I was reading through my Google Reader this morning and have discovered a delicious and useful list of things I need to return to in my journey back to optimal health and fitness — becoming sexy Chris again — from Kari Henley‘s Top 10 Tips From A Personal Trainer on The Huffington Post:

1. Your mental image of yourself defines what you will work toward. What is your reason for getting out to exercise in the first place? Is it so your clothes fit better, or to be able to ski this winter without dying on the slopes? Developing a strong mental image that is specific and positive will help motivate and guide your decisions.
2. Nobody eats enough good food. This one is huge, as most of us are on a perpetual diet, and pride ourselves by not eating, or skimping along with a minimal meal in order to splurge later. Wrong! “By 1pm, you should have already eaten breakfast, a snack, lunch, and be getting ready for another small snack,” said O’Hara. “You need to take a counter intuitive approach to your diet and until you start eating, the diet cycle can trap you.”
3. Your body adapts to everything. This applies to your diet and exercise, or lack of it. If you start walking a route in your neighborhood and think you can just do that forever- wrong! Ever noticed you start on new cardio equipment at the gym and it is hard to get through 20 minutes, but after a month you are hardly out of breath? That means it is time to mix it up and do something new. Try rowing, or stairs.
4. The word “Carbs” is a misnomer for dieting. If you are taking all carbs out of your diet, you are depriving yourself of one of the four necessary nutrients for your body, as well as vital B complex vitamins and critical fiber. Complex carbs contain valuable nutrients responsible for energy production. Cut out the simple processed carbs like cookies or crackers, and replace with plenty of whole grains, oatmeal, or brown rice.
5. Memories dictate bad habits. Ever wonder why you buy the same things over and over again at the store? Do you buy chocolate Oreos because your mother did? “Time to change up the menu,” says O’Hara. “Replace those frozen waffles with homemade with fresh blueberries, or forget the top ramen and make a quick soup that is simple and delicious.”
6. Face up to your personal statistics. This one really woke me up. Rather than just knowing your weight on a scale or your size of clothes, do you know your body fat percentage, your basic heart rate or the number of maintenance calories you should be eating for your age? “For less than $100, you can hire a personal trainer one time, to help you assess exactly what you need to know,” said O’Hara. Or, for absolutely free, O’Hara steers clients to the website: sparkpeople.com to get all your info and ideas on exercises to do. Check it out and get informed!
7. All or nothing exercise gets you nowhere, (or hurt). Lots of people are like me; the pants just get WAY to tight, so we all fired up about working out again, go out and buy new sneakers, and start running everyday like we are old pros. Then after a week, shin splints kick in, and then we quit. Others may hear about a new type of exercise, and try it without building up first, and get injured. O’Hara encourages starting with a solid, organized plan that can keep your progressing and organize a workout schedule you can use for the rest of your life.
8. We are not supposed to get weak and incapacitated as we get older. It is not true that we should stop being physically active as we age, but continue with cardio, resistance training and core building for a lifetime. Tennis, swimming, golf, yoga and power walking can be done forever.
9. It’s all about PUSHUPS baby! Come on, be honest, how many “proper” pushups can you do? “If you can’t do a push up properly, it means you lack core strength,” explains O’Hara, “and that is the most important area to maintain for posture, back support, and ongoing health.” For the ultimate challenge (and one that I am going to start myself) check out the One Hundred Pushups website for a full six week program to help you reach the seemingly impossible goal of being able to do 100 consecutive pushups. Wow!
10. There is a fountain of youth! “Strength in life is the fountain of youth,” said O’Hara, “strength in keeping the muscles strong and building them, strength in what you choose to eat, strength in your character – it is the absolute secret to a long life.”

I will let my words speak for themselves, as published in this month’s Atlantic magazine in Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough (gulp):

“Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.

“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”

Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline.”

Note: the interview was conducted over two years ago.

