Female Supremacy Articles - Page 18
Making fun of boys totally fair
by Treena Shapiro
ABOUT WOMEN
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
I never thought I'd say that there's a downside to not being oppressed. No, I don't want to be stripped of my job, my salary, my degree, my right to vote or any freedoms I enjoy.
I do want to be able to explain to a 9-year-old boy in terms he will understand why I think it's OK for girls to wear shirts that revel in their superiority over boys.
The T-shirts became an issue when my son Corwin begged me to buy his dad an "I beat your mom at Mario Kart" shirt as a testament to my poor video game skills. Ha, ha, ha.
I struck back and suggested we buy his sister a shirt that said "Boys are stupid."
"That's so offensive," Corwin complained. "Why are they so mean? You have to write about it."
In general, I support a girl's right to offend any member of the opposite sex who happens to cross her path. In fact, I'd much rather see a little girl wearing a shirt that mocks boys than one that turns them on.
That's not a conversation I'm willing to have with a 9-year-old, though, so I used the equality argument instead.
Maybe tomorrow's women will be propelled further faster if they obliterate the inferiority complex that apparently persists in some girls, especially when it comes to subjects like math and science. This "boys are stupid" thinking could lead to the obvious conclusion: Girls are smart.
Unfortunately, there was no way for me to bring this home to a boy who lives in a world full of bright and successful women, including his teacher, principal, doctors and even the governor. His parents both have female supervisors and so does he. That would be me.
In Corwin's eyes, I'm the primary authority figure. He could be sitting six feet away from his dad and he'll still get up to find me in another room to open a container, help him with his homework or answer a question, except, of course, if it deals with video games.
My second-in-command is his bossy little sister, whose powerful personality forces all of us to bend to her whims and wiles.
So don't try telling Corwin that it's women who need to catch up. In his world, it's the men who are lagging behind. It's not fair, he says, because everyone knows that boys are smarter than girls.
Uh-huh ... And he wonders why I support a girl's right to put boys in their place.
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'Girlcott' organizers get chance to share message
By Mark Houser
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, December 5, 2005
The local teen organizers of a "girlcott" that led Abercrombie & Fitch to pull two T-shirts from its shelves will visit the company's headquarters today to pitch their own designs.
Fourteen girls from Allegheny County Girls as Grantmakers will take a bus this morning to the clothier's headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, near Columbus, for a 90-minute afternoon meeting with company executives and managers.
The young women are keeping mum about what designs they have in mind until they can make their pitch, and there is no guarantee Abercrombie & Fitch will use their designs.
Schenley High School junior Emma Blackman-Mathis, 16, said she is nervous and excited that her group might have a chance to spread its message through fashion.
"I'm really, really excited to think about the fact that in a year these empowering T-shirts will be in pop culture mainstream stores, and that's mindblowing," Blackman-Mathis said.
The girls met Sunday to go over ideas for new T-shirts and other clothes and to plan their presentation, said Heather Arnet, executive director of the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania. The Downtown group is the chief supporter of Girls as Grantmakers.
Arnet, who will accompany the girls, said she hopes the company will take their ideas seriously.
"How often is it that a company's customer base comes to it with product ideas? It's a great marketing opportunity for them and a great opportunity for them to show some social responsibility," she said.
Arnet's foundation and three other local foundations formed Girls as Grantmakers this year to award grants of up to $10,000 to girl-led projects. The group's 23 middle and high school girls immediately chose the Abercrombie & Fitch protest as their first project.
Blackman-Mathis and the others were particularly irritated by a T-shirt that proclaimed "Who needs brains when you have these?" across the chest. The group held a news conference in October to demand Abercrombie & Fitch pull the shirts from their shelves.
Within days, Blackman-Mathis, Arnet and others were doing interviews on national and international networks. A week later, the clothesmaker agreed to stop selling shirts deemed offensive and to meet with the girls.
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Disappearing Act
By Michael Gurian
Washington Post
Sunday, December 4, 2005
In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured.
They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught -- literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words -- this is not really who I am."
That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in the District. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard.
"We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."
Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics,
and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.
The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a significant crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"
It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry -- men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gates and John Roberts and George Bush -- and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.
But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by.
