| Saturday, March 27, 2010 |
| China's One-Child Policy, Version 2.0 |
“Mothers in Space” is not a bad spin-off; its a new but fusty policy of the Chinese Space Program. After succeeding in taking control of 600 millions wombs and wiping all sensuality out of the public domain, the Government of the People's (but mostly Men's) Republic of China has defined which females are women enough to go into space.
According to new regulations, only women who are married and have children (sorry, child) can qualify as astronauts. Sure, there are other qualifications, like being an experienced fighter pilot, having no regional accent, no scars, no food restrictions, and the list goes on.
But supposedly a woman who is married and a mother is more stable than a single woman, or God forbid, a single mother. Strange how a single man wouldn't suffer from that same instability. Sad how a woman who makes the choice not to have a child can't be considered qualified. And I thought it was the women WITH kids who were being overlooked. Ok, I concede that space travel can mess with a woman's fertility, but that still doesn't allow a burgeoning astronaut to choose to forego having a biological child.
I guess we should thank China for supplying us with our ever-improving sex toys and turn a blind eye to the heavy stuff, like human rights and gender discrimination. And let's just hope that the Chinese don't colonize Venus in the meantime and give earth a bad rap in space.
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| Wednesday, March 17, 2010 |
| Is That a Banana in your Pants....? |
Mother Nature wasn't just being kinky when she designed the banana. It appears that she could have been trying to say something and we just weren't listening.
Your garden variety banana is not just one of the oldest dildos on the market, the butt of endless sex jokes and a condom model, but it is also – according to latest research – a source of protection against HIV for women.
God bless the pharmaceutical giants who have poured billions of dollars into finding a vaccine that will provide partial protection from HIV infection and thereby cut down the new infections. They have been at it for decades and haven't managed to pass the FDA yet. But scientists from the University of Michigan (Swanson et al. in Journal of Biological Chemistry) have found that a certain sugar-binding protein found in bananas, known as BanLec, acts as a powerful inhibitor of HIV infection. Bananas don't need FDA approval, nor do they need to be priced at a 5,000% profit. They can be taken by mouth and leave no aftertaste.
I guess I should qualify; bananas themselves won't work as protection (unless they are being used instead of human partners). It is their BanLec that needs to be developed into a vaccine.
And need I say it: you most certainly cannot ditch the condoms just because you shared a banana split before going back to his place for the night.
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| Monday, March 08, 2010 |
| Women to the Barricades! |
We've never had it this good. We've got education, money, sex, power, family. We're practically males. OK, maybe a few of us have education and money, some of us have the sex we dream of, a bunch of us have power, lots of us (though fewer than ever before) have partners and children. But Michelle Obama has it all... and great clothes. And that's one more person than in the past, which proves my point that we've never had it this good. One down, 3 billion to go.
On March 8th 2010, exactly 100 years after the first International Women's Day was celebrated, we can be supercilious about the need for the women's movement today. But we really aren't as equal as we could be. As long as girls and women are being traded for their bodies and modeling and prostitution are the only careers where women earn more than men. As long as abortion rights and who you're allowed to marry are still regulated by politicians. As long as health care and child care are not considered (at least partially) civil rights, leaving women to care for the sick, the old and people with special needs. As long as pregnancy and childbirth are life threatening and possession of a womb, whether employed or not, implies a lower wage for the same work.
As long as we can still write long lists of unnecessary gender restrictions, we have flags to fly. Women's style, you know, well decorated flags flown during creative, colourful demonstrations. The 100-year march. Not like the guys – they would have had a(nother) 100-year war.
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| Saturday, March 06, 2010 |
| Its Official: Womanizing is Stupid! |
This could be the shot in the foot (or the kick in the groin) of the urban legend that it is evolutionary for men to want sexual promiscuity. It turns out that smarter guys want sexual exclusivity, and get this: the same is not true for women.
Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the the London School of Economics looked into IQ levels and certain behaviours and attitudes. He found that smarter women and men tended to be more liberal and more atheist, and in terms of sexual behavior, the guys with the brains tended to be more exclusive to one sexual partner. Evolutionists can only explain this as “moving the species forward”. And speaking of moving forward, forget the stereotypes; the ladies don't fit that pattern, the smart ones and the less blessed sisters have similar tendencies when it comes to sticking to one guy, showing that no particular exclusivity choice is “smarter” than another.
Nice. So we are getting somewhere as a species.
The research is published in Social Psychology Quarterly (March 2010)
 
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