Couples with one dominant partner are happier and produce more children, study says

Leftist fantasies about equality don't even work in personal relationships

Equality may not be the best policy – at least when it comes to starting a family.  Research shows couples have more children when one half takes control of the relationship.

And the boom in births applies whether it is the man or the woman in charge. This may be partly because strong women find submissive men sexy, the Czech researchers say.

More than a quarter of women are the dominant partner in a relationship, making the couple stronger

Pairing a dominant personality with a more reserved soul may also make it easier to resolve rows and boost co-operation.

For the study, entitled Why Do Some Women Prefer Submissive Men, the researchers from Charles University in Prague quizzed 240 young men and women about the sort of person they were attracted to.

For instance, they were asked whether they would prefer to be with someone who would 'guide and protect' them or 'admire and serve' them.

They were also asked whether their mother and father had equal status in their relationship or whether one tended to be more submissive. Finally, they were asked how many siblings they had.

The results showed there to be more families in which one parent was dominant than where both were equal.

Women were in charge in 24.2 per cent of cases, the journal Neuroendocrinology Letters reports. The couples in which one partner was dominant had the most children.

The researchers said: 'Too often, we are told to view even mild dominance and submissiveness as a problem.

Our results challenge the frequently held belief in equality within couples as a trademark of functional partnerships.

'It rather appears that existence of some disparity, with one partner dominant, and the other submissive, improves cohesion, results in better co-operation between partners and improves the couple's ability to face challenges.'

They added: 'In the light of these results, both excessive pressures towards equality in some modern societies, and pressures towards male dominance in some traditional societies, represent a form of oppression.'

Couples made up of two strong characters had the fewest children.

The researchers said: 'If the two individuals rank at a similar degree, even minor conflicts may escalate due to competition.'

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Homosexuals take more drugs because they don't have children so are more prone to destructive behaviour, says Newsnight host Evan Davis

BBC Newsnight host Evan Davis has revealed that gay people take more drugs because they don't have children, it has been reported.

The gay broadcaster, who has always been candid about his own sexuality, said homosexuals were more prone to destructive behaviour as they were not bound by the same 'discipline.'

He was said to have described drug taking as 'socially infectious' among the gay community and said it was not helped by their slightly greater disposable income.

'The gay community has less discipline because it doesn't have kids to go home to, and slightly more disposable income, and then add to that that when these things catch on they tend to have a momentum,' the 52-year-old broadcaster told Attitude magazine.

'Once gay people start taking drugs, they'll take more drugs because it's socially infectious and one person will take them, then another. I just think it's something gay people have to watch out for.'

Davis comments come after the British Crime Survey found drug use among gay and bisexual men was three times higher than for straight men and was higher in the majority of individual drugs consumed including cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines and cannabis

The same report concluded illegal drug use by gay and bisexual women was four times higher at almost 23% than among heterosexual women.

This is not the first time that Davis has discussed drugs. In 2010 he was accused of using a new purge of health and safety rules to promote the legalisation of cannabis.

During an interview with, Lord Young, he seized on the Tory peer's remark that: ‘Frankly, if I want to do something stupid and break my leg or neck, that’s up to me.’

When Lord Young replied: ‘Haven’t you ever been skiing?’ the presenter retorted: ‘So if I want to smoke cannabis, that’s up to me as well, presumably?  ‘What principle distinguishes between me doing something dangerous that can break my neck and having a spliff?’

The journalist, who presents the BBC Two current affairs programme, told Attitude magazine that he was 'tortured' during his teenage years due to his sexuality.

Mr Davis,who was formerly an economist before joining the BBC, said he now hopes 16-year-old's in the same position think 'it's not a very big deal.'

Mr Davis, who is also known for his role on Dragons’ Den and Radio 4 flagship breakfast news show Today, replaced Jeremy Paxman as the host of Newsnight last year.

When his appointment was announced Tony Hall, BBC director general said: 'Evan is an outstanding journalist, an extraordinarily clever and intelligent interviewer.  'He has a wonderful presence on TV. I’ve got no doubt he will be a really great presence on Newsnight.'

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A Short History of The many meanings of 'political correctness'

Amanda Taub's Vox piece denying the existence of political correctness does get one thing right: The phrase political correctness "has no actual fixed or specific meaning." What it does have, though Taub doesn't explore this, is a history of meanings: a series of ways different people have deployed the term, often for radically different purposes. Unpack that history, and you can unpack a lot of the debates going on today.

People have been putting the words "politically" and "correct" together in various contexts for ages, but for our purposes the story begins in the middle of the 20th century, as various Marxist-Leninist sects developed a distinctive cant. One of the terms they liked to use was "politically correct," as in "What is needed now is a politically correct, class-conscious and militant leadership, which will lead an armed struggle to abolish the whole system of exploitation of man by man in Indonesia and establish a workers state!"  It was a phrase for the sort of radical who was deeply interested in establishing and enforcing the "correct line," to borrow another term of the day.

