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 is a bit of an oldie, but a University of Montreal professor looking to do definitive research into the psychological effects of porn was unable to locate a control group of men who had not viewed pornography at any point in their lives.
Okay, yes, this was in Quebec.
(hat tip)
Item 2: It turns out that parents are still the first line of defense against teen sexual activity. But at the same time, parents need to be able — and well-trained, if that’s what it takes — to discuss sexual matters openly with their children, in addition to instilling good moral values in their children that said children not only believe earnestly, but are able to defend rationally.
Item 3: Researchers in the UK, in a study involving 1,800 women, have been unable to find evidence of the existence of the G-spot.
Now you know.
(hat tip)
Item 4: “Beware of friends offering sperm.” Apparently, a lesbian couple asked a friend to donate some sperm to them so they could have “their own” child or some such, and then were all put out like he started acting like he might actually be the kid’s…what’s the word…father?
Weird, I know.
(hat tip)
Item 5: Looks like polyamory is the new gay, at least in terms of which sexual vice is clamouring for social acceptance.
(hat tip)
Item 6: Another bit of older news…France is set to become the first nation in the world to criminalize psychological violence between romantic partners.
My spidey-sense is telling me that this law, not unlike divorce and custody laws, will end up very heavily slanted in favour of women. Still, Vox raises a valid point:
Go ahead, madam. Show off for your friends by telling them how your husband is worthless around the house and doesn’t know how to change a diaper. He’s got the police on speed dial.
I think I may end up speaking, in advance, for any number of French men when I say: if only.
Item 7: A perfect illustration of how private sin has public consequences. Because of his infidelities, Tiger Woods’ various sponsors may have lost as much as $12 billion.
Collecting data over the two weeks following Woods’ suspicious SUV crash, two economics professors at University of California, Davis, determined the financial damage to the brands in bed with Tiger by comparing the stock price of the nine publicly traded companies that Woods endorses to both their competitors and the market as a whole.
Is it just me, or was the “brands in bed with Tiger” pun entirely unnecessary?
Item 8: Speaking (above) of parental involvement in their children’s sex-ed, it’s nice to see someone attempting to make the secular case for chastity.
Hey, we’ll take it!
(hat tip)
Item 9: If you ever wanted to know what a “gender studies” department gone wrong looks like, you couldn’t really do much better than looking at this example, of a (nameless) university which obviously took a page out of the now-deceased Mary Daly’s handbook:
I am not suggesting that men are smarter than women, but my experience with the feminists strongly indicated that they are themselves intellectual midgets and that they think their students are just as handicapped. A wonderful example of this was the practice at my university of academic staff making available, through a place called “The Womyn’s Room”, copies of previously submitted and marked assignments (written by males!!). These were provided to give the poor little dears some “guidance” as to what was expected if they wanted good marks. Put another way, lecturers were encouraging women to cheat by copying the work of others and to submit it as their own. Imagine how it must feel to be told that you are so dumb that you need to steal other people’s work to succeed. If you don’t think that the lecturers were as dumb as rocks themselves, consider that I was once told that gender was a social construction and that what men and women did in adult life was completely and exclusively determined by the toys that they had been given as children. Holding my face as straight as I could, I asked the lecturer whether this meant that men would be able to have babies if they were given dolls to play with when they were little. She gave me a puzzled look and said that she would have to think about it before giving me a definitive answer. No, I am not making this up!
Did I mention that another service offered by some lecturers was to provide coaching in lesbianism for those students who had not yet decided that this was an essential lifestyle choice? Now I want you to imagine how long a male academic would last if he started offering to take girl students home for the weekend for some sex education. About as long as he would last if he encouraged plagiarism, I suppose.
“Concupiscence darkens the intellect.” Enough said.
Item 10: This is one of those things that could be good news or bad news, depending on the situation: “Women can sense if a man is having sexual thoughts by the scent of his perspiration.”
Researchers at Rice University had men watch two 20-minute videos — one of educational material and the other erotic in nature. While they viewed the movies, the subjects wore polyester pads attached to their armpits to capture their sweat. Then the researchers brought in 19 women in their 20s and scanned their brain activity as they sniffed the different sweat-soaked pads.
Although the women weren’t necessarily conscious of it, a different area in their brain lit up in response to the “sexual” sweat from what reacted to the “normal” sweat. The Rice team next wants to examine how this phenomenon affects the way men and women behave towards one another.
Is it just me, or is the most unintentionally amusing part of this story the fact that the researchers were able to find nineteen women who were actually willing to spend an afternoon sniffing sweaty polyester?
Item 11: This lengthy rant about weddings by “The Rev. Know It All” (Father Richard Simon, in real life) is simply a must-read. I mean, c’mon…when something a priest writes gets prefaced with this:
Warning: THIS EPISODE OF THE REV. KNOW IT ALL IS EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE. IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW. PLEASE READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE. THE REV. KNOW IT ALL IS NOT OPPOSED TO ALL WEDDING CELEBRATIONS. HE IS NOT TALKING ABOUT YOUR WEDDING WHICH WAS A TRIUMPH OF PERSONAL SANCTITY AND GOOD TASTE. HE IS PROBABLY JUST HAVING A BAD DAY.
…you know it’s going to be good.
The average American wedding costs almost $29,000, according to “The Wedding Report”, a market research publication. $29,000!” Oh, by the by, the usual donation to the church is about $200.00. That $200 goes to the church, not to the priest. The usual gift to the priest is a hearty handclasp. The usual cost of the photographer is $2,000.00. All this tells me that the photographs are one hundred times more important than the grace of the sacrament, in most peoples’ estimation. The usual fee for the DJ is $1,500.00. I am consoled by this. It means that painful,occasionally obscene music loud enough to cause brain damage is only 75 times more important than the grace of the sacrament.
And by “good,” I mean “simmering.” Seriously, read the whole thing.
