Male/Female Differences

“Masculinity Is Not An Act” (Plus: It’s Not About the Nail)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Gay Patriot made my night! Just heading to bed and I got a laugh-and-a-half from the video! PLUS, I have been a fan of doc-Sommers for some time.

…Christina Hoff Summers, writing on Time.com… shatters the assumptions about manhood and masculinity that form the foundation of contemporary feminist thought. To summarize the main points briefly:

  1. Masculinity is not a mask, it’s how men are.

  2. Despite feminist desires to the contrary, it’s unnatural for men to act like women.

  3. Masculine behavior in boys is not a mental disorder; again, contrary to what feminism teaches.

  4. Men don’t need to express emotions to each other empathetically in order to be psychologically health.

The video [above], linked by a commenter a few months back, illustrates the point quite well.

Below is a Prager University video that is perfect for the topic at hand. Albeit a bit too “naturalistic” with its perceived history (time-table) of man, it is still chalked full of truth:

Male/Female Differences (updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

These Physiological and Chemical Differences are Real!

(NYTs) In a female mouse’s brain, a left-to-right pattern in the silencing of the X chromosome. These patterns may influence how individual brains function…. In some brains, for example, a mother’s X chromosome was seen dominating the left side, while the father’s dominated the right. Entire organs can be skewed toward one parent. Dr. Nathans and his colleagues found that in some mice, one eye was dominated by the father and the other by the mother. The diversity even extended to the entire mouse. In some animals, almost all the X chromosomes from one parent were shut; in others, the opposite was true…. Dr. Nathans speculates that using chromosomes from both parents is especially useful in the nervous system. It could create more ways to process information. “Diversity in the brain is the name of the game,” he said. ~ h/t UNCOMMON DESIGN

(Video Description) Are there physiological differences between the sexes that would naturally (or by design) cause one sex to excel in one aspect and not in another? In this short presentation, one lie of 12, you will see an exposing of how politically-correct feminists have undermined what otherwise is common sense.For more information on this topic as well as others, see “The 12 Biggest Lies.” (Used by permission and when embedded please connect to their website). They are also on Facebook: facebook.com/12biggestlies

Are there physiological differences between the sexes that would naturally (or by design) cause one sex to excel in one aspect and not in another? In this short presentation, one lie of 12, you will see an exposing of how politically-correct feminists have undermined what otherwise is common sense.

For more information on this topic as well as others, they are on FaceBook.

Neural Wiring

The participants were split into three age groups, aged eight to 13, 13 and four months to 16, and 17 to 22. The youngest group’s brains showed far less difference than those of the older two.

In one of the largest studies looking at the “connectomes” of the sexes, Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.

“These maps show us a stark difference–and complementarity–in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Verma.

For instance, on average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.

Past studies have shown sex differences in the brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions across the whole brain that have been tied to such cognitive skills has never been fully shown in a large population.

— PENN STATE

Dennis Prager point out that “many in the university are not even intellectually open in the natural sciences if an idea may clash with Left-wing opinion.” He continues,

In a talk before fellow economists, the same Lawrence Summers, when he was president of Harvard University (he had been secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton), addressed the issue of why there were so many fewer women than men in some areas of science, in math, and in engineering. He suggested that among other reasons, one might be that women’s brains are less suited to these subjects than men’s brains. More than one hundred Harvard professors signed a petition against President Summers, Left-wing alumni threatened not to give any more money to Harvard, and the vast majority of Harvard’s professors kept a cowardly silence while their colleagues sought to suppress completely respectable intellectual inquiry. Consequently, President Summers felt forced to apologize. In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced by the then-dominant Catholic Church to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University, an institution whose motto is Veritas (“Truth”), was forced by the now-dominant Left to recant observable facts about men and women.

Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 102-103.

The ATLANTIC MONTHLY adds their thoughts on the matter:

Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.

Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets.

Summers’s suggestion—now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies—was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only possible explanations for gender imbalances in the math-science area. He noted that high school boys have many more of the highest math scores than girls, and suggested that this might reflect genetic differences. He also stressed the need for further research into all three possible explanations.

