After all, all the assertions of feminism have been blind assertions looking for proof. Though as we move forward in biology, and other thigns, we are finding out that our parents and elders knew more intuitively about us than we know empirically in our daily lives.

That Prader Willi syndrome can be mitigated by father participation. That a female child living without her blood father has earlier onset of first menses (fathers let them live in a learning time longer). The list can be quite long, and will certainly explode as we find out more.

Well, just as men who are disenfranchised, tend to commit suicide because they are a net drain rather than a provider, why would it be so far from our ideas that women have similar mechanisms, though along her bailiwick, fertility.

Middle aged white women are the group that signed on the most to the feminist ideas of put off children (till infertility), put off marriage (till adaptability ossifies), claim abortion has no mental effect (except it does), and the list goes on.

Is it unreasonable to think that white middle aged women have reached the point of no return? That by kissing off good men, having fun without building a future till its too late, missing your biological clock, and finding out that the men aren’t interested any more (in contradiction to what all the magazines have been telling her), might be causing a problem that lack of religion, nihilism, hedonism, just doesn’t suffice to give meaning when your standing on the doc watching your “ships bearing your dreams, sail out of sight” to paraphrase Jackson brown.

The fact that new friends are made seldom, being warehoused in a clinic is a high thing for longer living women, no family to care, no family to call and keep in touch with, no companions…

Is it any wonder that this group might be dissatisfied with the new potential of their lives as it stares them in the face?

Where is the man to share my life? Where are the children, grandchildren, cousins and such to dote over? Where is the house and visitors to be with? The list can go on large given little inventiveness.

Pay close attention to the part in the press release that points out that “recent studies find that middle age is mostly a time of relative security and emotional wellbeing”. The reason is that they were interviewing those who came BEFORE the feminist advice to a utopian female life.  these women don’t have the things that this group has that gives them that.

Basically they are like men on their own after they get older. On their own, with no one, no family, and nothing left but dealing with it.

Personally, I don’t know the reason. However I do know that they will never figure out the reason, if the reason is in shibboleth land. Which means that as long as there is an ideological fence around answers, some answers will forever be out of reach, as will their solutions.

 

US suicide rate increasing:

Largest increase seen in middle-aged white women

The rate of suicide in the United States is increasing for the first time in a decade, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy. The increase in the overall suicide rate between 1999 and 2005 was due primarily to an increase in suicides among whites aged 40-64, with white middle-aged women experiencing the largest annual increase. Whereas the overall suicide rate rose 0.7 percent during this time period, the rate among middle-aged white men rose 2.7 percent annually and 3.9 percent among middle-aged women. By contrast, suicide in blacks decreased significantly over the study’s time period, and remained stable among Asian and Native Americans. The results are published online at the website of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and will be published in the December print edition of the journal.

The researchers also conducted a detailed analysis of suicide methods across specific population groups. While firearms remain the predominant method, the rate of firearm suicides decreased during the study period. Suicide by hanging or suffocation increased markedly with a 6.3 percent annual increase among men, and a 2.3 percent annual increase among women. Hanging/suffocation accounted for 22 percent of all suicides by 2005, surpassing poisoning at 18 percent.

“The results underscore a change in the epidemiology of suicide, with middle-aged whites emerging as a new high-risk group,” said study co-author Susan P. Baker, MPH, a professor with the Bloomberg School’s Center for Injury Research and Policy. “Historically, suicide prevention programs have focused on groups considered to be at highest risk—teens and young adults of both genders as well as elderly white men. This research tells us we need to refocus our resources to develop prevention programs for men and women in their middle years.”

Baker along with colleagues Guoqing Hu, PhD, Holly Wilcox, PhD, Lawrence Wissow, MD, MPH, analyzed data from the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) mortality reports, which provides data on deaths according to cause and intent of injury by age, race, gender and state. WISQARS mortality data are based on annual data files of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The reasons for the increase in the suicide rate are not fully understood. “While it would be straightforward to attribute the results to a rise in so-called mid-life crises, recent studies find that middle age is mostly a time of relative security and emotional wellbeing,” said Baker. “Further research is warranted to explore societal changes that may be disproportionably affecting the middle-aged in this country.”

