Date squares

Via Buzzfeed, ''13 Tips for Single Dames.'' Classic and timeless.

Here's a couple of them.

From the February 1938 issue of Click Photo-Parade magazine.

Someday my prince will come 2.0

Further to this, this:

Funny that none of them have names, not unlike Sex and the City's Mr. Big.

Ah yes. The perfect guy. Rich, famous, good-looking.

Strictly in fairy tales, of course.

Via reddit.

The Way It Was

Can't you just imagine the Draper household --  on one of those rare nights Don stays in with the family?

While Don plays Battleship with Bobby, there happily doing the dishes in the background are Betty and Sally.

 

Life was so much simpler then, wasn't it?

School Daze

 
Such a whoop-de-doo over Toronto District School Board director Chris Spence's vision statement which was released this week. You'd think it was the second coming the way the media fell all over his proposal for an all-boys school.

Now I can't pretend to be an education specialist, although I did take a few courses in university and was a supply high school teacher for a while. Still something about all of this has struck a nerve -- not only with me but for many others, at least judging by the email from teachers.

But, before I get to that, here's today's treeware column on the subject, with some links and notes.

Let's leave aside the fact that newly appointed Toronto District School Board director Chris Spence's "A Vision of Hope!" focuses on the struggles of just one sex.

And let's also not get too worked up about his proposed name for his new boys-only "Male Leadership Academy'' – as if men don't already run most governments, religions, corporations, universities, media and more.

Let us, instead, consider the idea of segregating boys at risk in order to give them the grounding they need to progress to graduation and productive lives.

In some ways, I am all for it.

That's because I lived it, at least in part, in Grades 1 through 7 back in the olden, still sexist '60s.

Schoolyards and entrances separated boys and girls, before class, during recess and lunch.

On our side, skipping and clapping games, hopscotch, Red Rover and Christmas sticker trading (even though I attended predominately Jewish schools).

Over in the wild frontier – which, by the way, was much bigger than our pen and included a football field – boys flipped hockey cards, played touch football and the profoundly physical British Bulldog. As for the geeks, they would show off their latest model or Meccano construction.

Inside, we were thrown together, except for gym and the hateful Home Ec and the infinitely more interesting Industrial Arts.

  Now understand that I am not for streaming girls into Home Ec and boys into IA. In fact, today I heard from quite a few men who tell me that they have no use for the skills they learned in shop and would have been much better off had they known how to boil an egg. Believe me, I get that. I could cook rings around any Home Ec teacher, sew, knit, crochet and clean with the best of them, all of which I learned at home. But today I still am constantly on the hunt for handymen (or women) who expect $35 an hour or more to install a light fixture or repair a leaking tap. That said, there should be classes available for those student -- probably mostly boys -- with mechanical aptitude and interest.

It worked out pretty well, at least for the boys. By the time they had to sit up with their hands folded, most had expended the energy that would have, instead, caused them restlessness and inattention.

There is no question that, in the earlier years, all other factors being equal, girls listen and read better than boys. Later, it evens out, with boys excelling at math – although I am not convinced that that's not cultural.

Now take me for instance. A high school flunkie after  failing both algebra and math. I was far more pre-occupied with getting the kink out of my hair to achieve the then-popular London Look than with doing equations or bisecting triangles. However, later in life, I scored straight As in all the math-based courses while going for my MBA.

Still, the sad fact is, according to StatsCan numbers for 2006/7, one out of three boys doesn't graduate from high school while one out of four girls doesn't make it (with many female dropouts attributed to pregnancy, by the way).

But really, is the education system at fault – or is it a society that rewards macho-macho men, extreme athletes and action, and a blow-them-up culture of violence? And what about a system that makes it unattractive for men to take up teaching?

Not that I believe a male teacher is necessarily better for a boy than a female teacher although, admittedly, in some instances, it might help. Trouble is, teaching, especially at the elementary level is considered women's work, pays women's wages and, for men, is fraught with the risk of being accused of liking kids a little too much, if you get my drift.

Fact is, if you pay attention to the cruel stories out of British upper- crust schools, it seems that girls' presence has a mitigating effect on that Lord of the Flies brutality – although females do better academically in the absence of boys.

