feminism
milhayser | April 4, 2016In January, Hillary Clinton still possessed the benefit of the doubt. Memories of her and Bill snarling at Barack Obama in 2008 had faded, and despite her long and dreadful record, it's always possible to turn over a new leaf. But Clinton's ongoing response to Bernie Sanders shows why she is unfit for the presidency. Even as the frontrunner, Hillary shows no leadership ability; she, too, follows Sanders, trailing him to the left as he takes meaningful positions on issues like income inequality and campaign finance reform. Her saccharine smile says "I can do that too!" but truly she should be…
pharyngula | January 20, 2016The stories about prominent harassers in the field of astronomy have been coming out a lot lately, and kudos to the field for taking steps to end a severe and chronic problem that impairs the advancement of half the members of the human race. But of course you knew the counter-reaction was coming. It's inevitable. Pointing out that prominent men have been doing bad things always leads to defensive shrieks of witch hunt!.
So here it comes: a "group" called Underground Astronomy is very concerned about the well-being of harassing astronomers. The women they've chased out of the discipline, not…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2015Today I proof-read the annual index for Fornvännen, the archaeology journal I co-edit. And I took the opportunity to look at our gender stats for full-length papers. There are 16 of these in this year's four issues. Only 31% have female first authors. An additional 31% have a male first author and at least one female author. So women are involved as authors in 62% of this year's full-length papers. That seems reasonably fair since several papers have only one author, so it would be impossible for each gender to be involved in all of them.
But you might wonder what a female author does to the…
pharyngula | August 27, 2015I endorse this article: 5 Ways That Science Supports Feminism – Not Gender Essentialism. It's making the point that when you actually study the relevant sciences, you discover that they fundamentally support a more complex view of sexuality than the usual boy/girl dichotomy. Here, in brief, are the five points it makes:
1. There Are More Than Two Sexes, Not to Mention a Vast Range of Gender Identities
2. The Environment Impacts Human Development from the Very Beginning at the Cellular Level
3. Socialization Is a Powerful Force
4. When Studies Do Find Gender Differences, They Are Often Too…
pharyngula | August 7, 2015I have a question for the partnered gay and lesbian couples out there. I know you get the question, Which one of you is the "man", and which is the "woman" from ignoramuses who are unable to think beyond their narrow sexual biases, but I'm wondering about a subtler, messier question.
Do you ever get asked, Which one is the mysterious one with incomprehensible desires? I'm curious because the BBC aired one of those science of sex shows titled, The MYSTERY of the Female Orgasm, which seems to be the standard question. Woman is mysterious…must seek out a pick-up artist to explain the cheat code…
pharyngula | August 4, 2015David Futrelle missed an opportunity! He posted about this awesomely stupid Reddit thread that asserts the biologically inferior nature of women, and then he admits to reading only a few of the comments in the resulting mess.
I do love that statement that They have very little conceptual understandings of mathematics, physics, IT or anything that matters -- so many presumptions packed into one short sentence! -- and it's amusing that this poor boy hasn't met any intelligent women because he defines "intelligent" as being as intellectually stunted as he is.
But there are so many other…
pharyngula | February 18, 2015That quote is from a good article in Nature on how sex is non-binary -- my only quibble would be with that "now". You'd have to define "now" as a window of time that encompasses the entirety of my training and work in developmental biology, and I'm getting to be kind of an old guy. Differences in sex development (DSDs) are common knowledge, and rather routine -- and coincidentally, I'm giving an exam on sex chromosome anomalies today.
The article works through a lot of basic concepts: chimeric sex, genetic vs. cellular vs. organismal sex, and the development of sexual characters. I was so…
catdynamics | January 4, 2015One of the joys of the holidays and the University turning off the heating and locking us out, is that it provides time to catch up on things: papers, refereeing, recommendation letters, grading, syllabi, proposals, all the stuff one can rarely get to during actual working semester hours.
And, sometimes, there is time for real life: casual reading, family, catching up online...
One of the ye olde blog things I like to look over occasionally is Scott Aaronson's shtetl-optimized, for the latest on P!=NP news, or polemic on quantum computing.
This time, what caught my eye was his take on the…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2014Here's an interesting case regarding Muslim women's veils. They're instruments or symbols of patriarchal repression, right? Well, check this out.
Dania Mahmudi is from my area, Fisksätra. She's 14 years old and wears a veil. Mahmudi has been practising karate for years. Two weeks ago she went with her club to the district championship, eager to compete. But the umpire disqualified her – for her veil's sake. It covered her throat, and karate competition rules state that the umpire needs to be able to watch for damage to each contestant's throat. OK, said her coach after a heated argument, so…
milhayser | October 20, 2014"Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet'." -Carlos Castaneda
"When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. And his thoughts soon clash.…
gregladen | May 5, 2014Miri has posted an excellent “…Review of the White House’s Report on Campus Sexual Violence which is a must read for anyone interested in sexual assault on campuses, and everyone should be concerned about this issue.
