Put them in burkas

Seriously?

The latest statistics show that 29 per cent of men admitted being distracted by short skirts and low-cut tops in the Summer weather, leading to record numbers of accidents on the roads.

And according to car insurance company Sheilas' Wheels, the summer smash phenomenon is getting worse each year - in 2009 men made 16.4 per cent more claims during the Summer than in any other month.

Behavioural psychologist Donna Dawson explained: "Research shows that men are far more easily distracted behind the wheel than women.

"Men are more visually orientated and so distractions such as an attractive woman walking down the street can quickly take their attention away from driving and the job in hand.

Ah yes. If it's not those ''women drivers'' it's those ''women pedestrians.''

But what's this?

"Testosterone also plays a part, as it makes men more prone to aggression, especially when frustrated by a confined space such as a car - and men are quicker than women to expose such irritability in hot weather." 

Except, of course, if it's a woman's ''time of the month,'' of course.

Photo Credit: © Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 & GFDL

H/T Hysperia

Going Guergis on you

Ah what is there to add to the airport rage incident involving our friend Helena Guergis, Minister of State for the Status of Women? That, had it been you or me throwing our footwear around we probably would have been tased?

And so, I'll leave it to my sister and brother bloggers.

Here's a brief round-up:

Best with the dirty details: Kady

Best headline kudos go to Dammit Janet!

Best musical score: Green Assassin Brigade.

Best snark: Big City Lib

Best justification, written without a hint of irony: This guy at the -- where else? -- National Post.

One final note: Guergis appears to have attributed her, um, stress to how she'd been working her booty off for the little people at the airport. She'd been in PEI handing out two big cheques, ya see.

Hmmm ... well maybe she had been working hard. For some 9 days during this very long Parliamentary break.

But as for much of her gone rogued fellow caucus members, just go read Susan Delacourt.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: The opposition is calling for Guergis' resignation. CBC News is polling viewers on the matter.

Me, I say no. That's because we could do worse, much worse, with potential replacements Cheryl Gallant, Candice ''Kill the Gun Registry'' Hoeppnner or Shelly Glover.

Stand by your man

No wonder they call women ''nurturers.''

When Dr. Marc Chamberlain, a Seattle oncologist, was treating his brain cancer patients, he noticed an alarming pattern. His male patients were typically receiving much-needed support from their wives. But a number of his female patients were going it alone, ending up separated or divorced after receiving a brain tumor diagnosis.

Dr. Chamberlain, chief of the neuro-oncology division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, had heard similar stories from his colleagues. To find out if these observations were based in fact, he embarked on a study with Dr. Michael J. Glantz of the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute and colleagues from three other institutions who began to collect data on 515 patients who received diagnoses of brain tumors or multiple sclerosis from 2001 through 2006.

The results were surprising. Women in the study who were told they had a serious illness were seven times as likely to become separated or divorced as men with similar health problems, according to the report published in the journal Cancer.

<SNIP>

If couples are happy before the diagnosis, it appears that men are more likely to abandon wives who become seriously ill. If couples are already troubled before a partner becomes ill, the finding suggests that women in unhappy marriages are less likely to proceed with a divorce if their husbands become ill.

“All these patients were couples when we met them, but we don’t know about pre-diagnosis marital conflicts that had been festering,” Dr. Chamberlain said. “But the striking part is with life-threatening illness, how often women are abandoned compared to men. That does not speak very well of my gender.”

Now I can hear many readers going, yeah, right, just when she needs him, he's out the door, the bastard.

But I'm going to be charitable here with my theory, based purely on my experience, while acknowledging that it is a gross generalization, okay?

Most women mull over problems, get emotional, call all their friends, go to their shrinks, get 70 opinions. This is why they have to try on everything in their closet before they go out and then ask if they look fat in this.

Men, on the other hand, are ''fixers'' and ''doers.'' They take action, pull out the tool box, get things out of the way, decide instantly, ensure that's ''taken care of.''

If you tell a guy you have heartburn, he will think you're expecting him to perform open heart surgery. Tell a woman that, and she'll get you an antacid, lecture you on chowing down on that Triple Bacon and Sausage pizza and soothe your fears that your having a heart attack.

See how it goes?

If men can't fix things, they feel like failures.

This is the very worst fate than can befall a man, that feeling of inadequacy, of not measuring up. He has been brainwashed since birth to achieve and to never lose points. Because he tends not to have emotional support systems like women do, he keeps that failure bottled up inside. Sometimes it leads to terrible tragedy -- substance abuse, suicide, murder-suicide in the case of men whose wives walk out.

Because of all this, I am not surprised that so many men feel they can't cope and quit just when they're most needed.

The uncharitable view? They're just something-the-Star-won't-let-print-here.

And that dear reader, is your 2-bit psychology lesson for today.

H/T Unrepentant Hippie

Burly men

''Mens Rights Now,'' whose handle always cracks me up, suggests somewhere in the comments on some other post that I blog this piece of propaganda by a right-wing think tank type for an ultra-conservative publication.

