In a survey in February by the National Association of Home Builders, builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president of research at the builders association. Some builders say more than a quarter of their new projects already do.
As somebody who’s starting to think about building a house, it’s an interesting trend. We’ll want to sell the house we build–should it have two master bedrooms? We’re not going to sweat it, but that number of 60% does seem really high. I guess the National Association of Home Builders has some self-interest in inflating the number, as it implies larger houses and more money for them. On the other hand, if they built a bunch of houses that buyers didn’t want, that wouldn’t help them. So, I’m guessing there isn’t too much spin in that estimate.
This quote struck me as worrying:
Occasionally, the need to separate does have to do with sex. Professor Rosenblatt said one older woman he interviewed said she had her own bedroom because, “I’ve paid my dues. I’m old enough that I don’t want to have sex at 1 a.m.”
Ouch. “Paid my dues”. If that’s how you think about it, maybe you want to, I don’t know, go with separate lives instead of separate bedrooms.
I just finished reading “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica”, a long piece by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly. It’s concerned with, as Oprah put it, ‘the oral sex epidemic’, and the apparent trend of young teenage girls offering casual, unreciprocated oral sex to boys.
There’s no analysis of how widespread the practice, and therefore how justified the parental hysteria is. Still, Flanagan delves expertly into that hysteria and the reality behind it, drawing some interesting connections to the books of Judy Blume and their contemporary equivalents. Flanagan’s a witty writer. Check out this passage:
Dr. Phil, who has the vast, impenetrable physique of a pachyderm and the calculated folksiness of a country-music promoter, employs a psychotherapeutic cloak of respectability to legitimize his many prurient obsessions.
Or this one:
Wherever there’s a girl gone wild, there’s a gender-studies professor not far behind, eager to blame her actions on the patriarchy…The problem with this idea is that surely the patriarchy was far stronger and more oppressive in the 1950s. But you don’t find Betty—or even Veronica—cravenly servicing Archie and Jughead.
A young mother herself, Flanagan doesn’t arrive at a lot of conclusions, but does provide some thoughtful commentary. I was reminded of the other long, well-written magazine article I’d read recently about how different things were for kids these days.
I was also reminded of this blog post, about sex bracelets, which continues to attract inane and peculiar comments from the teen set.
Yesterday I was in Shoppers Drug Mart, looking for a copy of Business Week or Wired. Although their magazine section is pretty massive–I’d guess thirty feet of four foot high racks in an L shape–they had neither magazine.
I stepped back, and observed an amusing effect in the way the magazines were organized. It’s clear that originally the store had intended one rack to be periodicals targeted at women (health, celebrity gossip, beauty, yoga, interior design and so forth) and the other at men (sports, cars, computers, financial news, etc).
However, the stereotypical women’s magazines had begun annexing the men’s. About 70% of the total seemed targeted at women. I expect it was, in part, the explosion of yoga magazines that drove the latest advancement.
This probably makes a lot of sense, because my anecdotal observations indicate that women buy a lot more magazines than men.
I got to wondering about the history of gender-specificity in magazines. Have women always bought more magazines than men? Surely not. If I looked at analogous racks in the fifties, would it be mostly Horse and Hound and, you know, Scientific American?
I’m too busy to ask the Internet today, but if you’ve got any thoeries, let’s hear ‘em.
In related news, one can’t write ‘men’s magazines’ without thinking of porn. Maxim and FHM, combined with the availability and, uh, ease of use of Internet pornography, seem to have eliminated pornographic magazines from all but the sleeziest of corner stores and bus stations. You sometimes see Playboy, but that’s about as raunchy as it gets.
As you may know, the DVD industry has been struggling with version 2.0 of Beta vs. VHS. This time around–having learned nothing, apparently, from the debacle of the eighties–they’re debating the merits of two high-definition DVD standards: HD DVD and Blu-ray.
Someone from Tom’s Hardware went round the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last week. He “did a quick straw poll on, the virtues of HD DVD versus Blu-ray, and the answer from a dozen companies, big and small, including Pink Visual and Bangbros editor-in-chief, is going into a single direction: HD DVD is the preferred format. Period.”
Whatever you think about the pornography industry, they’ve been on the bleeding edge of innovation since Nicéphore Niépce snapped (well, the exposure was somewhere between 8 and 20 hours) the first permanent photo back in 1827. As soon as they got that exposure time down to something manageable, I’m sure he was thinking “hang on, I could take photos of naked people and sell them”.
Apparently many hair salons have made the practice of providing women with a brown bag of hair coloring to match the coloring they just got put on their heads. A woman named Nancy Jarecki decided why not sell a product like this over-the-counter.
Unlike the zillions of hair dyes in the average drugstore, Betty Beauty only makes five colours–brown, blonde, black, auburn and, uh, fun (that’s pink). I guess colour matching isn’t that critical, given that the hair down there is likelier to only be seen in low-light conditions?
