Ing gets email

It is rather bizarre.

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN'T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution? … i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN’T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution?

…

i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

Gosh. I’m only a university professor of biology, not AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews with a high school diploma, but I thought the key ingredients for speciation were reproductive isolation and subsequent divergence by drift and/or selection. Not “race”, which is a sociologically loaded term that is poorly connected to any legitimate scientific concepts. Does this guy really think that humanity is poised for branching into 3 or 5 or 7 or 63 (or whatever the current tally of ‘races’ is nowadays) species? Is the unit of any potential speciation event in our future likely to be what we label as ‘race’?

Does anyone know who AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews actually is? I’d love to watch some of his videos. I’m sure they’re…entertaining informative amusing irritating.

The ‘human biodiversity’ racists are at it again

I have roused the furious slap-fighting anger of the HBD crowd, that’s for sure. They have now come up with a priceless argument to refute everything I’ve said, and are accusing me of being a creationist.

This image is priceless. Yes, @pzmyers, by definition, is a creationist. Why does PZ hate Darwin so?

This must be a doozy of a refutation, encapsulated in a single image. And here it is.

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real. Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real. Charles Darwin: I'm not a creationist: I'll use the word 'race' in title of my Origin of Species

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism

Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.

Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.

Charles Darwin: I’m not a creationist: I’ll use the word ‘race’ in title of my Origin of Species

You might have seen an earlier version of this argument in the comments here, but that was before they ran out and got the juicy quote from Charles Darwin.

I confess, the first thing that had me confoozled was that term “Cultural Marxist”. I had to scurry over to Wikipedia to look it up, I’m embarrassed to say. Here’s the definition:

Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to Western society, for instance the drive for individual acquisition associated with capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender roles, race and other forms of cultural identity; are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticise what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.

Oh. Hey. I am sympatico with most of that (I’d disagree with the arrow of causality implied in that phrase “to justify and maintain hierarchy”, but this is just a synopsis so maybe the reality is more sophisticated than that). I guess I am a Cultural Marxist then, in the sense that I oppose the appropriation and distortion of natural processes to justify ideological ends.

You learn something every day.

Of course, I don’t think my critics use the term in that rational sense. They are using it as a conservative insult.

In current political rhetoric, the term has come into use by some social conservatives, such as historian William S. Lind, who associate it with a set of principles that they claim are in simple contradiction with traditional values of Western society and the Christian religion. In this usage, political correctness and multiculturalism, which are identified with cultural Marxism, are argued to have their true origin in a Marxian movement to undermine or abnegate such traditional values.

I have to go along with that, too: fuck Western tradition and religion.

And then, conveniently, the racist wackos have lately been sending me a link to their favorite definitions. Here’s one from a site called Destroy Cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism: An offshoot of Marxism that gave birth to political correctness, multiculturalism and “anti-racism.” Unlike traditional Marxism that focuses on economics, Cultural Marxism focuses on culture and maintains that all human behavior is a result of culture (not heredity / race) and thus malleable. Cultural Marxists deny that biological reality of race and argue that race is a “social construct”. Nonetheless, Cultural Marxists support the race-based identity politics of non-whites. Cultural Marxists typically support race-based affirmative action, the proposition state (as opposed to a nation rooted in common ancestry), elevating non-Western religions above Western religions, speech codes and censorship, multiculturalism, diversity training, anti-Western education curricula, maladaptive sexual norms and anti-male feminism, the dispossession of white people, and mass Third World immigration into Western countries. Cultural Marxists have promoted idea that white people, instead of birthing white babies, should interracially marry or adopt non-white children. Samuel P. Huntington maintained that Cultural Marxism is an anti-white ideology.

Now that’s more like it. That’s the attitude I get from these loons: that I’m a race traitor because I recognize the humanity of people who are not white, and think our society perpetuates racist myths that require active opposition. It’s also a load of nonsense. I don’t tell white people that they should marry black people, or any other color-matching bullshit: I think people should be free to marry whoever they love.

That site also has some other charming definitions that I never wanted to know, but are very revealing.

Concepts to oppose Cultural Marxism:

Genophilia:  The love of one’s own race. A natural instinct that Cultural Marxists want to deny (at least for whites).

Identitarian Religion:  An older form of religion that stresses ancestral obligations.  Adamantly opposed by Christian Cultural Marxists (at least for whites). Throughout nearly all human history, identitarian religion (aka, ethno-religion), has been the norm.

Leukophobia:  The irrational fear of whites organizing racially.

Nation:  The very word ‘nation’ (from Latin ‘nasci’) implies link by blood.  The traditional (non-Marxist) understanding of nation implies racial homogeneity.  (Until very recently Europe has always been racially homogenous and USA, in 1960 census, was 90% white.)

It’s true. I don’t love my own race. I love people, though, and I don’t see any reason to exclude the majority of humanity from my circle of friends simply because of their ancestry, nor do I think it’s a good thing to start slicing up countries into tinier fragments of pure ethnicities, bolstered by a racist religion. And what are these people going to do in a few decades, when the USA is less than 50% white? Leave and go back to their racial homeland? Which is where?