Source: Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

This type of feminist logic really had its biggest push in things that they could paint sounded better. They would say, we have a larger cable between the two hemispheres, so we think we are superior. Or that women are multitaskers, and that is better (this after studies now show that multitaskers are not as good). The list of this kind of thing literally being endless as long as the inventiveness to spin something was healthier than the truth.

Now women say this even though there is millinea of evidence showing that women select their men on the basis of the men and their families competency in the world. Unsuccessful need not apply.  One would expect from darwin that men were being selectively bred for competency in world actions. Men on the other hand, select women for fertility, of which beauty and companionship are a part of it, there is little selection for women to be competent in the world, and definitely less selection, even today, that they be so. In truth the mythical patriarchy is the result of women selectively breeding men to be good in the world for their mutual benifit in fecundity and familial success.  In general, their exhaltations about reality rarely make sense in light of prior scientific knowlege and concordance.

So its really interesting to go over my usual science fare. From the journals i read to their representation in the press I came along this interesting piece ni the UK Telegraph.

Men’s brains are ‘better connected’

Previous studies have revealed differences in the density of nerve cells and other brain features but none of these gender differences have been linked to behaviour or function in a very convincing way.

Now, Dr Lidia Alonso-Nanclares and Prof Javier De Filipe of the Instituto Cajal, Madrid, Spain; and colleagues there and at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, used fresh brain tissue removed from epileptic patients during brain surgery to explore microscopic differences in the brain structure of men and women, revealing a consistent difference.

The authors of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used an electron microscope to study the brain tissue and discovered that in the temporal neocortex, a key part which is involved in both social and emotional processes, located near the ears, among other skills, that men had a one third higher density than women of synapses – the junction between two brain cells that enables precisely tuned cell-to-cell communication.

However, men had more brain cells, though the excess was slight compared with the excess in the number of synapses.

Prof De Filipe said that the difference in synapses was “very consistent” and surprising, though he stressed that in other regions of the brain women may have more connections.

Other work said that the anterior commissure, which connects several regions of the frontal and temporal lobes, is 12 per cent larger in women than in men, for example.

There has been little attention to the anatomical differences between men and women at the level of the synapse, adds Prof De Felipe.

Although these differences contribute to the way men and women differ, he could not say exactly how, though he said there had been much speculation and hilarity in the lab about how this higher connectivity could contribute to male interest in sex and football, not least because the study was led by “two very clever women.”

Because they team only studied four men and four women, since the main object of the study was to compare human brains to those of rats, mice and monkeys, the authors emphasise that more research is needed to understand how these differences influence brain function.

Brain function has been shown to differ between men and women in various respects.

Intelligence is not one of them. Much more convincing, says the team are studies that show differences that relate to spatial and language abilities, and whereas men excel in mental rotation and spatial perception, women perform better in verbal memory tasks, in verbal fluency tasks, and in the speed of articulation.

These differences are not thought to be a only consequence of the influence of sex hormones – oestrogen and testosterone – on brain organization during development but also of genetic factors.

Brain scans have found structural differences in the cortical volume of the Wernicke and Broca areas, involved in language, as well as in the frontal and medial paralimbic cortices, and in the thickness and density of the gray matter in the parietal lobes.

Women are smaller than men, on average, and tend to have smaller brains.

But Prof De Felipe points out that the intelligence of humans with brains weighing as little as half the average, may be normal or even above average. “There is not a clear correlation with the size of the brain,” he says.

