Aisha Harris: So, the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals has upheld a 2010 ruling against Quinnipiac University, which found that cheerleading is not a varsity sport under Title IX. The issue arose in 2009 when the university replaced the women’s volleyball team with competitive cheerleading, which the U.S. District Court found to be an inadequate swap.Erin Gloria Ryan of Jezebel argues that the courts were right to do so, writing “Women’s volleyball was never an activity that got the crowd going for men’s volleyball. You can’t win a gold medal in Olympic cheerleading.” Is she right? Or does the long-looming stereotype of women cheering on athletic men no longer hold water with the increased physical demands of today’s cheerleaders? Is cheerleading a sport?
The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, “has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).” They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents’ ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time. After consulting their pediatrician, a psychologist and parents of other gender-nonconforming children, they concluded that “the important thing was to teach him not to be ashamed of who he feels he is.” Thus, the purple-pink-and-yellow-striped dress he would be wearing that next morning. For good measure, their e-mail included a link to information on gender-variant children.
Reports of Black women hating on Gabby Douglas’s hair have been greatly exaggerated.
Articles claiming that Black women have fixated on Gabby’s hair have sparked the usual discussion about White beauty norms, hair politics, and internalized racism. But is itreally Black women who are obsessed with Gabby Douglas’ hair, or the media?
The idea that sisters are paying “more attention [to Gabby’s hair] than her gold medal[s]” is exactly the image of dysfunctional, belligerent Black women that the media loves. In the understandable rush to defend Gabby from critics, we’ve overlooked that this narrative is being pushed by racist, sexist media that can’t be trusted to report accurately on Black women’s opinions on just about anything. There’s very little evidence that hair is a priority when it comes to Black women’s feelings about Gabby Douglas.
In modern western societies, studies have found that women who are on the short side tend to have more children. In contrast, average-height men do the best, reproductively speaking, outpacing short and tall men in number of children fathered.
Height is also correlated with income, attractiveness, education, health and longevity, Stulp said.
Larger male sharks have to bite or trap the females to keep them around during courtship; marine biologists can tell when a female has been mating because her skin will be raw or bleeding. The process is so violent that, come the mating season, female nurse sharks will stay in shallow water with their reproductive openings pressed firmly to the sea floor. Otherwise they risk falling prey to roaming bands of males who ‘will take turns inserting their claspers in her’ (the clasper is the shark version of a penis, found in a pair behind the pelvic fins). A litter of fifty pups will have anything from two to seven fathers.