I am a feminist. I studied postmodern feminist theory at Uni and felt confident that the progress and passion behind feminism offered by deconstructionism — the cultural and linguistic tools a women would need to redefine her story and her self — would result in a female self-empowerment much more substantial than the hyper-sexual self-objectification of Manolo Blahnik feminism. I am not the only one asking the question, “What Ever Happened to Feminism?” Check out Body Politic by Ingrid Sischy from the T Style Magazine (yes, I read it).

“Body Politic
By INGRID SISCHY
Published: February 25, 2007Last fall I was stopped in my tracks as I walked into a show in Milan during the collections, and a male friend, who’d just witnessed the same debacle that I had, raised his eyebrows and asked, “What happened to feminism???? It’s a question that is being asked repeatedly these days, and for good reason. The only word for the fashion collection we’d just seen was “bimbo??? — clothes put out on the runway without irony, without quotation marks, without any raison d’être other than saving money on material. Over the course of the next two weeks I gave myself a little assignment. I’d watch the runways in Milan and Paris and check off those clothes that signified a throwback to the long past of objectifying women. And on the other hand I’d put a little star down when the designer seemed to be wanting to take us into the future with a view of women that reflected self-possession.

Good thing I still like swings. Of course there were exceptions, designers who were true to the present, but by and large it was backward and forward and backward and forward. Then there were the designers who left earth entirely and showed a universe of female droids and cyborgs. These were the ones who, intentionally or not, illuminated the big challenge facing women’s fashion, best described by tweaking the famous tag line from “Star Trek???: women’s fashion, the final frontier . . . to boldly go where no one has gone before.

That’s easier said than done. As Miuccia Prada said to me, “The problem with new ideas about feminism is that there has been so little public discussion of the subject.??? Well, that’s changing, big time — if not in fashion at least in the art world, which has historically been the first place where a new perspective begins. In fact, after it seemed as though the subject of feminism had been put on simmer, the art world is cooking with gas again, not just for a new generation of feminist artists but in retrospect too. The year started out with a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, once such a perfect target for feminist critics, who felt it was stuck in the Stone Age as far as the representation of women goes. Now there are bicoastal extravaganzas planned for this spring: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will stage “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution??? from March 4 to July 16, and the Brooklyn Museum opens “Global Feminisms??? on March 23. The show celebrates a new center for feminist art, anchored by the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s famous “The Dinner Party.??? How these exhibitions will loop back to fashion and the creative/commercial balancing act that designers have to do is anybody’s guess, but bets are that there will be a trickle-down effect, as there often is.

What’s interesting is that if one goes through the iconic works of the first, second and third waves of feminist writers, there is so little that actually addresses fashion. Rereading Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and so many others, I was struck by the dearth of attention to this subject, which after all has everything to do with how identity is constructed for the outside world. There’s no lack of thinking when it comes to inner life, working life, creative life and public life, but when fashion comes up, the attitude tends to be knee-jerk and programmatic. Take Greer’s climactic moment at the end of “The Female Eunuch,??? where she creates a sort of bill of rights, inciting women to: “. . . refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness.??? In fact some of the most powerful, liberated women I know choose to hobble around in the craziest skyscraper shoes. “The higher the heel,??? they say, “the better I feel.???

But the other part of Greer’s declaration — that women have the right to control their own bodies — is as resonant today as it was when she wrote it nearly 40 years ago. One can see that drama being played out in the fashion arena right now, with the debate over skinny models brought to a head by the deaths last fall of two South American catwalkers from complications of anorexia. The hysteria that resulted led to a spectacle of ignorance, hypocrisy and bureaucracy. If the issue weren’t so serious, some of the solutions proposed by bureaucrats — like models being weighed in like boxers or jockeys — would be funny. But unfortunately they don’t just infringe on everything that we are supposed to hold dear in the department of human liberties, they also display so little understanding of the disease they are trying to combat that it is frightening. So is the tendency to lump together girls who are naturally skinny with those who are sick, two very different realities. Hey, as someone who likes her fries, I’m all for bringing back a Rubenesque shape as the height of fashion, but the fact is that perceptions of beauty cannot, and will not, be dictated by laws. That’s where consciousness comes in. At the center of it all, for anorexics, but also for each of us, lies the issue of control, or as Barbara Kruger wrote in one of her most unforgettable artworks: “Your body is a battleground.??? Hopefully you win.”

Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.

I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradiction in the new feminism, in the new American woman.

I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was, “I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”

In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a hen house. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik k feminist.

The Manolo Blahnik feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care.

Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap.

We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after.

All we see is, “man that girl is fine — I’d like some of that.”

As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.

Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men.

And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape.

I have loved them, I have befriended them, and I worked through relationships with women who have survived sexual abuse and rape.

Its always an ugly story and the world is never the same. We just have not received the memo. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.

Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness.

And many men, too.

When it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?

Not I.

I am not sure if modern women have it very good. Not nearly as good as would be expected. I attended college at a high point for feminism an academia, when a woman would still identify with being a feminist.

Not any more.

Not Liberating, After All
How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh Hefner?

BY WENDY SHALIT
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?

Ms. Levy is baffled. “Why,” she wondered, “is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?” Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before the summer 2004 Games? Why did Katie Couric feel the need to point to her cleavage and gush “these are actually real!” when she guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” a couple of years ago?

Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires “everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars.” Ms. Levy describes the perfect distillation of this impulse–a social group called CAKE that hosts steamy, hooking-up parties in New York and London. CAKE makes big bucks advertising “feminism in action”–it claims to be the place where “sexual equality and feminism finally meet”–but its events are indistinguishable from those held at the Playboy Mansion.

The surface logic of such conduct is fairly simple, notes Ms. Levy. “Women had come so far,” or so the thinking went, that “we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny.” If male chauvinist pigs “regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”

Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: “Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love . . . that is not liberation.” It isn’t? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she “used to get so hurt” after a night of sex that didn’t yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: “I’m like a guy,” she brags.

How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl “resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping–sexy.” There seems to be a contradiction here.

Ms. Levy’s answer is that, after a brief and failed fight against pornography, feminism joined forces with Hef & Co. to fight for abortion rights. This is a plausible explanation, as far as it goes. Abortion has indeed assumed a primary importance in both feminist “rights” thinking and in the whole culture of soft-core libertinism: Mr. Hefner is a big fan of abortion, for obvious reasons.

But something else may be going on. Feminism grounded itself, in its early days, in the idea that there were no differences between the sexes. A girl wanting to keep her virginity was bad, for sexual reticence amounted to asserting a separate standard, a Victorian one at that. To Hef, modesty was a “hang-up,” and to the feminists it was a “patriarchal construct.” Ms. Levy believes that feminism was on the right track but then veered off-course: “What has moved into feminism’s place . . . is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles.”

But maybe feminism’s foundations were weak from the start. Everyone in Ms. Levy’s book–whether it’s middle-class girls who feel anxiety about appearing “hot” or grown women who confess to Ms. Levy that “accumulating sex for its own sake . . . is not that sexual”–shows that a woman’s experience of sex and love is very different from that of an adolescent boy or a man. Indeed, the more a woman imitates a man, the clearer these differences become.

Paris Hilton tells Rolling Stone: “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” (Ms. Levy reports that on one of the infamous videotapes she takes a cellphone call during intercourse.) Plainly, the sexual revolution has not brought fulfillment for women. Even its mascots experience boredom, and for the civilians there is distress and heartache.

It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word “modesty” within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as “backtracking,” they only help to perpetuate the “raunch culture”–even as they deplore its effects.

Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male “friends” of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say “no way!” but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.

Such a girl requires, in addition to perhaps Mace, a compelling alternative to the Female Chauvinist Pig. Otherwise she may well give in to social pressure–not to mention professorial nonsense–and then wonder what’s wrong with her when she is not happy with the pig in her bed or the pig she has become.

Ms. Shalit is author of “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” You can buy “Female Chauvinist Pigs” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

September 20, 2005

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ex=1127966400&en=3f7348e314a603ee&ei=5070&emc=eta1

By LOUISE STORY

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.

