Rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated

Okay, I didn't fall off the face of the planet. It's just been pretty unruly here, trying to live my life lately. Work has been at a break-neck pace and it took me much longer to recover from that stuff combined with the travel/jet lag than I'd anticipated. Everyone in my life is feeling neglected, and I'm still feeling a lot like I'm grinding my gears a good part of the time.

But all of that said, I think it's past time to return to blogging. Folks have been sending me all manner of bloggable items. For now, I will merely call your attention to the recent study that concluded that men who feel like their masculinity is threatened are more likely to support the Iraq war, want to drive an SUV, and be homophobic (okay that's troublesome parallelism, but I don't care). I guess those conclusions pretty fall into the "no duh" category, but it seemed worth sharing nonetheless:

Participants were randomly assigned feedback that indicated their responses were either masculine of feminine.

The women had no discernible reaction to either type of feedback in a follow-up survey.

But the guys's reactions were "strongly affected," Willer said today.

"I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle," said Willer said. "There were no increases [in desire] for other types of cars."

Those who had their masculinity threatened also said they felt more ashamed, guilty, upset and hostile than those whose masculinity was confirmed, he said.

A discussion here at work about this article led to this conversation:

"So we all know why men buy big trucks and SUVs, but why do women?"

"Protection. It's like a big egg carton."