June 14, 2012

Dutch women enjoy sex less than men do

Filed under: General,Health by Branko Collin @ 8:56 pm

According to a study by Rutgers WTF, only 60% of all Dutch women enjoy sex, as opposed to 78% of the men.

The study was held among 8,000 people. Rutgers claims it is the largest study on sexuality ever done in the Netherlands.

The number of women using birth control has dropped from 70% in 2009 to 69% in 2012. Of the fertile women that have sex but do not want to get pregnant, 9% don’t use birth control.

Acceptance of transgender people is low. One in five Dutch people prefer not to be around people who are gender ambivalent, and a similar number thinks there is something wrong with those who do not consider themselves clearly male or female.

(Photo by Flickr user Spec-ta-cles, some rights reserved)

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April 25, 2012

Trashing Ukraine for profit leading up to Euro 2012

Filed under: Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:00 pm

Insiders will tell you that Dutch energy firm Nederlandse Energie Maatschappij has been accused of bad advertising before and even of questionable business practices, and don’t have a good reputation. This time, they’ve really outdone themselves: they’ve trashed a country, subjected another to gender stereotypes and told everyone not to go to the Euro 2012 in Ukraine (yes, partially being held in Poland).

The website with porno posing ‘shopped Ukrainian women is actually online as part of this media strategy and basically says ‘keep him [your guy] at home’. You keep him at home, away from the mail order porno brides by switching energy firms and receiving a home beer tap that’s all pimped up in Dutch team colours. Ukrainian women are sluts, Dutch women need to worry about not being so chunky and keeping their stupid football crazed men at home using beer.

I’m a ref and I am holding up a red card right now.

Imagine if the makers had picked on Polish women, considering the recent wave of Poland bashing some Dutch politicians have inflicted on the rest of us. Picking on Ukraine was probably the only culturally sensitive thing this company did.

UPDATE: Adversing blog Adformatie quotes the makers of the advert as ‘reflecting pure reality’ because Ukraine gladly profiles itself as having beautiful women. I never thought fake pictures looked anything like reality.

(Link: www.dutchnews.nl, Photo of Ukranian woman by my3colors, some rights reserved)

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March 9, 2012

Stealth cheese steals show, cookbook wins in Paris

Filed under: Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 4:24 pm

Yes, the Netherlands took first prize at the World Championship Cheese Contest in the US and kicked Switzerland off its pedestal this week, but a group of five women from Groningen also won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award in Paris recently for the cookbook, ‘Koken Met Kruidnoten’ by Karin Sitalsing. They won the award for the illustration of a cookbook that features a lot of ‘kruidnoten’ recipes from local chefs Pierre Wind and Siemen de Jong.

Back to the cheese bit: the winning cheese, Vermeer, is a low-fat Gouda type cheese by Campina from Wolvega, Friesland, and is only called by that name for export, as nobody had ever heard of it until a few days ago. Remember, this is a country that boats Australian Homemade as a Dutch chocolate brand.

(Link: www.rtvnoord.nl, Photo of totally unrelated Gouda by Jon Sullivan, released into the public domain by its author)

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March 8, 2012

Dutch women are unequal, change is slow

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 5:38 pm

Women make 20,8% less than men in the Netherlands. They work in sectors that pay less because more women work in them, causing a vicious circle. They work less and earn less because they have to take care of their children, as men apparently don’t and it’s cheaper if they do it because they get paid less anyways. Bosses know they can offer women less money at the start of a job because women don’t negotiate. Sectors where more men work actually pay better. Some 75% of women work part-time and do not stand up for their rights, resulting in less pay and fewer rights. Foreign women are easy to discriminate against because they don’t know the rules or the law (been there, done that). Women’s jobs have less social status. Women aren’t usually bosses and prefer to be more low key, earning less. Older women earn a lot less than older men and female students earn less than male students even in their first job.

If you still think International Women’s Day is fluff, think again.

(Link: www.loonwijzer.nl, Photo of Birthday cake by C J Sorg, some rights reserved)

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February 15, 2012

‘Some 60% of women cannot earn their own keep’

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:59 pm

You’d think a mobile euthanasia unit or a pedophile political party would be taboo in the Netherlands, but one of the biggest taboos I know of is about Dutch women not being able to earn enough money to pay their way through life. The irony is, according to a recent report by Delta Lloyd Group Foundation, 70% do believe it is important to be able to take care of themselves, but in actual fact, they don’t or don’t want to. (Some 75% of Dutch women work part-time and 40% of the population still believes that women with children should not work full-time.)

I’ve heard all kinds of arguments and personal stories from Dutch men and women in all kinds of situations (kids, no kids, divorce) that have made me understand why some women ‘cannot’ work (they lose money!) still today in 2012, and the government can be blamed for a lot of it: a too high standard of living as compared to other EU countries relies on the ‘informal’ network (moms, grandparents babysitting, neighbours caring for elderly), much like big companies used to abuse the environment and let governments pay to clean it up.

But not ‘wanting’ to work or work more in a recession — we are officially in one today — is making someone else (husband, partner, society) pay for you, when you should be helping yourself out, if not your family. It makes men and women continue to think that more than half of Dutch women are not equal to men. The entire Western world works, has families, raises children and runs businesses, so what’s the hold up?

(Link: www.telegraaf.nl)

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November 3, 2011

Too many women in big cities, not enough men around

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:19 am

Well, we can’t just shoot women as if they were unwanted animals in the wild (at least not in the Netherlands) and we can’t tell them to go and live in smaller cities and ‘spread out’ (pardon the pun) like some politicians tell immigrants to do.

There are too many young women in big cities, as they go off to study and young men stay behind in the smaller towns, according to a professor in newspaper NRC. Statistic Netherlands backs this up too, saying that Utrecht and Rotterdam (as well as Amsterdam and The Hague if we count the four big cities) are full of females, too.

Knowing that more women study than men helps me believe this is true, but I think a better story would be why there are not enough men in the big cities, or that’s just me as a woman thinking out loud. In the regions of Oost-Groningen, large parts of Friesland, the Achterhoek, Limburg (not the South) and a few other patches, there are too many young men. Why do the men stay behind? If they don’t study more, don’t raise families and don’t take care of the elderly, are they, what, gaming all day? Of course not, hopefully, but I would like to know why.

And then there’s the ‘conclusion’ that “many women in their thirties are still single”, whereas my female brain reads that there are too many men who are taken at that age (and — surprise — many of them will be divorced soon enough).

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Half baked.

(Link: parool.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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November 2, 2011

Being a radio bitch is not what you think

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Dutch radio presenter Frederique de Jong of BNR (Business News Radio) has decided to refuse her nomination for this year’s ‘Radiobitch’ Award. The ‘RadioBitches Award’ (yes, all in Dunglish, I can’t help it) are serious radio awards for female presenters, with a jury and not public awards. They also have ‘BackstageBitch’, ‘NewsBitch’ and ‘TalentBitch’.

Questions from the audience?

1) Nope, the men don’t have Radio Jerk/Asshole/Douchebag awards. They have serious awards too with boring normal names.

2) That’s true, swearing in another language is not as blasphemous sounding as in your own. Bitch sounds cool and a little more neutral to the Dutch. It’s more like being a tough and cool person than a nasty person. It also proves many people don’t understand that it’s a bad word and related to a female dog. Frederique de Jong doesn’t want to be a ‘radioteef’ in Dutch, either.

3) Yes, other people have had issues with the name and want it changed, but the media people in Hilversum (where all the media is) can’t be bothered. The women have not protested much or else the name could change, but hey.

So if women complain they’re not playing the game and if they say nothing, they’re just being female doormats. It’s a lose-lose situation. I think it’s not an empowering name for an award and doesn’t sound serious at all: having to make sure we know it’s a serious award proves how inappropriate the name is.

(Link: radio.nl)

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January 16, 2011

Fathers of young children prefer part-time jobs too

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 3:38 pm

Women with partners prefer part-time jobs, we wrote last year. In fact, 50% of all Dutch women already have a part-time job. And dads want in on that action. According to the New York Times (via the Deccan Herald), one in three men either work part-time, or work four nine-hour days:

For a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush hour traffic.

There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch economics ministry, offices have moved into ‘flex-buildings’, where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.

The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.

Radio Netherlands wonders if society’s demand that fathers take a more active role in the upbringing of their children will lead to new Super Dads. Surely men will have to spend more than just one Daddy Day with their children to earn that moniker? When the term was applied to women, it meant women with two full-time jobs: one at home, and one at the office. It seems that even in the gender equality debate, a man gets the same reward as a woman for less work.

(Photo by Eelke Dekker, some rights reserved)

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November 8, 2010

Netherlands most gender equal country in the world

Filed under: General,Health by Branko Collin @ 12:41 pm

According to a report by the United Nations Development Program released last week, Dutch women are closest to being equal to men.

The UNDP measured gender inequality in 136 countries. After the Netherlands, gender inequality was the lowest in Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland, and the highest in Yemen, Congo and Niger. Among the developing nations, gender equality is the highest in Burundi. The indicators used for measuring inequality were maternal mortality, adolescent fertility, parliamentary representation, educational attainment and labour force participation.

See also: Women have low impact on Dutch work force.

Link: UN Dispatch.

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October 29, 2010

First female provost (priest) of a Catholic church

Filed under: Religion by Branko Collin @ 11:50 am

On Sunday the Old Catholic church, not to be confused with its Roman counterpart, will make a woman provost, the priest that takes care of the actual priesting in a cathedral, NRC reports.

The Old Catholic church is a schism of the Roman Catholic church that identifies with the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church, and that rejects the dogma of papal infallibility. In 1998 it started allowing women to become priests, and has about 6,000 members in the Netherlands.

Annemieke Duurkoop (63) is the third female priest for the Old Catholic church in the Netherlands, and the first to become provost. Before this she was a PR Manager.

(Photo of the Saint Gertrude cathedral in Utrecht by Wikimedia user pepijntje, some rights reserved)

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