TexanInfidel's Blog

David Duchovny is in rehab for a sex addiction.  Maybe it was prompted by a lack of sex after the most recent X-files movie tanked.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D92RKTMG0&s
how_article=1

David Duchovny in rehab for sex addiction Aug 28 09:16 PM US/Eastern


LOS ANGELES (AP) - David Duchovny has entered a rehabilitation facility for sex addiction. In a statement released Thursday by his lawyer, Stanton Stein, the actor said he did so voluntarily, adding: "I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family."

The actor's publicist, Flo Grace, confirmed the rehab report, which first appeared on People.com.

She and Stein both declined to elaborate further.

Duchovny, 48, plays a sex-obsessed character on the Showtime series "Californication," which earned Emmy nominations for casting and cinematography. The show's second season begins Sept. 28. Showtime had no comment Thursday.

The actor appeared in the film "The X Files: I Want to Believe" earlier this summer. He has been married to actress Tea Leoni since 1997. They have two children.

So I have noticed this as an ongoing trend among bloggers from the left in particular.  One blogger in particular deletes comments from bloggers who don't agree with her.  She has gotten better about it and it has led to more reasonable discussions.  And then we get a "new" blogger...

formerGOP has posted several cut-and-paste posts without acknowledging the original authors.  When I suggested that her post wasn't in-line with her normal grammatical patterns my comments were deleted.  When I suggested plagarism, my comments were deleted.  Turns out, it was plagarism.  She cut and pasted from an author who worked hard on their composition. 

Personally, I would rather confront opposing views than ignore them, but I would rather ignore them than delete them.  It just seems that censoring reeks of weakness and cowardice.  If you can't defend your actions then chances are they are not worth defending.  If you can't justify your opinions then they are probably without justification.

So I present you with the question:  Is it acceptable to just delete everyone who is in disagreement with you, or is it best to allow dissention?

What the BLEEP....

http://www.myfoxny.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail;jses
sionid=C14F59A0DD67FAC2792B29BDF65E79EC?contentId=72891
52&version=2&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=1.1.1&
sflg=1

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 6:39 AM on 21st August 2008

Dogs are developing a sense of fair play, scientists have found

Dogs are becoming more intelligent and are even learning morals from human contact, scientists claim.

They say the fact that dogs' play rarely escalates into a fight shows the animals abide by social rules.

During one study, dogs which held up a paw were rewarded with a food treat.

When a lone dog was asked to raise its paw but received no treat, the researchers found it begged for up to 30 minutes.

But when they tested two dogs together but rewarded only one, the dog which missed out soon stopped playing the game.

Dr Friederike Range, of the University of Vienna, who led the study, said: 'Dogs show a strong aversion to inequity. I would prefer not to call it a sense of fairness, but others might.'

The first Canine Science Forum in Budapest was attended by more than 200 experts to discuss what is going on inside the mind of a dog.

Human's inclination to invest dogs with human-like states of mind isn't as unscientific as it might appear as they really do have some remarkable mental skills that allow them to thrive in their strange habitat - our world.

Domestic dogs evolved from grey wolves as recently as 10,000 years ago since when their brains have shrunk so a wolf-sized dog has a brain around 10 per cent smaller than its wild ancestor.

Dr Peter Pongracz from Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and colleagues have produced evidence dog barks contain information that people can understand.

They found even people who have never owned a dog can recognise the emotional 'meaning' of barks produced in various situations, such as when playing, left alone and confronted by a stranger.

His team has now developed a computer program that can aggregate hundreds of barks recorded in various settings and boil them down to their basic acoustic ingredients.

They found each of the different types of bark has distinct patterns of frequency, tonality and pulsing, and that an artificial neural network can use these features to correctly identify a bark it has never encountered before.

This is further evidence that barking conveys information about a dog's mental state, reports New Scientist magazine.

They also discovered people can correctly identify aggregated barks as conveying happiness, loneliness or aggression.

'Even children from the age of six who have never had a dog recognise these patterns,' says Dr Pongracz.

Dogs are not just able to 'speak' to us - they can also understand some aspects of human communication.

At the forum in Budapest, Dr Akiko Takaoka from Kyoto University in Japan described as-yet unpublished work that examined what is going on inside a dog's mind when it hears a stranger's voice.

