In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Gender

Cross-class marriage

The New York Times is doing an excellent series on class issues this month, and the feature today is about what happens when people marry across class lines. The whole article is interesting, but one part in particular stuck out:

Even as more people marry across racial and religious lines, often to partners who match them closely in other respects, fewer are choosing partners with a different level of education. While most of those marriages used to involve men marrying women with less education, studies have found, lately that pattern has flipped, so that by 2000, the majority involved women, like Ms. Woolner, marrying men with less schooling – the combination most likely to end in divorce.

Thoughts?

More on Orgasm Science

The NYTimes has a review of Lloyd’s book that I wrote about yesterday, including a quote that greater clarifies her position:

Western culture is suffused with images of women’s sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.

“Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function,” Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is “natural” to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

“Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women,” Dr. Lloyd said. “And indirectly for men, as well.”

Thoughts?

And perhaps I can give Jam a forum to write a review when he’s done with the book… yes? Yes?

Ooh, Ooh, Eee: Orgasm Science

An article by the Boston Globe covers the scientific recognition of and the evolutionary arguments surrounding the female orgasm. A new book by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, “summarizes dozens of evolutionary accounts of the female orgasm – and knocks them all down. Like [paleontologist Stephen Jay] Gould, she thinks the female orgasm is purposeless, which is not to say pleasureless. And she extends the charge of bias, charging that too many scientists take the male-centered view that the female orgasm is closely linked to heterosexual intercourse and reproduction.”

Read More…Read More…

Drankin’ n’ Fightin’

Put your beer down and step away from the lady at the bar. Drunk women are as likely to fight in pubs as men.

Binge drinking women are just as likely to be involved in fights in pubs as men, according to groundbreaking research into violence and alcohol.

Researchers involved in the study, the first of its kind in the UK, found that “relatively large” numbers of women of all ages were getting involved in scuffles in licensed premises. Two cases even involved drunken pregnant women at the centre of the aggression.

…Dr Alasdair Forsyth, of Glasgow Caledonian University, who led the study, said the research showed that any assumption that violence was restricted to drunk men was wrong. He said: “Women were as involved in as much trouble as men and seemed to be getting as drunk as men.”

I don’t know whether this is amusing or troublesome. This morning, I’m leaning toward amusing.