So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.

“My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.”

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”

Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

“Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all,” said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

“Men really aren’t put in that position,” she said.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.

“I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it,” said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni – both men and women – to play in society.

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: “The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word ‘leadership’ conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.’s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that.”

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: “There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities.”

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person’s expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity – a gap that was small among alumni in their 20′s but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40′s, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40′s, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40′s, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30′s and 40′s.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

“It never occurred to me,” Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. “Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time.”

Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. “People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family.”

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children.

“A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,’ ” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30′s now.”

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

“My stepmom’s very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable,” said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. “It justified it to her, that I don’t look down on her for not having a career.”

Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother’s choice to work full time the “greatest gift.”

“She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career,” Ms. Sullivan said.

Some of these women’s mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.

Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu’s roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.

Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. “I do have this bias that the parents can do it best,” she said. “I see a lot of women in their 30′s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best.”

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”

Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu’s roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.

“Parents have such an influence on their children,” Ms. Ku said. “I want to have that influence. Me!”

She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.

“I’ll have a career until I have two kids,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily matter how far you get. It’s kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do.”

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

“I accept things how they are,” she said. “I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.”

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

“It worked so well for me,” she said, “and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.”

Thanks to Carrie for sending me this article.

My dear friend commented on this part of the article, “And when it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?”

Her response was, “….Therein lies the pitfall…. Once you start tasting of that forbidden apple, the garden of romance can all too easily dissapear! This, i think, is why many parents of our generation divorced — lack of faith in love is a direct result of the “free love” movement. Someone needs to warn the young!!! They need to be made aware of the booby-traps. Otherwise we are all just walking around with broken flowers, feeling numb to the pain we don’t even realize we are entitled to have.”

I love this picture of Dr. Sadie Allison, Pleasure Doctor. Dr. Sadie is a lot of fun to ogle. Dr. Sadie will be beautiful, inspirational, educational, and live this Sunday on Talk Sex with Sue Johanson on the Oxygen at 11PM Eastern.

Here is the love note I received from the sexy, beautiful, brilliant, and charming Dr. Sadie just now:

SUBJECT: O Baby! See Your Doctor On TV
FROM: Dr. Sadie Allison, Tickle Kitty

Hi Again Tickle Fan!

How can you revive the heights of passion—without waking the baby?

Come find out this Sunday evening when your Pleasure Doctor appears LIVE on “Talk Sex with Sue Johanson” at 11E/10C/9P on the Oxygen Network

The topic? “The Baby Came—Now It’s YOUR Turn!??? Get my advice on sex after the baby and see the toys, techniques and turn-ons guaranteed to reenergize your lovelife.

Or come right now to Tickle Kitty and get those toys at 15% off with FREE lube and your own Tickle Kitty Magnet, too! At checkout, use coupon code: “AfterTheBaby15???

Set your TiVo now, or tune in Sunday, Dec. 3rd. See you there!

- Dr. Sadie Allison
Your Pleasure Doctor
http://www.ticklekitty.com

P.S. Forward this email now to all your friends with new babies so they can discover (and save!) too.

I have been biking and running pretty much every day. Time to kick it to the next gear by adding weight training and bodybuilding.

Building muscle is the best way to lose fat because muscle has a higher caloric requirement. Thing is, I don’t know if I know the best, modern, ways to do this. So, I am probably going to join a board. Probably Bodybuilding.net because I don’t think books are enough. I want a community to support this next step.

“‘The yoga cured all kinds of back pains,’ he said. ‘Being a SEAL, you beat up your body.’” Via Yahoo! News

In addition to my biking, I have stepped up to my desire to become As Fit As Possible, I have begun to get a morning run in — before the heat comes rolling in.

The finaly step will be to add daily rows to the routine. This morning was a paltry 3-miler. I am not yet fit enough to maintain my daily four.

The Washington Post has a four-page article on the Wingman. Only one wingman? Amateurs! In high school and college, I was a member of wingteams. Via Wonkette, Gawker, and the Washington Post.