The foul brute may as well have rapped that women are “hos,” or declared that they should be kept barefoot and pregnant. The most remarkable feminist exercise in self-parody was that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who famously told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” that “I just couldn’t breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” and that she had to flee the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

Such fatuous feminist fulminations have been good fun, as have the eviscerations of Hopkins as a latter-day “Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, [who] suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines,” in the words of George Will. (More on Hopkins below.) But most of the commentary has glossed over one important point:

For all its foolishness and irrationality, the feminist hysteria about Summers furthers the career agendas of feminists who seek thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends. Such preferences are most easily justified as a remedy for male bias. And bias can more easily be blamed for gender imbalances if the possibility that more men than women are gifted with math-science brilliance is banished from public discourse.

This feminist-careerist agenda is conveniently ignored by the less hysterical critics of Summers, who make no claim that he said anything inaccurate but nonetheless reproach him for what a Los Angeles Times editorial portrayed as a gratuitous and insensitive ego trip. To the contrary, until his disgraceful capitulation to the power of political correctness, Summers was making a much-needed effort to break the self-serving feminist-careerist stranglehold on honest discussion of gender imbalances….

(ATLANTIC MONTHLY)

(Video Description) Oprah recently mentioned an incident that happened in Europe. It looks like — more and more — that this incident was fictitious… but nonetheless, it offers a great opportunity for discussion of the differences in the male/female brain. This is true whether you ascribe it to eons of evolution or creation ex-nihilo.

WebMD comments on the science involved:

Recent studies highlight a long-held suspicion about the brains of males and females. They’re not the same. So how does the brain of a female look and function differently from a male’s brain, and what accounts for these differences?

Disparities Start Early in Life

Scientists now know that sex hormones begin to exert their influence during development of the fetus. A recent study by Israeli researchers that examined male and female brains found distinct differences in the developing fetus at just 26 weeks of pregnancy. The disparities could be seen when using an ultrasound scanner. The corpus callosum — the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the right and left sides of the brain — had a thicker measurement in female fetuses than in male fetuses.

Observations of adult brains show that this area may remain stronger in females. “Females seem to have language functioning in both sides of the brain,” says Martha Bridge Denckla, PhD, a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Consider these recent findings. Researchers, using brain imaging technology that captures blood flow to “working” parts of the brain, analyzed how men and women process language. All subjects listened to a novel. When males listened, only the left hemisphere of their brains was activated. The brains of female subjects, however, showed activity on both the left and right hemispheres.

This activity across both hemispheres of the brain may result in the strong language skills typically displayed by females. “If there’s more area dedicated to a set of skills, it follows that the skills will be more refined,” says David Geary, PhD, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.

As a whole, girls outperform boys in the use of language and fine motor skills until puberty, notes Denckla. Boys also fall prey to learning disabilities more frequently than girls. “Clinics see a preponderance of boys with dyslexia,” Denckla tells WebMD. ADHD also strikes more boys than girls. The symptoms displayed by girls and boys with ADHD differ, too. Girls with ADHD usually exhibit inattention, while affected boys are prone to lack of impulse control. But not all differences favor girls.

Boys generally demonstrate superiority over female peers in areas of the brain involved in math and geometry. These areas of the brain mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls, according to a recent study that measured brain development in more than 500 children. Researchers concluded that when it comes to math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles that of an 8-year-old boy. Conversely, the same researchers found that areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys…

[….]

Geary suggests that women use language skills to their advantage. “Females use language more when they compete. They gossip, manipulate information,” he says. Geary suggests that this behavior, referred to as relational aggression, may have given females a survival advantage long ago. “If the ability to use language to organize relationships was of benefit during evolutionary history, and used more frequently by women, we would expect language differences to become exaggerated,” he tells WebMD. Women also use language to build relationships, theorizes Geary. “Women pause more, allow the other friend to speak more, offer facilitative gestures,” he says.

When it comes to performing activities that require spatial skills, like navigating directions, men generally do better. “Women use the cerebral cortex for solving problems that require navigational skills. Men use an entirely different area, mainly the left hippocampus — a nucleus deep inside the brain that’s not activated in the women’s brains during navigational tasks,” Geary tells WebMD. The hippocampus, he explains, automatically codes where you are in space. As a result, Geary says: “Women are more likely to rely on landmark cues: they might suggest you turn at the 7-11 and make a right at the church, whereas men are more likely to navigate via depth reckoning — go east, then west, etc.”….

