Photo by Flickr user marsmet462. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Sweet mother of pearl is there ever a mind-bending difference in the number of research papers on "female arousal" compared to similar studies of men.

This despite the fact that it sure looks like sex researchers (particularly principle investigators) are overwhelmingly male. And would have plenty of research material at... er... hand.

You'd think, especially for no-brainer (heh) PET-scan research like this one, called High-intensity Erotic Visual Stimuli De-activate the Primary Visual Cortex in Women, someone would bother to try the same experiment on men to see whether there were differences or similarities.

Or, if they did do use such experimental "controls" you'd think they'd mention it in the abstract. Not least because you'd think someone would be interested in one of two obvious outcomes

• Research showed that women's brains categorically process "high-intensity erotic visual stimuli" differently than do men's, or
• Research showed that women's and men's brains process such stimuli similarly.

Either way you'd think news about the latter two would be more interesting. But... probably because it would involve learning something about male sexuality... either nobody bothered mentioning it or, more likely, nobody's even bothered to try.

It's not that nobody's interested.  But most of the time it's not very integrated -- people generally seem to study a) female arousal, b) female arousal, c) female arousal, d) male arousal, e) female arousal, f) gay male arousal, g) female arousal, etc.  But you only occasionally see the same experiements conducted on both men and women. 

I still think the problem is that since everybody already "knows" everything you could possibly know about male sexuality (e.g. 90% of men masturbate and the other 10% are liars) there's no real reason to look... to see what if any of what we "know" is true.

Anyone out there want to raise their hand and say that like Ann Romney I'm qualified to advise the Republican Party on women's issues?

Because hey, just like Ann Romney I stayed home and raised children.

Hmm... I don't see anyone out their raising their hands.

Kind of makes me wonder if maybe there might be more to representing women's issues than being a stay-at-home parent.

Naah. Couldn't be.

Hilary Rosen must have been completely out of line to suggest Romney isn't the perfect choice to represent all women for her husband's political campaign and, for that matter, her husband's entire political party.

Gotta be.

Update:

Perhaps not surprisingly Linda Hirshman better articulates the point I was trying to make.

Although Ann Romney may be a fine spokesperson on some issues, the dirty little secret of angling for female votes is that while all women’s work, inside or outside the home, has the same worth, as Michelle Obama and Barbara Bush sweetly expressed, all women do not have the same interests. Women who work in the home do not have the same interest in the recovery of the formal job market as women who have to work for pay. Indeed, wage-earning women probably have more in common with their paycheck-dependent male co-workers on the subject of economic recovery than with household laborers such as Ann Romney.

Source: The Washington Post

That sounds about right. When I was a stay-at-home dad I really didn't spend much time thinking directly about either the delightful job markets of the Clinton years or the real-estate bubble. Nor did I think much of the Cheney/Bush-engineered job-market collapses. I instead mostly spent a lot of time stewing about how to manage our household budget while relying on someone else to provide it.

If that had been the sum of my experience of the job market it would not qualify me to say I'd worked a day in my life no matter that as a stay-at-home parent I labored mightily.

Bottom line: In America today most parents are obliged to simultaneously compete for jobs and earn money in the workforce and perform all the duties of domestic consumption at home. To say that Ann Romney's experience in the home qualifies as workforce experience is as out-of-touch as saying that Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital qualifies as parenting.

So evidently a bunch of 'wingers are trying to defend Rush Limbaugh with the the "moral equivalent" ploy. They're saying something on the order of "well, Bill Maher does it too."

Well, technically, to the best of my knowledge Maher hasn't spent multiple hours over the course of several days specifically calling one completely average, thoroughly normal person a slut, a prostitute, and a parasite.  Nor has Maher exhorted a one particular woman, nor the ~51% of the population who, frankly, just isn't that different from that woman to "pay him what he's owed" by... posting sex tapes for him to enjoy.  The way Rush Limbaugh has.

But you know what?  You don't have to be as viscous, unscrupulous, as calculated, or as big a bully as Rush Limbaugh to still be a fucking wholesale misogynist jerk.

You can just be a plain old retail sexist jerk.  Like Bill Maher when he says things like

‘If you were on a sinking ship and yelled, “Women and children first!” how much feminist opposition do you think you’d get? . . . Women want to fight men for equal pay, but how often do they fight a man for the check? . . . And any man who questions a woman’s physical capabilities gets branded a sexist — but who do they call when there’s a spider to be killed? Convenient feminism — crackpot theory or dangerous lunacy?’

