Yahoo News:

Dads are helping out with childrearing more and more these days. The result can be both a boon and a letdown for super-moms, whose self-competence can take a hit when paired with husbands who are savvy caregivers, new research finds.

The findings reveal the fallout as women have entered the workplace in droves over recent decades, many of them leaving young children at home. One result is mothers have less time for care-giving. Past studies have shown working moms are torn between full-time careers and stay-at-home duties. And lately more diligent dads are helping out with the diaper-changing and other household duties.

But since mothers pride themselves on being just that – moms – their self-esteem can take a blow.

“While mothers are encouraged to join the workforce, socially constructed ideals of motherhood requires mothers to be primary caregivers,” said study researcher Takayuki Sasaki of the Osaka University of Commerce in Japan. “Thus, employed mothers may feel pressured to do more care-giving to ensure the survival of their feelings of self-competence, even though they may wish for fathers’ increased participation to lessen their burden.”

So it’s A) Men always have yet another excuse to be lazy. Or, B) Women never ever stop bitching no matter WHAT.

Or C) Science isn’t science if it shows a social problem is in remission; all disasters have to be growing, all the time, threatening to engulf us.

Vote only once, please. Well, okay maybe more than once…

Blogger friend Andy lays it down:

Modern woman is not evil, and modern man is not weak, but the new assertion of the former has met the humble acquiescence of the latter, and the consequence of that convenient tryst is a shrinking of the places that men have for the making of things.
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It is difficult to know, but it seems that with the decreased room to work has come a decreased estimation for the work that does get done. The builders are no longer the heroes of our society. For far too long now we have been watching men span great distances with improbable technology for the nobility of human exploration, so the bridge maker has been rendered just another guy doing another thing in another place. It is passe exceptionalism in a culture full of people grown weary of celebrating a few hyper-acheiving world builders among throngs of everyday souls. There is no longer any accomplishment too great to be ignored, no myth too beautiful to be spurned, and no sedentary self-righteousness too complacent to be hailed as brilliance.

Watch out, ladies. Look for these tell-tale signs.

1. He can’t take an innocent joke at his expense.
2. He works in advertising, has an M.D., or is the lead singer and/or most good-looking member of a band.
3. He tells you about the assorted girls who hit on him. Or worse, the ones who looked at him and thus OBVIOUSLY wanted to hit on him.
4. He gives you a verbal resume on a first date. Even if it sounds impressive, run.
5. He begins 75 percent of sentences with I.

Begins three-quarters of his sentences with “I”? Last time I was on the market, I dated a lot of women who did that. Or let’s just say a lot of the women I dated, did that…makes me sound a bit more chaste. I didn’t (whoops!) keep a record of them or the sentences that came out of them…but it was easy to form the impression that nowadays this is just how available young ladies talk. I said this, I said that, and then I said…blah blah blah.

I remember noticing this about my ex-wife, way back in the early days, when there were still a few more months before she started looking like a future-ex. The story would start out “she said to me” — just telling me what happened to her at work that day. And then the remaining 99% of the story was “so then I said.” I remember teasing her about it and asking “so after that point, didn’t the other person say anything, or was it all just you talking?” Hmm, now that I think on it maybe that’s when she started being a future-ex.

Anyway, it really comes as news to me that guys aren’t supposed to do this. I suppose it’s not very chivalrous. Then again, I wonder how a gentleman comes off on a first date if he makes too much of a point of not doing it. Can’t you just hear the BFF’s debriefing afterward in the inevitable “So Tell Me What He’s Like” chit-chat? “It was so hard to get anything out of him…it’s like whatever he’s got going on, he didn’t want me to know anything about it. Really creepy.”

