The Day Today - 16th July 2007

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Today's picture, the cat again.

First up, the brilliant John Clarke and Bryan Dawe on sending the army into Aboriginal communities.

Hewligan's got into gender differences, with real comments too!, instead of web crawlers telling him to get a bigger penis. I'm not too sure about some of the claims, especially number 6 "Beautiful people have more daughters". I think that depends more on intelligence. And seriously I am on the side of Josh and HORansome about the nature of the article and the claims it makes. But in any event, here is a good hard biological sex difference.

The researchers found that male reproduction genes evolve much faster than any other type of gene, including female reproductive genes.

Why?

"You can see there is very strong competition for sperm to fertilize the egg, and eggs don't compete to find sperm,"

And broadly on the same theme some pieces by Roger Scruton and Cathy Young on feminism.

Scruton...

When women forge their own "gender identity," in the way the feminists recommend, they become unattractive to men—or attractive only as sex objects, not as individual persons. And when men cease to be gentlemen, they become unattractive to women. Sexual companionship then goes from the world. All that it needs to save young people from this predicament is for old-fashioned moralists to steal unobserved past their feminist guardians and whisper the truth into eager and astonished ears—the truth that gender is indeed a construct, but one that involves both sexes, acting in mutual support, if it is to be built successfully. In my experience, young people hear with great sighs of relief that the sexual revolution may have been a mistake, that women are allowed to be modest, and that men can make a shot at being gentlemen.

And Young...

However, framing the issues in terms of a male "war against women" had some unfortunate consequences -- notably, a much-deplored tendency to depict women as perpetual victims and men as villains. Women's ill-treatment of men is either obliterated or excused, resulting in a quasi-Victorian sentimental insistence on female virtue and innocence.

Often, the same people who bristle at the notion that women may be less sexual or less aggressive than men insist that unwelcome sexuality in the workplace is always a male imposition on women and indignantly reject any suggestion that women may sometimes be the aggressors in domestic combat.

Also, one of the most pointless movies I have ever seen - Human Traffic - was on last night courtesy of C4. The Guardian has an intersting take on the pointlessness of the culture surorunding it.

The most important cultural development in music of the last two decades, meanwhile, has been the rise of another seminal form of middleman, the disc jockey. Once just a canny selector of records and twiddler of the volume fader, the DJ is now a godlike presence in the club, even if, like Pete Tong or Judge Jules, he never composes a second's worth of music himself.

The reason for this is exactly the same as the reason for the rise of the conductor, even though the material conditions of performance could hardly be more different - it is the physical absence of the originating artist. The electronic composer works in his bedroom with a tower of computers and synthesisers; his music is mass-produced and distributed on vinyl. So when the music gets to be heard on the dance floor, there are waves of appreciative joy swilling round the place with nowhere to go. The guy who made it happen isn't there. The audience wants to praise him like they should, but it's impossible. The DJ is there, however, waving crazily from behind his decks, and so the adulation flows to him, for want of any more deserving receptacle.