Other gems: "how to pick up virgins"; "how to pick up refined girls" and, if a ladyfriend has overstayed her welcome, "Don't move, I have just broken a test tube filled with the Aids virus." While a spokesman assures us that, "This article … in no way reflects the Speaker's views today," there's no mention of the fact that the wit isn't even AskMen caliber. Oh, and given that only yesterday his wife declared in the Daily Mail that "I was a binge-drinking ladette who downed two bottles of wine a day and had one-night stands," she's probably less flustered by the attention than the average political spouse.

Sex Tips From John Bercow, The Speaker Of The House Of Commons [Guardian]
Sally Bercow [Daily Mail]

Deceptive, baby-hungry women have always been a staple of male-mythology; punching a hole in a condom is the sort of thing we like to do between maxing out guys' credit cards on shoes and sleeping with their best friends. So it's not shocking that this particular urban horror story should make the lad-mag rounds just in time for Halloween.

What is shocking and depressing is the number of women who the author brings in to bolster the story, making it seem as though it's totally common practice and that deception is part of women's acknowledged code of conduct.

"It's not about trapping the guy," Jody says. "That's kind of old-fashioned. Yeah, you want him to be into it, but there are other ways to get a guy to commit. If you're smart and in a good relationship, it's just about the fact that you want a kid." Even in her circle of young, urban, and gainfully employed friends, Jody says, this particular brand of subterfuge isn't exactly condemned the way one might expect. In fact, it's sort of, well, normal. "I see and hear people talk about it, and I understand. I get it," she says, "and I don't even think it's that manipulative. It's more like, 'Hey, the timing is right for me. I got pregnant-oops! Well, it's here, let's have it.' I think that's more the way it is now than it was back in the day when you had to marry someone before you got pregnant. Marriage doesn't matter now."

Then there's alleged feminine "logic" like this:

"A lot of us feel like it's not even really fair that men should get to vote, considering they could be 72 and, with a little Viagra, have another baby," says Vicki Iovine, author of The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy. "For us women, it's really a limited window. We know that boys who grow up to become men don't necessarily want to be men. They like to be boys. And so women say, 'You know what? He's gonna just have to snap out of it-and my pregnancy will be the thing to do it.'" The end, says Iovine, sometimes justifies the means. "Any guy with a heart and soul, and preferably with a job, once he sees the baby on the sonogram or hears the heartbeat, will melt," she says.

Wait - what? Don't rope me in with these women who want to disenfranchise men because they're...fertile for longer? For every Cosmo-wielding nutter this guy dredged up (and I'd really like to see the email he sent out requesting quotes from "friends") he could have found ten thousand who found the idea not merely abhorrent, but insulting and frankly incomprehensible.

Of course, to the author it makes total sense:

The average cost of in vitro fertilization in the United States is $100,000 per baby-and insurance generally won't pay a cent. Combine that with the shifting social mores about single motherhood and having kids outside of marriage, and you've got a pretty good explanation for why some women, particularly ones in stable relationships, don't see this as trickery at all-it's more like a nudge.

What these "shifting social mores" are, he neglects to say. Nor can he get a real read on the number of wily tricksters are out there, stealing men's sperm and then gouging them for money, because of the women who get preggers while on birth control, "there's no way of knowing how much of that disparity can be explained away by "intentional" oversight, but that's a big gap to chalk up to carelessness." Okay, first of all, there's a reason the Ring has taken off, and it's not because a plastic disc in one's vagina is so incredibly erotic. The pill is an enormous pain in the ass, an expensive, distorting, side-effect-inducing millstone with no regard for travel schedules, the availability of doctor's appointments, sleep, jet lag, pharmaceutical and insurance vagaries. That's 365 chances a year to screw things up. And while, yes, theoretically, it works, the reality is never, ever that straightforward. So save your insinuations, please.

Are there women who do this? I guess there are. If you believe Glee, the world is full of deceitful women. There are a lot of dishonest, desperate, screwed-up people out there who do all kinds of things. But this is not, I repeat not, common or acceptable amongst women. If anything, I think we'd judge it more, not merely because it's awful, but because we've fought hard for birth control and reproductive rights and that wasn't to entrap men into marriage.

