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A reader wrote in asking me why most men are "fascinated" with redheads. In this instance, I think "fascinated" is a nice way of saying "obsessed." She admitted to being a redhead, and, therefore, the object of such ardor. Columnist suggests attraction to redheads may be because they are a genetic rarity. She's asked these men why they are so drawn to the crimson-haired, and the best she ever got out of them was "Redheads iz just hawt, yo!" This is true, but it is not the whole truth. I wouldn't say most men love redheads. A sizable majority, sure....

Every time I write about how the modern culture seems dead-set on destroying the confidence of America's little boys, I am swamped with e-mail. It seems that everyone with a son or grandson has a story to tell about how manhood and chivalry are under attack. Last week I heard from a dad, Bill, who echoes the sentiments of many: "The boys are getting emasculated and wimpy/passive as they're now intimidated by girls due to fear of sex harassment charges and pro-female/anti male societal/educational tilts." Sadly, he's right. As a mom of two sons and a youth leader I have...

Ponca City, We love you writes "The Telegraph reports that men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive. This leads to speculation that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks. Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never...

Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women Talking to an attractive woman really can make a man lose his mind, according to a new study. Pat Hagan 03 Sep 2009 The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive. Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or...

COLUMNGame Over, Man?The Big Guy’s Guide to Guydomby Les Sillars Dear Big Guy, Dude!!!! We are so totally BUSTED!! It started last night. I was chillin’ with the guys, you know, watching some porn, playing a little poker, drinking some brews. And then Ms. Wet Blanket comes in and says we should turn it down a little. Well, like any Guy, I told her where to go, and Mom totally freaked out on us. We were in her freakin’ house, in her freakin’ living room, she shouldn’t have to put up with this at 3 a.m., what was that on her...

Middle-aged men who strongly idealize masculinity are almost 50 percent less likely than other men to seek preventative healthcare services, according to a study—the first population-based analysis of men's masculinity beliefs and preventative healthcare compliance—to be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. "This research strongly suggests that deep-seated masculinity beliefs are one core cause of men's poor health, inasmuch as they reduce compliance with recommended preventative health services," said Kristen W. Springer, the study's primary investigator. Springer is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, as well as a...

A study from the University of Bristol in England shows that men with short legs are at increased risk for heart attacks. Men with short legs have higher blood levels of triglycerides, lower blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol that prevents heart attacks and are more likely to store fat in their bellies, signs of not responding adequately to insulin, that causes late-onset diabetes. The authors feel that something that happened before a man was born caused both his short legs and his insulin resistance. Women who do not get enough to eat during the first three months of...

When I snapped out of my left wing trance last year, I was lost in space. I had no conservative friends and was clueless about web sites and books. I had heard something vaguely about Talk Radio. So I scanned my AM dial and found Michael Savage. (It took several months, and a chat with a rather bemused new friend, before I even realized there were other hosts as well.) Being a lifelong liberal, I'd never heard anybody like Savage in my life. He yelled; he called people "vermin." He was unbridled masculinity, not the touchy feeling kind I was...

Scientists have long suspected that the sex chromosome that only males carry is deteriorating and could disappear entirely within a few million years, but until now, no one has understood the evolutionary processes that control this chromosome's demise. Now, a pair of Penn State scientists has discovered that this sex chromosome, the Y chromosome, has evolved at a much more rapid pace than its partner chromosome, the X chromosome, which both males and females carry. This rapid evolution of the Y chromosome has led to a dramatic loss of genes on the Y chromosome at a rate that, if maintained,...

What is a mancession, you ask? It's a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history. Eighty percent of job losses in the last two years were among men, said AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summers, and it could get worse. Here some graphs provided by Mark Perry, an economist from the University of Michigan who coined the term mancession that, with any luck, is not long for our world. Unfortunately this trend doesn't look to be reversing itself any time soon. How do we explain this? The decline in...

When does a boy become a man? The answer goes far beyond biology and chronological age...

A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men. Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care,...

Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, men are becoming the second sex in American higher education.In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences released Beyond Bias And Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, which found “pervasive unexamined gender bias” against women in academic science. Donna Shalala, a former Clinton administration cabinet secretary, chaired the committee that wrote the report. When she spoke at a congressional hearing in October 2007, she warned that strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate” women face in university science. This “crisis,”...

Researchers found that men preferred the shape of ordinary women, equivalent to dress size 14, than so-called super-attractive models, according to a study that compared the body shapes of ordinary women, Playboy centrefolds, models from the 1920s and 1990s and glamour girls. Professor Rob Brooks at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues, asked 100 male students to judge the attractiveness of 201 line drawings of female torsos with different hip, waist and shoulder measurements.

THE economic crisis is sweeping away men's jobs at a faster rate than women's in the US, heralding the onset of a "mancession". New unemployment figures have revealed the biggest gap in jobless rates between men and women for more than half a century. The shifting pattern is redefining gender roles and challenging the status of men as family breadwinners. Tony Hawkins, 48, was laid off by his truck manufacturing plant in North Carolina after 22 years. "You could kind of feel it coming, but you think, well, you'll be OK, when all of a sudden, boom!" His wife, Johnnie,...

Boys who have a so-called "warrior gene" are more likely to join gangs and also more likely to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, a new study finds. "While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role," said biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of Florida State University. In 2006, the controversial warrior gene was implicated in the violence of the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, a claim that Maori leaders dismissed. But it's no...

A man's chances of dying early are cut by a fifth if their bride is between 15 and 17 years their junior. The risk of premature death is reduced by 11 per cent if they marry a woman seven to nine years younger. The study at Germany's Max Planck Institute also found that men marrying older women are more likely to die early. The results suggest that women do not experience the same benefits of marrying a toy boy or a sugar daddy. Wives with husbands older or younger by between seven and nine years increase their chances of dying...

A group of University of Chicago students think it's time the campus focused more on its men. A third-year student from Lake Bluff has formed Men in Power, a student organization that promises to help men get ahead professionally. But the group's emergence has been controversial, with some critics charging that its premise is misogynistic. Others say it's about time men are championed, noting that recent job losses hit men harder and that women earn far more bachelor's and master's degrees than do men. "It's an enormous disparity now," said Warren Farrell, author of "The Myth of Male Power" and...

The US recession has opened up the biggest gap between male and female unemployment rates since records began in 1948, as men bear the brunt of the economy’s contraction. Men have lost almost 80 per cent of the 5.1m jobs that have gone in the US since the recession started, pushing the male unemployment rate to 8.8 per cent. The female jobless rate has hit 7 per cent. This a dramatic reversal of the trend over the past few years, where the rates of male and female unemployment barely differed, at about 5 per cent. It also means that women...

Studies Cast Doubt on Usefulness of Common Test for Disease Men are being urged to carefully consider risks before undergoing prostate cancer screening in the wake of two large, long-awaited studies that did not produce convincing evidence that routine testing significantly reduces the chance of dying from the disease. The PSA blood test, which millions of men undergo each year, did not lower the death toll from the disease in the first decade of a U.S. government-funded study involving more than 76,000 men, researchers reported yesterday. The second study, released simultaneously, was a European trial involving more than 162,000 men......