Burns My Shorts
thusspakezuska | May 21, 2009It can't be avoided. Once a year you make the trek to the gynecologist's office for the annual exam. For various reasons, the whole experience is extremely unpleasant for me, and yet I go, because I try to take care of my health. And hey, I have health insurance! And it pays for the annual exam. Lucky me, I don't even need a referral to see my gynecologist. Though I do get to pay the higher copay for "specialists". This is especially maddening as my primary care physician, a woman I respect and dearly love, could do the exam for me - and does, for many of her other patients - but my…
thusspakezuska | May 15, 2009Hat tip to reader James Ramsey...
What do women really need in computer? Because, what with our vaginas and all, our computing needs are so, so different from those of men. Thank the goddess Dell is looking out for us, with its helpful marketing strategy that emphasizes "color schemes, cases and dieting tips". Oh my god, I can accessorize my laptop? I must have died and gone to heaven! Here's a "Tech Tip" from the Della site (isn't that so cute??? get it? Dell, the real site, is gendered "guy", while Della is for us girls. I mean, who would want to buy a laptop from a guy site, right…
thusspakezuska | April 21, 2009I love the comic pages in the newspaper. Some of them are just mildly amusing, but some are bitingly funny and offer real social satire (Pearls Before Swine comes to mind here, as does Non Sequitur). But I was definitely not amused this past weekend when I read the April 19 strip of Foxtrot.
In case you aren't able to view the strip: the first panel shows a string of numbers, below which is a key. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a semi-complex mathematical formulation, which must be solved to yield the number, which in turn allows one to substitute letters for numbers in the…
thusspakezuska | March 23, 2009Yeah, I should be asleep, restoring strength for spending another day with mom. But I'm catching up on email and blogs and preparing for the upcoming Diversity in Science Carnival WHICH YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BE WRITING SOMETHING FOR - GET BUSY, NOW!
And in the course of all that I read this post by Stephanie Z which led me to Sheril Kirshenbaum's post (Goodbye, Sheril, we will totally miss you here at Scienceblogs) Where Are The Women With BIG Ideas?
I'd like to point readers to a recent piece from The Guardian asking 'Where are the books by women with big ideas?'
Books like Freakonomics,…
thusspakezuska | March 15, 2009This past Friday morning, as per my usual routine, I sat down to read the Philadelphia Inquirer with my coffee and breakfast. And I came across an article that nearly made me vomit back all that delicious Toy Cow Farms blueberry yoghurt I had just spooned down. I refer, of course, to the piece on the "quaint Victorian home" shared by Darla, Chelsea, and Coco Puff.
Their dwelling has a cedar-shake roof, vaulted ceilings, and hardwood floors, heating and air-conditioning, moldings and casement windows, drapery with valences, and fanciful wallpapers.
At Christmas, music from the RCA Victor…
thusspakezuska | March 1, 2009Reader JC left a comment on a recent post about sexual harassment that led me to a Feminist Law Professor post on a sexual harassment lawsuit against Brigham & Women's Hospital. It is a post well worth reading, if you have ever wondered why more women don't sue over sexual harassment, or why women don't just speak up immediately and complain at the first sign of harassing behavior. Maybe you have been secretly suspecting that women who file sexual harassment charges or lawsuits just have some ax to grind and/or are trying to ruin some Nice Man's career because they are bitter pre-/post-…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2009SCENE:
At the YMCA: they used to have perfectly serviceable water fountains in the room with the treadmills, elliptical trainers, and weight machines. They ripped them out and replaced them with water coolers that require the use of little conical paper cups - which, of course, must be used once and then thrown away. I and a few others left comments on their comment cards to the effect that this was a fucking stupid move, wasteful in the extreme, bad for the environment, blah blah. Response: we hear your concerns; we are so concerned about sanitation, water coolers are better for everyone,…
thusspakezuska | February 24, 2009It's certainly a tragedy when anyone takes their own life. I feel very sorry for the surviving family members and colleagues affected by the suicides of two U. of Iowa professors accused of sexual harassment who took their own lives last year.
And yet. I have little patience with this Chronicle of Higher Education article about them. You can file it under the category of "but he was such a really wonderful person! There's just no way he could have done these things!" Or, alternatively, "Those TERRIBLE women RUINED the lives of these WONDERFUL men!"
In the case of Arthur H. Miller…
thusspakezuska | February 10, 2009I love being part of ScienceBlogs. I've gotten to meet a lot of my Sciblings in person by now and have generally found them to be wonderful people. Readers, I like them!
Except. I really don't like the trash one of my Sciblings has been flinging around lately. Sooooo not cool. Details over at Isis's pad. Sing it, sister!
When people go around saying stuff like this
I have been accused of not being on board because I don't like the anger. At the same time I'm a progenitor of anger when I feel like doing it. I admit that the anger works, but I also feel that ally building is sometimes…
thusspakezuska | January 21, 2009As if the world needed another example of how the American health insurance system is completely insane, maddening, inefficient...I mean, we've all seen Sicko, right? But let me just share the private hell I've been through recently. I'd like to tell you what happened yesterday, but to do that, I have to go back a month or two.