The differences were in a social area of the brain. I would guess that the men have more complex areas since they have to deal with not only positive social interaction, but also negative and conflicted social interaction where backing down is losing, not a means of finese. In other words, the social landscape of men encompasses the social landscape of women AND the social landscape of complex conflict. Rather than men not being as socially developed, they are more socially developed to handle social interactions where social rules are less able to be enforced, applied, or imposed. Such a development would naturally lead men to see a wider landscape of social possibility which encompases choices that women dont use or are mitigated from (by size as one example), and to lead women to not be capable of even seeing the potentials of conflicts and outcomes as their machinery isnt gearted to think of them as options. 

There is great pressure for this kind of Darwinian development as it relies on women not seeing options that exist but are always negative to them (like fighting over a male mate), which proscribes their solutions. Just as living in a world where there are more options to social conflict that work to a end result, would make men have a larger richer panoply of potential social actions that would include behaviors and outcomes that are not open to the women due to their size and higher fertility value.

The truth is that men have to work in both worlds, the worlds of potential conflict without limits, and the world of women where conflicts have hard limits. This naturally would set them up to have more in this area than those that dont have this need, and have other needs in relation to young children.

As science goes forward, we are finding out that the customs of our culture were important ways to act in light of our biology, and that the pronouncments of feminism and other 5th column groups that they know biology would be a certain way before investigation has been nothing but politically motivated malarky that has wasted our lives and time.

To quote the release:

The research by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor Francisco Ubeda finds that the amount of care a father gives to his child may cause a shift in the syndrome in which its symptoms, in essence, reverse themselves.

In a world where fathers are now considered akin to the appendix, its interesting to find more information that the presence of a father changes the outcomes for the children in drastic ways. Yes I said more, as females raised without a blood father present have lower ages of onset of first menses. That if a human female is raised without a father, or with a stepfather, she matures earlier, and so her time to learn is clipped by biological urges appearing earlier than later.

Until now, scientists assumed that those genes and their level of expression—how much their effect was felt on the individual who carried them—was based on how the offspring drew resources from their mother. In this case, resources can mean anything from basic nourishment to less-tangible resources such as affection and attention.

Such an assumption area a modern thing, as that was not how we thought when we had a more solid culture handed down generation to generation by families. After all, there are a lot of feedback loops in biology, and this discovery shows, that since we can feel things in the abstract, those abstractions can have a serious effect in how our genetics plays out the story of our lives.

In order to have the opinions we do ideologically, the whole of the biology of life has to be simplified to the point where we deny the nuance and subtlety of how it works, and how utterly dependent it is on the structures that we lived under as we journey through time to reach the place and time we are now.

Left ideology, with particular attention to feminism, denies these subtleties so as to control behavioral outcomes of the people who choose to get their advice from the people that even make biology political. Mother Nature is about how things are; ideology is how things should be based on simplification, obfuscation, and goals identified by a select few justified by premises as a means of selling them to the many even if they have ulterior motives.

While they don’t think this could lead to a cure for the condition called PWS, it does lead to the understanding that we are much more sensitive to the things around us (and perhaps political tweaking of such is not such a good idea over letting us be who we are).

According to Ubeda, perhaps the larger implication of the research lies in his finding that a small contribution of resources by the father may influence how imprinted genes are expressed and trigger a change of expression during development.

Father’s presence in the home to provide resources is something that we respond to biologically.

Imagine that.

Though the larger question is: what will this mean, if anything, toward father policies in state interventions and law? While this is the first thing they have found that is clearly and unambiguously indicated, it will by no means be the last as long as modern genetics is allowed to proceed (and a form of Lysenkoism doesn’t take hold).

That resources are defined in this case by more than just a monetary donation to the house fund paid through state mediators, its also love, teaching, rewards, understanding, and all the other things that go with rearing children to be healthy, happy, competent adults.

Who knew that having your dad around could hide a genetic condition that makes you obese, and allow it to be expressed if he is absent?

Somehow fathers knew that their absences were causing more harm than they could express, maybe such research will help put real reasons to what they know deep in their hearts: that their children need them.