That's true. Girls do not want to appear to be smarter than boys, for one thing. And, when boys are around, they are more concerned with attracting them, whether actively though flirtation or, in some cases, passively, by rolling up one's hair with a jar of Dippity-Do and sitting under a dryer, wasting hours that would be better devoted to study

Currently, there's conservative literature, including Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys and Kathleen Parker's Save the Males, which lays the blame for boys' failures on feminism.

Oh don't get me started on those two. I interviewed Parker when her book came out, a book I ripped to shreds for its bogus claims and fallacious conclusions. Like I said in another post, for people like this, it's a zero sum game. They say that, when women gain, men lose. I say bullsh*t.

As if high-school dropouts did not exist in the stay-at-home-mom 1950s.

But look at some of these dropouts. Albert Einstein. Self-made billionaire Richard (Virgin Airways) Branson. Director Quentin Tarentino. Inventor Thomas Edison.

You can count U.S. presidents, Nobel Prize winners, artists, bestselling authors and businessmen among them.

Indeed, in the Sexual Paradox, developmental psychologist Susan Pinker discusses this phenomenon, how so many boys who lag behind grow up to be men who shoot ahead.

"Statistical differences do exist between men and women," she writes.

"But statistics should never speak for individuals, restrict their choices, or justify unfair practices."

Which is what a vision statement that all but excludes girls will do.

That's why it gets an F from me.

Actually, that just one of the reasons.

The presumption being made, both by Spence and the media, is that girls have arrived. That they no longer have learning issues.

Which is bogus. As one high school teacher wrote to me:

It's not so much that boys don't have problems that are specific to their gender, it is that as Director, he is responsible not just to his "pet project" of helping boys succeed. 

He is responsible for all at risk students and yet, there is no mention of any other at risk group in his Vision of Hope. This leaves me feeling somewhat hope-less. 

What about the increased level of violent incidents perpetrated by girls? 

Or the fact that Julian Falconer highlighted that girls are commonly victims of sexual harassment and assault in our schools?  Where is the plan to address those issues?  Where  is the plan to help girls - notorious underachievers in maths and science (unless placed in gender-specific classes interestingly enough), for example - to do better in those courses? 

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with helping boys succeed.  I just have a problem when it is the only focus in the vision of the director of the fifth largest board in North America. 

Then, when I read the editorials in the Star and Globe, both tepidly accept at face value the notion that focusing exclusively on boys is okay.  Actually the Globe disgustingly suggests that for the past two decades its been all about empowering girls, and now it's the boys' turn!  How can that even be conceived of as accurate when girls are still the daily victims of sexual assault and harassment in our schools.

Great points. Incredible how the media seem to have such a short attention span, given everything that was said in last year's Falconer report on school violence.

But there's more to it than that.

I live near a middle school. Today I was walking my dog at lunch and passed a bunch of kids (sexually mature girls towering over still little boys) eating the usual corner store crap. I crossed the street at the crosswalk where a Porsche stopped to let me through. You would have thought, from the boys' reaction, that a UFO just landed. All goggle-eyed. The girls, of course, were oblivious.

Hey, we are different. Very different. I don't deny that for a second.

But maybe there are other solutions instead of segregating boys, which won't help them much in the real world.

For one thing, not all boys are at risk. Nor are the risks the same. Socioeconomic factors are at play here, for example. So are sexuality and ethnicity.

Maybe what we need are some more technical streams. If boys are more interested in how things work, then maybe we need schools and classes more focussed on such courses. 

Maybe smaller teacher-to-student ratios would allow those children who have special needs to get the attention they deserve -- and that includes the smart, studious kids.

Maybe we ought to look at starting boys a year later in Grade 1?

What we should not be considering is the attitude put out there by Spence in a story today.

Wayne Martino, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of the recently released book Boys and Schooling: Beyond Structural Reform, said "working-class boys do less well than working-class girls – but middle-class boys do better than working-class girls," so programs targeting boys overlook other needy groups. "We also have evidence in Toronto that the race gap is much larger than any gender gap," he added.

He said segregating boys can actually reinforce stereotypes that they are expected to think and act one way, and that so-called "boy-friendly" learning doesn't necessarily prepare them for the real world.

Spence acknowledged the mixed research, but said much of it has focused on older boys; he proposes a school starting at kindergarten.

