For decades boys' performance in school has lagged that of girls. Recent studies show that boys are catching up, but there's no joy in why that's so:
Girls have lost ground in reading, math and science at a troubling rate, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of student test scores across the country.
Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe. Boys now consistently outperform girls in math, after being roughly even or slightly ahead in the years before 2020. Girls still tend to perform better in reading, but their scores have dropped closer to boys.
The findings suggest that pandemic learning loss hit girls particularly hard in ways that haven’t been addressed by schools. The most recent test scores show that girls haven’t yet recovered. This comes following longstanding gains for girls and women in educational attainment.
Theories abound why girls seemed to suffer more during the COVID lockdown:
Shutting down schools might have hurt girls more because they tend to do better in school generally, said David Figlio, a professor of economics and education at the University of Rochester who has studied gender gaps in education. “Girls have a comparative advantage in school and you take schools away, they’ll suffer more,” he added.
Another hypothesis is that girls took on more household duties during the pandemic—including taking care of younger siblings—so were less able to focus on school.
Boys can catch up to girls by bettering themselves or because girls have gotten worse. When the reason is the latter, no congratulations are in order,
The typical stay-at-home girlfriend video opens on a young woman in a pristine apartment. At 8 a.m., she makes the bed and cooks pancakes for her boyfriend before he goes to work. After a green juice, it’s time for self care: a private Pilates reformer session and a microcurrent facial. Then, she has lunch with a girlfriend at a local hot spot, goes for a long walk and listens to a podcast before it’s time to get ready for date night.
Clips like this abound on TikTok—smooth, hypnotic videos presenting an idealized vision of a traditional marriage, minus the wedding ring, plus a dose of the current wellness boom. Being a stay-at-home girlfriend (or SAHG for short) is all about supporting your boyfriend with tasks like cooking and housework, plus a rigorous self-care regimen to keep up appearances. The phenomenon reflects a Gen Z move away from mid-2000s “girlboss” hustle culture, and toward aspirations of a softer life.
As to what the men get out of these relationships, it may seem obvious from the photos of three SAHG's above, but the writer feigns ignorance.
Often, the boyfriends themselves are the ones to propose these arrangements. They’re working a lot, or traveling a lot, and want extra support at home. Or they just enjoy paying for everything.
This lifestyle choice is antithetical to woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle feminism, but true liberation is the freedom to live the life you want, not the life that people say you should want.
Stanford researchers have found the specific cells in the brains of male mice that activate sexual desire. They were able to manipulate desire through the application of a protein called "Substance P."
[Nirao] Shah and his team found buried in mice brains, a bit above the roof of the mouth, tiny neural connections that are tasked with processing information from the outside world.
They tell a male mouse whether another mouse is female, and feeling flirty.
If so, this good news is relayed to an adjacent set of brain cells, located on the same circuit. Then a small protein, called Substance P, issues a call to action — like a Marvin Gaye groove.
The team focused on a set of genetically distinct neurons in the amygdala that do something special: They secrete a small and slow-acting peptide dubbed Substance P.
Then the scientists watched a different set of neurons in the preoptic hypothalamus that had receptors for this Substance P. Those two groups of neurons work together, like lock and key.
When Substance P binds to these receptors, it gradually sensitizes the neurons so they become increasingly active...
Normally, male mice are slow to warm up, taking 10 to 15 minutes before mounting. Afterwards, they take a five-day break before regaining interest.
But when the researchers directly infused Substance P into mice brains, the animals turned into love junkies.
Rather than waiting to mate, the mice were ready instantaneously. They even fell in love with lab equipment, mounting plastic tubes adorned with the tail end of a toy mouse bought on Amazon.
They could also become prim, proper and prudish. When researchers silenced the neurons and switched off the circuit, dialing down production of Substance P, the mice lost desire.
We're years away from determining if there's a similar mechanism in the brains of human males and whether the human version of Substance P can be administered (or turned off) safely. If that can be achieved, the control of man's biggest sex organ, the brain, is around the corner.
Today it was my turn to do the Old Testament reading. It was the Creation story, i.e. the entire first chapter of Genesis plus three verses of the second. It's a lengthy passage, and familiar to most churchgoers.
Later, I took another look at 1:27:
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
I wonder how long that passage will remain intact.
We have previously observed how Progressive ideology is entering the Episcopal Church through language revisions that no one has bothered to explain to the great unwashed.
Substituting genderless language (e.g. "humankind" for "mankind") is probably acceptable to most, but the Church will lose many followers if the new theology embraces the idea that there are more genders than male and female and if it doesn't explain why the change is right and necessary.