Explaining a genetic disorder’s unique shift

Findings reported in this week’s PLoS Biology give insight into the unique characteristics of the birth defect known as Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), and at the same time, may help explain the way that a certain type of gene is expressed in all humans.

The research by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor Francisco Ubeda finds that the amount of care a father gives to his child may cause a shift in the syndrome in which its symptoms, in essence, reverse themselves.At birth, children with PWS experience great difficulty suckling and have very low weight. After they are weaned from their mothers, though, their appetites become voracious, and they become obese.

Ubeda believes that this shift results from PWS’ genetic roots on what is known as a group of imprinted genes. Humans typically get two copies of every gene—one from their mother and one from their father. Imprinted genes are prevented from working in one of the two copies, so that only the mother’s gene or father’s gene is expressed. This can be problematic when the working gene is somehow damaged.

Until now, scientists assumed that those genes and their level of expression—how much their effect was felt on the individual who carried them—was based on how the offspring drew resources from their mother. In this case, resources can mean anything from basic nourishment to less-tangible resources such as affection and attention.

Ubeda’s work, however, seems to show that as more of an offspring’s resources are provided by its father, that shift can also trigger a change in how those imprinted genes are expressed.

Ubeda said that PWS, which results from a deleted portion of the father’s copy of a group of imprinted genes, provides a clear example.

“Before weaning, the mother has the monopoly on providing resources directly to her offspring,” said Ubeda, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UT Knoxville. “After weaning, the father directly provides a greater share of resources to his offspring.”

Ubeda found that as the share of the father’s contribution of resources increases, there is a shift in which copies of the PWS group of imprinted genes is expressed, leading to the marked change in how PWS itself affects the child.

While Ubeda notes that this finding is unlikely to have an immediate effect on how PWS is treated, it provides implications for how diseases and conditions that are a result of imprinted genes are viewed.

“I don’t have any sense that this will somehow lead to a cure for PWS, but it does present a new area for those interested in the disease to study and hopefully a new understanding of how the disease functions,” said Ubeda.

According to Ubeda, perhaps the larger implication of the research lies in his finding that a small contribution of resources by the father may influence how imprinted genes are expressed and trigger a change of expression during development.

It’s a new finding, he said, and one that fills in a blank caused by conditions like PWS that seem to be influenced by more than just the mother’s contribution. It exemplifies how social structure may have shaped the symptoms of some diseases over the course of human evolution.

According to the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association of the United States, the syndrome is found in one out of every 12 to 15 thousand children, and while rare, is considered the most common genetic cause of obesity.

Citation: Úbeda F (2008) Evolution of genomic imprinting with biparental care: Implications for Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes. For more information on journals please see original article through title link.

 

 

 

That anecdotal experience has been supported by the spate of recent books on how to find a rich husband, a seminal New York Times article and a more recent Reuters report that even large percentages of women physicians and Stanford MBAs are wanting to not work or to work minimally. Perhaps that because they saw their first-wave-feminist mothers not find working outside the home to be as pleasurable as they thought it would be.

A recent CNN article explains that the desire to be a stay-at-home woman, extends not just to the women who claim their motivation is to spend more time with their kids, but even to the childless.

Guys, if you don’t mind assuming all of the financial burden associated with a live-in woman and perhaps children, fine. Some guys don’t mind. But many others have unwittingly been manipulated into being beasts of burden by women who use the techniques summarized in the above-referenced books and articles.

Make sure you’re making the huge decision to bear all the financial responsibility with fully open eyes.

 

Gender equality on the slide?

(PhysOrg.com) — Cambridge University study suggests growing numbers of people are concerned about working mums’ impact on family life.

Support for gender equality in Britain and the US appears to have peaked and could now be going into decline, research at Cambridge University has revealed.

