feminist blogs in english

It’s true — being a perfect feminist is a full-time job. That in itself is EXTREMELY PROBLEMATIC.

This afternoon, my wife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy, 8 pound 12 ounce baby boy. We have a younger brother for Heloise; our family is expanding and we’re thrilled. No name yet, but we’ll announce in due course.

I’ll be taking some time away from my regular writing gigs to be with Eira and our children. It is a very happy time.

I missed all those popularizations about the raping gay  dolphins:

Dolphins have been defamed. Six weeks ago, the Daily Mail informed us about The dark side of Flipper: He's a sexual predator who resorts to rape to get his way.
And the Daily Telegraph also told a similar tale: "according to scientists", dolphins resort to "rape" to assert authority.
Other news outlets around the world carried similar reports. Examples: bisexual and exclusively gay dolphins (MSN); male dolphins are bisexual, US scientists claim (Australia's News Ltd); and male bottlenose dolphins engage in extensive bisexuality (ZeeNews, India).

Anyone who has read my litanies about how science is popularized knows why The Daily Male Mail would print that popularization or why the Daily Telegraph would follow suit.

Many popularizations popularize stuff that's not in the initial study, of course.   But this one is really an extreme example because the particular paper did not discuss rape or homosexuality in dolphins:

Are you kidding me? If the ‘writers’ of these articles had read the paper, they would have noticed that it contains nothing about the sexual behaviour of the dolphins they studied, bisexual or otherwise, aside from brief mentions of the possible consequences of social networks on reproductive success. It certainly didn’t mention anything about bisexual behaviour, homosexual behaviour, or rape.

That's good advice, about actually reading the paper one summarizes and popularizes.

What's instructive about this case is that it tells us so very clearly WHY certain studies get popularized and many others do not.  That this particular study had nothing (or very little) to do with the sexual behavior of dolphins doesn't matter at all.

A study twenty years ago has argued that dolphin bulls engage in behavior which to humans looks like gang-rape:

Richard Connor and other colleagues showed, almost 20 years ago that male dolphins work in alliances to cut a female off from the pod and coerce her into mating. It's a behaviour that forever associated male dolphins with the human idea of 'gang rape.'
...

The other side of the dolphin story illustrates my point. Dolphin bulls behave like gang rapists, harassing solitary females until, exhausted, the female copulates with one or all of the males.
Perhaps the similarities with the most repellent coalitional behavior among men are merely superficial. Perhaps they run deeper than that. That makes a fascinating question to be researched. Sensitively. But no matter what the findings, what dolphin males do in Shark Bay doesn't make that kind of behavior any more acceptable in men.

It's unclear to me how often this behavior has been observed, whether it is common or unusual and whether the observer's interpretation of it is correct.   But it was reported in a study twenty years ago, not in the study this past spring.




 

Due to my massive traveling, the Link Encyclopedia is late. And quite short thanks to people who make it impossible to scroll down one’s Google Reader feed by clogging it with endless pictures of their ugly cats. Still, here it is:

I’m very much afraid that the following is, indeed, will be the future of Greece: “The lesson, not just for Greece, but for every democratic nation, from this debacle, is that democracy is severely constrained in a globalized world. If an electorate votes inconsistently – as it appears will be the Greek outcome – the inconsistency will not survive. Anti-austerity for Greece implies the return of the drachma. It also implies economic turmoil and ultimately – in my judgment -the replacement of democracy in Greece by military rule.” I also find the idea of the limits that the globalization places on democracy to be very interesting. For smaller, less powerful countries, this definitely seems to be the truth.

Autism and oral exams.

I always wondered where the following way of responding to people’s concerns comes from: “Women are trained and expected to be ‘nice.’  Especially with their friends.  If a friend says, ‘I think I blew that audition because I didn’t have time to prepare,’ the ‘proper’ female friend response will be ‘oh, no, I’m sure you did fine…”  We are Nice.  Reassuring.  This we call, “being supportive.”” Words can’t describe how this attitude bugs me. The last thing you want to hear when you share that you have messed up is this kind of careless dismissal. It always makes me feel completely diminished and brushed aside with my puny little concerns. I don’t think it’s a gender issue, though. In my life, there are 2 men and 1 woman who routinely drive me up a tree with this kind of a response. What do you think?

Why are there so few women in physics? An insightful analysis by a woman who is a physicist.

A very good post in RUSSIAN from a woman who remembers Stalin very well and explains how Putin is obviously trying to imitate Stalin. A very interesting post.  If you do not read in Russian, maybe you can translate it with an online translator.

Writing with beans. A very creative post on academic writing by a talented academic.

I completely agree with this blogger’s ideas on what should be done to prevent “casino banking” from undermining the entire economy of the country.

