A summer of blogging neglect has led to a backlog of saved articles and as always this is my way of catching up. The theme of this post is sex and gender and there’s lots of interesting stuff here. Happy reading.

• The Gender Death Gap: I doubt this is a workplace gap women are in any hurry to close, at least not by dying more anyway.
• Demining the Sahara: Although these women are taking more than their fair share of risks!
• Why Men Love Ken: “If we believe – wrongly, insanely! – that all differences between men and women are the product of socialisation, then the best advice we can offer to unhappy Kens is that they ought to become more like women. Go to therapy. Cultivate their soft skills. Get over themselves. Maybe that would work in Barbieland. But here in the real world, we still have to contend with the masculine energy that William Broyles Jr. describes so well – an energy that can be channelled in both extraordinarily antisocial and extraordinarily prosocial directions, depending on the incentives at play.”
• For Barbie, The Winning Move is Not to Play: “The movie’s climax is keyed to the realization it’s impossible to be woman, and that what our society asks of women is undesirable, even if you could achieve it. I don’t think the film goes far enough in putting forward a different, positive vision, and it leave women’s solidarity as the shared experience of thwartedness.”
• The Harried Leisure Class: “It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption require a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively. It feels hard.”
• Assimilating Women into Male Institutions: “When women became accepted into leading universities, in the professions, and into managerial and executive positions in the work place, both men and women held some harmful cultural attitudes. Many of us have come to understand how men need to change. The need for women to change is less well appreciated.”
• Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons: “…the fact that the risk is so age-specific requires a different explanation, namely that parents quarrel more over the upbringing of teenage daughters than of teenage sons.”
• The Gender Well-being Gap: “Women say they are less cheerful and calm, more depressed, and lonely, but happier and more satisfied with their lives, than men.”
• Why are Gender Pay Gaps so Large in Japan and South Korea?: “
• What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Discourse: “Even the flimsiest male specimen has psychological needs related to accomplishment, strength, usefulness and capability; an atmosphere of unconditional empathy and unrestrained emotional disclosure can be poisonous to those things. Whatever the reason, men understand that therapy (the practice) is mostly just the medical codification of a typically female worldview as objectively true and correct. Most men aren’t going to be interested in joining a conversation conducted in that spirit.” *Note: there’s one swear word in this article
• The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity: “I worry for the young right. As Jonah wrote, all too many of them “have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era; they think being shabby is normal and smart.” But there is a better way.”
• Counting the Cost of Progress: “The most powerful weapon at women’s disposal for defending ourselves against the undercounted cost of supposedly empowering hook-up culture is making sex properly consequential again. And I suspect many men would prefer a robust “no” from a self-possessed young woman to being resentfully hectored about toxic masculinity. By reclaiming human sexuality as something that men and women govern together as one of the most profound and beautiful mysteries of our common humanity, we can begin to win sexuality back from its current jaded, affectless role as low-consequence leisure activity or mere marketing tool.”

Relevant book reviews

• The Genesis of Gender reviewed by Andrea Turpin
• Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality by Zachary Wagner reviewed by Rachel Darnall