Oh well. In the end, for the most part, I’m convinced it’s physical. At least with the younger ladies it is; if you look like Casper Van Dien, you can say whatever you want to say and be as egomaniacal as you please, she’ll find a way to get past it and the litmus tests won’t even be applied. The few that wanted to hang on to me, before the one I eventually snagged, really didn’t have anything else good to say about me besides that I was “handsome.” Whatever was positive that could be said about the brains, was uttered dismissively by those who chucked me to the curb, in the middle of the “someday you’ll find someone” speech. Those who wanted to keep me, catalog’d it alongside all the other things that made me an overall pain-in-the-ass.

In the end, men and women are exactly alike: If they’re available for very long, they’re available for a reason. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But it’s certainly true.

Some fifteen years ago there was this book put out by a couple of bitter women called The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. Men all over the civilized world, within the tenth of a second they took to analyze the phenomenon, had exactly the same thought: This shit would send me running away screaming, so if “The Rules” really do work then these millions of excited women must be looking for someone different from me. You see, there is an unstated, unifying principle behind each and every one of The Rules, and the unifying principle is this — actually, it’s a small double-handful of principles: The man should do more work, the woman should decide more things, the man should know less about what’s going on, and the whole experience should cost him a good amount of money.

This, I think, feels mighty good to you if you’re an available female and you’ve been through some unsatisfying dating experiences, particularly if you’re the one that got dumped. It doesn’t follow from that that these are rules that will work in your future dating endeavors. But the women got excited about the book anyway, by the millions. And this puts the big reveal on the kind of women who like this stuff: If you put them in the right emotional frame of mind, and then tell them some things that aren’t true, you can get whatever you want out of them. Hmmm. I think I know why their dating lives might not have been fulfilling.

Most prominently displayed quote at The Rules home page: Oprah Winfrey. “The Rules isn’t just a book, it’s a movement, honey.” Yes, that Oprah Winfrey. I rest my case.

Well, I don’t know why Vox Populi waited this long to critique The Rules (hat tip to The Ness in Darkness), but I’m glad he did. Wonder if the people who need to read it, will ever see it.

Rule 1: Be a “Creature Unlike Any Other”

Given that Playboy has spent five decades proving the near-universal male predilection for a slender, pretty, large-breasted, blue-eyed blonde, this rule is obviously insane. In fact, most men have distinct preferences that anyone who knows them well can easily identify…Women are naturally attracted to outliers for the sheer sake of their novelty. Men aren’t.

Rule 2: Show Up to Parties, Dances, and Social Events Even if You Do Not Feel Like It.

This makes sense, but you probably shouldn’t bother if you’re just going to be a tiresome bitch. Unless it’s a Goth party, then feel free to mope and whine all you like, Lady Dolorous.
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Rule 5: Don’t Call Him & Rarely Return His Calls

That’s fine. He’ll be busy having sex with the woman who calls him at 11 PM to see if he happens to be free at the moment and you’re just another haughty bitch who can’t be bothered to call him back anyway. This is easily the worst Rule, as it is designed to ensure that the only men who will continue to call you are terminally obsessed stalkers.

Rule 6: Always End Phone Calls First

This Rule is fine, because there isn’t a single man on the planet who keeps track of who hung up first. Besides, he’s either reading his emails, surfing the Internet, or playing video games while you’re rambling on and on about who said what to whom anyhow.

There are, in my opinion, quite a few women who sunk some money into this book and still have it on their shelves to this very day even though they’re still single and miserable. There is an unhappy phenomenon taking place here…and it is not exclusively female, although it is perhaps predominantly female. The phenomenon is an enjoyment of the adrenaline rush that goes with the feeling of solving a problem, coupled with sustained ignorance and apathy regarding whether the problem is really being solved. The Rules were given the ol’ college try; they didn’t work, for the reasons Vox Populi states, along with some others; but the whole experience felt so damn good. Especially those above-mentioned principles according to which men shouldn’t decide anything and they shouldn’t be in control of anything.

Of the millions of old copies of The Rules that were snatched up all those years ago, I speculate further that more than half of them reek of cat urine.