"I think what we are trying to do is truly groundbreaking in terms of starting with a kindergarten to Grade 3 model and building as we grow," said Spence, who has authored two books on boys and learning.

Many classrooms are based on co-operation, "but boys thrive on competition," Spence said. "... When you've got a majority of teachers who are female, that might not be the natural inclination for them to bring competition into the classroom in a balanced kind of way."

Competition? Isn't trying to get decent grades a good enough goal?

Wrote another teacher:

Personally, I think that a proposed all-boys school has very little to do with boys learning and more to do with keeping enrollment up in TDSB.  I also think that the real target will not be boys from fatherless families, but those families from cultures who value the separation of boys and girls.  If we have schools for boys, we will need schools for girls.  What will be the hidden curriculum for girls?  To be leaders or servants?

Excellent questions.

One of the first things Hamas did when it became the ruling government of Gaza was separate the girls from the boys.

The Insanctity of Marriage

Via Canadian Cynic:

What this is about is, all that hate directed at those who want same sex marriage rights in California. If the ''sanctity of marriage'' crowd really is concerned about ''the sanctity of marriage,'' they'd outlaw divorce, right?

But the truth is, they're just homophobic.

So anyway, this video:

Heh.

Schrödinger’s rapist

A Facebook friend passed on this link to me. It's probably the best piece I've ever read on how men should approach women who, more often than not, are suspicious and even fearful of strange (in all senses of the word) men who make advances on them. If you Google the title of the post, you'll find that I am not the only blogger who liked it.

Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.

Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look further afield to encounter her.

So far, so good. Miss LonelyHearts, your humble instructor, approves. Human connection, love, romance: there is nothing wrong with these yearnings.

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.

“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is. When I go on a date, I always leave the man’s full name and contact information written next to my computer monitor. This is so the cops can find my body if I go missing. My best friend will call or e-mail me the next morning, and I must answer that call or e-mail before noon-ish, or she begins to worry. If she doesn’t hear from me by three or so, she’ll call the police. My activities after dark are curtailed. Unless I am in a densely-occupied, well-lit space, I won’t go out alone. Even then, I prefer to have a friend or two, or my dogs, with me. Do you follow rules like these?

So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?

Now go read the rest.

I don't think most men know what it is to be followed by creepy guys through malls or department stores. I don't they know what it is to feel some guy's thigh up just a little too close on a crowded streetcar. I don't think they know what it's like to be worried about walking your dog -- even a great big super vicious one like mine -- after a party. I don't think they know what it is to have to spring for a cab instead of hopping on the subway because you're coming homing from the 9 p.m. showing of a movie.

But this is reality for most women, who curtail their movements at certain hours or in certain areas, for fear of being attacked.

Which is why I like my friend Sooey's comment a few posts ago.

At the very least, women should pay 50% less tax than men do because of all the extra precautions we are forced to take to be safe from men. Also, we are allowed nowhere near the enjoyment of public space that men have. We should be compensated accordingly.

But enough about us.

Men, this post's for you.

Who wants to play with who wants to be a millionaire?

Via BuzzFeed, this three-month old video which is suddenly climbing the charts.

All I can say is, ewwww.

Imagine if were Regis with a gorgeous woman contestant.

Ewwww.

Yes Dear, tonight. I have a headache

Here's some bedtime reading for you: Why Women Have Sex -- Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (And Everything in Between).

Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When University of Texas at Austin clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them.

Through the voices of real women, Meston and Buss reveal the motivations that guide

women’s sexual decisions and explain the deep-seated psychology and biology that often unwittingly drive women’s desires—sometimes in pursuit of health or pleasure, or sometimes for darker, disturbing reasons that a woman may not fully recognize. Drawing on more than a thousand intensive interviews conducted solely for the book, as well as their pioneering research on physiological response and evolutionary emotions, Why Women Have Sex uncovers an amazingly complex and nuanced portrait of female sexuality.

Seems that the co-authors uncovered 237 reasons for women wanting to get under the covers.

237!

And they involve a lot more than the usual, typical, cliches. A lot lot more.

