Thus Spake Zuska

Following Isis's Lead...

Category: Announcements • Burns My Shorts • Gratuitous Sexism • Outrage of the Week

While I've been away from the blogiverse, it appears that you've had the misfortune to be treated to all manner of disgusting ads popping up here at ScienceBlogs. Mail Order Brides, Naughty Singles, and I don't know what all else. Isis has some details here. She says:

...if you've been visiting me for any length of time then you know how I feel about the exploitation of women, especially racial minorities and women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That's the entire point of the Letters to Our Daughters Project and the Silence is the Enemy Project, right?

That said, I cannot in good faith continue to contribute content here while these ads remain visible. This also makes me sad because I love being at ScienceBlogs. I love my Sciblings (well, most of them) and I believe in the establishment of community for the promotion of science. But, it would not be right for my page views to generate revenue that funds individuals who exploit women. The morality in this matter seems pretty black and white.

I believe the management here at ScienceBlogs when they tell me that they are working to have their ad agency remove the ads, but the traffic generated in the meantime while those ads still appear still puts money in the pockets of those who exploit women. So, until I receive confirmation from the Overlords here at ScienceBlogs that these ads are gone, I'm taking a hiatus.

Well said. Can't think of a thing to add at this point. I'll be back when the ads are gone. In the meantime, I sincerely apologize to those of you who have been offended by the ads, and I hope that someday you'll receive an apology from ScienceBlogs, too.

Posted by Zuska at 9:41 PM • 3 Comments

Delays, Delays

Category: Announcements

Hi folks. I had kind of a rough visit home to mom at the end of last week/weekend that took a lot out of me, followed by several days in a row of pretty bad migraines. I had hoped to post my next Gender Knot installment today but it just ain't happening. Rather than promise another date I will just say - ASAP. Between the trip and the migraines I am just worn out. Please bear with me. Thanks.

Posted by Zuska at 8:50 PM • 6 Comments

First Year Patriarchy Laboratory

Category: Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds

Christina Pikas has a nice post about finding information in books.

Sadly, however, she notes the following:

What kinds of things might a book work best for?...not for cutting edge, mostly

What does this imply when you think about our ongoing project to work our way through Allan Johnson's The Gender Knot? Oh crap, we're doing gender equity work, but we're not on the cutting edge?

That's okay, d00dz. Trust me, you so do not want to jump right to the cutting edge of discourse on the patriarchy. Did you walk right into the lab as an undergrad or a fresh grad student and start banging chemicals and glassware and equipment around?** I didn't think so. You had to learn some basics and background info first.

I guarantee you, though, that if you stick with The Gender Knot you will come through at the end knowing a whole lot more about patriarchy and gender issues, in a useful manner, than perhaps you did about chemistry at the end of your first-year chem lab. At least, if your first-year chem lab was like mine.

**If you did, you are just a fool. That shit is dangerous.

Posted by Zuska at 1:23 AM • 5 Comments

Cooking: A Primitive Protection Racket

Category: Gendering Technology • Manly Men • What They're Saying

Bloggingheads.tv has John Horgan interviewing Richard Wrangham of Harvard on a variety of topics related to his new book Catching Fire. The part of interest to me - and to our ongoing discussion on patriarchy - relates to cooking as a "primitive protection racket" in which men agree to protect women's food supply in return for being fed so they can just hang out and do manly shit. It's a fascinating discussion, if you can get past Horgan giggling in sheepish delight every time Wrangham points out what a shitty deal patriarchy is for women.

Interestingly, this section of the interview is advertised as "ancient connections between food and sex" but it would more properly be described as "ancient connections between food and the sexual division of labor". I guess "sex" is more sexy and sells better than "sexual division of labor". Because Wrangham clearly points out that the sexual division of labor that involves women cooking and feeding men is NOT related to who's having sex with whom.

He also clearly makes the point that this sexual division of labor is not a result of our biology, but a consequence of a choice of a particular set of social relations - one of which, in modern industrial societies, we have chosen in many ways to undo. Single men are able to feed themselves, if only by ordering pizza, and married men often do the cooking these days.

Incidentally, the mini-review of Wrangham's book on Amazon illustrates why the term "mankind" is not an appropriate substitute for "humankind":

By making food more digestible and easier to extract energy from, Wrangham reasons, cooking enabled hominids' jaws, teeth and guts to shrink, freeing up calories to fuel their expanding brains. It also gave rise to pair bonding and table manners, and liberated mankind from the drudgery of chewing (while chaining womankind to the stove).

The second sentence is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. It sounds sort of nice on first glance with that oppositional mankind and womankind. Until you realize that those who were liberated from the drudgery of chewing were, well, everyone, women as well as men. The sentence sounds like it's working to say men got liberated from x while women got chained to y by the move to cooking, but that's not what happened. Humans got liberated from x, while simultaneously, a subset of humans, women, got chained to y. Using the term humankind would make it clearer that women simultaneously benefited from and were harmed by the move to cooked food. Using mankind as a substitute for humankind attempts to work both meanings into this sentence. First, the fuller and true meaning, that humans benefited from something that also harmed a subset of humans. Second, the less true oppositional meaning that men (only) gained and women were harmed. That second oppositional meaning also serves to reinforce the notion that mankind really means men and that women are a special (lesser) case of mankind - a subtextual meaning that the use of the word humankind in this instance would not convey.

