There is a direct link between increased female labour participation and growth: It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent.  Continue here.

I’m planning on canning homemade jam this holiday season, swept up in the same do-it-yourself zeitgeist that seems to have carried off half my female friends. I picked and froze the berries this summer, and I’ve been squirreling away flats of Ball jars under my kitchen sink for months. For recipes, I’m poring over my favorite food and homemaking blogs — the ones with pictures of young women in handmade vintage-style aprons and charmingly overexposed photos of steamy pies on windowsills.

“That’s neat,” says my mother, as I babble to her about pectin and jar sterilization. She’s responding in the same tone of benign indifference she would have used had I informed her that I was learning Catalan or taking up emu husbandry.  Continue.

AP – November 29, 2011

Nigeria’s Senate voted Tuesday to criminalize gay marriage, gay advocacy groups and same-sex public displays of affection, the latest legislation targeting a minority already facing discrimination in Africa’s most populous nation.  More here.

This is how you teach about LGBT issues in an age appropriate way. Take note United States. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tykz4JhBKv8&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube]

Presidential candidate Herman Cain, a former CEO of a pizza chain, has determined that the toppings on a pizza can serve as indicators of a man’s masculinity.  http://wapo.st/sCSu3W

NPR’s Fresh Air interviews Jill Lepore, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of the current New Yorker piece “Birthright: What’s Next for Planned Parenthood.” Listen to How Birth Control Became Politicized here.  You can also watch a detailed history of Margaret Sanger’s fight to legalize contraception and to develop a birth control pill through the Greenwood Library streaming video system. This episode of the American Experience is called  The Pill.

The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts could not be more different. Besides the obvious focus of their organization on girls and boys respectively, the Girl Scouts are an inclusive organization, while the Boy Scouts have gone to the Supreme Court of the United States twice for their right to discriminate- once for the right to exclude atheists and a second time for the right to exclude gay and bisexual men and boys and lesbian women who might be serving as Scout Masters. Girl Scouts does not require that members believe in any higher power and they are committed to diversity and inclusion. For example, Girl Scouts of Colorado recently made the following statement:

“We accept all girls in kindergarten through 12th grade as members. If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout ….Our requests for support of transgender kids have grown, and Girl Scouts of Colorado is working to best support these children, their families and the volunteers who serve them.”

Boy Scouts, on the other hand, continue to push forward a narrow idea of what constitutes a boy or man in our society as indicated by the following advertising campaign.

It is possible that this is some strange Boy Scout homage to the novembeard campaign, but somehow I doubt it.  If this turns out to be real, and it appears to be at this time, what is one to make of it?

This piece from Allison McCracken posted on Antenna explores the erotic appeal of androgynous males in popular culture. McCracken examines the fan culture surrounding the character of Kurt on Glee and the actor who plays him Chris Colfer. This fandom, comprised mainly of women and gay men, is similar to the fervent fan community surrounding Adam Lambert and indeed the broad appeal of more feminine or androgynous male pop stars in Europe and Asia.  McCracken demonstrates- through an exploration of  the Kurt/Chris fandom- that a  feminine (and in this case also gay) man can  be a source of erotic fantasy for young women and men. This contradicts the view of many in the mainstream media. In fact, Glee itself has played on the idea that Kurt is not sexy because he is a feminine male.  If one simply googles kurt/blaine fanfiction, fanvideo, or fan art you will quickly see this is patently false.

An article in a Columbia Journalism School publication has prompted a review of the B110 line in Brooklyn, on which women are to ride in the back.

http://nyti.ms/oNaPWo