Wilmut’s team named the sheep cloned from a single adult cell “Dolly” because that cell had come from a mammary gland. I’m tempted, on that basis alone, to cast my vote against human cloning. I mean, if that kind of short-sightedness or immaturity is going to be running things, they’re bound to go horribly wrong. …
Category: men
Jan 07 2014
Arrogance, I think
Fresh from the office of my supervisor who persists in gently giving me unsolicited advice, despite being neither older nor wiser, I’m struck by Rousseau’s tone (in his “Marriage”): “Extreme in all things, they [women] devote themselves to their play with greater zeal than boys. This is the second defect. This zeal must be kept …
Dec 18 2013
Let’s Talk about Sex
[This one’s a little old, as you can tell by the Salt-n-Pepa reference, but still relevant, I think. Sigh.] Disc jockeys generally come in two sexes: male and female. So what, you may think, sex doesn’t matter. Oh but it does, so sad to say. I used to deejay for weddings and other parties, and …
Dec 10 2013
Men’s Precision Teams
Have you ever wondered why, in the sport of figure skating, there are no men’s precision teams? Sure, precision skating requires attention to detail and a highly developed spatial sense. But both are surely male capabilities; in fact, aren’t they male superiorities? Isn’t that why (so we’re told) men dominate science and engineering? And of …
Dec 01 2013
First (and last) Contact
Women have a long tradition of being diplomats. “Historically… marriage has been the major alliance mechanism of every society, and little girls are trained for roles as intervillage family diplomats…the married woman straddles two kin networks, two villages, sometimes two cultures” (The Underside of History, Elise Boulding, p.53-54). Many women have decades of experience, settling …
Nov 22 2013
A Little Less Evolved
Sometimes I wonder whether men have a defective chromosome: the Y was supposed to be an X, but somehow it ended up missing something – a case of stunted growth, or arrested development. This defective chromosome, uniquely characteristic of the human male, causes them to be a little lower on the evolutionary scale, a little …
Nov 01 2013
What happens when men do the cooking and the baking?
Used to be women did the cooking and the baking. Then men starting getting into it. And in theory, I have no problem with that. In fact, I’m all for making everything gender-unaligned. But now that men are in the kitchen, suddenly it’s important. So important it’s being televised. And my god, the drama! (And …
Oct 24 2013
The Pill for Men
‘Outrageous!’ That was the word used way back in ’85 in response to the expectation that men take a contraceptive that had a side-effect of reduced sex drive. Hello. Let me tell you about the contraceptive pill for women. Side-effects include headaches, nausea, weight gain, mood changes, yeast infections, loss of vision, high blood pressure, …
Sep 23 2013
Testicular Battery and Tranquilizer Guns (what the world needs now is)
Given the relative vulnerability of men to sexual assault (all it takes to disable them is a swift forceful kick, or, at closer quarters, a good grab, pull, twist – almost anything, really) (whereas women have to be partially undressed and then immobilized), given the relative vulnerability of men to sexual assault, it’s surprising that …
Sep 15 2013
p.s. (the grounds for assuming a woman is a lesbian)
The guy in the pick-up did not know if I was a lesbian. He apparently assumed so. Because… (take your pick; they’re all exemplars of flawed reasoning) – I do not live with a man. – I am not married to a man. – I am not a mother. – I am not feminine in …
fiction
