Lately, there's been grousing around the blogosphere about the low view afforded to males in the media lately. The New York Times seems to have joined the bandwagon with an article entitled "In Mating Games, Spiders May Learn Faster than Young Men".

An experiment in the article shows that female spiders can learn about sexual preferences. Despite the insulting title, there's nothing whatsoever in the article about young men, nor any comparisons drawn.

Apparently, we're just supposed to conclude men are stupid in contrast to spiders when we read:

... she had never imagined that spiders had enough brainpower to remember a sexual preference

Oddly, the article has more to say about the strange rituals of human females than males:

For example, female Japanese quail not only prefer males that they have observed copulating, they will also go after a male they have previously rejected after observing him mate with another female.

"That's kind of the experience in a group of girls at a bar," Dr. Hebets explained, "when they all agree `that guy is cute,' and suddenly you find him more cute than you normally would have if nobody had said anything." ....

Female quail are so susceptible to getting the thumbs-up from other females, Dr. White and Dr. Galef showed, that they even prefer males who look like other successful males.

This dovetails (haha) nicely into my own previous observations regarding women's social mating/dating behavior.