The study, by Professor Jacqueline Scott from the University’s Department of Sociology, found evidence of "mounting concern" that women who play a full and equal role in the workforce do so at the expense of family life.

Although there are no signs of a full-scale gender-role backlash, there does appear to be growing sympathy for the old-fashioned view that a woman’s place is in the home, rather than in the office.

The study appears in a new book, Women And Employment; Changing Lives And New Challenges, which Professor Scott also edited.

"The notion that there has been a steady increase in favour of women taking an equal role in the workplace and away from their traditional role in the home is clearly a myth," she said.

"Instead, there is clear evidence that women’s changing role is viewed as having costs both for the woman and the family.

"It is conceivable that opinions are shifting as the shine of the ’super-mum’ syndrome wears off, and the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealisable by ordinary mortals."

The survey compared the results of social attitude surveys from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s – using recent data from the International Social Survey Programme as well as older polls. Professor Scott focused on the results from Britain, the United States and – because the earlier surveys pre-dated the fall of the Berlin Wall – the former Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).

In each survey, samples of between 1,000 and 5,000 people were asked to say whether they agreed or disagreed with a number of statements. Statements such as "A husband’s job is to earn income; a wife’s to take care of the children," were designed to test their overall views on gender equality. Others, such as "Family life suffers if a woman works full time," examined whether they considered maternal employment as harmful to children or families.

The study shows that while British attitudes are more egalitarian than in the 1980s, there are signs that support for gender equality may have hit a high point some time during the 1990s. When it comes to the clash between work and family life, doubts about whether a woman should be doing both are starting to creep in.

In the 1990s, for example, more than 50% of women and 51% of men said they believed that family life would not suffer if a woman went to work. Since then, the figure has fallen – to 46% of women and 42% of men. Fewer people (54.9% of women and 54.1% of men) now take the view that a job is the best way for a woman to be independent than in 1991.

The results are even more extreme in the United States, where the percentage of people arguing that family life does not suffer if a woman works has plummeted, from 51% in 1994 to 38% in 2002. About the same number of West Germans (37%) agree; but the number there has risen, having been just 24% in the mid-1990s.

Professor Scott argues that each country is at a different stage in a cycle of sympathy for gender equality. In West Germany, where up until the 1990s a large majority of people still believed that men should be the family breadwinners while women stayed at home, acceptance for the notion of working mums is now increasing.

In Britain and the US, however, where support for equal opportunities for both sexes is much longer-standing, some people are now starting to have second thoughts. In most cases, this appears to revolve around concerns that the welfare of children and of the family are being compromised the more women spend their time at work and find themselves lumbered with the double burden of employment and family care.

The report adds that there should now be further investigation into whether the attitude shift is occurring because caring for the family is seen as predominantly women’s work, or because people feel there is no practical alternative to a woman fulfilling the role.

"A change in attitude is not the same thing as a change in behaviour, but attitudes do matter," Professor Scott added. "Women – particularly mothers – can experience considerable strain when attitudes reinforce the notion that employment and family interests conflict.

"If we are to make progress in devising policies that encourage equal working opportunities for women, we need to know more about what gender roles people view as practical, as possible and as fair."

Women And Employment: Changing Lives And New Challenges is published by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. this week.

Provided by Cambridge University

 

Study: verbal aggression may affect children’s behavior

The methods mothers use to control their children during playtime and other daily activities could have a negative impact on their child’s self-esteem and behavior, according to a new Purdue University study.

"It’s hard to tell parents how to interact with their children based on one study, but what we see here is that parents who have a propensity for being verbally aggressive have a tendency to try to direct and control their children during a play period," said Steven R. Wilson, a professor of communication who specializes in family issues. "As a result, these children were less cooperative, and not only are parents setting up situations that are challenging for them to handle, but they also are subtly undermining their child’s self-esteem."