The Futurist has an essay up of some 12,000 words give-or-take (hat tip: Cassy Fiano), on why it seems civilization is quickly disintegrating under our feet:

The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.

Our take on it? Yes, you’re “undervaluing” people when you denigrate them simply for being what they are, regardless of their actions or lack thereof. And you certainly “overvalue” them when you worship them for being certain things rather than doing certain things.

That’s not intended as a promotion of my own view of why civilization seems to be crumbling under our feet; although that remains my answer to the question today. It is crumbling under our feet because we are no longer fit to stand upon it, because of a number of issues that all trace back to our predilection for passing judgment on each other for what we are, rather than for what we do. What The Futurist is exploring is one small facet of this sickness. Women good, men bad, and who cares what any of them actually do.

We are undervaluing work, overvaluing entertainment, undervaluing defense, overvaluing compromise, undervaluing meat, overvaluing organic vegetables, undervaluing competition, overvaluing empathy…et cetera. Because we’re trying too hard to think like women.

Speaking just for myself, that is not intended to bash women. If we were to undervalue them and overvalue men, and embark on all the thought transgressions that would result, our consequential societal problems would be just as severe. But “If” is ultimately a game for children. In the real world, things are what they are; and we are out of balance, because being out of balance is a state that is in perfect harmony with our efforts.

Wired found a study:

The gender gap in computer science may have been widened by Star Trek, a new study suggests — but it could be bridged with a less geeky image.

New research published in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that the stereotype of computer scientists as unwashed nerds may be partially responsible for the dearth of women in the field, as shown by National Science Foundation statistics.

“What this research shows is that the image of computer science — this geeky, masculine image — can make women feel like they don’t belong,” says lead author Sapna Cheryan of the University of Washington.

“I think this is an important contribution to the literature,” says Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton of the University of California, Berkeley. He says it raises questions about how much conscious control people have over their choices.

Previous research has found that a person can get a good sense of what another individual is like just from spending a few minutes perusing that person’s bedroom. Cheryan wondered if the same was true of classrooms.

“You can get a message about whether you want to join a certain group just by seeing the physical environment that that group is associated with,” Cheryan says. “You walk in, see these objects and think, ‘This is not me.’”

Cheryan and colleagues tested this idea by alternately decorating a computer science classroom with objects that earlier surveys pegged as stereotypically geeky—Star Trek posters, videogames and comic books — or with objects that the surveys found to be neutral— coffee mugs, plants and art posters. Thirty-nine college students spent a few minutes in the room, then filled out a questionnaire on their attitudes toward computer science.

Women who spent time in the geeky room reported less interest in computer science than women who saw the neutral room. For male students, however, the room’s décor made no difference.

This would explain why on all of the shows on WB Network — let me repeat that, all of the shows — you find a male character from there, and the dude doesn’t act like a “real” dude, knowwhatimean? The wounded-puppy look; immaculately tweezed eyebrows that could hold up book collections. A twenty-something face that has never known stubble (unless it’s in the script), or for that matter pressure under a deadline. He’s only concerned about one thing, ever, and that is whatever concerns her. He is only masculine in the ways a girl would find non-threatening — if she’s about twelve — and therefore, he isn’t very masculine at all.

It all makes sense. Everything has to fit someone’s image of “female-friendly,” and if it doesn’t then whoever created it is widening a gender gap. Better knock it off now.

This is such a colossal mistake; females are more resilient than this. Aren’t they? Or do I have it wrong? All of them, young and old, need to see plaid and paisley everywhere they look?

Wouldn’t it be funny if these asshats set out to make an “experiment” that would prove the opposite — that men are influenced by a room’s decor just as much as, or more than, their female counterparts. The data got in the way, so they found a different spin to put on it so they could still get their grant money.

Suppose we turn the world upside-down and make the technical fields bright purple and pink so they are pleasing to women who demand this. Make it all appealing…just barely long enough for them to pass a point of commitment. And then they find out, it’s greasy nerds, it’s some other more humble line of work to which they did not dedicate themselves to the necessary training, or it’s waiting for a sugar-daddy. Who’s that help? Really, I wanna know.