Why introducing the voucher system for public colleges is a horrible idea.

This is something you should never say when applying for an academic position. Immaturity is not all that attractive in a professor.

A really great post on the wrong questions mothers ask each other and themselves.

And the title of the worst piece of the month goes to the following: “Women are nicer than men. There are exceptions. Most people of both sexes are probably fairly nice, given the nature of their upbringing and opportunities. But in terms of their lifelong natures, women are kinder, more empathetic, more generous. And the sooner more of them take positions of power, the better our chances as a species.” Now let me go and vomit for a while. Notice the insidiousness of this particular brand of sexism. This is precisely the kind of sexism I have always experienced: as a woman, you are supposed to be so much better, nicer and kinder than a man. And if you allow yourself to stop being generous, giving and empathetic at any point, then you have failed as a woman. You are nullified as a female because you cannot uphold this fake standard of self-sacrificial perfection. OK, I need to go vomit some more.

Plus, to compensate for the shortness of the link encyclopedia, here is a random observation: I have encountered half a dozen posts in my feed that make the earth-shattering revelation that Obama’s recent statement of support for the gay marriage is nothing but a ploy to attract more votes. Obama couldn’t care less for gay marriage, these bloggers say. He is just trying to milk the current growing public support for gay rights in this country. What such bloggers don’t seem to get is that this is precisely what a good democratic leader should be doing. He should keep his own convictions, beliefs, principles, religion and prejudices to himself and express the ideas of the people who voted for him. He is our hired manager, and it is his sworn duty to act as such. If the majority of people who voted for him support gay rights, so should he. What Obama believes as a human being is of absolutely no interest to me. All I care about is how faithfully he represents the wishes of the people who voted for him. The Democrat Presidents are not very good at that, normally.

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Spawned on second base, but thought they rolled a double. From John Scalzi:

In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

OK, that sounds a bit shrill.  But I'm fed up with the argument that having an MBA or experience in running a private firm (sometimes to ground) is useful for those who would like to be the president of a country.   I'm equally fed up with the argument that just like a family, the government must do belt-tightening when times are bad.

A country is not a corporation (yet) and a country is not a family.

There are good economic and other reasons why we don't run families like corporations or corporations like families, and there are even better reasons for not running a government like a firm or a family.

Though often it does sound as if conservative politicians want to be like those old-fashioned economists who were reputed to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

This is about abortion, of course:

Via Rachel Maddow:
"It's going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all -- but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to--  Roe vs. Wade. So we've done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They're like, 'Well, the poor pitiful women that can't afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That's what we've learned over and over and over.'
"But hey, you have to have moral values."

Sounds like Bubba is soo tired of hearing about those coat hangers.

Bryce Covert has a fascinating article in the Nation right now about how baby-having can put you deep in debt — not just because babies are expensive, but because U.S. parental leave policies put impossible financial strain on new parents.

When it comes to taking time off for a new baby, the best-laid plans often go awry. Sonya Underwood had worked at a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, for eleven years before getting pregnant with her third son. As a single mother, she prepared to cover the income she would lose during her unpaid leave, hoarding paid time off and taking out disability insurance. And then real life intervened. Doctors told Underwood that she had an incompetent cervix and put her on bed rest three weeks ahead of schedule. Then her son arrived at twenty-six weeks. The twelve weeks of leave she is guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act soon ran out, as did the insurance, even though her son remained in the NICU. “I didn’t have any money left,” Underwood said. So she went back to work and visited him at the hospital every day.

But once her son came home, Underwood’s situation quickly became untenable. Daycare centers wouldn’t take a medically fragile baby. Her human resources department informed her that her only choice was more unpaid leave. “It didn’t help out my situation because I still had rent due, my car note due, utilities, everything else,” she said. After she exhausted that leave, she was let go from her job, lost her car and couldn’t qualify for unemployment insurance because of her role as her son’s caretaker. The only places left to turn were Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and a loan she already knew would be difficult to pay back. “I’m a victim of FMLA because it didn’t help my family,” she concluded.

That’s Roger Ebert’s argument. And listen, I love me some Roger Ebert, but this is a big piece of crap. His point basically comes down to, “Women are nurturing and wonderful and non-violent, men are competitive and want to see boobs, because Evolution.” And ugh I don’t even have the time to pick through this mess, but y’all should go for it in the comments. I’ll start: Most people have the capacity to be wonderful, non-violent, nurturing and loving. Most people also have the capacity to be competitive, driven, aggressive and ruthless. Most people are capable of great kindness; most people are capable of being total assholes. The degree to which any of us displays any of these traits depends largely on circumstance and partly on individual personality and temperment. Those things are certainly influenced by gender, but our gender does not in fact hard-wire us to be nice or awful.

Thanks Ms. Scopophiliacs for the link.