Like most gender differences in outcomes, there only ever seems to be concern when women are under-represented in fields like politics, and never any concern when men are under-represented for outcomes like bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctor’s degrees, graduate school enrollment, biology degrees, veterinary degrees, optometry degrees, pharmacy degrees, etc. The only exceptions are when the outcomes are negative like prison populations, learning disabilities, occupational injuries and fatalities, motorcycle injuries and fatalities, suicides and drug addiction and then there is no concern about female under-representation.

The comments will further shine a spotlight on how few senior women there are in the Government. There are currently five women members of the Cabinet.

Mrs Mensch said the need to look after her children meant she would not devote herself entirely to a Cabinet job. She said: “I don’t have any ambitions to be a senior politician at all, to be in the Cabinet, whatsoever.

Sexism is the stock in trade of the tabloid press. Challenging it strikes at the very core of the business model, and that is what feminists and our allies must remain brave and clear-headed enough to do.

No, it isn’t. It just isn’t.

For a basic fact about the media world that Ms. Penny needs to understand.

Newspapers, TV shows, magazines, they do not tell us our prejudices, do not force those of the journalists or proprietor or business model upon us.

They chase those that are already extant.

That’s what the business model is. Yes, I’m sure it’s a shock to find out that there are millions who think the way the Mail does. Millions who take the Sun because they are interested in a bit of gung ho nationalism, bad puns, bare tits and three letter crossword answers. That the paid circulation of Tribune shows that there’s some four people in the entire country interested in the internal machinations of Left Labour.

But that is what the actual situation is. The problem is in us, if problem it be, not in our newspapers.

She added: “This ‘sexualisation’ process objectifies women and girls, and grooms boys and men into thinking it is acceptable to view and treat women and girls as sex objects. This portrayal of women is incompatible with a socially responsible press.”

We do not want a socially responsible press. We want a free press.

As free of my prejudices about what makes a socially responsible press as it is from your.

When it’s men puffing out their chests, doing the peacock strut, this is macho and bad. When it’s women thinking about their titties this is a terribly important matter of body image.

Why is it that exactly the same thing, standard gender behaviour, is good when done by one gender and bad when done by the other?

“Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice…..

Ob/Gyn, in the modern world, involves performing abortions. It would be unlikely for someone to enter that profession without being in favour of their sometimes being performed.

Amongst the young it is in favour of women now. Overall it is in favour of men but that’s down to two things.

1) Overall is comparing women in their 50s etc, people who did not receive the same education or career opportunities as the men of their age group. This is a problem that will be solved simply by time.

2) Motherhood. The pay gap appears at the average age of primagravidae. We don’t actually have a gender pay gap any more. We have a motherhood pay gap. To change this you’re going to have to change biology and good luck with that in a mammalian species.

So, can we please decalre this problem over and get on with solving some of the others that plague us?

I’m afraid that I have to admit to be a dreadful sexist on this matter. It’s true, I do hurl the epithets around, quite delight in insulting, using Anglo-Saxon.

But the insults direct are almost always reserved for men. Where they are aimed at women they are much more gentle (no problem with calling Huhne a twat but Polly is going to be a trout).

So, there we have it, I’m a sexist I’m afraid. I insult women less and more gently just because they’re women.

Because childcare responsibilities still fall on women, women with children take low-paid, opportunity-free part-time work, and suffer economically and, presumably, spiritually.

It’s spiritual suffering to take care of your own children now, is it?

Women’s strike

Can you imagine if all the women in the country went on strike at the same time? Well, IT might carry on relatively unperturbed. But the health system would grind to a halt, schools would be emptied, newspapers would go unwritten, and the lack of hairdressers would lead to the worst hair day this country had ever seen.

Er, yes, that is one of the reasons for the gender pay gap.

Occupational segregation.

You’ve just, in an article bemoaning its existence, given us one of the reasons for its existence.

She has presented a wealth of studies that show men want to get laid more within their relationship, that celibacy is far more common among women, that masturbation and use of erotic material are far more common among men, that men are more unfaithful and more frustrated, report more sexual desire, across a whole range of countries. The only thing I think might complicate her conclusion – that men are randier than women, and why won’t we all just accept it – is that this area is culturally quite freighted. There are certain expectations, going back centuries, of male sexuality being rampant and ungovernable, and equal and opposite expectations of female sexuality. This might – call me crazy – impact upon the way that men and women report, express and prosecute their sexual desire.

It’s quite alarming really.

X says “people are like this”. Y responds “but only because people have been like that for centuries”.

