It is a tradition to throw paper planes onto the stage during the Ig Nobels

BBC News - 'Beer goggle' study wins Ig Nobel award

It is a tradition to throw paper planes onto the stage during the Ig Nobels

 

FHM's 100 Sexiest Women In The World 2012: The full list! | Girls | FHM.com

FHM's 100 Sexiest Women In The World 2012: The full list! | Girls | FHM.com

FHM's 100 Sexiest Women In The World 2012: The full list!

2012 Maxim Hot 100 | Maxim

2012 Maxim Hot 100 | Maxim

Our fellow Americans: As we're reminded every four years, democracy is the cornerstone upon which our great land is built. That's why this year, for the first time in Hot 100 history, we let you, the readers of Maxim, weigh in on who should comprise the definitive list of the world's most beautiful women. From movie stars to murder suspects to a cartoon, here are the sexy results. God bless America! Check out Maxim’s Hot 100 in Under 100 Seconds

The guys just can't look away as Catey Shaw (r,) and Kylie Lefkowitz walk in Times Square on Go Topless Day.

Gals bare boobs on 5th annual Go Topless Day, and guys find the feminist parade is hard to top - NY Daily News

The guys just can't look away as Catey Shaw (r,) and Kylie Lefkowitz walk in Times Square on Go Topless Day.

Her weight shouldn't matter, but it does to him | StarTribune.com

Her weight shouldn't matter, but it does to him | StarTribune.com

Dear Prudence: I'm a healthy woman standing 5-foot-5. Before I got married, I weighed 115 pounds. I didn't gain a lot of weight during pregnancy, either. But since our daughter was born (she is now 3), I've had little time for exercise or looking after myself. I now weigh 145 pounds. My doctor says I'm still in the healthy range of BMI and I feel OK. The problem is my husband, who constantly tells me I need to lose weight. At first he tried to say he was worried about my health, but later admitted that he's not as attracted to me as he once was. I am hurt and angry by this, and I am even more determined not to lose weight to please my man. We've argued a lot over my weight and appearance and now neither of us is attracted to each other. Should I lose my weight or should he change his attitude?

Coming foie gras ban brings dinners and dissent - latimes.com

Coming foie gras ban brings dinners and dissent - latimes.com

On July 1, SB 1520, the bill that bans the production and sale of both foie gras and foie gras byproducts (including feathers for down jackets and comforters) goes into effect, and anybody wanting a legal taste of the stuff is going to have to do it in another state. After June 30, a restaurant that serves foie gras — typically produced via gavage, a process in which ducks or geese are fed through tubes inserted in their throats — can be fined up to $1,000.

NOVA | World in the Balance | Material World | PBS

NOVA | World in the Balance | Material World | PBS

India: The Yadev Family
At age 25, Mashre Yadev is already mother to four children, the oldest of whom was born when she was 17. Each morning at their home in rural Uttar Pradesh, she draws water from a well so that her older children can wash before school. She cooks over a wood fire in a windowless, six-by-nine-foot kitchen, and such labor-intensive domestic work keeps her busy from dawn to dusk. Her husband Bachau, 32, works roughly 56 hours a week, when he can find work. In rough times, family members have gone more than two weeks with little food. Everything they own—including two beds, three bags of rice, a broken bicycle, and their most cherished belonging, a print of Hindu gods—appears in this photograph.

Transgender Clownfish? Gender Diversity Lesson at California School Riles Critics - FoxNews.com

Transgender Clownfish? Gender Diversity Lesson at California School Riles Critics - FoxNews.com

"This is only the latest example of what seems to be a New-Age, gender-bending agenda pushed into the mainstream media by those who refuse to accept the traditional sex differences between men and women," Brown wrote.

Push Up Bikini Tops at Abercrombie Kids » Sociological Images

Push Up Bikini Tops at Abercrombie Kids » Sociological Images

Allison K. sent in another example of the sexualization of young girls.  Abercrombie Kids is selling bikinis with “push-up” tops.  According to Wikipedia, the company markets its products at kids age 7-14. The average age of puberty is 12.   So, at what age should girls start trying to enhance their cleavage?  How old is too young?

