Gratuitous Sexism
thusspakezuska | June 24, 2010Jun. 17, 2010 3:34 AM ET
SB COMMUNITY DEEMS FEMINISTS IRRELEVANT NOBODY MEAN GIRLS, OMNIPOTENT PRIVILEGED HELLIONS
Douchey McDoucherson, ScienceBlogs Writers
ANYWHERE (SB)
Just days after a remarkable dustup in the science blogosphere, ScienceBlogs community members gathered to render judgment on feminist science bloggers.
Noted commenter, blogger, and cress fancier B-DOH! said "PZ and Orac take out the clueless fuckwits of the world with penetrating criticism, incisive wit and clever put downs. Feminists science bloggers, with their aggressive snark, set a tone."
Newly disclosed…
thusspakezuska | April 28, 2010A reader sent me a link to this d00dly graph, What The Force Would Be Used For If It Actually Existed. If you don't want to bother to click through, the answer is: greater than 50%, pulling the remote to you because it is too far away; insignificant percentage, actually making a difference in the universe; all the remaining percentage, persuading women to undress. Wait, I can't keep typing because I'm laughing so, so much. Oh, those clever d00ds.
My correspondent wrote:
This is rather disturbing if you think about it. Using coercion to "persuade" a woman to undress: shades of rape…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2010The other day, a male friend of mine was at the grocery store in the check out line. He was not feeling particularly happy, and, I guess, was frowning a little. A dude in line behind him tapped him on his shoulder to get his attention and when he turned around, the dude said, in a bright voice, "You dropped something," and was pointing to the floor. My male friend looked down and said, "I don't see anything." The dude then told him, "You dropped your smile." My male friend was not amused. He turned around going back to his business saying, "Oh, OK." The man proceeded to walk away mumbling…
thusspakezuska | March 14, 2010Over at the mansplaining thread, you can read literally hundreds of hilarious, annoying, frustrating, heartbreaking stories of how women are constantly subjected to intrusive, incessant, insensitive, inane mansplaining. Interspersed you will also find comments from d00dly d00ds whinging away about how awful it is that women are talking so MEAN about men, and their mansplanations about how mansplaining doesn't exist. Then some douche tried to coin the phrase femsplaining.
Femsplaining, as best I can tell, is a phenomenon that arises in the following manner:
(1) A woman points out an…
thusspakezuska | February 5, 2010Lindsey Vonn is on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Womentalksports.com notes
Vonn is first a GREAT athlete, but she also represents norm of feminine attractiveness. The combination of athleticism and attractiveness make Vonn the likely poster girl of the US Olympic Team, and the media hasn't disappointed in constructed her as such.
Not to be left out, Sports Illustrated is featuring Vonn on their February 8,2010 cover (pictured here). For those of you who follow SI Covers, know that female athletes are RARELY featured on the cover.
Over the last 60 years researchers have shown that about 4…
thusspakezuska | January 21, 2010Okay, the actual story is this:
if you are an overweight woman you:
⢠May have a harder time getting health insurance or have to pay higher premiums
⢠Are at higher risk of being misdiagnosed or receiving inaccurate dosages of drugs
⢠Are less likely to find a fertility doctor who will help you get pregnant
⢠Are less likely to have cancer detected early and get effective treatment for it
And the story goes on to outline a whole host of reasons, some discriminatory, some actual problems caused by physical realities, why the above might be so. But before you get to any of that, you are…
thusspakezuska | December 29, 2009Last time I checked, Erma Bombeck, when she was alive, was a hugely popular American humorist who wrote a newspaper column and published 15 books, most of which were best sellers. She came from the working class, and made quite a successful career for herself in publishing, at a time when women normally did not have careers.
But apparently, since she wrote about housewives and domestic issues, there's nothing to admire about what she did. And if you want to mock a woman writer these days, why, you just link her to Erma Bombeck and call it at day. See: "Erma-Bombeckian" (Steven Pinker…
thusspakezuska | October 5, 2009Last night I was watching tv with Mr. Zuska and the loathsome Kohler's "Jo's Plumbing" commercial came on yet again.
Plumbing is one of those trades that have been traditionally dominated by men. Women have struggled to gain access to these well-paying jobs. It is a job that takes a women out, often on her own, into the houses of strangers, where she might be vulnerable to sexual assault, not to mention the harassment and discrimination she might have to put up with on the job from colleagues.
