"You lay off our women"

From an interview with actor Mark Ruffalo promoting "The Kids Are All Right," in which his character attracts Julianne Moore's character, the femme in a butch-femme lesbian household, into a heterosexual affair:

... Ruffalo says he has come up against some bizarre territory marking and paranoia in the real world as a result of the movie.

"I was doing an interview with a woman on tv and afterward the woman said, 'By the way, I'm a lesbian, and you lay off our women,'" Ruffalo recalls.

"At first I thought she was kidding and then I realized she was really serious," he adds. "She totally meant it. I was like, 'Are you kidding?'"

Ruffalo worried "she was going to arm wrestle me or something." He didn't think he'd fare well either: "Not against that passion."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Larry Summers and Yves Saint Laurent

The storm of denunciation and the vast expenditures on affirmative action that followed former Harvard president Larry Summers' suggestion that one reason there aren't many female professors of, say, mechanical engineering in the Ivy League is because not all that many females want to be professors of mechanical engineering contrasts strikingly with the mostly uncontroversial lack of female representation at the highest levels of a job that many women really, really would like to have: fashion designer.

Yves Saint Laurent, who died last week, was among the first (but hardly the last) designers to be public about being homosexual. He became famous at age 21 in 1957 when his boss, the top French designer of the era, Christian Dior, another homosexual, dropped dead. The responsibilities of the House of Dior were divided up among four employees, three women and young Yves. But when the next show proved a success, he, not the three women, became the national hero who had saved French fashion.

So, why is there so much outrage over lack of female representation among math, physics, and engineering professors but not among dress designers? Money is the most obvious reason. Harvard has a $35 billion endowment and a world famous brand name largely immune to deterioration. So, when a desperate Larry Summers asked feminist educrat Drew Gilpin Faust to come up with ways to placate his critics, she returned with a $50 million wish list, which he quickly signed off on. But, that wasn't enough, and Larry was eventually shown the door, to be replaced by ... Ms. Gilpin Faust!

The value of the Harvard brand is basically immune to this kind of corruption, so the leeches have their sights set on Harvard.

In contrast, fashion businesses are much more ephemeral, so they are difficult for designated victim groups to exploit. It probably wouldn't be hard to prove in court that there's an old boys network of gay men who discriminate in favor of each other in the fashion business, but getting any money or quotas out of them would be much harder than with Harvard, since they can just dissolve their businesses and start new ones.

The other major difference is leadership. The feminists who demand more engineering professorships for women are typically led by hard-charging lesbians, like the late UC Santa Cruz chancellor Denice Denton, who stood up to "speak truth to power" to poor old Larry. These include some pretty psychologically intense people (not long after, Denton leapt from the 42nd floor of the luxury apartment building where her lesbian lover lived on the $192k salary Denton had arranged for her). Although they share many traits with men, they don't empathize with men well. The dominant traits in a Denton-type lesbian academic is ambition and resentment of anybody competing with her in clawing her way to the top, which manifests itself in anger toward men.

In contrast, the women who would like to design pretty dresses for a living tend to be much more feminine. They empathize and sympathize too much with the gay men who are blocking their rise.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT: Gay marriages are just plain better than that other, more unequal, and all-around yuckier kind of marriage

Here's a classic article from the Health section of the New York Times tonight:

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can be solved. ...

Personally, my motto is vive les deep-rooted biological differences between men and women.

And here's a stunning finding about same-sex "marriages:" partners who aren't of different sexes don't exhibit stereotypical sex differences!

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship.

Who knew?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How many gay male golfers are there?

I never made it out on a golf course in all of 2007, but I have been playing since 1971. Over the years, I've played in foursomes with hundreds of people, the majority of them strangers, and run into hundreds of others around the golf course or driving ranges in Chicago and LA. Not one has ever triggered my gaydar. A gay friend who is an intense sports fan and I went to several pro tournaments together, but I could never talk him into actually trying to play the game.

Sure, private country clubs would likely tend to discriminate against homosexuals, but 95+% of my rounds have been played at public courses where anybody who pays the greens fee can play. By way of comparison, my playing partners over the years include perhaps two dozen blacks, almost as many Latinos, and more Asians.

Golf isn't much of a team sport, so discrimination by teammates wouldn't be an issue as it is with gays and other sports.

Even stranger, golf doesn't seem particularly macho either. It's non-violent and there's no danger involved. There are some polite, upper class rituals involved in the game that would seem not uncongenial to gays.

So, it could be very informative to understand why golf appeals to some straight men but almost no gay men. But we don't really understand the appeal of golf yet. (I take my best guesses here in this 2005 American Conservative article.)

Since lots of celebrities are golfers and lots of celebrities are gay, for years I've been trying to falsify my hypothesis that gay men almost never find golf appealing by finding a bunch of gay golfing celebrities. But I haven't found any, other than maybe Danny Kaye, the amazingly talented comedian-actor-musician of a half century ago (Michael Richards's Kramer on "Seinfeld" channeled a little of Kaye's shtick), who was an avid golfer and baseball player/fan (he owned the Seattle Mariners). He was married for 47 years, but, at least in the years since his death in 1987, has been subject to rumors of bisexuality.

