A funny little thing about memory a couple of hours ago – a madeleine-equivalent but not to do with taste or smell. I happened on a mammoth yard sale which turned out to be loaded with interesting stuff. An old-fashioned wicker dolls’ carriage was the first thing I spotted, with old-fashioned doll dresses in it, plus a stack of handmade doll bedding in a pretty fabric. A couple of slipper chairs with purple velvet seats, an oddly-shaped floor lamp – and table after table after table full of dishes, costume jewelry, tchotchkes, toys – all sorts, and much nicer than the usual yard sale dreck. Hoarder-like in quantity but not in quality. I settled down to take my time and look at everything, because it was worth looking at.

So I got to a table with a box on it full of costume jewelry on cards, and I picked up a card with a pair of earrings with tiny shells – tiny shallow bowls surrounding a rhinestone – and zoom a memory shot out of the vault, one I’d never retrieved before. [Read more…]

The “Gender Equality in the Secular Movement” Panel from Women in Secularism 2 is online.

But she smiled at me. But she didn’t object when I sat next to her. But she flirted back. But she let me kiss her. But she laughed at my joke. But she didn’t say no when I refilled her glass. But she drank the wine. But she let me in when I rang her doorbell.

MIKE “Handy” Hancock MP has a curious attitude to the treatment of women, judging by his lawyers’ efforts to defend him. If a woman lets a man into her home, she consents to his advances, the lawyers are arguing as they try to derail an investigation into the Portsmouth MP’s alleged harassment of a mentally ill constituent. [Read more…]

Laurie Penny is tired of “Not all men!!” and similar petulant irrelevancies. True, it’s not all men, but that’s not the same thing as not a problem.

You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world yet still benefit from sexism. That’s how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because it’s less hassle that way. [Read more…]

Guest post by Dan Bye, originally a comment on Not prepared for what happened.

Everyone agrees there is “a” problem, and nobody is claiming that philosophy’s problem is the worst of all academic fields. So what’s left is whether philosophy has a *bad* problem.

Massimo points out that there is no evidence that philosophy has a particularly bad problem, and leaves it at that. And it’s also true that the existence of male majorities can be the result of societal pressures (i.e. sexist attitudes in the world at large) rather than sexist hiring practice, which Massimo also leaves there.

What we’ve got here is a lecture about the nature of evidence. Thanks very much. [Read more…]

The hell with Strong Female Characters.

What what what? What should we want, weak female characters?

No; characters with more than one adjective.

Sophia McDougall explains in the New Statesman.

…the phrase “Strong Female Character” has always set my teeth on edge, and so have many of the characters who have so plainly been written to fit the bill.

I remember watching Shrek with my mother.

“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense that I was saying it because it was what I was supposed to say. [Read more…]

That’s how to make girls eager to go to school – force them to undergo “virginity” tests. Way to go, Indonesia.

From the Guardian:

A plan to make female high school students undergo mandatory virginity tests has been met with outrage from activists, who argue that it discriminates against women and violates their human rights.

Education chief Muhammad Rasyid, of Prabumulih district in south Sumatra put forward the idea, describing it as “an accurate way to protect children from prostitution and free sex”. [Read more…]

Education is important, right? It’s important to do the early stages of it well, not just the last stages, right?

Teaching is hard work. Teaching in a middle school is crazy hard work. A Facebook friend who just started teaching in a middle school posted an account of his third day, and gave me permission to quote it. It is, frankly, horrifying.

Oh oh. Day3 was worse than Day1. My 3-day experience of teaching has been pretty horrific overall. I estimate my half-life as a teacher, before I have to bail to live, is just a few more days. Jail would be better. (I could read and sleep more.) The amount of work involved is insane – and I’ll have an additional class from next week (and won’t get out of school tomorrow till 9pm, to sleep at 10 to get up at 3). There’s essentially no lesson prep time at all – except the weekend. [Read more…]