Author Archive
There’s a popular meme around these interwebs: Thankful Thursday. I’m not sure exactly where this meme originated, but it’s one of my favorites, because it gets you thinking about all the things in life from week to week — from the seemingly mundane to the major — that should be appreciated. And I don’t know about you all, but I don’t do that nearly enough.
Here’s my list for today. Feel free to share your own in the comments, or leave a link in the comments to your list on your own blog.
1. The color purple. 
2. The luxury of working in an air-conditioned office.
3. Elliptical machines.
4. Living in a city with such an … interesting … political landscape.
5. A car that may be filthy and falling apart, but that gets me places.
6. Fellow nerds, dorks, geeks, and dweebs (we’re taking over!).
7. The possibility of traveling overseas this fall.
8. Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, for giving me something to laugh at derisively while I shake my fists at its twisted “moral” messages.
9. Being around talented, creative people every single day.
10. Rufus Wainwright’s voice.
11. My camera. I don’t feel right without it near me.
12. My dad, for believing in me enough to make it possible for me to have that camera.
13. The fact that my new cats have not yet figured out how to jump up on the kitchen counter, which, if they knew how, would complicate my life by about a hundred percent.
14. Finally realizing that “acknowledgment” doesn’t have an additional “e” in it. Yeesh!
15. Rain!
What about you? What are you thankful for this week?
Via Alternet comes Gloria Steinem’s defense of “chick flicks” and, to a lesser extent, “chick lit,” which is arguably much more vapid than the standard “chick flick” such as Steel Magnolias.
Steinem argues that a “chick flick” can be defined as having “more dialogue than special effects, more relationships than violence, and relies for its suspense on how people live instead of how they die.” The rub is that the cultural attitude toward “chick flicks” — a general, if sometimes unspoken, acknowledgment that they are lame and inferior because of their emphasis on relationships and emotion — reflects a prevailing condescending cultural attitude toward women and “women’s issues” (as if females are the only sex to have emotions and relationships) in general.
So, Steinem suggests a new literary and film genre to level the playing field.
We’ve all heard the weathered old stereotype that pegs women as the chattier of the two sexes. Last year, Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and founder of San Francisco’s Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, published The Female Brain, a book that claimed it would help explain why:
• A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000
• Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain once every couple of days but enter a man’s brain about once every minute
• A woman knows what people are feeling, while a man can’t spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm
The 20,000 words meme picked up some steam after Brizendine’s book hit the shelves (to be fair, the idea didn’t start with Brizendine’s claim; some variation of the “women speak more words than men” stereotype has been repeated for years and years; linguist Mark Liberman has a good compilation of the meme’s permutations here) and such cultural heavyweights as New York Times columnist David Brooks began using the numbers as a foundation for broader claims about sex differences. Unfortunately for Brizendine (and Brooks and anyone else clinging to the notion), the science behind the meme was hard to dig up.
In fact, new research suggests that the stereotype of the chatty woman and the mum man is mostly bunk.
A new study released by Science finds that the gap between the number of words spoken by men and women is practically nonexistent.
There’s an interesting post up at Huffington Post about the women of Saturday Night Live and why their careers never seem to take off like their male counterparts, even when the culture awards them comedy-legend status (the writer’s foremost example is Gilda Radner). 
The writer, Alex Remington, says a partial explanation is that the women of SNL are plagued by the same problem as all the other women in Hollywood: Despite their talent, their careers are jeopardized by their ages.
The women on Saturday Night Live have often been fine comedians, but the show doesn’t give them a good platform to be funny themselves. So after they leave the show, each becomes yet another thirtysomething woman struggling to make it in Hollywood, still looking for her one big break amid a sea of younger, hotter girls.
(click map to enlarge)
Just a month or two ago, a friend and I — both of us relative Memphis noobs; she’s been here about a year and I’m coming up on two and a half years — were having lunch and the conversation inevitably turned (okay, I steered it there) to how to meet dateable people in this city. We kicked around the obvious places — bars, music shows, school, etc. — and then pondered the online dating scene in the Mid-South and if it’s even worth diving into. She moved here from San Francisco, where dating via Craigslist is somewhat popular, but as Memphis isn’t quite the tech-y city that San Francisco is, I can’t imagine that online dating would be nearly as rewarding.
Now that I’ve seen this map (which many people are comparing to a high-school dance, with boys on one side of the room and girls on the other), though, it looks like an uphill battle for straight women in this city no matter what the strategy. Memphis seems to have upwards of 20,000 more single women than men. That helps explain why a lot of guys I know date a lot more women than you’d think (I’m kidding … sort of). It’s sheer demographic hooey.
So, how to overcome such numeric inequality? How do you meet people in Memphis? And am I wrong about writing off online dating? Or should I just move to the west coast?
Hat tip: Pharyngula
