i want to be kissed.
in other news...
here's an article from the ny times. boys, you know i love and respect you, but your gender has been the source of extreme frustration lately, so i found this article pretty satisfying.
enjoy ladies.
EDIT: so here's an adendum, because some of you kids are getting way too uppity.
lighten up guys. this is from the OP-ED page of the new york times. it's based on a REAL study, but it's SUPPOSED to be tongue in cheek, and provide humor rather than provoke snippity comments. touchy subject i guess? perhaps it's good to get a glimpse into how women have felt for millenia ad-nauseum.
what i liked about this study the most, is that it promotes more understanding and tolerance between the sexes.
how many times have i heard, from our patriarchal society that, "guys just can't figure women out" or "women are too emotional, too messy, too chaotic"? doesn't anyone find it INTERESTING that maybe there really is a very fundamental genetic difference? that there's a reason relationships and understanding each other is so freaking hard? we can give each other a lot more leeway. i'm not a big science head myself, i don't even know that i BELIEVE in evolution, but it's still something to ponder.
so get off my case, or my X chromosome will come over there and beat up your Y.
Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.
But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.
Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.
"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."
Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.
"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."
Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural.
So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs.
The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.
As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."
This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.
"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.
Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down."
Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner - 100,000 years - men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.
Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast," sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes.
"The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how," he said. "He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or can't clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it.
"I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome."
Dr. Page says the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males." It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.
The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.
in other news...
here's an article from the ny times. boys, you know i love and respect you, but your gender has been the source of extreme frustration lately, so i found this article pretty satisfying.
enjoy ladies.
EDIT: so here's an adendum, because some of you kids are getting way too uppity.
lighten up guys. this is from the OP-ED page of the new york times. it's based on a REAL study, but it's SUPPOSED to be tongue in cheek, and provide humor rather than provoke snippity comments. touchy subject i guess? perhaps it's good to get a glimpse into how women have felt for millenia ad-nauseum.
what i liked about this study the most, is that it promotes more understanding and tolerance between the sexes.
how many times have i heard, from our patriarchal society that, "guys just can't figure women out" or "women are too emotional, too messy, too chaotic"? doesn't anyone find it INTERESTING that maybe there really is a very fundamental genetic difference? that there's a reason relationships and understanding each other is so freaking hard? we can give each other a lot more leeway. i'm not a big science head myself, i don't even know that i BELIEVE in evolution, but it's still something to ponder.
so get off my case, or my X chromosome will come over there and beat up your Y.
Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.
But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.
Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.
"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."
Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.
"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."
Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural.
So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs.
The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.
As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."
This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.
"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.
Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down."
Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner - 100,000 years - men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.
Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast," sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes.
"The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how," he said. "He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or can't clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it.
"I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome."
Dr. Page says the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males." It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.
The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.
VIEW 15 of 15 COMMENTS
You can no more explain a man by his chromosomes than you can a woman by her breast size. Only a few decades ago, our reason for keeping women out of the workplace was that they were assumed to be built for childbearing rather than thinking. There have also been theories of the Jewish nose and the African forehead. Human worth and the emotional landscape are far too complex for these simplistic explanations. Its too great a leap from genetics to emotions, and I feel sorry for any man who believes that he is pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout. His is a life half lived. Theres so much subtlety to see and to celebrate in the human experience, but we wont see it if we keep objectifying each other. So heres a kiss for your wonderful complicated soul thats far more than the sum of its parts. *smmooooch*