In a double-blind study men and women displayed opposite behaviors when they were exposed to hexadecanal (HEX), a chemical found on babies' scalps: [bold added[
breathing in HEX influences our social behavior, dialing up aggression in women but attenuating it in men. This sex difference stunned the researchers. Based on mouse studies, they expected HEX to have a calming effect across the board...“Women exposed to HEX reacted 19% more aggressively, while men were 18.5% less aggressive.”
...The authors speculate that HEX is an ancient survival mechanism. Mothers exposed to the chemical signal would be more likely to defend their babies against threats, while fathers who inhale it would likely be less aggressive.
Brain scans confirmed that exposure to HEX caused sections of men's brains to react very differently than women's.
Because the dimensions of aggressiveness and agreeableness are not as value-laden as, say, intelligence ("more aggressive" is not necessarily a compliment while "more intelligent" is), the apparent findings of an inherent sex difference in reacting to a chemical has escaped controversy.
Let's hope that researchers will design, conduct, and report on future experiments in this area with neither fear nor favor.
Germany’s WOW Tech Group is combining with Lovehoney, a U.K.-based online retailer, to offer a range of sex toys, lingerie, and lubricants to retailers and consumers. The companies officially announced the tie-up Thursday...
The deal comes as homebound consumers during pandemic-induced lockdowns spurred demand for sexual wellness products. Together, WOW Tech and Lovehoney, which will be known as the Lovehoney Group, will be profitable and expect to generate sales of more than $400 million this year. That is about double the combined 2020 level, making it the world’s largest sexual wellness company measured by revenue, they say.
The merger, which values the combined group at more than €1 billion, equivalent to $1.2 billion, represents a bet that the sector’s growth can continue even as the rollout of vaccines allows more people to leave their homes and socialize in groups.
A $1.2 billion merger is petty cash to many companies and would hardly rate a sentence, much less a headline, in the WSJ, but it's all about attracting clicks. They "made" me read it, didn't they?
So it's called "sexual wellness" now. What's the SIC Code?
It's easy to get lost in streaming video, just like the internet itself: one views an article or video, clicks on a related item, then goes to another, etc., and four hours are gone.
On Netflix I've been watching episodes of Glee, which I missed when it ran on Fox from 2009 to 2015. (Confession: I usually fast-forward through the drama about the members of a high-school glee club and go right to the song-and-dance numbers.)
Two episodes of Season 4 were devoted to Grease. Performed by the Glee cast, the tunes were catchy, and the choreography was professional quality. So I gave the 1978 film, also streaming on Netflix, another look. I enjoyed it far more than I did when it first came out. The film had non-stop kinetic energy, and leads John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John showed why they were apex entertainers in the '70's and '80's.
But this is not another geezer posting about the talent back in his day. This is about language--how in the 1970's movies and music could get away with words that would not get past the self-censorship of today.
Below are the lyrics from Greased Lightning, a paean to a car and the sexual hopes of teen-aged boys. By the way, Grease was and is rated PG:
Why this car is automatic
It's systematic
It's hydromatic
Why it's greased lightnin'!
(Grease lightnin'!)
We'll get some overhead lifters, and four-barrel quads, oh yeah
(Keep talkin', oh keep talkin')
Fuel injection cut off, and chrome plated rods, oh yeah
(I'll get the money, I'll kill to get the money)
With a four-speed on the floor, they'll be waitin' at the door
You know that ain't no shit
We'll be gettin' lots of tit in grease lightnin'
Go, grease lightnin', you're burnin' up the quarter mile
(Grease lightnin', go grease lightnin')
Go, grease lightnin', you're coastin' through the heat lap trials
(Grease lightnin', go grease lightnin')
You are supreme, the chicks'll cream for grease lightnin'
We'll get some purple French tail lights and thirty-inch fins, oh yeah
A palomino dashboard and dual muffler twins, oh yeah
With new pistons, plugs, and shocks, I can get off my rocks
You know that I ain't braggin',
She's a real pussy wagon - grease lightnin'
Go, grease lightnin', you're burnin' up the quarter mile
(Grease lightnin', go grease lightnin')
Go, grease lightnin', you're coastin' through the heat lap trials
(Grease lightnin', go grease lightnin')
You are supreme, the chicks'll cream for grease lightnin'
Go, grease lightnin', you're burnin' up the quarter mile
(Grease lightnin', go grease lightnin')
Go, grease lightnin', you're coastin' through the heat lap trials
(Grease lightnin', go grease lightnin')
You are supreme, the chicks'll cream for grease lightnin'
Like everyone who's reading this, I've seen a lot of Internet scams over the years. This month I got my first "sextortion" email. The would-be blackmailer does have the password to a real account.
His threat is reprinted below verbatim, except for the substitution of "Password". I totally ignored the email and didn't suffer any of the promised consequences for a very good reason, explained below.