The old industrial promise -- "That guy will get a decent job no matter what" -- is just that, an old promise. So is the old promise that a man will be able to feed his family and find personal meaning by "following in his father's footsteps," which has vanished for millions of males who are not raised with fathers or substantial role models. The old promise that an old boys' network will always come through for "the guys" is likewise gone for many young men who have never seen and will never see such a network (though they may see a dangerous gang). Most frightening, the old promise that schools will take care of boys and educate them to succeed is also breaking down, as boys dominate the failure statistics in our schools, starting at the elementary level and continuing through high school.
Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women and more likely to engage in crime.
He'll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock and are more likely not to pay child support.
Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:
The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.
Boys and young men comprise the majority of high school dropouts, as high as 80 percent in many cities.
Boys and young men are 1 1/2 years behind girls and young women in reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the workplace).
The industrial classroom is one that some boys do fine in, many boys just "hang on" in, many boys fall behind in, many boys fail in, and many boys drop out of. The boys who do fine would probably do fine in any environment, and the boys who are hanging on and getting by will probably re-emerge later with some modicum of success, but the millions who fall behind and fail will generally become the statistics we saw earlier.
We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change from an industrial culture to a post-industrial one. We want them to shut up, calm down and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't matter too much who boys and men are -- what matters is who we think they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out. When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we still have time to save.
And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters every week, from parents, teachers and others who are beginning to realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system -- realize that boys are struggling and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social movement -- a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago. It's a movement that gets noticed for brief moments by the media (when Columbine happened, when Laura Bush talked about boys) and then goes underground again. It's a movement very much powered by individual women -- mainly mothers of sons -- who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was born, I had to rethink things."
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Why X Marks the Gender
Wired News
02:00 AM Mar. 17, 2005 PT
With the publication this week of the gene sequence of the X chromosome, we will start to find genetic reasons for why the sexes are different, beyond XX and XY.
One clue leaps straight out of the mass of sequence data detailing the 1,098 genes found on the X: Of 40 women whose X chromosomes were looked at, all of them showed extensive variation in gene activity.
Huntington Willard, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University in North Carolina, said that this meant that effectively there are two different human genomes, one male and one female.
"We looked at the X chromosomes of 40 women and every one of them had a unique pattern of gene _expression," Willard said. "All of that variation is completely unique to women. The X chromosomes of males are all the same in this regard."
Women (and all female mammals) have two copies of the X chromosome, but the extra copy isn't needed, and is switched off in a process called X inactivation. Or that's what scientists thought.
"Our study shows that the inactive X in women is not as silent as we thought," said co-author Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at Penn State College of Medicine, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. "The effects of these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the differences between men and women that aren't attributable to sex hormones."
Carrel and Willard published their results in Nature this week. Commenting on the findings, Chris Gunter, senior editor at Nature's Washington office, compared women to calico cats.
"The calico cat is a good model for X inactivation," said Gunter, "because the cat's coat is a mosaic. In a similar way women are a mosaic of the X chromosomes inherited from their mother and father."
A second paper in Nature reveals more secrets about the X, and in particular, how damage to it causes disease.
Allan Bradley, director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where much of the sequencing was carried out, said, "We often describe the results of sequencing as a 'catalog of human genes.' The results of projects such as the finished X chromosome are so much more than that. They are the forces that will drive biomedical advance in the U.K. and around the world."
That's because more than 300 genetic conditions are linked to the X chromosome, by far the highest proportion of any chromosome. They range from color blindness to autism, muscular dystrophy to leukemia and hemophilia.
Many of these conditions are far more common in men than women. That's because women, with two copies of the X, have a backup in case of mutation. Men, with one X and a tiny Y chromosome containing only seven genes in common with the X, have no such backup.
"The X chromosome was pivotal in early human genetics because we were able to see clearly how mutations cause disease," said David Bentley, head of human genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and an author of the sequence paper. "We know what goes wrong with a high diversity of human diseases associated with the X."
The X chromosome includes the gene that causes Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the largest known gene at 2.2 million base pairs long.
"From studying such genes, we can get remarkable insight into disease processes," said Mark Ross, leader of the Human X Chromosome Project at the Sanger Institute.
The X chromosome also has stories to tell about human evolution -- the new code reveals that the X and Y evolved from a pair of regular chromosomes 300 million years ago -- and even human history.
Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia but did not suffer from the disorder, meaning that she had the gene causing the disease on one of her X chromosomes but not on the other. She passed the gene to her granddaughter Alexandra, and through Alexandra's marriage, to the heir to the last czar of imperial Russia, Alexis. It's been suggested that Alexis' hemophilia led indirectly to the Russian revolution.
