I Want You to Want Me. Oh, No, Wait, I Want Crispin Glover!

Hey, ladies! It's ten in the morning on a Monday! This means that, as you are all drinking your coffees and checking your e-mails and cursing the Lord God Almighty for the eight-hour work day and its wicked helpmeet, the five-day work week, it's time to talk about... YOUR VAGINA!

Yes, I know, this is totally appetizing, and exactly what you wanted to be thinking about right now. You can thank me later. Did you know, ladies, that your vaginas are all turned on by pornography? All types of pornography can do this to your vagina, says certified vagina scientist Meredith Chivers in the New York Times: straight people pornography, lesbian lady pornography, gay man pornography, even bonobo pornography! She knows this because there is some kind of terrifying vagina monitor that she stuck up a bunch of lady research subjects ("But I was here for the Xanax trials!") and observed that the vaginas in question got all lubed up after exposure to said porns. Yet the ladies, in clear defiance of the dictates imposed by their vaginas, only reported arousal when watching the pornography that corresponded to their preferred form of humping. This means that either (a) lubrication and feeling turned on are two different things, or (b) your brain is LYING because it doesn't want anyone to know your vagina is such a perv.

Now, there is a perfectly sensical explanation for this finding, and it is as follows: rape (or "unwanted vaginal penetration," as the Times and/or certified vagina scientist Meredith Chivers cheerfully call it) is a violent act that causes physical injury; if your vagina automatically lubes up in the presence of sexual signifiers, your chances for severe internal injury are somewhat diminished. (Though not in a huge way! And this should in no way be interpreted as a signal from your body not to fight back! The body, it has defense mechanisms; this is maybe one. That is all.) This theory has already been put forth, most notably by Natalie Angier in her (TEN-YEAR-OLD) book Woman: An Intimate Geography, so there's no chance the Times would devote this much space to such an interesting and relatively non-newsy finding unless they could find some way to attach a ridonkulous, out-of-date, totally sexist generalization to it, so the whole time you are reading this article you are just waiting for it to land and... oh, here it is!

When she peers into the giant forest [that is your vagina - ED.], Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”

Oh, yes! Women are all turned on by being wanted, having a sexuality that is essentially passive, reflexive, and performative, rather than a biological drive which causes us to pursue sex like The Dudes (but not The Dude; he was too laid-back)! Oh, and this in no way makes sense when applied to lesbian ladies, because basically no girls would ever have sex with any other girls if this were true, because they would all sort of sit around and stare at each other and wait for someone to get turned on so they could reciprocate, and it would never happen! Oh, and women didn't actually report being consciously turned on by all types of pornography, so this makes less sense than ever! Oh, and porn-watching is not sex and fantasy is not reality so it makes no sense to use someone's response to a fantasy scenario to explain their behavior or desires in the real live world! Awesome! Thank you, Science!

Yes, there are many legitimate criticisms to be made of this theory. However, I am choosing to believe it with the full strength of my conviction. This is because, prior to reading this article, I was convinced (through sad experience) that it was possible to get turned on by a dude who did not only not desire me, but actually wanted nothing to do with me. Now I know this is untrue! They were simply hiding their overwhelming passion and/or boners, due to society's harsh constraints. Since I am not a creep, I will not press the issue: however, it's good to know they were all so totally into me all along. Here, I present a photo gallery of Men Who Have Wanted Me through the years.

RAHM EMANUEL: Seems psychotically intense in a way that makes him kind of sexy; wants me.

CRISPIN GLOVER: Seems just plain psychotic in a way that would make dating him a wonderland of Quirks and Issues; wants me.

RIVERS CUOMO: Delicate man-flower (Quirks! Issues!) who makes crappy music; would probably not perform said crappy music while we were making out; therefore, wants me.

PAUL RUDD: Wants me and every single woman I have ever spoken to; posed for this picture.

SPECIAL AGENT FOX MULDER: Fictional; has wanted me since I hit puberty. Perv.

Science Explains Why You Are SO DISGUSTING. (Hint: It Involves Food!)

Oh, Science, you rascal! I look away for one second, and there you are, dropping weirdly gendered knowledge on the populace like it's your business. (SCIENCE ALERT OF THE FUTURE: Dropping Weirdly Gendered Knowledge on the Populace Its Business.) Today's Science Alert concerns eating, and why it is very bad. Here are the actual findings, as far as I can tell: 

[Men and women] underwent brain scans while being presented with their favorite foods. In addition, they used a technique called cognitive inhibition, which they had been taught, to suppress thoughts of hunger and eating. 

While both men and women said the inhibition technique decreased their hunger, the brain scans showed that men's brain activity actually decreased, while the part of women's brains that responds to food remained active. 

