According to the BBC's online brain gender test, I am 75% male, despite my B cup and apparently functioning uterus.
It's FUN! You are given a series of visual, emotional, and intellectual tests and they tell you how men and women usually score.
Yes, duh, it's flawed, but I'm sure any survivor of childhood therapy will find it as thrilling as I did.
In case you are curious, I'm better than most men and most women on everything except for word association. I got angles perfect, a balanced brain for spot the difference but almost in the guy range, I'm left brained, I'm ever so slightly worse than most women for empathizing, and ever so slightly worse than men for systematizing, my finger ratio is 1:1, I totally ROCKED 3-D shapes thinking I would suck, I split the money 50:50 like any good Montessori child, and I prefer only the manliest of man faces.
You know how funny it is to read studies from the 50's and how they thought black people had smaller heads so they were not as smart? I think there's a lot of that sort of possibility in this study in Discover, but it's still completely interesting.
An anthropologist at U of Arkansas decided that Lucy, everyone's favorite Australopithecus afarensis homonid, was promiscuous because the few male body parts they have from her same species are on average 50% larger than her. This, according to people who apparently do not have anything better to do with their time, means that a few big males probable dominated the mating.
Apparently species where the males are much larger than the females are that way so that males can fight each other for the females. And normally pair bonding species are of similar sizes. So I have two questions:
1) What about species where the females are larger, as is the norm in the animal world?
and 2) If large males are large to fight off other males, does this not imply that winning males simply took the females they were fighting for? And if so, are we forced to once again examine rape as a driving force behind human evolution?
An interesting article from the NYT on the inherent value of talking about each other behind our backs. I've been waiting for this for years! I kid. But I also talk a lot of shit. So it's nice to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of human evolution where it belongs.
I actually saw a documentary a few years ago which claimed up to 80% of human interaction could be qualified as gossip, i.e. talking about other people.
"Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual."
It's also "important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership." And let's not forget that it's very useful for making sure that fat girl doesnt make the cheerleading squad because she's really a total slut.
A great mental image for the alpha girls of highschools everywhere: "When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news, and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors."
I don't know what to think of this study. It claims that people, more-
so for certain people, will go blind after seeing pornographic images or super gorey ones. I think the use of the word "blind" is just fun because of the stereotype of masturbation making you go blind. Becasue it would seem like people were just distracted more than unable to see.
But what is interesting is that they think the brain might work differently for shocking images than common ones. But I have to think about my whole porn addiction theory. I wonder if people who get addicted to porn are similar to people who get addicted to gore? I mean, it would be nice if all of Gwar's fans were also fans of irony but some of them are completely serious.
Also, I just think the link between sex and violence is always fascinating.
This is an amazing article, from Rolling Stone of all places, about the current DEA strategy for pot smokers: lock them away.
John Walters, Bush's drug czar, has redirected most of the effort of the DEA towards marijuana rather than dealing with pesky drugs like heroine and crack. Recently, the federal governement ruled that even states that legalize medical merijuana are not exempt from drug raids. So clinics in SF are being raided and people there charged with federal crimes, a far worse offence than state.
* All told, the government sinks an estimated $35 billion a year into the War on Drugs.
* The results? "Drug prices are at an all-time low, drug purity is at an all-time high, and polls show that drugs are more available than ever"
* Since 1992, according to a recent analysis of federal crime statistics by the Sentencing Project, arrests for marijuana have soared from 300,000 a year to 700,000.
* The government spends an estimated $4 billion a year arresting and prosecuting marijuana crimes -- more than it spends on treating addiction for all drugs -- and more and more of those busts are for possession rather than dealing.
* One in four people currently in state prisons for pot offenses are classified as "low-level offenders." In New York, arrests for possession -- which now account for nine of every ten busts -- are up twenty-five-fold during the past decade. [I can attest to this personally.]
* 9,000 tons of pot are still harvested each year in the United States
* Walters has launched a nationwide effort to persuade schools to conduct drug tests on student athletes -- and even entire student populations.
* The Supreme Court has upheld drug testing of students involved in sports and other extracurricular activities, [which can] include any student who parks on campus.