And so, too, the genome-sequencing revolution rolls on. Don't expect it to end any time soon.
"One of the findings from the sequencing of the X chromosome is that there are more genes involved in disease than we think," said Bentley.
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Women beat men on muscle endurance
News In Science
Tuesday, September 26
Men may have strength, but women beat them hands down for endurance when doing certain exercises, a US study has found.
The University of Colorado reports at a meeting of the American Physiological Society on the results of a study that compared men and women doing two low-force exercises using the elbow flexor muscles.
In the first exercise, participants had to hold their arm rigid for as long as possible. In the second task, a weight bag was added to the wrist and subjects were asked again to hold their arm in the same position for as long as possible.
The study found that women outlasted men by an average of 75 per cent for both tasks. But rather than some kind of motivational effect, the study found the difference was due to some feature of the muscles.
The authors suggest that, given that women are weaker than men, the difference may be due to some interaction between muscle strength and blood flow within the muscle. But it may also be due to the different types of muscle fibres in women and men, or even their different hormones.
Study coauthor Dr Sandra Hunter said while there was much known about the effects of estrogen, there is just as much that is not known about how it affects women's bodies.
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Mars Vs. Venus
Who's better suited for backpacking--men or women?
People have speculated that women may be more suited to endurance exercise than men, and results from studies seem to support this idea," says Dr. Barry Braun. His research has shown that while men burn more carbs during endurance exercise, women burn more fat. The payoff? Women can exercise longer before depleting their glycogen stores.
Women may also be stronger at altitude. Researcher Charles Fulco at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, MA, tested men and women on a task that measured muscle strength and found that the fairer sex has approximately twice the muscle endurance as guys at sea level. "We also found that women were better able to maintain their endurance at altitude," says Fulco. "When men are initially exposed to altitude, they have reduced small muscle endurance, whereas the women had no such decrement."
In other areas, men may have the edge. "In general, women are smaller than men. However, the weights of tents, sleeping bags, and other supplies are relatively fixed," says Fulco. As a result, a woman is more likely to carry a higher percentage of her body weight compared to an equally outfitted guy. "For this reason, a woman--compared to a man of similar fitness--may be slowed," he says.
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NAUGHTY IS NICE THIS HOLIDAY SEASON:
VIBRATOR SALES BENEFIT CHARITIES
BOCA RATON, FL, December 08, 2005 ---
Vibrators have been given a bad wrap. But this holiday season, vibrators are the "good"gift to wrap up for women while benefiting charities. Boca Raton resident Author, Amy Botwinick is in the 'giving spirit' donating a portion of the proceeds from her new book, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR DIVORCE: The Road To Finding Your Happily Ever After and product sales from her website, www.todaysdivorcedwoman.com to local charities, including women's shelters for domestic violence.
"There are many reasons to make taking care of yourself a priority this holiday season and now you can do it while helping out a great cause. This year women shouldn't put themselves down at the bottom of their shopping list. By treating themselves to some girlie retail therapy, they can get some ideas on how to indulge themselves with much needed pampering for the mind, body and spirit, just by clicking into the Divorce Survival Kit of my website.
Not only will women feel empowered doing something good for themselves, they'll be helping others start a new life in a safe environment for themselves and their children," explains Botwinick.
Recently, Botwinick has offered helpful tips for the holiday blues post-divorce and is planning on providing an '"After-Divorce Valentine's Day Survival Guide For Women" at a book signing scheduled for January 19th, 2006 at Borders Books (9887 Glades Rd., Boca Raton, FL) as part of an on-going commitment toward helping women's charities in association with promoting her book.
This first-time author shares her own journey in a helpful girlfriend-to-girlfriend conversational guide to help women through the divorce process and beyond. Botwinick is currently enjoying her "happily ever after." She is a divorced mother of two, and has been a chiropractor for the last twelve years and has held a teaching position at a local college. Her business for over a decade has been about listening, learning and helping others. Amy's research and writing convey a directness and honesty that comes from personal experience.