Now, I could make some joke about men voluntarily turning off their brain centers, and it would be very three-camera-sitcom and sort-of-quasi-but-not-really-feminist of me. I will do no such thing! This conclusion does, in fact, sound very Scientific. When presented with the same stimuli, using the same learned technique to suppress reactions, men's brains showed less activity in the targeted center than women's did, although subjects of both genders reported fewer conscious urges to act on those stimuli. Intriguing! Also, impartial! I can't really harp on that. What I can do is show you the headlines that various news outlets used to report it, which go like this:  

WOMEN WORSE THAN MEN AT GIVING INTO HUNGER PANGS - The Daily Telegraph

MEN CAN SUPPRESS HUNGER BETTER THAN WOMEN - I Really Should Study

MEN TOUGHER THAN WOMEN IN RESISTING FOOD TEMPTATIONS* - eFlux Media

STUDY PROVES MEN MORE LIKELY TO RESIST FOOD THAN WOMEN ("A new study by American researchers has found men are more likely to resist food than women, as they have more will power" - I know, we're just doing the headlines, but this was so delightful I had to share) - DBTechno.com

WOMEN LESS ABLE TO CONTROL APPETITE THAN MEN - redOrbit.com

WHY MEN ARE BETTER DIETERS THAN WOMEN - Time

WHAT MAKES WOMEN FAT? BLAME THE BRAIN - The Chicago Sun-Times

And my personal favorite, which is notable in that it just bypasses the issue of food altogether and gets straight to the point, which is: 

MEN RESIST TEMPTATION BETTER THAN WOMEN - KARK 4 News, Little Rock, Arkansas

Now, as I was reading all of this legitimate journalistic coverage of the issue, I kept getting the feeling that I'd heard this story somewhere before. It was something about women, and eating, and our inherent weakness which leads us to do bad stuff, and...

...oh. Oh, right, there it is. 

So, my question to the Respected Legitimate Journalists of America is this: if you are going to deploy this incredibly ancient form of misogyny, as well as the more recent "women who like food are gross and we hate them" variety, why not go all the way? Here are my suggested headlines for Science News of the Future: 

WOMEN BASER THAN MEN, MORE PREY TO CARNAL URGES - Ye Medieval Tymes

WOMEN DETERMINED TO BE IDENTIFIED WITH NATURE, GROSS ANIMAL INSTINCTS; MEN, CULTURE AND THOUGHT - Weirdly Prevalent Binaries Determined to Be Pretty Much Bullshit Quarterly

ALL WITCHCRAFT STEMS FROM CARNAL LUST, LOVE OF BURRITOS, WHICH ARE IN WOMEN INSATIABLE - Malleus Maleficarum Sun-Dispatch

SCIENCE PROVES THAT IF YOU HADN'T LET YOURSELF GO, I WOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO SLEEP WITH HER, NOW WOULD I? - Journal of Blatant Rationalizations

WOMEN: DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT YOU ARE EACH AN EVE? THE SENTENCE OF GOD UPON THIS SEX OF YOURS LIVES IN THIS AGE: THE GUILT MUST OF NECESSITY LIVE TOO. YOU ARE THE DEVIL'S GATEWAY: YOU ARE THE UNSEALER OF THE FORBIDDEN TREE: YOU ARE THE FIRST DESERTER OF DIVINE LAW: YOU ARE SHE WHO PERSUADED HIM WHOM THE DEVIL WAS NOT VALIANT ENOUGH TO ATTACK. YOU DESTROYED SO EASILY GOD'S IMAGE, MAN. ON ACCOUNT OF YOUR DESERT EVEN THE SON OF GOD HAD TO DIE. ALSO, YOU ATE THE LAST OF THE OREOS, AND I WAS SAVING THEM. - The Daily Tertullian

There. Now, that's news! 

*This is the headline on Google Reader; the site replaces "tougher" with "better." I'm so glad they realized this might sound wee bit sexist! "MEN BETTER THAN WOMEN" is a far more sensitive way to lead off your post, don't you think? 

SCIENCE FACT: Chicks More Likely to Admit Having Emotions

Happy Historic Event of the Inauguration of Barack Obama Day! I hope you enjoyed it! I certainly have. Yet, while we do things like "hope" and "cry" and "pat ourselves on the back for ending racism in America because we are FOX News correspondents and therefore terrible and wrong all the time," Science labors on!

For example, did you know that women are emotional? They are sooo emotional, you guys. More emotional than men, even! Women are so emotional that, even in their sleep, they keep having emotions and stuff! This is what Science, through its earthly vessel Jennifer Parker of the University of the West of England in Bristol, has discovered.

