What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

from Sunday’s NYT. full piece here.

I read this with interest, dying to read the comments section…but there wasn’t one. I’m guessing they were afraid to have it. Saw a few FB friends discussing and they all felt like the article didn’t reflect their experience in NYC.

We all do things in order to be (sexually) attractive to others. Some with abandon, some with reservations.

I also listened to the Lena Dunham interview on Fresh Air today – anybody else catch it? I thought the segment where Terry asked her about young adults’ sexual behaviors and appetites being influenced by watching porn was handled in a thought-provoking way. I’m sure the subject matter is mildly horrifying to many but I thought the discussion accurately reflected what I’ve heard in interviews.

Watch this video about a performance piece by Sarah Hughes.

Over the span of more than 10 years, Hughes has traveled the globe documenting people in one outfit in which they feel safe and comfortable and one in which they feel sexy. The photographs are accompanied by audio interviews in which predominately women, and some men, answer questions about themselves and what makes them feel safe, sexy, vulnerable and powerful. Hughes has taken the project to Canada, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa and Swaziland.

This is definitely true for me personally.

The public is increasingly going to Wikipedia as a research source: According to a recent Pew survey, the percentage of all American adults who use the site to look for information increased to 42 percent in May 2010, from 25 percent in February 2007. This translates to 53 percent of adults who regularly use the Internet.

What I don’t do is contribute to wikis. Why?
I don’t consider myself “the expert” on much of anything and even if I did, I’m not sure I’d have the patience to sit down and clean up everybody else’s misinformation. I am constantly AMAZED at how much time my C. will spend “telling people on the internet that they are wrong.” The same people, over and over again. I am convinced a lot of insomniac men sit around in their underwear at night, talking (typing) shiz to one another. I would rather read than yell at my computer – call me crazy.

Do you contribute? Because now I’m thinking that more of us ladies should do so.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Consider and discuss:

…. the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

Our recession has been around long enough for left and right-leaning thinktanks to collaborate on papers on topic.

I thought this one from the American Center for Progress and the Hamilton Foundation was worth skimming through.

And for the second time in less than 6 months, the Atlantic has a cover that’s screaming how men are becoming obsolete.

As more and more colleges struggle to balance out their campuses (since so many more girls are entering and completing their undergraduate degrees) it’s interesting to see that some grade schools might have to face the same issue.

I believe in the past, there was a more concerted effort / general wisdom approach to “balance” out genders when initially admitting kids into the programs. Are school administrators tired of listening to young girls’ parents complain when their qualified child does not get in or are more parents pushing harder for the daughters than in the past?

Though the [New York City] school system over all is 51 percent male, its gifted classrooms generally have more girls.

Around the city, the current crop of gifted kindergartners, for example, is 56 percent girls, and in the 2008-9 year, 55 percent were girls.

Educators and experts have long known that boys lag behind girls in measures like high school graduation rates and college enrollment, but they are concerned that the disparity is also turning up at the very beginning of the school experience.

Why more girls than boys enter the programs is unclear, though there are some theories. Among the most popular is the idea that young girls are favored by the standardized tests the city uses to determine admission to gifted programs, because they tend to be more verbal and socially mature at ages 4 and 5 when they sit for the hourlong exam.

Biases and expectations among adults are often in play when determining which children count as gifted, and fewer boys appear to end up in gifted programs nationally. A 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that boys were “overrepresented in programs for learning disabilities, mental retardation and emotional disturbance, and slightly underrepresented in gifted programs,” said Bruce A. Bracken, a professor at the College of William & Mary who wrote one of the two exams that the city uses to test gifted children. He said the implications of the study were “disturbing.”

Dr. Bracken’s assessment, which makes up 25 percent of a child’s gifted score in the city, has been field tested for gender bias, and during a recent round of testing in Virginia, no gender differences in the score were recorded. But the longer Otis-Lennon Ability Test, the other 75 percent of the gifted exam, is “more verbal than some of the other tests,” which could play to girls’ strengths, said David F. Lohman, a professor and testing expert at the University of Iowa.

More lefty liberals writing about their friends from the New York Times.