If you were the sort of radical who was not interested in establishing and enforcing the correct line, you were bound to start mocking this way of talking, and by the end of the '60s the mockers were flinging the phrase back at the drones. In 1969, for example, when Dana Beal of the White Panther Party defended the counterculture against its critics on the straight left, he argued that freely experimenting was more important than trying "to be perfectly politically 'correct.'"

A year later, in the seminal feminist anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, Robin Morgan derided male editors who had "the best intentions of being politically 'correct'" but couldn't resist butting in with their own ideas. In the new usage, which soon superseded the old Leninist lingo pretty much entirely, "politically correct" was an unkind term for leftists who acted as though good politics were simply a matter of mastering the right jargon.

Meanwhile, a similar but slightly different approach to the phrase emerged. In '80s issues of magazines like Mother Jones or Ms., "politically correct" could describe a consumer good or a lifestyle choice. The tone here was usually lightly self-mocking, as you'd expect when words once associated with a shifting Maoist party line were now being applied to an exercise book or a fake fur. But some people did use it earnestly, perhaps because they weren't in on the joke, perhaps because they just thought the term was too good to go to waste. In the early '90s, a woman told me that she and her friends had often said "politically correct" without any irony when she was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr. She wasn't happy when she started hearing people use the expression disdainfully.

My favorite mid-'80s manifestation of the phrase has to be this ad that Mother Jones ran in 1985—mostly because I'm not entirely sure if it's being partly ironic or completely sincere. It's clearly one of the funniest things anyone wrote that year, but I'll be damned if I know whether the person who produced it knew that:



By then the term was fairly well-established on American campuses. When future Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol debuted his comic strip Thatch in Brown's student newspaper in 1988, he included a faux superhero called Politically Correct Person, a character forever correcting people's language and consumer choices. "Yes, I'm familiar with Doonesbury. 

The phrase persisted in the more radical segments of the left as well. When I was attending the University of Michigan, one of my colleagues at the student radio station edited a queer/punk zine called P.C. Casualties, which ran this righteous rant in 1991: "As if bullying prank phone calls from those young Republican shitheads weren't enough, now we have half-assed, pseudo-radical academics playing the same old power games as well. Yeah, you've got all the 'correct' answers, and even a little power in your corner of this political ghetto. But you're all fake....All you've managed to do is torture and maim those you really ought to be caring for—your own brothers and sisters. The bodies of P.C. Casualties lay strewn all over, ghosts of dreams too afraid to materialize, and whispers too fearful to make a sound."



That piece was published near the end of the 1990-91 academic year, which also happened to be the year the phrase had its national coming-out party. The December 24, 1990, Newsweek featured the words "THOUGHT POLICE" on its cover; inside, a Jerry Adler article argued that "where the PC reigns, one defies it at one's peril." A month later, John Taylor's cover story "Are You Politically Correct?" appeared in New York magazine. The Wall Street Journal ran a series of pieces attacking political correctness. And around the same time that issue of P.C. Casualties appeared, President George Herbert Walker Bush warned the graduating class at Michigan that "the notion of political correctness" was replacing "old prejudices with new ones."

"Politically correct" had now entered the mainstream lexicon—and, maybe more important, the conservative lexicon. But what did people mean when they said it? When that jeremiad in P.C. Casualties got down to specifics, it invoked "women banned from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival for practicing S&M." You weren't likely to see that mentioned in a George Will column. So what were the conservatives upset about?

To a large extent, it was the same things critics on the left had been upset about. But there were other complaints here too. While Newsweek's cover story included anecdotes about censorship and other heavy-handed attempts to impose an orthodoxy, it also veered off periodically into discussions of deconstruction, the Great Books canon, and other subjects that didn't have much to do with civil liberties. Taylor's New York story went even further in that direction, including a whole section on Afrocentrism. From 1990 onward, a bunch of longstanding conservative complaints about campus life, particularly its arguments about what was taught in the English departments, were framed as debates about political correctness.

For some on the right, "P.C." began to be a vague way to refer to anything left of center. "Un-P.C.," meanwhile, became a phrase people used to pat themselves on the back, not just on the right but in the culture at large. By proclaiming yourself politically incorrect, you were announcing that you were a brave opponent of stultifying orthodoxies, even if your actual opinions were as vanilla as the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.

On the left, some people embraced the term defensively (at Michigan, several student groups opened the 1991-92 school year by adopting the slogan "PC and Proud"), while others foreshadowed Taub by declaring political correctness a myth. More recently, it's become common to claim that what conservatives call political correctness is really "just politeness." (And indeed, if someone uneducated in the jargon of the week unwittingly uses the wrong language, he may receive the same reaction he'd get at a society dinner for using the wrong fork. But I don't think that's what they mean.)

