Rule 5 Thursday
Because I figure it’s high time I at least pretend to be making an effort to drive a bit more traffic to the ol’ blog here.
Item 1: This one came out last week, actually, just after I posted the previous Thursday round-up. So, here, a wee bit late to the party, is my link to Adam Carolla’s analysis of the “Hot Chicks with Douchebags” phenomenon:
(hat tip)
Item 2: Ross Douthat offers up an interesting analysis of literature in the age of porn versus literature in the age before.
Is it even possible, as a writer, to convey erotic tension in an engaging (but not necessarily explicit) way anymore, given that the more…er…direct alternative is only a few mouse clicks away?
(hat tip)
Item 3: Both the Pill and abortion can, in fact, be linked to heightened risks of breast cancer.
Just so you know.
Item 4: Mark Steyn, among others, predicted this might happen, but now it looks like the news has caught up with his demographic predictions: China’s skewed birthrate could leave as many as 24 million men in that country single by 2020.
An imbalance has already been observed in Chinese society:
Authorities put the normal male-female ratio at between 103-107 males for every 100 females. But in 2005, the last year for which data were made available, there were 119 boys for every 100 girls, the newspaper said.
However, the study said that in some areas the male-female ratio was as high as 130 males for every 100 females, a report by the Mirror Evening newspaper said.
…with predictable results:
The Global Times said abductions and trafficking of women were “rampant” in areas with excess numbers of men, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
Illegal marriages and forced prostitution were also problems in those areas, it said.
And what caused all this? Two guesses, and the first one doesn’t count:
The report said the study urged the government to relax the so-called “one-child” policy and study the possibility of encouraging “cross-country marriages.”
China first implemented its population control policy in 1979, generally limiting families to one child, with some exceptions for rural farmers, ethnic minorities and other groups.
It has said the policy has averted 400 million births.
Researchers said the gender imbalance problem cropped up in the late 1980s when the use of ultrasound technology became more prevalent.
This allowed women to easily determine the sex of their foetuses, leading to an increased number of sex-selective abortions.
Yup…it’s all about empowering women, that there abortion thing.
I am reminded of something Lenin said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” and I am reminded of nothing so much as this quote when I look at all the various ways in which easier access to legal abortions has made things worse for women overall. Capitalism never sold its own neck to Lenin, but abortion handed over women’s rights to men in ways that the worst Victorian misogynists could never have even dreamed of.
Item 6: Evangelical Catholicism has been looking at NFP and the ways in which people struggle with it (here and here). They’re insightful articles, though they don’t address every situation (for example, what about couples who have no trouble at all discerning fertility…but who nevertheless are faced with the prospects of long, lengthy periods of abstinence due to the fact that they, shall we say, have fertility to spare.
But in general, the analysis is still good, and looks at what earnest Catholics can do to offer outreach to such people as this.
Item 7: John Zmirak is at his typical best in his latest article, and delves briefly into sexual neurosis (of the sort that is unfortunately associated with the Church) in it:
For a certain type of Catholic, this is when his sincere outrage at the crazed, depressing hedonism that rules the airwaves and the Internet can screw him up into a Puritan, even a world-hating Gnostic. I’ve read ultra-Traditionalist authors who are so appalled at the modern West’s sterile sex-cult that they’ve blundered into heresy — like the elderly lady author who wrote that sexuality hadn’t simply been corrupted by the Fall; sex was the result of the Fall, imposed by an angry Creator to mock man’s attempts at becoming “like unto God” by driving him to rut like the other beasts. Needless to say, this writer trashed attempts by Pope John Paul II to recover a healthy reverence for sex; in fact, she rejected St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching that marital union is the ordinary means of grace for the sacrament. Such assertions, she scoffed, were merely an attempt by misguided Christians to baptize the “pagan sex cults” of the ancient world.
To this, of course, the orthodox answer is that those very cults were themselves a perversion of the holiness God intended to attach to the marital act. But why bother arguing? We’re not facing here an intellectual difficulty but a spiritual snare, which captured the author and threatens us. Outraged at the sinful abuse of a Created good, she rejects its proper use — imputing evil to those who enjoy it. Married couples who claim that their lovemaking brings them closer to each other and to God she dismisses as self-deluded neo-pagans. Much better, she says, to admit that even marital intercourse is typically at least venially sinful (something St. Augustine said, in a momentary backslide to his Manichaean years), and try to minimize the damage.