Wilson and Felicia Roberts, an associate professor of communication, are lead authors of a study that appears in the July issue of Human Communication Research journal. The researchers videotaped 40 mothers as they played with one of their children, ages 3-8, during a 10-minute, unstructured play period. The mothers also completed a series of questionnaires to assess their general tendency to be verbally aggressive toward others. For example, someone who is verbally aggressive is likely to insult others as a way to motivate them to comply or behave.

The researchers found that mothers who were high in the general tendency to be verbally aggressive often tried to take control of the play period. For example, the four mothers with the highest verbal aggression scores on average were attempting to direct their child’s actions once every 12 seconds, while the four mothers with the lowest verbal aggression scores tried to do so only about half as often. In addition to verbally aggressive mothers telling a child to play with a different toy or to stop playing, they also used negative body language, such as restraining a child by the wrist or shoulder, to reinforce their commands.

"Of course all parents direct their children, and people in general are always directing others to close a door or hand them something," said Roberts, who has a background in linguistics and is a conversational analyst. "It’s something we do all the time. But there is a qualitative difference in the kinds of directing going on by these verbally aggressive mothers. By looking at how and when directives occurred, not just how often, we found that moms who scored highest on verbal aggression used directives to control the child and, ultimately, the way the game or activity was played. The aggressive action is not overt, as in a parent hitting or yelling, but these small negative maneuvers can say so much to a child."

Parents interested in learning more about how to improve communication with their children should contact a pediatrician or seek out community family and social service programs, Wilson said.

"We all say things to our children that we regret saying, but saying a lot of things that attack a child’s self-confidence is not healthy," Wilson said. "These parents were in an unstructured, low-stress environment, and if we saw this behavior in such a brief setting, how could such negative interactions, even so subtle, affect a child over the long-term? For example, if the parents always have to control what activity they and their children are going to play – as well as for how long and how they are going to play it – you wonder if this communicates to the child that what they want to do doesn’t matter."

The researchers will be looking at how praise plays a role in these types of parent-child interactions.

Source: Purdue University

"No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."

 

 

Overworking husbands drive working wives back into the home, study finds

Americans work longer hours than ever. That not only hurts women’s careers but also widens the gender gap and threatens to trigger a resurgence of the traditional homemaker/breadwinner family structure in dual-earner households, says a new Cornell study.

Presented Aug. 1 at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Boston, the study found that "Women whose husbands work long hours are more likely to quit their jobs," said Youngjoo Cha, a Cornell doctoral candidate in sociology who expects her Ph.D. in 2010. "Yet men’s careers are not impacted when their wives put in long hours."

Cha found the phenomenon occurs among women across occupations, but the link is strongest among women with children and professional women.

Working long hours has increasingly become expected in the work culture, she noted, and her research shows how "seemingly gender-neutral workplace norms can result in discriminatory outcomes and perpetuate gender inequality."

To determine the impact of longer work hours on dual-earner households, Cha analyzed data from the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation, a longitudinal survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Cha found that women whose husbands worked more than 60 hours per week were 44 percent more likely to quit their jobs, compared with similar women whose husbands did not overwork. Professional wives with overworking husbands were 52 percent more likely to quit than similar women whose husbands did not overwork. Professional women with children were 90 percent more likely to quit their jobs than childless women whose husbands did not overwork.

In 2002 more than 12 percent — up from less than 9 percent in 1983 — of employees in the United States worked more than 50 hours a week. Cha found that 30 percent of professional husbands in dual-income households worked more than 50 hours per week, compared with only 12 percent of their professional wives. This suggests, said Cha, women in professional jobs are less likely to expect spousal support than men.

"Many workplaces use ‘face time’ as an important proxy/signal for workers’ commitment or professional competence," said Cha. "However, it should be noted that increased work hours do not assure increased productivity, and more importantly, it can seriously disadvantage many female workers who put in fewer hours at work than men."

The research was supported by a grant from the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center and the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell.

