The Dish

Research reveals a link between straight men’s socioeconomic status and the breast size they prefer on their partners:

[T]he present results indicate that men in relatively low socioeconomic sites rate larger breast sizes as more physically attractive than do their counterparts in moderate socioeconomic sites, who in turn rate a larger breast size as more attractive than individuals in a high socioeconomic site. In broad terms, these results are consistent with previous studies showing that there is an inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and breast and body size judgements. These results provide preliminary evidence that breast size may act as an indicator of calorific storage and that men in environments characterised by relative resource insecurity perceive larger breast sizes as more attractive than their counterparts in higher socioeconomic contexts.

Researchers also evaluated how hunger affected judgment:

[H]ungry men rated a significantly larger female breast size as physically attractive than did satiated men. Although the effect size of this difference was small-to-moderate, it nevertheless suggests that there are significant differences in the attractiveness ratings based on breast size between hungry and satiated men. In addition, the results of this study corroborate previous work showing that hungry men rate a significantly heavier female body size as attractive …. Moreover, these results are in line with the findings of Study 1: in both studies, it appears to be the case that men who experience relative resource insecurity show a preference for a larger breast size than do men who experience resource security.

(Hat tip: Hazlitt)

Diane Mehta praises the “death poems” of Stevie Smith, noting, “Any longing that might have gone to a man Smith instead projects onto death”:

If you’re a thinking, feeling poet, you’re going to wonder what the meaning of life is, and it might depress you a little. And if, like Smith, you start off with a religious feeling and then discard it, even if you keep the spiritual dialogue up—which she did, as a practicing Anglican—you’re going to run into some sort of spiritual chasm. (It was the same for Eliot and Auden, though they chose salvation while Smith, disillusioned, was deeply ambivalent about the existence of the afterlife.) On top of that, if you give up romantic intimacy and become an old maid, well, your longing will need to deposit itself somewhere over the course of a lifetime. So Smith longs for death. “Tender Only to One,” a kind of love letter, says it straight:

Tender only to one,
Last petal’s latest breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.

Centuries ago, “loving” death by way of exploration and religious feeling was much more in style. In a 1957 letter to Anna Kallin, a colleague at the BBC Radio, Smith explained that she was including a lecture, “The Necessity of Not Believing,” in which she showed how she was religious when young, then wasn’t at all, and then became “conscientiously anti-religious” because it was immoral to believe. Her description of the lecture is a sound description of Smith herself: “It is not at all whimsical, as some asses seem to think I am, but serious, yet not aggressive, & fairly cheerful though with melancholy patches.”

A reader alerted me to it, in the wake of the Kansas House of Representatives passing a law that would allow widespread discrimination against any gay or straight people who could even faintly be connected to a wedding or even commitment ceremony. The obit is for a pillar of the local community:

Bruce G. “Butch” Neis was born March 15, 1953 in Lawrence, KS the son of Samuel G. Jr. and Elizabeth Kindig Neis. He was a farmer, a welder and owned Bruce Neis Trucking. He was a lifetime member of the Eudora Township Volunteer Fire Department. He also was a member of Eudora Emergency Medical Services for 22 years and a 14-year sponsor of the All-Night After Prom Party at Eudora High School.

Among his survivors are

two sons; Richard B. Neis (spouse Carrie) of Eudora, KS, Aaron M. Neis (partner, Thaddeus Winter) of Honolulu, HI … and two brothers; Samuel D. Neis (spouse Bill Spinney) New Bedford, MA, Russell D. Neis (spouse Tina) …

My italics.

You know why the Christianists will lose? Because they are insisting that a man like Neis disown his partnered gay son and his married gay brother. Happily the far right does not seem to have succeeded in tearing this particular family apart. Update from a reader:

A footnote to your post: The Lawrence Journal-World, on whose website that obit appeared, will not, as a matter of corporate policy mandated by its extremely right-wing ownership, run notices of same-sex marriages. However, their obituaries run exactly as submitted by funeral homes, with no editing, so the mention of the man’s sons’ partnerships slipped through. And in fact, the obit you linked to actually is on a third-party site, Legacy.com, which handles online obituaries for the Journal-World (and many other newspaper websites). So it evaded the newspaper’s own editorial/advertising policies against honoring gay life events. Sadly, there’s still quite a ways to go in acceptance of gays in Kansas – even in Lawrence, by far the most liberal and open community in the state.

Sean O’Hagan wonders why we’re drawn to images of abandoned places:

[T]here are the images of cities or entire landscapes that have been deserted and left desolate, whether swaths of downtown Detroit or the modern ghost towns that border Chernobyl following the nuclear accident of 1986. In the former, the broader arc of history and commerce is suggested, not just in the decline of a great city, but possibly of a country, an empire. In the latter, our fear of nuclear disaster, and its apocalyptic aftermath, is summoned. Here, too, the precedents are fictional, but they tend to be darker, from the metaphysical chill of TS Eliot‘s epic poem The Waste Land to post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels, most notably the dystopian and oddly prescient stories of JG Ballard or, more recently, Cormac McCarthy‘s unremittingly bleak survival novel, The Road. …

Herein perhaps lies something of the true nature of our fascination with abandoned places: they allow us to look at, even surround ourselves, with the traces of decay and desolation, without actually experiencing the human cost. That there are no people in these photographs is, of course, part of their haunting power, their melancholic force. For the photographers, this is an aesthetic call.

Update from a reader:

You and your readers might be interested in the Japanese photographer Masataka Nakano, specifically his book Tokyo Nobody, which is a collection of images of Tokyo, sans people. Examples here.

(Image of the entrance to the zone of alienation around Chernobyl via Wikimedia Commons)