Tuesday 25 February 2014

3 Sex Facts I learnt Today

Some days it's a complete pleasure to be a journalist, because all you have to do is sit, read and immerse yourself in research to prep for an upcoming feature. Today was one of those days for me and it probably won't come as much of a surprise that what I was researching involved sex.

Here are three tid-bits of super interesting sex things I learnt today, that sadly won't make the feature, but I didn't want to let them go to waste!

1. Sharks and vagina's - like two peas in a pod
Well, sort of. Very vaguely. Luckily it doesn't have anything to do with razor sharp teeth and vagina dentata. Both contain squalene: a substance found in shark livers and natural vaginal lubricant.

2. How To Make Fake Spunk
Sometimes scientists need to make artificial semen. Masters & Johnson reportedly did this to try and disprove the 'up-suck' theory (which they did). Apparently to make something of the same consistency of actual semen you need a cup of flour mixed with water, although, apparently, cornstarch works just as well.

3. Discovery of Human Sex Pheromones
Knowledge of animals using pheromones to attract a mate has been known to scientists since the late 70's, but it wasn't until 1986 that they discovered that humans give off pheromones too. That was the year I was born and is a super cool fact. I'm miffed as to why that was never included on my "year you were born keyring"?!


Thursday 20 February 2014

The Perfect Mess

I am in turmoil. My other half has just cleaned the office, thus affecting all of the positive creative energy within the room, which I use to feed off and come up with all of my wonderful, world-changing ideas. As he faffed and put-away, I felt myself getting more anxious. I need that magazine there, and leave that bit of paper so I know where it is and yes, I do need that receipt. ARGH!

The (intelligent) git has just pointed out the paradox of the situation: that by cleaning and "ruining my creative environment" he's just given me something to write about in this blog.

What a bastard.

We have a "shared" office space. It's not equally shared, it is more mine than his. He only works from home once a month for a week, whereas I am here all of the time and even the week that he does work from home, he only uses it in the evenings when a work related call comes through. Essentially, it is my office and in my office I like a certain amount of organised mess. It's nothing OTT, it's not like I have coffee cups piled high or newspaper clippings everywhere. It's more just a few magazines dotted about the place that I haven't got round to putting away, or am constantly referring to in the week that I have a deadline, and the several notepads - each assigned a different feature - that I need to have on the desk at all times until my deadline for said feature has been met.

To the untrained eye, it may look messy, but it's organised mess and there's actually some positive research about organised mess.

Take this 2012 study for example, where a group of two students we're placed in two different rooms: one insanely neat and the other with a bit of chaos. Asking the students to dream up new uses for ping pong balls, the ones in the messy room came up with much more imaginative uses (and no, I'm sure none of them had anything to do with popping out of body parts). Just one example that mess equals creativity.

Or this book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. It argues that too much neat encroaches on productive time. "If you devote all your time to organizing, you won’t get anything done. If you don’t spend any time organizing, the resultant mess bogs you down completely. When you find the ‘sweet spot’ between messiness and order, then you have a perfect mess," explained Eric Abrahamson, one of the book's authors. That's what I have...sorry, had! A perfect mess.

Tomorrow could have been the day that I sit in my organised messy office and dream up my blockbuster novel. I guess now we will never know!


Tuesday 18 February 2014

Pink Toys For Tomboys: does colour really matter?

One of my best friends had a baby girl today. It's her fifth child. Her first four children are all boys, so when we found out that she was due to have a girl everyone was pleasantly surprised and, if we're honest, the conversations quickly turned to theories of how this little lady is going to survive in a house full of lads.

Personally, I reckon she'll be fine and will no doubt grow into one of the toughest tomboys I'll know. I'm already assuming that's what she's going to be, especially as the mother (my friend) has put the kibosh on anything pink and she's going to grow up in a house full of cars, trucks, Lego, sports gear, DS and computer consoles that her older brothers adore playing with. Geez, I'm jealous.

This is fine by me, because I have a real issue with pink toys, especially pink toys that try to be “boys toys” aimed at girls, like this recent offeringfrom NERF, which I spotted an advert for while on holiday in France.

I hit on something similar with my first tomboy blog post when I found the god-awful Tomboy Tool Kit. My issue is thus: why does something which women are more than capable of using, because after all a hammer is a hammer, a NERF gun is a Nerf gun, then need to go and be painted pink in order to make it somehow more legitimate for women to use? If a woman, or young girl is in a hardware/toy shop and they are faced with two products that are exactly identical in every way except colour - lets say one is grey and the other is pink - would they choose the pink one because it somehow means that it is more tailored to a woman/girl using it? That somehow the manufacturers have gone the extra mile to produce something specifically for women because they have made it more stereotypically feminine by painting it that colour?

It's a sure fire way to tap into the psyche of women, I'll give the marketers that, and I think this is when the debate around colour really becomes an issue as it somehow implies that 'specialist' pink things should be used by females as a non-gender alternative is somehow inferior or not suited to the female form.

Of course, this is bull shit.

However, this led me to think more about the recent debate around the need for gender neutral toys and question whether I was actually being a total hypocrite for secretly wanting my friend's little girl to turn into a tomboy and therefore avoid pink completely?

The idea of genderneutral toys has been a hot topic recently, thanks to the comments made by the Education Minister, Elizabeth Truss calling for 'gender neutral toys' in nurseries and parent-led projects like Let Toys BeToys and PinkStinks campaign. I fully agree that separating toy sections into “boys” and “girls” should be abolished. No more should a girl be discouraged from playing with a toy tool kit, than a boy should be prevented from pushing a doll around in a push chair. By doing this you'd hope the debate about girly colours and boyish colours would also become null and void, because is it really the colour we have issue with, or the act of the play that the child is performing?


A really interesting article is this on The Telegraph by June O'Sullivan, chief exec of London Early Years Foundation, who argues that indeed toys need to be toys and kids, both boys and girls, should be able to pick up with and play with whatever they feel comfortable with. Reading this and the subsequent comments, certainly made me re-evaluate my opinion on pink toys, because if I think back honestly to when I was younger, whether something was blue or pink mattered less to me. What was important was how I could fit it into my pretend story and if it didn't work, I wouldn't play with it. So, really, apart from doing away with the idea that 'this is just for boys' and 'this toy is just for girls', does colour actually matter?