Provided by Cornell University

Women end up less happy than men

Less able to achieve their life goals, women end up unhappier than men later in life – even though they start out happier, reveals new research by Anke Plagnol of the University of Cambridge, and University of Southern California economist Richard Easterlin.

 Plagnol and Easterlin’s study, forthcoming in the Journal of Happiness Studies, is the first to use nationally representative data spanning several decades to examine the role of unfulfilled desires in a person’s sense of well-being.

As the researchers explain, expectations of success may vary among those raised in different generations (i.e., an economic depression). Data sets from a range of time periods may also have different demographic compositions.

In their analysis, the researchers control for birth cohort and demographic characteristics such as race and education. They find that women are, on average, happier than men in early adulthood – but the glow wears off with time. Specifically, after the age of 48, men’s overall happiness exceeds women’s happiness.

These gender patterns of overall happiness correlate to patterns in two significant aspects of life satisfaction: family and finances.

As Plagnol explains: In later life it is "men [who] come closer to fulfilling their aspirations, are more satisfied with their family lives and financial situations, and are the happier of the two."

Women and men have fairly similar life goals when it comes to love, the study reveals. Nine out of 10 people of both genders reach adult life wanting a happy marriage.

"Differences between men and women in aspirations for marriage and children are fairly small," says Plagnol, who received her Ph.D. from USC in 2007. "Gender differences in satisfaction depend largely on attainment."

The saddest period of the average man’s life – his 20s – is also the period when he is most likely to be single.

Young men are also more dissatisfied than young women with their financial situations, not because they are worse off, but because they want more and therefore experience a greater "shortfall," the researchers explain.

But age alters many things, including men’s money woes and lackluster love lives.

After 34, men are more likely to be married than women, and the gap only widens with age, mirroring men’s growing satisfaction with family life.

Men also become more satisfied with their financial situations over time, as reflected in their increased spending power. The researchers found that men tend to covet big-ticket items that might not be within reach until later in life, such as a car or vacation home.

(A notable exception: women want more "nice clothes" than men, the researchers found.)

These findings are consistent with an earlier study by Easterlin showing that recent generations are less satisfied than previous generations, despite having more.

"Of course, one doesn’t have to be married to be happy, but if that’s something you really want – and it is for most people – then the failure to attain it can have an impact on your overall happiness," Plagnol says, adding that those in a relationship also tend to be in a stronger financial position than those who must depend solely on their own resources.

Some age milestones:

– 41: Age at which men’s financial satisfaction exceeds women’s financial satisfaction
– 48: Age at which men’s overall happiness exceeds women’s overall happiness
– 64: Age at which men’s satisfaction with family life exceeds women’s satisfaction

Citation: Plagnol, Anke C. and Richard A. Easterlin, "Aspirations, Attainments, and Satisfaction: Life Cycle Differences Between American Women and Men." Journal of Happiness Studies; DOI: 10.1007/s10902-008-9106-5.

Source: University of Southern California
 

It may also stand to reason that those who have unrealistic desires, and a less accurate view of the world and how it works, would end up more unhappy. "You can do it all" becomes a socialist cry to equal misery under these kinds of results. Add to this the fact that women are happier married than not, and what does the advice of mostly lesbian feminist leaders has done for the general happiness of women today?

Of course since this goes against the prevailing political wind, the information will not be used to address how we can be happier. Instead it will be mostly ignored, that way the crisis that befalls women can be molded by some pretty ingenious leaders.

Barack Obama threatened to kick the ass of a fellow legislator while in the Illinois State Senate.

A fellow Illinois state Senator says Obama made the threat — or something sounding like it — during a tense exchange in the Legislature.

The lawmaker says a third person had to phyiscally intervene to separate them.

Personally, I doubt Barry could fight his way out of a wet paper bag. But still, such irrational behavior obviously doesn’t speak well for Obama, and certainly helps put the lie to this  false persona he’s built for himself as a calm, thoughtful, new kind of politician.