So maybe Taub's right; maybe we should drop the phrase from our lexicon. Not because it doesn't describe anything, but because it describes so many things that you can't use it without worrying that people won't understand what you're talking about. But I won't scold you if you use it anyway. I wouldn't want to come across as politically correct.

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Parents branded child abusers by NHS 'bullies'... simply for refusing a heel prick test on their newborn baby

Britain more frighteningly authoritarian than ex-Communist Poland

It should have been the most joyous moment of their lives, one they would look back on fondly for years to come.

But for Tony Shepherd and his Polish fiancee Viola, the weeks after the birth of their baby were filled with disbelief, followed by desperation and finally outright terror – when a small act of perfectly legal defiance led the NHS to brand them child abusers.

The couple could never have imagined that their refusal to have a simple heel prick test for their son would escalate into a full-blown investigation by midwives, social workers and even the police; or that before their son Charlie was even three weeks old, he would have to endure two intimate internal examinations.

Although completely exonerated, the couple were so appalled by the incident that they left the country.

Today, in an extraordinary interview from their home in Babiak, Poland, the couple reveal the hair-raising sequence of events that drove them to the edge of despair and nearly lost them their child for ever.

They have grave questions about the targets that drive so much health service procedure and the lack of communication between NHS trusts – two issues they believe lie at the heart of their ordeal.

Now they intend to take legal action. ‘We have been dealt with appallingly,’ says Tony, 42. ‘The NHS has robbed us of the joy of having a newborn child.’

After seven years together, Tony, a former stockbroker and owner of a legal services firm, and Viola, 28, an architect, were overjoyed when Charlie was born at Whiston Hospital in Merseyside last June.

Apart from a cephalhematoma – a swelling on the head that is a common birth injury and usually clears up within weeks – Charlie was healthy. But the couple’s problems began when a midwife from Whiston visited the new parents at Tony’s mother’s home in Knowsley.

‘She didn’t phone – she just turned up,’ Tony recalls. ‘She seemed forthright and authoritarian; looking down her nose.’ The midwife told them she would do a heel prick test, in which blood is taken from the baby’s foot to be screened for a range of conditions including cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease. It is not a compulsory procedure, but she seemed insistent.

‘She didn’t ask our permission,’ Tony says. ‘We didn’t know what this test was, so asked her. She said it was something they do which looks for conditions in the baby.  ‘I asked what conditions exactly, but she couldn’t tell me.

‘We like to know the reasons for doing tests so I advised her that we would research it and contact her if we wanted it done. She said, "That’s not how it works I’m afraid." ’

The midwife eventually agreed to leave a number for the Liverpool community midwives’ office and left.

The couple returned to their seven-bedroom home in Aigburth, Liverpool, and were transferred to the care of Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

Seemingly unaware that they had already been visited by a Whiston midwife, one from LWH then phoned and said she would be visiting to do the heel prick test. Tony and Viola calmly told her they were still deciding whether to have the test.

‘That same midwife proceeded to call us 15 times,’ Tony says. ‘I own a legal services company so I know what constitutes harassment.’

At 5.30pm that day the exhausted new parents, who were napping, woke to the sound of the buzzer to their gated property. Someone seemed determined to reach them. ‘It continued for 15 minutes,’ Tony says. He eventually opened the door to find a woman in a midwife’s uniform.

‘She said, "So you are in then?" like I was a naughty schoolboy,’ Tony says.

The midwife said she was there to do Charlie’s heel prick test. Tony says: ‘She said, "Listen to me, it’s going to be done today whether you like it or not because it has to be done within ten days." She then put her hand on my chest and tried to push past me into our home. I managed to push her away and close the door. I told her if she didn’t leave, I’d phone the police.’

The midwife in question denies any physical contact.

According to NHS guidelines, the blood spot (heel prick) test is offered to parents of babies in the UK from when they are five days old and up to one year of age.

Although screening is strongly recommended, parents can decline. Tony believes he knows the real reason the midwife was so insistent on getting the test done: targets. ‘We were told by friends that midwives have targets to get the heel prick test done,’ Tony says.

‘There’s immense pressure on midwives, but there’s also the culture that you will just do as you’re told. We naturally question everything.’

According to Public Health England, individual NHS trusts aim to get 95 per cent of newborn babies tested before they are eight days old.

Things got more serious still when the couple were visited by two uniformed police officers.

Tony recalls: ‘The officer explained they had received a report saying we had refused prenatal care – we hadn’t – and now were refusing postnatal care. They wanted to see if Charlie was OK.’

The officers seemed to have a particular suspect in mind – Tony.

