Facebook is looking to collect data on where your cursor hovers and clicks.

Says Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin, whose face looks like this:



At least he can't track my eyes and read my mind as I look at him.

Record the closest approximation of your thoughts.
	The face of evil.
	He must be rich, and yet his teeth remain unwhitened.
	He seems like a nice man.
	A generic white-man face. Nothing is gained or learned by seeing it.
	In the future we won't need faces. We'll have Facebook.
pollcode.com free polls

AND: You remember the past?

"This is the average American male in his 30s. He doesn't look too bad, right?"

Uh... wrong.

"I don’t see myself as beautiful. I was a kid who was freckle-faced, and they used to call me 'hay head.'"

Said Robert Redford, who also reports that when he was 18, studying art in Italy and France, the women there did not find him attractive.

So — if we can believe that — even the prettiest pretty boy may still fall within the shadow of the old adage "You're only pretty as you feel."

Now, after years of recognition as incredibly good-looking — he's 77 — he says:

"And I guess the nice thing about getting older is that you don’t have that [beauty] quite so much anymore. I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young."

That face is the only face we get to see in his new movie — "All Is Lost" — in which he's (apparently) the only actor.  I've seen the trailer. He's lost at sea. Tom Hanks is also having lonesome, though not that lonesome, trouble at sea in a big movie this fall, and Sandra Bullock is alone in a space suit, bereft even of gravity in a grave situation in "Gravity."

It must say something about us that we're being presented with tales of rugged individualists far adrift from any foundation. Did we ask for that? It's what Hollywood decided, back when this fall's movies were given the go, that we'd need in the Fall of 2013. There's no reason to give much credence to Hollywood's notion of who we are right now. Hollywood thought we were the Lone Ranger and Tonto last summer, and the people said no. Perhaps the Lone Ranger isn't lone enough for our alienated psyches. He had Tonto. Where's my sidekick? the public that shunned "The Lone Ranger" might have thought. How can we identify with his loneliness when he has Johnny Depp?

Robert Redford famously had a sidekick, Paul Newman, in the 2 movies that made him seem to be even more handsome than the already-impossibly-handsome Paul Newman — "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting." And Redford did have another movie in the works with Newman — a movie version of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" (my second-most-listened-to audiobook). Newman died 5 years ago, but now the news is that it will be made with the not-always-completely-cute Nick Nolte. If you know the book, you may agree with me that Nolte seems more like Bryson's "Walk in the Woods" sidekick Stephen Katz than does Paul Newman.

You might think Newman was more like Katz because he was (half) Jewish. ("Newman had no religion as an adult, but described himself as a Jew, saying, 'it's more of a challenge.'") Nolte, on the other hand, is (apparently) a man disconnected from any particular religion. ("'Where’s God?' You’re gonna kill yourself with that. You’ll never be able to answer that.")

But Bryson's Katz — despite the distinctively Jewish name — is not Jewish, as Bryson reveals in his memoir of childhood, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" (my most-listened-to audiobook):

Some years ago when I came to apply a pseudonym to one of my boyhood friends, I chose the name Stephen Katz partly in honor of a Des Moines drugstore called Katz’s, which was something of a local institution in my childhood, and partly because I wanted a short name that was easy to type. Never did it occur to me that the name was Semitic. I never thought of anybody in Des Moines as being Jewish. I don’t believe anyone did. Even when they had names like Wasserstein and Liebowitz, it was always a surprise to learn they were Jewish. Des Moines wasn’t a very ethnic place.

Anyway, Katz wasn’t Jewish. He was Catholic.

You've come to the end of this longish first-post-of-the-day, and maybe you're wondering, What are we supposed to talk about now? The issues are: beauty, aging, loneliness, sidekicks, floating adrift without foundation, the extent to which Hollywood may know who we really are, and Where's God?

"Beauty is often treated as an essentially feminine subject, something trivial and frivolous that women are excessively concerned with."

"Men, meanwhile, are typically seen as having a straightforward and uncomplicated relationship with it: they are drawn to it."

The implication is that this may be unfortunate — not exactly ideal morally — but it can’t be helped, because it’s natural, biological. This seems more than a little ironic. Women are not only subject to a constant and exhausting and sometimes humiliating scrutiny — they are also belittled for caring about their beauty, mocked for seeking to enhance or to hold onto their good looks, while men are just, well, being men.

