A doctoral student in economics at the University of Pennsylvania is examining teenage sex habits in the context of the laws of supply and demand, and he’s discovered something that should upend the way we talk about teen pregnancy. According to Penn’s Arts & Sciences magazine, Seth Richards has analyzed national data on the sex habits of high school students and found that, when it comes to the age at which boys and girls first have sex, boys are far more influenced by what their peers are doing and by the number of available sex partners than are girls.

Richards concludes that “boys seem to be more susceptible to these social mechanisms, whether it’s the norms among their same-gender peers or the availability of partners. To the extent that people are thinking about interventions that work through social mechanisms, they should consider specifically how they’re targeting boys.”

This is striking because our society tends to emphasize the female’s role in sexual matters. In part, this may be practical—a teenage girl who becomes pregnant often winds up more responsible for the child than the boy with whom she had sex. But the emphasis also stems from a religious perspective that exaggerates the importance of female chastity (and downplays the benefits of contraception). You don’t see many purity balls for boys.

And there is also that pervasive cultural notion that boys will be boys but girls should know better. At the American Prospect's Web site, Monica Potts describes the bizarrely-named “No Wedding, No Womb” blogger campaign, an attempt to “raise awareness about low marriage rates in the black community,” as more concerned with telling black women how to behave than improving the lives of children. Potts quotes a campaign blogger, who writes that the black community needs to practice more abstinence: “No one can be better at that than the keeper of the vagina castle, the black woman.” Yikes. I don’t even know what to do with that metaphor.

If Richards is right, it may be that all this time we’ve been directing our efforts at the wrong gender.

Photograph of kissing teenagers by KoS for Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: gender, sex, teenage pregnancy

The more I get to hear from Johnny Weir, the happier I am. Weir, the Olympic figure skater best known for his “quote-unquote flamboyance—I hate that word,” defies the rule, almost universally true of out-there celebrities, that they’re significantly less cool and interesting once they open their mouths. There’s Lady Gaga, with her precociously curated exuberance; there’s Madonna—ditto. There are many more examples, but why waste time discussing them?

Johnny. Dark-lashed, delicate, dynamic Johnny. He is one of the few people in public life who can successfully argue (by example) the many ways in which gender is fungible. He is as earnest and self-deprecating as he is aggressively, purposefully ridiculous, as this New York profile demonstrates, and this allows him to get away with a lot. Like skating while dressed as a swan named Camille with one red glove for a beak, or referencing another skater’s “shot-of-vodka, snort-of-coke" performance, or telling People mag how he ran around his Olympic hotel suite naked, watched The Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Lemon-Pledged every surface to prepare for his short program. During the 2006 Winter Olympics, I went shopping with Weir—flush with cash from skating exhibitions, he dropped $1,330 in two hours in Turin’s high-end stores. He brought his sunglasses collection up to 103 pairs and confessed that the sight of a knockoff designer bag “hurts my feelings.” Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins once described Weir as “in the grip of truth serum,” without artifice or self-consciousness. You don’t get the impression that he’s a normal guy marketing himself as eccentric, but a genuine eccentric canny enough to market himself.

(Speaking of marketing, Weir is contemplating what to do now that he’s 26 and getting too old for competitive skating. He’s thinking fashion and music, according to the New York profile, and he sounds kind of lost: “I was offered to do a porno movie. It was a masturbation movie. I looked at it and said no. It’s dirty. So I won’t do porn, I won’t do anything where I have to wear a big fuzzy animal costume, like no Disney On Ice or anything, and that’s basically it. I’ll try pretty much anything else. I mean, I don’t want to drive a Zamboni.”)

After Canadian TV commentators reportedly joked that Weir should undergo a “gender test” during an Olympics broadcast in February, Weir turned serious, responding in measured tones. (Well, first he joked that he’d heard worse about himself in bathrooms.) He believed in free speech, he said, but he wanted people to think about the consequences of their words. He wanted more kids to experience “the freedom that I feel.” Weir has long existed in that coy sexual netherworld once occupied by Clay Aiken; nearly everybody assumes he’s gay, but he won’t talk about it. (Only his hairdresser knows for sure.)

