Nov 08, 2011 11:00
gecko,
art,
rail,
marvel,
business,
hacking,
trains,
immigration,
scotland,
law,
respect,
antibiotics,
email,
thefuture,
legal,
movies,
troll,
time,
advice,
marriage,
film,
russia,
hormones,
materials,
notw,
organdonor,
organs,
mickeyrourke,
farming,
ukraine,
abuse,
links,
surveillance,
men,
humanrights,
uk,
wales,
oppression,
europe,
funny,
shopping,
rupertmurdoch,
potholing,
wtf,
epicfail,
physics,
cave,
money,
phrenology,
ironman,
relationships,
gender,
lgbt,
harrassment,
wikipedia,
politics,
donations
ROFL.
"the offered explanation is, of course, pants."
Yeah, there's a lot of nonsese. Although (with a depressing low bar) it's still better than I might have expected: the journalist rejects the apprarently spurious speculation, and the subheading, while a bit sensationalist, actually refers to what facts there are rather than someone else's innaccurate gloss on them.
The actual facts seem to be:
* An unnamed and uncited "online discount [clothes?] shopping website" did a survey, discovering what certain percentages of women said about their shopping pattenrs
* The proportions are obviously meaningless since there's no suggestion the sample was representative (and it probably wasn't).
* However, the suggestion that some proportion of people feel like this is fairly plausible.
* There is an implied assumption that men don't clothes shop like that. That seems likely true, but is also completely unstated, let alone cited.
* There is a quote which sounds like completely spurious speculation. It's impossible to tell if the psychologist was talking nonsense, was browbeaten into giving a quoteable quote for the newspaper, or quoted completely out of context just to manufacture an article and she originally said something well-researched and/or sensible and/or unrelated.
* If the suggested effect (that women get a specific thrill from shopping) is true, there's no data about the source of the effect: it could be that women more often like shopping (either genetically or culturally), or that the thrill is unisexual, but more women are culturally impelled to express it in clothes shopping, or that everyone reacts about the same way, but women are more often culturally impelled to claim or admit it in the sort of language used, or that the whole thing is spurious, etc, etc,
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