Women have the power to rebalance things, but they are too nice/decorous/deceitful to do it. We would need to become more expressive of our desire for beauty in our male partners. If it's really true that men subject us to a constant and exhausting and sometimes humiliating scrutiny, then we could do the same to them. I don't think it's really that bad — constant and exhausting and humiliating — but we could put the same amount of pressure on men.

Men who seek other men seem to be putting much more pressure on each other than women put on heterosexual men. You might say that's because men desire beauty more than women do, but I think it's more that women hold back from demanding what they want.

We are hoodwinked into trying to be nice (which produces results that aren't necessarily that nice). So here we are, working at both beauty and niceness in ourselves, instead of demanding — and perhaps getting — beauty from men.

How about more direct expression and honesty? Women, like men, love beauty. Stop denying that you want it, and stop complaining that you don't have enough of it for yourself. What's really "trivial and frivolous" is endlessly fantasizing that other people are making you fritter away hours looking at yourself in the mirror and fiddling. Own your vanity, revel in it, laugh at it, or reject it, but move on to other activities, like finding a man who's as beautiful as you are.

AND: By saying "as beautiful as you are," I am not bullshitting that all women are beautiful. If you insist on getting someone who is more beautiful than you are, how is that going to work? You may say that men are looking for women who are more beautiful than they are, but that's my point. Why should that work? If you think it works because men sweeten the deal with money, that's something you might use to deepen your contemplation during that otherwise possibly frivolous time you spend at the mirror.

"Healing Waters"... really?

I'm going to need something to heal me after looking at that picture.

"I didn't know I was skinny-fat until my Russian boyfriend told me so."

"Actually, I didn't even know that was a thing until he told me so."

The longer I stared at myself, the more I began to notice what it was that made Julio cringe. My chest was dystrophic. My arms were unformed. My neck was frail. Skin hung over the band of my underwear and, on top of that, I was hairy. Everywhere.

Yes, we're talking about 2 men here, but that doesn't let you heterosexual men off the hook. That just means that if your love partner wasn't female, he might tell you some things she's thinking but is too nice to say.

"Norway’s handsome PM poses as taxi driver to hear the wishes of the people."

(Via Bloggingheads.)

"Why Are Guys Afraid to Wear Speedos?"

"American men need to get over their Freudian fear of showing off their junk."

The title and subtitle to a Slate article about men's bathing suits.

Random sentence: "My interest is not entirely sordid. My primary motivation is, in fact, safety."

Speaking of pants...

... do you remember what men were doing with their pants 3 years ago? No? Where is our cultural memory?

Remedial reading:

Judging by the number of bared ankles appearing on the streets this summer, the rolled cuff look of 2009 appears to have become the rolled cuff epidemic of 2010....

Tragic photos at the link, which is to the NYT, where no one prods you to remember all the way back to 1920 and T.S. Eliot ("I grow old … I grow old …").

"You have to channel Johnny Depp for that moment and ask yourself, ‘How would Johnny Depp roll up the bottom of his pants?’"

That was 2010... when you had to think about Johnny Depp to figure out how to wear your pants. 

"Wisconsin's leather community finds brotherhood and kink at International Mr. Leather 2013."

It took me way too long to figure out whether this Isthmus article was about an actual beauty pageant or a fictional theater piece about a pageant — like "Smile" or "Miss Firecracker" or "Little Miss Sunshine."

It drives me crazy — this journalism style of withholding the who-what-when so we can ease into the story with quotes and anecdotes. Is the assumption that we want to read it before we know what it's about or that we wouldn't want to read it if we knew what it was about?
Turns out, it's a real pageant, organized by one Jeff Gruenberger, who, we're told, "realized the attire leathermen wear holds significance beyond expressing masculinity":

"While some people think it's just a fetish, just a kink, ... there's the core qualities of integrity, charity, brotherhood, honesty," he says. "Those are things that we truly believe in. The leather is just an outward sign of that."

Gruenberger breaks leather down into several categories, which he calls the "Big Five." Sirs, Daddies, Boys, Slaves and Pups. These categories co-exist in many leather communities, and are separated by power and experience.

Things that are truly believed in...

"A Dad or father figure teaches a boy certain things growing up," he says. "You learn respect, being very structured. You're learning all those qualities from a Sir or a Daddy."

As a Boy becomes more involved in leather, he may ask around his community for a Sir or Daddy. He can later become a Daddy or Sir once his mentors feel he has earned the title. Gruenberger says this categorization is not universally accepted, nor are the boundaries as rigid as the labels suggest. But he thinks the model helps provides stability and perpetuates leather's history.