In New York, Weir again is asked to define himself. He responds with a heartfelt, if impossibly idealistic, statement about how labels are meaningless. (“My whole stance is that I just want people to react to who I am, I don’t want people to react to what I am.”) Better is the response he’s given on previous occasions: It’s private. Just as true is what he adds next: “[T]he reason I haven’t told the nitty-gritty and the dirty past and what I chose to be involved with sexually is because, first of all, it’s trashy. It’s not cute.” Oh, and also because he’s writing a tell-all.

So much of Weir’s appeal is his playful androgyny, his neither-here-nor-there-ness. The “mystery” of who (if anyone) he sleeps with stands in for the mystery of who he fundamentally is—can anybody really be so bombastic, so earnest, so free-spending, so “free?”

Tags: celebrity, gender, gender test, johnny weir, lady gaga, madonna, sexuality

Jessica, Amanda, thank you for pointing out Sarah Palin’s and Karen Handel’s taunts about the inadequate manhood of their opponents. How clever of these women to make clear that they are the better men for the job! Maybe they learned something from last year’s Massachusetts special Senatorial election: ignoring gender can sink a campaign.

In our state’s 2009 election to replace Sen. Ted Kennedy, the gender attacks were simultaneously more traditional, and—maybe because of that—less visible to commentators. Many noted that Scott Brown’s famous Cosmo centerfold didn’t hurt him the way something comparable would have hurt a woman; it might even have hiked his status a bit. But I didn’t see anyone commenting on the fact that Brown ran almost entirely on his manhood. His signature TV ad started with him leaning out of his pickup truck, saying, "I have a truck." (Honest, I’m not making this up.) His pickup truck was seen as a symbol of his regular-guy-ness, with emphasis on "regular." But it was only regular because he was a guy. Can you imagine a woman saying that? She’d be laughed out of town—or rather, have her womanhood questioned, to say the least. And yet I never heard any commenters noting that one of Brown’s central attractions was his big…truck. Another of Brown's TV ads had him standing in a kitchen, as if to say: See, gals? He'd be a great husband! He even knows where the kitchen is! Now imagine how a woman's ad would be seen if she were taped standing in a kitchen. She'd be inviting viewers to think—or say—that she ought to stay there.

Martha Coakley, by contrast, ran as a 1980s neutered woman: She never pointed out that she was female, she kept her appearance as neutral as possible, and she rarely offered emotion of any kind—emotion being, presumably, soft and girly. Massachusetts has never elected a female governor or senator. Coakley has long been ambitious, and clearly worked against that female handicap by coming up through the political ranks first as a district attorney and then as the state’s top prosecutor—nice, tough jobs that should have proved that she had, as Sarah P. would say, cojones. But running on neuter didn’t work.

I wouldn’t suggest that the gendered campaign was why Coakley lost; her campaign had quite enough flaws, thank you, including an all-but-unforgivable gaffe about the Red Sox, the local religion. (See: Fever Pitch.) But clearly politicians can't afford to ignore gender. Smart campaigners elsewhere might well have taken a lesson: attack your opponent’s manhood before it can attack you.

Photograph of Scott Brown by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: gender, Karen Handel, manhood, martha coakley, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown

Following the appalling revelations about child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests that have filled the papers recently, one question has started to nag at me: What about the girls? So many of the news stories focus on priests taking advantage of their position to rape and otherwise sexually traumatize boys and young men. Now, I have no way of knowing this for sure, but I’ll bet that thousands of girls the world over were similarly abused. Is anyone else wondering if young women have been left out of this story, and if there’s some agenda that’s driving that absence?

Tags: Catholic Church, child sexual abuse, priests

Periodically, I see folks in the mainstream media discover the existence of mean female rednecks, standing beside their bigoted brothers with the same look of incomprehension and rage on their faces, and I'm always surprised that anyone could be surprised by this. Growing up in the thick of redneck country, I well knew that the only thing meaner than a right-wing male ignoramous is his wife, standing beside him glowing with the joy of finding a politically feasible excuse to act with the anger and viciousness usually reserved for men. So I wasn't the slightest bit surprised to see the report showing that half of the Tea Partiers are female. Women have always kept up with men in the conservative movement, and, as Politico argues, they can outshine the men as well.

