Your views may differ, but here at Spinster HQ the day just doesn’t feel complete unless we meditate on a study conducted by sexperts explaining patriarchy in unassailable scientific terms. In fact, we’re collecting evidence in support of the theory that sexperts — there appears to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of’em — are actually cybernetic minionbots engineered by a secret cabal of overlords to ceaselessly pursue a sacred quest: proof that H. sapiens is actually two distinct species, Homo masculomacho, (“regular guys”), and Monachus gluteus rosus, (alternatively known as “uteropods”).
But that’s another post!
Today’s boys-and-girls-are-different-species study finds that if you are a team of evolutionary psychologists, and you superscientifically “quiz” 571 young adults about whether they have a “positive outlook,” and then present the results of the quiz at the British Psychological Society in Brighton, the BBC will post an article in its “Health” section entitled “Sisters ‘make people happy’.”
Whereas — you guessed it — “brothers breed distress.”
According to Professor Tony Cassidy of the University of Ulster, families with boys need extra care.
“We may have to think carefully about the way we deal with families with lots of boys.”
Then again, we may not. Because fortunately, female offspring, with their specialized cohesion, communication, happiness, and emotional openness lobes, can be utilized to stabilize the psychological health of otherwise crummy families. Girls, it turns out, are built-in family therapists!
[Professor Tony Cassidy] said many of the participants had been brought up in families where parents had split and the impact of sisters was even more marked in these circumstances.
So if you’ve got some sisters, and your family is still dysfunctional (dad’s a stinking drunk, mom lies in bed all day weeping, junior is amassing firearms for a school shooting, etc) it can only mean one thing: the girls aren’t doing their jobs. Most likely they’re hanging around coffee shops with dog-eared Rimbaud paperbacks, scribbling self-absorbed poetry. These slackers must be urged to put their shoulders to the wheel. I suggest grounding them and taking away their cell phones until the fam is once again purring along like a well-controlled Basic Patriarchal Unit.
30 comments
Ciccina
April 2, 2009 at 11:32 am (UTC -6)
Twisty, where did you find that gorgeous monkey? That shade of pink is so… so…. enticing! I’m going to run to CVS right now – I want my butt to look like that in time for the weekend!
MLH
April 2, 2009 at 11:39 am (UTC -6)
Yeah, if families dissolve, it’s the wife’s fault. If once it’s dissolved, it fails to get back together, it’s the daughter’s fault. Like it’s always womens’ responsibility to fix everything men mess up.
Pinko Punko
April 2, 2009 at 11:43 am (UTC -6)
I think we are at least three species- you forgot the evolutionary psychologists Homo masculomacho ssp asshaticus supremicus.
Kaethe
April 2, 2009 at 12:18 pm (UTC -6)
If brothers are such a drag, wouldn’t it be easier to just go ahead and get rid of them, thus permitting the buoyant babes to get on with happinessing?
birkwearingblamer
April 2, 2009 at 12:25 pm (UTC -6)
In my experience, a girl in dysfunctional a family is crushed until her spirit is killed. According to this nob, a girl should put on her stepford-wife smile and pretend like everything is hunky dory. Is that supposed to be healthy for the girl? Notice how the girl is turned into a wife and a fembot at the same time?
AM
April 2, 2009 at 12:35 pm (UTC -6)
And they make it sound as though being a sister has nothing to do with being a girl, a woman, a female. Same thing with brothers, no boys no men no males.
Twisty
April 2, 2009 at 12:58 pm (UTC -6)
“Twisty, where did you find that gorgeous monkey? ”
That monkey? Lard, there are thousands of’em here in Cottonmouth County. They eat armadillos, I believe.
PandanCat
April 2, 2009 at 12:59 pm (UTC -6)
That monkey butt at the top is making me too hot and bothered to compose a rational comment. Hoooboy, who needs human females when you’ve got that kind of roseate rumpage?
Orange
April 2, 2009 at 2:34 pm (UTC -6)
What’s hotter than a proboscis monkey’s Jimmy Durante nose? Why, its enticing red hindquarters, of course.