There are over two million divorces in the U.S. each year. Cinderella's prince charming has either turned into a toad or run off with Sleeping Beauty. Left in the pixie dust are millions of women looking in the mirror each morning wondering, now what? CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR DIVORCE: The Road to Finding Your Happily Ever After (Health Communications, Inc.; December 2005; $12.95) by Amy Botwinick explores all facets of divorce: from making the decision, surviving the legal battles and getting on with life. Through the author's own experiences and those of other women, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR DIVORCE prepares readers for the road ahead: how to get through the business of divorce with humor and aplomb, get beyond the bitterness and on to a healthy, happy life.
This is not another dry book about the process of divorce from a lawyer or psychologist. CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR DIVORCE is fun and uplifting and for women only. The author shares her own struggles, emotional foibles and stories from others, to help the reader through her own emotions. A special section on the male perspective opens the door to the workings of the male mind, helping readers find some common ground with their ex or soon-to-be ex, making an easier transition to "uncoupling."
Sections of the book include: Making peace with your decision, taking stock of the financial situation, dealing with reactions from family and friends, the legal three-ring circus, forgiving and letting go, dating and new relationships, and telling and helping the children.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR DIVORCE is a breath of fresh air that helps the reader transform her feelings of being trapped to feelings of empowerment. It describes the world of divorce—warts and all—with some much-needed comic relief and heart. The reader will realize she's not alone as she learns how other women have coped with the emotional craziness of uncoupling, jettisoned their emotional baggage, and gotten back on the road to defining and finding their happily ever after.
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The Blue-collar Husband
Crain's Chicago Business Issue
December 15, 2005 
Statistics urge professional women to widen reach, but challenges abound; the problem of parties, Mary Hollie is CEO of a non-profit agency; her husband, Larry, is a Chicago police officer. He's had to learn to mingle at parties, while she's come to accept his inflexible work schedule.
When Lisa McManus planned her company's kickoff party, she also arranged to have a friend tag along to keep her husband occupied. Knowing he has difficulty mingling and making small talk, Ms. McManus assigned the friend to keep him busy while she handled the party.
"He can take me to one of his functions and I can fit in just fine," says Ms. McManus, an executive assistant and office manager at Chicago's uBid Inc., an online auction company. "But when I take him to mine, he has a hard time."
Ms. McManus' struggles may reflect those of many marriages, but there is an extra twist: Ms. McManus works in a business setting, while her husband is a carpenter. Their differences range from the way they dress — she wears slacks or skirts and blouses, while her husband slips into
jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts — to dinner table conversations.
"He works in a different world," she says. "If it's not about buildings, he doesn't have a lot to say. And I lose interest, too."
Her husband, Anthony McManus, who has his own carpentry business, acknowledges that "conversations in general," especially after his wife started a new job where he didn't know anyone, are the most difficult aspect of a white collar-blue collar marriage.
Experts say this mix exacerbates the usual challenges of marriage. Though men still overwhelmingly earn more than women, there are a growing number of couples in which women earn more and have more education than their partners. Women overtook men in college enrollment 20 years ago, and that gap has only widened. In 2002, 9.4 million women enrolled in college, and just 7.2 million men, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.
A significant difference in job status or income can affect acceptance by family, friends and co-workers, as well as money issues and societal expectations, all of which play a part in how couples get along.
"Money is always a big issue in marriages in terms of conflict, and it can be a greater issue in these kinds of relationships," says Debra Stern, a Chicago-area licensed clinical social worker and marriage and family therapist. "Money translates into power, so whoever makes the most money often feels — rightly or wrongly — that they have more power in the relationship. Or the other person thinks so. That's the challenge."
It's a challenge that doomed Mary Kier's marriage to a postman.
Ms. Kier, executive vice-president of a Chicago executive search company, met her then-husband when they were in their early 20s and both worked in retail. But while she moved into the executive search field and a corporate existence, he lost his job and eventually took a position with the U.S. Postal Service. "At one point, I earned more than 10 times more than he did," Ms. Kier says.
Meanwhile, her husband forbade her to talk about her work at home. "It wouldn't have been hard if I felt he wanted to share my life or share the day-to-day things that made my life exciting and interesting. I tried hard to dumb down to what he was interested in, whether it was bowling or hanging out at a bar with his friends. But it never worked."
DIVERGENT PATHS
Therapists say couples who marry young often find themselves in similar scenarios as they get older and move into different careers.
"You're in love and you don't think about the future, and you think you can overcome anything," Ms. Stern says. "Early on, the incomes may be similar. But over time, the blue-collar worker continues on his path, and in her white-collar career, her salary increases exponentially. People don't always think about that."