History alone should remind us of thise fact. Women stood right alongside the men when it came to harassing civil rights activists. Women have often been the shock troops in the anti-choice movement. Defense attorneys for accused rapists try to stack the jury with women, who are often eager to hear what a horrible slut the victim was (and how much better they are in comparison). Female conservative students at Dartmouth joined in with the men in destroying anti-apartheid protest art in the '80s. There's nothing about being female that prevents someone from becoming a reactionary.

None of this is to deny that angry white women in conservative environments don't face a great deal of oppression because they're women. On the contrary, they tend to face way more of the slings and arrows flung at women. They're way more likely to have to cook dinner and then to clean up everything while their husbands slink to the living room to watch the game, and they're way more likely to have to smile and bring him a beer while they do it. Many women in this world never seem to sit down at home, and, just as bad, they never seem to get up at work, because they face so much sexism that they really do have to work twice as hard to be seen as half as good. Women in this world accept a lot of shame for their sexuality and have to put up with way more jokes about how women are feeble-minded from their male relatives. So, definitely, they're bullied.

But as much as we'd like to believe that the bullied automatically have more sympathy for others who are bullied, we have all seen the ugly reality of the bullied person finding someone smaller to pick on. Responding to sexism by becoming a feminist and separating from your community doesn't seem feasible to many women, so instead they try to compete with the men in the arena of being hateful toward racial minorities, the poor, and women who don't conform to strict gender roles. Some of the meanest misogynists I've met have been female; they seem to think by hating on other women, they'll get an exception for themselves as one of the good ones. You'd think a stay-at-home mother in conservative country would see what she has in common with a woman who needs public assistance to get by, but often the reaction instead is to gloat about being superior and to deny any connection whatsoever with the unworthy unmarrieds.

Sexism means women have less, not more, space to dissent from the prevailing opinions in their community. Since women are judged more, gossiped about more, and considered easier targets by the bullies in their community, they have all the more reason to conform to right-wing standards. There's a strong incentive for conservative women to un-sex themselves, Lady Macbeth-style. Borrowing some of the social esteem that men enjoy by outdoing the men in paranoid, hateful right-wing rhetoric is an easy path to glory for many conservative women. Witness the career trajectory of Sarah Palin if you have a moment's doubt about that.

Photograph of couple by Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: michelle bachmann, right wing women, Sarah Palin, tea partiers

As reported earlier this week in the journal Nature, biologists at MIT's Whitehead Institute found that the Y chromosome has evolved more rapidly than any other human chromosome. Fabulous. Just when it looked like hard data definitively debunked the notion of innate female inferiority, we find out that the male chromosome is actually a genetic power broker—a far cry from the wisp of DNA scientists had long hypothesized it to be. Researchers believe that the Y's diminutive size, once thought to be the result of genetic decay, actively accelerates evolution.

So are men "more evolved" than women? Not exactly. As the Times noted, "This does not mean that men are evolving faster than women, given that the two belong to the same species, but it could be that the Y’s rate of change drives or influences the evolution of the rest of the human genome." After decades of striving for equal opportunity, men still fill the role of rainmaker in the biological boardroom—in mammals, at least.

Tags: gender, genetics, Science, X chromosome

If the police are right, and Ray Clark killed Annie Le over a power struggle in their shared lab, then that means that the narrative that the media initially plugged this story into doesn't quite fit the circumstances. A pretty, petite woman about to be married who disappears? We're all conditioned to think of sex crimes, instead of workplace violence. If you've ever been the victim of a violent crime, or supported someone who has, there's a bit of comfort to be had in the belief that it could have happened to anyone. Let's hope Le's friends and family are taking comfort in that now.

That said, it's not completely accurate to assume that because this act of violence began as a power struggle at work doesn't mean that gender doesn't play a role in it. According to statistics kept by the Department of Labor (that are sadly out of date), women are more likely to suffer injuries from workplace violence than men. Violence is the second leading cause of death for women at work, after auto accidents. Perhaps with all the attention that Le's death is getting from the mainstream media, workplace violence against women will start to rate attention in the same way sexual assault and domestic violence do.

