A post for women, to start the New Year off right

Can we finally acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the "glass celing" is becoming a relic of the 20th Century? The Economist reports that "within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce."

In that vein...I had this link saved from last June but forgot about it. Esquire magazine asks: "Where Have All the Loose Women Gone?" "Over the years, as women became educated and gained control over their lives, they wanted more stuff, more choices, more men. If you have a great-grandmother, ask her and she'll tell you: The chance to try people out for a while before you marry them is one of the best things that happened in the twentieth century. But the post-post-feminist maelstrom that is Danica Patrick and the Real Housewives of Wherever and Secretary Clinton versus Beauty Queen Palin means that women can wield real power, but it comes at the cost of confusion — professional, social, and sexual. Sex has become a minefield just too tricky to navigate as they build a career or a family or a reality-TV-show franchise. They go elsewhere. Which is a disaster for men. Until now, feminism has been the best thing that ever happened to us..."

Now more stuff from the archives: Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic examines "A Boy's Life" Or is a girl's? Children as young as 5 are now being diagnosed as being transgender, and increasingly turning to medical remedies to their sense of confusion:

• "The change is fueled mostly by a community of parents who, like many parents of this generation, are open to letting even preschool children define their own needs."
• "Overall, though, Tuerk’s explanation touches on something deeper than latent homophobia: a subconscious strain in American conceptions of childhood. You see it in the hyper- vigilance about “good touch” and “bad touch.” Or in the banishing of Freud to the realm of the perverse. The culture seems invested in an almost Victorian notion of childhood innocence, leaving no room for sexual volition, even in the far future."

Kay S. Hymowitz in the City Journal examines the biological urges that causes the Femina Sapiens to want a career and children -And if they are compatible. "Women have many more oxytocin receptors in their brains than men do, and those receptors rev up during orgasm, childbirth, and breast-feeding—signaling that at a biological level, the boundaries most of us take as axiomatic between sexual pleasure, reproduction, and mothering are not all that clear. Hrdy goes so far as to conclude that “the ‘afterglow’ from climax is an ancient ‘maternal’ rather than sexual response.” In females, in other words, the maternal urge shapes the sexual urge." Likewise, Lori Gottlieb wonders "Is it better to be alone, or to settle?" Her advice? "Marry Him!"

• "When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband."
• "Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option."
  

Keeping on the sexual warfare front, Ross Douthat (before he started writing columns for the NYT,) asks the uncomfortable but intriguing and important question: Does looking at pornography make you an adulterer?

• "Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up."
• "If it’s cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn’t it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV? Isn’t the man who uses hard-core pornography already betraying his wife, whether or not the habit leads to anything worse?"
• Has the Internet changed the nature of masturbation: Is there a difference between one-way longing for a magazine pinup and reciprocal acts of eroticism online?
• "This isn’t to say the distinction between hiring a prostitute and shelling out for online porn doesn’t matter; in moral issues, every distinction matters. But if you approach infidelity as a continuum of betrayal rather than an either/or proposition, then the Internet era has ratcheted the experience of pornography much closer to adultery than I suspect most porn users would like to admit."
• The language used by a man quoted in the article is that "of a man who has internalized a view of marriage as a sexual prison, rendered bearable only by frequent online furloughs with women more easily exploited than his spouse."
  

Finally, a special random bonus: The Danish newspaper Politicken announces that "Obama is Greater Than Jesus." No comment.