Category: Men & Women

Things that men and women do, sometimes to each other

Amazing Find

Men & Women

Here we go:

My old friend Richard Dorman* once described this wondrous female feature to me thus:

“Way I see it, old man, my job is to insert my tallywocker into the aperture provided, and commence the rocking movement for the next few minutes until the load is delivered.  Job done.  If she needs to activate her little switch to reach her own Special Moment, then it’s up to her to activate it.”

Try as I may, I can find no fault with his logic, cold as it may be.

And where would we be without !SCIENCE!, I ask.

*Dicky was an old colleague of mine back at the Great Big Research Company (Seffrican division).  He deserves, and will one day get, his own entry [sic]  on these pages.

10-Foot Pole

Men & Women

In the first few months after I moved to the U.S., I remember asking a girl out on a date.  When she agreed, I asked where I could pick her up.

“I’ll meet you there,” was her response.

Needless to say, I was a little mystified.  “No, I don’t mind picking you up,” I insisted.

“Well, I’d feel more comfortable just driving to wherever we’ll be meeting up.”  Then she added, “That way, if we’re not having a good time, we’re each just free to go.”

Wow.  That was interesting, and very enlightening.  Basically, what she was doing was hedging her bets — and from her body language, the unspoken message was that she was likewise uncomfortable in having me learn where she lived.

Culture shock, on my part.

Faced with that rudeness, I’m afraid I was rude in return.  “Tell you what:  let’s just go in three cars, to make it even more inconvenient.”

Needless to say, nothing ever came of the whole thing.  I later learned that at the time I asked her out, she was a couple months pregnant.  Bullet, dodged.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read this little story:

“One of my rules is, if a man doesn’t at least offer to send you a car for the date, whether you take it or not, no date!” said Savannah Pagnozzi, a Big Apple lifestyle influencer. “No. Absolutely not. We don’t do that.”

Look, I get it, when it comes to NYfC.  It’s not the easiest place to get around — I mean, forget about driving anywhere, whether it’s to pick up your date or even to get to the rendezvous.  And I could certainly see getting a car (Uber, cab, whatever) to take you to her place to pick her up.  That’s the gentlemanly thing to do.  But what this NYfC bint wants is to have a chauffeured drive to the place and  — no doubt — another carriage to take Princess home as well.

The sheer effrontery of this, from a woman who is at best marginally attractive (in Manhattan;  in L.A. or Dallas, she wouldn’t get a second look) just takes my breath away.  No doubt, she’ll probably want to see a personal financial statement from him during that first date as well.

Ladies, just remember:  if you’re not bringing much to the party, so to speak, you’re not really in any position to make demands of a first date.  To be blunt, you have no room to feel entitled just because you have a vagina — and especially so if it’s a well-trodden path, so to speak.

As for the guys:  take a hard pass when you’re confronted by this kind of attitude.

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.