Category: Men & Women

Things that men and women do, sometimes to each other

Reading Foundations

Education, Homeschooling, Men & Women

Over at Snark & Shotguns comes a timely bit of analysis:

In 2015 a team of researchers walked into German classrooms and asked teachers to rate how good boys and girls are at reading. The average answer was that girls are better. Then they tracked the kids for two years. Boys whose teachers held the strongest stereotype saw their reading self-concept drop measurably, holding actual achievement constant. The teachers weren’t making the boys worse readers. They were making the boys believe they were worse readers, which boys, being human, respond to by reading less.

It gets funnier. A French team in 2016 gave eighty third-graders the same reading task twice. First time it was framed as a reading test. Boys flopped. Second time, same task, framed as a game. Boys beat the girls. And here’s the punchline — the boys most damaged by the “test” framing were the boys who cared most about reading. The ones who’d internalized that reading mattered were the ones whose performance collapsed the moment reading was put in the institutional cage labelled Test.

And then the most telling observation:

Last thought, and this one really matters. Jerrim and Moss, in the biggest international study of its kind, looked at 297,000 fifteen-year-olds across 35 countries and asked which kind of reading develops reading skill.

Answer: fiction.

Only fiction.

Non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, comics… Once you control for fiction, none of those do the work. The gender gap in fiction specifically is larger than the gender gap in any other text type.

Boys are not failing to read. Boys are failing to read the one thing that makes them better readers.

I can attest to this.  When we started homeschooling the Son&Heir, fresh out of Catholic middle school, we tested his reading skills and found them to be around sixth-grade level.

So in addition to whatever else we taught him (Saxon Math, mostly), he had to read for no less than four hours a day.  Every day.  And by “every”, I mean Monday through Sunday.  (We made allowances for family outings and so on, but that as the guideline.)

At first, he kicked and screamed, complaining that he kept falling asleep, to which our response was, “Fine.  If you fall asleep, don’t worry about it.  Just keep reading when you wake up.”  We didn’t really much care what he read, only that it couldn’t be a picture book or comics.  And because he didn’t know what to read, I gave him a series of books from our library to start with.  There were no restrictions about following the list, however;  if he got halfway through a book and it failed to keep his interest, he could quit reading it — but he had to explain to me why he’d done so.

It took about a year.  And then one day he asked me:  “Do we have any more books by Daphne du Maurier?”  He’d found a favorite author.  In the following months, he read her entire body of work.  And then came the real breakthrough:  he discovered fantasy, in the shape of R.A. Salvatore (author of about a jillion titles), and over the next few years read all of his body of work.

All of a sudden, we couldn’t stop him reading.  He moved on to the Great Books — he still has the set — and never looked back.  To this day, he is one of the most well-read men I know.  His B.A., by the way, carries a Philosophy major, which is not a discipline for the non-reader.  (He reads stuff, e.g. Hegel, that makes his father’s brain hurt.)

I know:  the plural of anecdote is not data.  But it certainly supports the Jerrim and Moss experiment.

Now go and read the whole article to see how badly public schools have served our boys.

Situation Vacant

Men & Women

This one gave me a chuckle:

Lando Norris’ model ex-girlfriend Margarida Corceiro shows off her incredible figure in a tiny blue bikini after split from Formula One world champion

Well, of course she would.  Her meal ticket has gone away, so now she has to put the merchandise back in the window.

It must be said, however, that without the current F1 World Championship and all his money, young Lando would not be regarded as much of a catch.

But it just goes to show that no matter how beautiful or attractive a woman may be, there’s always at least one guy who’s sick of all her bullshit.  Although, speaking personally, I think she’s completely unattractive:  way too skinny and no superstructure to speak of.  But that’s models for ya.

So Much For That Trend

Men & Women, Sports

People have been moaning recently about how Gen Z kids aren’t having sex anymore, also seeming to prefer hanging out on porn websites or (worse) relying on A.I.-created partners for their jollies.

Well as it turns out, that’s apparently not true for all Gen Z kids:

The village where Winter Olympics athletes are staying in Milan has reportedly run out of condoms after slashing its supply from 300,000 to a mere 10,000.

I would have thought that the condom needs for just the Swedish Olympians would have emptied [sic]  that supply — the Swedes (Winter and Summer) being generally regarded as the most prolific users thereof — but hey, I guess the Olympics Committee was trying to save money or something.

I guess it’s also quite telling that these kids felt they could rely on “government” to take care of their every need.  (Without any proof, though, I’m pretty sure that most of the American kids brought their own supplies of said items with them — I know I would have, under such circumstances.)

And just to head one argument off at the pass, let’s at least acknowledge that when you throw a group of superbly-fit youngsters from all over the world together into confined quarters, they’re going to go at it like rabbits.  (And the organizers need to be kicked in the ass for thinking that these young Olympians were going to be any different from previous athletes.)

No need to spend time at PornHub or ai.com when you can have easy access to real-life willing bodies, after all.

Maybe Not

Men & Women

Them times sure are a-changing… just not quite how Dylan envisaged it:

Tabitha Willett has sparked debate as she criticized ‘commuting men on their phones’ for not offering her a train seat – despite wearing a ‘baby on board’ badge. 

The Made In Chelsea star, 33, who is expecting her second child, took to Instagram on Tuesday to tell London commuters to ‘do better’. 

Sharing a short video of a busy train showing a number of people sitting and standing on their phones, Tabitha penned: ‘I don’t want to be a moan but… 

‘On the way back from the school run and a carriage full of men on their phones and no one stood up for a pregnant woman with a badge or elderly couple next to me. 

‘Do better London’.

Not gonna happen.

I mean, I myself will always stand up to offer my seat to a woman, pregnant or not.  But I’m not a younger man who’s had the shit kicked out of me since childhood by the public school system, by the media and by women in general for my toxic masculinity and frequent screams of “we can do anything that men can do”.

