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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Why Are Female Redheads Sexualized and Male Redheads Reviled?

 
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Prince Harry: Heartthrob or mutant?
(Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images)
“Red hair is a woman's game,” Tom Robbins writes in his 1998 GQ essay “Ode to Redheads.” “The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blonds who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration,” Robbins says. “They look like brown-haired men who've been composted. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junk yard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.” That’s a grim view of redheaded men—and it was coming from a fellow ginger.

This month, British photographer Thomas Knights—also a redhead—hopes to turn that stereotype on its head with “Red Hot,” a photo exhibition featuring “a cast of high profile and good-looking red headed males,” shot giving torrid looks in topless poses. Male redheads “are completely emasculated and desexualised in popular culture,” Knights told the Guardian. “The main thing for me is the huge polarisation between the way our society perceives ginger men and ginger women.”
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Why do we see redheaded women as rubies and redheaded men as rusted? Perhaps because the rarity of the shade—redheads benefit (or suffer) from two doses of a recessive gene that causes a mutation in the protein that regulates melanin—has inspired a historical association with difference and deviance. In the Middle Ages, red hair was taken as a sign of witchcraft and vampirism; Elizabethan actors portrayed Jewish characters with false noses and red wigs; and Judas is often painted with a long, fiery mane. For women, the perception of deviance is often eroticized. The sins attributed to women are largely sexual ones. And the expression of this sexual deviance is often rooted in the follicles. "Hair itself is symbolically fraught,” University of Texas myth scholar Betty Sue Flowers told the Washington Post in 2002. “Hair equals sex. Why do women have to cover their hair in churches? There are more rules about hair than anything else except covering the genitals. It's so connected with spiritual and religious taboos." 

The result? Red is now the shade of choice for contemporary femme fatales, from Jessica Rabbit to Joan Holloway. Meanwhile, ginger boys are ridiculed and sexually marginalized; in 2011, a Danish-based international sperm bank stopped collecting donations from redheads, saying it was “drowning in semen” from unpopular ginger donors. Try to think of a famous redheaded man who isn’t Damian Lewis or a prince, and you get a lot of clowns: Conan O'Brien, Louis CK, Carrot Top.

The myth of the sexy redhead and her deviant brother was constructed by male apostles, playwrights, and painters. Some women buy that version of sexuality, too: Knights interviewed one woman who willingly dates a ginger man but still fears the consequences: "Of course I'm going to love it, but I don't want a ginger baby," she said. But projects like Knights' show how easy it is to revert that centuries-old idea by taking a few photos from a different perspective (and recruiting some exceptionally good-looking gingers to pose). “Someone recently asked me, ‘What’s so special about red hair?’ ” Knights told The Cut. “Well, nothing. It’s not special—it’s just equal. All I want is for ginger men to be on a level playing field.”
Amanda Hess is a freelance writer and DoubleX contributor. She lives in Los Angeles. Tweet at her @amandahess.

It’s a Christmas Miracle! New Study Shows That 1% of Women Claim to Have Virgin Births

It’s a Christmas Miracle! New Study Shows That 1% of Women Claim to Have Virgin Births

David Strumfels -- though probably a hoax, it isn't physiologically/biologically impossible and probably does happen at least on very rare occasions, just as it does with many other animals.

It’s a Christmas Miracle! New Study Shows That 1% of Women Claim to Have Virgin Births

***Update***: BMJ is known to write parody papers in their Christmas edition. So while the material below is plausible, take it with a grain of salt. It’s likely a hoax.
(In a related study, 1% of women lie to researchers.)

The headline’s serious, though it requires a little more explanation.

A new report published in the Christmas edition of BMJ shows that 0.8% of women who became pregnant also claimed, at the time when the child would have been conceived, that they were not having sexual intercourse:

Based on interviews with 7,870 women and girls ages 15-28, 45 of the 5,340 pregnancies in this group through the years — 0.8 per cent — occurred in women who reported that they conceived independent of men. The figure does not include pregnancies that result from in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technology.

The girls were 12 to 18 years old when they entered the study in the 1994-95 school year and were interviewed periodically about their health and behaviour over 14 years, including via computer as a way to encourage them to be candid when answering questions about their sexual history.

The 45 women and girls who became pregnant despite, according to what they told interviewers, being virgins at the time of conception differed in several ways from peers who acknowledged that men had had a role in their procreation.

So why would they lie…?

Turns out nearly a third of them had signed pledges saying they wouldn’t have sex before marriage. Hell, they may have been wearing purity rings as they got it on.

They “Virgin Birthers” were also “more likely than non-virgins to say their parents never or rarely talked to them about sex and birth control.”

They were also less likely to know how to use a condom.

And, I’m assuming, they wanted to sound like they were chaste, even to the researchers who didn’t know them, and even though the evidence to the contrary was growing right inside of them. (It’s also possible they didn’t realize that they technically had sex.)

I love the conclusion:

The researchers found that although the mothers in question were more likely to have boys than girls and to be pregnant during the weeks leading up to Christmas, neither similarity to the Virgin Mary was statistically significant.

You’ll be interested in knowing there were a few “virgin fathers” as well.
(Thanks to Christopher for the link)

Pathogenic hypothesis on the possible role of CagA-positive strains in ischaemic heart disease. : Clinical effects of Helicobacter pylori outside the stomach : Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology : Nature Publishing Group

Pathogenic hypothesis on the possible role of CagA-positive strains in ischaemic heart disease. : Clinical effects of Helicobacter pylori outside the stomach : Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology : Nature Publishing Group

I've Been to VietNam But Never Saw This


I stole this from Google+.  It's in Vietnam, probably in the north somewhere.  Now I've been to VN, and saw some amazing things, but nothing like this.

Degenerative disc disease

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deg...