Morning News Fix: Boys and Girls Edition

Square Jaws Can’t Catch a Break

You can expect plenty of “girly men” headlines today. Women with marriage on the brain reportedly prefer men who have more feminine features like curved, thin eyebrows and wide eyes. When asked to “judge a book by its cover,” women thought men with square jaws and more rugged features would be less stable mates and more prone to cheating. And here we were just learning that mate selection was all about pheromones and the secret nerve! Read more about what psychologists have learned from analyzing speed dating and the accuracy of first impressions. Then go read this book.

What do your parents and your grandparents have more of than you?

No, not money. Sex! Scientists are only now beginning to study sexual health and habits in our aging population. Blame that on our youth-obsessed celebrity culture if you like, but researchers say that ever-lengthening lifespans are changing expectations and ideas about quality of life, and that includes sex. Turns out seniors are quite sexually active, and that’s a healthy thing. (Also, it’s time to retire the ball-n-chain jokes: married couples get the last laugh when it comes to sex. They have almost twice as much fun in the sack as all the singletons out there. If you’re wondering about the legitimacy of this study, over one million people were surveyed.)

Women Prefer Pink. And Aprons.

A study claims that women really do prefer pink, men really do prefer blue, and that’s just the way it is. The researchers theorize that women might have evolved to prefer pink and red hues due to evolutionary division of labor. (Women picked fruit; men hunted animals and kept an eye out for dark moving objects that might present a threat. So that’s why Eve went for that apple! Just imagine if it had been a plum.) Actually, the preference for blue is universal. While the study is interesting, since it was conducted by asking 1,000 pairs of men and women to select rectangles of colors as quickly as possible, I’m not sure this really proves anything more than successful social conditioning of adult men and women.

‘Christians’ Call for Arrest of Gays and Lesbians

A “Christian” activist group in Kampala (that’s in Uganda, gang) marched against those out-of-control gays and lesbians. Currently, sodomy is punishable by life in prison in that country. So, obviously, more needs to be done. Says leading pastor Martin Sempa: “Homosexuality and lesbianism break three laws; the laws in the Bible and the Koran, the laws of nature and the laws of the land, the Ugandan Constitution.” Okay. Restraint…going…out…window…now. Laws of nature, huh? We better tell the goats. And the monkeys. And the sheep. And the 450 other species (humans included) who are “breaking” the laws of nature.