Well, yes Miss Y, but turn your mind to the possibility that people have been like this for centuries because people are like this.

You know, it’s simply not true that all of our ancestors were entire dunderheads awaiting Andrea Dworkin to tell them how it really is.

EHRC: Women must wait 70 years for fair share of top jobs

Nope, not an ounce of truth in the assertion.

The British women’s beach volleyball team‘s new design of, ahem, kit, reveals more than the fact that women’s sport is still not taken seriously. Looking like extras on the set of Baywatch, the team, spotted this week on London’s Horse Guards Parade “warm-up” before the Olympics, wore less material between them than you would expect on a size 14 M&S T-shirt.

Sigh.

As one commentator put it, women wear beachwear to play beach sport.

But there’s more to it than just that.

Female athletes have been wearing female athlete’s clothing for some time now.

The real problem is that we live in a neurotic, miserable society with a deeply disturbed attitude to food, nurture and consumption, a society which teaches children, and particularly girls, that their growing bodies and normal desires are unacceptable and must be starved away.

The implication there is that society teaches young women that being young women, having feminine curves, is unacceptable. These are what must be starved away to return to a pre-pubertal state.

Yet the other 50% of your journalistic output is about how society sexualises young women, fantasises, drools, over the firm curves and chest fats of young women.

I can see that either could be undesirable, even disturbing and dangerous: I’m just not sure how it’s possible to believe in both.

Could you please advise?

It has been a slow crawl for the doll. In the 50s and even the 70s – the 60s were a tentative audition for today – a size 12, with hips and breasts, could make it on to a billboard or into a movie. Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Ava Gardner – all had flesh and interesting faces and imperfections. Russell’s eyebrows looked like draft excluders and Gardner had a cleft chin you could topple into. They looked like individuals. No more. Models and actresses are tiny now, and curiously similar, with every trace of fat melted off, every shadow painted out.

I’m sorry but she just wasn’t. From the recent auction of her dresses:

Sharing a rotating mirrored platform with Hedy Lamarr’s peacock gown from “Samson and Delilah” and Kim Novak’s rhinestone- fringed show dress from “Jeanne Eagels,” Monroe’s costume was displayed on a mannequin that had been carved down from a standard size 2 to accommodate the tiny waist. Even then, the zipper could not entirely close.

But that’s just one dress. Perhaps the star was having a skinny day. To check, you could look across the room and see that Monroe’s red-sequined show dress from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was at least as petite, as were the saloon costume from “River of No Return” and the tropical “Heat Wave” outfit from “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Half a Person

In fact, the average waist measurement of the four Monroe dresses was a mere 22 inches, according to Lisa Urban, the Hollywood consultant who dressed the mannequins and took measurements for me. Even Monroe’s bust was a modest 34 inches.

That’s not an anecdote. That’s data.

The other actresses’ costumes provided further context. “It’s like half a person,” marveled a visitor at the sight of Claudette Colbert’s gold-lame “Cleopatra” gown (waist 18 inches). “That waist is the size of my thigh,” said a tall, slim man, looking at Carole Lombard’s dress from “No Man of Her Own” (a slight exaggeration — it was 21 inches). Approaching Katharine Hepburn’s “Mary of Scotland” costumes, a plump woman declared with a mixture of envy and disgust, “Another skinny one.”

An American 2 is a British 6, a zero a 4.

It just ain’t true that Monroe was Sophie Dahl sized. Can we finally kill this one?

Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah, after studying the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, has proposed that grandmothers must have played an important role in the ascent of Homo sapiens. “Good foraging grannies mean healthy Hadza kids – and that was also true for our ancestors,” she said.

Hawkes argues that when our apeman ancestors were evolving in Africa, females normally died at child-bearing age. Then an occasional female lived a little longer, and would have helped her daughters, when they had their own children, to dig and forage for food. These grandmother-mother pairings thrived, so their genes for longevity would have been passed on. In this way, the slow rise of the senior citizens began.

But now Caspari has extended the idea. It wasn’t granny power on its own that did it; grandfathers played a critical role,

Indeed, as other researchers have pointed out.

Just as grannies helping grand kids to survive will tend to perpetuate the genes for long lives, so will those of the age of grandads covering those of the age of their children do so.

For one of the things about human beings is that we’re long lived for our size. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but there’s a general relationship between size of organism (mammals have a different relationship from reptiles, etc, but the relationship generally holds within each major design of animal) and length of life.

Some have even compared it to the number of heartbeats in a life: shrews have very fast heartbeats, elephants very slow, but not all that different a number of total heartbeats in an average lifespan. And yes, heartbeat is associated with size.