‘They looked around a couple of floors and asked Viola, "Is there anybody you know stopping you from having care?" In other words me.’ Later that day it was the turn of Liverpool Social Services.

‘They said they’d had reports from LWH that we were refusing care.

‘They looked in every room and asked lots of questions: how long had we been together; whether Charlie was planned; how and what we fed Charlie; how we changed him – we demonstrated this and they took notes. They asked Viola if she was under duress. They said, "We think your partner may be refusing care in some way because it’s usually your partner who speaks.

‘ "Are you allowed to speak, are you in any form of danger? Is your partner violent towards you?" ’

Viola says: ‘I’m not a person who sits quietly and lets Tony make the decisions. It was horrible and embarrassing. When they left they said, "If you do want to tell us some time in the future, that’s OK."'

Tony adds: ‘I don’t have any form of police record. I’m a professional person. To feel that I was being labelled as something I’m not was terrible.’

After admitting there were no care issues, the social workers apologised and left.  But this was not the end of the couple’s problems.

Concerned that the cephalhematoma injury on Charlie’s head had not changed, Tony and Viola asked their health visitor for advice. They were promptly sent to their GP.

‘She took Charlie from us, examined his head and referred us urgently to Alder Hey Hospital,’ Tony says. ‘We were extremely worried. On the way to the hospital I was terrified. I felt that because of the midwives, the police and social services visits, this was snowballing. I thought they were going to take Charlie from us.’

Once at the hospital, the couple read through the notes the GP had sent with them and were horrified to discover a full run-down of the visits from the midwives, police and social workers.

Tony’s so-called ‘controlling’, ‘unusual’ and ‘strange’ behaviour had been flagged up, as had his refusal to allow a heel prick test.

Worse was a letter from the couple’s GP who had suggested, in light of their notes, that Charlie’s head lump could be an ‘NAI’ – a non-accidental injury. ‘That meant they were putting us forward for child abuse,’ Tony says. ‘I broke down at that point.’

Viola adds: ‘We would never hit Charlie. I couldn’t believe we could be in this situation.’

After an agonising hour-long wait, Tony and Viola saw the consultant.

‘We told him we were being victimised and harassed but he wasn’t interested. He examined Charlie from top to toe. He wanted us to change Charlie’s nappy and at that point he examined Charlie’s genitals and anus. My GP friend later told me that this was to see if we had abused him.’

The consultant confirmed that the lump was a simple cephalhematoma and asked why they had refused the heel prick test.

‘I explained that we hadn’t refused it but that no one could explain it to us. The consultant talked it through and we had it done then and there. All we wanted was for someone to tell us what it was for.’

Charlie then endured a second thorough examination, by another consultant. The couple had gone in at 6.30pm and left, exhausted, at 2.30am. ‘We were both extremely upset,’ Tony says.

The following day, the distraught couple, who had been planning to eventually retire to Poland, wrote a list of pros and cons of moving there or staying in Britain.

‘The biggest con of staying in Britain was potentially having our son taken from us or dealing with the NHS on a continual basis,’ Tony says. ‘That tipped the balance.’

The decision made, they put their home up for rent and left for Poland two weeks later.

To those who may dismiss their decision as overly dramatic, Tony insists: ‘It’s not knee-jerk if you’ve been through what we’ve been through. I’m scared to go back to the UK in case something happens.

‘If Charlie fell and broke an arm and needed hospital treatment, would there be a red flag against our name? Are we going to be on a register? Will Charlie be thought of as an abused child? Our GP friend said that once you had a red flag against your name, it never goes.

‘Poland is a third-world country in some ways, but when it comes to care they seem light years ahead of the NHS.

‘The NHS should be a public service, but it’s being made into individual businesses using private subcontractors who have targets that need to be exceeded each year.’

Viola now says that she would be afraid to have another child back in Britain.

John Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley and chairman of the Justice For Families campaign group, said he understood the couple’s distress.

‘The system could decide that they are "unwilling to co-operate with professionals" and put their baby up for adoption,’ he added. ‘You can see the health and care sector getting more and more aggressive in the way people are treated.’

Tony and Viola want to share their experience to help others. ‘We can’t be the only ones who have experienced this,’ he says. ‘Parents have rights. Research your rights and don’t be afraid to say no.’

Dianne Brown, director of nursing and midwifery at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, said: ‘The midwife followed Trust guidelines. Neither the midwife nor Liverpool Women’s referred the family directly to social services or the police. LWH believe the midwife behaved in a professional and appropriate manner and have received no formal complaint.’

A spokesman for Whiston Hospital said: ‘The Trust’s community midwife visited for a routine postnatal check two days after Charlie’s birth. No screening tests were carried out during this visit, but it was discussed with the parents and advice given.’

The couple’s GP failed to respond to requests for comment.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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