CANADIANS! I just want you to know that you dont need to boycott the US or anything. In fact, it's all fine. We are being taken down systematically by George W. Bush and it's SO fucking obvious it's amazing. Look at this:
* "While the feds target pot smokers, a burgeoning meth epidemic is swamping rural communities, especially in the West and the Great Plains. Nearly half of state and local law-enforcement agencies identify meth as their greatest drug threat -- compared with only one in eight for marijuana -- and more than 1 million Americans use the highly addictive drug, which is linked to violent crime, explosions and fires at meth labs, severe health problems, and child and family abuse. In 2003, drug agents busted a staggering 10,182 meth labs, and the fight against meth is straining the resources of local police and sheriffs in small towns. But the White House has proposed slashing federal aid for rural narcotics teams by half. "If those cuts go through, they're going to totally wipe us out," says Lt. Steve Dalton, leader of a drug task force in southwest Missouri."
CAN IT GET ANY MORE BLATENT????
This is an article from the NYT on the various differences between male and female brains, as well as their links to autism. Interesting points are listed below:
BUT, let us keep in mind that these differences appear when you look at GROUPS. INDIVIDUALS are widely varried and could fall on either side of the spectrum.
* the average man's cerebrum (the area in the front of the brain concerned with higher thinking) is 9 percent larger than the average woman's.
* men also have a larger amygdala (an almond shaped structure in the center of the brain involved in processing fear and emotion), and more nerve cells.
* In women, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker, perhaps facilitating interchange.
* This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males (on average) activate only the left hemisphere.
* On average, males finish faster and score higher than females on a test that requires the taker to visualize an object's appearance after it is rotated in three dimensions. The same is true for map-reading tests, and for embedded-figures tests, which ask subjects to find a component shape hidden within a larger design.
* Males are over-represented in the top percentiles on college-level math tests and tend to score higher on mechanics tests than females do.
* Females average higher scores than males on tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and language ability.
* girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate.
* One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.
* On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face. [I am suspicious of this one.]
* the amount of prenatal testosterone, which is produced by the fetus and measurable in the amniotic fluid in which the baby is bathed in the womb, predicts how sociable a child will be. The higher the level of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact the child will make as a toddler, and the slower the child will develop language.
* Males obviously produce far more prenatal testosterone than females do, but levels vary considerably even across members of the same sex. In fact, it may not be your sex per se that determines what kind of brain you have, but your prenatal hormone levels.
From Grist:
Estrogen exposure blamed for upswing in male chest-reduction surgery
British men are flocking to clinics for surgery to reduce their man mammaries. Here we pause a moment to savor that sentence ... OK, done. U.K. doctors blame increased exposure to female hormones for a reported doubling over one year of the number of operations for gynecomastia, a condition in which men grow bosoms similar in structure and composition to those of women -- as distinct from the mere fat deposits adorning portly TV-sitcom husbands. A society of U.K. plastic surgeons reported that members performed about 53 male chest-reduction surgeries apiece in 2004 compared to 22 in 2003. Likely causes of the estrogen exposure include traces of women's contraceptive pills in the water supply and hormones fed to animals raised for human consumption. Increased female hormones in the environment are also blamed for falling sperm counts in British men, whose ongoing emasculation is raising world schadenfreude to levels not seen since the Thames flooded with raw sewage almost a year ago.
Surgens actually "found mammary gland tissue usually found only in women."!
You can always trust Stu to uncover studies like this:
Reed et al. (2003) did a study to look at what the causes are of reoccurring yeast infections. They started with a sample of 148 women with yeast infections, 33 of which had a reoccurance of the infection during the study. They then looked at what factors made it most likely for the yeast infection to have reoccurred.
What they discovered was that it didn't matter if their partner was harboring lots of yeast or not (disproving the theory that men act as a reservoir to reinfect women with yeast). There's already lots of the yeast (Candida spp.) all over us, it's presence on the woman's partner didn't really matter.
What they did find is that women who had cunnilingus performed on them were 2.94 times more likely to get a yeast infection again. The next most likely cause was if the woman masterbated using her own saliva (making her 2.66 times more likely to become infected again).
This study didn't look at nonoxynol-9, I hope cunnilingus isn't quite as bad as that...
Eating lots of bread, and not drinking milk, also increased the chances of yeast infection.
REFERENCES
Reed, B. D., P. Zazove, C. L. Pierson, D. W. Gorenflo, and J. Horrocks. 2003. Candida transmission and sexual behaviors as risks for a repeat episode of Candida vulvovaginitis. Journal of Women's Health 12(10): 979-989.
Reed, B. D., D. W. Gorenflo, B. W. Gillespie, C. L. Pierson, and P. Zazove. 2000. Sexual behaviors and other risk factors for Candida vulvovaginitis. Journal of Women's Health & Gender-Based Medicine 9(6): 645-655.