She played dogs a series of recordings of unfamiliar voices - both male and female - with each voice followed by a photo of a human face on a screen.

If the gender of the face did not match that of the voice, the dogs stared longer, a sign that their expectations had been violated.

Dr Takaoka said: 'This suggests dogs generate an internal visual representation of a male or female correlated with the voice.'  She suggests that this ability to infer information about a person from their voice alone might help dogs communicate with people.

It is generally accepted that a few other animals, including great apes, are capable of this mind reading to some extent, but it is nevertheless a quality reserved for only the most intelligent of species.

But Dr Alexandra Horowitz from Barnard College in New York prefers the term "theory of behaviour" to describe dogs' apparent insight.

She said: 'I think there is a massive territory between a theory of mind and a theory of behaviour.'

Her own recent study illustrates the point - when dogs play together, they use appropriate signals for grabbing attention or signalling the desire to play depending on their playmate's apparent level of attention, such as whether it is facing them or side-on.

That could be interpreted as mind reading, she admits, but a simpler explanation is that dogs are reading body language and reacting in stereotyped ways.

Lately a certain unnamed blogger (PROUD_MEXICANA) has been deleting clever comments if they disagreed with her or sometimes even turning comments off.  I apologize if I might have caused anyone's well thought out blog comments to be deleted by accusing her of being the Speedy Gonzalez comment deleter. 

Please feel free to post your clever comments below.

Consider this a public service announcement.  The mayor of a mining town in Australia is calling for women to move to his town due to having too many men.  Any women will do, really.  Awesome.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=08081807453
2.7wyoh5kf&show_article=1

Aussie mayor urges unattractive women to move into town

View larger image

The mayor of an Australian outback mining town has come under fire for urging unattractive women to move in, assuring them they will find a man because there is a shortage of women.

John Moloney, mayor of Mount Isa in northwestern Queensland, told a newspaper his town was a place for "ugly ducklings to flourish into beautiful swans" and called on the "beauty-disadvantaged" to flock there.

In the face of outrage over his remarks, Moloney stood by his comments, saying he did not mean to cause offence but wanted to highlight the gender imbalance in the remote town of some 25,000 people.

"Well I said beauty disadvantaged," he told national radio. "Now beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty can be a good set of teeth, beauty is nice wavy hair. Beauty can be blue eyes or green eyes.

"There is such a thing as disposition, temperament, manners, general attractiveness, attitude and demeanour, all those things tend to make a person attractive."

Mount Isa city councillor Gary Asmus said that while there was a shortage of women, Moloney's comments were an insult to the town's menfolk.

The mayor was "returning us to the Dark Ages and making the guys that live in this town seem like sex-hungry starved men that will pounce upon the first girl that they see walking down the street," he said.

Anne Morris, who has lived in Mount Isa for 50 years, told the radio she had not come across anyone who she would call ugly.

"The people that are coming into town now are coming here to work and find a house and live and bring up their families, but with these sort of comments ... I'd say 'humph, fancy going up to that place'," she said.

The operations manager of the city's popular Irish club, Bernard Gillick, said he sees the gender imbalance daily but suggests the mayor's solution might not be the right one.

"Anyone who moves to Mount Isa, beautiful or not so beautiful, they have a great chance to make a great life here. It is a fantastic town." he said.

"If guys have the right attitude then, you know, any type of girl will be happy to be with them so maybe the guys need to fix their attitudes a little bit."

Thank you, The Smoking Gun:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/081
5082yoo1.html?link=rssfeed

AUGUST 15--Following an undercover operation, Colorado police this month broke up a prostitution operation running out of a massage parlor known as Tokyo Sauna. Broomfield Police Department officers arrested a 54-year-old woman on a prostitution charge and a 65-year-old male customer for patronizing a hooker. But the big catch was the 48-year-old woman who allegedly ran the prostitution operation. She was charged with pimping, pandering, and keeping a place of prostitution. Mi Sook You is her name. Honest. She is pictured below in a mug shot taken following her August 6 arrest. (2 pages)

