[Paleopsych] WP: Unconventional Wisdom: Tough Bunnies

[Premise Checker]

Unconventional Wisdom: Tough Bunnies (and more)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102102270_pf.html
[The article by Beggan and Allison itself will come in a moment.]

    Tough Bunnies
    By Richard Morin

    By Richard Morin
    Sunday, October 23, 2005; B05

    First surprise: Playboy centerfolds are tough, say two social
    psychologists who did a content analysis of the biographical text that
    runs with the photographs of Playboy's playmates.

    Second surprise: There's text with those centerfold spreads?

    For the record, your Unconventional Wiz is shocked, shocked! that
    women are still being objectified in skin magazines. He has not
    personally looked at a Playboy in more than 20 years, and then only to
    confirm the barroom claim of a Miami Herald colleague who said she had
    posed as a centerfold in her wild and crazee youth. (An exhaustive
    search through back issues confirmed that she had.) Anyway, I have
    moved on. And I had hoped the world had as well.

    But apparently it has not. And that's one reason that James K. Beggan
    of the University of Louisville and Scott T. Allison of the University
    of Richmond decided to take a scholarly approach to the magazine's
    playmate prose. Even in this age of the Internet, with its easily
    accessible porn, Playboy claims more than 3 million subscribers,
    ranking it among the country's top-circulating magazines.

    To ferret out Playboy's message to its, um, readers, Beggan began in
    1998 to assemble a database that contained all the photos and text
    from the 204 Playboy Playmate pictorials that appeared in the magazine
    between 1985 and 2001. Much of it was distilled from a cache of
    Playboys he found gathering dust in a Louisville bookstore. (And, of
    course, in the interest of scholarship, he just had to rescue them
    from oblivion.)

    Beggan and Allison, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of
    Popular Culture, found a pattern to the way that Playboy's wordsmiths
    described the women who graced the magazine's centerfold. They were
    typically strong, career-oriented, aggressive and, in a surprising
    number of instances, downright "tough." Adjectives suggesting
    vulnerability, submissiveness or passivity appeared less frequently.

    But are these women really as they were described? Perhaps not, Beggan
    acknowledges. But it doesn't matter: "This is the image of them that
    is being presented to men. The Bible or Shakespeare teach important
    lessons; it doesn't matter who wrote them" or whether the story lines
    cleave tightly to historic fact.

    Beggan, who's been a subscriber to Playboy for a decade, has enraged
    some feminists by arguing that Playboy doesn't treat women merely as
    sex objects and "is not really about men getting laid, but about
    teaching men how to be better men." Rather than poised Hefneresque
    swingers, he argues, Playboy targets "uncertain guys who are trying to
    learn" how to be more sensitive to women's needs.

    After all, he says, the symbol of Playboy is a "furry bunny, not a
    tiger."

-------------

    Notice how gas prices shot up virtually overnight after Hurricane
    Katrina -- but are falling much more slowly now?

    We have only ourselves to blame, says an Ohio State University
    economist who studied how people shop for gasoline. Matthew Lewis
    found that the typical person hunts for the lowest possible prices
    when costs are rising -- but gets lazy and doesn't shop around when
    prices start to come down. As a consequence, gas station owners and
    other businesses have less incentive to lower prices when their
    wholesale costs drops.

    For the study, Lewis used data on prices charged at about 420 service
    stations in the San Diego area from January 2000 to December 2001. The
    data were collected by the San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action
    Network, which describes itself as a consumer watchdog group. Data on
    wholesale gas prices paid by the stations were obtained from the
    Energy Department, he writes in a working paper available on his Web
    site.

    Ironically, consumer buying patterns put more money in the pockets of
    gas station owners when prices are falling than when they are rising.
    Lewis found that profit margins were highest when the wholesale price
    of gas was dropping and consumers stopped bargain-hunting. That eases
    the pressure on station owners, which in turn allows them to keep
    prices high, thereby increasing their profit margins.

------------

    Never mind about gas selling for $3 a gallon. It's when tomatoes top
    $2 a pound that we should really worry -- at least those of us who are
    concerned about the rate of obesity in children.

    A new study by two Rand Corp. researchers found that young children
    who live in communities where fruits and vegetables are expensive are
    more likely to gain excessive weight than children who live in areas
    with less costly produce. That finding helps explain the growing
    incidence of obesity in children over the past 20 years, a time when
    the cost of fruits and vegetables has increased faster than other food
    prices as well as the cost of living, asserts Roland Sturm, a senior
    Rand economist and lead author of the study published in the journal
    Public Health.

    The study by Sturm and economist Ashlesha Datar also was remarkable
    for what it didn't find. The researchers couldn't make any link
    between obese kids and the presence of many convenience stores,
    full-service restaurants, fast-food restaurants or grocery stores near
    their homes. Advocacy groups have suggested that such a link exists,
    they reported.

    The research team examined excessive weight changes in 6,918 children
    in kindergarten to third grade from 59 metropolitan areas around the
    United States. The researchers then compared the weight gain figures
    with the relative price of fruits and vegetables in each of the areas
    studied. The data was collected by the federal government as part of
    its Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.

    Where do fruits and vegetables cost the most, relative to the price of
    other food and necessities? The winner: Mobile, Ala., where children
    gained about 50 percent more excess weight as measured by body mass
    index (a ratio of weight to height) than children nationally, Sturm
    reported.

    Fruits and vegetables were relative bargains in Visalia, Calif., where
    children's excess BMI gain was about half the national average.

    [2]morinr at washpost.com