WAHAHA

HUBERT: “No. The reality is that teens are resonating with the message of abstinence education in increasing numbers. There’s trends data to show that more and more teens are abstaining.”

ABRAMS: “That’s not what the studies show! You’re losing on the studies.”

HUBER: “No, that’s not true. In fact, a recent study just released –“

ABRAMS: “From who?”

HUBER: “Virginia’s abstinence education program.”

and later...

MADDOW: “Whenever I evaluate myself, I turn out to be doing awesome.”

Although Knocked Up Was Sexist...

This disparity is on display in a whole series of recent comedies, from School of Rock to High Fidelity. It's also powerfully familiar to anyone who follows the so-called Mommy Wars. In that proliferating literature of family friction, women's lives seem to shrink to a series of pragmatic decisions about achieving balance, while men are concerned with domestic stuff only to the degree that they choose to be. In this regard, Knocked Up is in keeping with the zeitgeist: If, as Heigl delicately put it, the movie is a "little sexist," that is because it is the natural product of a culture evidently sold on the notion that women are so focused on domestic mechanics that they simply don't know how to allow themselves the playful inner lives men do, whether they're free-associating brilliantly with their friends, or lazily absorbed in video games. (The trope cuts both ways, of course: It allows men to be comedic geniuses, but it also means that husbands get portrayed right and left as childish dopes.) Just glance at a book like The Bitch in the House, where female essayists portray their male partners as slouches who don't get the job done until they're given a to-do list.

Stories about boys who have more fun than girls go back to Wendy and Peter Pan. But there was a time when romantic comedies, as Denby points out, were more egalitarian in their assignment of playfulness. These days, romantic comedies routinely depict a loss of some essential autonomy for the man, and a lesson in "balance" for the woman. A culture that assigns all that weight to what "men" and "women" want only makes it more difficult for couples to establish their own fruitful ratio of intimacy to privacy. The best moments in Knocked Up are those that suggest the world doesn't have to be this way—that of course women can possess playful inner lives too. There aren't quite enough of them. You leave feeling that what poor Debbie—and Alison—really wants is not a husband who knows to bring home pink cupcakes for a birthday party, but a culture that grants them the same indulgent latitude their partners get: the luxury of not having to be relentlessly responsible. Slacker, starring a woman. Barring that, of course, there's Juno, the story of a knocked-up girl from her own irreverent perspective—written, as it happens, by a female scriptwriter—now playing in a theater near you.

Enlightenment: that's what I want too. That's why my last serious relationship ended, so long ago, I think. I didn't always want to have to be the responsible one. It's taxing. Now I'm much less responsible (seeming), so others hopefully won't ask me to be constantly on top of things. That's not my job. At work as a lab tech it is, maybe, but if you're at home and have a significant other it should not just be your job. Bollocks to that.

Wiki wiki

I just fixed an article on Wikipedia. I feel good about myself.

Anti-Science has gone meta!!!!

Abstinence Clearinghouse is Sad That Science is Being Misrepresented and Taken Selectively to Thwart Abstinence Only Education

Awwwwwww. Cry me a river, abstinence-only educationalists. Now, it would be one thing if the research ACTUALLY proved that abstinence-only education worked (although that probably wouldn't bode well for the continuance of humankind). But the vast majority of the literature seems to show conclusively that it doesn't work. Abstinence education proponents aren't even bothering to mess with the literature now, as the "global warming is a hoax" and "smoking doesn't kill you" folks have been doing; instead, they are whining that scientists have done so to them. Aw, how unfair!

Thanks to Pandagon for the link.

Oh, You Know

In terms of social interactions I am consistently rated FAIL.

I CAN HAZ REAL FOODZ???

"Food vouchers for women and children overhauled"

This goes in the rare category of news which doesn't just depress the hell out of me.

So W.I.C. has changed the foods it subsidizes to include whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. This is great news! Programs that provide food for low-income people are notorious for providing food which is just plain awful for you - anything from just candy and chips to canned and highly processed foods (Read Nickel and Dimed if you don't believe me, or just look it up on the internets). The idea that we should look out for the health of the people we're providing the food to, and not just the health of the food industry, is long past due a solid revival.

Comparisons to the Nazis? Never OK

You would have thought that more people would have heard of Godwin's Law by now.

Obviously, this idiot hasn't. Jeez, not only is he extremely anti-immigrant, but also either supremely unaware or stupid, or both. Makes you wonder about the people that we elect to represent us (granted, this is in Italy, but I'm fairly confident the situation is even worse here).

Ah, the Y Chromosome

Interesting how some people attribute so much by ways of intelligence to the lilliputian Y chromosome. That poor guy must be packed with all sorts of good shit... the math genes, abstract thinking, self-reliance, ability to be more than sort of a semi-autonomous incubator on legs... my goodness.

Except WAIT... the Y chromosome is almost entirely composed of second copies of genes needed in two copies also found on the X chromosome, with the majority of its length consisting of non-coding DNA*. There is essentially only one gene, the SRY gene, which is involved in the determination of masculinity and all it entails.

That means the difference between men and women is determined by one gene, and then what? The ENVIRONMENT, you say? What a naughty word. Surely how we are brought up has no influence on our behaviors or our psyche. This would be tantamount to saying that society influences how men and women feel they need to behave. Never, I say. I am programmed by my genes to want to shave my legs and wear dresses, as well as to be bad at chess. No conditioning or lack thereof has caused these behaviors. No siree.



*Ridley, Matt. Genome. Figure out the rest of the citation yourself.