And I haven’t even mentioned the other people like me, who consider it a colossal headache when they have to work with someone, man or woman, who never should have entered the field in the first place. That is no picnic. Someday I must jot down all the reasons why that sucks so much. For now, I’ll just comment that it sucks for them just as much as it sucks for everybody else.

I know they’re just trying to be politically correct, but this really isn’t very helpful to anyone.

Andy asks a great question. I’m sure the answer has to do with cherry-picked bits of ancient and not-so-ancient history, and copious amounts of thundering righteous indignation.

Cassy Fiano, who works hard at developing all the attributes the rest of us are supposed to be wanting to have…beautiful, nice, articulate, quality thinker, wholesome values…is experiencing a case of culture clash. She’s come in virtual contact with someone who works equally hard (if we are to believe what we read, which isn’t much of a stretch) at being a nasty, toxic person. And is admired for this, for the time being, with regularity…

After reading this interview with Megan Fox, I’m convinced that she epitomizes everything that is wrong with women today. Check out her illuminating statements in the new Cosmopolitan:

MEGAN FOX is scary as she is sexy.

The Transformers beauty has been giving her verdict on relationships and leaves us in no doubt who wears the trousers in her house.

She told Cosmopolitan magazine: “Women hold the power because we have the vaginas.

“If you’re in a heterosexual relationship and you’re female, you win.”
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“I never call them guys, I always call them boys,” she explained.

“Maybe it’s a superiority complex – my needing to keep them down.”

Ya think??

Reading this, I just couldn’t help but think that this is exactly the problem with women and relationships today. Too many women think exactly this way, “empowered” by third wave feminism and Sex and the City. When the woman in the relationship has this kind of attitude, it dooms the relationship. It doesn’t matter how Beta the man may be. It will be doomed to fail.

My wisdom:

At her age, [her shitty attitude] actually makes a lot of sense. Twenty-somethings think of it as commodities trading, and she’s worked really hard to achieve precisely the look that is in the greatest demand, so she’s showing the behavior that capitalizes on it the best.
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[Trouble is,] When you have set yourself up in an antagonistic role, it’s best to be hard to read. The power-mongering-bitch thing is such a simple thing to read, and an even easier thing to understand. And so long before the immature male mind figures out this kind of woman is a waste of his time and energy — like, ten years earlier than that — even if he possesses only a mediocre amount of intelligence, like what Ms. Fox possesses of acting ability, it’s a relatively easy task for him to begin…drum roll please…

…manipulating her right back. And there are lots of ways to do this.

The glossy-mag puff piece doesn’t go on long enough to direct any attention toward how Ms. Fox perceives men — whether she has some complaints about them or not. Anyone want to place some bets that the starlet has a negative comment or two to make? That among these complaints might be that she has found them to be manipulative?

Wouldn’t exactly be sticking your neck out, would it.

It’s a rather sad thing what is happening to the bridge across the divide between the sexes; it’s sad what is happening to sex itself. The act used to be the highest compliment a woman could pay to a man. It’s still a positive thing, I think, but now it has some meaning as one of the few things a woman could want from her fella, that isn’t exploitative. Think about it — a woman wants something from you, what she wants is not sex, nowadays that’s likely to mean it’s something you wouldn’t give up willingly. And if sex is part of it, that means she’s bartering with you, which means it’s something more in her interest than in yours. This applies to anything, I don’t care what. It’s become so difficult to simply share a positive experience in which you both want to participate.

I think a lot of women are in Ms. Fox’s camp, and have simply given up. “He” is just a lowercase-h little-boy thing…something to be manipulated. So there aren’t things she wants to do that he’d also like to do, versus, things she wants to do that he’d despise…and therefore are to be avoided. Instead, there’s this vast encyclopedia of things she wants to do, in which he would not willingly participate — and so he has to be bribed, blackmailed, ridiculed and coaxed into it.