I had a wingteam in high school. We would go out in teams of three or five. Three to five guys together looks less desperate than two guys lurking.

Let’s say there are only two cute girls. The three guys move in and engage, making one another look funny and cool. One guy is predestined to disappear into the night after things gel. In a team of three or five, there is a simple system of “dibs” sometimes used, although most often the most senior, the most cool, or the most alpha come first while the newest, youngest, or lamest is predestined to break off.

Calling dibs is a serious business when men go out — very serious — and breaking dibs is a serious offense that may result in getting drummed out of the team, also known as “being excommunicated.” Dibs last as long as the the dibsholder likes. We men are never catty and rarely fight over women to say nothing of backstabbing or stealing someone elses dib (of course, it is open season outside of the team).

A single wingman? How pathetic. When I was in high school and college, going out was an orchestrated mission with strategy, with tactics, and with easily-definable goals with success and failure metrics and defined exit strategies.

Women didn’t have a chance.

“American obesity is up to 50 percent more prevalent than previously reported. A review of data indicates that from 1988 to 2002, male obesity rose from 16 to 29 percent, and female obesity rose from 22 to 35 percent. And that’s not even counting all the overweight people.” Via Slate

“It is unfortunate that women’s general imperative – or more positively phrased, their ability – to ignite attraction and even love in men with simple good looks is so universally perceived by our modern intelligencia as negative for women,” says Mark over at Anthony Citrano’s Weblog.

“The fact that is that women can very reliably ensure themselves that they will attract a pool of potential suitors sufficiently large enough to allow them to choose according to their liking simply by presenting themselves physically within a fairly simple set of parameters hardwired and socially programmed into men to fire their passions and their attachment.”

“For men trying to attract a large enough pool of women to allow them to be choosy, the equation is a much more complex soup: physical factors (bald generally negative, hairy back generally negative, short generally negative, fat generally negative, style continually changing and unpredictable), social factors (status, wealth, perception by others, fetishized archetypes – e.g. pained poet, bad boy, impassioned rebel, strong silent type, lonesome cowboy, etc.), personal charisma (charm, wit, intelligence, confidence, articulateness, social skills, etc.), and for some women, the man’s future potential as a good mate as a provider and partner.”

“For men, the bar in terms of looks is set really quite low, but otherwise, they have quite a lot to juggle and tweak if they are hoping to present themselves to the world in a way that will ensure they have a large enough group of women attracted to them to allow themselves to be selective.”

“Women, on the other hand, are actually quite fortunate with the simplicity of their challenge: simply look good. A large group of men will be attracted, and the woman can enjoy the power of selection she desires. Given, there will be work involved. Probably rather hard, sweaty, disciplined work, but the work is simple, straightforward and well-defined. Above a woman’s shoulders, there are limitations to how much can be done to get her looks within the pre-wired/societally-programmed parameters, but the multi-billion dollar cosmetics industry is fully focused on giving women all the tools and technical support they could wish for in this field. As for the rest of the body, the formula there to enflame the interest of the vast, vast majority of men is very simple in our modern American society: keep yourself slim and healthy, and keep your muscles toned, taut, and strong. Just be slim, athletic, toned, and healthy and the vast majority of American men will find your body – and thus, you – very attractive.”

“Yes, there are men who are exceptions to this rule, but if you want something that will trigger attraction in the vast majority of American men, this is it.”

“And the method is simple: eat healthily, work out. Eat only healthy food, and spend a minimum of an hour a day working hard to tone your body. Go running, lift weights, do yoga – whatever combination gets your body slim and tight. The added enormous fringe benefit is that you will live a healthier, probably longer life, and enjoy more happiness and psychological stability – exercise and good nutrition feed and relax the psyche.”

