Still laid low with a cold. As I mentioned yesterday when I’m sick I’m fond of watching what-the-heck movies I might not otherwise bother watching and movies I’m not sure anyone else would bother with either.

Last night I what-the-heck’d it with a cheesy-looking movie called School for Seduction (Ws)

Here’s the movie blurb, via Amazon.com:

When gorgeous Italian temptress Sophia Rosselini’s (Kelly Brook) School for Seduction arrives in Newcastle, four friends—each hoping to release their inner sex goddess—sign up for an education in the ‘seductive arts.’ Taking their cue from sultry Sophia, the newly confident women unleash themselves upon their unsuspecting partners with lustful abandon—winding up in some unexpected and hilarious situations!

Pretty… generic sounding, eh? Perfect B-movie… maybe even c-movie fare. Just the thing to watch when you don’t care if you fall asleep in the middle of.

Turns out that description is perfectly true… and also 100% unhelpful. A slightly more descriptive but also unhelpful description comes from Amazon member Therese Van Arsdale

This is a wonderful little find of a movie. A mysterious women arrives and a group of ordinary, overworked women decide to undertake her course in seduction Italian style. But this is more than a film about how to stand in high heels, like The Full Monty, School for Seduction is at its heart about worth and how one values oneself whether at home or at work.

Trying to be equally less helpful I thought it was a wonderful movie in the recent insightful, inventive, complex British tradition that includes The Full Monty or Billy Elliot. Only this one’s more complex, more humorous, and way better at rolling comfortably along with near-parody stereotypes and then poking you good-naturedly but sharply in the ribs for forgetting that stereotypes never fit actual individual human beings.

I feel kind of like a bum for saying absolutely nothing else about the movie: a woman leaves her Italian husband, comes to a working-class city in England, opens a “how to construct yourself as an elegantly-seductive woman,” and enrolls a number of awkward working-class types (including the mandatory transvestite), only nothing goes quite as expected.

I really can’t say anything else about it because the last thirty minutes or so are so completely and pleasantly unexpected. But you can watch instantly or order School for Seduction from Netflix or buy it for about six bucks from Amazon and see for yourself.

Actually, I guess I could say that it’s surprising that such a well-made, well-written movie would be the only film writer and director Sue Bell appears to have worked on.

Anyone else ever seen it? Did you like it? Even though I wasn’t feeling well I’m pretty sure I wasn’t hallucinating that it was a good movie.

One would imagine that a quick skim through something like GLAMOUR.COM’s 50 Sexiest Men of 2010: The Results might be enough to kill an assertion that began with the words

A Canadian boy, at the age of sixteen, sells millions of albums and creates hysteria among throngs of female fans. He once almost created a riot of 6,000 screaming girls when he sat on the edge of the stage. His masculine good looks and street smart confidence makes him a heart throb of a generation. Wait…masculine good looks? OK, so I’m not talking about who you think I am. I am talking about an entirely different Canadian boy, singing sensation Paul Anka, who created a wake of screaming, fainting girls in 1957. Three years later the FDA approved the use of oral contraceptives in the US. Fast forward another fifty years: According to recent scientific research, half a century of widespread use of the pill may well have changed the preferences of young women away from masculine-looking men to those with more feminine features. Enter stage right… Justin Bieber.

This didn’t stop Big Think’s sex and economics blogger Marina Adshade from taking a stab at it anyway.

Good rule of thumb for writing speculative essays about science or economics research results? The words “may well have” generally have the exact same truth value as “probably hasn’t,” but editors almost never publish them when you say it that way. For instance “half a century of widespread use of the pill probably hasn’t changed the preferences of young women away from masculine-looking men to those with more feminine features.” Equally true and also more credible (especially in light of the overwhelming popularity among women of Clint Eastwood, earlier Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Telly Sevalas, Patrick Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Hugh Jackman, or the men from that Glamor.com piece, over the last half century) but way less marketable.

But as long as we’re here let’s take a look.

First of all, well, sure, three years after Paul Anka was driving barely post-pubescent girls to riot the FDA approved the Pill. And just two years after that the baby-faced, apple-cheeked, and “girlishly” long-haired Beatles also drove barely post-pubescent girls to… riot. So Adshade must be on to something, right?

Oh wait, how many teenie-bopper Anka and Beatles fans back then (or, for that matter, Justin Beiber fans today) were candidates for The Pill? Doh! None? Because in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. most anti-contraception laws from earlier in the 20th Century were still in full force with the result that the Pill was mainly available to mostly older, mostly married women.

Well sure, you say, but what about later when use of the Pill did become more commonly available to among younger women? Fast forward a couple of years though, to the period between, say, 1965 and 1972. Who was still inducing young women to riot at rock concerts? Oh, that would be the Beatles again… the by-then heavily bearded, military-uniform-sporting post-Sargent-Pepper-album Beatles.

And who exactly was most likely to be taking the Pill back in the days before the correlations with stroke and other health impacts emerged? Why that would be women from the “counter-culture” with their almost universal preference for ever shaggier, rougher, more heavily-bearded, and even less-washed and thus more “manly” smelling men.