So easy to read, even for a young, inexperienced beau. And that is to the “lady’s” detriment. This is a house that cannot stand.

Dr. Helen produced a paragraph I thought worthy of note:

In fact, when I searched Amazon with the key words women who hate men, I came up with only books about…men who hate women.

Interesting. I guess we gentlemen aren’t throwing enough dollars to the publishers. Or we are, but our money just isn’t worth as much as woman-money.

Trust me on this. I would have parted with some decent coin, in the days and months following my divorce, to explore the subject of women who hate men. I’d have gone out of my way to get ahold of whatever information I could, in whatever way I could find it. So I hope no one’s gearing up to tell me there’s nothing being published on the subject because there’s a lack of discernible interest in it.

Quite to the contrary — the interest is high and it oughtta be a whole lot higher. Name a societal problem, and a durable, convincing argument can be constructed that the problem started with women who hate, or hated, men. It is the one human vice we have made no efforts to stigmatize or restrain whatsoever.

Nothing’s available on it? Nothing? Is this something where lots is being written, but the publishers are saying no? Or is nothing being written?

She must do some re-thinking, and she does it as only she can. Some good, deep thinking about the relationship between the sexes over there.

My thoughts are very sensible as well, and as usual, trump everything else in line-of-sight in the contest of common sense. But they’re already on record at her place.

Says the flibbertigibbet, I screwed around on my husband, so I guess marriage can’t work out for anyone…plus, I get to write a column!

On marriage: Let’s call the whole thing off
Author Sandra Tsing Loh is ending her marriage. Is it time you did, too?
By Sandra Tsing Loh
updated 6:27 a.m. PT, Mon., June 22, 2009

Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we bewailed the fate of our children.

And yet at the end of the day — literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks — when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized…no. Heart-shattering as this moment was — a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history — I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in “Against Love,” and as everyone knows, good relationships take work.

Which is not to say I’m against work. Indeed, what also came out that afternoon were the many tasks I — like so many other working/co-parenting/married mothers — have been doing for so many years and tearfully declared I would continue doing. I can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half — sometimes more — of the money…I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother — which is to say, my failure as a wife — I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
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Imagine driving with me now to Rachel’s house for our new 40-something social hobby — the Girls’ Night dinner. Leap not from my car, even though I realize — given my confessed extramarital affair, avowed childhood desire to see my father explode into flames, and carpet of tattered Happy Meal wrappers — I may not strike you as the most reliable explicator of modern marriage. Still, we forge on, and what I’d like to do now is recant for a moment and not be quite so hard on marriage, which I think is a very good fit for some people.
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[Helen] Fisher, a women’s cult figure and an anthropologist, has long argued that falling in love — and falling out of love — is part of our evolutionary biology and that humans are programmed not for lifelong monogamy, but for serial monogamy.

“Why Him? Why Her?” explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:

The Explorer — the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.

The Builder — the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.

The Director — the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.

The Negotiator — the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.

Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26 percent of the sample, Builders 28.6 percent, Directors 16.3 percent, Negotiators 29.1 percent. While Explorers tend to be attracted to Explorers, and Builders tend to be attracted to Builders, Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.

Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!”

The nitwit. Guess Fisher forgot about that fifth one there. Poor schmucks that are married to these nitwits; they’re about to lose half their stuff because they made the awful mistake of allowing their nitwit wives to read books.

Yup, it’s really as bad as people think it is. Middle-aged married women with a Cinderella complex, angry that life isn’t perfect and stress free, get all sauced up and talk each other into divorces. Then they bury their gross wrinkly noses in hateful chick-books carefully designed to expunge any doubts about it that might remain, download some hunky stud off the innerwebs, and the poor schlub who was stupid enough to marry them loses half his stuff.

