Quotulatiousness

December 4, 2009

Debunking the porn-violence link

Filed under: Randomness, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

After giving up all hope of finding “uncontaminated” study subjects, a Quebec researcher concludes that the long standing claim that viewing pornography leads to violence and sexual crimes doesn’t appear to be true:

Lajeunesse, unable to find any smut-free young chaps, carried out a detailed study on 20 students who admitted having a fondness for filth. It seems that 90 per cent of all porn is viewed on the internet nowadays, at least in French Canada. Unsurprisingly single chaps watch spend about four times as much time looking at porn as those in committed relationships.

“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional,” reports Lajeunesse.

“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship … Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy … men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he adds.

The study was funded by Canada’s Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Violence Familiale et la Violence Faite aux Femmes (CRI-VIFF, or the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women). However Lajeunesse firmly rejected the idea that goggling over naughty pics, vids etc leads men to mistreat the ladies they encounter in real life.

Amusingly, while putting this post up, my iTunes playlist offered up Rough Trade’s “Crimes of Passion”.

November 19, 2009

Female fighter pilots in Pakistan, but not in India

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:30

Strategy Page looks at the differing outlooks for female pilots in Indian and Pakistani service:

The Indian Air Force does not plan to train women to be fighter pilots. Neighboring Pakistan is not much better, even though it has seven female fighter pilots. They fly F-7s, a Chinese version of the Russian MiG-21. None have been in combat yet, despite the heavy use of jet fighter-bombers in nearly a year of fighting in the tribal territories. There, the more modern F-16s are doing most of the bombing of Taliban targets. The Indian air force leaders believe that it costs so much (over $2 million) to train a fighter pilot, that they air force needs 10-15 years of active service to get that investment back. But women tend to leave the air force to have children, thus making them much more expensive fighter pilots than their male counterparts. So the Indian leadership is holding off on female fighter pilots.

Women flying Pakistani F-7s are a very recent development, part of a program that only began six years ago. Pakistan is not alone using women as fighter pilots, with China graduating its first 16 female fighter pilots this year. There are already 52 women flying non-combat aircraft, and another 545 in training. India has female military pilots, who only operate helicopters and transports.

[. . .]

All the nations considering female fighter pilots, are having a hard time keeping male pilots in uniform. Too many of the men depart for more lucrative, and less stressful, careers as commercial pilots. Women may not be the solution. Currently, only about half of Indian female officers stay in past their initial five year contract. Indian women, even military pilots, are under tremendous social and family pressure to marry. Those that do may still be pilots, but married women expected to have children. The Indian Air Force provides its female officers with ten months leave for this, six months during pregnancy, and four months after delivery. The air force does all this because pilots are very expensive to train. Fuel costs the same everywhere, as are spare parts. So what India may save in lower salaries, is not enough. A good pilot costs over half a million dollars for training expenses, and requires over five years flying experience to become effective in a first line fighter (the Su-30 for India). It’s all that expensive aviation fuel that pushes the final “cost of a fighter pilot” to over $2 million. Many women are willing to take up the challenge. But they have already heard from their peers in Western air force, that motherhood and piloting can be a very exhausting combination.

October 20, 2009

Cheerleader pay . . . is about the market rate

Filed under: Economics, Football, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:26

In last week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, Gregg Easterbrook made a pitch for NFL cheerleaders being underpaid. Not so fast there, Gregg says Steve Czaban (Czabe):

Easterbook is brilliant 90% of the time, but this one is the equivalent of a pick-6 the other way. In fact, it sounds a lot like a deep and repressed liberal urge gurgling forth against the tide of his otherwise sensible, free market intellect.

NFL cheerleaders are paid exactly what they are worth. They may even be over-paid. How do I know this? Because the NFL has had no problem filling their cheer squads for this price. Ergo: the price is right. The market has spoken.

Trying to staff a cheer squad for a much lesser league at this price, would likely run you into personnel shortages or weight issues. The National Football League, however, carries tremendous resume value for these ladies. It carries community status, it carries secondary value that far exceeds the $100 bucks a game.

If this was not true, then you wouldn’t need tryouts. You would just take the first 12 who volunteered.

It’s quite true, despite the earnest appeal for higher pay from last week’s TMQ, cheerleaders are — on the evidence of the current market conditions — overpaid. Some jobs pay high wages because of the unpleasant working conditions or the need for extensive prior training (like garbage collectors and doctors, respectively), while others pay low wages because the job requires no unusual skills or provides non-cash benefits so that there are always more applicants than jobs.

H/T to Mises Economic Blog for the link.

October 16, 2009

QotD: Maturity, fading

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Maturity as a general virtue, however, declined in the Sixties when indiscriminate sexual liberty, detached from responsibility and emotional engagement, became a human right from puberty forward. With no need to defer the gratification of appetite, there was no further need for patience, maturity’s hallmark.