In this commercial the young plumber is, of course, hot and sexy, dressed in tight clothing to…
thusspakezuska | August 4, 2009You are a male physics professor, and you want to improve science education. What could possibly be a better idea than to team up with a bunch of professional cheerleaders and make a video of them shouting out science tidbits while they shake their pompoms? Science cheerleaders!
I know, right? You wish you'd thought of it first, don't you?
The only thing worse than this loathsome idea is the Chronicle of Higher Education reporting on it with the headline "Blonded By Science". Seriously.
I am not sure whether James Trefil, of George Mason University, seriously thinks that women…
thusspakezuska | July 2, 2009While 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…
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2009Sooooo....it appears some of you take your comics quite seriously. At least, should one be so foolish as to point out painfully obvious, boringly everyday occurrences of sexism.
Danimal asks of Comrade Physioprof: "So you are saying the comic reflects real life?"
What Physioprof said is this: "Every single one of the Foxtrots themselves represents absolute conformity to patriarchal gender norms. And the characters who are not part of the family who appear to violate those norms serve the patriarchal narrative purely as foils."
Inasmuch as patriarchal gender norms represent Real LifeTM,…
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 | 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 | 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 | March 6, 2008I don't think this is what Dave Munger had in mind when he recommended using graphics in your blog posts, at the NC Science Blogging Conference.
For the last two weeks, this post has been one of the top 3 posts on Scienceblogs - the number one post last week.
This is the kind of post I would expect to find on an adolescent male's science blog. But hey, why not use objectification of women to boost your science blog? Apparently it works.
Afarensis, I puke upon your pseudonymous shoes.
For whose benefit, we might ask, has Afarensis posted this bit of cheesecake? Why, for the benefit of…
thusspakezuska | February 12, 2008I've written in the recent past about why Jim Watson is bad for science, especially the perception non-scientists get of science as a result of his pseudo-scientific racist natterings. I analyzed the reactions within the scientific community to the recent Watson imbroglio.
It's far past time for me to speak up about how Watson's mess hits closer to home. I am talking about his role on the board of directors of Seed Media Group as a scientific adviser. Seed Media Group, as you may know, is the organization that sponsors Scienceblogs. I have to tell you, it is extremely disgusting to be…
thusspakezuska | October 16, 2007Really. I am not making this up. As quoted in The Guardian:
He smiles. "Rosalind is my cross," he says slowly. "I'll bear it. I think she was partially autistic." He pauses for a while, before repeating the suggestion, as if to make it clear that this is no off-the-cuff insult, but a considered diagnosis. "I'd never really thought of scientists as autistic until this whole business of high-intelligence autism came up. There is probably no other explanation for Rosalind's behaviour.
Oh, yes, a considered diagnosis, I'm sure. He's been considering since 1953 what he'd like to preemptively…
thusspakezuska | September 27, 2007Saw this over at The Chem Blog. Couldn't help offering my own spin on it. Chem Blog needs some serious shoe-puking.
I recommend you read the original, then my version. It will be more fun that way.
Oh god that is so freaking depressing isn't it? Reminds me of a sad story from when I was in grad school. Seems there was a boy with good looking transcripts but about equivalent to those of a girl in the program so they gave a hearty fellowship to the boy because, as you may have guessed, he's got a Y chromosome and this advantage must be exacerbated with fellowships, grants and pats on…
thusspakezuska | September 12, 2007So I'm skimming along in Google Reader, thinking it's the year 2007, when whoa! I happen upon this post by Female Science Professor. Did he actually call her "science lady"? WTF? What millennium are we living in?
And this is the kind of response you get from the authorities when you are calling about a long-standing, well-documented problem of stalking/harassment. But hey, she wasn't actually physically assaulted by the stalker, so what's the big deal, right? Plus, she was asking for it.
What if she was physically assaulted and was actually unable to ask for it at the time - i.e…
thusspakezuska | September 11, 2007Female Science Professor works with Professor Troll. Perhaps many of you have a similar colleague or acquaintance.
What do you do when you constantly have to rub shoulders with Professor Troll's ilk? Like mosquitoes in summer, they buzz around strong, intelligent women, unable to stay away, compelled to bite with the little meanness of remarks on your lack of merit, while simultaneously injecting the irritant of blather based on their wildly inflated ego. You will find the words "rigorous" and "hard science" and "real scientists do/would/are..." popping up in their conversation a lot.…