She had been trying to get pregnant again, and he was in a romantic mood.
She made a counterproposal. “Or we could watch ‘The Prophet,’ ” she said, referring to an animated movie based on a book by Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran.
“I’m a mom,” the 31-year-old digital-marketing strategist explains. “I literally just want to Netflix and chill. We stop there.”[snip]
Ashley Aranda, a 36-year-old who runs an online business making stationery and lives in Rockville Centre, N.Y., says that at least 25% of the time, she and her husband choose Netflix over sex—despite their wish to conceive a third child....
One in four people said they turned down intimacy in favor of binge watching in the prior six months, according to a March survey of more than 1,000 people conducted by SurveyMonkey for The Wall Street Journal. Among people 18 to 38, the rate is higher, with 36% of respondents saying they opted for streaming video.
When your humble blogger was in high school, Paul Ehrlich's predictions of over-population were embraced by all the smartest people. We had to attend school-wide assemblies on the topic.
Paul Ehrlich shouldn't be blamed for not foreseeing the agricultural revolution, how higher living standards would lead to smaller families, or Netflix.
He should be castigated for taking some data points and creating an upward sloping line that continued indefinitely into the future. It's a good thing we don't do that any more.
Glucose metabolism is impaired in Alzheimer's (researchgate)
Women tend to live longer than men. This is one of the most robust findings in biological science, and the evidence isn’t hard to find. In the U.S., women outlive men by almost five years, on average, while the gap is as wide as 10 years in Latvia and Vietnam. Now there is fresh evidence that women not only have a longevity advantage; their brains seem to be more youthful throughout adulthood, too.
We ought to be spending more research dollars on why men die earlier and why men are more susceptible to neural degeneration. Sure, this "unfairness" in allocating university research dollars is potentially a violation of Title IX, but the important scientific question is: do zombies prefer women's brains?
As expected, new California laws in 2019 expand progressive ideals and the regulatory state ("non-binary" can be the sex on driver's licenses, no pets from "breeding mills", at least one woman on public companies' boards, sexual harassment training required of 5-employee businesses, no plastic straws, etc.), but there's one new law that enlarges freedom:
This bill would authorize the department to issue a special on-sale general license to the operator of a for-profit cemetery with specified characteristics, including that it be more than 100 years old, be located in, and designated a Historic-Cultural Monument by, the City of Los Angeles, and have an endowment care fund and a memorial care fund that are exempt from the payment of income taxes, as specified.
The law's specificity may cause one to think that an LA cemetery must have bribed contributed to some legislators' re-election fund.
It's easy to eliminate such suspicions: just grant liquor licenses to Northern California memorial parks, where a "stiff" drink is often greatly needed.
Nowhere is the American political divide more stark than in the difference between college-educated white women and non-college-educated white men:
a campaign for Congress in many places starts with 60% of college-educated white women favoring the Democratic nominee. An even larger share of white men without degrees favor the Republican—making both essentially unreachable by the opposing candidate.
It's easy to denigrate each group through simplistic stereotypes: the white men are ignorant gun-loving racists while the white women are overeducated snowflakes who come running to the burly men when the real world comes knocking.
I look at it this way: whites' loathing of the opposite sex's politics makes it less likely that they'll couple, much less reproduce, accelerating the day when whites will no longer be in the majority and this graph won't matter.
These events all happened 15 to 70 years ago, but time's distancing lessens the horror only slightly.
Top Roman Catholic leaders in Pennsylvania covered up decades of child sex abuse involving more than 1,000 victims and hundreds of priests, according to a long-awaited grand jury report released Tuesday....
The allegations stretch back to the 1940s, detailing child rapes and groping that mirrored the reports that have roiled the church worldwide. But the document includes several uniquely disturbing accounts of its own — including one of a 1970s pedophile and child pornography ring in Pittsburgh among priests who whipped their victims and took photos of one boy as he posed naked as if on the cross.
The evil acts weren't perpetrated by just one or two outlier priests; they were a gang protected by the Church. According to the Grand Jury report: [bold added]
But the biggest crime of all is this: it worked. The abuser priests, by choosing children as targets and trafficking on their trust, were able to prevent or delay reports of their sexual assaults, to the point where applicable statutes of limitations expired. And Archdiocese officials, by burying those reports they did receive and covering up the conduct, similarly managed to outlast any statutes of limitation. As a result, these priest and officials will necessarily escape criminal prosecution. We surely would have charged them if we could have done so.
But the consequences are even worse than the avoidance of criminal penalties. Sexually abusive priests were either left quietly in place or “recycled” to unsuspecting new parishes – vastly expanding the number of children who were abused. It didn’t have to be this way. Prompt action and a climate of compassion for the child victims could have significantly limited the damage done.