I don't have  my hands on the book ... yet ... but I did read this fun piece by Tanya Gold for The Guardian. It's long, but totally worth your time. Here's an excerpt:

Ever had sex out of pity and wondered why? "Women," say Meston and Buss, "for the most part, are the ones who give soup to the sick, cookies to the elderly and . . . sex to the forlorn." "Tired, but he wanted it," says one female. Pause for more amazing detail: fat people are more likely to stay in a relationship because no one else wants them.

Women also mate to get the things they think they want – drugs, handbags, jobs, drugs. "The degree to which economics plays out in sexual motivations," Buss says, "surprised me. Not just prostitution. Sex economics plays out even in regular relationships. Women have sex so that the guy would mow the lawn or take out the garbage. You exchange sex for dinner." He quotes some students from the University of Michigan. It is an affluent university, but 9% of students said they had "initiated an attempt to trade sex for some tangible benefit".

Medicinal sex

Then there is sex to feel better. Women use sex to cure their migraines. This is explained by the release of endormorphins during sex – they are a pain reliever. Sex can even help relieve period pains. (Why are periods called periods? Please, someone tell me. Write in.)

The only place -- based on Gold's review, anyway -- where I take exception to the book is where the co-authors discuss assault.

Women also have sex because they are raped, coerced ...

That's not sex. That's violence. That's attacking. That's a power grab.

Literally.

Still, from what I can tell, this book looks like must-reading ... for men.

Now, how many reasons do you suppose these researchers would find if she surveyed men on why they had sex?

You know I had to ask.

P.S. The comments on the Guardian piece are hysterical.

Promosexuality

My friend Mattt with three Ts sent me a link to this sickening story. It speaks for itself:

The Associated Press is reporting that 18-year-old South African runner, Caster Semenya is on suicide watch after recent tests revealed (in front of the entire world no less) that she is intersex.

(Update: It is not actually AP reporting this but ANI, Asian News International.)

<SNIP>

According to the AP report "officials as saying that psychologists are caring [for] the 18-year-old round-the-clock after it was claimed tests had proved she was a hermaphrodite."

South African lawmaker Butana Komphela, said: "[Semenya] is like a raped person. She is afraid of herself and does not want anyone near her. If she commits suicide, it will be on all our heads. The best we can do is protect her and look out for her during this trying time."

The mere fact that it's gotten to the point that Semenya is reportedly on suicide watch indicates that we've all failed; sports officials, consumers, and media.  We've done what we always do; react like vultures when consuming someone else's personal story and personal tragedy. Probing so deeply into this woman's life while taking away her voice in the process illustrates our failure as a global society to care for our own; our daughter. 

There's more. I hope you read it.

I wish I had seen it before I had written today's treeware column on the subject. Perhaps it would make those heartless commenters and emailers who have been calling Semenya a ''freak'' have a little more compassion.

But probably not.

I also missed this via MondoVille, another great post.

Mainstream news coverage, within South Africa and worldwide, has reflected ignorance, and worse. Here's a snip from a news article that describes her with the derogatory term "hermaphrodite":

The athletics governing body is also expected to advise her to have surgery to fix the potentially deadly condition, the paper reported. The IAAF would not comment on the results that have yet to be released.

You stay classy, New York Daily News.

I can't think of a single mainstream media source that crossed my field of vision that didn't exploit this young woman's genitalia for fun and profit. All our hands are dirty.

Anyway, here's hoping today's column made up for some of that. I've added some linky freshness:

Often, when readers compliment me on a gutsy column, they say I have "balls."

Not surprisingly, this most often comes from men who equate cojones with courage.

I often reply, "No not balls but eggs, baby! Eggs!''

Not that I have ever hatched those eggs as Mother Nature had intended.

Some would argue that that puts me in violation of Directive One in the Bible: Be fruitful and multiply.

Others would claim that that makes me less of a woman.

As if our privates define us.

Now here's the tricky part: Had things gone down differently round about the 10th week I was occupying Mom's uterus, my female plumbing might have more resembled male hardware.

That's because male and female genitals in the embryonic stage are exactly the same. It's only when the chromosomes start to kick in, that gonads become ovaries or testicles, while other bits grow into penises or clitorises.

Most often, our things are clear to the naked eye. Sometimes, not.

Some babies are born "intersex,'' a wide range of possibilities caused by hormones, genetics and/or some intrauterine "switch'' that didn't flip at the expected time or in the usual way.

