In the old days if you wanted a promotion you wore a short skirt, now it's the other way round.
More than 90% of presidents and prime ministers are male, as are nearly all big corporate bosses. Men dominate finance, technology, films, sports, music and even stand-up comedy. In much of the world they still enjoy social and legal privileges simply because they have a Y chromosome.
What is a "rampant homosexual"? What makes him rampant, and do rampant heterosexuals exist as well?
Well-to-do parents fear two things: that their children will die in a freak accident, and that they will not get into Harvard. The first fear is wildly exaggerated. The second is not, but staying awake all night worrying about it will not help — and it will make you miserable.
Michael Burgess, suggested that fetuses are already masturbating by 20 weeks — although only male ones.
Some transgender people do not go to the loo all day because they have been harassed, assaulted or kicked out of one. This can result in dehydration, urinary-tract infections and kidney problems.
Women are just men with less money.
In 1939, 10% of American brides received a diamond engagement ring. By the end of the century 80% did. 26% of young American brides say they dreamed about their future engagement rings years before beginning a relationship.
A pun, like porn, is defined less by intention than by reception.
Tax reform is always the bridesmaid and never the bridem.
The hijab helps women be treated for their minds, not their looks.
Over Sabbath meals, Israelis who are worried about growing intolerance discuss whether to put their children or their country first.
It's like a big house with only one bathroom, and daddy's been in there too long.
Each suburban housewife, wrote Betty Friedan in 1963, struggles with a single question as she makes the beds, shops for groceries, chauffeurs children about and lies beside her husband at night: "Is this all?"
Confucious said that while a man's parents were alive, he should not travel far afield.
Will fatherhood make me happy?
A husband follows his wife and another man to a hotel room. Through the keyhole he sees the pair embrace. As they fling off their clothes his wife's underwear catches on the doorknob, blocking his view of what happens next — and leaving his faith in her fidelity intact.
Even in Mecca and Medina people have intercourse.
Armpits4August, a campaign, encourages women to grow underarm hair for a month to challenge norms of beauty. Members of La Barbe, a shock troop of French feminists set up in 2008, infiltrate male-dominated meetings wearing beards and derisively congratulate the men on their supremacy.
Immanuel Kant has the best insights into the gay-marriage debate — he argues that, once you have stripped away the nonsense, marriage is nothing more than a contract for the mutual use of
the sex organs.
For those not naturally well endowed, breast implants may make economic sense: going from flat-chested to a D-cup increases hourly rates by approximately $40, meaning that at a typical price of $3,700, surgery could pay for itself after around 90 hours.
It does seem that the little darlings really are good for your health — something to remember next time your children's behavior makes you want to scream.
Plato described love as a serious mental disease. Aristotle saw it as a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Tina Turner dismissed the feeling as a second-hand emotion. The nature of love — how and when and why and with whom humans fall for each other — has preoccupied thinkers through the ages.
Shakespeare mused that "it is beyond the power of man to bring love and wisdom to an union."
A newly-discovered scrap of one of holy texts which seems to quote Jesus speaking of "my wife." Karen King of Harvard University presented a translation at a conference in Rome on September 18th. Churches that believe their priests must be celibate in order to be like Jesus are not about to change their rules, though. Assuming the fragment is genuine, it shows only that others talked about Jesus using that word. The definition of "wife" is open to question too: Gnostic writing also features terms such as "bridal chamber", used without any connotation of sexual intimacy.
The vagina is not nearly as free today in the West as we are led to believe.
The problem with penises, as Richard Rudgley, a British anthropologist, admitted on a television programme some years ago, is that once you start noticing them, you "tend to see willies pretty much everywhere".
The euro was supposed to be the manifestation of a grand political project. It feels more like a loveless marriag e, in which the cost of breaking up is the only thing keeping the partners together.
When he reads obituaries he looks not for the age of the deceased but the length of their marriages, and envies those who had more time than he did.
After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads for suspiciously cheap "Viagra"?
One Chinese billionaire has particular requirements for a matchmaking agency: suitable candidates should be aged 20-26, weigh less than 50kg (110lb) and have no sexual experience. So far more than 5,000 young women have applied.
"Customer 360" is due to be tested in the new London store next spring. It will mean that Burberry keeps a detailed database on each customer's spending habits. That could cause embarrassment, for example if a customer who has bought racy gifts for his mistress enters a Burberry store with his wife and is enthusiastically ushered to the skimpy bikinis.
Are there no American children who have broken a leg at camp, suffered psychological trauma by coming last in a race, or been discriminated against by competing against stronger boys?
Finding a nice Jewish girl in Mississippi isn't easy.
Beautiful flowers — like beautiful women — can separate the most sensible men from their money. In the 17th century Holland, tulips grew so expensive that people exchanged them for houses.
In early imperial Rome, when the emperor Augustus put a tax on celibacy in response to anaemic marriage rates, he faced a spate of betrothals to underage women, an open revolt from his senators — and a decline in his citizens' conjugal appetites.
Are you cheating on your spouse? If so, please stand up and declare it. Total silence? What virtuous readers The Economist has.
The latest survey of time use in America suggests women still shoulder most of the housework, spending on average an hour a day scrubbing, hoovering and shopping, compared with barely 20 minutes for the unfairer sex.
Performing a Mozart quartet takes just as long in 2012 as it did in the late 18 th century.
Defining rape, or trying to, is a sure-fire way to start a row. Does age matter? (In some countries, sex with minors is automatically rape; in others, it is not.) Must it involve violence? What kind of sex is involved? Is the victim by definition a woman and the perpetrator a man? Do time, location or the parties' sexual histories play any role?
I don't know any successful women who haven't had a powerful sponsor in their organisation to give them their first big break.
Marriage is a surprisingly good predictor of management style, reckon Nikolai Roussanov and Pavel Savor of Wharton Business
School. The average unmarried boss invests 69% more than his married counterpart, they find.
Lillian Hellman was a hypocritical "bitch with balls", in the words of Elia Kazan.
When Theits, Achilles's mother, dipped her baby in the river Styx to give him her gift of invulnerability, she had to hold him somewhere.
The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar's Benison club in Scotland, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings were brought to a fitting climax, as it were, when they would communally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter.