Stressed Men Prefer Larger Women, Because You Were Wondering [Weighty Matters]

A study in England has found that men coping with stress more often prefer larger women than men who aren't stressed at all, an insight that builds on earlier findings about how experiencing stress affects body-size judgments, often leading people to be attracted to more "mature" body types.

Viren Swami from the University of Westminster in London along with Martin Tovee from Newcastle University cobbled together 81 white British men, randomly assigning them to be placed in either stressful or relaxing situations. The men who were to experience some stress in the name of science were subjected to a fake interview, while the men who were just going to chill out in the name of science were placed in a quiet room where they could just think about all the stupid things academics do with grant money.

After having their disparate sit-downs, the subjects were asked to look at rate the attractiveness of photographed women ranging from emaciated to obese. The men who'd been subjected to a stressful situation rated larger women more favorably than the men who weren't stressed, though the study authors didn't say whether the stressed men exclusively preferred larger women or were simply more amenable to body types deviating from a certain cultural "ideal."

Previous research into body-type preference has figured that people in stressful situations, i.e. times when money or other resources are scarce, prefer heavier partners because if someone's carrying around extra weight, it probably means that they have access to a steady supply of food and are consequently healthy. Similarly, when someone is dealing with emotional stress of the sort that subjects in this latest study experienced, a larger, more mature body may indicate that a prospective partner is better equipped to deal with tough times. In other words, from this very limited study, science has taught us that we're all just looking for that special person with shoulders broad enough and backs sturdy enough to help share the heavy burden of our overloaded stress knapsacks.

Stress Makes Men Appreciate Larger Women [LiveScience]

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Just Because Cheerleading Is Hard Doesn't Mean It's a Sport [Sports]

Two, four, six, eight, to whom do we not allocate? Cheerleaders! At least, that's what the Second US Circuit Court has ruled in a case that pitted women's volleyball against competitive cheerleading. According to the ruling, although cheerleading is physically demanding, it doesn't qualify as a Title IX sport, and therefore a cheerleading team isn't a suitable replacement for another women's athletic team. As it should be. Replacing volleyball with competitive cheerleading as it exists today would be a huge step back for women's sports.

The girl jock-on-girl jock drama began in 2009, when Quinnipiac University announced that it was cutting its women's volleyball team and replacing the squad with a competitive cheerleading brigade (is that the proper terminology for of a group of cheerleaders? Let's say that it is). The volleyball team sued to preserve its existence, and in 2010, a federal judge ruled that under Title IX, cheerleading isn't a sport. The school, apparently dogged in its quest to be rid of the volleyball menace, appealed, and yesterday, the Second US Circuit Court handed down an almost identical ruling to the federal judge. Cheerleading isn't a sport, and cheerleaders aren't athletes — at least, not under the law.

While it may seem kind of head-scratching to call cheerleaders anything but "athletes" — their Aly Raisman-like tumbling passes and difficult pyramid maneuvers require training and can lead to the same sort of broken bones and torn ligaments one might suffer after a padless football practice — Title IX defines "sport" and "athlete" differently than a physical fitness test might. In order to be a Title IX "sport," the activity must have coaches, practices, competitions during a defined season, an organization that governs the sport and standardizes rules, and have competition as its primary goal. Competitive cheerleading is still, at its core, "cheerleading," and until very recently, it existed primarily as a way to rile the crowd up so they get good and excited to watch men's sports. Women's volleyball was never an activity that got the crowd going for men's volleyball. You can't win a gold medal in Olympic cheerleading.

The Second Circuit wrote in its ruling that while competitive cheerleading doesn't fit the definition of a Title IX sport yet, it may in the future. It just needs to work on having a defined season, getting more organized, and existing as a primarily competitive event rather than a warm-up act. And while a knee-jerk reaction to the ruling may be one of disappointment ("...but cheerleaders work HARD, y'all! It's like being a gymnast without mats who has to yell and smile and look pretty almost breaking her neck!"), if the Court had ruled that Quinnipiac was justified in replacing volleyball with cheerleading, what kind of a precedent would that have set? What other competitive sports would universities have wiped out in favor of promoting a sport that, for all its physical demands, still obliquely requires its female competitors look pretty in a traditionally feminine way?

[WSJ]

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Waitresses Wearing Red Make Better Tips, Because Red Is All About Sexy Sex [Attraction]

If we've learned anything about the color about the color red, it's that some people can't see it, that it's nevertheless splashed over very important public signs, and that it makes people want to drop whatever they're doing and procreate. Procreate hard.

Despite an anthropological study of bygone months that disspelled the fanciful notion that men were more attracted to bright red vulvas, a French study published recently in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research found that waitresses wearing the color red can expect big tips from male patrons. Meanwhile, the waitress wearing other colors might as well just be extras in a black and white movie about a man who goes to lunch and discovers that the world is not strictly in black and white.

Researchers dressed waitresses in prismatic t-shirts and then unleashed them on 722 French diners. The waitresses were told to keep track of their tips and act normally, i.e. not like they weren't participating in something that would soon degenerate into a bizarre Skittles commercial. Waitresses wearing red earned, on average, about 15 to 26 percent more in tips than their non-sexualized colleagues, but the researchers were careful to note that, despite all the popular speculation floating around that red is an amorous color, the different color shirts had no effect on the waitresses themselves.