The one kink in all this is that before the police released the power struggle theory, the standard sexualized narrative about violence against women had set in, which caused some digging that resulted in reasons to believe that suspect Ray Clark may have a history of the more famous kind of violence against women. Gawker collected stories about Clark's high school girlfriend reporting him to the police because she was afraid to break up with him, and excerpts from his girlfriend's MySpace blog that indicates that their relationship is probably stormy and potentially violent. None of this is especially surprising. Our society continues to inculcate violence as a masculine trait, and men who live up to that rarely keep their violent tendencies bucketed in one part of their lives. It's all too easy to see how a man who reacted with violence when he saw defiance from romantic partners would have a similar reaction when defied by a woman he merely had a working relationship with.

Tags: annie le, domestic violence, ray clark, workplace violence

Is Kate Middleton Britain’s Henry Louis Gates? That is to say: Is she a public figure whose personal upheaval has lately sparked a national conversation over deeply ingrained prejudices? That’s the theory bubbling beneath this Washington Post piece parsing the recent uproar over Middleton’s uncle, Gary Goldsmith, who was caught on tape prepping cocaine for consumption at the Ibizan villa he’s dubbed La Maison de Bang-Bang. Media coverage has focused on Goldsmith’s “two divorces, familiarity with prostitutes, and the hard-core porn he is said to enjoy on his 52-inch TV.” (Not that the British press is given to tabloidization or anything.)

For non-Royal Watchers, the 27-year-old Middleton has been snogging Prince William under the watchful lenses of the paparazzi since 2001, when the pair met as students at St. Andrew’s. And though her family made boatloads of money and she’s made boatloads of best-dressed lists, both her wealth and refinement are too arriviste for some. Middleton herself has largely escaped personal opprobrium, but can’t quite leave behind the origins spelled out in her Dickensian name: Her ex-flight attendant mother has become the target for aristocratic scorn, writes WaPo’s Mary Jordan:

The queen and Prince Charles have greeted Kate warmly, though in a much passed-along tale, Carole Middleton was talking to some royals and violated a taboo by using the word "toilet" instead of "lavatory." It was a gaffe heard around the kingdom, despite the fact that spokesmen for the royal family have denied any such exchange.

In perhaps the snidest remark, William's aristocratic friends reportedly would say "Doors to manual" when Kate arrived, a sneering reference to an instruction her mother may have heard from pilots in her former profession.

Jordan quotes a source who draws a comparison between America’s preoccupation with Gates’ media firestorm and Britain’s with Middleton’s, and writes that “Class in Britain is roughly equivalent to race in America—despite enormous strides toward equality, social standing simmers never far below the surface.”

Maybe. We don’t have the whole formal peerage thing here, nor, of course, do we dislike bootstrappers—or ever use the word lavatory. But wasn’t social standing as well as race simmering just below the surface in l’affair Gates? And our fascination with class certainly boils over, all by itself, every time we turn on reality television, in a way that I’d argue race never quite does in pop culture. But I suppose the recent Obama-Palin presidential contest (sorry, McCain) remains the most instructive snapshot of current race/class prejudices in America. And while good old gender certainly rounded out the trinity during that election (as it does with Middleton, of course, and anyone else accused of angling to marry up), concern over class trumped concern over race when it came to picking who would wear our crown.

Photograph of Kate Middleton by Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: britain, class, gender, henry louis gates jr., Kate Middleton, prejudice, Prince William, Race, Royals, United States

The modern equivalent of blaming Eve for the fall of mankind may be blaming Stone Age societies for today's gender relations. Sharon Begley has a nice summary of this attitude in her recent Newsweek story on evolutionary psychology:

Men who were promiscuous back then were more evolutionarily fit, the researchers reasoned, since men who spread their seed widely left more descendants. By similar logic, evolutionary psychologists argued, women who were monogamous were fitter; by being choosy about their mates and picking only those with good genes, they could have healthier children. Men attracted to young, curvaceous babes were fitter because such women were the most fertile; mating with dumpy, barren hags is not a good way to grow a big family tree.