“That’s it: Eat Right, Work Out. It’s never been simpler, easier, or healthier for women in America to ensure themselves a good selection of suitors. Gone are the days when men required proper pedigree, Betty Crocker domestic perfection, virginal purity, unflawed adherence to societal etiquette, perfect-makeup-and-heels-with-dinner-on-the-table-at-six. Now, if you just look hot, you will have a dozen men to choose from. How you choose to manage all your opportunity is another game entirely, but that is a game of managing affluence, rather than struggling for sustainance.”

“You may respond to this simple truth by stamping your feet and insisting that ‘I want a man who will love me for who I am’ and other such self-excusing tripe, but if you want to invest your energies in something that will give you a broad pick of men (and whining about the realities of the mechanics of male attraction will not do that, just for the record) then invest them in this: Eat Right, Work Out. From your excess you can choose the man who truly loves you.”

“If after that, you want to do your hair, primp your makeup, do your nails, dress prettily, fine. That will probably make things even a bit better for you – but those are icing on the cake. Most men barely notice those details. When you look hot during your workout with a slim, strong body, sweat dripping off you, your hair a mess, as far from primped and perfect as imaginable, then you have made it. Dress and primp for other girls. Men don’t really care.”

“Eat Right, Work Out. Make your body hot by the hard-wired and societally programmed beauty standards of the early 21st century, and you will have more men to choose from than you know what to do with. Fortunately, today’s standards of attraction are for strong, healthy, slim bodies – universally recognized as an incredibly healthy, life-prolonging combination, unlike the Twiggy anorexic fetish of the 70′s, or the arteriosclerosis, backache-inducing obese standard of Rubens’s years.”

“It’s never been easier for women. Men’s slavish attraction to beauty is your ally, not your enemy. It puts the power in women’s hands with the minimum of work and the absolute minimum of variance in where women have to invest their efforts. Recognize a good thing when it’s been given to you.”

I took a four-mile run this afternoon and ended up at the Capitol Hill WSC expecting to do some weight strength training only to find that I couldn’t even fake it.

So I cornered the lovely Sandi and booked five sessions of personal training with Mia for Monday at 8, Tuesday and Wednesday at 6, Thursday at 9, and Friday at 6. If I have a date with you on any of those dates at any of those times, you’re bumped.

I have also scheduled runs for noon each day of the week. Gerris and the river call and I really would like to compete on a club level by later this season.

Also, I have a gentleman’s bet with Justin that will be very costly if I don’t lose lots of weight, gain lots of muscle, and drop my waist size substantially. And if I can’t pay up, Justin will break my kneecaps, I am pretty sure — or he’ll surely try and we’ll both get pretty messed up.

Plus, I am single in the city. What more can I say. It’s not all about sculling!

Enjoy my complete coverage with The Nicole Richie Diet, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, and Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating. Enjoy!

Nicole Richie Coverage: Nicole Richie’s Workout, Nicole Richie’s Diet, Comprehensive Nicole Richie Diet Coverage, To the Richies: What the Hell is an Eating Coach?, The Nicole Richie Diet, Most Popular Articles on ChrisAbraham.com

Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, The Only Reason I Blog: The Continuing Nicole Richie Saga, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating is Most Commented Article, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating

“Lionel Richie is so concerned over his scary skinny daughter Nicole’s health that he has hired her an eating coach, reports the new issue of In Touch Weekly.” Via OH NO!

Enjoy my complete coverage with The Nicole Richie Diet, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, and Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating. Enjoy!

Nicole Richie Coverage: Nicole Richie’s Workout, Nicole Richie’s Diet, Comprehensive Nicole Richie Diet Coverage, To the Richies: What the Hell is an Eating Coach?, The Nicole Richie Diet

Most Popular Articles on ChrisAbraham.com, Nicole Richie is Wasting Away Beautifully, The Only Reason I Blog: The Continuing Nicole Richie Saga, Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, LEAVE NICOLE RICHIE ALONE !!!!, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating is Most Commented Article, I Love Nicole I Want to Look Like Her, Any Suggestions?, Nicole Richie is Just Not Eating

From a lovely and helpful reader of this blog, Bree, in the comments section of Who Knows Nicole Richie’s Diet Regimen, “OK here it is all those looking for Nicole’s Diet, I havent tried it yet but Im definitly going to!!! hope this helps….” Thanks Bree!