Kaethe may be onto something. Are these scientists not providing solid support for routine culling of male babies from the herd?
Laughingrat
April 2, 2009 at 3:29 pm (UTC -6)
Ah, the circular logic of Patriarchy. It’s like a little perpetual-motion machine, isn’t it?
PhysioProf
April 2, 2009 at 3:45 pm (UTC -6)
That monkey butt has rendered Comrade PhysioProf completely powerless.
Jonathan
April 2, 2009 at 5:52 pm (UTC -6)
“According to Professor Tony Cassidy of the University of Ulster, families with boys need extra care.”
Funny, the sexperts said the exact opposite on Slate: that the parents of a girl are more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy, that divorced women with girls are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with boys, and that parents of girls are also much more likely to try for another child than parents of boys.*
Why do the papers keep hiring these idiots? They can’t even keep their lying BS straight!
* Their ‘scientific’ conclusion? “Maybe boys are just more fun to have around.” These minionbots are such a-holes.
Twisty
April 2, 2009 at 6:08 pm (UTC -6)
Whao Jonathan! That’s some seriously stinky shit you dug up there.
I have no doubt, naturally, that the actual findings of these economists are supportable by facts, i.e. that parents prefer boys to girls. The stinky part is the author pretends it’s a great mystery. Why-o-why would anyone prefer a boy?
Duh, asshole author who will not name Patriarchy, it’s because the world is his oyster; girls are, like the ur-girl Eve, God’s little afterthought.
Twisty
April 2, 2009 at 6:27 pm (UTC -6)
“That monkey butt has rendered Comrade PhysioProf completely powerless.”
It’s all part of my devious plan to take over med schools the world over.
TheBellWitch
April 2, 2009 at 7:23 pm (UTC -6)
Wow. Right to the source in that Slate article: even female fetuses are to blame for the crumbling of the Great American Institution of marriage. And here I am, reading feminist blogs and wasting all my hard-earned cash on sensible shoes. Who knew just being conceived was enough?
another voice
April 2, 2009 at 9:49 pm (UTC -6)
Wait, we can use this Slate car crash of an article. If taking a chance on getting (gasp, the horror) a girl-child, is too dangerous for the marriage, maybe the reproducing types can be convinced to avoid tempting fate. Don’t reproduce at all, and there is no chance of spawning a marriage-killing female. Problem solved. Right?
another voice
April 2, 2009 at 10:06 pm (UTC -6)
One might also assume that women who produce boys buy into their patriarchal status more and fight against their captors less because they know at least their offspring will be ok in this crapheap of a patriarchal culture. They accept their own fate in order to let the boys carry on. If they had girls, they would fight the system a bit more to try and get a better deal for the child. The captor, er husband, would not like such a threat to his status quo. Ergo, divorce. Perhaps I stretch here?
Inkling
April 2, 2009 at 11:21 pm (UTC -6)
Wow, when did Slate turn into Misogyny Central? Granted I haven’t felt compelled to visit their site in a while, which I now see was a presciently obstreporal lobe-sparing move on my part. It doesn’t take a PhD in whateverology to figure this one out. Because we’ve been brainwashed into buying the gender essentialism BS, most women cluelessly believe that a boy without a Father Figure present to teach him how to hunt mastadons and beat his chest while grunting insensibly will suffer a gender identity crisis and may even, gasp!, begin expressing his emotions freely or take an interest in books and movies with plots and an emphasis on relationship development. If things get really ugly, he might even learn to be a good listener and develop a healthy respect for women. Nope, we most definitely can’t have that. It’s far better to have a representative of Homo masculomacho around the house so the poor boy doesn’t go astray.
Oh, by the way, thank you, Twisty, for posting the picture of the monkey butt. Now I know which shade of lipstick I need to add to my femininity arsenal for inciting lust in the nearest Homo masculomacho. Er, which shade to avoid, I mean.
belenen
April 2, 2009 at 11:29 pm (UTC -6)
funny and dreadfully true. I was the built-in family therapist in my rotten family unit, and oh yeah my brother caused distress. But if not for the patriarchy saying “boys will be boys” and “girls, be good” well then we’d have a different story.