(WEB-MD)

(Video Description) While on the show, Dennis Prager brings up a previous call to Adam Carolla where a college student, Erin, from Wellesley College called into Prager’s “Male-Female Hour.” She believes that our nature is totally by convention, that society brings out what we see in the male and female differences. After Adam Carolla gives his “patented” input, I then include the actual call. It is sad that all this money is flushed down the proverbial toilet in this girl’s life… but life tends to carry a big swat board. One hopes she reads books like: “The Myth of Male Power” or, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.”

Another brain website comments:

…The female and male brain is different and the two brains process information differently. The good news is that with some conscious effort communication can be enhanced between the brains and frustrations lowered.

In general, female brains tend to employ both sides of their brain to process information while male brains tend to rely primarily on their dominant or language side to process. As the dominant hemisphere tends to be analytic, problem solving, task oriented, detailed, and verbal this helps to explain male behavior. A female brain can also process in this manner, but the non-dominant hemisphere that can process emotion, meaning without words, empathy, tone, and disposition is also engaged by the female.

Perhaps this helps to explain why females enjoy shopping while most men view it as a chore, women vote differently than males, men and women struggle communicating with each other, and men do not understand psychotherapy. Men tend to be more isolative, less talkative, and focused on solution. Women tend to be more group oriented, more talkative, and focused on the means and not necessarily the ends. This gets played out in the U.S. at this time as women and men tend to view the same debate between candidates differently (men tend to focus on content and women both content and style)…

(FIT BRAINS)

Cheap Thrills Provided By Christina Hoff Sommers

Published by Papa Giorgio

I know, this is “campy” and I hate “people worship,” but I have been a fan of Dr. Sommers for quite some time, since the first publishing of The War Against Boys. Dr. Sommers was ahead of the curve and enlightened me on subjects I had to mature in to fully understand. At any rate, I am merely posting the tweet and h/t to me for passing this along. The link to the videos originally tweeted in in the pic. Cheap thrill but I feel accomplished… I  k n o w... dumb!

Six-Year Old Boys and `Slut Walks` ~ Whatch-U-Talkin-Bout Willis!?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Gay Patriot has an interesting take that I thought of myself after listening to a story on the radio, that is, would they have been as adamant if it were a boy kissing another boy on the hand?

Item No. 1: A little six year old boy in Colorado — which is lately giving Florida a run for its money as America’s nutjob state — has been suspended from school and labeled a sexual harasser for the sexcrime of kissing a little girl on the cheek.  Because school administrators must always be on the lookout for potentially anti-social behavior are idiotic and insane.

Why do I feel like if he had kissed another little boy on the cheek, he’d have been given a school award and a guest spot on the Ellen DeGeneres show?

In point number two of GP’s post he points out that the Left is trying to make even looking at women a crime! to which he adds the following commentary:

And isn’t it positively deranged that the same people who champion “slut walks“* excoriate men for paying attention to women’s bodies? It’s like the left is saying, “We champion the right of women to dress like sluts, but any man who looks at them is a thought-rapist who must be punished!”

*This link leads to pictures of scantily clad San Francisco feminists. You have been warned.

[I wish to add that is you go to page 2 and 3 of “slut walk,” you get some propaganda bonuses… also viewable as a single page.]

Just to make the point clear… the LEFT is crazy! Doesn’t matter if you are gay or straight… just the Left in general!

Making Nature Criminal

Feminist author Ti-Grace Atkinson shows her true autonomy when stating, “the institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist.”[1]   Marilyn French, feminist author calls all men rapists: “All men are rapists and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”[2]  Let us allow Gloria Steinen, feminist extraordinaire, to set the stage with the following praises about her contemporary, Andrea Dworkin, “In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.”[3]   Why preface Andrea Dworkin?  Because she has this to say about men in general: “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”[4]

…A Feminist Dictionary,[5] whose definitions are self-explanatory:

Male:  “… represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants… the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female.”
Man: “… an obsolete life form… an ordinary creature who needs to be watched … a contradictory baby-man.”
Testosterone Poisoning: “Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’”

(Via: Gnostic Feminism: Empowered to Fail)

[1] Daniel Dervin, Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 244; another telling quote comes directly from Atkinson’s own biography, Amazon Odyssey:

The price of clinging to the enemy [a man] is your life. To enter into a relationship with a man who has divested himself as completely and publicly from the male role as much as possible would still be a risk. But to relate to a man who has done any less is suicide…. I, personally, have taken the position that I will not appear with any man publicly, where it could possibly be interpreted that we were friends.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York, NY: Links Books, 1976), 90, 91.