Posted by Zuska at 12:37 PM • 19 Comments

Next Gender Knot Post Will Be Next Week

Category: Announcements • Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds

Hi all...just wanted to let you know that I am planning to do the first post for Chapter 2 of The Gender Knot sometime next week, probably mid-week. I have the new edition of the book and have been reading but there's a lot of stuff going on with mine and Mr. Z's family this week. I hope to do a few posts on other topics in the meantime, but we will be back with the Gender Knot next week. Meanwhile. there are still some pretty active discussions on the last few posts. Thanks to my readers for such intense conversation.

Posted by Zuska at 2:28 PM • 4 Comments

Gender Knot Ch. 1 Follow Up: Who Has The Power of the Gaze?

Category: Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds

What does it mean when a woman ogles a man in the patriarchy?

Reader RichB commented:

...men being looked at as sexual objects increases their power, but women being looked at as sexual objects decreases their power.

Reader Hope isn't buying it:

Really? So if I ogle a man, I'm increasing his power? If a man ogles another man, he's increasing that other man's power? Or is it just that I, as a woman, have no power to objectify a man? No power, period?

What's the answer? Can a woman objectify a man, or not?

Read on »

Posted by Zuska at 7:09 PM • 50 Comments

Gender Knot Ch. 1 Follow Up: Intentionality

Category: Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds

In light of the great discussion you all have been having on the second post on Chapter 1 of The Gender Knot, I thought it would be a good time to direct you to this most excellent Feminism 101 post at Shakesville, "Sexism Is A Matter Of Opinion". The whole thing is pure gold but I'd like to point out in particular this section on intentionality.

Read on »

Posted by Zuska at 6:39 PM • 17 Comments

A Question for Women in Geoscience/Environmental Science/Field Science

Category: Announcements • Naming Experience • Workshops and Conferences

Kim at All of My Faults Are Stress Related asks:

I've got a question for women readers, especially those in the geosciences, environmental sciences, or field sciences: what do you get out of reading blogs? And if you have a blog yourself, what do you get out of writing it?

I'm asking because there's a session at this year's Geological Society of America meeting on "Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences" (and that's in the applied geosciences as well as in academia), and I wondered whether blogs (whether geo-blogs or women-in-science blogs or both) help.

Please do go read her post and, if you are a woman in one of the relevant research fields, leave your 2 cents worth in the comment thread. The post is a wonderfully written examination of Kim's reasons for blogging - you'll enjoy it on it's own terms, even if you don't want to contribute to the comments.

Posted by Zuska at 6:16 PM • 0 Comments

The Gender Knot: Ch. 1 Discussion - "Where Are We?" Part 2

Category: Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds

Welcome to our discussion of The Gender Knot by Allan Johnson. This is the second post in the discussion series. We will be discussing Chapter 1 "Where Are We?" You can find all posts connected to this discussion here.

As noted before, there is an updated edition of the book now available. In the first post, I was working with the 1997 edition. I now have the new edition and this post is based on that edition. The first chapter is available online here. If you haven't had a chance to read the chapter, maybe you'd like to go now and read the pages covering "Women and Patriarchy" and "Deep Structure and the Way Out", page 13 to the end.

Just as in the first post, let's start with one important concept. If you take away nothing else from today's post, please at least spend some time chewing on this bit (based on arguments of sociologist David Wellman) which is actually to be found in a footnote on page 15 (emphasis mine):

The words sexism and sexist are commonly used to describe a personal prejudice or the person who holds it...however, that approach is too narrow to be of use because male privilege requires far more than this to continue...I use the term to indicate anything that has the effect of promoting male privilege, regardless of the intentions of the people involved. By judging actions, policies, and institutional arrangements solely in terms of their consequences, [this] conceptualization allows us to focus on the full range of forces that perpetuate male privilege, and saves us from the trap of personalizing what is essentially a social and systematic phenomenon.

We're going to take this concept along with Johnson's metaphor of patriarchy as a tree and use both to look at a particularly illustrative and timely (in the blogospheric sense) case study. Yes, I am speaking of tit-ogling. Come along with me, d00ds, for we have much to talk about.

Read on »

Posted by Zuska at 7:10 PM • 59 Comments

The Iron As Technological Art Object: Part II

Category: Geekalicious • Gendering Technology • Why Aren't You Reading This?

When I was a young girl, I used to watch my mother at her ironing board. There was always a lot of ironing to be done. She kept a big clear plastic bag of clothes waiting their turn at the ironing board, and would sprinkle them with water - there was a special bottle for this sprinkling. I do not think we owned a steam iron when I was very young, and dampening the clothes in this manner was an attempt to help ease the wrinkles out during the ironing process.

Eventually I became old enough to assist in the never-ending ironing chores, and my mother let me practice on pillow cases, just as she did with my sisters. (My brothers, being boys, were exempt from such women's work.) Pillow cases were easy, nice and rectangular; Dad's white t-shirts were slightly more tricky, and from there on I graduated to jeans and then other fancier types of clothing.

Looking back on those years, I can't believe how much time we spent ironing, and how many things we ironed that never feel the touch of an iron today. Pillow cases! White cotton undershirts! Who irons such things nowadays, even though modern irons with all their advanced technology and wonderfully controlled settings would make short work of what we labored over in decades past. I own an Oreck Cord-Free JP8100C Steam Iron which is lightweight and a breeze to use, and yet I ironed a total of two articles of clothing with it in the past two years.

I thought about these things the past week at my mother's house, as I contemplated Jay Raymond's gorgeously photographed book Streamlined Irons.

Read on »

Posted by Zuska at 2:29 PM • 9 Comments