The world's oldest mother gave birth to twins at age 70.  Now she's ready to show them off.  This was all an attempt to have a boy to inherit their fortune since girls can't inherit it in India.  However, they mortgaged the house, took out a loan, and are surviving on gifts from friends.  Didn't that defeat the financial purpose of the whole thing?  Anyway, the babies are pretty cute for being products of elderly goings ons...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/indi
a/2563579/Worlds-oldest-mother-shows-off-twins.html

So the hottest trend in hair transplants?  Eyebrows, moustaches, and beards.  I'm not kidding.  Too much hair on your bottom?  Put it on your face!  This reminds me of the episode of Beavis and Butthead where they glued their private hair to their face since they couldn't grow beards yet.  Who knew that Mike Judge was a comedian AND a prophet?  Look out, Joseph Smith!

http://mainstreet.com/what-price-beauty-eyebrow-imp
lants

• StumbleUpon | 
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--> Facebook | 
• More...

But women aren’t the only one going for bushy brows: Men are getting eyebrow transplants, too! In fact, the split is 50/50 at his offices, Dr. Armani says. (Men more often ask for a flatter line while women request a small arch.)

PROCESS
First, Dr. Armani draws brows on you, both so he can assess how many follicles the area will need, but also so you can check out how your new brows might look. The actual transplantation process is typically a two- to three-hour-long procedure not requiring hospitalization. Dr. Armani says he uses local anesthesia to freeze an area of the body with fine hair, which works best for brows, in order to remove 50 to 400 follicles. For ladies, he removes scalp hair from above the ears; for men, he often removes back hair. Each follicle is microscopically taken from the original site and transplanted individually to the new site. Fiber implants are against the law in the United States and Canada so no hair implants are “fakes,” says Dr. Armani.

UPKEEP
Keep those nail clippers handy! Hair growth is specific to the part of the body it originated from, Dr. Armani says. Therefore, hair from the top of your head will grow long—perhaps even grow curly!—even if it is transplanted to the skin above your eyes. (Hopefully this won’t be a problem if you had a back hair transplant.) In addition to trimming your brows regularly, you may need to check in with a plastic surgeon again for a touch-up procedure after 10 years or so, Armani says.

MOUSTACHE and BEARD TRANSPLANTS
What if you’re an actor who was just cast in Pirates of the Carribean 4, but you can’t grow a Johnny Depp-style beard? Don’t walk the plank just yet—you can get facial scruff transplanted, too. Beards and moustache transplants are “much more common than you would think,” says Dr. Armani, especially for “younger stars on the C/B level.” He says he performs about 10 per year. In fact, two days before he spoke to MainStreet, Dr. Armani said he performed a beard transplant on a “B-list actor in major competition with other boys” at the actor’s home.

THE PRICE
Like any plastic surgery, hair transplants are going to cost you. Dr. Armani doesn’t charge his clients based on the amount of hair he transplants, but rather on what the quality of the skin he is working on. For example, if a patient has a lot of scar tissue at the extraction or the transplantation site, he or she may pay at the higher end of the $5,000 to $10,000 spectrum for the cost of the procedure.


Beard and moustache transplants cost $15,000 to $25,000 per procedure, they’re pricier, because “the angles are much more difficult,” he says.

Unfortunately, Dr. Armani says he has never had a patient’s procedure covered by insurance.

Confession time:  I cannot hear the name Julia Child without seeing the SNL skit where Dan Akroyd slices off an appendage.  Little did I know that his inspiration was part of the OSS, the predescessor to the CIA.  Check out the list of celebrities who were spies during WWII and I dare you to get any of our leftist elite in Hollywood to spy for America now.

Moe Berg / White Sox catcher

Thomas Braden / author "Eight is Enough"

Julia Child / TV Chef

Miles Copeland / father of Stewart Copeland (the Police)

Arthur Goldberg / Supreme Court Justice

John Hemingway / son of Ernest

Here's the article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080813/ap_on_go_ot/spies_
revealed;_ylt=Ah95QCIVUv5qak9AVBQyBRiyFz4D

Apparently the list of 24,000 people comes out today!