In November my mother was hospitalized, and then spent time in a rehab hospital. During that time, she had a CT scan that diagnosed blood clots in her lungs. Medicare had approved my mother's stay in the rehab hospital and, presumably, the treatments and…
thusspakezuska | September 10, 2008So, to recap:
A couple of women are having a conversation, and the topic turns to tit-ogling. "No one should be staring at my tits in the workplace," they all agree. "That makes me uncomfortable, creates a hostile work environment, and constitutes sexual harassment! How difficult is it to look at my eyes? Staring and ogling is a threatening display of power enacted in a sexual manner. This isn't the Mad Men era. Haven't men figured out how to behave in a professional situation by now?"
A dude at the table next to them has been listening in and feels compelled to pipe up:
"Ladeez…
thusspakezuska | August 28, 2008This article was bizarrely stashed in the business section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, rather than reported as Science news, or even just as general news.
Going back to 1969, a chemist with no soul named Manfred DeRewal bought a local farm and then used it as a chemical waste dumping ground, hiring himself out to local companies as their cheap waste solution. This went on for, oh, a really long time. Litigation is now ongoing in the federal courts over who is responsible for cleanup. Now this:
Yesterday, Carpenter Technology Corp., one of the companies whose waste ended up at the farm…
thusspakezuska | August 19, 2008A reader named Paul Murray left this comment on a older blog post of mine:
The comments on tit-staring make me wish the women could occupy a man's body for a day. Ignoring tits in your visual field is as easy as it is for a woman to simply ignore a cute baby in the vicinity.
I was flabbergasted, to say the least. What to be more annoyed at? The suggestion that women are somehow programmed - biologically, of course, I am sure - with some sort of infant-adoration module? Or Mr. Murray's casual insult to his fellow men, that they are simply incapable of behaving decently? That's quite some…
thusspakezuska | August 1, 2008Female Science Professor has a great Q&A post, So They Had To Hire A Woman. Here's a sample:
Question: So you're going to get a Ph.D.? Couldn't you find anyone to marry you?
Answer 1: Why would I want to get married when so many men are just like you?
Answer 2: That's right, and I want to be a professor so that there are fewer people like you saying things like that.
I much prefer the first answer. Heh.
But really, once you start perusing the comments, it's absolutely stunning how many women report having some variant of this question thrown in their face. Like this comment from…
thusspakezuska | July 16, 2008Hello, dear readers...if there are any of you left...I've been away for a week taking care of mom, plus the usual migraine breaks...back home now, and hoping to get back in the blogging groove asap.
Meanwhile, Physioprof is off guest-blogging at Feministe for two weeks and you absolutely have to read his deconstruction of a really atrocious piece of reporting in the New York Times about Title IX and science, Teh Ladeez Jus Don Liek Teh Scienz. Warning: the quotes from the NYT will make your teeth hurt.
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2008I was browsing the Women's Policy Inc. site, which is awesome, and ran across an item in the June 16, 2008 issue of The Source that just left me with my mouth hanging open. I can't find a permalink for this item; follow this link and scroll down to the fifth item, "House Approves Paid Parental Leave for Federal Employees". What's under discussion is a bill that
would allow federal employees to be paid for four of the twelve weeks of parental leave to which they are entitled under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) (P.L. 103-3). The legislation also would permit federal employees to…
thusspakezuska | June 24, 2008The latest issue of Smithsonian arrived today, in time for my dinner. There are few things more pleasing than reading and eating on a fine summer day, sitting on the back patio with a light breeze blowing and the perfect toasted cheese sandwich, not burned this time, sitting on my plate.
But even a perfect toasted cheese sandwich can have its charms diminished when you find your sex so blithely dismissed in the opening lines of an article that caught your eye:
Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a craftsman sat in a cave in a limestone cliff overlooking the rocky coast of what is now the…
thusspakezuska | May 12, 2008A friend of mine recently accepted a job in academic administration. He is extremely excited about the job and eager to do good things in his position. He is also a dedicated father and truly shares equal parenting responsibilities with his spouse. His spouse is in a career that is less time-flexible than academia is - or could be.
At my friend's prior job, he generally started his workday a little later than the norm, in order to care for the kids until departure for school. He worked from home very early in the morning, was accessible by cell and email, and came into the workplace…
thusspakezuska | April 17, 2008UPDATE: After posting this entry, I found out that the paper I discussed here is not actually slated at this time to be published in a peer-reviewed journal; it is merely available as a preprint. Nevertheless, I hear that the folks at Nature have picked up on this and have interviewed the author; we may see something next week there about it.
Remember that famous line about how women need to be twice as good as men to be considered half as good? A new statistical study by Sherry Towers available on ArXiv.org shows just how true this is in the world of particle physics.
Here's the scoop…