Manly Men
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 | March 10, 2010That mansplainer thread just won't quit - it is the gift that keeps on giving. Well, if you can call continuing recitations of the endless ways women are constantly mansplained by the d00dly mainsplainers of the world a "gift". Along with the mansplainer d00ds who show up to mansplain how mansplaining does not exist, should not be called mansplaining if it does exist, is a benign and non-sexist practice if it does exist, and anyway, I THOUGHT THIS WAS SCIENCEBLOGS WHAT ABOUT THE SCIENCE DEAR GOD WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE POOR SCIENCE????
Which brings us to Ace's most excellent and apropos…
thusspakezuska | March 9, 2010I failed to produce this post in time for DNLee's Diversity in Science carnival - Black History Month: Broadening STEM Participation at Every Level. That's mostly because I had a bunch of personal stuff going on in the past couple weeks that just wouldn't leave me alone. I think I'll be back to more regular blogging now.
You might have already read my brief post on Hercules, the chef enslaved by George Washington who eventually escaped to freedom. In it I noted "It was no small thing to be a chef under such circumstances, and the degree of technical skill required was surely astonishing…
thusspakezuska | November 14, 2009Not that it matters much with this dreadful film, but if you're worried about spoilers, don't read this post till you've seen the movie. You've been warned. Proceed past the jump at your own risk. Movie trailer can be found here.
Norma and Arthur have been given a box! With a button! Push the button and get a million bucks! Only, well, someone has to die. Dang. Norma's a nice girl, but she pushes the button anyway. And then watches it rise again in all its slow motion phallic majesty.
So, it turns out, the fancy little button boxes are being doled out only to married couples…
thusspakezuska | June 24, 2009Bloggingheads.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…
thusspakezuska | May 15, 2009Well, that's quite a vigorous discussion we've all been having these past few days over proto-feminist d00ds, no? I am grateful to you all for your participation and for the many good suggestions made to help proto-feminist d00ds along the path of growth. In case some of you missed it, Comrade Physioprof offered his own handy-dandy guide for d00dly commenters over at Isis's place.
With all the interest in these two posts, I'm thinking that maybe we need to spend a little more time talking to/with/for the d00dly d00ds. Herewith, I am proposing Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds.…
thusspakezuska | May 11, 2009In the midst of a vigorous discussion on my last post, reader Deatkin expressed his frustrations as to how he might engage in a positive manner in a discussion of feminist issues. In this case, it was not the hairy-legged man-hating feminazi Zuska who was intimidating; it was Comrade Physioprof.
Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that the problem lies with me on this... In sum, I may simply be too immature (I'm 20 and a mere undergraduate) to think broadly and imaginatively enough on feminist issues in order for me to reach a conclusion that somebody such as [Comrade Physioprof] would find…
thusspakezuska | May 5, 2009Every manly man of means these days has gotta have a man-cave, right? Every man gotta be a caveman, right?
Wrong. D00ds, step away from your caves! You must read The Caveman Mystique, and if you cannot, as a self-respecting caveman, be bothered to read a whole freakin' book, at least read this post over at The World's Fair. Fab interview with Caveman Mystique author Martha McCaughey.
Maybe if you read the book in a techno-geeky way, say, on Kindle, you could preserve your caveman status even as you are deconstructing it????
Image from Flickr, posted by VonMurr http://www.flickr.com/…
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 5, 2008In the past it's not been my practice to read the business section of the newspaper but lately I've been paying more attention to it. Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer's business section featured an article I just couldn't resist: Hacker Camp: Computer programmers get to play attacker in order to learn how to do security better.
Early in the article we learn that all the "campers" are men. This is discouraging. I don't know how attendees were recruited or selected but I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of outreach to women. This is the part of the article that really woke me up, however:…
thusspakezuska | November 4, 2007Ladies, all these years you've been using blenders and understood them as belonging to the category "kitchen gadget".
But when he uses the manly new stainless steel RPM blender, it's not a kitchen gadget, it's a tool!
Or so the manly man on HGTV's "I Want That! Kitchens" informed viewers this afternoon.
It was a beautiful spot on the show. We saw the happy nuclear family at home, mom reading to the kids, and dad - dad practiced a few karate kicks for the camera. That helped establish his manliness for us, prior to us seeing him in the kitchen using that gadget - I mean, the new RPM…
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.…
thusspakezuska | August 30, 2007Alert reader Linda Carpenter has given me a heads-up about a forthcoming book that is a "take down of ev-psych style cave-masculinity". Ooh, that sounds tasty! The book is The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science by Martha McCaughey. Here's the book description:
Has evolution made men promiscuous skirt chasers? Pop-Darwinian claims about men's irrepressible heterosexuality have become increasingly common, and increasingly common excuses for men's sexual aggression. The Caveman Mystique traces such claims about the hairier sex through…
thusspakezuska | August 20, 2007Here's a charming quote from a recent LA Times piece on neuroscience:
...Lynch said: "Several years ago, I sent a student out and said, 'Your job is to find out what the boys know about assembly.' That's what grad students are for. They're the cannon fodder of science. You throw them at problems that have no chance of being solved..."
The cannon fodder of science. If I were a graduate student, I would so not go to work in Moron Gary Lynch's lab. Especially if I were a female graduate student. I mean, really - "the boys"? Sexism and infantilizing your rivals all in one handy phrase.
I…
thusspakezuska | August 19, 2007Have you read the Nature editorial? Have you read my earlier post about it? Maybe what you are wanting is a deeper textual analysis of the editorial itself. You've come to the right place.
Men [sick]
Our 1869 mission statement is out of date.
That's what the bitchy, complaining women are making us say.
It was 1833 when the English polymath William Whewell first coined the word 'scientist'. Over subsequent decades, the word gradually replaced such commonly used terms as 'natural philosophers' and 'men of science.
Scientist, you see , actually means "men of science". So even if we changed…
thusspakezuska | August 15, 2007Female Science Professor has been posting a set of tales based on her recent, annual trip to spend quality time with the extended family. Those of you with families should be able to sympathize.
In Men Are So Special, she reminisces about last year's bang-up good times:
It might be easier to endure these family visits if I could get away once in a while and take a break from making sandwiches for my uncles, but our family get-togethers occur on an island, in a house surrounded on 3 sides by tall trees and on the fourth side by a cliff. I think it would be easier to escape from Alcatraz.…
thusspakezuska | July 31, 2007You can study it scientifically, gather the data, analyze it, publish it in Science, and have it discussed on NPR. But by golly, if you are asking us to give up cherished stereotypical beliefs about male and female nature, then you can just take your data and shove it, mister! You are wrong, wrong, wrong, because My Personal Feeling About How Things Are says otherwise.
This, of course, would be the kind of reaction stirred up by Matthias Mehl et al.'s study Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?, published in the July 5, 2007 issue of Science. Let us consider the abstract from the…
thusspakezuska | June 19, 2007For those who may be interested, I have written an addendum to the infamous "I Support Gender Equity in Principle..." post. The very ugly comments thread on that post is now closed. You'll notice you can't post comments here either.
I'm doing this for my mental health. It's either this, or all gardening and no blogging.
thusspakezuska | June 11, 2007UPDATE: I have appended some text to this post at the end. I have closed the comments on this post because they have become so unpleasant all around and I don't think further dialogue here is serving any positive purpose. If you disagree with me, I'm sorry. I'm also sorry I didn't do this a lot sooner.
I was browsing around Absinthe's blog looking for something in an old post when I happened across an entry I had missed. It seems Absinthe has taken down an older post discussing the differential treatment of two physicists - husband and wife - at Fermilab.
The post commented on an…