Comfort Foods

Men lose weight more easily than women

Well, yes. We knew that, didn't we? We knew it anecdotally, at least. There can't be many women in North America who've watched their male friends decide to lose weight and suddenly drop impressive numbers of pounds. Whether that's even remotely healthy is a separate question, of course.

What I find interesting in this article, though, is the little paragraph about comfort foods:

Gender differences in preferred comfort foods may also play a role in weight loss success. Research shows that men find comfort in foods associated with meals prepared by their mothers such as meat and potatoes. Women, however, crave foods that don't involve preparation such as breads, prepackaged sweets and chocolate – foods that are quite accessible and easy to overeat.

I'd love to know more about the "research" they're referring to here (the whole article suffers from an appalling inability to cite sources, but that's another post). Intuitively, though, it makes sense: men tend to crave food that involves extensive preparation ("like Mom used to make"), and women crave food that... doesn't. Which makes sense, because who craves something when they're going to be the ones putting in all the effort to make it? I wonder if men who do all the cooking are as likely to crave meatloaf as those whose wives cook for them?

Hide your primary colours! The girls are coming!

I'm sure I've ranted about this before, but you'll have to indulge me. There is nothing that sets me off quite so much as the proliferation of pinkification.

Pinkification is when toy companies take something that was perfectly good and gender-neutral, and create a pink version "just for girls".

We've seen it with Lego (you'll note this is the "girls" category. There is no "boys" category -- the other categories are things like "action figures" and "robotics"). We've seen it with games, like Monopoly and Jenga.

And now, Fisher-Price is making pink versions of... well, see for yourself.

What's most appalling is not that toy companies are making these pink atrocities. It's that parents must be buying them, enthusiastically. It's that a young girl's room can be (and probably is) entirely gender-specific and pink from the moment she's born. Which means these girls never get the chance to think of playing with or doing anything that's not specifically coded "girl". So rather than imagining themselves as real-estate moguls when they play Monopoly, they can only imagine themselves in a "boutique" "shopping" environment.

And now they can only imagine themselves stacking pink things. Before they're two.

It's all about the berries

One more from the annals of "identifying possible biological gender differences and coming up with bullshit evo-psych explanations for them": women like pink... er, slightly redder blues.

Let me first express how impressed I am that someone (whether the reporter or the writer of the press release, I don't know) took the finding that women apparently prefer slightly redder blues than men, and declared that:

more women than men really do prefer pink — or at least a redder shade of blue

Because if you've done a study about colour preferences and gender, you've just gotta get pink in there somewhere, right?

But it's the explanation for this apparent difference in preference that just kills me -- women must prefer reddish blue because of all those bright red berries they had to gather 'way back in the mists of time.

Of course, if it turned out men's preferences were on the red end of the spectrum, we'd be talking about how men evolved to like the red blood of the animals they hunted or something. But since it's women, it must be all about the berries -- oh, and "healthy, reddish faces".

Why this preference (so far evident in only the one study, as far as I can tell) has to be explained through evo-psych, I don't know. Couldn't it just be a slight difference in visual processing? Or something culturally influenced (sure, they tested a "small group" of Chinese people, but that's hardly conclusive)?

ETA: And Bad Science reveals that the results for the Chinese population were... not similar at all. The absurdity! It grows!

What makes a mother

I have to admit, I'm somewhat conflicted about the Patti Tomasson case.

Well, not about the case specifically. I believe adoptive parents should absolutely be entitled to parental leave and I think it's a shame the court decided otherwise.

What conflicts me is that the discourse around the case has been almost entirely about mothers. Tomasson herself has emphasized that "paternity benefits are a separate issue".

But I don't think they are. If this is all about bonding with a child, why should fathers be any less entitled to that time? The idea that bonding is a purely maternal activity just reinforces the kind of gender essentialism I wish we could get past. We need more fathers to spend time with their children, both when they're young and as they grow. Is it any wonder child-rearing is still an overwhelmingly female job, when men are actively excluded from the discourse?

By the same token, it is true that childbirth is physically exhausting, and carries with it all kinds of trauma -- there's no doubt that one would need time to recover from that. To that extent, I agree with the judge. Where I disagree is that parental/maternity leave is (or should be) about more than just the physical exigencies of childbirth.

I suppose in my ideal universe, there would be medical leave to allow for late prenatal care, childbirth and recovery, and there would be parental leave, for which all parents would be eligible, and which would take up the vast majority of the time period we now think of as maternity leave.

Thoughts?

Summer camps are a truly wonderful thing. Unfortunately, the Municipality of the District of West Hants, N.S. has a pretty skewed idea about what summer camp should be -- at least for girls.

It never fails to amaze me when I see something like this happen. Surely, by 2007, we've figured out that girls sometimes like the outdoors. Sure, an outdoorsy camp probably wouldn't appeal to everyone -- but to have it strictly gender-segregated like this feels like a massive throwback. Are we really still that stereotypical in our outlook? Apparently.

They say they surveyed the children to findout what they would like to do. What I'm wondering is, did they ask the girls what they would like to do, or did they ask "what would girls like to do". 'Cause the answers to those questions are often very, very different.

For anyone looking for outdoorsy activities for girls, I strongly recommend getting involved with the Girl Guides of Canada. They can be a little on the flaky side sometimes, and a lot is dependant on what unit you end up with. But they're a great organization, and they start with the fundamental belief that girls can do anything they set their minds to. I have many great memories of my years in guiding, and can't recommend them strongly enough.