Monday, September 04, 2006

Feminists faking orgasms, a catfight, not shaving, and rock music for brains

The news out of Britain today is just terrific. In the Observer, get this, we have a feminist arguing for women to be nice to men. Good lord. Whatever next? But really, Fay Weldon offers the following advice to women not getting off from getting laid: "If you are happy and generous-minded, you will fake it and then leap out of bed and pour him champagne, telling him, 'You are so clever' or however you express enthusiasm". Personally, behavior like that from a bed partner would make me deeply suspicious. "Clever"? I have been declared at least reasonably capable in bed (really, at least once!), but "clever"? As for the leaping out of bed, she oughtn't be capable of "leaping" anywhere at that point if anything has been done at least reasonably right, don't you think? Besides, the champagne ought to be in easy reach without any kind of leaping, oughtn't it?

But then there's the question of faking it. Ms. Weldon goes on: "Faking is kind to male partners ... Otherwise they too may become anxious and so less able to perform. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it." Ah, so it comes down to the fragile male ego from which so many women are so convinced we all suffer intolerably. Of
course, every woman I ever met has had a universally and infinitely durable ego and no performance anxiety of any sort in any realm.

Now, I don't know if I've ever observed a fake orgasm, although I've had my suspicions (and I know of at least one woman who would happily and for the simple fun of it, claim that she faked every single one just to try and puncture my oh-so-fragile ego, but I know better, hehe), but either way, I don't much like it. It's just dishonest. One learns from one's mistakes. If one thing doesn't work, try another. We're too tired now? Well, there's always tomorrow. But why fake it. Who needs that?

Of course, if the choice is between faking it and making a scene because you didn't get off, I'd rather you weren't in my bed in the first place.

These issues aside, Ms. Weldon's advice gets the predictable short shrift from the more common variety of feminist. Apparently, she's an old fart whose ideas are not relevent to the modenr woman. Hmmm. Bitchy.

Of course, if we want more bitchiness, we can check out Hastings where a lesbian teacher is accused of fondling the daughter of a woman who she says was her ex-lover. Someone's lying, and whoever it is, the claws are well and truly out. Cat fight, anyone?

Next, on the male side of the street, we've got the BBC's usual pathetic idea of science reporting encapsulated in an item trumpetting a link between shaving less and having strokes. Huh? Yes, that's right, if you shave less than once a day, the BBC thinks you're more likely to have a stroke. I expect that this is some feminized twit's idea of "News for Men"(TM). Before reading on down the article I tried my best to imagine how dragging, or rather not dragging a blade across my face could possibly influence the integrity of the blood vessels inside my skull.

Momentarily distracted by the thought that not shaving tends to be better for the blood vessels on the outside of my head, I ask myself: when do I not shave? When I can't be bothered, but wouldn't that make me more relaxed and therefore less likely to pop a vein at the general antagonism of the world? Then we read that men who need to shave less have less testosterone, although any possible suggestion of cause, effect and intervening mechanism is left to our imaginations as we further learn that men who shave less frequently are more likely to smoke. Yes, well, that's bleeding obvious isn't it? As is the tendency to have angina and do manual work and be less likely to be married and more likely to have a heart attack and contract lung cancer. All this for not shaving.

But the extra chance at lung cancer & heart attack is actually caused by the smoking. Duh. Even so, not shaving still means that you're 30% more likely to die from any cause. This, of course, is a distinctly odd thing to say because everyone that I know, shaver or not, is 100% more likely to die from something sooner or later.

As ever "follow the money" is a good way to figure out what's really going on, and the lead, er, researcher says he still doesn't know why the correlation, but he hopes to carry our further research. I.e., he wants more funds. I wonder if he's angling for a grant from Bic.

Finally The Times tells us that rock music is good for our brains. My immediate mental vision was a slightly eye-watering mix of leather jackets, long hair, IQ tests and slurred "yeah, well, iss obvious innit". But no, apparently, for a sum total of sixteen Scottish "volunteers", listening to classical music or rock allows for better performance in memory tests than does listening to static noise or silence. Again, following the money, The Times points out that "The Mozart Effect" has "spawned a multi-million-pound industry in classical music CDs designed to boost children’s intelligence." Perhaps we'll see the Red Hot Chili Peppers' next album with a sticker propounding its intellectual merits alongside the parental advisory.

And this is just Monday...


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