that they get more time to themselves than we do."
posted by Xurando
on Jan 29, 2009 -
199 comments
Billionaires have more grandchildren through their sons than through their daughters, because the status advantage is more reproductively valuable to the sons. Therefore, it would be adaptive for the mothers of their children to bear more sons than daughters. But surely that can't be; mothers can't control the sex of their children.
Oh but so it is: billionaires have 60% male children.
[more inside]
posted by grobstein
on Jan 17, 2009 -
69 comments
Kay S. Hymowitz strikes again.
Previously, she wrote an
article positing that "that too many single young males (SYMs) were lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes."
Now she has a new thesis: That angry, disenfranchised single young men use "Darwinist" philosophy to justify "resistance to settling down" and "unsentimental promiscuity".
[via]
posted by shotgunbooty
on Nov 17, 2008 -
164 comments
"
Women and children, first," is a familiar cultural refrain, with its popular roots in the gallant sacrifice made by the male contingent aboard the doomed
Titanic. Their sacrifice has inspired
poetry,
sculpture,
male social clubs, and, of course,
cinema. Yet, this sacrifice of near-mythic scale
was in some respects a myth, with
survival statistics skewing well in favor of men of higher social and economic class than children (and, to a lesser extent, women) of lower status.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 25, 2008 -
70 comments
Men in Women-in-Prison [Films]
"This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream. How this unlikely cathexis occurred, and how it functioned, is the subject of this essay."
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Aug 7, 2008 -
23 comments
“With the number of human beings having increased more than six-fold in the past 200 years, the modern mind simply assumes that men and women . . . will always breed enough children to grow the population . . . Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population decline. . . .
Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.”
posted by jason's_planet
on Apr 26, 2007 -
79 comments
Ask A Man? "You have come to the right place for love, relationship and dating advice. Ask a man will provide you with the love, relationship and dating answers you seek. Our staff of amazing men have agreed to break the "man code" and tell you the absolute truth about what your man is really saying to you." For example: "Men want respect. In a man's world, men are nothing without respect. In a relationship, a man needs to know his woman respects him. "
posted by feelinglistless
on Oct 20, 2006 -
43 comments
Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex with You. That quack Dr. Phil says that while sex is only 10% of a marriage, it's 90% when you're not getting it. Or words to that effect. There's some truth to that.
This site discusses, from woman's point of view, why a wife might not feel like sex--often for years at a time. She also goes into greater detail (with insights taken from her own life and experience) such issues as
some causes and what a
man can do.
posted by John of Michigan
on Oct 23, 2005 -
55 comments
(all links safe for work)
Some once hypothesized that as pornography became more accessible and more mainstream, men in turn would become uncontrollable, ravenous sexual beasts. I always thought this myself: a man will see something in porn that a real woman won't give him—Internet porn now caters in a click to
every fetish you can imagine—and he will find a way to get it.
My ex-girlfriend, observant and intelligent beyond her years, always used to tell me the opposite: it wouldn't turn men into beasts, having their way with every woman they saw. No, it would turn them away from women completely, libidos and their ability to connect with
real females weakened by the hardcore acts and impossible bodies that only porn stars could give them. The porn would crave some intrinsic desire, but leave both people in the couple lonelier and less fulfulled.
Now I think
she was absolutely right.
posted by symphonik
on Apr 17, 2005 -
209 comments
Single-Sex Education When WNYC's
Leonard Lopate Show decided to
discuss (audio) the Summer's gender brouhaha, an interesting thing happened. The guest expected to support gender difference interpretations, Dr. Sax, and the guest expected to discuss structural challenges to women in the sciences, Dr. Bell, agreed on one solution: single-sex education. As the AP noted last summer,
single-sex public education is up. Though some
object on the basis that
separate is never equal, Dr. Sax's organization claims both
boys and
girls see definite results. And even if you don't agree with Dr. Sax's reasoning, he says
the studies are on his side. After all, girls schools have given us awesome ladies like Rosa Parks, Sally Ride, and me.
posted by dame
on Feb 9, 2005 -
115 comments
She may not have the grey matter, but what's that matter anymore, anyway?
A recent study shows that men have more
gray matter, women have more
white matter and in the end these differences seem to be no matter. Apparently men have more raw computing power, while women have a more efficient infrastructure -- resulting in similar general intelligence.
posted by ThePrawn
on Jan 21, 2005 -
27 comments
Personal ads in the Arab world "Resident of the UAE, 28 years old, high-school diploma, looking for a veiled wife, a citizen of UAE or any other Gulf county. Will be allowed to continue working after marriage."
~ "Syrian, 36 years old, holds a government position, is interested to meet a tall, fair-skinned and green-eyed virgin, Lebanese or Moroccan."
posted by onlyconnect
on Aug 29, 2004 -
21 comments
The story of Ohh! For men it is quick, easy and essential for reproduction. For women, it is slow, difficult and purely for pleasure. Yet despite such differences, it brings the sexes together and is the basis of the monogamy that distinguishes us from other animals. In his new book, Jonathan Margolis examines the phenomenon of the orgasm
posted by Postroad
on May 2, 2004 -
74 comments
TheSafetyNet.Org • A collective of men who are working to stop date-rape and sexual abuse. "When a person is raped, it’s trust that’s used as the weapon...We’ve decided that it’s time to reclaim that trust, reclaim that responsibility. Men Rape. Men abuse. And men can stop it."
posted by dhoyt
on Jan 10, 2004 -
2 comments
Fake lie-detector reveals women's sex lies - "Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives, reveals a new study ... Women who thought their responses might be read said they had had an average of 2.6 sexual partners, compared with 3.4 partners for those who thought their answers were anonymous. But those who thought they would be caught out by the polygraph reported an average of 4.4 partners." I'm guessing a similar study done on men would reveal that as the likelihood of getting caught in a lie increases, the number of partners claimed would
decrease...
posted by RylandDotNet
on Jul 14, 2003 -
25 comments
She works, he doesn't Last week's Newsweek had a story about women who work and their husbands don't-either laid off or for other reasons.
Personally, I know of at least 10 couples where the woman has been the "alpha earner" as well as where the men have been out of work for long periods of time. They may not go out and golf the whole time and they surf the internet "looking for jobs", but the bottom line is they don't go out and get a job, any job, to pay the bills, and appear to be okay letting their wives (who aren't happy about it) earn the money.
Why is this happening? It wasn't "ok" just a few years ago. Is it a
passive-aggressive thing? A reaction to years of expecting to be the
sole bread winner? Why do all my women friends in this situation agree that if they were laid off, they would get ANY job immediately, but their men seem to think it's okay to coast for months to years. And why the
double standards? Why does being the sole earner make women angry and resentful, even though they may embrace the feminist agenda wholeheartedly?
posted by aacheson
on May 15, 2003 -
91 comments