It's kind of short-sighted not to track the effect shirt color has on the shirt wearers because, if there's so much general consensus that red is the universal color for sexy times, then wouldn't wearing a red shirt somehow affect the behavior of the wearer? Or maybe, rather than trying to uncover some underlying primal urge in male diners to lust after and therefore give more money to women wearing red, researchers should have noted the obvious — red is the color societies employ when they want individuals to stop moving in a certain direction. Okay, so, if red means "stop," then maybe the waitresses in red shirts came as wake-up calls to bad tippers: "Hey, stop being parsimonious diners because it's hard work being someone's personal servant for an hour."

Waitresses in red get better tips from men: study [NYDN]

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Fired CEO Says Her Company Canned Her Because She Has Breast Cancer [Running In Heels]

Aug 3, 2012 2:50 PM  

Tuesday Morning Corp.'s former CEO, Kathleen Mason, is suing the home-furnishing retailer for allegedly firing her after they learned she had breast cancer. Classy!

The financially-challenged company and some of its investors have recently criticized Mason for the company's declining revenue and large third-quarter losses; one investment firm, which recently paid millions of dollars for Tuesday Morning shares, said Mason "led an extraordinary destruction of shareholder value in stark contrast to the success of Tuesday Morning's peer group."

But Mason's lawyers say that's not why she was ousted. "The board's attitude toward Kathleen changed after it learned of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment," attorney Rogge Dunn said in a statement Friday. He also claimed that Tuesday Morning had no long-term debt and had been profitable every year Mason led the company, and that it was telling how her severance package "emphasized medical benefits."

The package also includes a 10-year consultancy clause followed by an 18-month noncompete clause, which her lawyer says means would "in effect locking her out of working elsewhere for nearly 12 years."

Tuesday Morning CEO Says Breast-Cancer Diagnosis Factor in Her Ouster [WSJ]

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Women Dislike Mitt Romney Because He's a Condescending Prick [Mitt Romney]

More disconcerting trouble for Mittens Romney this week, as a new poll shows that with less than 100 days to go before the election, Obama leads in three key swing states. To make matters worse, results of the poll clearly show that much of the President's lead is due to the fact that Romney is completely unpopular with the ladies. Some strategists say that Romney's woman problem is due to his seeming lack of empathy, or his stance on certain hot-button lady issues that rhyme with mirth control, fabortion, squeaquel pay, schmeducation, and baternity leave, and while that may be true, the real reason women are turned off by Romney is that he's incredibly, monumentally patronizing.

In Ohio and Pennsylvania, two relatively boring places that the media will be referring to as BATTLEGROUNDS for the next three months, female voters prefer President Obama by more than 20 points over his Republican rival. Among men, Romney leads, but since 53% of voters are women, Romney's going to have to stop coming across as utterly repugnant to them if he wants a snowball's chance in Moab of occupying the White House.

What's going on? Why do women hate Romney so much? Maybe because he reminds them of a guy they went out with one time, the guy who insisted on explaining how a souffle is made to a professional chef, the tax attorney who tries to go over the finer points of the Higgs boson with a female physics major, the football fan who assumes that all female football fans don't know that there are two different kinds of "safety." Maybe he reminds them of the bumbling Principal on a Disney Channel sitcom, the one that's always trying to ruin all the kids' fun, the hopelessly square one who doesn't get it but acts like he does. GQ's Marin Cogan surmises that Romney probably doesn't mean any harm with his head-scratchingly dumb insistence on things that are not true and offers a generous interpretation of Romney's gaffes as simply mansplainations gone awry,

Going even further back, there's something sort of mansplainy about "I like being able to fire people," and "Corporations are people, my friend!" isn't there? Attacking him on those comments worked because they sounded too facile; they made him seem too entitled. In a weird way, if you see Mitt Romney's gaffes as merely mansplaining, they're somehow more tolerable, because it implies that they come from a lack of self-awareness rather than malice.

But condescending people — men or women — oblivious to their own ignorance are more dangerous to an organization or government than people who know that what they're doing is wrong or evil. People who are aware that they don't know everything have the potential to grow and learn. Even ol' steampunk oil-pumping hearted Dick Cheney went from being a gay marriage skeptic to an advocate after he saw his daughter in a happy same sex partnership. If Mitt Romney's constant, confusing lying is a symptom of a chronic mansplainer run amok, his refusal to acknowledge that he was wrong about anything ever is a symptom that he believes he's fooled everyone — even himself.

Despite this, men still favor Romney, albeit by a small margin. Perhaps they're just not as used to being talked down to, or talked over, as women are, and don't recognize the signs — dismissiveness, unwillingness to answer questions, interpretation of any pushback as offensive. Maybe men aren't as fed up. Maybe they've fooled themselves into believing him.

[CBS]

The unfeeling developer thwarted by a team of ragtag kids

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Here's Four Seconds of a Baby Wombat Running Because That's All You'll Need [Video]

Aug 2, 2012 7:45 PM  

For something that will take such a small chunk out of your day, this video of a baby wombat scurrying across the floor will make your life exponentially better.

[Say OMG]

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