I'm adding this one to my list of "why not to take the pill" right behind blood clots and cancer.  You can comment on this post regardless of whether or not you have a uterus.

http://www.livescience.com/culture/080812-contracep
tive-smell.html

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

posted: 12 August 2008 08:04 pm ET

While several factors can send a woman swooning, including big brains and brawn, body odor can be critical in the final decision, the researchers say. That's because beneath a woman's flowery fragrance or a guy's musk the body sends out aromatic molecules that indicate genetic compatibility.

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors.

MHC genes churn out substances that tell the body whether a cell is a native or an invader. When individuals with different MHC genes mate, their offspring's immune systems can recognize a broader range of foreign cells, making them more fit.

Past studies have suggested couples with dissimilar MHC genes are more satisfied and more likely to be faithful to a mate. And the opposite is also true with matchng-MHC couples showing less satisfaction and more wandering eyes.

"Not only could MHC-similarity in couples lead to fertility problems," said lead researcher Stewart Craig Roberts, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle in England, "but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odor perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners."

Sexy scents

The study involved about 100 women, aged 18 to 35, who chose which of six male body-odor samples they preferred. They were tested at the start of the study when none of the participants were taking contraceptive pills and three months later after 40 of the women had started taking the pill more than two months prior.

For the non-pill users, results didn't show a significant preference for similar or dissimilar MHC odors. When women started taking birth control, their odor preferences changed. These women were much more likely than non-pill users to prefer MHC-similar odors.

"The results showed that the preferences of women who began using the contraceptive pill shifted towards men with genetically similar odors," Roberts said.

Pregnant state

Based on the work by Claus Wedekind, a University of Lausanne researcher who preformed similar studies in the 1990s, Roberts suggests a likely reason for the pill's effect on a woman's odor preferences. The pill puts a woman's body into a hormonally pregnant state (the reason she doesn’t ovulate), and during that time there would be no reason to seek out a mate.

"When women are pregnant there's no selection pressure, evolutionarily speaking, for having a preference for genetically dissimilar odors," Roberts said. "And if there is any pressure at all it would be towards relatives, who would be more genetically similar, because the relatives would help those individuals rear the baby."

So the pill puts a woman's body into a post-mating state, even though she might be still in the game.

”The pill is in effect mirroring a natural shift but at an inappropriate time,” Roberts told LiveScience.

The results are detailed in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

I don't know if this is awesome or creepy - but I'm leaning creepy.

http://inventorspot.com/articles/girls_get_anime_lo
ok_with_extrawide_contact_lenses_16872

Wide-eyed and not-so-innocent?
Anyone who's seen Japanese comics, cartoon videos or anime art is instantly struck by the common look of the girls - big eyes that, by making the rest of the face look small, add the cuteness and sex appeal prized by many Japanese men. Since no amount of cosmetic surgery will make actual human eyes larger, some girls are trying another way to up their cute quotient: extra-wide contact lenses!

These are no ordinary contacts - they're not only tinted, but tinted prominently in the extra-wide outer ring. The result is the appearance of a bigger, wider iris.

To quote the sales copy, "Wanna get big, watery shiny eyes without any surgery? CRAVE AND ENVY NO MORE!"

The extra-wide contact lenses are made by a variety of companies including Geo and Dueba, and cost in the $30-$50 per pair range. It seems they're not just cosmetic - send in your prescription and the lenses will be made to order.

The site featuring the lenses sells a few other beauty aids, including a painful-sounding "nose clipper" and a Crystal Colagen Breast Mask which demands a posting of its own - keep a big, watery, shiny eye on this blog!

Please pick the poodle:

http://www.akc.org/poll/special/presidential.cfm>

No, it is not a crack on Barack Obama.  It is a touching story of an 111 year old reptile that will become a father for the first time!

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080806-ap-re
ptile-father.html

By The Associated Press

posted: 06 August 2008 09:39 am ET

Henry the tuatara and his younger mate Mildred produced a dozen eggs last month after mating at the Southland Museum on New Zealand's South Island in March.

Tuatara curator Lindsay Hazley said Wednesday Henry has lived at the museum's special enclosure for Tuatara since 1970 and had shown no interest in sex until he recently had a cancerous growth removed from his genitals. He was now enjoying the company of three females and might breed again next March.

There is nothing to do but cut-and-paste!

