Marilyn Manson’s Paparazzi-Thwarting Plan Was Probably Way Better in Theory [Dirt Bag]

Ever have what you think is a really good idea when you're sitting around talking to your friends about your ideas? "Mayhap," you say, pouring yourself another snifter of brandy, "I'll write version of Macbeth that takes place in corporate America. Or I'll get my scuba certification and scour the Caribbean for sunken Spanish galleons. Or I'll scrawl ‘fuck you' on my face so that, when I walk through the airport, the paparazzi's pictures of me will be rendered useless. Useless, I say!"

That's what Marilyn Manson must have said to his friends before actually appearing at LAX with ‘fuck you' written sloppily over his face in a bid to thwart paparazzi from publishing any pictures of him. Of course, the gambit merely attracted a whole lot of attention Manson might not have otherwise received, and it also forced him to apologize to pretty much everyone else in the airport — TSA agents, parents with small children, and calligraphers. Maybe if the words had been a little clearer, his plan wouldn't have looked hasty and half-baked, but, as it was, Manson ended up looking like someone who'd fallen asleep with his shoes on at a party and been summarily drawn upon by someone more concerned with stealth than penmanship. [THR]

Chad Johnson, the NFL wide receiver formerly known by the Spanish malapropism Chad Ochocinco, has been arrested for allegedly headbutting his wife, former Basketball Wives star Evelyn Lozada. The couple reportedly had a heated argument after Lozada found a receipt for condoms in Johnson's Maserati. Johnson says he headbutted Lozada by accident, and since there are no bond judges scheduled to work Sunday in the Davie, Florida area, Johnson could very well spend the rest of his weekend in jail. [TMZ]SNL producer Lorne Michaels has decided to pass on producing the 2013 Academy Awards show over disagreements with Disney CEO Robert Iger about things like Jimmy Fallon hosting. Also, 13 is a really unlucky number and Michaels doesn't want to be responsible for putting the Jason Voorhees sizzle reel together in order to appease the machete-wielding movie villain. [THR]DJ Khaled apparently missed a few rent payments and consequently owes his Miami landlord $55,000, meaning that, if you want a live-in DJ to ensure that you throw the best parties, now would be a good time to contact DJ Khaled. [TMZ]Flavor Flav didn't pay his taxes for a while and now owes about $1 million to the IRS. [TMZ]Maybe if he'd listened to Pauly D's financial advice and bought gold, though, Flav wouldn't be so bad off as he is now — he'd be worse off because buying gold is for suckers. [TMZ]A judge has banned a businessman named Howard Mann from selling Michael Jackson memorabilia online because the Jackson estate holds copyright on MJ's name, which Mann was apparently using for multiple domain names in order to sell MJ-related products. [BBC]Conrad Murray is upset that someone posing as the mother of two of Michael Jackson's children was allowed to visit him in prison. [TMZ]Ryan Lochte's mom says that actually her son is too busy to date OR have one-night stands — he just swims all the time and brainstorms new catch phrases. [NYDN]All of France thinks that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are going to get married this week, but all of France also thought that the Maginot Line would keep the Germans out of Paris, so... [Mirror]50 Cent decided to be a charming gentleman and say, in reference to tKanye West pairing himself off pairing Kim Kardashian, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." [Radar]Megan Fox thinks she and Brian Austin Green were "destined" for each other, like in a cosmic soul mates kind of way. [Contact]Russell Brand, who was able to kick his own drug habit, wishes he'd done more to help Amy Winehouse get clean. [The Sun]Duane Chapman, better known to evil-doers everywhere as Dog the Bounty Hunter, was recently denied a visa to the U.K. because of his involvement in the 1976 murder of a Texas drug dealer. [Guardian]Jason Segel and Michelle Williams grabbed smoothies and drank them, if you know what I mean (I mean they purchase smoothies and then imbibed said smoothies, probably with reckless abandon until brain freeze set it). [HIMYM]

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Sparking a better conversation with Wildfire

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Giving you a better Google

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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]

Image via Chubykin Arkady/Shutterstock.