Younger couples are also more likely to ignore concerns raised by friends or families about a potential spouse and problems they foresee, therapists say. The reverse, however, is also true: These "mixed marriages" may thrive a little later in life.
Age, life experience and confidence helped Bill Erickson and Susan Snow adapt to each others' different work environments. He owns a plumbing company, and she's a retired Cook County Circuit Court judge. Theirs is the second marriage for both, and each says their life experiences have
helped them learn to adapt.
Mr. Erickson calls his wife "gracious" and "adaptable" and says she's been known to adjust her conversation to fit in with his crowd, though she denies it. "There's no dumbing down at all," Ms. Snow says. "I feel a great pleasure being around these people. They're very real."
But Ms. Snow says she didn't always think that way; her first marriage was to a lawyer with a similar education.
But, "by the time I was older and more mature in making life-partner choices, I saw the choices Bill made were more real and more grounded and less based on ego."
Kathy Stathos, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Chicago, says couples need to have confidence in themselves and their spouse. "It's about having a sense of self," Ms. Stathos says. "If you feel good about yourself, whether you chop trees or are a plumber — no matter what you do — you can adapt and it's okay.
"It also translates to how good you feel about your spouse. If you feel he's a smart person regardless of his education level or degree, that's going to be a healthier relationship."
Chicago Police Officer Larry Hollie — the blue-collar half of a blue collar-white collar relationship — says his 20-year marriage thrives because he and his wife have been communicating from the get-go. "Her making more or me earning less isn't an issue."
"We were clear on what we wanted to do when we were dating, so there were no surprises," says Mary Hollie, CEO of a non-profit.
MINGLING WITH CEOS
Mary and Larry Hollie say that's what's kept their marriage healthy for 20 years. He's a Chicago police officer; she's a CEO for a non-profit child welfare agency. The two met at Illinois State University.
"We were clear on what we wanted to do when we were dating, so there were no surprises," says Ms. Hollie, who went on to get a master's degree. It helped, they say, that early in their careers they both worked in areas of social services.
Still, their blue collar-white collar relationship isn't without its ups and downs.
For Ms. Hollie, the biggest challenge is the rigid schedule of a police officer. As with most blue-collar jobs, when her husband starts his shift, he can't leave until it's done. And the fact that the hours can be anything but 9 to 5 aggravates Ms. Hollie.
"Not having the flexibility and knowing that he's restricted has been frustrating," she says, especially when trying to coordinate carpools and after-school activities.
And then there are those company parties.
Mr. Hollie says he's learned — albeit grudgingly — to mingle at parties that bring together CEOs for his wife's job.
And his wife admits that going to his company parties can be "uncomfortable" at times for her. "I end up knowing his bosses. So it's odd. I deal with them on a different level than he does."
Still, both say they've been able to talk through issues and avoid conflict, though Mr. Hollie does occasionally question the dry cleaning
bill.
"We found a way early on to communicate," Mr. Hollie says. "Her making more or me earning less isn't an issue."
And work, he says, is just one element of their marriage: They've dealt with life as a mixed-race couple, as well as the challenges of parenthood. "We have a daughter in high school," Mr. Hollie says, "and that's more of an issue than anything else we can go through."
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They're simply mad about the boys...
ANNA SMYTH
IT WAS always going to be as finely choreographed as a classical ballet, but even her most ardent critics must have been surprised at the success of Kate Moss's post-drug-shame comeback. Just weeks after leaving rehab she is back in our headlines, this time with the best possible news: she has found a new passion for 2006, and this time, she won't mind being photographed enjoying it.
His name is Jamie Burke. He is an aspiring singer-songerwriter who was educated at the £24,000-a-year Charterhouse boys school, and he met Moss through their mutual acquaintance with Richard Branson's son, Sam. Although they only met the week before Christmas, they spent New Year together skiing in Aspen, and allowed themselves to be snapped canoodling on the slopes.
All of this bodes well for the single-mum supermodel, and signals the fresh start she needed both personally and commercially. Despite the fact that his "schoolfriends" have been quick to point out his roguish reputation, a bit of posh rough is always going to be a safer bet than a drugged-up rock star who makes Keith Richards look like the Dalai Lama.