Then, around 1975 or 1976 the evidence about the pill’s side effects became overwhelming, women began dialing way, way back on the amounts they took (the first “mini-pills” where introduced around that time) and before you knew it the hottest riot-starters were the extraordinarily dweeby, non-manly-looking likes of Johnny Rotten, Boy George, and Elvis Costello.

So anyway, yeah, if we’re just ginning up random “may well have” scenarios you could as easily make the case that the Pill decreased interest in “feminine” men.

But let’s not do that either.

Chris of Cynical-C answers the question “How Does a Brigham Young Univ. Student Grow a Beard?”

By visiting a doctor and filling out lots of paperwork. I wonder if you could cut down on some of that if you just grow a mustache?

A student who wishes to obtain a beard exception must visit a BYU Student Health Center doctor by appointment (422.5156). The doctor will fax his recommendation. The student then needs to come to the Honor Code Office to fill out some paperwork and receive the letter allowing the growth of the beard, if approved. If a yearly beard exception is granted, a new Student ID will be issued after the beard has been fully grown, and must be renewed every year by repeating the process. If a request is granted for a temporary or more permanent beard exception the student will be notified by the Honor Code Office; at which time the student will come into the office to complete the necessary paperwork. After completion of this process the student may then grow a full beard according the guidelines given.

(via J-Walk)

That’s the whole post. I got it here.

The first commenter says that Pensacola Christian College dress code and Hyles Anderson’s are much worse. Anderson’s sounds vague but may be strictly enforced. Pensacola Christian College’s is, um, more strictly enumerated. As is is their behavior code. Both men and women must turn right down some road rather than left to go to a nearby beach, for instance. Students must not leave campus only with members of their own sex and never in groups smaller than three for men and five for women. Sheesh! The only concession to modernity seems to be an admonition for women to wear no more than two sets of earrings at a time.

The second commenter, Julia S., remarks that “finally something crappy for the guys to deal with. Go Jebus!!! Wait? Did Jebus need permission to grow HIS?!? Hey!!!!” Except for the “finally” part. equirements to shave really is one of the few appearance-related issues men are saddled with socially, compared to myriad such obligations imposed on women.

Further down KidneyPI raises a favorite issue of mine, given the Bible-beater obsession with Shalt Nots: “Being a religious school, shouldn’t they require beards? Leviticus 19:27 seems to forbid shaving.” (In Leviticus “rounding the corners of thy head nor beard” is at least as smite-worthy an abomination as homosexuality, premarital sex, or adultery and yet at Pensacola, Brigham Young, or Anderson it’s nothing but crickets.)

So lately I’ve been enjoying the lifestyle-simplification blog Wise Bread. They’ve got great tips on deals, on avoiding scams, on reducing fripperies in your life, and just generally spending your time, energy, and money on what you need instead of what you think you need. It’s a nice intention and nicely done blog.

The other day they reviewed The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man by Brett and Kate McKay. It sounds like a handy book with tips on stuff like how to skip stones, to McGyver a fire without matches, to pick out a suit, how to make a wedding toast, how to use jumper cables.

All those are seriously handy skills for men to have. What’s funny, of course, is that with the possible exception of buying a suit those are all skills that both men and women can and frequently do both master and enjoy. And for that matter, to write with authority about since the book itself was written by a man and… a woman!

Actually, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, since the unquestionably manly Chief Sitting Bull, General Tso or even George Washington would have been completely at sea in either Brooks Brothers or Ross Dress for Less even the suit-choosing business isn’t essential to manliness.

Speaking as a 100% red-blooded hetero man, if I was to write such book about genuinely universal manly arts I might include a section on the manly skill of massaging your partner’s sacrum, lower back muscles, ribs, and abdomen when she’s cramping unlatching a baby when both mother and child have fallen back to sleep so you can change the inevitably-soiled diaper. You never see that in manly-man books but they’re great skills that roughly 90% of men could use at some point in their lives that roughly 90% of women probably don’t. And maybe something on the manly art of calming another man who hasn’t figured out there are ways besides trying to pick a fight in order to to boost his momentarily-low testosterone levels.

True, there’s the problem of who’d want to read a three-chapter book… ok, four chapters since there are those (mostly manly) urinal stunts. But at the end of the day there aren’t a lot of other genuinely and exclusively manly things to know… that wouldn’t be just as interesting and useful for women to know. (And don’t get me started on all the things men could learn that are supposed to be the exclusive domain of women.)

So… what tips would you include in your essential guide to masculinity?

Update: Doh! First addition to the list: “How to find someone’s clitoris (if you don’t already know)“ is the most commonly Googled post on my site.

Update: Stasha in comments suggests men need to know how to lead in ballroom dancing. Good call. Strictly speaking I don’t think it counts as a classic “masculinity” thing because it’s something far more often desired of men than expected of us. (Most men I know, even the ones who enjoy it, would say it’s certainly not innate.)