I can understand that it must be hard for a man to surrender all control of this issue - believe us, it's not so fun assuming the total responsibility, the chemical consequences, or the expense. But there are such things as condoms. A guy who claims he was tricked into impregnating his girlfriend (he has no contact with the child, but does pay child support) has sued his ex. The case has been taken up by the National Center for Men, which calls it "Roe vs. Wade . . . for Men." No, see, that would be if men were legally denied the right to wear condoms. But while I am, in fact, willing to believe this occasionally happens (apparently, judging from the psychos quoted above) it's also, as the judge ruled, simply impossible to prove - and more to the point, a very slippery slope indeed in a world where many men are all too ready to duck their responsibilities.

And it's irresponsible stories like this that perpetuate dangerous, offensive stereotypes and misconceptions. For the vast, vast majority of us, having a baby is quite a big enough deal without adding deception and ruses to the mix. Guys, wanna avoid this? Don't sleep with someone crazy, because literally no one rational is pulling this. Your DNA is not that appealing. Oh, and wear a condom. The needle thing is too obvious for most of us crazy baby-grubbers, anyway.

That Was No "Accident" [Details]

Although, I suppose we should give Douthat a break. It is a 45-page academic paper comprised of nearly 40 years worth of data subjected to regression analysis and filled with statistical and sociological jargon. It's so much easier to just read the abstract and then judge the ongoing battle for social equity as ultimately harmful for women! That abstract states:

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative wellbeing is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men.

From that, Douthat extrapolates this:

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness.

It's the new Feminine Mystique! Only, you know, not.

The authors do, however, offer explanations more plausible than Douthat's idea that the attainment of something approaching gender equality makes us poor dames so unhappy. (Douthat would only have had to read to page 4!)

For example, if happiness is assessed relative to outcomes for one's reference group, then greater equality may have led more women to compare their outcomes to those of the men around them. In turn, women might find their relative position lower than when their reference group included only women. This change in the reference group may make women worse off or it may simply represent a change in their reporting behavior. An alternative form of reference dependent preferences relates well-being to whether or not expectations are met. If the women's movement raised women's expectations faster than society was able to meet them, they would be more likely to be disappointed by their actual experienced lives.

In other words, if we come into the world — work, domestic, social — expecting equality and then don't get it — which many of us don't — and we start comparing ourselves to men, of course we're going to be pissed. It's the old bait-and-switch, and who the fuck likes that?

The authors add:

The second possibility is that broad social shifts such as those brought on by the changing role of women in society fundamentally alter what measures of subjective well-being are capturing. Over time it is likely that women are aggregating satisfaction over an increasingly larger domain set. For example, life satisfaction may have previously meant "satisfaction at home" and has increasingly come to mean some combination of "satisfaction at home" and "satisfaction at work". This averaging over many domains may lead to falling average satisfaction if it is difficult to achieve the same degree of satisfaction in multiple domains.

In other words, when women had no reasonable expectation of being able to achieve happiness at work (due to lack of jobs or proscribed labor market possibilities), they didn't count their expected-dissatisfaction at work as part of whether they considered themselves happy and, once the possibility of being happy is there (regardless of whether the equality to achieve it is translated into practice), they count their dissatisfaction as part of their overall happiness. I guess I sort of fail to see where that's such a terrible thing, but, then again, I'm not Harvard-educated.

In addition, Douthat ignores this little gem about what the phrase "subjective happiness" means in practice.

However, it should be noted that subjective well-being is both a function of the individual's personality and his or her reaction to life events. As such, correlations between life outcomes and happiness may not be causal. For example, one reason that married people report substantially greater happiness than unmarried people in a cross-section is because happy people are more likely than unhappy people to marry (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2007)

The authors also note that self-reported happiness correlates with social expectations of when one ought to be happy.

Self-reports of happiness have also been shown to be correlated in the expected direction with changes in life circumstances. For example, an individual's subjective well-being typically rises with marriage and income growth and falls while going through a divorce.

In other words, if ones thinks one is supposed to be happy (or unhappy), one reports that, making subjective well-being both a measure of what one thinks one ought to feel and what one actually feels. I'll leave it to other people to extrapolate whether or not there might be reasons that women would be more likely feel they're supposed to not be happy when they are, or why men might be more likely to report being happy when they legitimately aren't.