As for their bogus syllogism that tries to equate denying that something is biologically real with being a creationist, some things aren’t biologically real — there are no fairies, unicorns, or winged monkeys. Stating that they don’t exist does not make one a creationist. There are differences between individuals that are genetic, and therefore the distribution of individuals carrying them fall into clades, but that does not imply that all of humanity cleaves naturally into a small number of discrete groups. That is a recipe for hate, as well as being biologically invalid. Which, I guess, makes the Human Biodiversity phonies all a bunch of creationists, by their own reasoning.

Also, bad news: Darwin was a racist. He carried a great many of the prejudices of a typical Victorian gentleman, and they come through in his writings; but at least they were softened by his humanism, and he aspired to be more egalitarian. But you don’t get to call St. Chuck your perfect ideal. He was flawed. And the theory does not rely on the perfection of one of its discoverers.

Holly Dunsworth also has a relevant quote from Darwin’s The Descent of Man.

Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classified as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.

I’ll add to that this quote:

Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the “Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.

Darwin isn’t your friend, HBD racists, and even if he were, it would be an element of his character to deplore, not reason to accept race hatred as a necessary component of evolutionary thought.

Online Gender Workshop 3

I’m going to apologize upfront. First, this is a day late. Real life has intervened, and it looks like every other day may end up being the schedule. I want to keep the momentum of one post a day, and I will try again to do that, but family responsibilities and an upcoming law final are limiting my ability to get longer posts done in a timely manner. For my second apology: I set up a trap exercise, at least to some extent. I won’t do this in the future, but to get a real appreciation of a trap, sometimes you have to be pushed into it. This is one of those times where the artificial trap in the exercises should (I hope) reflect the nature of traps that are integral features of the gender terrain.

Antiochus Epiphanes clearly caught on with comment #25 in the previous thread:

I’m not trying to be difficult, but can an object be said to have a gender?

Call me a jerk for setting this trap if you like, but today we’re going to begin to go back and look at our previous definitions of masculine, feminine, woman, man, and gender. Are your definitions inclusive of objects? If not, and if you then took this exercise seriously, what does that mean?

Feminist analysis of gender has been crucial to the ethical progress the English speaking world has made in the last 200 years. I by no means wish to throw it under the bus. Nor is it illegitimate to argue that objects and their placements in pictures or videos can be used to send messages. But objects have gender only in the sense that objects have sale prices (not even just prices, but sale prices).* In the every day territory of gender naïveté, gender binarism is not merely dominant, it is literally unquestionable. But those who “problematize” gender rope in a blizzard of semiotics.

The result for trans* and intersex folk attempting to explain themselves, attempting to be, literally, recognized by others while interacting with the gender binarists is like living inside a misshapen forcefield. While others might find the field quite protective, a trans* person often can’t function without painfully straining against the field from the inside just to perform everyday tasks. The problems for intersex folk are traditionally different: as doctors are about to bestow a forcefield to an infant, the doctors recognize a difference in shape in one of the most sensitive areas of our human bodies. Thoughtfully, the doctors have a solution: cutting the body to fit the forcefield.

In conversations around gender in those willing to consider either modified gender binarism (yes, it’s binary, but man is not isomorphic with male, and woman is not isomorphic with female) or non-binary gender, it is now possible to have a conversation with others about how trans* people are gendered and intersex people are sexed. However, this topic is given weight and treatment distressingly similar to that of discussions on the gendering of staircases.

In one world, we are painfully confined and, since we are assumed not to exist (and cannot be properly seen through the distorted field when we try to make ourselves known), have no access to help. Our requests for help are not even intelligible. In another world, we have the same status as fascinating objects. In short, there is no language, there is no context, in which trans* people have full humanity. Intersex people are denied their humanity in ways different, but just as consequential.

Where are the gender-descriptive or gender-identifying words that area always humanizing (could never be applied to mere objects), yet just as applicable to trans* and intersex folk as to non-intersex cis folk? Have you seen any in any of the discussion here yet?

This provides an environment of forced choice: if a person can cushion contacts with the field through throwing on a sequined pill-box hat, a tuxedo, a pair of doc martens, or all 3 at once, might it be worth the confinement to have the protection of the forcefield, now that the protection is merely confining, and not actually harmful? If a person feels sufficiently protected by other forces, might more freedom of movement be worth tossing aside the safety of the force field?

And here we get to interesting questions. Like all lives, trans* lives are confluent lives. Is it possible that a person with more money, more class status, or whiter skin will be more likely to feel safe enough without a forcefield? Which disabilities make a person less threatening, and thus less a target for certain types of violence? Which disabilities make a person appear powerless, and thus more of a target for certain types of violence? How many disabilities have both these effects? The effects of confluence are a major factor influencing the number of murders of MtF PoC.

These effects also influence whether a particular victim is more likely to be identified publicly as a victim of a gender or sex motivated murder. Is an FtM person who goes by Alex and wears Dickies going to have hir story told accurately in the paper? Is a wealthy, white MtF person murdered at home going to have family or others concealing the circumstances (even the victim’s clothing!) to “protect his reputation”? And will the police be more likely to forgive the family their deceptions and accede to their wishes than they would be for an MtF person of color murdered on the way home from a bus stop?**

Any number of aspects of trans* life are directly affected by class, race, gender assignment at birth, legal sex, religion, and other socially important aspects of our lives and bodies. But one thing does not change: the gendered world around us is thoroughly dominated by a culture created by and for cis* people. In that world, because of that culture, cis* folks’ obsession with gender rules.