YouTube - Katie Makkai - Pretty

YouTube - Katie Makkai - Pretty

This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in.
About women who will prowl 30 stores in 6 malls to find the right cocktail
dress, but haven't a clue where to find fulfillment or how wear joy, wandering
through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those 2 pretty
syllables.

About men wallowing on bar stools, drearily practicing
attraction and everyone who will drift home tonight, crest-fallen because not
enough strangers found you suitably fuckable.

This, this is about my own
some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity,
begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question
from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy
of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five
letters.

http://dianasmanylifetimes.blogspot.com/2010/11/katie-makkai-pretty.html

How Technology Has Changed the Way We Break Up - Newsweek

How Technology Has Changed the Way We Break Up - Newsweek

Around the time that movie was being made, Ilana Gershon, an assistant professor of communication and culture at Indiana University, began to notice a curious phenomenon among her students. She was teaching a class on linguistic anthropology—the study of how language influences culture—and she tried a new exercise to get her students to think about their shared expectations for behavior. “I asked them what makes a bad breakup,” Gershon says. “I was expecting people to have really dramatic stories, ‘I caught them in bed together,’ something like that.” Instead, they all responded with tales of outrage about the medium rather than the message, complaining that they got the bad news by text or by Facebook rather than in person.

Bros Like This Site

Bros Like This Site

Bro Culture: Icing on the Social-Marketing Cake? - TIME

Bro Culture: Icing on the Social-Marketing Cake? - TIME

The bro is nothing new, of course — just a term to describe raunchy young men. Bros, by any other name, have been around for decades. They predate Animal House and continue to show up in pop culture in MTV series like Jackass and Bromance and in movies like I Love You, Man and The Hangover. The probable etymology of bro: inner-city guys called each other "brother," which was appropriated by Hawaiian dudes as "brah." Some frat boy picked it up in the islands and brought it home as "bro." The term really took off, however, in 2007 when a University of Florida student begged a stun-gun-wielding campus cop, "Don't tase me, bro."

In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way - CNN.com

In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way - CNN.com

The announcement illustrates a widely acknowledged but seldom-spoken truth of the technology world: Whenever there's a new content platform, the adult-entertainment industry is one of the first to adopt it -- if they didn't help create it in the first place.

Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World

World Values Survey

Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World

Modernization's Challenge to Traditional Values: Who's Afraid of Ronald McDonald?

Modernization's Challenge to Traditional Values: Who's Afraid of Ronald McDonald?

http://www.deu.edu.tr/userweb/ceyhan.aldemir/dosyalar/inglehart,%202001.pdf

Modernization's Challenge to Traditional Values

Modernization's Challenge to Traditional Values

http://www.deu.edu.tr/userweb/ceyhan.aldemir/dosyalar/inglehart,%202001.pdf

Our National Eating Disorder

The New York Times > Magazine > Our National Eating Disorder

October 17, 2004
Our National Eating Disorder
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Carbophobia, the most recent in the centurylong series of food fads to wash over the American table, seems to have finally crested, though not before sweeping away entire bakeries and pasta companies in its path, panicking potato breeders into redesigning the spud, crumbling whole doughnut empires and, at least to my way of thinking, ruining an untold number of meals. America's food industry, more than happy to get behind any new diet as long as it doesn't actually involve eating less food, is still gung-ho on Low Carb, it's true, but in the last few weeks, I can report some modest success securing a crust of bread, and even the occasional noodle, at tables from which such staples were banned only a few months ago.

World Values Survey ASR paper 2000

MODERNIZATION, CULTURAL CHANGE,
AND THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITIONAL VALUES*

http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/Upload/5_19-51_IN.PDF

Cultural map of the world

http://margaux.grandvinum.se/SebTest/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base_54

Cultural map of the world.