Or, quite frankly, women might have been lying all along.

It has been recognized that an individual's assessment of their well-being may reflect the social desirability of responses and Kahneman (1999) argues that people in good circumstances may be hedonically better off than people in worse circumstances, yet they may require more to declare themselves happy. In the context of the findings presented in this paper, women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and have thus deflated their previously inflated responses. Or, as in Kahneman's example, the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy.

Not surprisingly, Douthat ignores the fact that the study shows that the subjective happiness of African-American women is actually much higher than that of African-American men.

An important exception is that this phenomenon has not occurred similarly across racial groups. African-American women have become happier over this period in parallel with rising happiness among African-American men, implying little change in their gender happiness gap. This rise in African-American women's happiness has occurred as part of an overall rise in the happiness of blacks, a rise that has eliminated two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap (Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008b).

Douthat actually deliberately ignores this, stating in his piece:

But this can't be the only explanation, since the trend toward greater female discontent cuts across lines of class and race. A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

Actually, no, it doesn't show that at all — particularly because the authors had no data on self-identified Hispanics prior to 2000 and were forced to make some pretty hinky extrapolations to come up with the conclusion Douthat cites as established fact. But to admit that would cut against Douthat's thesis which is — to those who rememberwhat Douthat thinks about "sluts" — unsurprising. Douthat thinks that women are unhappy because society doesn't do enough slut-shaming!

[Feminists and conservatives] should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn't (and couldn't) look like the old sexism. There's no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can't join forces - in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s - behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age.

No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn't seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period.

Right, the problem with single motherhood is that it — on its own — makes women unhappy and they're not remotely unhappy because, unlike in, say, Europe, there aren't enough social structures or government services to mitigate the difficulties of achieving professional success and responsible single-parenting. Nope! If we just slut-shamed women (and, to Douthat's credit, some men) more, then they'd have fewer children out of wedlock and would totally be happier! Except for the women who have children outside of matrimonial bounds, who would be slut-shamed for irresponsibly having sex, an ironic statement from a guy who prefers to sleep with women not on birth control. There's no word on whether women who are single parents after a divorce would also be shamed for having driven off their husbands.

But, even further to that, the authors of the study specifically investigated the potential for single motherhood being the cause of the decline in female happiness, and disproved it.

Along with the decline in marriage has come a rise in single parenthood, both through growth in out-of-wedlock births and through divorce. Thus, we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents, and, to account for the duel burden of working parents, between employed parents and non-employed parents. Once again, we see similar trends in happiness across these groups, casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood, or work-family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women.

And, just for good measure, let's throw in what women have to say about what they think they've gained from the feminist movement (page 25):

Moreover, women believe that their lives are better; in recent polls asking about changes in the status of women over the past 25 or 50 years, around four in five adults state that the overall status of women in the U.S. has gotten better (and the remaining respondents break two-for-one towards "stayed the same" over "worse"). Additionally, the 1999 Virginia Slims Poll found that 72% of women believe that "women having more choices in society today gives women more opportunities to be happy" while only 39% thought that having more choices "makes life more complicated for women." Finally, women today are more likely than men to believe that their opportunities to succeed exceed those of their parents.

Ah, Douthat. But there are other reasons, besides intellectual laziness, ideological blinders, an utter failing to understand any nuance in female sexuality and a 10-year case of blueballs not to blame him for having failed to parse the research he cites as a reason for society to get behind him on the slut-shaming bandwagon. I mean, there must be, because the New York Times gave him a column!

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness [University of Pennsylvania]
Liberated And Unhappy [NY Times]

Related: Yes, This Was Published In A Major Newspaper In The Year 2009 [Pandagon]
Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes On The Pill [Brad DeLong]

Basically, as Alkon sees it, there are legions of desperate wannabe moms out there who go to bars, pick up men, lie about their birth control status and get pregnant for the purpose of finding a financier to bankroll motherhood. Those who just fuck up their birth control too much should either start getting Depo or get an IUD so they can ensure they don't get pregnant. But, if pregnancy catches up with a dude who wasn't expecting it, well, it's totally unfair that the system makes him pay child support.