And then they become authorities on marriage, graciously counseling women who are more mature and mentally balanced than they are. Making craploads of money, if they get lucky…and still pulling in that alimony check. So that girls’-night-out wine-buying slush fund stays all slushy.

This is the kind of thing that makes me think our whole society needs a reboot. In a number of our most treasured institutions, the rules are made by whoever among us have proven themselves to be, without any doubt, the most dysfunctional.

So one of the bloggresses we follow, a particularly enchanting and intelligent one, got hold of a phony egghead study that says something completely ridiculous and decided to believe every word in it. Said phony egghead study concerns something men and women are simply not going to see the same way — ever — and it was obviously written up by a chick for other chicks. So don’t be too hard on Dr. Mel, she’s a chick too.

Besides of which it goes without saying her judgment is not perfect. Far from it. She put together a list of hot and sexy conservative blogger guys, and left us off of it. Just like that. So, you know, she’s got her on-days and her off-days. So do we all.

Here’s what the study says. Hope you’re sitting down for this one, guys. Here it is. Ready? — We, on our side of the gender aisle, have a much narrower and uniform definition of the ideal woman, than women have of the ideal man. They like variety more than we do.

Isn’t that a riot?

Quoting myself, at Dr. Melissa’s place, trying to inject some reason and common sense into it —

Try this: In an urban setting, pick out the women who are, or successfully project the appearance of being, the creme de la creme of genetic perfection. Top tenth of a percent. Women who can have whichever guy they want. Now let your eyes drift off two feet to the left or right…to the dude. Oh no, you don’t really need to, you already know what he looks like don’t you? Cookie cutter. Mass produced. No variety whatsoever.

He’s 6′2″ but he wears a sleeveless shirt built for someone who’s 8′2″. He’s got goofy shorts on that come down well past the knee. Gold chain or two about the neck, which is thicker than his head. Sort of a flesh Michelin-man. Or a chubby round little boy decked out in his dad’s summer clothes, and then you triple the size of the whole thing. Plus an obligatory tattoo. Right now the hair on the head is half an inch long, or gone entirely, so it doesn’t much matter what color it is. Skin is not white, not black, something in between. Mixed ethnicity, or Caucasian with a really good tan. Cash-register jaw. Think Jay Leno, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Howie Long.

These guys could’ve been built on a conveyor belt.

I went on to cite the example of girls-in-glasses; and now that I give it another think, I’m ready to pin my entire argument on that one thing. Guys, I can tell you, are split even-Steven on this, right down the middle. Of course I’m not split at all. Guys-in-general are split. Half the dudes recoil in horror at the genetic inferiority (or lifetime curiosity about the written word) that imprisons a fair maiden behind the corrective lenses…the other half of us are intrigued, and not mildly.

After glasses, there is the height thing. Do you have to stop seeing her if she’s taller? And then the big-nose thing. A lot of guys don’t notice, a lot of other guys can’t stand a big nose on a girl. And then there are the breasts. The arm muscles. Her thighs aren’t curvy enough, or they’re too thin…huge issue for some guys, not worth mentioning to other guys.

We aren’t all scrambling for the same model of girl. Just take my word for it.

But I’ll let all that other stuff go. I’m willing to rest the entire thing, like I said, just on the reading glasses. Because it’s personal…they’re my Achilles’ Heel, my Kryptonite. Probably because of the very first girlfriend that started all that trouble. Thirty-five years now — I don’t quite have the balls to jot down on the front page of a blog sitting right there on the innerwebs, exactly what a nice-lookin’ gal in glasses does to the thoughts in my head. But she certainly does something, I’ll say that much. And all guys on the planet do not agree with me about it.

We got variety in what tickles our fancy, trust me on this. Dustin Wood and Claudia Brumbaugh might have missed it, but it’s there, I’m in a position to guarantee it.

I think this is one of those many, many examples where the way women see things, seems to be a whole lot more real than the way the fellas see things — because women do a lot more talking.