And yet what stage of life could be worse for indefinite prolongation? Adolescence is a period marked by extreme intellectual callowness, thrall to raging hormones, obsession with appearance and social caste, contempt for authority, fascination with the transgression of rules, immoderate self-righteousness and intense sensitivity to perceived offence.

For the negative physical consequences of adolescence as a cultural norm, consider the body-sculpting, porn and plastic surgery industries. Our culture’s obsession with youthful appearance and limitless, Dionysiac sexuality is pandemic.

For the more pernicious negative intellectual and political consequences, consider the universities. In academia one finds a ruling cadre of grey-haired, jeans-clad university teachers pickled in Woodstock-nostalgic revolutionary amber, still rebelling against their parents’ conformity and hypocrisy, still contemptuous of their parents’ institutions and values, even those that stabilized family life and nourished communitarianism.

The political correctness these ideologues embody, Epstein shrewdly notes, is a peculiarly adolescent phenomenon: “Political correctness . . — from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory — could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: . . . Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses [and] the possibility of slights, real and imagined.”

Barbara Kay, “The decline of maturity”, National Post, 2009-10-16

October 15, 2009

Ralph Lauren moves decisively to quash negative press . . .

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

. . . by allegedly firing the model whose Photoshopped-to-stick-insect proportions drew the criticism in the first place:

The model featured in the Ralph Lauren Photoshop stick insect outrage — in which she was Photoshopped to within an inch of her life — claims she was sacked by the company for being “too fat”.

Filippa Hamilton suffered such an extreme digital makeover in an ad for the fashion company that BoingBoing was prompted to gasp: “Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis.”

Ralph Lauren quickly threw DMCA takedown notices at BoingBoing and PhotoshopDisasters for exposing the folly, but subsequently decided to apologise.

October 12, 2009

Object to skeletal fashion models? You’re a “fat mummy”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

Karl Lagerfeld puts you into your place, fatty:

Karl Lagerfeld, the eccentric German fashion tsar, has waded into the debate about size-zero models by saying that people want to look at “skinny models” and classing those who complain as “fat mummies”.

Lagerfeld, 71, was reacting to the magazine Brigitte‘s announcement last week that it will in future use “ordinary, realistic” women rather than professional models in its photo shoots. He said the decision by Germany’s most popular women’s magazine was “absurd” and driven by overweight women who did not like to be reminded of their weight issues.

“These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly,” said Lagerfeld in an interview with the magazine Focus. The designer, who lost a lot of weight himself when he went on a strict low-carbohydrate diet several years ago, added that the world of fashion was all to do “with dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women”

The complaint about ultra-thin models has a lot of merit: the model is chosen to be as close to a clothes-hanger as possible, to improve the sales of the item at retail. It’s easier to persuade buyers to buy things that look like they do on the runway when they’re in the store.

The fact that the majority of women in western cultures don’t come close to fitting that sort of clothing is largely ignored. The designers tend to prefer clothes that do not provide room for typical womens’ hips, breasts and curves. One sometimes wonders if the clothing is supposed to be equally attractive on bone-thin fashion models or young teenage boys . . .

lauren_model_photoshopped

Image from BoingBoing. Extreme photoshopping in the original ad.

October 5, 2009

Challenging Canada’s prostitution laws

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Canada’s archaic laws governing the sex trade are being challenged in court:

If she could do it herself, Terri-Jean Bedford would strike down Canada’s prostitution laws, perhaps using the riding crop she plans to bring to court.

Instead, the Toronto dominatrix and two other sex workers have launched a sweeping constitutional challenge to the legislation, arguing it perpetuates violence against women.

The landmark case gets underway Tuesday in a University Ave. courtroom where Bedford, in a nod to traditionalism, is promising to arrive conservatively attired, even if she is packing a tool of her trade.

Prostitution is legal in Canada: that fact always seems to be a surprise to most people. What isn’t legal are all the other activities surrounding the act: soliciting customers, having a safe place to conduct your business, and so on. This has always made prostitutes more liable to be injured or killed because they have to ply their trade in unsafe conditions, and they are rarely taken seriously when they attempt to get the police protection they should be entitled to.

The 49-year-old Toronto grandmother, along with prostitutes Valerie Scott, 51, and Amy Lebovitch, 30, is asking Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice to invalidate Criminal Code provisions that serve as Canada’s policy response to the world’s oldest profession.

They argue that prohibitions on keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living on the avails of the trade force them from the safety of their homes to the insecurity of the street, where they are exposed to physical and psychological violence.