Nicole appears to be shrinking before our eyes. The 23-year-old has hit the gym with a vengeance (2+ hours a day) and now weighs an astonishing 91 stone.

The Diet
Breakfast: 2 Egg Whites; 1 Scoop of Protein Powder mixed with Water.
Lunch: 4oz. Chicken, Mixed Greens, 1c. Orange Juice
Dinner: 4oz. Fish, Steamed Veggies
Dessert: Fruit

The Workout
1 Hour Weight training
90 Minutes of High Impact Cardio
…….although they say……..
Her recent transformation is a prime example of how drastically a balanced diet and increased physical activity can change a person’s appearance. Nicole exercises four times a week and does something different during each session. Besides integral training (cardio and weight work combined) the newly svelte starlet likes to use the indo board for balance and leg work. Furthermore, according to her trainer Adam Estner, “Richie now eats more food than before, but she eats the right kind.???

When oral sex is perceived as more casual and less intimate than a first kiss, there is going to be blowback, namely that oral sex will be understood as “not cheating.”

A married man or woman would be safe to receive or offer oral sex to someone outside of the marriage and still technically not be having sex outside the marriage.

I already know loads of men who have had “the talk” with their girlfriends — sexual history — and, like a scene from Clerks, oral sex is not included in sexual history. Oral sex is just casual and only Intercourse is included. We men hate that. Of course, yes: its a double standard. That said, when we find out how much inconsequential head has been graced, we go a little nuts. We also have discovered a loophole we can drive a 747 through: oral sex is not cheating! If we are apart or if the opporunity avails, we can receive a “gift” whenever we want and its really nobody’s business.

Male logic: “So, if a blowjob isn’t sex to my girlfriend it means that I can get blowjobs all night long and its cool. Fucking A!”

The blowback, of course, is that few partners in Holy wedlock would consider this behavior as honoring the vows of marriage. I think few boyfriend-girlfriend pairs would be cool with it were it to come clean, either.

The normalization — or cheapening — of very intimate contact with men and women outside of a partnership can be nothing but destructive to “conventional” monogamous relationships — even when the acts are technically “legal.”

To be honest, I don’t know many men or women who are okay with a partner who snuggles with someone else. One might say that snuggling and kissing are very intimate and that a blowjob is just an impersonal act and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (you know, men just need to get off, you know).

Well, HPV (genital warts) and herpes aside, its not nothing!

Kissing, holding, touching, and stroking are all intimate acts. Giving and receiving oral sex to the Euros is actually considered more intimate than Intercourse. Kissing, fucking, sucking, blowing, and masturbation are all very intimate acts. And to consider their effects on our lives and our hearts longterm to be nominal is very dangerous.

When it comes to affairs of the body between two people, same sex or boy-girl, all interactions are important. As a result, it is immensely important to guard your heart.

The best way to guard your heart is to always put yourself into the other person’s shoes. I have done far from a good job of doing this myself and have found myself painting myself into all sorts of corners — corners I would have not been in had I taken a second to consider my effect on the world. My world: my lovers, my friends, my family, and especially the friends and acquantences who would love to be my lover and the friends and acquantences I would love to love. It is never a good idea to take advantage — to be an opportunist. “Just because you can” is never a good reason to do anything. If you want to experience severe Karmic blowback just toy with someone’s heart, take advantage, just do shit. If you really want to have your Karmic savings trashed, say things like “its all fair on love and war,” we’re both adults,” “she knew what she was getting into,” “it was just a one-night stand and she should have known what it was,” “he should have been mature enough to know what it was.”

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, both when protecting your heart and your soul; when it comes to herpes, AIDS, human papillomavirus (HPV) infection (genital warts), syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis, and trichomoniasis, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.

Or since I know better the heart and the soul than I did in my 20s, maybe its the other way around: an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.

Amen.