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If Women Want to Race Like Men, They Better Look Like Girls [Sports]

Thanks to a combination of Lady Gaga lyrics, deodorant strong enough for men but made just for us, and pole dancing classes, women are now more equal with men than ever. We're out-enrolling men in college, we're installing tampon machines in executive suite bathrooms, and we still enjoy a commanding lead in the overall "Who Has Made The Most Human Life Inside Their Bodies?" race. The gender gap is even narrowing in the arena of athletic achievement — if current trends continue, within the next century, female Olympians will be just as fast as their male counterparts. But as the gap narrows, women breaking barriers and challenging men will have to make sure they look like girls while doing it — or face a series of tests to make sure they're really, authentically ladies.

Since women were first allowed to compete in the Olympics in 1900, men have consistently been faster and stronger than their female counterparts. But, as The Atlantic charts, that gap has narrowed as women have had more opportunity to train, and as athletic participation among ladies has become more commonplace and less something to be avoided on the grounds that according to a popular school of thought, it would make a lady's uterus fall out. In the 1910's, it took the world's fastest woman almost 13 seconds to run 100 meters; men were doing it in around 10.5. By 1988, when Florence Griffith-Joyner set the women's 100 meter world record in 10.49 seconds, men had only improved to slightly under 10 seconds. Women breaking world records in swimming in 2012 are fast enough to challenge Mark Spitz's times in the late 1960's. And during these London Games, 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen caused several bowties to rapidly spin around and royal monocles to pop out when she swam the last 50 meters of her split in the individual medley faster than Ryan Lochte.

As it stands now, the world's fastest women are about 90% as fast as the world's fastest men across a variety of sports and at a variety of distances; The Atlantic calls it the "golden ratio." But if current trends continue and women keep gaining on men, within the next century, the ladies will match the dudes in the water and on the track, according to a computerized projection.

Whether that will actually happen is up for debate, since game-changing sports innovations happen all the time and Olympians keep marrying each other and producing superbabies (marathon superstars Kara Goucher, Paula Radcliffe, and Deena Kastor have all recently given birth to future alpha runners, and 6 adorable married couples can boast that both parties are competing in this year's Olympics. And we can't forget about all of the professional athletes who keep impregnating Victoria's Secret models). But the concept of the world's fastest women approaching the world's fastest men presents new challenges to athletic officials, which they're handling about as poorly as possible.

It seems that as the gap between women and men's achievement narrows, IOC officials expect that women will do their best to look like what gender they're supposed to be, because women who race like men and look like men must be men, right? In order to prevent men from racing as women or women from doping themselves until their veins course with man-blood, a new gender testing procedure has been instituted — basically, if an official suspects that a female competitor may be a little too manly, that competitor will be subject to "gender testing" to make sure she's not packing too must testosterone. In other words, if a lady breaks a world record but looks too boyish, she can be singled out. Better get your nails done, ladies.

To play devil's advocate, it seems the genetic testing is designed to preserve the existence of women's sports; if anyone who identifies as female can compete regardless of their body's ability to produce performance-enhancing hormones, then why separate the genders at all? But gender testing that singles out individuals who dare not look girly enough is a pretty crappy way to do it. The Huffington Post's Maya Rupert points out that there's a crappy racial dimension to gender testing as well,

There is a widely held standard of beauty and femininity that is based on white racial characteristics. Because an assumption of whiteness has permeated gender norms, many features typically associated with white women are popularly mischaracterized as features of all women. Thus, women of color are often perceived as being less feminine. In a system where perception determines whether an athlete's gender will be tested, the inevitable result will be that women of color are more likely to be challenged.

This isn't alarmist hand-wringing; this has actually happened. South African runner Caster Semenya was basically turned into a side show and forced to undergo gender testing when officials doubted that she was really a girl. They later backpedaled, clarifying that they weren't testing her gender; they were simply testing to see if she had a "rare medical condition" that gave her a competitive advantage. Ah, yes. Because no elite athlete possesses any "rare" physical characteristics that may give them an advantage.

How athletic officials will navigate the ever-more-complicated waters of gender and athletic achievement remains to be seen. But as we as spectators are riveted by the razor thin distance between gold, silver, and bronze, in the future, we'll note the distance between what makes a man, what makes a woman, and what happens when they race.

[The Atlantic]

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Novelist Amanda Craig Says Maeve Binchy Would Have Been A Better Writer If She'd Had Kids [Motherhood]

Since the passing of 72-year-old Maeve Binchy, the much-loved (and childless) Irish novelist, the Telegraph has published an essay by British novelist Amanda Craig that immediately blew the fuck up, and it's easy to see why.