Fascinating – read it here.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

What will our families’ economic structure look like in 5 years, 20 years, when I’m old and gray? All Americans (citizens of most of the world?) think about these things more frequently than we ever thought possible, I’m sure.

As planners/strategists/what-are-we-calling-ourselves-these-days, it’s our job to do it a bit more thoughtfully, perhaps with a bit of detachment even.

Before the Great Recession whirled into our lives, girls were already attending and graduating from university at higher rates. In something like 30% of dual income households, the ladies were already bringing home the larger paycheck.

With this in mind, one of the more interesting threads to ponder (to my potted mind) is what, if any, changes will occur within male-female relations as a result of mens diminished earning capacity. Will we all finally GET BEYOND money as equaling power in a relationship? Will “the gold-digger” varietal of our species veer towards extinction? (fingers crossed, small prayer, nod and done!)

A bit of fodder for the mental hamster wheel, my pretties:

Read this phenomenal Atlantic piece on how today’s economic situation will change the future of manhood.

Last Friday, the Labor Department released payroll information and yep, it’s official, more women are working in the US than men. This blog post in the NYT digs into the data.

And then head over to a University of Chicago professor’s article that pulls apart some of the data surrounding government entitlement payments by generation. It’s sure to make the senior set uncomfortable. There aren’t any comments up as of my posting here, but I imagine there will be in short order.

An average couple has 135 tiffs a year, a new UK study has found.

According to the survey by Esure home insurance, couples spend 40 minutes a day on average arguing about household chores.

And the biggest cause of domestic dispute is leaving clothes strewn around the house, the study of 1,000 men and women found.

One of my favorite bike shots from The Sartorialist

From Scientific American:

Although bike lanes painted on streets and automobile-free “greenways” have increased ridership over the past few years, the share of people relying on bikes for transportation is still less than 2 percent, based on various studies. An emerging body of research suggests that a superior strategy to increase pedal pushing could be had by asking the perennial question: What do women want?

In the U.S., men’s cycling trips surpass women’s by at least 2:1. This ratio stands in marked contrast to cycling in European countries, where urban biking is a way of life and draws about as many women as men—sometimes more.

Women are considered an “indicator species” for bike-friendly cities for several reasons. First, studies across disciplines as disparate as criminology and child ­rearing have shown that women are more averse to risk than men. In the cycling arena, that risk aversion translates into increased demand for safe bike infrastructure as a prerequisite for riding. Women also do most of the child care and household shopping, which means these bike routes need to be organized around practical urban destinations to make a difference.

“Despite our hope that gender roles don’t exist, they still do,” says Jennifer Dill, a transportation and planning researcher at Portland State University. Addressing women’s concerns about safety and utility “will go a long way” toward increasing the number of people on two wheels, Dill explains.

The website WireTap is new-found favorite of mine. Heavy on advisers from Current TV, The Nation, and AlterNet, the site is a great platform for young (appears to be mostly college age) writers / content creators from the most diverse backgrounds I have ever seen in a single site. If you need to understand what young adults care about about, how they define their worlds, this site should be a regular stop in your information gathering missions.

Below is an excerpt from a recent perspective piece I enjoyed. Topics often include reactions to current events around the globe, stories about race, gender and identity. I also like that the students are paid for their submissions.

The 1996 launch of “Sex on Tuesday” at the University of California, Berkeley– birthplace of the 1960s national student activist movement — triggered the campus newspaper sex column phenomenon.

Within a few years, the sex column had spread to campuses across the country, becoming the “most publicized, electrifying, and divisive phenomena in student journalism,” in the words of Dan Reimold, leading expert on the student newspaper sex column.

Reimold estimates that “during any given semester more than 200 sex and dating columns are being published in U.S. student newspapers, magazines, and online outlets…. What’s most important here is perspective. In the mid-nineties, the number of student sex columns: zero.” In addition to increasing student readership, the proliferation of student sex columns has drawn national attention.

Entertainment is usually a key reason behind the publication of sex columns, but the writing is not all about fun. These controversial pieces have proved battlegrounds for the rights of the student press and “appropriate” subjects for publication (ironically, only increasing their popularity and fueling the movement).