Teresa Puente on the sexist and racist stereotypes stirred up by the Sanford affair.
Demand justice for the Florida tomato pickers who supply the produce that Chipotle uses.
Dana Goldstein and Michelle Goldberg chat on bloggingheads about Sanford, Iran, Sarkozy's burqa ban, and Michael Jackson.
A study shows that women are less likely than men to agree on what traits are attractive. (Though I tend to think studies that make such major generalizations based on gender are not particularly enlightening.)
Urge the Senate Finance Committee to ensure any health-care reforms contain reproductive health coverage.
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The conclusions drawn based on that study (about what traits each gender finds attractive) make no sense and sound antiquated.
The readers' opinions which they chose to highlight are incredibly stupid. It's almost like they went out of their way to find the worst ones:
Northern_Nonsense on LiveScience.com wrote, "There has to be some kind of link between gender and programmability. The masculine brain (I don't have one, but I deal with them all the time) seems to want lines to follow: rules, military service, conformity in general. It's no wonder there is a uniform ideal for mates as well."
Seriously?! Of course the first thing someone brings up is genetics... no mention about the social constructions of gender in our society. Obviously it's because the "masculine brain" is just sooo incredibly different from the feminine brain.
Yeah, the whole time I was reading it I was like,
"Is no one going to point out the fact that men are allowed to be attractive in much more varied ways than women? Older men can still be attractive while older women are 'used up,' and it's this big horrible thing if a man admits he finds a heavier woman attractive, etc, etc!"
You make a great point, newfeminist. Women, in traditional marriage, have been commodified. How they sell themselves is largely by trying to make themselves physically attractive to men. So, the definition of what makes women attractive is always up for public debate and personal pains that women take to achieve it. That's why men look at women in magazines (shopping in a catalogue that most of them cannot afford to purchase from) and women look at women in magazines to see what they need to look like.
This tendency is residual scum from when women had to depend on men to survive.
Some studies show that this is changing. I read that among the ruling class, women have been selecting men who look a certain way. I think that the homophobic term "metrosexual" applied to upscale urban men who use "product" and work out is a misidentification of this phenomenon and that the trend now is for men to start feeling worse about themselves rather than women to start feeling good about themselves, because capitalism benefits greatly from the perceived "need" to be "attractive."
Rkaralius simply remarked, "LOL! No wonder it's so hard for guys to figure out what women want."
barf barf barf
Men have traditionally said they want a woman who is intelligent and well-educated. But the study proved that men based their attraction on physical appearance, namely how thin and seductive they are. They also rated more confident women as more attractive.
Ummm... You're asking them to judge people based on photos, and you act all surprised when they base their judgement on "physical appearance" rather than intelligence and sense of humour?
All this study proved is that men can rank people in terms of physical attractiveness. It certainly doesn't demonstrate that that's the primary criterion that we use.
"Researchers say this might explain why the competition for good-looking women is so fierce in the real world. For women it's not as hard to find a mate since they have different ideas of what's attractive. But for men, the researchers said they would likely have to invest more time and energy in attracting and guarding their mates from other potential suitors."
Umm... notice how incredibly male-centric this conclusion is?
If men are all looking for one type of woman, how do they conclude that things are easier for women?
This is plain and simply one of these childish "My life is harder! No mine!" type of arguments
But if it's true that men are more homogenous in what they find attractive, that would blow a big hole in you guys' arguments for equality at all cost, right?
So feminists have an incentive to disregard these findings as "junk science" rather than taking them for what they're worth.
Huh?
I stopped watching when Dana said that she'd only ever known Michael Jackson as a "creepy pedophile," and then it was two white women scratching their heads over why his death was such a big deal to people.
Ugh.
I'm guessing the reason more men agree on what's hot is because the women in the media all generally look more or less the same, but men in the media have a much broader range of looks and styles. I mean, when was the last time they cast a woman who looks like the female equivalent of Jack Black?
I wonder if these results (that men agree more on what's attractive) hold true when they survey gay or lesbian men and women?
"I wonder if these results (that men agree more on what's attractive) hold true when they survey gay or lesbian men and women?"
In the article they said it did. Not that this study still isn't flawed for many of the reasons other posters mentioned above.
"I'm guessing the reason more men agree on what's hot is because the women in the media all generally look more or less the same, but men in the media have a much broader range of looks and styles. I mean, when was the last time they cast a woman who looks like the female equivalent of Jack Black?"
this is a chicken v. egg argument. you argue that men's ideal of beauty is dictated by social stigma, while it's entirely possible that those in the media and on film are chosen because they closely match men's narrower ideal of beauty.
But then wouldn't the ideal female have looked the same across the ages? Beauty ideals have changed vastly through human history - early fertility statues depict heavyset women with lots of body fat. In the middle ages and the Renaissance, the ideal woman was also more heavy. Today's super skinny ideal (Meghan Fox) would have caused all the women to die in childbirth. Look at Marilyn Monroe! Just a few decades ago, curvier women were the epitome of female beauty.
How can you possibly argue that men are hard-wired to like today's ideal when it's clear by looking at history it has been an ever-evolving process?
I think that the fact that women are conditioned to obsess over every imperfection on their own body makes them more likely to do the same thing to other women when men would just have a general positive reaction. So where a man would just say 'oh she's attractive' a woman might decide she dislikes something subtle about the shape of a single feature.
I also think that men often feel pressured to feign a positive reaction to women who are stereotypically hot even if they actually prefer a different kind of woman because of a perception that a man who doesn't like a 'hot' woman is weak sexually or more homosexual. I've many times seen men question the sexuality of another man if he dares to admit he doesn't find a famous porn star attractive.
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