Craig says it's much easier to find the time and energy to write when you don't have kids. Fair enough. But ultimately, she poses this question: "Do you miss out on something essential about the human condition if you eschew childbearing?" And although she spends a lot of time dancing around it with hasty justifications, it becomes clearer that her answer is basically "Yup!"

How come, Amanda Craig?

No matter what your experience of adult love, there is nothing as strong as the bond between a mother and a child... Putting yourself last is one of the best things that can happen to a writer. I make no moral claims for motherhood ­- which can bring out the worst in a person, in the form of vicarious rivalry, bitchiness, envy and even mental illness - but going through the ring of fire does change you and bring about a deeper understanding of human nature.

See, Craig and the "we" she uses to indicate female novelists with children have to toil extra-hard, wayyyy harder, than those selfish, layabout childless women who "work in Hawthornden Castle, the luxurious writers' retreat which offers a month of working time uninterrupted by cooking, cleaning or child care." But it's OK, because she also humblebrags about her kids' undisputed brilliance (Ancient Greek! Russian! Oxbridge!)

I can't help but feel that [Binchy's] detailed portraits of ordinary life might not have been so predicated on the relationships between men and women had she had a child.

That's true, and neither would Jane Austen's, George Eliot's or the either of the Brontës—examples Craig herself brings up earlier, asking if Austen's fixation on romantic love would have lasted if she'd had a child. Is Amanda Craig dissatisfied with the novels that Jane Austen and her sad, unenlightened, empty womb produced? Does she read Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch and think "This is pretttttty good, but it would be AWESOME with babies?" Craig's statement itself might be true, but it's the "I can't help but feel" that qualifies it: asserting that the focus on romantic love rather than the love of parents and children somehow reduces the importance of the writing is problematic.

Ultimately, Craig closes her essay with:

[Binchy's] first novel was about a 20-year friendship between two women [and she] didn't need the experience of motherhood to write about love and friendship in a way that charmed millions. But she might have dug deeper, charming less but enlightening more, had she done so.

Oh, shit, childless women writers! We have been banished from the bastion of Enlightened and unceremoniously dropped on our asses onto the slight Isle of Charming. Who wants to go to that castle with me? OMG, Hawthornden Castle 2012, WOOOOO!!!

'If Maeve Binchy had been a mother...' [Telegraph]

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Women's College Dean Says Same-Sex Education Is Better for Businesswomen [Running In Heels]

65-year-old Cathy E. Minehan, dean of the all-women Simmons College School of Management, a small Boston college which launched the first MBA program designed for women in 1975, says that women have a better chance of succeeding professionally without men around.

In a coed academic environment, "male leadership roles remain unchallenged, and women are left with 'play the game our way, or go home,'" she told the Wall Street Journal.

Before taking over Simmons last summer, Minehan was the chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and spent almost 40 years working in banking in Boston and New York. She said she chose the dean position over retiring because she'd "always had this interest in what you can do, systemically, to make it easier for women to be successful in business."

Minehan is clearly (and rightfully) proud of what Simmons' women have accomplished — "If Harvard wants a case about a woman leader, they usually are looking at stuff we've developed," she said — but her views on same-sex education seem a bit antiquated. "Why is it better to address those systemic issues in an all-women environment when so much of the business world is dominated by men?" the WSJ asked her. "How is that good training for real life?" Here's her response:

Just think about mission-driven education in general-for example, historically black colleges. The schools provide not only a first-class education, but also an environment and culture in which it's easier to talk about some subjects.

[At Simmons, students] can develop tools to navigate better in the business world because they understand the subtleties of a male-dominated culture in a way that they might not understand in classrooms that are dominated by men.

An example: negotiations. Women don't negotiate the same way that men do. We teach classic negotiation theory, classic negotiation practice, but we also teach about the situation women will find in [the outside world] and then how to deal with it.

When (shockingly) asked about Marissa Meyer, Minehan said the whole being pregnant while also CEO thing wasn't such a big deal. "If she's smart enough to run Yahoo, which the board seems to think she is, she's smart enough to figure this out," she said.

We've written at length about how Meyer's refusal to talk about her gender can be frustrating, but the idea that only women should have to learn about "the subtleties of a male-dominated culture" in an academic setting is disheartening in a different way. It's doubtful that "gender-blind" Meyer would ever step foot on Simmons' campus.

Why an All-Female School May Be Best Training Ground [WSJ]

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