[2] Elizabeth Knowles, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 5th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), cf. Freeman, E.A., 324.

[3] David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York, NY: Free Press ,2001), 225.

[4] Neil Boyd, Big Sister: How Extreme Feminism has Betrayed the Fight for Sexual Equality (British Columbia, Canada: Greystone Books 2004), 23.  Dr. Boyd continues with Dworkin’s quote:

In fucking, as in reproduction, sex and economics are inextricably joined. In male-supremacist cultures, women are believed to embody carnality; women are sex. A man wants what a woman has – sex. He can steal it outright (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States), or own it outright (marriage in most societies). A man can do some or all of the above, over and over again.

Ibid.

[5] Edited by Cheris Kramarae & Paula A. Treichler. Feminist Dictionary, University of Illinois Press, Champaign: IL [1986].

Tug-of-war vs. Tug-of-Peace

Published by Papa Giorgio

This comes via Time magazine, by a favorite author, Christina Hoff Sommers:

As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to “shoot” a “bad guy” — his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado’s Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at “bad guys” in order to “save the world.”

In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school’s zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn’t the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys.

Girls occasionally run afoul of these draconian policies; but it is mostly boys who are ensnared. Boys are nearly five times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls. In grades K-12, boys account for nearly 70% of suspensions, often for minor acts of insubordination and defiance. In the cases of Christopher, Josh and Alex, there was no insubordination or defiance whatsoever. They were guilty of nothing more than being typical 7-year-old boys. But in today’s school environment, that can be a punishable offense.

Zero tolerance was originally conceived as a way of ridding schools of violent predators, especially in the wake of horrific shootings in places like Littleton, Colo. But juvenile violence, including violence at schools, is at a historic low. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2011, approximately 1% of students ages 12 to 18 reported a violent victimization at school. For serious violence, the figure is one-tenth of 1%. It does no disrespect to the victims of Columbine or Sandy Hook to note that while violence may be built into the core of a small coterie of sociopathic boys, most boys are not sociopathic.

[….]

Across the country, schools are policing and punishing the distinctive, assertive sociability of boys. Many much-loved games have vanished from school playgrounds. At some schools, tug of war has been replaced with “tug of peace.” Since the 1990s, elimination games like dodgeball, red rover and tag have been under a cloud — too damaging to self-esteem and too violent, say certain experts. Young boys, with few exceptions, love action narratives. These usually involve heroes, bad guys, rescues and shoot-ups. As boys’ play proceeds, plots become more elaborate and the boys more transfixed. When researchers ask boys why they do it, the standard reply is, “Because it’s fun.”

According to at least one study, such play rarely escalates into real aggression — only about 1% of the time. But when two researchers, Mary Ellin Logue and Hattie Harvey, surveyed classroom practices of 98 teachers of 4-year-olds, they found that this style of play was the least tolerated. Nearly half of teachers stopped or redirected boys’ dramatic play daily or several times a week — whereas less than a third reported stopping or redirecting girls’ dramatic play weekly.

Play is a critical basis for learning. And boys’ heroic play is no exception. Logue and Harvey found that “bad guy” play improved children’s conversation and imaginative writing. Such play, say the authors, also builds moral imagination, social competence and imparts critical lessons about personal limits and self-restraint. Logue and Harvey worry that the growing intolerance for boys’ action-narrative–play choices may be undermining their early language development and weakening their attachment to school. Imagine the harm done to boys like Christopher, Josh and Alex who are not merely discouraged from their choice of play, but are punished, publicly shamed and ostracized.

…read more…

Dennis Prager reads from and comments on the above article:

Intrinsic Benefits [i.e., built in by nature] from Male/Female Heterosexual Marriage ~ Excerpts from `What Is Marriage?`

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is an important set of excerpts from the book, What is Marriage?, and is linked to my Cumulative Case. I highly recommend getting the book and reading chapters three and four, you can also follow up on the many references to the quotes I did not include below:

Against this, some on the libertarian Right say that mar­riage has no public value, and call for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether. Voices on the Left say that marriage has no distinctive public value; they say the state may work it like clay, remaking marriage to fit our preferences. Here we show where both go wrong.