"We're one of the few communities in the gay community that's kind of like that," he says. "The leather community comes from a military background, the World War II military veterans. When you think of it in that terms, it just makes sense."

Things that just make sense.

"Working-class students struggle with 'composite masculinity,' study finds."

"Combine the 'chiselled out of rock' body of actor Ryan Reynolds, the intellectual prowess of writer Christopher Hitchens and the 'funny, quirky' demeanour of film star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and you have the perfect role model for male middle-class undergraduates."

But while bourgeois students can “seamlessly integrate” many types of masculinity, a study at two universities concludes that their working- class peers find squaring the many demands placed on the modern man more challenging....

Both groups say that brainpower is a part of masculinity, but as Nicola Ingram, lecturer in sociology at the University of Bath and one of the project leaders, explained, working-class students... "are partially struggling to pull [together] different forms of masculinity,” she said. “The middle-class men on the other hand seamlessly integrate [them]…to create a ‘composite masculinity’. This…allows them to be many different types of men at once, although they emphasise ‘intellectual masculinity.’”

One middle-class interviewee spoke of admiring how the late Mr Hitchens threw “his weight around intellectually” on debate shows, adding that the way he talked with female panellists showed “intellectual masculinity.” This kind of attitude “belies an assumption of entitlement to dominance,” according to Dr Ingram, and was “arguably a refashioning of traditional male hegemony.”

Do you know how to be dominant the Christopher Hitchens way?  You have to crush the opposition through the force of your ideas not out of the feeling that you must win because you are the man.

Has feminism made it much harder for lower class men to do well in life?

"Look at this Boston bombing. The pictures of those two brothers. Aren’t they cute?"

Said I, as quoted in The New Yorker today in a piece by Paul Bloom called "The Dzhokar Tsarnaev Empathy Problem." I was being sarcastic and criticizing the media for using a strikingly baby-faced picture of Tsarnaev in practically every report.

Bloom concludes:

Relying on the face might be human nature—even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin. Actually, both biases reflect the parochial and irrational nature of empathy—if Tsarnaev were black, would he evoke the same response from the mothers [Hanna Rosin described here]? When someone talks about the warm feelings she has for Tsarnaev because of his sweet face, we should treat this with the same wary understanding that we would give to someone who admits to caring more about those who have the same color skin. It’s an empathetic response, and a natural one, but hardly one to be proud of.

Bloom says nothing about the baby-faced picture of Trayvon Martin that the media tended to use. Sweet faces manipulate us emotionally even when they are black. And an individual's face isn't quite the same as his skin color, because the mind is revealed through the face (albeit incompletely and often deceptively). Bloom displays the media's favorite photo of Jared Loughner and declares that we don't feel much empathy toward that face. But the problem with that face is not inborn ugliness. It's craziness in the expression. We are properly repelled by that.

It is the true sociopath — I would suggest — whose does evil things but keeps a normal-looking face. We need to challenge ourselves to recognize the sociopaths in our midst. And let's not try to overcome our aversion to faces like Loughner's or Adam Lanza's. These people have terrible problems that we ignore at great risk.

ADDED: The post title corrects a typo that appears in The New Yorker ("bothers" for "brothers").

There's no "upper limit on penis size" but "'the most attractive penis size' appeared to fall outside the range used in the study..."

"... which was designed to capture 95% of the variability women would encounter. So although attractiveness beyond the 3 in. continued to increase in a linear fashion, it did so at a slower rate."

3 inches refers to incremental enlargements over a baseline that is never stated, so it's a tad hard to understand what this projected ideal actually is. The women in the study looked at "life-size video clips of computer-generated images of naked men who varied in height, body shape and flaccid penis size, but not in other qualities like facial attractiveness and hair."

Personally, I find computer-generated images very creepy, and I'd hate to be asked to take looking at naked CGI men with larger and larger penises seriously as a "science" experiment. Stuck down at the bottom of the article — which appears in Time magazine — is this: "height was as important as endowment in a male’s attractiveness, while wider shoulders and narrow hips was more important than both combined." In other words, after much obtuse blah blah blah about the importance of penis size and height, we're told that in fact wide shoulders and narrow hips are more important.

What a poorly written article!

"A startling number of teen girls have admitted to having a schoolgirl crush on bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev..."

"... proclaiming their love for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect on social media."

The media is to blame for this, as I accused the other day on Bloggingheads (where Bob Wright didn't seem to get why I what I was saying or why):

"Mr. Mower tracked their sex life in a notebook he kept in his nightstand."