Not once does Alkon suggest that if a man doesn't wish to assume to risk of impregnating someone that he should either religiously use condoms regardless of what the women says about her birth control method (or STD status) — particularly if he is being taken home from bars for one night stands — or refrain from engaging in sexual activity that carries a risk of pregnancy. In fact, she dismisses the latter as "unrealistic." But, the risk of the pregnancy is utterly the woman's, and if she's not prepared to have an abortion, give the kid up or support it financially on her own, then she shouldn't be having sex.

Gotcha Pregnancies & Men's Rights [Pajamas TV]

Related: Advice Goddess [Official Site]
Dr. Helen [Official Site]

Earlier: Getting Knocked Up "Accidentally On Purpose" Is All The Rage In London

Lopez's ostensible purpose for snagging an interview with Noonan is her new book, Political Grace, which Lopez uses as a jumping off point for attacking Noonan for not being sufficiently pro-Sarah Palin. But before she gets there, Noonan gets to discuss her inspiration for the book:

In my book I tell the story of a dramatic terror alert at the U.S. Capitol during the events surrounding the funeral of Ronald Reagan. I was in a ceremonial room in the Senate, part of a delegation asked to receive back the president’s body from California, where he had died, for the lying in state. A plane had entered Capitol air space, was headed toward the Capitol, was presumed to be weaponized. All were told, literally, to run for their lives — “Incoming aircraft, one minute out!” Quite a scene. As I walked I saw a great lady ... be carried down the Capitol steps in her wheelchair, as all around her fled. She held her cane in her hand, like the brave little prow of a ship. And as I turned and saw her a thought came with the force of an intuition, though it was not that, just a thought: Before this is over we’ll all be helping each other down the stairs. ... We must become more serious in the way we practice our politics, more equal to the moment. We need to take the long view; in the age of chatter we need forbearance, maturity, and grace.

What Peggy Noonan doesn't mention about this moment was that the Capitol was evacuated because Republican Governor and former Congressman from Kentucky Ernie Fletcher directed his state's plane to buzz the Capitol (in violation of Washington's air space) to get himself a better view. Fletcher was later forced to pardon his entire Administration to save them from ethics charges, was himself indicted, struck a deal with prosecutors and lost reelection in 2006.

Anyway, K-Lo asks why Sarah Palin isn't politically graceful enough for Noonan, and then asks her if she doesn't feel guilty for getting Barack Obama elected by not being partisan enough. Noonan then schools her about the merits of intellectual honesty — and how it is that one gets a Wall Street Journal column in the first place:

My first thought is that any columnist who thought he was playing a major or minor role in people’s political decisions would be mildly delusional. Columnists tend not to have that power, nor deserve it. But my second is of course I try to think about the implications, if any, of what I write. But where I come down is this: I am a columnist, and my job is to try, within the limits of my abilities, to tell my readers what I think is happening, and what it means. I have to say what I believe to be true or I don’t deserve to write for the Wall Street Journal.

K-Lo isn't willing to let it go, though, asking Noonan how she could abandon John McCain and conservatives everywhere with her intellectual honesty noise, and Noonan swats her like a gnat, again.

In a larger sense, Kathryn, allow me to say here that I have been dismayed to see something new happen, in the past few years, in conservatism. ... When I was first struggling through as a young conservative, when Bill Buckley was heading NR and Ronald Reagan and then Bush I were in the White House, conservatism was marked — truly, distinguished as a political movement — in part by an air of profound latitude in terms of what could be said. We had brawls. ... Now there is, in the conservative movement, a greater air of fearfulness, of repression. And this is all so very un-conservative. "Which side are you on?", "You better not buck the team," "Declare your loyalties, comrade." Literally: comrade. This is not the way of conservatism, this is the way, the manner and tone, of the old leftism. I don’t think it’s defensible morally, and I know it’s indefensible practically. Movements must grow, must include, expand, gather in; politics is a game of addition.