So if all of this is true, it should be true for all humankind. It should especially be true in modern hunting and gathering societies. Unfortunately, as Begley details in her article, the evidence rarely bears out the these theories. (I am aware that not all evolutionary psychologist are obsessed with cavemen sex, but here I have chosen sensationalism over dry talk of spandrels. Sorry.)

One of the strongest trends in modern mating is women's preference for taller males. In post-industrial cultures, there are far fewer women married to men that are shorter than them than would be expected by statistical chance. Are women hard-wired to think that taller men would kill way more giraffes than shorter men, thus providing a luxurious Stone Age lifestyle? How better to test this than to look at a society that actually hunts giraffes?

The Hadza of Tanzania are among the few hunter-gatherer people left on earth. Despite threats from agriculturalists, diminishing game, and an Emirati land grab, the Hadza have maintained their traditional lifestyle. To see if actual hunter-gatherers had height preferences in their mates, Rebecca Sear and Frank W. Marlowe examined mate selection in the Hadza. They also wanted to see if the Hadza married people that had similar physical characteristics to themselves—for example, did tall, thin Hadza marry other tall, thin Hadza?

The Hadza proved to be far less judgemental about height than the Western press. There was no evidence of height preference: About as many women were married to shorter men as would have been expected by random chance. There was also no correlation between the couples' height, weight, BMI, or percent body fat. Sear and Marlowe concluded that "mating is random with respect to size in this population."

Why don't the Hadza care about height? Sear and Marlowe speculated that since the Hadza live in small, homogenous communities, they could make decisions based on the entire health history of a potential partner, obviating the need for height as a proxy of health. Or height might actually be a disadvantage in a food-limited society, since large people require more food. Though this study doesn't explain why Westerners value male height so highly, it does illustrate the peril of assuming that human preferences are set in Stone Age stone.

Photograph of a tall couple by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: gender, Science, what men want in a mate, women

My grammar-sensitive family is in a tizzy over the “On Language” column from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine on the absence of a gender-neutral singular pronoun, a source of copy editing agony that has most recently surfaced on Twitter. In truth, the 140-character limit of the Twitterverse adds very little to an issue that word nerds have long struggled with: the sentence contortions of someone trying to avoid misusing “they” or relying on the gendered “he.” Who among us hasn’t tried at some point alternating his pronouns between “he” and “she,” or scratched her head over whether he/she or s/he looks less belabored?

Authors Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman (Safire’s on vacation) bring some interesting historical tidbits to the discussion. (Feel free to disregard their Twitter quotes, though. Nothing but an attempt to make a stodgy topic feel 2.0.) In a difficult tidbit for Strunk and White enthusiasts to digest, they say that “they” was actually accepted as a singular pronoun (as in “Everybody should lower their voices”) going back as far as Chaucer. The person who suggested subbing in “he” as the default singular pronoun was actually a woman: Anne Fischer, a feminist entrepreneur and grammarian who, like me, just couldn’t stomach the plural “they” being forced into the role of epicene.

I’m curious where others stand on this debate. Any chance of hu or shhe taking off, or are they doomed to an Esperanto-like fate? Should grammar snobs suck it up and agree to use “they” in place of he/she—a suggestion that horrifies my mother, who wrote in an e-mail that she found it “most distressing, to think that even English language mavens are starting to approve of this corruption.” My cousin added that “if this history checks out, we might have some serious pet peeve revisions to do as a family.” (We already lost the battle on another family-wide pet peeve, “nauseous,” which formerly meant only inspiring nausea—grounds for a good, admittedly snooty, chuckle when people mistakenly described themselves as such.)

Personally, I’m with Fischer, and would rather agree to treat “he” as gender-free. When I’ve tried to stray from that, I encounter the awkward dance of dodging gender stereotypes: If my attempt to alternate leaves me with “Every doctor should wash his hands” and “The teacher should respect her students,” do I pull a pronoun switcheroo lest I accidentally imply that being a doctor is a man’s job and a teacher a woman’s?

Tags: gender, grammar, new york times, on language