"He drew a chart and filled in different-shaped dots to represent various scenarios: He initiated sex but was declined. They planned on sex but didn't follow through. They actually had sex. Mr. Mower says he was rebuffed 95% of the time; his wife says his memory is highly subjective. He became grumpy, gained weight and stopped wanting to come home at night. 'For me to feel good about myself, I needed her to have sex with me,' he says. 'Otherwise I thought she didn't love me.'"

From a WSJ article titled "How Often Should Married Couples Have Sex?/When He Says 'More' And She Says No," linked by Instapundit with the line: "It’s the whole maintenance sex discussion again. As usual, the MSM is just catching up with InstaPundit."

I say: It's fine to recommend having sex just because your partner wants it, but I'm afraid there are some really unappealing sex-wanting partners out there. Remember this one was ready to out himself in the Wall Street Journal — keeping a graph in the nightstand, going into passive-aggressive mode. Hello? She's not attracted to you! And your solution is to become more and more unattractive? (Pic at link: Beard without a mustache?!)

In the story, the man reads a book called "The Passionate Marriage," decides he needs to "let myself feel what I really felt," and gives her the book to read. She says, we're told, that "reading a book about sex made her feel sexy." Well, at least the book made her feel sexy.

By the way, he's a blogger. Connect the dots. Why is he telling this grisly story and posing for bare-lipped photos in the WSJ? I presume it's a book project.

See yourself as other see you... guys too!

You've seen the oh-so-touching revelation — via Dove — to women of how others really see them. If not, catch up now:



Now, it's time for the men:



The original was always funny, of course.

ADDED: That pair of videos reminded me of the 2011 viral video "Manifesto for Conscious Men":



Which led to this parody:

Dear Woman from Will Ferrell

Again, you didn't really need the parody. The original was already funny, but the parody is very useful if you find it hard to laugh at sensitive people, you beautiful person, you.

Obama said: "She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country."

Wow.  Yikes. Embarrassingly sexist.

And, hey, what about our guy, J.B. Van Hollen?

Meade watches the NCAA tournament, but I do not.

I don't like it. And I do watch baseball and football. Not as much as he does, but enough to prove that I'm not averse to all spectator sports. But I do not like basketball. Meade tells me he guarantees that if I were to take a little time to learn a few things about what's going on in basketball that I could enjoy it.

He compares it to his learning to like "Survivor." At first, he spurned it. A fake endurance contest. Why, he's done real endurance races — 24-hour mountain bike races. What's this voting people off an island? But — motivated to share time with me — he learned some details — the strategy, the edit — and it became interesting. If I would learn a few things about basketball, I wouldn't just be putting up with it. I would actually enjoy it, as he now enjoys "Survivor."

"Did you ever notice how the women on 'Survivor' are all wearing bikinis?" I ask. The whole implied argument is painfully obvious. Basketball players in their slinky, baggy tank tops and immense, swishy skirt-pants.

But maybe women don't care so much about what a man looks like. It's the functionality of the body. The performance. This is Meade's theory.

I resist the theory. There's performance on "Survivor" too, I say. But would you enjoy "Survivor" if the women were all wearing big baggy T-shirts and big loose pants?

We compare football, which women are especially fond of watching. The big shoulders, the tight pants (bulge-enhancingly light-colored and shiny). There's something to see. That's a spectator sport. The men look like men. Basketball players are dressed like very unattractive women or horribly oversized children.

"And they're always falling on the floor, and then Dad comes over and gives them a time out," I say. "It's completely not sexy."

"But Idol is dropping nearly every week and last night was down 50% from its Thursday night premiere this season..."

"... and that’s scary."

They've obviously got themselves to blame, for several reasons, the main one being the desire to make it a "girls" year. Before the voting even started, they'd stacked the deck to exclude a "boyfriend"-type guy for the young girls who watch the show with their parents. "Idol" lost track of idolatry. The girls liked the boys, but somehow that couldn't be permitted to keep happening year after year. But that was the show! Was.

Emma Watson has a problem with English guys and American guys.

"English guys are very well put together.... They dress really well and they are very well mannered. But they are also very restrained. Usually in the whole courting situation, I‘m used to being first of all, ignored for the first two months of the ritual. And then maybe they'll acknowledge my presence."

American guys are "like, 'I like you. You're great. Let's go on a date. Let's do it.' I'm like, 'I'm sorry, what just happened?' This is like a huge culture shock for me. They're very like open and very straight-forward—but they wear flip-flops and I don't know if I like that."

And I'm like, wow, poor Emma Watson.