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and
_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article4448371.ece#c
id=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164

I know. Saving the males is an unlikely vocation for a 21st-century woman. Most men don’t know they need saving; most women consider the idea absurd. When I tell my women friends that I want to save the males, they look at me as if noticing for the first time that I am insane. Then they say something like: “Are you out of your mind? This is still a male-dominated world. It’s women who need saving. Screw the men!”

Actually, that’s a direct quote. The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.

While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves, the better to muffle emotions that fluctuate between hilarity (are these bitches crazy or what?) and rage (yes, they are and they’ve got our kids).

In the process of fashioning a more female-friendly world, we have created a culture that is hostile towards males, contemptuous of masculinity and cynical about the delightful differences that make men irresistible, especially when something goes bump in the night.

In popular culture, rare is the man portrayed as wise, strong and noble. In film and music, men are variously portrayed as dolts, bullies, brutes, deadbeats, rapists, sexual predators and wife-beaters. Even otherwise easy-going family men in sitcoms are invariably cast as, at best, bumbling, dim-witted fools. One would assume from most depictions that the smart, decent man who cares about his family and pats the neighbour’s dog is the exception rather than the rule.

I am frankly an unlikely champion of males and that most hackneyed cliché of our times – “traditional family values”. Or rather, I’m an expert on family in the same way that the captain of the Titanic was an expert on maritime navigation.

Looking back affectionately, I like to think of home as our own little Baghdad. The bunker-buster was my mother’s death when she was 31 and I was three, whereupon my father became a serial husband, launching into the holy state of matrimony four more times throughout my childhood and early adulthood. We were dysfunctional before dysfunctional was cool.

Going against trends of the day, I was mostly an only child raised by a single father through all but one of my teen years, with mother figures in various cameo roles. I got a close-up glimpse of how the sexes trouble and fail each other and in the process developed great em-pathy for both, but especially for men.

Although my father could be difficult – I wasn’t blinded by his considerable charms – I also could see his struggle and the sorrows he suffered, especially after mother No 2 left with his youngest daughter, my little sister.

From this broad, experiential education in the ways of men and women, I reached a helpful conclusion that seems to have escaped notice by some of my fellow sisters: men are human beings, too.

Lest anyone infer that my defence of men is driven by antipathy towards women, let me take a moment to point out that I liked and/or loved all my mothers. In fact, I’m still close to all my father’s wives except the last, who is just a few years older than me and who is apparently afraid that if we make eye contact, I’ll want the silver. (I do.)

My further education in matters male transpired in the course of raising three boys, my own and two stepsons. As a result of my total immersion in male-dom, I’ve been cursed with guy vision – and it’s not looking so good out there.

At the same time that men have been ridiculed, the importance of fatherhood has been diminished, along with other traditionally male roles of father, protector and provider, which are increasingly viewed as regressive manifestations of an outmoded patriarchy.

The exemplar of the modern male is the hairless, metrosexualised man and decorator boys who turn heter-osexual slobs into perfumed ponies. All of which is fine as long as we can dwell happily in the Kingdom of Starbucks, munching our biscotti and debating whether nature or nurture determines gender identity. But in the dangerous world in which we really live, it might be nice to have a few guys around who aren’t trying to juggle pedicures and highlights.

Men have been domesticated to within an inch of their lives, attending Lamaze classes, counting contractions, bottling expressed breast milk for midnight feedings – I expect men to start lactating before I finish this sentence – yet they are treated most unfairly in the areas of reproduction and parenting.

Legally, women hold the cards. If a woman gets pregnant, she can abort – even without her husband’s consent. If she chooses to have the child, she gets a baby and the man gets an invoice. Unarguably, a man should support his offspring, but by that same logic shouldn’t he have a say in whether his child is born or aborted?

Granted, many men are all too grateful for women to handle the collateral damage of poorly planned romantic interludes, but that doesn’t negate the fact that many men are hurt by the presumption that their vote is irrelevant in childbearing decisions.

NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm Continued on page 2 Continued from page 1 and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy.

It’s not fashionable to question women’s decisions, especially when it comes to childbearing, but the shame attached to unwed motherhood did serve a useful purpose once upon a time. While we have happily retired the word “bastard” and the attendant emotional pain for mother and child, acceptance of childbearing outside marriage represents not just a huge shift in attitudes but, potentially, a restructuring of the future human family.