[….]

First, as we have seen by reflection that procreation uniquely extends and perfects marriage (see chapter 2), so the best available social science suggests that children tend to do best when reared by their married mother and father. Studies that control for other factors, including poverty and even genetics, suggest that children reared in intact homes do best on the following indices:

Educational achievement: literacy and graduation rates

Emotional health: rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide

Familial and sexual development: strong sense of identity, timing of onset of puberty, rates of teen and

out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and rates of sexual abuse

Child and adult behavior: rates of aggression, attention deficit disorder, delinquency, and incarceration

Consider the conclusions of the left-leaning research institution Child Trends:

[R]esearch clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Children in single-parent families, children born to unmarried mothers, and children in stepfamilies or cohabiting relationships face higher risks of poor outcomes. . . . There is thus value for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents. . . . [Fit is not simply the presence of two parents, . . . but the presence of two biological par­ents that seems to support children’s development.

According to another study, in the Journal of Marriage and Family, “[t]he advantage of marriage appears to exist primarily when the child is the biological offspring of both parents.” Recent literature reviews conducted by the Brookings Institu­tion, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, the Center for Law and Social Policy, and the Institute for American Values corroborate the importance of intact households for children.♦

Single-motherhood, cohabitation, joint custody after di­vorce, and stepparenting have all been reliably studied, and the result is clear: Children tend to fare worse under every one of these alternatives to married biological parenting. To make marriages more stable is to give more children the best chance to become upright and productive members of society. Note the importance of the link between marriage and children in both stages of our argument: just as it provides a powerful reason to hold the conjugal view of marriage, so it provides the central reason to make marriage a matter of public concern.

But this link is no idiosyncrasy of our view. It is amply con­firmed in our law. Long before same-sex civil marriages were envisioned, courts declared that marriage “is the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would be nei­ther civilization nor progress.” They recalled that “virtually every Supreme court case recognizing as fundamental the right to marry indicates as the basis for the conclusion the institu­tion’s inextricable link to procreation.” In their account, not just ours, “the first purpose of matrimony, by the laws of nature and society, is procreation”; “the procreation of children un­der the shield and sanction of the law” is one of the “two princi­pal ends of marriage.” In fact, “marriage exists as a protected legal institution primarily because of societal values associated with the propagation of the human race.” Examples can be multiplied ad nauseam.

A second public benefit of marriage is that it tends to help spouses financially, emotionally, physically, and socially. As the late University of Virginia sociologist Steven Nock showed, it is not that people who are better off are most likely to marry, but that marriage makes people better off. More than signal maturity, marriage can promote it. Thus men, after their wed­ding, tend to spend more time at work, less time at bars, more time at religious gatherings, less time in jail, and more time with family.

The shape of marriage as a permanent and exclusive union ordered to family life helps explain these benefits. Permanently committed to a relationship whose norms are shaped by its apt­ness for family life, husbands and wives gain emotional insur­ance against life’s temporary setbacks. Exclusively committed, they leave the sexual marketplace and thus escape its heightened risks. Dedicated to their children and each other, they enjoy the benefits of a sharpened sense of purpose. More vigorously sow­ing in work, they reap more abundantly its fruits. So the state’s interest in productivity and social order creates an interest in marriage.

[….]

MAKING MOTHER OR FATHER SUPERFLUOUS

Conjugal marriage laws reinforce the idea that the union of husband and wife is, on the whole, the most appropriate envi­ronment for rearing children—an ideal supported by the best available social science.† Recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages would legally abolish that ideal. No civil institution would reinforce the notion that men and women typically have different strengths as parents; that boys and girls tend to benefit from fathers and mothers in different ways.

To the extent that some continued to see marriage as apt for family life, they would come to think—indeed, our law, public schools, and media would teach them, and variously penalize them for denying—that it matters not, even as a rule, whether children are reared by both their mother and their father, or by a parent of each sex at all. But as the connection between mar­riage and parenting is obscured, as we think it would be eventu­ally, no arrangement would be proposed as ideal.

And here is the central problem with either result: it would diminish the social pressures and incentives for husbands to remain with their wives and children, or for men and women having children to marry first. Yet the resulting arrangements—parenting by divorced or single parents, or cohabiting couples —are demonstrably worse for children, as we have seen in chap­ter 3. So even if it turned out that studies showed no differences between same- and opposite-sex parenting, redefining marriage would undermine marital stability in ways that we know do hurt children.