Basically, Noonan is saying that K-Lo and her compatriots' attitude of "Our guy is our guy because he is our guy regardless of anything else" is harmful not only to the conservative movement, but to the Republican party as a whole because the vast majority of the country think that their attitude is ugly and exclusionary and, one might say, fascistic, in that it seeks to stifle all dissent in the name of consolidating power.

K-Lo still wants her to explain why McCain isn't more like Reagan than Obama, which Noonan dismisses as a load of shit, asks her to define conservatism and then, most tellingly, says that "I tend to think there will be a serious revisiting of our founding principles." Naturally, as far as K-Lo is concerned, those founding principles are exclusively conservative ones, but in the midst of all her other idiotic biases, that's probably the least stupid. Noonan takes her — and, by extension, some of the ugliest elements of the modern conservative movement to task:

I happen to think careerism has become an unseen force in much of the fighting. Conservatism didn’t used to be a career, it was a sailing against the wind, a pushing back against the age that is pushing you, and it was often lonely, individual, painful. It has been for me.

By the end of this, I was almost to the point that I was digging Peggy Noonan as much as Moe used to, but then she said that the basis of all conservative and right-thinking philosophy was a belief in God, and she lost me again. Nonetheless, it was fun to watch her rip to shreds this idea that the conservative movement needs to be uniform in its beliefs and its support for the Republican candidate — and by "fun," I mean, I enjoyed watching someone who can actually think for a living try to talk to someone who can't.

Grace Will Lead Me Home? [National Review]

Related: Governor Pardons All But Himself In Personnel Investigation [WAVE 3]

Here's what he says:

As for [the writer's male cousin] "playing for the other team" at college, ACK, that can indeed be just a phase—but for women, not men. Heterosexual and homosexual women, if legit scientific research is to be believed, "tend to become sexually aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal pattern," according to the results of a 2003 study conducted at LUG-infested Northwestern University. Men, on the other hand, prefer erotica that plays exclusively to their professed sexual orientation. Which means, of course, that female sexuality is a fluid and male sexuality is a solid. Or something.

And ladies? Pointing out your fluid sexuality isn't an insult. It's a compliment — hell, it's a freakin' superpower.

Hmm, seems to me I covered the topic of what turns on the ladies before and found that the scientist who wrote the most recent studies on this said:

To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality.

Also, if you don't have time to go back and read it, (statistically speaking) women get minimally aroused by watching pretty much anything fuck — including monkeys — but that doesn't make us all bestialists either. Sexuality isn't about who you want to watch fuck, it involves who you actually want to fuck. And if men don't or —in my opinion, more likely — can't express as wide a range of bisexuality as women, maybe that has more to do with the taboos around male hetero- and bisexuality than anything else.

I've known bisexual men and they have it hard (heh) from both ends (sorry, can't stop) of the spectrum. A close friend of mine in college was bisexual, and gay men didn't want to get into a relationship with him, convinced he would leave for a more socially-acceptable female life partner, and women often didn't want to sleep with him knowing he'd had a guy's dick up his ass. I've heard plenty of gay men comment that they wouldn't want to get involved with a bisexual man. I've had one of my close gay friends admit that he is (years after coming out) still attracted to women here and there but that it was usually too much trouble to date women because of the lack of acceptance from certain quarters in his social circle. Bisexual men and women are often considered "really" gay but trying to fit in, rather than there being a wide acceptance that they are actually bisexual. And Dan Savage is a good example of this stereotype, as he tells his reader that the cousin is obviously just a closet case but that, perhaps, his fiancée is the kind of woman who likes a gay guy (as though having a bisexual open relationship is just soooo weird). It's such a weirdly and disturbingly normative answer for a columnist who is all about letting people know the safest way to drink other people's urine.

Oh, and about how female bisexuality is a superpower? Yeah, if playing at or displaying an attraction to women for the sake of titillating men is super, or a power. Maybe us bile-spewing ladies just get annoyed when everyone keeps telling us we are bisexual, Dan, because some of us aren't and the ones who actually are aren't doing it for anyone's benefit but their own.

Ladies, Pointing Out Your Fluid Sexuality Isn't an Insult, It's a Freakin' Superpower [Village Voice]
Savage Love December 5, 2007 [AV Club]
What Women Want (Maybe) [New York Times]