But there is something else about Burke which makes this interesting: he is only 20. Moss will celebrate her 32nd birthday in a few days' time. She may not have been looking for it but, in getting herself on the right track, it seems Moss is following the example set by a growing number of older women who are dating men around a decade their junior.
Earlier this year, Demi Moore, 41, married Ashton Kutcher, 27. Next year, Sheryl Crow, 43, will marry the seven-times winner of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, 34. And this Christmas, Madonna, 47, celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary with Guy Ritchie, who is ten years her junior.
It's not just a red-carpet trend, either. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 25 per cent of UK marriages the bride is now older than the groom. In ten per cent, the woman is more than five years older than her husband - a figure which has doubled in the last 20 years.
There is much you could say about women who fancy younger men but, for what it's worth, most involved agree it's not an issue. When quizzed about his new wife, Kutcher pointed out that most critics wouldn't bat an eyelid if the roles were reversed: the point being that older men have been seducing much younger women for centuries and continue to do so. And Susan Sarandon insists the 12-year gap between herself and actor husband Tim Robbins merely stimulates their relationship.
But is that really the case? Does the age gap matter? And why are more women choosing younger partners?
There is, of course, a very obvious answer. Much like Mrs Merton's query to Debbie McGee about what it was that "attracted her to the millionaire Paul Daniels", the decision to go with a more youthful, limber, smouldering man is not hard to understand.
On the woman's side, a partner enjoying his sexual prime will always be more attractive than an ageing husband whose sex drive is on the downturn. And, for a younger man, the experience and confidence of a woman in her thirties can deliver the eroticism which may be lacking from a less worldly and mature woman who is just beginning their romantic life.
"Sex may certainly be a factor," says Phillip Hodson, a fellow at the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy. "Men do reach their sexual peak at around 19, whereas women do so much later, around 38 years old. But, more importantly, our views of female sexuality have changed in recent decades. Women are no longer viewed with a peasant mentality - that they are attractive in their breeding years and not thereafter. We have moved away from that prejudice and, now, just as men are fertile until they die, we have acknowledged that women are sexual until they die."
But if it is purely sexual, it's not necessarily a good thing. For a start, while the spark of attraction may exist between a twentysomething man and thirtysomething woman, move that forward ten or 20 years and you will almost certainly find a different sexual balance. There's no denying that women of 55 look different from the way they did when they were in their thirties, and not everyone has $250,000 to "invest" in their bodies the way Demi Moore has in order to defy time and nature. And good relationships require more than just good sex.
"No, it can't be as simple as the sexual match," Hodson continues. "Women now have significant economic power, so they don't have to rely on a man providing for them.
"If a woman has been married already, she may feel relieved of the need to find a protector, and free to enjoy a relationship in which she can have more dominance. And, on top of that, women do live an average of five years longer than men, so it makes biological sense if you don't want to be left old and alone."
This is not to say it will all be plain-sailing. Many are sceptical of age gaps for good reason, not least of which is the fact that a difference of ten years can signify a disparity in life stages.
Christine Northam is a counsellor with Relate and says that, while there are reasons for women to enjoy their equal partnerships with younger men, there can be great challenges, too.
"In any relationship, if your developmental stages don't match, there can be difficulties," she says. "If one of you, say, is preparing to be a grandparent and the other is enjoying the height of their career, it can be tricky.
"One may want to wind down sooner than the other, and then there can be competition between priorities.
"The answer, as ever, is to keep communicating, and try to empathise with each other's viewpoint as much as possible.
"In my view, it doesn't really matter whether the man or woman is the older partner, so long as you keep talking and trying to understand."
May to December: Famous women and their younger men
• FRANCESCA ANNIS AND RALPH FIENNES
Age difference: 18 years
Ralph Fiennes met Francesca Annis when she played Gertrude to his Hamlet in a London stage production. Sparks flew, and in 1996 the two left their relationships - he was then married to ER's Alex Kingston and Annis was with photographer Patrick Wiseman - to begin a romance.
"I think if two people have a strong connection and a strong bond, that's what's important," Fiennes says of the age gap. "Certainly in my life, age difference has not been a problem."
• SUSAN SARANDON AND TIM ROBBINS
Age difference: 12 years
When Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins played lovers in the 1988 baseball film Bull Durham, the couple began to hit it off in their private lives as well. Susan admits their age-gap has broadened her horizons. "When you're with someone from a different generation it can be so stimulating.