Yesterday I wrote that Victoria’s Secret stores won’t be coming to Canada any time soon. Last night, somebody told me about a more nefarious angle about Victoria’s Secret–they produce 1 million catalogs per day from virgin fiber paper with little or no recycled content. That’s 395 million catalog a year, most of which don’t get read (though, you know, the photos may get looked at).
I learned this from victoriasdirtysecret.net, a site dedicated to getting the underwear giant (heh) to change their ways. ForestEthics wants Victoria’s Secret to:
End purchases from any company that is not identifying and halting logging in Endangered Forests in the Canadian Boreal;
Maximize post-consumer recycled content in catalogs (achieve 50% post-consumer recycled in five years);
Ensure that all suppliers are shifting to Forest Stewardship Council certification;
End the use of any forest products sourced from other Endangered Forests, such as key areas of the Southern U.S.
Here’s a Village Voice article discussing the campaign and Victoria Secret’s dubious response.
And yes, that title is a baldfaced land grab for attention.
Apparently Victoria’s Secret acquired La Senza. I had no idea, and must pay more attention to the undies mergers and acquisitions marketplace. Alas, Victoria’s Secret remains one of the few major franchises that Canadians must still go south of the border for.
I’m blogging about this so that a) I can include a photo of a scantily-clad model and b) so that I can quote the awkward headline.
Victoria’s Secret not slipping its lingerie into Canada, La Senza boss says
Victoria’s Secret bras and panties aren’t likely to be available in La Senza stores (LSZ.TO) despite its U.S. parent company’s deal to buy the Canadian lingerie retailer.
La Senza will continue to operate independently and there also aren’t any immediate plans for Victoria’s Secret to open its own stores in Canada, Laurence Lewin, president and chief operating officer of the Montreal-based company, said Thursday.
Speaking of models, I was having a conversation about them the other day. Is the Era of the Super Model over? I (obviously) don’t pay much attention to the world of fashion, but I feel like there are far fewer models who are household names than, say, ten years ago. Is this true, or am I just out of the loop?
The person I was talking to pointed out that actors have taken away a lot of the advertising work that models used to do. If you open a magazine like Cosmo these days, you’ll see a lot of actresses doing makeup and fashion ads. Could this be a reason–that actors have bogarted the super model stardom?
Teabagging, of course, is a sexual practice and a term coined, I believe, by John Waters.
It took me a while to understand what this meant in-game, but I figured it out. See, when you’re shot and ‘killed’ in Battlefield 2, you lie around, crippled and staring at the sky for 15 seconds waiting for a medic. If you don’t get resuscitated, you respawn.
If an opposing player–particularly the one that shot you–wants to taunt you, he can come by and repeatedly crouch over you, in your field of view. Hence, the in-game teabagging.
YouTube, of course, has a record of all human activity. Safe, if a little rude, for work:
My pregnant friend Lesley sent me this article from last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. It’s all about the big and messy business of bovine sperm harvesting. Things I learned from the article:
They actually use a steer or castrated bull as a kind of fluffer. Or stand-in. I can’t quite hit on the right metaphor for this: “‘Their role in life is to stand there and be mounted,” Mr. Carscadden said. ‘I don’t know if that’s better or worse than the alternative, which is to go to the food industry.’”
One shot by the ‘undisputed big boy’ of Canadian bulls, Godwyn, is worth CAN $250,000. That’s good for 2500 doses, or $100 per potential calf.
Godwyn has to suffer a lot before he gets off:
The bull mounts the steer three times, but is interrupted by the collection team on the first two to induce a big yield on the third. “On the first one, they’ll literally grab his penis and not allow him to ejaculate or penetrate,” he said. “On the second one, they spray the penis with disinfectant.”
And, on the third mount, the collector reaches in with an “AV”, or artificial vagina, just in time for the moment of glory.
Who has the worst job, the castrated bull or the sperm collector? A tough call.
I was reminded of a story an Irish friend told me about horse breeding. We went ‘down the country’ to observe the goings-on one day and learned the breeders used a female donkey as a fluffer before the actual extraction.
Here’s something I didn’t know about Old Bendy, ye olde Monarch of Hell, Mr. Horny Horns. Apparently there’s one feature that’s omitted from most modern depictions of Satan: his massive boner.
I was listening to the Slate Explainer podcast which takes us smoothly from the UN General Assembly to the pits of H-E-double hockey sticks.
Slate contributor Daniel Engber cites the Councils of Toledo, 30-odd synods held over three centuries in Spain (not, as we heathens might expect, the Ohio birthplace of Corporal Maxwell Klinger). In 447 AD, one such Council gave the modern world the first official description of the Lord of the Lower Depths:
A large black monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs - or one cloven hoof - ass’s ears, hair, claws, fiery eyes, terrible teeth, an immense phallus, and a sulphurous smell.
That quote comes from a WWF page on the, uh, demonization of the poor, unsuspecting bull.
Pre-Christian pagan religions were all about the phalli (here’s an academic paper on the subject), so it’s no surprise that church elders would ascribe a mountainous manhood to (oh well I never) Mephistopheles. There’s a famous 5th century Greek play, for example, where the male characters wore big phalli as part of their costumes.