Some babies are born with a little bit of this and that, and sometimes surgical decisions are made to set these children down the Barbie or basketball route.

Sometimes those decisions turn out horribly wrong, as Colorado State U.'s Gerald N. Callahan describes in his timely new book, Between XX and XY.

Tormented lives, confused identities, even suicides follow.

In the case of Idaho's 32-year-old Lisa May Stephens Stevens – born visibly intersexed, cosmetically converted into a boy, but lived as a woman – her priest suggested that maybe suicide wouldn't be a mortal sin. She blew her brains out.

Which brings us to the spectacular Caster Semenya, 18, the South African sprinter whose privacy and private parts have been violated in the most public way. Not only were the results of her humiliating gender tests leaked to the media, she only learned of them from news reports.

As much as I don't want to dwell on this young woman whose life, I suspect, has not only been ruined, but also endangered, by reports that she lacks a uterus or ovaries, and has internal testes, her situation is instructive.

She is not a freak. No more than a six-foot supermodel or a seven-foot basketball player is.

And yet ...

You've heard of trial by media? This is rape by media.

Headlines scream that she is a "HERMAPHRODITE!'' – technically not true. A hermaphrodite usually has the equipment to get it on with men and women.

More to the point, as The Nation emphasizes, calling somebody a "hermaphrodite'' is as enlightened as calling them "mulatto'' or, I might add, "half-breed.''

What's important here is that intersexed people are very often targeted for hate and harassment, attacks and murders.

What's more, many of them stand accused of practising a "homo-sexualist'' lifestyle, as a news release from the anti-choice Lifesite.ca and R.E.A.L. Women intimated on Monday last week.

As if intersexed people – or, for that matter, most gays and lesbians – have a choice.

That joint statement was a condemnation of Pride Toronto's bid to host World Pride in 2014 – an event that, by the way, was scheduled for Jerusalem in 2006 but was cancelled after religious groups objected.

Funny because people who are gay or lesbian, intersexed or bisexed, and everything in between, are, should you believe in Her, exactly as God made them.

There's no reason to keep stoning them, literally or figuratively.

Now, if you don't mind, I'll take my balls and aim them at my next target.

Semenya didn't cheat. She didn't take steroids. She didn't have surgery. She obviously looked enough like a woman to pass muster in front of her fellow athletes in locker rooms. And make no mistake, there is at least cursory gender testing at most athletic competitions.

She has identified female all her life.

I mentioned that Semenya's life is endangered for two reasons. One, the risk of suicide which, as we know, is quite a possibility. And two, despite how the South African government has moved to protect and defend her -- too little too late as veteran athlete Carl Lewis says in the video -- she lives in a society that (1) is infamous for sexual assaults and (2), despite legislation, does not take kindly to GLBTs, at least not outside the urban areas.

Not that things are much better here, if you ask me. Here in Ontario just this month, one gay man was savagely attacked in London, while another was viciously assaulted in Thunder Bay.

Both are hate crimes.

As for Semenya, imagine being on top of the world, 18, your whole glorious life ahead of you, complete with a cover girl makeover, only to discover, via news reports, that who you thought you were is not what you are -- and that everything you have dreamed of doing and could be doing has been stolen from you just because of an act of nature before you were even born.

Imagine people hating you for that.

It's easy even if you don't try.

(Props to my friend McLean Greaves for turning me on to the word ''promosexuality.'')

BIG OOPSY DATE: I misinterpreted Salon's report on Lisa May Stevens. She did attempt suicide -- but her attempt failed. She's alive, well and living proudly intersex.

Now I lay me down to ...

Okay, I will dispense with this one very quickly because it is impossible to avoid some very naughty puns.

Suffice to say that, for good Catholic couples, getting on your knees in the bedroom is acquiring a whole new meaning.

The Daily Mail reports:

Roman Catholic couples are being encouraged to pray together before they have sex.

A book published by a prominent Church group invites those setting out on married life to recite the specially-composed Prayer Before Making Love.

It is aimed at 'purifying their intentions' so that the act is not about selfishness or hedonism.

Considering that the Church is against contraception, maybe couples could also pray that sex not lead to pregnancy, at least not this time.

Oh, lead me not into temptation to keep going with this one.

(Via BuzzFeed)