"Tim's taste in music, his love of [ice] hockey - it opens you up to new experiences."
• JOAN COLLINS AND PERCY GIBSON
Age difference: 32 years
Joan Collins made headlines when she began a romance with then 35-year-old theatre company manager Percy Gibson - and one of the questions the couple constantly faced was that of their three-decade age gap.
"I'm not going to be so naïve as to pretend we didn't spend a lot of time discussing that very issue," Percy said. "But it's a damn shame for two people so happy together to make the difference in age the reason for not being together."
And his glamorous wife agrees. "I've always felt age shouldn't be a chronological issue," she says. "I know that I look and act a lot younger than I am... I'm much more secure in myself than many girls in their twenties."
And besides, she quips, reversing the common argument in order to have the last laugh over her detractors, "If he dies, he dies."
• MADONNA AND GUY RITCHIE
Age difference: Ten years
Thirty-four-year-old film director Guy Ritchie says his life with one of the world's biggest pop stars is "just like anyone else's, except we don't go off to nine-to-five jobs".
But the couple are living proof that opposites attract. "Age is not an issue," he says. "I don't even think about it unless someone brings it up."
I was told 'enjoy it whilst it lasts'
CASE STUDY
Mary, 46, has been married to John, 36, for eight years. The couple live in Edinburgh.
How old were you when you met?
I was 36 and he was 26.
Did the age gap every worry you?
The age gap worried me... still worries me. It's a problem, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But it's no more of a problem than the host of other issues facing couples. At the time I happened to be talking to my aunt (much married herself) and bemoaning the age gap, and she replied (quite cheerfully, despite the cynicism of the comment): "What are you worried about? All men eventually leave for younger women, so why not have the relationship anyway and enjoy it while it lasts?"
That kind of convinced me to continue regardless; that, and the fact that the boy in question seemed to have some very mature attitudes about things. And, there's always the fact that he was clearly completely crazy about me - never underestimate the persuasive powers of a smitten fellow.
Would you agree that younger men make for more active, vital partners?
No, I would not. I think it's an individual thing. I have friends pushing 60 who are as hot to trot (about life, not just love) as anyone else. No, any positives about the relationship are utterly unconnected to his age.
Do you think you face difficulties because of the age gap?
Again, nothing really serious, especially because we knew from the start we'd no intention of starting a family.
My husband's mother, when we first got together, was most amusing.
She said: "Now, you'll have to be patient with Mary, because she'll be going through the menopause soon," which I found hilarious as I was only 36. But seriously, a lot of our early exchanges progressed along the lines of: him - "How do you know that?" me - "Because I was alive then."
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Is monogamy dead?
A look at the influence of 'non-connected sex,'
By Brian Alexander
MSNBC
Updated: 12:06 a.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
At the recent World Congress of Sexology in Montreal, noted sociologist Pepper Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, made a startling argument.
“There is every reason to believe,” she said, “that non-monogamy will become part of the American sexual cycle.”
More sex without strings
In the past, Schwartz argued, “women were the moral gatekeepers.” They insisted on monogamy, established it as an ideal, and tried to enforce it. Now, though, about one-quarter of women ages 18 to 24 are boinking more than one guy at any given time, according to a University of North Carolina study. About one-quarter of high school kids have what Schwartz politely termed “non-connected sex” but the rest of us have been calling “hooking up,” and these quickie sex exchanges are often initiated by the girls.
We’ve also witnessed the Dr. Phil-ization of the country. “We have become a more psychological nation,” Schwartz said. We see “cheating” as occurring in some sort of mental context. Maybe she slept with him, we tell ourselves, because she was depressed. Or maybe he slept with her, we say, because he’s being walloped by middle age. To understand is to forgive.
Though Schwartz admitted that “it is hard to know what the numbers mean,” she thinks non-monogamy will continue to increase. Some theorists, she pointed out, think monogamy arose “so that unattractive men could get wives,” but with the increasing power of women — sexual, financial, cultural — this old system will break down.
Primates sleep around more than Hef
There is some science to suggest Schwartz is right. Human-style monogamy is rare in mammals. Our closest relatives, other primates, have more partners than Hugh Hefner has had women in his grotto. Genetic evidence suggests we ourselves weren’t so devoted either, until somewhat recently in our evolution. So whether or not it’s even “natural” for us to be monogamous, or it’s culturally imposed, is still a debate.
