The Problem With Bridal Movies

Amanda Marcotte nails it:

We are supposed to think that women have all the power in these situations, because they do all the planning and men are mere props in the game. But really, that’s not how it goes in this narrative, not really. After all, men carry with them that all-important power, to whip out the ring and rescue a woman from the horrible non-life of the spinster and grant her entrance into the land of the living. The reason men don’t really have personalities in these stories is not because they’re of secondary importance at all. It’s because they fill the role of the gods in this story, and as gods, they must seem slightly distant and above it all.

Fun with Webtools

So this is making the rounds today, which draws on a map of metropolitan areas with surplus single males or single females that garnered some attention a while back claimed to show that the East Coast was full of lonely single women and the West Coast full of lonely single men. However, that map may have painted with too broad a brush, as Ezra Klein notes:

The original map counted all singles between the ages of 20 and 64. The new map lets you screw with some sliders for a data range. And the results are fascinating. On the young end of the spectrum, single men outnumber single women just about everywhere. If you hold the ages to 20-34, DC, for instance, has 27 extra single men for every 1,000 people. Shift the slider so it tracks folks from age 45 to 60, and DC has 48 more single women for every 1,000 folks.

One can find a kind of proof of this in another webtool that's making the rounds, which is a mashup of Craigslist personal ads and Google Maps. You can filter the results according to sexual preference, and the thing that jumps out most when one look at the DC area, say, is that there are considerably more men seeking women and men seeking men than there are women seeking men or women seeking women. This assumes, of course, that most of the people who post Craigslist personals are in the 18-44 age bracket, so take it with a grain of salt.

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

My former classmate Katherine Nehring, currently living in Benin, offers an intriguing theory:

Maybe that’s why cats are generally considered feminine, as opposed to masculine dogs – because it’s the females of one species and the males of the other that are prone to obtrusive and embarrassing displays of sexuality. While male cats may spray, for instance, I have yet to see them become enamored of anyone’s leg, and that’s a classic dog behavior. I won’t even get into the anatomical and existential questions posed by our female dachshund’s repeated attempts to impregnate our male cat, but the point stands.

There's definitely something to that -- although I would say that the differing standards of cleanliness for dogs and cats, combined with stereotypes of "dainty" women and "grungy" men, have something to do with it as well.