I promised you the first post on The Gender Knot today, and I still plan to get it up today if at all possible. My plan had been to work on it Monday and Tuesday but most of those days I was plagued with headache and it was difficult to concentrate on writing. So, it's not done yet.
Please note Chapter 1 is available online here.
In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to listen to fellow Scienceblogger Pal MD's latest Palcast, The Kitchen Edition, which relates to my post On Being A Patient.
Or maybe you'd like to read this post by Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection and just puke, puke, puke on John Rushton's shoes. Be sure to enjoy Zen Faulkes' comment with the perfect book review for Mr. Rushton, and then my buddy Pal MD again who notes, quite rightly, that Rushton is "not even wrong".
Or maybe you'd just like to sit and quietly contemplate this: The whole Susan Boyle thing - is "ZOMFG the homely old ladee can SING!" the celebrity-land equivalent to Science-land's "ZOMFG, look, the pretty young girl does skienz!" ????
All three items should be as good a prep as any to diving into the The Gender Knot.
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The only surprise about Susan Boyle was the contrast with her speech -- and there are plenty of other examples (Joe Bethancourt can barely speak for his stutter, for instance, but can sing all week in a dozen accents.)
Anyone who was surprised by the plain-looking 40ish woman's voice has been spending way too much time with the manufactured music world and too little with serious music -- including, but not limited to, opera.
Looking forward to your comments and the discussion.
Got the book on my wife's Kindle, but haven't read all of the first chapter yet. I paged by the preface, but decided I need to go back and read it in detail. The preface might rate its own discussion.
His point that it is the social system rather than men, and that the social system is a construct of both men and women, was very interesting. I thought he went a bit too far with the point about language, because it is my opinion that English (particularly American English) has contributed to gender equality. Talking about equality in a marriage is almost senseless in Russian, where "zamuzh" means, literally, "after the man".
Personally I think Rushton's errr... 'research' isn't worth wasting the meal ;)
Admittedly, I covered Susan Boyle last month, but not quite for the same reasons as Perez.
Looking forward to The Gender Knot!