Well, you know how I just live to please guys like Men's Rights Now.

Anyhow, the piece is about how unemployed ''burly'' men in the US -- who, admittedly, have been hit hard by the decline in construction and manufacturing jobs -- are supposedly being shortchanged by some grand feminist conspiracy to keep them from benefiting from stimulus spending by President Barack Obama.

Seriously.

Never mind how the author cherry-picks statistics, and compares apples with oranges, to make it seem as if women are living high off the hog while men are on the bread lines. Never mind how women make up the bulk of the poor. Never mind how, except for right now, the unemployment rate for women is consistently higher than for men. Never mind how so many families are headed by women who have no fallback support. Never mind that most women struggle in part-time jobs that the author never mentions. Never mind that women are less like to qualify for unemployment benefits. Never mind how women make less. Never mind how, when the government bailed out the financial sector, it was men's jobs that were saved.

According to the author:

A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. He called for a two-year "shovel ready" stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.

Women's groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like "Where are the New Jobs for Women?" and "The Macho Stimulus Plan." A group of "notable feminist economists" circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to "institute apprenticeships" to train women for "at least one third" of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a "heavily male-dominated field" like construction: "We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges." As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE-- Women's Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

Now, although this story is American, it has some relevance here in that Canadian men have also suffered in the job market -- although our government completely ignored what women said about so-called ''shovel ready'' projects.

I won't bother to eviscerate the entire piece, despite the easy pickings. I will point out however that these evil feminists were not conspiring to take away jobs from men, but to ensure that money went to families for such things as, horrors, health care and food. They also thought it would be only fair that, since women's tax dollars were going into this (and so much has been lost by the macho men on Wall Street), that it would be a good opportunity to even out some of the incredible inequalities that persist in the trades.

Here's a summary of what WEAVE wanted:

No. 1: Affirmative action plans:
These ensure that women and people of color are actually hired and trained for public-sector jobs. In the years since Bush took office, the number of federal contracts has risen sixfold. Spending has also gone way up, to almost $368 billion currently from $209 billion in 2000. Staff to monitor these contracts at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, meanwhile, dropped. In his inaugural address Obama talked about government conducting its business in the "light of day" and on his first working day in office he emphasized financial transparency. Government contracts are the place to put those sentiments into action.

No. 2: Infrastructure projects:
In 2003 only 4 percent of the roughly 400,000 registered apprentices were women. Scholars with expertise in these matters must be brought to the policy table so this gross discrepancy can be fixed. This is critical because while women hold 10 percent of construction jobs, most--5.8 percent--work in offices where wages are about 16 percent lower. Unless the Labor Department recommits to workplace integration--by gender and race--the jobs that pay a truly livable wage will not benefit women or people of color in proportion to their presence in the labor force.

No. 3: Spending on health care, child care, education and social services:
This spending both provides jobs to women and provides services needed by all families. The fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is families. Forty percent of requests for emergency shelter come from families. More than 85 percent of homeless families are headed by a lone parent, and most are women.

Now, while it's true that WEAVE pushed for more jobs for women in the trades, it also recognized that people were in serious trouble:

Overall, two-thirds of the stimulus program will go toward tax cuts, relief for state budgets and direct payments to the unemployed and others hurt by the recession, part of the administration's desire to provide immediate fiscal relief. Much smaller pieces of the pie will be allocated for weatherization, affordable housing and other projects designed to create jobs.

John Husing, a Southern California economist, said keeping teachers and police officers employed should help prevent the recession from getting worse. But he said the stimulus package would have improved communities' ability to grow over the long haul if it had dedicated more money to public works.

While billions of dollars eventually will flow to infrastructure projects, Democrats who crafted the package say they directed most of it to existing government programs such as Medicaid and education to prevent state economies from slipping even more. One goal was to help fill state budget gaps, keeping teachers and others employed while strengthening the social safety net.

Let's be clear about one thing: A bunch of feminist economists, no matter how smart, are not going to divert gabillions of dollars in government spending away from men just because they hate them.

Which is what this ridiculous piece insinuates.

The truth is, when you look at who wrote it, who paid her, and where her piece was published, the truth emerges.

Any money that doesn't go to business is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

Any money that goes to the public sector is feminist-driven socialism.

Talk about shovel ready.

Happy Men's Rights Now?

Chew him up and spitzer out

Provocative, as usual, column from my friend and colleague Rosie Dimanno today, about ''cuckolded''  wives such as Elizabeth Edwards and Veronica Lario Berlusconi not ''manning up'' and suffering their cheating husbands silently.

Both have been profoundly wronged, certainly to hear them tell, which each is doing via the vehicle of biography and TV confessional, for one, and ambushing emails to the media, for the other.

Say what you will about husbands who are cads – as their respective spouses, disgraced Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – appear to be. Yet males, even those who have been on the violated end of infidelity, are rarely wont to open a vein in public.

