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* Zack Rosen at The New Gay on the assumption that gay men love Sex and the City: “assumptions about my relationship to SATC make me about as angry as being called fabulous,” he writes. “We’ve all gone on bad dates or slept with someone who never called us again. We do not all, however, live in a New York City haze of money and extreme fashion. We do not all act as if women and gay men are half-formed creatures that will die flopping on the floor if they cannot find a mate. And most importantly, we do not all subscribe to the notion that the life lived by the SATC gals is a mirror image of that undergone by the contemporary urban gay male.”

Rosen isn’t just peeved at the constant comparisons between all gay men and a set of sexually promiscuous, frivolously spending, Cosmo-swilling white ladies; he’s also unimpressed with the film’s depiction of actual gay men: “this movie . . . features a gay wedding between two men who hate each other, love an all-white color palette and hired Liza Minnelli to sing ‘Single Ladies.’ I’ve hosted orgies that were less stereotypically gay than that.”

* Who would you rather work for: Andrea or James?

Madeline Heilman at New York University once conducted an experiment in which she told volunteers about a manager. Some were told, “Subordinates have often described Andrea as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. She is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees’ creativity.”

Other volunteers were told, “Subordinates have often described James as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. He is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees’ creativity.”

The only difference between what the groups were told was that some people thought they were hearing about a leader named Andrea while others thought they were hearing about a leader named James. Heilman asked her volunteers to estimate how likeable Andrea and James were as people. Three-quarters thought James was more likeable than Andrea.

The story goes on to examine the experiences of two transgender scientists at Stanford who transitioned mid-career—-one transitioned to male, the other to female. I wonder who had a better time post-transition?

* SAFER Campus on WaPo‘s recent examination of campus rape: When you headline a story “Schools trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence,” shouldn’t you then report on some schools that are actually trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence?

I found the title of the article “Schools trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence” in the Washington Post to be extremely misleading. I expected to read a some stories of how schools are adequately and sincerely making efforts to prevent and respond to crimes such as rape, but instead I found myself reading a boring, shallow article that barely grazes the real picture of violence on college campuses and how institutions are dealing with it.

* Student journalists at the University of Utah who secretly inserted words for genitalia in the school newspaper will not be penalized. Apparently, publishing “penis” and an unidentified “slang term for the vagina” are not, in fact, outlawed in the school’s Code of Conduct. “Administrators said academic holds on the journalism students were lifted after they determined the student code was not violated by the prank, which spelled out the words in large capital letters within The Daily Utah Chronicle’s farewell columns.”

* Alyssa Rosenberg points to another lady-centric movie I will definitely see:

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