It’s true that people “aren’t quite as naturally monogamous as we might like to believe,” says Malcolm Potts, an expert on the biology of sex at the University of California, Berkeley. “Monogamy is relatively recent in our civilized history.”
Potts, an author of "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality," regards monogamy as “a struggle,” but one most people aspire to.
He doesn’t necessarily disagree with Schwartz that non-monogamy is growing in our culture, but says that monogamy will remain the ideal, something we’ll still try to accomplish, even if we only manage it later than we used to.
“I think the thing that is setting the scene in America [for more non-monogamy] is that the age of first marriage is rising but the age of puberty has fallen," Potts says. "In the 18th Century, girls menstruated at 18. Now it’s 12.”
That creates a very long interval during which our hormones are raging but we still have to get an education, mature, and figure out who we are and who we’d like to marry. As a result “people have sex before marriage and we, as a society, accept that.”
Under those conditions, there’s bound to be a lot of partner-switching and checking out who might be more fun in bed. So non-monogamy may indeed grow as Schwartz suggests.
Better parents now?
But, Potts argues, once we do marry, we tend to try to make those marriages work and we are probably better parents than we used to be because we’re more mature. We’ve gotten a lot of play time out of our systems. As a result, he says, “I do not know that we have any firm evidence that there is more extramarital sex now than 50 years ago.”
Monogamy in marriage, he believes, is all about the kids. Both men and women have an interest in making sure children are protected and nurtured, and straying makes that task more difficult, so most of us don’t do it.
The idea that we’re becoming a nation of orgiastic libertines is, of course, one of the animating ideas of the Christian right. They’d like to take us back to a mythical time when there was no porn, no sex before marriage, no straying once you were in that marriage.
While they may see Schwartz’s argument as proof of their fears, and justification for repression of sexual liberties, maybe we should all be encouraged.
It’s possible that both Schwartz and Potts are correct, that there is more non-monogamy in our society, but that, in the end, most of us wind up in stable marriages and make better parents.
Wouldn’t that be something?
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Women take a great leap forward
By CNN's Hugh Riminton in Shanghai
Wednesday, May 18, 2005 Posted: 10:23 AM EDT (1423 GMT)
CNN) -- Women of the world take note: there's a new club on the block.
Female, upwardly mobile Chinese internationals, or "fumchis," consist of a generation of Chinese women born into the best of times.
At a cocktail party thrown for visiting jazz singer Laura Fygi in Shanghai, the fumchis are out in force, and the mood is buoyant.
"If you are under 25, literally you have never had a bad day in your life. Ever since you were born, every day has been a better day than the day before," entrepreneur Yue-Sai Kan says.
"They know there is no limit to what they can accomplish as long as they work very hard," she adds.
Annie Wang, novelist and social commentator, is the ultimate networker on the Shanghai scene.
"People want to take this opportunity to enjoy their womanhood because they have seen their mothers suffer or have sacrificed so much for their children," she says.
"A woman like me -- I want to go to a Western society, I want to be liberated, I want to be able to do the things I want to do!"
For years, Wang wrote a Sex and the City-type column -- the People's Republic of Desire. She found young women torn between wanting a faithful husband, and tasting the new fruits of freedom.
"Some people tell me I want to be wilder than the westerners -- so that shows I am cooler than westerners if I can do things they don't dare to do, and I am even more cutting edge," she says.
Amid industrialists and the oilers of the wheels, the party is full of multi-lingual young women running publishing or marketing businesses, often representing top-flight Western brands.
The guests include former Olympic sprint swimming champion Joey Zhuang, who now heads her own media firm. There is nothing, it seems, standing in her way.
But can it all really be this easy?
This generation of women might have escaped the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and China's "one-child" policy might have relieved them, whether they like it or not, of endless motherhood.
But this is a cultural revolution all of its own, which brings pressures in its own right.
"China is still a male-dominated country -- you can't deny that. It's still much easier for a man to do business in China than it is for a woman," laments businesswoman Eva Ho.
Wang also has concerns.
"People don't want to talk about politics, people don't want to talk about literature. People just want to talk about very, very practical things -- can I get a good job? Can I get a good car? I worry a little bit about the soul-lessness," she says.
But these concerns aside, in this new, glittering China, it's clear that there is a social and sexual revolution underway -- if not a political one.
