Breaking news, boys not sex addicted animals!1!

Who would have thought:

Today, though more than half of unmarried 18- and 19-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, fewer than 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old boys and girls have, down from 50 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls in 1988. And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation.

[...T]he 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than one-third of teenage boys, but only one-quarter of teenage girls, cited wanting to avoid pregnancy or disease as the main reason they had not yet had sex. Fear about sex was intensified by the AIDS crisis and by sex education that portrayed sex outside of heterosexual marriage as risky. Combined with growing access to pornography via the Internet, those influences may have made having sex with another person seem less enticing. [...]

In a large-scale survey and interviews, reported in the American Sociological Review in 2006, the sociologist Peggy Giordano and her colleagues found teenage boys to be just as emotionally invested in their romantic relationships as girls.[...]

[T]he most recent research by the family growth survey, conducted between 2006 and 2010, indicates that relationships matter to boys more often than we think. Four of 10 males between 15 and 19 who had not had sex said the main reason was that they hadn’t met the right person or that they were in a relationship but waiting for the right time; an additional 3 of 10 cited religion and morality.

Boys have long been under pressure to shed what the sociologist Laura Carpenter has called the “stigma of virginity.” But maybe more American boys are now waiting because they have gained cultural leeway to choose a first time that feels emotionally right. If so, their liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the very feminist movement that Rush Limbaugh recently decried.

Hatttip to reddit.

I hope he dies / I hope she dies - Topsy analysis

Now that was interesting. The blogger on the Men Matterz blog used Topsy (a site to analyze tweets) to see how common advocating violence towards men were. The results from the last 30 days:

“cut off his dick” – 646 instances
“chopped off his balls” – 102 instances
“chopped off his dick” – 60 instances
“chop off his dick” – 232 instances
“rip his dick off” – 31 instances
“going to kill him” – 374 instances
“I hope he gets raped” – 34 instances
“I want to stab him”- 66 instances

If retweets are taken into consideration, just on these phrases alone which only represent a fraction of the variations out there, the number exceeded well over 4,000 genuinely disturbing comments in just 30 days.

I have no clue how twitter works when it comes to retweets but found this pretty interesting. I asked myself, of course, but what about women, as compared to men. So I used Topsy as well as Google to find some results for phrases that include kill, die and rape. The Results:

                              Topsy (All Time)      Google
----------------------------------------------------------
"I hope he gets raped"         121                 385,000
"I hope she gets raped"         56                 184,000
Gender Ratio (F:M)            0.46                    0.47

"I want to rape him"           241                  99,300
"I want to rape her"            62                 139,000
Gender Ratio (F:M)            0.25                    1.39            

"I hope he dies"              1937               1,790,000
"I hope she dies"             1181                 603,000
Gender Ratio (F:M)            0.60                    0.33            

"I want to kill him"          3642               3,360,000
"I want to kill her"          1915               1,420,000
Gender Ratio (F:M)            0.52                    0.42

"I hope he gets killed"         54                 627,000
"I hope she gets killed"        45                 223,000
Gender Ratio (F:M)            0.83                    0.35

Pretty interesting results. Especially for the rape items where I did not suspect to be more hateful comments against men, on Twitter. The Google result for "I want to rape him/her" is the only item where the female version got more hits. I played around with "rape her / rape him" which is in favor of the female version, however most of the results listed seem to come from news reports so these findings are not surprising and I was looking for people advocating for violence.

Why do women like women more than men like men?

That is the question:

Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: why do women like women more than men like men? - Rudman LA, Goodwin SA. - 2004

Four experiments confirmed that women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's and investigated explanations for this sex difference, derived from potential sources of implicit attitudes (L. A. Rudman, 2004). In Experiment 1, only women (not men) showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity, and self-esteem (A. G. Greenwald et al., 2002), revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference. Experiments 2 and 3 found pro-female bias to the extent that participants automatically favored their mothers over their fathers or associated male gender with violence, suggesting that maternal bonding and male intimidation influence gender attitudes. Experiment 4 showed that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women. In concert, the findings help to explain sex differences in automatic in-group bias and underscore the uniqueness of gender for intergroup relations theorists.

Recently in England

While I do usually focus on the Us of A...some noteworthy stuff that popped up in my google reader this (and the last) week: There was the case of a student suing the London School of Economics because there gender studies course was misandrist:

The 39-year-old, who attended the university last year to take up a Gender, Media and Culture Masters degree, said there was “systemic anti-male discrimination”.

A statement by the school kind of agree

The university’s legal team has asked for the case to be struck out, claiming the core texts were not compulsory, merely recommended readings, and that the texts were equally available for both men and women to read, so therefore did not directly discriminate against men. The team also argues that “any discriminatory effect [against men] was plainly justifiable”.

Read the excellent analysis by TS here. Then there was this

Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone has launched a scathing attack on her male counterparts, insisting the world's continuing financial crisis was a direct result of men's failure to make the correct choices. 'In terms of decision making I have always gone out and advocated to women you must get your hands on levers, you must get hold of power, you must be where decisions are made. Because otherwise if you leave it to - I'm going to say men in this case because that's the way the world has worked - you get terrible decisions. 'Look at the mess the world is in, and look who has been in charge. I leave it there.'

Kind of disturbing that the person saying this is the equality minister there.

Meanwhile, fellow Conservative MP Priti Patel told the Evening Standard: 'These comments are really ill-thought out. As equalities minister she has got to be unbiased about the value that both men and women bring to decision-making. 'She works in a department that is trying to address inequalities in society - to then dump the blame for a range of problems on one sex is completely wrong and misguided.'

From the same party that wants this.

[2d] 'Enabling vulnerable families to stay together by implementing the Corston recommendatons, which would see a gradual closure of all women's prisons and their replacement with some small custodial units for serious and dangerous offenders, and, for most women offenders, a larger network of support and supervision centres in the community.' [found via reddit]

More misandry in that teachers case:

Mr Pullinger had almost 20 years' teaching experience when he was dismissed in 2009. The GTC heard this month that he had allowed a pupil to sit on his lap, shared a chair with another and, on numerous occasions, "failed to disengage immediately when girls ran up to him and put their arms around his legs". He had been warned in writing on two occasions, but had "failed to heed" the advice. In its ruling, the GTC said it had "noted the positive testimonials about Mr Pullinger and the fact of the positive assessment of his technical abilities". But it ruled that his behaviour amounted to "a breach of the standards of propriety expected". The ruling added: "His behaviour demonstrated a failure to establish and maintain appropriate and professional boundaries in his relationships with children in his care."

I guess the following is not that surprising:

Around a quarter of primary schools [...] now have no male teachers, and experts have warned that a lack of male role models may be putting boys off school at an early age.

And we had of course this:

At present, a woman can start receiving her state pension at the age of 60 years and seven months. A man must wait until he is 65. Under the changes, the age will be 65 for both men and women in November 2018, rising to 66 by April 2020. [...] ‘We’ll make sure that the state pension they do get is calculated in a fairer way. At the moment, pensions are often bad news for women and I’m determined as the minister to change that. ‘There’s a range of things that you can do, whether it’s about dates or about other bits of the system, that would ease the financial pressure for those most affected. ‘I won’t pre-empt what we’ll say to Parliament in some weeks’ time but the crucial thing for us is fairness.’

Fair eh?