Well then, young men might say, you can bloody well stand on the train when there aren’t any open seats, just like men do.

And let’s be honest:  that passive-aggressive button (“Baby On Board”?  give me strength) isn’t going to help matters.

Back in the day, of course, such boorish and selfish behavior from younger men would have sparked a response from other men in the railway carriage, said miscreants being hoisted out of their seat by the collar, with maybe a few solid cuffs to the head thrown in.

Now?  No chance, chickie.

And you can think your ultra-feministicals for that, because men have a simple response for when the rules of the game are changed to their detriment:  they just stop playing.

Manners and courtesy, you see, have always been an indulgence and not a duty.  And the days of indulgence are over.

Like I said:  I’m not going to change;  the habits and manners of a lifetime are too ingrained in me for that simple rejection.  But when young men have never been taught those simple manners, those lubricants of polite society, and even been chided that said manners are arrogant and prime examples of The Patriarchy / Toxic Masculinity…

Well, they’re just going to stay in their seats.  As they should.

Lifetime Curse

Men & Women

I have written elsewhere that most of my problems in life have generally stemmed from three sources, which on occasion have overlapped substantially:

  • my total inability to accept authority figures and/or their pissy little rules
  • my stubbornness and refusal to respond (positively) to ultimatums
  • my love of the female of the species

The first two are pretty self-explanatory, but as for the third… well, it has various layers.

My infatuation with the female sex was documented at an early age.  In first grade I became infatuated with a lovely Jewish girl named Lynette, and tried for ages to get her to kiss me, but to no avail.  With that abject failure to guide me, I left off any kind of physical approach for years thereafter, but the infatuation for for the opposite sex stayed with me.

I kissed a girl for the first time at age 13, while on our annual summer holiday on the Natal north coast.  (Thanks, Ingrid!)  That a very attractive blonde Dutch girl allowed me to kiss her, nay even to French kiss her, made me realize that maybe just maybe things weren’t going to be horrible and I wasn’t going to end up, in today’s terminology, as an incel.

At age 14, my housemaster referred to my attitude (correctly) as “cherchez la femme ” — I wasn’t even aware of it, but he obviously saw the signs:  longing glances at the few female teachers at our boarding school, and the fact that I was one of the first guys in my class to actually have a steady girlfriend (hi, Ethne!) who nearly got me into serious trouble when a teacher caught me making out with her not clandestinely but right out in the open at a school rugby match.  Luckily for me, he was a cool teacher and just told me to stop doing that (as opposed to shopping me to my housemaster, which would have ended badly — caning, suspension, you get my drift).

I once faked an injury to avoid playing a weekend sports match against a rival school, just so that I could skip school and go to the movies with my girlfriend — as I recall, the fourth or fifth after Ethne (hi, Althea!  or was it Bridget?).  Sadly, I was busted by another teacher who saw me holding her hand at the bus stop;  and guessing (correctly) that I didn’t have a “pass” (we called them an exeat ) to leave the school grounds, he turned me over to my housemaster who promptly flogged me and “gated” me (kept me at school over the weekend) for three full weeks.

I’ve already told about the time when, in my final year at high school, I was found to have entertained my girlfriend in my dorm room — as it turned out, quite innocently in that there was no romantic activity, but which very nearly got me expelled.

And on and on it went over the years thereafter:  a catalogue of romantic catastrophes, broken hearts, failed relationships, infidelities, divorces etc.

All driven by my insatiable infatuation with women.  Fortunately, as I’ve got older, the problem has become milder (thank gawd) but I still love women, even though the actual interaction with them has softened to merely flirting (a constant source of irritation to New Wife, who is blessedly aware that it’s quite harmless).  Here’s an example (and it’s quite harmless, as you will see).

I was shopping at the supermarket some time ago, and as it happened, on the list was a female-oriented product which I was unable to locate.  (Not sanitary protection, of course — I know where to find that — but it was something like a sewing kit or maybe needles.)  Because I’m a man, I don’t ask for directions and in any event, the store people were nowhere in evidence and I wasn’t going to go searching for a specimen.  But there was a woman shopping in the aisle, so I walked up to her and said, “Excuse me:  I’m sorry to bother you but you are a lady — a very attractive lady, by the way, but that’s a topic for another time — and so you probably know where I can find [this product].  Can you help me?”

Of course, this being in the South, she was properly appreciative of the compliment and didn’t think I was oppressing her or trying to rape her or whatever the Modern Delusional Woman thinks when confronted with this kind of situation.   Instead, she smiled (dimples!), thanked me for the compliment, and told me where  to find the thing.  And that was the end of it.  (By the way, she wasn’t very attractive, but hell, it cost me nothing and might have made her day, so whatever.)  Just an innocent encounter, with no ulterior motive whatsoever.  (Had this happened when I was in my twenties… well.)

This behavior has persisted even into my advanced years.  I call it Vestigial Testosterone Syndrome (VTS):  vestigial because it’s not the raging forest fire of my youth, but yet there are still a few embers glowing amongst the ashes.

I can’t even stop looking at attractive women when I’m out and about.  The habit is completely ingrained at this point, and I’ll probably never stop.  On my deathbed I’ll doubtless be flirting with the nurse.

It’s not some kind of leering silliness, either.  I appreciate the female form in all its beauty and wonder, much as I appreciate a nice-looking car, or a painting.  It’s beauty — sometimes flawed, sometimes exquisite — and I love it, all of it.

If this causes some people to have the modern-day apoplexy at my gall in having male tendencies, I don’t care.

Which, come to think of it, may well be a fourth trait of my personality to cause me trouble:  my total indifference towards other people’s opinions of me and my actions.