There are exceptions to this generalization, of course. But for the most part, men do not go whingeing to Oprah or pen avenging memoirs that simultaneously mortify a couple's children or wash the dirty BVDs out in the open.

I suspect this comes from the social conditioning of boys, who are still raised to not shed tears in public or otherwise reveal themselves as pussies. Girls, by comparison, are nurtured in the culture of tattle and tell-all grievance from the time they're subjected to their first schoolyard name-calling.

Females are inundated with mass media messaging – subliminal and overt – about bred-in-the-genes persecution, the biological and manifest destiny of their X chromosome, the gender for whom offence is endlessly done to.

The consequence, too often, is a kind of emotional indigestion with public burping as the antacid, especially for women who can command an audience.

They seek public validation for their pain.

Ummm ... and feel free to jump in here Rosie if you read this -- a guest post would be awesome -- but I don't think it's so simple.

For one thing, I don't think Senora Berlusconi is all that tearful. Instead, she's out kicking billion dollar butt.

For another, Edwards handled the situation when it happened with discretion and aplomb.

Like so many other politcal wives who are forced to stand by their man while they make tearful public mea culpas after being caught with their pants down with hookers or in men's rooms -- remember Eliot Spitzer's wife Silda? -- she is not curling up into a fetal position.

Maybe it was political opportunism on the Edwards' part -- although how anybody could believe this would never come out is kinda crazy. I truly believe Elizabeth took a ''this is nobody's business but ours'' approach.

Now she's cashing in. Good for her.

Of course I can't say how many male pols have been cheated on because, after all, the media aren't interested in what non-elected people do. Besides, cuckolded men tend not to hold news conferences. 

The only reason anybody cares what Edwards and Lario have to say is because their husbands were/are famous cheaters.

P.S.I know the origin of the word cuckold relates to the cuckoo but I liked this photo better.

Rich bitch

Oh cry me a river.

Manhattan women whose investment banker boyfriends and husbands no longer make seven figure salaries are pooling their tears and their problems, reports the New York Times.

Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Raoul Felder, the Manhattan divorce lawyer, said that cases involving financiers always stack up as the economy starts to slip, because layoffs and shrinking bonuses place stress on relationships - and, he said, because "there aren't funds or time for mistresses any more."

(One such mistress wrote on the blog that when she pouted about not having been taken on a trip lately, her married man explained that with money so tight, his wife had taken to checking up on his accounts.)

These Choo-less Recession Widows even have a blog, Dating a Banker Anonymous, where:

... women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. DABA Girls was started by two best friends whose relationships tanked with the economy. Not knowing what else to do, we did what frustrated but articulate girls have done since the beginning of time - we started a blog. So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter and email your stories to dabagirls@gmail.com. Warning all stories sent will be infused with our own special brand of DABA Girl humor.

To be honest, I am not entirely sure the whole thing isn't a very clever put-on.

But either way, it beggars belief how much coverage the ''suffering'' rich people are getting in the media compared with those working poor who have lost their jobs, their homes and had to give up their pets to shelters (or worse, abandoned them) because they could not even afford the price of cat food.

On a related matter, here's a look at how many well-off couples, who have lived the 1950s stay-at-home wife lifestyle, are experiencing economic shockwaves.

In a bloated front-page profile in the New York Times Style section on Sunday, a headline informs us that a laid-off dad from Darien, Connecticut is "A Bit Lost."  Scott Berry, the dad in question, lost his job as a technology analyst for a boutique investment firm in Manhattan in December 2007 and has actively been looking for a new position ever since.  Meanwhile, Scott’s wife Tracey, who has gone back to work after a brief stint at home, balks at the prospect of buying her kids clothes at Walmart. 

"How can you complain about my spending when you don’t have an adequate income?" Tracey asks Scott during their arguments.  "How can you complain about me not earning an adequate income, when you can’t control your spending?" asks Scott.  Less sympathetic is the anonymous wife from Tribeca who tells us that in her family it was his job to provide a nice lifestyle while hers was to run the household and the children’s lives.  When he loses his Wall Street bonus and his income drops from $800,000 to $150,000 a year, she’s bitter and crushed. "Let me just say this," she tells the reporter. "I’m still doing my job."

Give me a break.

What happened to for better or worse, for richer or poorer ... ?

UP YOURS DATE: OMG, Now those poor little rich girls may have a book deal.

What will the book be about? How to stay beautiful without your boyfriend’s black Amex? Where to shop when you have to spend your own money?

Can the movie be far behind?

FURTHER UP YOURS DATE (30/1/09): I thought something smelled fishy.

Spoiled, awful, hateful gold-diggers feeling sorry for themselves...there's an eagerness to buy into this tale, to believe that people are like this -- that women are like this -- that's disappointing. Because yes, it might be a tale of spiteful gold-diggers, but it might also be a far more interesting tale of women who know exactly what buttons to press, and what stereotypes to feed, in order to get themselves a lot of attention.