By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous.

Lots of women can, do and always will raise children without fathers, whether out of necessity, tragedy or other circumstance. But that fact can’t logically be construed to mean that children don’t need a father. The fact that some children manage with just one parent is no more an endorsement of single parenthood than driving with a flat tyre is an argument for three-wheeled cars.

For most of recorded history, human society has regarded the family, consisting of a child’s biological mother and father, to be the best arrangement for the child’s wellbeing and the loss of a parent to be the single greatest threat to that wellbeing. There’s bound to be a reason for this beyond the need for man to drag his woman around by her chignon.

Sperm-donor children are a relatively new addition to the human community and they bring new stories to the campfire. I interviewed several adults who are the products of sperm donation. Some were born to married but infertile couples. Others were born to single mothers. Some reported well-adjusted childhoods; some reported conflicting feelings of love and loss.

Overall, a common thread emerged that should put to rest any notion that fathers are not needed: even the happiest donor children expressed a profound need to know who their father is, to know that other part of themselves.

Tom Ellis, a mathematics doctoral student at Cambridge University, learnt at 21 that he and his brother were both donor-conceived. Their parents told them on the advice of a family therapist as their marriage unravelled.

At first Tom did not react, but months later he hit a wall of emotional devastation. He says he became numb, anxious and scared. He began a search for his biological father, a search that has become a crusade for identity common among sperm-donor children.

“It’s absolutely necessary that I find out who he is to have a normal existence as a human being. That’s not negotiable in any way,” Tom said. “It would be nice if he wanted to meet me, but that would be something I want rather than something needed.”

Tom is convinced that the need to know one’s biological father is profound and that it is also every child’s right. What is clear from conversations with donor-conceived children is that a father is neither an abstract idea nor is he interchangeable with a mother.

As Tom put it: “There’s a mystery about oneself.” Knowing one’s father is apparently crucial to that mystery.

Something that’s hard for many women to admit or understand is that after about the age of seven, boys prefer the company of men. A woman could know the secret code to Aladdin’s cave and it would be less interesting to a boy than a man talking about dirt. That is because a woman is perceived as just another mother, while a man is Man.

From their mothers, boys basically want to hear variations on two phrases: “I love you” and “Do you want those fried or scrambled?” I learnt this in no uncertain terms when I was a Cub Scout leader, which mysteriously seems to have prompted my son’s decision to abandon Scouting for ever.

My co-Akela (Cub Scout for wolf leader) was Dr Judy Sullivan – friend, fellow mother and clinical psychologist. Imagine the boys’ excitement when they learnt who would be leading them in guy pursuits: a reporter and a shrink – two intense, overachieving, helicopter mothers of only boys. Shouldn’t there be a law against this?

We had our boys’ best interests at heart, of course, and did our utmost to be good den mothers. But seven-year-old boys are not interested in making lanterns from coffee tins. They want to shoot bows and arrows, preferably at one another, chop wood with stone-hewn axes and sink canoes, preferably while in them.

At the end of a school day, during which they have been steeped in oestrogen by women teachers and told how many “bad choices” they’ve made, boys are ready to make some really bad choices. They do not want to sit quietly and listen to yet more women speak soothingly of important things.

Here’s how one memorable meeting began. “Boys, thank you for taking your seats and being quiet while we explain our women’s history month project,” said Akela Sullivan in her calmest psychotherapist voice. The response to Akela Sullivan’s entreaty sounded something like the Zulu nation psyching up for the Brits.

I tried a different, somewhat more masculine approach: “Boys, get in here, sit down and shut up. Now!” And lo, they did get in there. And they did sit. And they did shut up. One boy stargazed into my face and stage-whispered: “I wish you were my mother.”

Akela Sullivan and I put our heads together, epiphanised in unison and decided that we would recruit transients from the homeless shelter if necessary to give these boys what they wanted and needed – men.

As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere.

His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so. I suspect they would have found coffee tins brilliantly useful as lanterns if he had suggested as much.

But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id.

Our society’s young men encounter little resistance against continuing to celebrate juvenile pursuits, losing themselves in video games and mindless, “guy-oriented” TV fare – and casual sex.