I would like to address one aspect of the problem here, briefly: the use of and concern over the term “rape culture.”
When I first encountered the term “rape culture” I was put off by it. I’ve lived in and directly studied, and indirectly studied through the literature, a wide range of cultures around the world, and there is a great range of variation in prevalence of and…
gregladen | March 14, 2014Warning, rapey themes and strong language, go away if you can't handle that.
Which is worse, rape threats or lightening up about rape threats? Since I hardly ever get rape threats and the ones I get are absurd, it is not really for me to say. The question here, is what does a woman who is active on line and gets numerous and scary rape (and other) threats feel about those threats vs. advice from allies(ish) who say "don't worry about it, just leave that behind."
This is tricky stuff, because the overt strategy one takes can vary depending on circumstances and there are a lot of valid…
gregladen | December 7, 2013This is a movie, narrated by Jodie Foster, produced by Robert Redford, directed by Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs, about the first woman director ever. She made the first narrative film ever. She also invented movie stars. Oh, and the thing where you have sound? She was the first to use synchronized sound. She did a lot of things first, and no one has ever heard of her. Many of her films were destroyed, others misattributed to others. This is one of the most amazing stories of modern culture I've ever seen. Can't wait 'till the actual film comes out.
More information is here and here…
gregladen | December 7, 2013Content warning: Severe obnoxiousosity.
I cribbed this from NPR. The Brain Scoop channel is here. If you've not watched it you are missing some good stuff!
...Emily Graslie's "The Brain Scoop" is one of the warmest, slyest video blogs on the web. She's where I go to find out what museum scientists are up to — and right now she's at the Field Museum in Chicago, where she wanders from department to department, exploring, delighting, asking questions that you and I would ask if someone gave us a free pass to gawk our way through one of the great natural history museums in the world. So I was…
gregladen | October 17, 2013Laura Helmuth has written what I think is one of the most important posts so far to emerge from the fray that is Bora Zivkovic's: Don’t Be a Creep: Lessons from the latest terrible, sad, fascinating scandal in the science blogging world. Before getting to what I think is the most important part of her post, I want to first say what the most important overall lessons are, clearly, from this whole maneno, because they are different than the lesson Laura writes about:
1) Men behaving poorly in relation to women, in the context of power imbalances (but also without the power imbalance) is…
gregladen | August 7, 2013Update: Never mind, Never mind! Scientific American Blogs has taken down Dr. Stollznow's post. So, I guess everything is OK now! False Alarm, everyone go home. Nothing to see here.
Say you are a woman in the Skeptics or Secular movement, professional, possibly working for one of the big organizations. If you are sexually harassed (or worse), the way you get your voice heard is, apparently, to blog your heart out, or use an anonymous tumbler.
That is wrong. Organizations such as JREF and CFI should have been places that were safe, and that would facilitate and amplify your voice as…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2013My Wulfheodenas homie David Huggins asked me a good question. ”Shield maidens! True or False? Okay, that was a bit general, but female 'warrior' graves, symbolic or otherwise?”. I take this to mean “Were there female warriors in Northern Europe AD 500-1000?”
Let's start by examining why everyone accepts that there were male warriors. Indeed, to my knowledge most scholars believe that at least, say, 99.9% of all warriors were men, and conversely that a considerable percentage of free-born men received some degree of weapons training. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, the written…
gregladen | May 28, 2013Secular Woman is an organization I'm proud to be a member of. SW has released a statement responding to the latest dust up in the Secular-Atheist-Skeptical Community in which CFI leader Ron Lindsay somehow got assigned the job of giving the welcoming/opening talk to the second Women in Secularism Conference, and made a big mess of it.
Here's the first part of the statement, click through to read the rest:
The Secular Woman Board of Directors, in consultation with our most active members and supporters, regrets having to express our organization’s deep concern over recent public statements…
gregladen | April 11, 2013Usually I don't mention books unless I've read them, but I thought a lot of my readers would be interested in a volume I have only heard about: Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and the Sexual Politics of Meat.
Here is the description:
When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that…
gregladen | February 3, 2013... Warning abuse triggers ...
Breakthrough's video -Mann ke Manjeeré- winner of the Screen Awards 2001 in India and nominated for MTV's 'Best Indipop Music Video', reached 26 million households via six satellite music television channels, effectively mainstreaming discussions about domestic violence issues throughout South Asia and reaching as far as Tajikistan, Indonesia and the United States.
One Billion Strong