In the Age of Twitter, when speech offenses evoke comparisons to the slaughterers of millions, we have lost the ability to make distinctions. Dante, in his description of Hell, assigned the treacherous---those who betrayed the trust given to them---to the worst (Ninth) circle of hell. Sounds good to me.
Additional comments:
1) Atheists who don't believe in Final Judgment can rationalize committing evil, but what about these priests? I suspect that after the first act they thought they were going to Hell anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.
2) I am hopeful that this won't happen again, at least on such a scale. The optimism is less due to Church reform than to the inability to keep information, especially shameful information, secret for long.
Two powerful, beautiful, funny women are completely comfortable talking about their own bodies, men, ethnicity, and work on national TV. There are no insults and no complaining, and most of the humor is self-deprecating.
The clip was made 34 years ago, but it may as well have been another century (hey, it was!).
Divorce lawyer James Sexton offers another reason to get off of Facebook--it tempts you to cheat on your partner: [bold added]
Facebook is the single greatest breeding ground ever for infidelity. Nothing that has come before — not swingers’ clubs and key parties, not chat rooms, not workplace temptations, not Ashley Madison, Tinder or Grindr; no, not even porn — comes within a thousand miles. I don’t keep detailed statistics on these things, but if I had to estimate I would say I get two or three new cases per week that feature infidelity that started or was made easier to perpetuate by Facebook. [snip]
There’s a popular saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, meant to discourage people in recovery from hanging around bars: “If you sit in a barbershop long enough, eventually you’re going to get a haircut.”
Quit Facebook. You don’t need the temptation and you don’t need to create the temptation for someone else. Let the past be the past.
The internet has conferred enormous benefits, but it has made a few bad things worse.
To maximise their lifetime earnings, women should aim to have their first child between the age of 31 and 34.
the [Danish] study concluded that women who waited until 31 to have a child earned more over their entire careers than women without children.
The study’s authors suggest that older women, who tend to be more highly skilled, are harder to replace in the workplace – so companies may bend over backwards to support them. Older women may also be more attached to their careers, and less willing to give them up. And they tend to earn more so are better placed financially to offload their children on other people during the day.
Yet according to this study, there’s not much to be gained financially from delaying having children until after the age of 34. College-educated women who have their first child between the ages of 31 and 34 earn on average 13% more than women without children. However, women who have their first child between the ages of 34 and 37 earn only 2% more than women without children.
Other tidbits:
"Having a child before the age of 25 is particularly impoverishing."
Conceive with a younger man: "there was a 62% drop in sperm supply between men in their early 30s and those in their early 40s."
What is a bug to some is a feature to others: 20-somethings who don't want to get pregnant should take another look at 50+ year old guys, who take less energy to keep happy and would be very grateful for the attention....or so I've heard. Besides, you can't argue with fertility science.
[On a serious note, as the latter-day Reign of Terror obliterates all progressive strongholds, i.e., Hollywood, government, the media, and (eventually) academia, your humble blogger must point out that he is only referring to situations where women initiate contact. So please spare me, he whimpered.]
I knew that the sexual depredations of various Christian leaders--Catholic priests, television evangelists, and conservative religious politicians--trumpeted almost gleefully by the media, could not have been the whole story. Every practicing Christian I encounter knows that he is a sinner, but regularly repents and tries to do better next time. How come the only abusers and harassers of women and children were Christians and/or conservatives? How come Hollywood, the media, and academia, rife with people who are not religious and often proudly so, were so free of sin?
Now we know that they were not, their actions have been more numerous and severe, and their deeds have been actively covered up for at least the 20 years dating back to the Clinton Administration. The whole edifice is collapsing like a House of Cards.
Much more important than the current discussion, the congregation blessed Jared and Alexandra, who grew up in our church, on their wedding earlier this week.
Dear Lord, please forgive me for any feelings of satisfaction or vindication that I feel. If I were more secular, I would crow about justice being served (is this the "social justice" that I keep hearing about?), but that would be wrong.
Senator Kirsten Gillebrand (D-NY), a staunch long-time supporter of both Clintons, now says President Clinton should have resigned 20 years ago during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The comment drew immediate fire from Philippe Reines, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, who was first lady at the time of the affair. “Over 20 yrs you took the Clintons’ endorsements, money, and seat. Hypocrite,” he wrote on Twitter. “Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. Best of luck.”
After decades of silence, Democrats are finding it advantageous to denounce sex-abuse and sex-crimes committed by members of their own party (during this period there's been no such reticence about pillorying Republicans), though it means throwing the Big He and She under the bus.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.--Groucho Marx