The casual sex culture prevalent on university campuses – and even in schools – has produced fresh vocabulary to accommodate new ways of relating: “friends with benefits” and “booty call”.

FWB I get, but “booty call”? I had to ask a young friend, who explained: “Oh, that’s when a guy calls you up and just needs you to come over and have sex with him and then go home.”

Why, I asked, would a girl do such a thing? Why would she service a man for nothing – no relationship, no affection, no emotional intimacy?

She pointed out that, well, they are friends. With benefits! But no obligations! Cool. When I persisted in demanding an answer to “why”, she finally shrugged and said: “I have no idea. It’s dumb.”

Guys also have no idea why a girl would do that, but they’re not complaining – even if they’re not enjoying themselves that much, either.

Miriam Grossman, a university psychiatrist, wrote Unprotected, a book about the consequences of casual sex among students. She has treated thousands of young men and women suffering a range of physical and emotional problems related to sex, which she blames on sex education of recent years that treats sex as though it were divorced from emotional attachment and as if men and women were the same. Grossman asserts that there are a lot more victims of the hookup (casual sex) culture than of date rape.

Casual sex, besides being emotionally unrewarding, can become physically boring. Once sex is stripped of meaning, it becomes merely a mechanical exercise. Since the hookup generation is also the porn generation, many have taken their performance cues from porn flicks that are anything but sensual or caring.

Boys today are marinating in pornography and they’ll soon be having casual sex with our daughters. According to a study by the National Foundation for Educational Research issued in 2005, 12% of British males aged 13-18 avail themselves of “adult-only” websites; and American research findings are similar. The actual numbers are likely to be much higher, given the amount of porn spam that finds its way into electronic mailboxes. If the rising generation of young men have trouble viewing the opposite sex as anything but an object for sexual gratification, we can’t pretend not to understand why.

The biggest problem for both sexes – beyond the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease – is that casual sex is essentially an adversarial enterprise that pits men and women against each other. Some young women, now fully as sexually aggressive as men, have taken “liberation” to another level by acting as badly as the worst guy.

Carol Platt Liebau, the author of Prude, another book on the havoc that pervasive sex has on young people, says that when girls begin behaving more coarsely so, too, do boys.

“And now, because so many young girls have been told that it’s ‘empowering’ to pursue boys aggressively, there’s no longer any need for boys to ‘woo’ girls – or even to commit to a date,” she told me. “The girls are available [in every sense of the word] and the boys know it.”

Men, meanwhile, have feelings. Although they’re uncomfortable sorting through them – and generally won’t if no one insists – I’ve listened to enough of them to know that our hypersexualised world has left many feeling limp and vacant.

Our cultural assumption that men only want sex has been as damaging to them as to the women they target. Here is how a recent graduate summed it up to me: “Hooking up is great, but at some point you get tired of everything meaning nothing.”

Ultimately, what our oversexualised, pornified culture reveals is that we think very little of our male family members. Undergirding the culture that feminism has helped to craft is a presumption that men are without honour and integrity. What we offer men is cheap, dirty, sleazy, manipulative sensation. What we expect from them is boorish, simian behaviour that ratifies the antimale sentiment that runs through the culture.

Surely our boys – and our girls – deserve better.

As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.

In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.

Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.

Saving the males – engaging their nobility and recognising their unique strengths – will ultimately benefit women and children, too. Fewer will live in poverty; fewer boys will fail in schools and wind up in jail; fewer girls will get pregnant or suffer emotional damage from too early sex with uncaring boys. Fewer young men and women will suffer loneliness and loss because they’ve grown up in a climate of sexual hostility that casts the opposite sex as either villain or victim.

Then again, maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe males don’t need saving and women are never happier or more liberated than when dancing with a stripper pole. Maybe women should man the barricades and men should warm the milk. Maybe men are not necessary and women can manage just fine without them. Maybe human nature has been nurtured into submission and males and females are completely interchangeable.

But I don’t think so. When women say, “No, honey, you stay in bed. I’ll go see what that noise is” – I’ll reconsider.

© Kathleen Parker 2008

Extracted from Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker, published by Random House New York