As you know, one of my favorite tricks is to take a list (The Top 100 Whatevers) and use it to investigate some question that never occurred to the people who created the list. That way, my question doesn't bias the data, which could happen if I made up the list myself. The list might not be particularly good at ranking the Top 100 Whatevers, but it provides a decent source of data unaffected by my preconceptions.

So, here is Golf Digest's 2007 list of "Hollywood's Top 100 Golfers," which lists actors/actresses, but not behind the camera talent. It's ranked in terms of handicap (the lower the better).

Soap opera star Jack Wagner is the only actor with a "plus" handicap (meaning, roughly, that he is expected to break par).

The list reveals what Billy Crudup, the New York actor with the superb diction, is doing besides voice-over commercials and turning down Hollywood roles: he's ranked #3. Recently it became possible to live in Manhattan and play a lot of quality golf with the opening of two super-expensive courses in New Jersey's industrial wastelands just across the Hudson River. Crudup plays to a 4.5 handicap at the new faux-Irish Bayonne Golf Club amidst the docks.

The biggest stars in the Top 20 are probably Dennis Quaid, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Murray, and Hugh Grant.

I'm sure they are missing some people who should be on the list and some who shouldn't be on the list are making up handicaps. Generally, the players who list a handicap to a decimal point actually have played enough to have a handicap, although that might not be, technically, their current handicap. I'm a 16.9, for example (or that's what I was for one glorious week in 1990).

The ones who round it off to a whole number may be just blowing smoke entirely. For example, Sean Connery has dropped to a "22.0," but he definitely is a fanatical golfer. On other hand, while I'd like to believe that lovely Jessica Alba is a "22," it sounds too much like Cameron Diaz's male fantasy character in "There's Something About Mary" who hangs out at the driving range on her days off from healing sick children. (Cameron is a 34 on the list). Jessica has been photographed playing golf with her fiance, the world's luckiest man, but, somehow, I don't think she's quite as dedicated to the game as the old Scotsman.

Among actresses, Alba ranks second following the more plausible Cheryl Ladd (from the original "Charlie's Angels") at 18.

Anyway, this list mentions 92 men in a profession with an above average number of homosexuals, so there is a lot of data to work with. Quite a few of the actors are fairly obscure, like Richard Kind of "Spin City" and "Mad About You" (who is indeed kind -- he helped me look for a club I had lost at Robinson Ranch). But you can look up a lot of information about each one. For example, Kind is married and has three kids.

So, how many of the 92 are rumored to be gay?

There's Tom Cruise (#95). I have no opinion on all the rumors, but he's clearly not a very intense golfer, if somebody that coordinated is only a 32 handicap. And there's young Zac Efron of Disney's "High School Musical," who is #52 at a 14. He gets a lot of crap from the celebrity snarksites who are jealous of his girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens (e.g., "he's basically a dancing candy cane come to life"), but, who knows? (Getting totally off topic, here's a picture of her father that you have to see.)

I'm sure there are others on the list, but I think my old hypothesis is supported.

Update: Here's Golf Digest's list of the best 100 golfing singers and musicians. The only scratch golfers are Kenny G and Vince Gill. Bob Dylan is supposedly a decent 17 handicapper, while Neil Young is an 18.6. (When Young's band Buffalo Springfield signed their first contract, Young's last request of Ahmet Ertegun was: "I'm a golfer. Can you help get me in a country club out here?") The list has lots off country singers and lots of black singers and even a black country singer (Charley Pride).

And there's a black gay golfer in Johnny Mathis, who plays to a fine 10.5 handicap at mighty Riviera. I don't think it's all that secret that he's gay.

The only other gay on the list who jumps out at me is Lance Bass, who is in the "New to the Game" category with a 36 (the worst handicap allowed under USGA rules).

I'm sure more expert researchers might find a couple more, but far fewer than in a list of top 100 singers or musicians who don't play golf.

In summary, we have two lists with 185 men on it in two professions, acting and music, that are well know to feature an above average number of gays. If you exclude the men with handicaps over 30 as not very serious golfers, that leaves one obvious gay out of about 160 men, and, likely, several more discrete gays.

But if you took a random list of 160 prominent male musicians and Hollywood actors who aren't golfers, what percentage would be homosexual? Let's say 15%, just for sake of argument. So, at 15%, you'd expect 24 gays out of 160. Right now we've got Johnny Mathis, so we'd need to dig up 23 closet cases off the lists. I don't think that's going to happen.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Good title, good article

In New York:

The Science of Gaydar
If sexual orientation is biological, are the traits that make people seem gay innate, too? The new research on everything from voice pitch to hair whorl.
By David France

My 1994 National Review article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," which lists three dozen traits where statistical differences among the sexual orientations are found, appears to have held up well over the years.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer