… and no this isn’t the start of a women and bicycles joke. But, once you slog past the super-models in bikinis, included on distinctly thin grounds, and the women inexplicably dressed in evening wear and with makeup slathered on like concrete (so Daily Mail!) there is actually a proper, interesting story in today’s Observer Woman magazine.

All that stuff about how all boys being reared by their mothers turn into hoodie-wearning hooligans … seems it is wrong. Instead, a researcher has found that many families are better off without the dad.

Peggy Drexler, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University and a former gender scholar at Stanford University, has published Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men (Rodale Books). In a unique study she followed more than 60 fatherless families over 10 years. As time went by she practically became another member of the family in these households. She picked up boys from school, dropped them off at sports clubs, spent weekends and holidays talking in depth to both them and their mothers. All the while taking notes and taping conversations. What she discovered stunned her and has divided public opinion. It goes to the heart of the very idea of the apple-pie American family: is it necessary for a son to have a dad?

Since the book was published she has criss-crossed the country, talking about her research in the nation’s bookshops, lecture theatres, radio stations and television studios. She’s been short-listed for publishing awards and approached by HBO to make a documentary based on the families she met. Her findings contradict many judges, social scientists, religious groups and pundits. But what she discovered was that a boy’s morality and masculinity can be cultivated without a live-in father.

Indeed, she goes even further. In her view, traditional families have much to learn from these households: that boys from fatherless homes can fare better than boys raised in nuclear families.

It was the WAGS (wives and girlfriends) wot lost England the World Cup – oddly enough, didn’t see one of them on the field.

McLaren, who succeeds Sven-Goran Eriksson as England manager, feels that the WAGs’ conspicuous high spending in designer stores and raucous partying in the bars of Baden-Baden, England’s World Cup base, did not help the teams’ performance in the World Cup. England went out on penalties to Portugal in the quarter-final.

And it is not mother who knows best, but a “top fertility doctor” (unsurprisingly male), who says that women over a certain (unspecified) age should not be given fertility treatment: “Abdalla believes the practice should be halted because elderly mothers may not live long enough to see their children grow up.”

So presumably he also believes in compulsory vasectomies for males over the same age (in fact a few years younger, no doubt, since men on average die younger than women)?

If a 38-year-old single mother from South Africa can do this, it is our duty to try to ensure that Tesco is kept to its word:

Ms Baartman took on the might of the UK retailing world when she highlighted the plight of farm workers at Tesco’s annual shareholders’ meeting in London.
In front of more than 500 onlookers the fruit packer, who is paid 46 rand (£3.49) per day, made an impassioned plea to one of the best-paid executives in the City, Tesco’s chief executive Sir Terry Leahy. Her wages just scrape the legal minimum set by the South African government earlier this year, but are less than a man would earn for the same work.
Ms Baartman confessed she was risking her job by speaking out. She works on a farm in the western Cape that supplies Tesco with fruit during the country’s four-month growing season.
…
David Reid, Tesco’s chairman, said the supermarket’s ethical trading team had visited South Africa but had found no proof to back up the allegations made because both ActionAid and Women on Farms, a South African pressure group, will not name and shame the farms concerned. He promised to “personally guarantee” to protect Ms Baartman from any backlash from her employer if it managed to “expose any bad practice”.

You’ll find me again over on the Guardian’s CommentisFree, presenting an argument for a broad definition of “politics” in the blogosphere, and indeed more broadly. I doubt it will say anything particularly startling to most of my readers, but I’ve already been dueling with the first troll, so if you feel like offering a supportive comment I wouldn’t complain. I have to be in the mood to bother, but then it is fun…!

The cases that generally get attention are those in which the women end up dead, or grossly physically injured, but the practice also causes enormous psychological injury.

The girl, from Peterborough, was subjected to moral blackmail by her parents who said they would kill themselves if she did not marry the cousin she had never met.
The judge told the High Court in London: “She was kept in a remote part of Pakistan for many months and, despite begging her parents to be allowed to return to this country, she was subjected to unrelenting pressure, initially from her mother and subsequently by her father, as also from other members of the wider family.”… “She was subject to continued emotional pressure and moral blackmail, applied over many months,” the judge said. “Her will was overborne.”

Rightly, her marriage has been annulled, but that doesn’t mean she is free, for her solicitor told the court:

“I had to meet her in a Jobcentre to get instructions on the case because there was no other way to meet her. I, a white middle-class lawyer could not go to her home to meet her,” she said.
The woman is still living with her brothers who, Ms Hutchinson said, were in control. “She is cowed by her parents. She has to be terribly careful,” the solicitor said.

The woman is now 20, so it is probably too late for social services to intervene, but there must surely be some way of giving her some genuine freedom.