Based on the 1918 model of worldwide deaths from an influenza pandemic, couldn’t there be over 133,333,333 casualties worldwide, with the brunt being, of course, in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa?

With the CDC anticipating 89,000–207,000 deaths from Avian Bird Flu in the US if the influenza goes pandemic, with 3,320 deaths in Maryland and 4,491 death in Virginia, I fear that the CDC and we Americans might be wildly optimistic. Via The Washington Post

I think its pretty low and stupidly optimistic. The CDC estimates 2-7.4 million deaths as a result of a global outbreak.

According to the CDC, “In the United States alone, the next pandemic could cause an estimated 89,000–207,000 deaths, 314,000–734,000 hospitalizations, 18–42 million outpatient visits, and 20–47 million additional illnesses”

Considering a global population north of 6,446,131,400 and the current state of public health in developing nations, lets look at the numbers from the past:

“Outbreaks of the Asian flu in 1957-58 and the Hong Kong flu in 1968-69 killed over a million people. Spanish flu killed 40 million people world wide in 1918-1919.” Financial Express

in 1918 there were 1.8 billion people, in 2005 we have over 5.4 billion people in the world. 40 million deaths from influenza in 1918 was 2% of the world population. Today, 2% of the world’s population is 133,333,333: 133 million deaths from avian flu worldwide.

Thats 133 million dead and doesn’t include the sick.

Salon has an article for you ladies on how to find someone warm to bring home to the folks this Holiday Season. Gossip columnist Cindy Adams gets some helpful hints from a matchmaker. Via NY Post.

Advice includes the obvious. Of course, by quoting the following lines, I am going to be on the shit list of all of my female friends and girlfriends, but I’ll do it anyway (and I will say “duh” first):

The first of Ronis’ bright ideas, according to Adams, is “look pretty. Package the femininity. Hair done, makeup done, lose the weight, manicure a must. Never walk the dog without lip gloss.”

Yes, men do notice when your hands look like shit. The only words we have, though, is, “she really didn’t work very hard for the date so I am not going to follow up.”

I thought that the cashmere Juicy Couture hoodie was cute when I bought one for my ex until I saw the pink velour Playboy version

My dear friend, Doctor Wendy R. Gottlieb, is a plastic surgeon trained in reconstructive surgery. She and sixty-four other members of the Virginia Hospital Brigade will be heading out to Comayagua, Honduras, this Saturday, November 5th, for a week of offering primary care, surgical, eye care, and physical therapy.

My friend Rachel Greenwald wrote a great little book a few years ago called Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School. Very smart strategy and from my perspective, it would work on me.

As a man, it seems really smart to me. Actually, Maureen Dowd, you need to read it post haste

Rachel uses the business and marketing practices she culled from HBS to find a fulfilling love relationship. This books will appeal to alpha-women because Rachel likes to say that in terms of dating and finding the right man, “you really need to make it your business.”

Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School

Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School* is a New York Times Best Seller . The book teaches a proven 15-step program to find a wonderful husband. This is an innovative approach to the frustrating reality of being single at any age, but especially between the ages of 30 and 105. It’s all about taking action and moving forward, not analyzing why you’re still single, who’s to blame, and why society is the way it is.

This book describes “The Program???—a simple to understand 15-step process that uses classic marketing techniques I learned at Harvard Business School.

You will learn how to:

-Devise a “Personal Brand??? and be unique
-“Package??? yourself to improve your appearance
-Use “Niche Marketing??? and “Telemarketing??? in your husband search
-Use “Mass Marketing??? to increase the volume of men you meet
-Maximize “Online Marketing??? to attract the best men from online dating sites
-Use “Advertising??? to get more fix-ups from friends
-“Audit??? your efforts and conduct “Exit Interviews???
-Use “Best Practice??? dating rules for retaining the men you want

You will also learn the answers to:

-What are the unique dating issues for women after 35 and how do I handle them?
-Where do I find older single men?
-What are the small things I can do every day to meet more men?
-What is the “Date/Sex Rule????
-What is the most over-looked resource for finding a husband?