If sex is so bad, and if Catholics hate sex so much…why do they have so many kids?
Item 8: Here’s one that’s sure to start an argument: we men are in touch with our feelings, more so than women!
At least where sex is concerned, that is:
A few days into the new decade, it already feels as if an age of surprise and paradox is dawning. In a warming world, we are experiencing the coldest winter for years. The Conservatives have promised to control the might of supermarkets. And – the biggest shock of all – it has been discovered that the human gender which is the more in touch with its innermost feelings, most emotionally honest and consistent, is… male.
No one was prepared for that. Men have been in the doghouse for so long that it has begun to feel like home. Women’s comfortable settlement on the high moral ground is now accepted as part of the age-old natural order.
But wait. An authoritative study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour journal, has investigated 132 surveys, involving 4,000 interviewees, in order to analyse truthfulness when it comes to sexual matters.
The results are startling. Whereas men’s mental and physical response to desire was found to be perfectly aligned, there was a disastrous mismatch between what women felt and what they said they were feeling. Some reported that they were aroused when, physiologically, they were not. Others claimed to feel nothing when in fact their bodies were absolutely fizzing with erotic need.
The report has been spun various ways in the press. Female sexuality is more subtle and nuanced than male randiness, one argument has gone. Another interpretation suggested that a terrible burden of guilt has afflicted many women whose bodies are sending them all the wrong signals. The truth, surely, is simpler than that. Men are more mature, less in denial, about their sexual natures. The male mind and body are in a healthy state of balance.
Now you know, good reader.
Item 9: About those airport body scanners? It turns out that the…erm…revealing look they get of you might just be stored elsewhere, instead of deleted immediately.
When full-body scanning started popping up at airport security checkpoints last year, travelers and privacy groups were up in arms. After all, who wants a revealing image of himself or herself stored on Transportation Security Administration (TSA) computers? Since then, the TSA has reassured us that the scanners neither store nor transmit images.
But according to a report from CNN, transportation officials might not be telling the whole truth. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) recently received documents detailing the technological specs of some scanners and the terms of the TSA’s vendor contracts. According to these documents, the TSA requires that each scanner be able to store and send images when in “test mode.” An unnamed TSA official confirmed this to CNN, but nobody is saying exactly what “test mode” entails.
Comforting thought, no?
Item 10: It’s a brave new world: sexbots are finally here.
Expect an uptick in missing persons reports from concerned geeks wondering where their pen-and-paper RPG GMs have got to.
Item 11: A gender-positive campus group for men at a UK university is causing controversy. In related news, water found to be wet:
Typically, when a student organization issues a manifesto proclaiming that “gender identity is largely socially constructed,” that group’s members don’t use the bathroom with the urinals in it.
Not so at Manchester University in England, where a controversial club called the MENS Society has co-opted the language of feminist theory in their quest to “encourage a positive male gender identity” by “dispelling the myths of a universal, normal masculinity.”
MENS Society founder Ben Wild got the idea for the organization when he analyzed the roster of clubs on campus. “There was nothing being done in terms of issues specific to men,” Wild tells Asylum. “Nothing on prostate and testicular cancer, or male-on-male rape, or male domestic abuse, et cetera. It seemed only right that these issues be addressed.”
Wild’s efforts to have his club ratified by the students society caused a stir not only at Manchester University but in England’s national press, with critics claiming there is no need for a men’s club in a man’s world, and that the MENS Society trivializes the struggle for equality that women still face.
Idiot quite of the week, right here in this article:
When we corresponded with [Manchester student Victoria Thompson], she conceded that the MENS Society may “appear” to be inclusive — and 90 of 306 MENS Society members are now women. But she doesn’t accept the premise that there is any need for it. “Men experience no oppression because they are men,” Thompson explains. “They only experience oppression as black, disabled, LGBT or working-class people.”
Sure thing, Ms. Thompson. Whatever you say.
