feminist blogs

Girls are more plugged-in than boys. Duh.

A new LA Times/ Bloomberg poll surveyed the habits of 12-24 year-olds and uncovered some interesting data regarding girls' media-consumption habits, as well as their attitudes about media:

They are the most sensitive to degrading depictions of women — 78% find this type of content most offensive — and the most enthusiastic about viewing content on iPods, laptops and cellphones. They're also the most carefully monitored by parents: 68% say their parents know how they spend their time online.

[...]

Often called Generation Y, the Millennials or Echo Boomers, these kids are known by economists, sociologists and marketing experts as optimistic team players and rule-followers, born into "child-centered" families and raised as part of the most celebrated, protected and overscheduled generation in memory. Technology has been so much a part of their lives that, to them, life before e-mail and the Internet was "the Stone Age."

[Girls this age] were influenced by the late-1990s "girl power" phenomenon and now are often more accomplished, higher achievers than their male counterparts, economist and historian Neil Howe said. They're also more likely to use technology to socialize, according to the survey findings. More than half of teenage girls reported regular instant-messaging, about two-thirds report writing and reading e-mail regularly and just under half report visiting social networking sites.

"Today it's the girls at the front of generational change," Howe said.

[...]

The poll showed that ...today's teens contradict long-held assumptions about gender. For example, the survey found that when it comes to offensive content, 66% of boys and girls ranked disrespecting women at the top of the list. Teen girls are especially facile with technology, in some cases more so than boys their age — for example, 21% were open to the idea of watching a movie on an iPod, compared with 16% of teen boys.

Cue the "but boys do the math and science and coding better because they're genetically pre-disposed to perform better at anything that requires thinking. Naturally, the females do better at the social Web." BECAUSE OF THE SOCIAL!!!!!!!!

And, as we all know, women dominate the boards of Web 2.0 companies. BECAUSE OF THE CLUETRAIN!

And while we're on this topic, has anyone seen any women bloggers lately?

Say it isn't so!

Clean-up on aisle three:

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing women in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.

Heidi Fleiss seems to think so:

Heidi Fleiss, the ex–Hollywood Madam, the woman who used to stash clumps of cash beneath her mattress, the woman who took the fall and didn’t name names, the woman who served three years’ hard time for being, in her own words, “a flesh peddler,” is going legit. Oh, sure, she’s still going to peddle flesh, but she wants to do it legally this time. Her plan is to open a brothel in Crystal, about 80 miles outside of Las Vegas. It isn’t going to be like any other brothel in America, or anywhere else for that matter. Her establishment will cater to women. Only women. Her hookers will be men, gigolos to be exact. Heidi Fleiss is trying to open a stud farm. Technically, she’s trying to become America’s first stud farmer.

Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny's new Democracy: A Journal of Ideas features an interesting read by Jedediah Purdy on The New Biopolitics. Like Matt Ygleisas, I need time to digest the piece before I can react to its prescriptions. At the same time, I wanted to point you to the article, and to this depressing reality in particular:

What do people in modernizing cultures do when they take reproduction out of the realm of luck and nature and put it under self-conscious control? In much of Asia, the answer has turned out to be that they have sons. For those conditioned by U.S. abortion politics to think of reproductive choice as always and entirely pro-woman, this is a disconcerting irony. Even more troubling is that millions of individual reproductive choices produce a massive demographic distortion–scores of millions of men with no one to court, love, or marry.

[...]

The preference for sons in Asia has several interwoven sources. One is the cultural esteem given boys, men, and the parents of boys in societies where women’s positions remain pervasively inferior. Another is economic: parents rely heavily on their children for retirement, and men’s lifetime earnings remain much higher than those of women. China’s one-child policy, which is strictly enforced in cities and often caps rural families at two children, intensifies both motives by raising the stakes of each birth. A daughter under those circumstances is not merely the first child, but the child.

Do you really want to own everything you poke? Because I was under the impression you didn't. And I sure am glad beer makers are now targeting a more upscale customer.

Take note:

In these early soundings for 2006, Republicans face the potential reemergence of a gender gap that Bush narrowed in his 2004 reelection. While men split evenly when asked which party they intend to support in November, women prefer Democrats by 57% to 31%, the survey found. Democrats hold a commanding advantage not only among single women, a traditional Democratic constituency, but married women, a swing group that broke toward Bush and the GOP in 2004.

In case you haven't seen this already [And you may not have, right? You might've been partying at Palm Springs 'Beefster Spring Break' for all I know!], Cecilia Fire Thunder --President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation-- is fighting HB 1215:

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

If you want to do something to help the women of South Dakota, stop what you're doing now and make a check out to "OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder." Bitch PhD has more details.