That said, in addition to the data on child outcomes sum­marized in chapter 3, there is significant evidence that moth­ers and fathers have different parenting strengths—that their respective absences impede child development in different ways. Girls, for example, are likelier to suffer sexual abuse and to have children as teenagers and out of wedlock if they do not grow up with their father. For their part, boys reared without their father tend to have much higher rates of aggression, de­linquency, and incarceration. As Rutgers University sociolo­gist David Popenoe concludes, “The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender-differentiated parenting is important for human development and that the contribution of fathers to childrearing is unique and irreplaceable.” He con­tinues: “[W]e should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion . . . that ‘daddies can make good mommies.’ . . . The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.” In a summary of the relevant science, Univer­sity of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same:

Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific lit­erature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that—on average—men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.

Of course, the question of which arrangements our policies should privilege is normative [should be based on natures/natural conditions]….

♦ Note that for a relationship to be ordered to procreation in this principled and empirically manifested way, sexual orientation is not a disqualifier. The union of a husband and wife hears this connection to children even if, say, the husband is also attracted to men. What is necessary is rather sexual complementarity—which two men lack even if they are attracted only to women. It is not individuals who are singled out—as being less capable of affectionate and responsible parenting, or anything else. What are instead favored as bearing a special and valuable link to childrearing are certain arrangements and the acts that complete or embody them—to which, to be sure, individuals are more or less inclined.

† The need for adoption (and its immense value) where the ideal is practically impossible is no argument for redefining civil marriage, a unified structure of incentives meant precisely to reinforce the ideal—to minimize the need for alternative, case-by-case provisions.

Sheif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, What Is Marriage: Man and Woman: A Defense (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2012), 37, 42-45, 58-60.

 

Is the Increase of Women In Medicine Good or Bad for Society? (Dennis Prager)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager deals with the outcomes of forced fairness, pointing out that this egalitarianism never produces equality or “good” for society on a whole. In my in-depth dealing with the mantra/myth of the glass ceiling, I quote that older NYT’s and L.A. Times articles mentions in the above audio:

(NYT – 2011) …..But the productivity of the doctors currently practicing is also an important factor. About 30 percent of doctors in the United States are female, and women received 48 percent of the medical degrees awarded in 2010. But their productivity doesn’t match that of men. In a 2006 survey by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, even full-time female doctors reported working on average 4.5 fewer hours each week and seeing fewer patients than their male colleagues. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 71 percent of female pediatricians take extended leave at some point — five times higher than the percentage for male pediatricians.

This gap is especially problematic because women are more likely to go into primary care fields — where the doctor shortage is most pronounced — than men are. Today 53 percent of family practice residents, 63 percent of pediatric residents and nearly 80 percent of obstetrics and gynecology residents are female. In the low-income areas that lack primary and prenatal care, there are more emergency room visits, more preventable hospitalizations and more patients who die of treatable conditions. Foreign doctors emigrate to the United States to help fill these positions, but this drains their native countries of desperately needed medical care.

If medical training were available in infinite supply, it wouldn’t matter how many doctors worked part time or quit, because there would always be new graduates to fill their spots. But medical schools can only afford to accept a fraction of the students who apply…..

(LA TIMES — 2011) ….The answer, they speculate, is that women are choosing lower-paying jobs on purpose because they offer greater flexibility in hours and are generally more family-friendly. The researchers acknowledge they don’t have the data to prove that this is the case, but the data they do have is consistent with this theory.

If so, they say, that would be a victory for women (and even men.) Studies show that many doctors are burned out and would rather take jobs that allow them to have a good quality of life. Now — thanks in large part to the growing ranks of female doctors — such jobs are available. They just come with lower salaries.

“Instead of being penalized because of their gender, female physicians may be seeking out employment arrangements that compensate them in other — nonfinancial — ways, and more employers may be beginning to offer such arrangements,” the researchers wrote…..

Women-We Want You ~ Not A Dream

Published by Papa Giorgio

Men look at women. That’s their nature. But is this fascination with the female body a threat to their spouse or the woman they are with? That’s the question that best-selling author and nationally syndicated talk show host, Dennis Prager, deals with here. His answer will be a revelation to most women… and a relief to most men.