Inkling
April 2, 2009 at 11:37 pm (UTC -6)
“In my experience, a girl in dysfunctional a family is crushed until her spirit is killed. According to this nob, a girl should put on her stepford-wife smile and pretend like everything is hunky dory. Is that supposed to be healthy for the girl? Notice how the girl is turned into a wife and a fembot at the same time?”
This. Yes. A thousand times yes.
I can’t resist addressing this factoid that I skipped over in my previous post: “…parents of girls are also much more likely to try for another child than parents of boys.”
Could it possibly be because girls are such an exquisite delight that parents yearn to add more little dearhearts to their household? And could the reason for getting off the procreation train after one boy possibly be because one self-indulgent, bratty patriarchal mini-unit causes enough frustration to discourage parents from creating more nerve-wracking handfuls? See how that works? I’ve got news for the evo psych nitwits: my conclusions are just valid as yours, so NYER!
phiogistic
April 3, 2009 at 5:20 am (UTC -6)
Earlier this week I helped with a presentation of “The Price of Pleasure,” a pretty horrific documentary roundup of popular porn, and porn research. When I got home, I needed to watch something -nice- to try to get my mind off the horrors in the documentary. After drinks and lots of pictures of kittens I thought, “Hey, self, let’s watch some Bill Cosby, he’s as far from porn as you can get.” And then I was treated to a twenty-minute routine about his first child, and how disappointed he was that she was a GIRL, how his father mocked him, and all the importantly manly things he was going to miss out on, and how he tried to turn her into a boy by blowing in her mouth (to turn her vagina inside out). HA HA HA HA HA! HA! So freakin funny I almost cried.
speedbudget
April 3, 2009 at 5:37 am (UTC -6)
THE POWER OF THE MONKEY BUTT COMPELS YOU!
tinfoil hattie
April 3, 2009 at 6:33 am (UTC -6)
They accept their own fate in order to let the boys carry on.
Or, they do as I do, filling their little boy-heads with radical feminism at the breast, and continuing nonstop until they leave home.
I’m training some pretty good blamers here, which means they might at least examine their privilege someday.
muchell (mesaventure)
April 3, 2009 at 10:03 am (UTC -6)
My best friend is pregnant–went through some hellish complications her first few weeks knowing about it. Her husband “just knows it’s a boy,” surely something to do with his glorious sperm.
Recently, some of my Nigel’s family members referred me to some sort of “mystical Chinese birthing calendar” that will allow me to make sure I end up with the desired resulting male (or female) child–almost with the insinuation that I should use it soon. My response: “What do you do if you want a hermaphrodite?” (I realize I probably should have used the term ‘intersexed child,’ but I don’t know if they would have caught my drift.)
slythwolf
April 3, 2009 at 10:49 am (UTC -6)
What if my sister is an abusive asshole whose systematic tearing down of my self-esteem continues into adulthood?
Cocodamolly
April 3, 2009 at 11:36 am (UTC -6)
cybernetic sexperts? let’s EMP them.
otoc
April 3, 2009 at 12:56 pm (UTC -6)
Maybe marriages with more girl children are more likely to break up because of the higher rates of molestation?
Positively Present
April 3, 2009 at 1:34 pm (UTC -6)
Wow. I just stumbled on this blog this afternoon and I’m in heaven. What an interesting (albeit upsetting) post! Thanks so much for posting this — and for creating such an awesome blog!
rubysecret
April 3, 2009 at 7:26 pm (UTC -6)
And moms with girls (like me) stay away from subsequent relationships with males out of fear of molestation. Yep.
Cindy
April 4, 2009 at 1:21 am (UTC -6)
The study says: Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families.
I can’t believe that families in distress give over power to girls who then create and lead open communication and build cohesion.
I can believe, however, that girls/sisters who are low on the power hierarchy, are routinely scapegoated when families are in distress. The classic role of the scapegoat in society is to build group cohesion, after all.