Fill in the blank: ____ is NOT a priority for most men.

Alright, it's not strictly a bioethics issue or controversy, but it is an article in a medical journal and the article did grab my attention:

The Journal of Sexual Medicine interviewed 28,000 men in Europe and the Americas and found, when assessing their priorities, that males between the ages of 20 and 75 ranked "honor" and "getting respect from their peers" ahead of having sex.

According to the FoxNews article, "About one-third of respondents said being healthy was the most important factor, 26 percent valued a happy family and 19 percent said they most valued being in a good relationship. Only 2 percent placed a satisfying sex life as their top priority."

On Sex-Segregated Schooling

NYT has an in-depth article on
teaching boys and girls separately in school based on proposed differences in everything from artistic preferences to optimal operating temperature.

While I have blogged previously on using scientific input to improve educational methods, I am somewhat skeptical of the extent to which segregation is advocated. A large reason is that while the mean may show a slight differential between the sexes, the spread has significant overlap and we regularly see a healthy number of outliers. I, for example, took a Thundercats lunchbox to school and read all the books in the library on "creepy-crawlies" like ants, spiders, and snakes, and I know I would have been utterly miserable in an all-girls' classroom.

Assuming that these differences are scientifically provable (or non-disprovable) for a majority of the population, we are left with a naturalistic/normative conflict between what is "optimal" now and what we forsee as future needs (such as the need to interact comfortably with males and females).

One thing we can take away from this is that we ought to exercise caution when advocating extreme changes in schooling to avoid backlash effects (as are becoming apparent in the marked decrease of boys' success in school). Also, there is no clear-cut answer on how to improve our education system, but there are many academic disciplines we ought to access in order to enrich the discussion.

Addendum: A few more thoughts on this. First, an important question inherent in any push for change the question must be asked: "Are we running away from something, or running towards something?" In other words, in segregating boys and girls, are we avoiding a harm, or seeking a benefit?

Second, I observe that while girls suffered in school in previous generations due to overly low expectations, the current hypothesis for boys is that they suffer from overly high or unrealistic expectations. I'm sure a gender theorist would have some interesting comments on this.

Third, I have noticed that a majority of problems develop at the interfaces between contrasting systems or paradigms. In this case, it will be when we make a shift from a school system that adapts to the strengths and weaknesses of girls and boys to an adult world where people are expected to adapt to the needs of society ("including a competitive workplace that was designed around men's strengths and is only slowly changing," the feminist in me notes). Assuming that such an education system presents significant benefits, I am concerned with how we will help children make the transition to adulthood.

Quote of the Day: Does the Sex of Your Surgeon Matter?

In response to an article in the NY Times online today about a report from The Journal of the National Cancer Institute that suggest that whether a woman receives radiation treatment after breast cancer surgery may be influenced by the gender of her surgeon, a reader made the following provocative comment:

“It's a generalization, I know, but of all the different kinds of doctors I have had, the females have had overwhelmingly far better bedside manner. And better bedside manner makes for better treatment--it's the difference between being treated like human being and being treated like a GalaxoSmithKlineMerckProctor&Gamble Inc. pinata.”

Full article here; all the comments here.

Why Sex Matters for Neuroethics...

There is a provocative article in the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience today which asks: "Why should we pay special attention to the neuroscience of sex differences? " Authors lay out a plethora of directions in which such research could go, posing such as questions as "How ought we disseminate this information into a sensitive social environment that has a history of bias and discrimination against women? What are the implications of this work for our understandings of what makes us women and men? How should this research be applied in educational, medical, and legal contexts, if at all?... In considering the neuroscience of sex differences, we confront a fundamental issue: how do science and society understand female-male differences, or rather, women and men?"

A little different approach than the previous post we had on Gender: Love it or Kill it?.

The full article can be accessed here, subscription required.

"We" not "She" had an abortion

(This follows nicely from the post on gender.)

blog.bioethics.net reports on a new movement to involve men in outlawing abortion.

According to the article by the L.A. Times:

Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

I think that it is great that there is an effort to involve men more in the process of sex and pregnancy. But let's encourage a genuine effort to empower men and give them a voice in this process - let's advocate for men to become more aware of all the processes related to sex, pregnancy, and birth. The archaic "predatory" model of men and sex needs to be fully rejected, and parents need to stop raising their boys to "go get 'em!" while relying on intimidation and threats to foist the burden of chastity only onto their daughters.

It is a good start that men are beginning to realize the emotional impacts of pregnancy termination, but our society ought to come together to share the emotional impacts of all aspects of intimacy and reproduction, aspects that until recently have been shrouded in mystery and shame (and just a bit of possessiveness by women) and withheld from men.

Let's truly forge new respect for life by bringing in both sides of the equation into this effort.