I recently expressed skepticism over specific claims of differences between men's and women's brains, including that women use 20,000 words per day, while men use 7,000. This has now been debunked by Mark Liberman at Language Log in a series of posts:

• < a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003419.html">Neuroscience in the service of sexual stereotypes
• Sex-linked lexical budgets
• Sex and speaking rate

I found out about these posts from the always interesting Mind Hacks blog.

Men, Women, and Sex

Recently, I ridiculed the idea that men think about sex two thousand times as often as women do (once a minute vs. once every couple of days). According to my highly scientific polls, 52% of men think about sex at least once a minute while more women think about sex every few days (27%) than do one or more times per minute (18%). The majority of women (55%), however, think of sex an intermediate amount. It looks like the sex sex difference is greater than I thought but less than the article implied. Still, I'm going to invest in divorce futures.

Beyond Satire

I also had a survey on whether to run personal items in this blog. Most people said yes, although a few would prefer that I stick to the "beyond satire" theme. For those people, you can use this bookmark or this feed to only get items tagged beyond satire. Let me know if you have any problem with them.

According to Femme Mentale, an article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine has found the following differences between male and female brains:

• Thoughts about sex enter women's brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.
• Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000 per day.
• Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.

While I'm sure there are differences between male and female brains, I found these laughable. Presumably, when a man and women have sex, the man is thinking about sex and the woman is enumerating vocabulary words. Meanwhile, unless the woman starts to cry or hit the man, he hasn't the slightest idea how she is feeling.

Update: See results of above poll for men.

Senate Readies For Minor Abortion Bill

Unfortunately, the bill is neither minor nor humorous.

Excerpts from Grooms for Life from Feministe via feministing:

Is there a way to radically decrease abortions without asking the government to do it? Adoption is often suggested here and that is a good alternative but I think there is another as well.

Marriage. I am not talking just about a return to the “shotgun marriage”; rather, I think an offer of marriage from a man who is not the father but will assume all the traditional responsibilities of fatherhood would be accepted by many unmarried pregnant women. The motif of a man proposing marriage to a woman pregnant with another man’s child is a common one on soap operas that are a fairly good gauge of female fantasy. These stories represent the truth that many pregnant women don’t really want to abort, and would not, if marriage and commitment were offered to them.

Grooms For Life could be facilitated on a practical basis by computerized matching of pro-life single men with unmarried pregnant women interested in carrying to term. Certainly, the number of Grooms For Life would fall short of the million and a half abortions per year–but the government would be able to ensure birth quite imperfectly as well. Additionally, female pro-lifers and married men could spend their time recruiting bachelors to their cause so that the screaming demonstrators outside abortion clinics would soon be replaced by swains in bow ties, holding rings and serenading the pregnant women.

From MrsCake's blog, My Pet Goat:

One of my more unfortunate habits is occasionally eating at McDonald's. Anyhow, they have "boy" and "girl" toys with their kids' meals, which make interesting statements. Currently, they have "spy gear" for boys and troll dolls for girls.

Here are some comments from the "boy" side of the Happy Meal box.

• "Your motion sensor detected a rival spy!"
• "You've hacked into the enemy's computer!"
• "Fuzzy radio signal!"
• "You've tripped a security beam!"

Here are some comments from the "girl" side.

• "OMG! You and your friend wore the same dress to the party!"
• "You got a new 'do"
• "Curling iron burnt out!"
• "Your purse is 2 cool!"

Yeah, like I really needed more reasons to stay away from McDonald's.

You can see pictures at the original post.

Every year, I lead a "how to build a computer workshop" at the Mills Expanding Your Horizons conference for girls. This year, I had several Google volunteers (in addition to Mills and UCB student), and my write-up is in the official Google Blog.

"Maybe I became a mathematician because I was so crummy at housework."

Australian article via fark:

QANTAS chairman Margaret Jackson was suspected of being a terrorist and frisked during a visit to the US last year. The airport security guard who checked her was reluctant to believe that a woman could be the head of an airline.

Mrs Jackson said yesterday her briefcase was searched after she went through a security check at Los Angeles airport.

Among her documents were detailed plans of new aircraft, including cross-section diagrams showing seat layouts.

"The guy said 'Why have you got all of this?'," she told the Herald Sun.

"And I said, 'I'm the chairman of an airline. I'm the chairman of Qantas'. And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, 'But you're a woman'."....

After proving her identity, Mrs Jackson produced paper with her letterhead on it and wrote a note to the guard, whose name was Bill.

"And I wrote, 'Dear Bill, this is from the chairman of Qantas, who is a woman'."

This reminds me of a 1989 article about women at technical conferences, which I first excerpted in a report about women in computer science:

[PFS Inc. president Mary] Rich remembers attending the National Computer Conference (NCC), a now-defunct computer convention, where the male attendees outnumbered the female ones by a ratio of 300 to 1. Convention officials as well as hotel staffs were extremely suspicious of single women, Rich said. Women were often suspected of being prostitutes trying to solicit show attendees. Rich said she once tried to go to the hotel room of a colleague for a drink only to be kicked out by security when trying to get in an elevator.

Rich, who co-chaired the 1986 NCC with another woman, said that as recently as three years ago one of the primary concerns was how women were being treated at the show. `We still had problems with security not believing [the credentials of] women trying to get onto the show floor,' she said [LaPlante 1989].

I'm back to featuring material beyond satire: RealDoll, "the most realistic love doll in the world", priced $6499 and up. The first time I saw the site, I wondered if it was satire, including Howard Stern's testimonial:

Best sex I ever had! I swear to God! This RealDoll feels better than a real woman! She's fantastic! I love her! This RealDoll is for real, I swear! Better than a woman! My wife isn't as good as that! May God take away all my ratings if I'm lying!

It's for real, though, and a recent article shows it's even further beyond satire. Here is an excerpt from Real Dolls: Love in the Age of Silicone by Meghan Laslocky:

Sirens all – luring men to an exclusive cyber island where high-tech and age-old male fantasy fuse. Imagine! A beautiful woman whose face one can pull off and replace with another. A beautiful woman who poses for countless pornographic photographs and won’t mind when you show them to your friends. She never lies, cheats, get pregnant, or passes on disease. She offers great sex unfettered by the pesky daily push-pull of a relationship. She never says, "No."

A beautiful woman who, when a man whispers in her soft, slightly sticky ear that she is his one and only love, he can almost hear murmur that the feeling is mutual.

For some owners, a Real Doll is simply a 3-D Playboy -- voluptuous and eager to please, an inanimate co-conspirator in a thrilling dip into synthetic love. For others, with their torn breasts and mangled genitals, Real Dolls are speechless vessels of violence.

But for yet another group of doll loving men, Real Dolls are gentle courtesans whose silicone curves offer companionship and relief beyond orgasm. In their world, regular sex with 100 pounds of silicone just might be preferable to intimacy between two breathing beings. Depending on how you look at it, doll love is either the perfect solution to or the symptom of any number of problems -- plain old-fashioned loneliness, a dysfunctional personality, or a brain that is simply not wired for love. Lust for the inanimate is nothing new. But combining lust and plastic, with a dash of the Internet, makes for a potent cocktail: love in the age of silicone.

A shorter version of the article, entitled Just Like a Woman, appeared in Salon.