Or when he opined that it was a bad idea for Ellen Degeneres to cry about adopting a dog or something because it would hurt then-candidate and, I guess, fellow woman Hillary Clinton's chances on the campaign trail.  Or something.

Or how about just check out the time he actually got the jump on Limbaugh's call for Sandra Fluke to post sex tapes by asserting that since (in his opinion) breast-feeding moms really just want to show off their boobs they should only do it at Hooters restaurants.

So yeah,

In pretty much exactly the same way a clock tattooed on a pig's ass the Right Wing can be right about something twice a day.  And they're right that just like people should call out Rush Limbaugh for emitting truckloads of misogynist pig shit every single day, people should also call out left-leaning people like Bill Maher on those occasions when he pinches out an equally offensive little misogynist turd of a "joke."  Like the time Maher "joked" that he hoped Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann would "split the MILF vote." Or when the late Christopher Hitchens did it.  Or David Letterman.  Or Stephen Fry. Or techno-geeks.  Or me (because I'm probably not that much of an angel either.)  Or...

Gee.  It actually looks like people on the left call out other people on the left for being sexist jerks all the time.  As compared to people on the right who...

Ok, so maybe a better analogy might be that a calendar tattooed on a pig's butt being right once a year.  Or however often someone on the right goes so far off the deep end that even Republican kowtowing wimps say something... however kowtowing and wimpy.  But the point remains!  While right-wingers lament only Limbaugh's "choice of words," preferring he had only called Sandra Fluke a... what?... a trollop and a fallen woman, and thus don't actually give much of a shit how much abuse their party bosses excrete on the "other" 51% of the population, most people to the left of Joseph McCarthy, Lee Atwater, and Paul Ryan actually care about sexism.  And so I think the 'wingers are probably right that we could be a little more organized about opposing sexism in our own ranks.  (Actually, we could be a little more about organizing anything, but I digress...)

Anyway I'm going to do the right wing a little favor here.  I'm going to propose an annual awards presentation to the year's biggest sexist jerk on the progressive side of the aisle.  With maybe lesser monthly and special occasion awards as well.

And to acknowledge the important contribution the right has made to sexism awareness I propose calling it the Rush Limbaugh Memorial Sexist Pig's Ass award.

Anyone care to Photoshop up a suitable trophy involving, say, an image involving a pig's butt, a Limbaugh profile, and a tattooed clock?

Lisa Wade says

Her Dad corrects her, saying “Boys, well, boys want both…”

But her Dad is wrong.  Boys in the U.S. are taught from a very early age to avoid everything associated with girls.  Being called a “girl” is, in itself, an insult to boys.  And the slurs “sissy” and “fag” are reserved for men who act feminine.  So, no, boys (who have learned the rules of how to be a boy) generally reject anything girly.  (Indeed, this was one of the themes of Jimmy Kimmel “bad present” prank played by parents on their kids.)

The girl’s Dad, however, articulates a symmetrical analysis. The idea is that there are gender stereotypes — ones that apply to boys and ones that apply to girls — and that both are inaccurate, unfair, and constraining.  His mistake is in missing the asymmetrical value placed on masculinity and femininity.  Boys and girls are simply not positioned equally in relationship to stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.

Source: Sociological Images

 

What I sort of want to know is... given how totally full of awesome this kid is at, what, age three or maybe early four, why on this big blue marble would anyone mind being associated with girls, being a girl, being mistaken for a girl, admiring the dickens out of girls, and so on. And why would anyone waste an average of .5 liters of tidal volume wishing they had more sons instead of daughters, or selectively fucking aborting daughters, etc.?

You know what's really great about that video? She could have been my daughter at that age, who certainly made observations that astute. And you know what's great about that? Neither the girl in the video nor my daughter are curve-bending prodigies -- they're perfectly normal, perfectly sensible human beings who are special as possible to their loved ones but nothing like unique. Which is good because if they were prodigies there might be some excuse for excepting them but still grubbing every other human with XX pairing at the 23rd chromosome.*

Instead girls rock because people rock. Sure, some rock more than others... because some people rock more than others. Still no cause for culturally drowning girls... and only girls, naturally... in a deep pink sea.

* For starters. There are plenty of other ways of designating "girls" for the purpose of discriminating. But XX chromosomes are pretty representative so let's start there.