September 28, 2009

Random links of possible interest

Filed under: Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:38
  • More on the ongoing ammunition shortage in the US, as manufacturers are still unable to produce enough to satisfy demand.
  • Police at G20 take trophy photo including arrested protester handcuffed and kneeling in front of the group. H/T to Radley Balko.
  • Voyeurs rejoice! What sounds like a report from the Journal of Spike TV reveals that a mere 10 minutes of ogling well-endowed women provides as much benefit to men as 30 minutes in the gym, as far as heart disease, high blood pressure and stress are concerned. H/T to Ghost of a Flea.
  • New Zealand bans in-vehicle GPS navigation systems . . . but only if they’re running on a mobile phone. Non-phone based systems apparently don’t distract you with directions the way phone-based ones do. Or something.
  • Detroit Lions fans love the Washington Redskins.

September 23, 2009

Swedish military bust-out

Filed under: Europe, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Sweden is having some problems with essential parts of their military equipment, specifically the bras issued to female troops:

Flimsy military brassieres are unable to stand up to the strains imposed when female Swedish troops perform “rigorous exercises”, routinely bursting open or even catching fire — so forcing busty young conscripts to hurriedly strip off in the field.

The revelations come courtesy of the Gothenburg Post and English-language Swedish journal The Local. The Post reported yesterday on concerns raised by the Swedish Conscription Council, an organisation concerned with the rights of conscript troops in the Swedish forces.

September 3, 2009

Was Fukuyama correct after all?

Filed under: China, Economics, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:28

Scott Sumner has an interesting post up about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thoughts of the late 1980s:

So the obvious choice for most successful prediction is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

[. . .]

I get very annoyed when I see people say “the Chinese case proves that economic development doesn’t inevitably lead to political liberalization.” There are so many problems with this sort of statement that one hardly knows were to begin. China has seen incredible political liberalization since 1978, indeed even some progress since 1998. But what about western-style democracy? To answer that question, consider the list above. I would argue that China most resembles Thailand. Both have similar per capita GDPs, both have a huge split between the urban elite and the rural poor. My hunch is that consciously or subconsciously, the urban residents of China are not thrilled by the idea of a pure democracy that would effectively turn the country over to the rural poor. But wait a few decades, when China goes from being 60%-70% rural, to 60%-70% urban, and from mostly poor to mostly middle-income, and from mostly undereducated to mostly educated. Then let’s see how Fukuyama’s thesis holds up.

History is still ending. Or maybe I should say “his story” is ending, the story of war, revolution and voyages of discovery. The Illiad and the Odyssey. And “her story” is beginning. A world focused on improving education, health care, cuisine, leisure time, the arts, communication, animal rights, the environment, etc.

August 21, 2009

Am I a sexist for saying I favour this?

Filed under: Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

By way of The Register. At risk of being labelled as a sexist, I think GoTopless (probably NSFW in most workplaces) is a worthy effort:

Welcome to GoTopless.org! – We are a US organization, claiming that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men.

[. . .]

Why a National GoTopless Protest day? Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On SUNDAY AUGUST 23RD, 2009, topless women will rally in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and will demand that they be granted the fundamental right to be topless where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution (please see our exact legal argument on the right to be topfree for women under “14th amendment” in news section)

It’s legal here in Ontario, although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone taking advantage of the newly established right since the day after it became legal . . .

However, my support for this particular effort in no way means I’m in favour of the Raelian agenda . . . which is, um, spacey in the extreme.

July 26, 2009

QotD: Over-eager fans

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Whoever asked “What’s next?” Note that I just finished the book on Tuesday.

There are people who inquire brightly of new mothers, as they are being wheeled out of the delivery room, “So, when are you going to have another?” These people would deservedly be in want of their kneecaps, if only the mothers could get up.

Lois McMaster Bujold, posting to the Bujold mailing list, 2009-07-26

July 15, 2009

QotD: The Matriarchy

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:29

[Alan Oak]: In a correspondence with feminist scholar Sylvia Kelso, published in Women of Other Worlds (1999), you wrote:

“Where has anyone experienced a matriarchy for test comparison?” you may ask. In fact, most of us have, as children. When the scale of our whole world was one long block long, it was a world dominated and controlled by women. Who were twice our size, drove cars, had money, could hit us if they wanted to and we couldn’t ever hit them back. Hence, at bottom, my deep, deep suspicion of feminism, matriarchy, etc. Does this mean putting my mother in charge of the world, and me demoted to a child again? No thanks, I’ll pass . . .

This leads me to another thought [. . .] Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal. Nothing is more likely to set any subordinate’s back up, whether they be male or female, than for their boss to come the “mother knows best” routine at them. We need a third place to stand. I’m just not clear how it became my job to supply it.

Lois McMaster Bujold, interviewed by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net, 2009-06

July 14, 2009

Random links of possible interest

Filed under: Randomness, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

Just a few links to provide you with click-therapy:

(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005579.html.)

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