When plotting this relationship humans are way, way, off the trend. Much longer lives than would be expected for our mass/heartbeat.

And one of the reasons is that grandads chased the teenage girls, thus passing on those genes for long lives.

At the extreme it’s been said that every human over 50 owes their existence to dirty old men. An exaggeration, yes, but one with that vital grain of truth in it.

It ought to be obvious, beyond remarking, that a woman should be able to sleep with whom she wants, when she wants, as often as she wants, without danger and without shame.

Yes, I’d like a pony too.

The bit that seems to have been left out is “with those who would like to sleep with her”.

How about this for Timmyism:

It ought to be obvious, beyond remarking, that Timmy should be able to sleep with whom Timmy wants, when Timmy wants, as often as Timmy wants, without danger and without shame.

Quite apart from the danger likely from wifey of such a social creed, again, it’s rather left out the question of consent, of those who would sleep with me.

A second supposedly leading lesbian blogger was exposed as a man masquerading as a gay woman, a day after the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was revealed to be the fictional creation of a married male student from Edinburgh.

Paula Brooks, who claimed to be the executive editor of a US-based lesbian site LezGetReal.com, told the Washington Post that “she”, too, was a man – in this case, a 58-year-old retired construction worker from Ohio called Bill Graber.

Now all we need to find out is that Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McMasters are in fact a 72 year old, male, retired steel worker from Gary Indiana and life will be complete.

Sadly unlikely to happen as I would expect the quality of prose to have been better if it were true.

Extreme scepticism that Weiner is anything but the victim of a political hit job is more than warranted in this case, and not just because of the lack of evidence or the fact that this is being heavily promoted by Andrew Breitbart, who has a long history of disseminating falsified evidence to support his claims (see the Shirley Sherrod affair etc). Nor should you be sceptical only because of the timing of this story – remarkable, if true, that this should happen right after another New York congressman resigns from office after sending an inappropriate picture to a woman online, only to see the Republicans lose his seat to a Democrat in the special election to replace him. Nor should you be sceptical only because the photo in question so crassly lends itself to puerile “weiner” jokes at the congressman’s expense.

No, we should be sceptical of this story chiefly because it fits a larger pattern of rightwing culture warriors ganging up and sexually harassing random young women after floating facetious insinuations about improper relationships between these women and Democratic politicians.

Blame Monica Lewinsky. Or, more specifically, blame rightwing nostalgia for the year of Monica Lewinsky, when conservatives were able to openly indulge their hatred of a popular Democratic politician, their prurience and their love of smacking down young women who devote their energies to pursuits other than being good Christian housewives. The days of Monica Lewinsky were a heady time indeed for the right; ever since then, they’ve been trying to recapture the magic. In the process, they’ve built up a long list of deplorable vilifications of innocent young women and their friends and family, usually for no other reason than said young women look how conservatives imagine the next Monica Lewinsky will.

Now let us fast forward a week, an entire 7 days:

His admission came hours after new topless photographs that he emailed Meagan Broussard, a 26-year-old single mother from Texas, were published by Big Government, a conservative website.

They cast fatal doubt over Mr Weiner’s unlikely claim that a picture of a man’s crotch, which was sent to another young woman in Seattle from his Twitter account last week, was sent by hackers.

Mr Weiner’s explanation raised eyebrows when he could not say “with certitude” that the crotch was not his, but continued to insist that he had not sent the picture.

He admitted last night that he meant to send it privately but inadvertently made it publicly viewable. “I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked,” he said.

He also confirmed a claim by the website that he had also sent an “X-rated” photo of his body to Miss Broussard. “This was me doing a dumb thing, doing it repeatedly and then lying about it,” he said.

Earlier in the day, a third woman – who remains unnamed – gave radaronline, another website, a selection of sexually explicit Facebook messages she claimed were sent to her by Mr Weiner.

Well done Ms. Marcotte!

Add this to her defence of John Edwards and her insistence that the Duke lacrosse players were obviously, clearly, guilty of rape and…..well, let’s just say that Amanda is good evidence for the contention that the problem with feminism is some of the self-declared feminists.

What truly ads to the amusement is that four years back, Huma Abedin, Congressman Weiner’s now wife, was rumoured to be Hillary’s lesbian lover, the great sex scandal that would kill her presidential run. That probably was a piece of political manouvering, not something based in any form of reality. Although who was doing the leaking, well, in 2007, during the Democratic primaries, who would have benefitted most from Hillary leaving the race?

Strangely, probably not any of the Republicans……