Transplanting a Seattleite

There are a couple of statistics making the rounds that I don't believe. One of them (eighty some odd percent of women want to be asked before having anal sex) I don't believe because I don't believe _anyone_ wants to be surprised in that particular way (and the statistic purports to be about women who want to have anal sex, so what you were thinking as an alternative explanation isn't); also, there's never a source.

But then there's the one about 20% or whatever of people admit to having used a cell phone while having sex. Arianna Huffington was on the Daily Show last night, and Jon Stewart flat out said he didn't believe it, and Arianna is all, how would you know, you're a happily married man. And this is the point where we all remember that she used to be conservative, and married to a gay guy.

So I don't know, but I still kinda don't believe the 20% of people using a cell phone while having sex. Because seriously, how desperate is their partner that they are putting up with that.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cell-phone-use-during-sex-believe-it/

File this under Kids These Days?

From Gabrielle Glaser's book: "Today, women buy nearly two-thirds of the 784 million gallons of the wine sold in this country, and they drink about 70 percent of what they buy."

It's not unambiguous, but the obvious interpretation is that women are consuming 47% of the wine sold in this country -- which isn't necessarily the impression one would get if one didn't actually sit down and do the math (.3 * .67 + .33 = percentage of wine consumed by men; 1 - that = percentage consumed by women).

I recognize that I am ignoring the statistical impact of people who are not identified as men or women.

ETA: Reading Glaser is like reading Friedan. Why is it that the present is always somehow uniquely more stressful than the past? Also, if no one tracked how much women were drinking in the past, how can we be so sure that women are drinking more now? I'm not really buying a lot of this. The research based parts are okay, but the qualitative analysis is terrible.

Oh boy: she says, "We see it in Richard Louv's powerful book lamenting housebound children, Last Child in the Woods."

I may have to start skimming.

The history overview is terrible. WCTU did not "require" that members be "white, Protestant women born in North America". Catholics were at least nominally welcome, altho it's hard to imagine them being very comfortable around a bunch of people slinging the usual anti-Catholic/nativist/anti-Irish etc. rhetoric. Outreach was done to Native Americans, at at least one Cherokee attended a WCTU convention as a delegate. As for "born in North America", that is unadulterated bullshit. They did a ton of outreach to immigrant communities _in their native languages_, and a lot of it was successful. German speaking WCTU chapters had their own newspaper.

This is execrable.

Says Prohibition wouldn't be achieved without female suffrage so the two groups joined forces -- of course Prohibition preceded female suffrage. *sigh* It's clear Glaser's source on Prohibition had a strong opinion and Glaser made no effort to check it for validity, but instead took the standard approach: pretend that Prohibition was somehow an over the top, class biased response to a non-problem.

Still more complaining on Wednesday: "As states passed no-fault divorce laws, the divorce rate began climbing, reaching an all-time high in 1981, when more than half of all marriages dissolved."

Editor? Editor?