Greg Beato, my go-to source for weird insights into mass culture, has a very funny analysis of the DIY show Man Caves over at the Smart Set. The show is premised on the idea that men need man-friendly rooms in which to be manly, and the hosts help regular guys turn ordinary rooms into testosterone-rich dens featuring, say, stripper poles and motorcycles. But Beato thinks the masculine showboating is just the price of entry to an aesthetic realm typically reserved for women and gay men:

If today’s men don’t seem quite as grown-up as their grandfathers did, they show a much greater flair for decorating and design. Of course, men, or at least straight men, are wary about talking too enthusiastically about the way a well-proportioned ceramic tile can really open up a narrow room—so they develop strategies for masculinizing their passions. In the 1970s, their medium of extravagant creative expression was the custom van: Small block engines were the perfect beards for beaded curtains. In the 1990s, professional wrestling gave straight men a venue to unabashedly appreciate fringed Speedos; silver lamé high-tops; and greasy, fussed-over Botticellian mullets—not in a gay way, but simply as a sourcebook of ideas to use in their own efforts to unleash their inner peacocks. Now it’s Man Caves.

All of which would suggest that Man Caves is less about affirming some prior idea of maleness than expanding its scope.

Tags: Home Decor, Maleness, Reality Television

Stats sweetheart Nate Silver ran abortion-rate data from the CDC and has found that states with higher numbers of people who identify as pro-life have lower rates of abortion than pro-choice states. But, this finding is somewhat deceptive. As anyone who receives Guttmacher Institute press releases knows, 87 percent of counties do not have abortion providers, and the CDC data does not always count state of residence, only the state where the abortion is performed. Additionally, since CDC abortion data is self-reported by each state, as Silver notes, "Some states, like Florida and Louisiana, do not report their abortion statistics, and in other cases ... [data collection] may be subject to various sorts of imperfections, as the reporting of abortion statistics can have some political implications."

But the Silver stats show something less blatantly obvious than states with no abortion doctors having lower rates of abortion:

The Guttmacher institute data...suggests that abortion providers in pro-life states carry a larger caseload. Abortion clinics in the 15 most pro-life states performed an average of 949 abortions in 2005; those in pro-choice states performed an average of 576 ... This may imply that there are either too few providers in pro-life states to meet the demand for abortion (or too many in pro-choice states)—although clearly many women who want an abortion are willing to travel for one.

Silver does not draw any pat conclusions from this research, but ends his article with a difficult and important question. "If it's a three-hour drive to the nearest clinic, how many women will ultimately wind up forsaking an abortion (and how many will have an illegal abortion instead)?"

Tags: abortion, abortion rates, Guttmacher Institute, Nate Silver, pro-choice, pro-life

Yesterday, Playboy.com posted a provocative story: "So Right It's Wrong." The piece was written by Guy Cimbalo, and its premise was to target those conservative women that he would like to, as he put it, "hate fuck." But if you click on that Playboy.com link, you'll find the piece is no longer there. And that's because the blogosphere went crazy after Playboy published it, going so far as to call for a boycott, and Playboy pulled it.

If you want to read the piece in full, conservative blogger Caleb Howe has reproduced it in a series of screenshots here. The piece begins thusly:

Obama promised us the dream of post-partisanship—a cuckoo land where party affiliation and factional animosity were forgotten. Turn on cable news or open any newspaper, however, and you’ll quickly discover that the dream has yet to materialize. But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate fuck. We may despise everything these women represent, but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.

What follows isn't, well, pretty. It's a listicle that eviscerates every conservative female that crossed Cimbalo's radar as someone who was at least in some regard physically attractive and yet whose personal politics he found to be utterly loathsome. The list includes Michelle Malkin, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Laura Ingraham, and Peggy Noonan.

On Malkin: "Worse than fucking Ava Braun." On Ingraham: "Vagina dentata would be an improvement." On Noonan: "Imagine fucking your grandmother. Now imagine your grandmother coined the phrase 'a thousand points of light.' It's worse than that."

In response, the female blogosphere had a collective seizure, converting Cimbalo's "hate fuck" wish list into a rapist's screed: "

Writer Guy Cimbalo Shares Top 10 Republican Women He'd Like to Rape." Male bloggers weighed in with mixed sympathies. Salon: "Cimbalo managed to get one or two guilty smiles out of me, but the overall effect is beyond creepy." The Sundries Shack: "I Don't Know Guy Cimbalo, but I'd Enjoy Punching Him in the Mouth." Meanwhile, Politico's Anne Schroeder Mullins linked to the Playboy post and listed the names of the women but reposted none of the attendant raunchy prose, a move for which she was trounced; in response, she altered the post and added an apology. For once, it seemed, women on the left and the right were in agreement. "***** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *****": "Conservative Women's Group Condemns Hate-Filled Playboy Article."

Apparently, free speech is so over when the masses rule the media: "It's only OK if I think it's funny. It's only OK if it fits my politics. It's only OK if I say it is." I wish Playboy hadn't pulled it. Censoring the piece doesn't make it any less real, any less politically incorrect, any less true. Attempting to police human nature is the real joke here.

Tags: Guy Cimbalo, misogny, Playboy

A second friend recalls her visit to Dr. George Tiller's clinic:

In July 1993, my husband and I received the worst news about our son's impending birth: He suffered from multiple, severe fetal anomalies, both internal and external, thought to be the result of a rare blood disorder. If he could survive his early birth at 24 weeks he most likely would not survive his blood cancer beyond the age of 9.

After several years of trying to conceive our second child, the news could not have been more devastating. When we heard the news, I had been in Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC for more than two weeks, hooked up to a subcutaneous pump delivering a medication to stop contractions. While still reeling from the shock, we were told we could take our chances and let the baby be born, but that the state would be forced to intervene if we did not then take every measure to keep our son alive. Or, we could consider two late-term abortion clinics—one in Wichita, Kan., the other in Holland! Our initial thoughts were "how could we be in a major NYC hospital in the United States and be told these are our only choices?" To say it was surreal is an understatement.

We made the very painful decision to travel to Wichita after many sleepless, tear-filled hours of discussion. The "quality" of life our son would have had, and the effects this birth could have had on our family for years to come, brought us to that difficult road. I could never explain to anyone how it felt to travel six hours with my baby kicking, knowing that I was about to end the life we tried so lovingly to create. While my husband lived this nightmare with me, even he could not understand or experience the depths of despair that I felt. The scars are still there.

My husband and I found Dr. George Tiller to be a caring, sensitive, and compassionate man who truly believed he was helping those of us who were desperate and had nowhere else to go. While we were at his clinic, he was very concerned about an 11-year-old child raped by her stepfather. And, when we were tormented by Operation Rescue protesters outside his clinic, he put on a bullet proof vest and personally drove us out of there while we hid in his van.

You can read other tales from inside Tiller's clinic here and here.