Well, actually, what Science has discovered through Jennifer Parker of UWE is that women have more nightmares than men do, and report having more intense emotional experiences of those nightmares, in their dream journals. This could be due to any number of factors - like, say, the fact that women are socialized to express emotion more freely than men, or the fact that it is not culturally acceptable for men to admit they are afraid of anything, or the fact that, generally speaking, dudes are discouraged from keeping dream journals in the first place and might therefore be less comfortable with whipping out the glitter pens and unicorn notebooks in order to share their deepest darkest secrets with a research team. This is not what Science and/or Jennifer Parker have determined to be true, however! Here, Parker explains:

"From our results it appears that men and women differ in the frequency of nightmares - women have more - and women perceive those nightmares to be more emotionally intense.

"I think that women use their dreams as a subconscious coping strategy.

"I believe these results show that women carry over their waking concerns into their dream life more so than men do, and they appear to have more difficulty with 'switching off' their concerns."

For the record, while explaining her various crazypantsed generalizations, er, SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSIONS, Parker does not say that she actually did any research into what her test subjects experienced in waking life, so she's apparently assuming that women are failing to "switch off" concerns (so emotional!) without really investigating said concerns in the first place.

Which makes no sense, because there are a ton of more or less non-gender-related things you can do to give yourself a nightmare: terrible, horrible, traumatic things, like reading The Lover before bedtime (young chicks and old dudes - I find this gross! IT'S A GOOD BOOK, I'M JUST SAYING) or watching Southland Tales, ever, or quitting smoking, which, for the record, is actually scientifically proven to give you screamingly vivid and weird dreams even when you use that gum that tastes like Satan's asscrack. Like, last night, due to I think all three of these things, I had this terrible terrible dream about being forced (somehow!) into an arranged marriage with Wallace Shawn, and he was telling me about how many times per week I would be expected to, um, have dinner with Andre, and I had just reached the part where he was like, "I would like you to slap me around," and then I woke up, hyperventilating, and my gentleman caller was there, and I was like "OH HOLY CRAP THANK GOD YOU'RE TALL, I mean, HERE." This happens to dudes, too, I am thinking! Or, at least, it happens to someone else. Oh, God, please tell me it happens to someone else. It was so horrible.

Anyway. I have no problem with believing that women might be more able to access their emotional lives than men. I might even be willing to believe that they are under more emotional strain or experiencing more psychological conflict than men are, because, whatever, it's a man's man's man's man's world and all of that. Yet conducting a study that is basically just you reading dream journals and then being like, "chicks have soooo many feelings?" Jennifer Parker, you had better be grateful that I am a person who resists puns in my daily life, because otherwise, I would be mighty tempted to conclude this post with some version of the phrase "wake up."

UPDATE: Oh, snap! It appears that I did just that, and it was lame! Oh, well. Here is something to haunt your dreams. 

You Know What I Love? Responsible Journalism.

Like this charming lede in the New York Times, which does not at all trivialize date rape:

In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts — Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.

Ah, the power of language: with a single adjective, you can remove "drugging a woman in order to have sex with her" from the realm of vicious crime intended to enforce male domination, police women's sexuality, and keep women scared with the constant, unspoken threat of random, devastating violation at the hands of men and therefore less likely to live full lives or to confront men directly, and turn it into something that might happen on an episode of Jeeves & Wooster. "Why Bertie, I do believe you've date raped me! You unscrupulous cad!"

I say, it was a dashed good scheme, eh wot?

Anyway:

That’s the bad news.

Ha ha, I would say so!

The not-so-bad news is that you may enjoy this potion if you took it knowingly with the right person. But the really good news, as I see it, is that we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. Although this love vaccine isn’t mentioned in Dr. Young’s essay, when I raised the prospect he agreed it could also be in the offing.

Oh, Science! Is there anything it can't do? It can even inspire this particular dude to write, seemingly from the depths of bummedness, that love is "a dangerous disease" and "a potentially fatal chemical imbalance." JEEZ.

Actually, there are plenty of things Science can't do, or can't do yet, anyway, but this development does at least offer some hope. For example, there might, at some point in the future, be an "actually being friends with your ex, rather than writing each other nice e-mails about Battlestar and then fighting like wolverines every time you are in the same room" potion. Or a "being civil and generous to your boyfriend's ex/your ex's girlfriend because, heck, they didn't do anything you haven't done" drug. Or maybe - just maybe - there could be some sort of very specific medication to keep a man from reciting the lyrics to Ice Cube's gender-theory masterpiece "A Bitch Is A Bitch" in several different conversations just to see you react! ("Now, the title 'bitch' don't apply to all women, but all women got a little bitch in 'em." "OH MY GOD." "But he says it doesn't apply to all women! You're being very unfair! Now: it's like a disease that plagues their character, taking the women of America." "OH SO IT'S A DISEASE NOW IS IT HOW INSIGHTFUL." "It starts with the letter B; it makes a girl like that think she's better than me.") There might even, at some far-distant point in the future, be a "don't put this on the Internet because you can never take it back and also it's kind of stupid" drug. Until then, however, we will all just have to rely on our own finer instincts and act like grown-ups.

So, you know, we're fucked.

SCIENCE FACT: People Who Say "I'm Not Racist or Anything" Totally Racist!

Yes, it's true: some people who claim not to be racist also tend to not do anything or get upset at all when they witness obvious acts of racism! Finally, a SCIENCE FACT that explains why people read Vice magazine (endorsed by Colt 45: "It's Ironic that You Drink It, Because in Your Mind You Associate It with Black and Poor People, which You're Not!")*

Now, onto the real mystery: what on earth have I been doing to cause this to show up as a contextual Google link in my WORK E-MAIL?

*Yes, I know, this is "Poop on Vice Week," and it's getting tired. What can I say? As a time traveler from the early part of this decade, during which some people actually read Vice, I care about these things.

SCIENCE FACT: People Who Take Dumb Things Seriously Maybe Kind of Dumb

In what is undoubtedly the most important and revelatory study of Scientific Matters released to date, "relationship experts" at an Edinburgh university have proclaimed that romantic comedies are guilty of - wait for it - "promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love."

I know! I can hear your cries of shock and denial! But es one hundred percent verdad, ladies: people who watch - and consider themselves fans of - such high quality cinematic entertainments as "Runaway Bride," "Maid in Manhattan," and "The Wedding Planner" do, in fact, tend to have crappy relationships, due to the fact that they believe in "predestined love," immediate commitment, and the idea that "if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them."

Now, I know what you are saying: this, along with your mean-spirited photo pick, is pretty sexist, Tiger Beatdown! I totally agree. These films are undeniably gendered, and so is the fact that we are reading a study of their deleterious effects on their (female, duh) audience, rather than a study of how dudes are affected by comedies that promote insidious, relationship-destroying ideas such as "your fart and poop jokes are totally sexy" or "your fear of growing up and having a committed relationship is not at all annoying or crazy," or "insanely beautiful blonde girls with high-paying, enviable media careers naturally want to end up with dudes who look and act like this."

And yet.

Romantic comedies are infantile and gross. That much, regrettably, is true; they take one of the most fascinating topics of all time, the question of how we imperfect human beings can achieve or maintain intimate relationships, and they reduce it to a set of signifiers so limited, self-referential and hollow that they leave you feeling cynical, not only about movies, but about love itself. I mean, is that really it?

"I have to write a magazine article about how to make a guy dump you - I hope I don't find lasting love in the process!"

"I have to make this totally free-spirited guy into less of a loser than usual - jeez, I hope he doesn't make me less uptight and teach me to love!"

"I plan the weddings of others, yet my own romantic life is a shambles - I hope I don't meet Matthew McConaughey! Or maybe I hope that I DO.*"

Which is not to say that I have not watched two of these three movies (with my mother, on Thanksgiving or Christmas weekends, because I was oh so very bored) or that they were not, in and of themselves, completely adequate diversions. You don't have to believe in the particular myth of love put forth by romantic comedies just because you've seen one or two of them. In the above-quoted article, there is no real differentiation made between people who watch the romantic comedies referenced within it (all of which are dumb enough to frustrate a mildly retarded hamster, should said hamster take them seriously) as entertainments and people who watch them as Works of Art. In an article that is full of mildly insulting statements, that is more insulting than anything else.


*I DO. Get it? I DO?? For the WEDDING PLANNER?????? Oh, my god, help me.

[Via.]

SCIENCE FACT: People Who Benefit From Privilege More Likely To Think Privilege Is Awesome

So: there is a study which states that men with "traditional" views on gender earn more than men with egalitarian views. Surprise! (By the way, I love the euphemistic use of "traditional" rather than "sexist." Like, if I burned a woman to death because I thought she'd been blighting my crops with her menstrual blood, that wouldn't be a witch hunt - that would be "traditional agriculture.") Here, the authors of the study, Livingston and Judge, struggle to explain this puzzling new phenomenon:

"It could be that traditional men are hypercompetitive salary negotiators -- the Donald Trump prototype, perhaps," Judge said. "It could be on the employer side that, subconsciously, the men who are egalitarian are seen as effete."

Oh, "effete!" Yes, that's probably it: employers only give raises to sexist men because non-sexist dudes are giant pussies. By Jove, Science, you've done it again! 

Anyway, it's probably true that sexist men are rewarded more than non-sexist men (and all women) for their work. It might even be true that sexist dudes are super-powered ultra-negotiators who earn higher salaries because of their manly fortitude, although I really doubt it. However, it really seems not at all groundbreaking to point out that the people who benefit most from sexism are the people most invested in preserving it. Call me an idealist, but I generally think that a study should, if at all possible, be slightly more enlightening than an average episode of Mad Men.

Because, seriously, Mad Men has this: 

And he wears shorts.