Obsession?

Well, yes. You’re the group that defines gender in terms of people but then tries to shoehorn in pencils and mugs. It is not enough that we have to know the gender of the people around us, but if we wish to engage with others, we have to know the gendered implications of literally everything around us, our entire context.

Why? Social rules and social consequences. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s trivially easy to prove that behavior varies with the gender of one’s interaction partner. Studies of eye contact initiation, cessation, and duration between pairs of persons serve quite ably as proof of concept.*** Violating social rules caries consequences. In an effort to minimize those consequences, it becomes vital for those living in a gendered system to be aware of context and follow social rules of gender. While “nature” might have soft, feminine connotations in many contexts, “the outdoors” might have masculine connotations just as often. Which did your conversation partner use to describe the setting of a vacation? How do patterns of word choice (and tone of voice, use of questions and question marks, and more) influence how one is perceived? While it’s perfectly fine to be something other than a housewife-paragon or warrior-paragon, the more one deviates from gender expectations, the higher grow the risks.

Cis* people often have traumatic stories to tell about younger years when learning contextual gender interpretation and gender risk management. But for cis* folk, by definition, it is possible to live a psychologically healthy <i>adult</i> life that feels authentic <b>and</b> which is also sufficiently far away from the risky features of the gender terrain for cis* persons to make the vast majority of choices without any fear that <i>this one small step</i> will be the step to cause an injurious – or fatal – fall.

It is this relative safety, the distance from dangerous edges, that makes it possible for a cis* dominated culture to be so gender naive and gender obsessed at the same time. Without criticizing anyone, I note that the conversation about what is phallic took (predictably) quite confusing turns: a hexagonal pencil might not be phallic, one suggested, but a cylindrical pencil just might. Likewise, in everyday contexts, children must learn that grabbing a softball for a game of catch is coded feminine, while grabbing the smaller baseball is coded masculine. Take the time to read through just a little bit of past discussion again. Without taking anything away from the utility of becoming **aware** of gender signals, what does it reveal about the depth of our societies’ gender obsessions that we can find gendered cues literally everywhere we look? Imagine being so frequently at the edges that literally anything – whether one’s pencil is hexagonal or cylindrical – might be enough to make one’s gender a safety liability.

Moreover, we excuse our gender obsessions in ways that are horribly harmful. Most of us are willing to go so far as to say that objects <b>have</b> gender, rather than that we, as humans, project gender onto those objects in a manner as artificial as a shopkeeper slapping on a sale price. The price is by no means a property of the object, nor is the gender. It is a property of ourselves, which is, in part, why we can differ so much as individuals and as societies in the gendering of clothes, mugs, and other objects. When we dodge responsibility by saying things like, “Blue <b>is</b> a masculine color,” rather than, “I masculinize blue,” we are teaching gender irresponsibility and gender naturalism at the same time. Is it any wonder then, that in those too-common cases where trans* people’s assailants or murderers are brought before a justice system, defendants will displace the source of rage onto the victim? Is it any wonder that jurors, judges, and the media sympathize with defendant whose expectations of naturalism were violated and who certainly played no role in <b>creating</b> those expectations? If they did recognize that, rather than trans* deception or trans* victimization of cis* folk, what was actually happening was a setting of a trap by cis* folk specifically to catch out and punish trans* folk for being trans*, those jurors, judges, and media representatives might feel uncomfortably guilty.

And they should. While those determined to protect themselves from harm through the reinforcement of rigid gender forcefields go about deliberately confusing sex and gender, those like feminists who have much to gain from separating the two appear to be unable to muster a consistent vision of separate sex and gender, and in both cases the ultimate effects on those outside the norms of gender and sex are similar: dehumanization and invisibility.

So let’s take a look back at our original definitions from a less naive stance. The point of these exercises is still to get a definition of these terms <b>as you use them</b>, not as you would like them to be used. We will come back to these definitions one more time at the end of the workshop to come up with some that we feel will be helpful going forward <b>after</b> the workshop, but changing habits is hard if we don’t know what the habits are in the first place.

 

Exercise 12: Redefinitions. Let’s look carefully at just a few definitions:

a. Gender

b. Man

c. Woman

d. Feminine

e. Masculine

 

Try to come up with a new definition for at least 3 of these. Use your experience in the video exercise (including your critiques or rebuttals, and others’ critiques of your ideas) to guide you. Look back at the cues you used: these are gender cues, even where the assumption is that they reveal something about sex directly and gender only indirectly. What definitions of masculine and feminine accurately represent the indications of femininity or masculinity that you used?

Now think about the object exercise: did you gender an object? If you did, how can you define gender consistently with how it has been used by you in these exercises? Many people in gender studies break gender down into subcategories. Would you find it helpful to create multiple, subcategoric definitions? What would the subcategories be? What would the definitions be?

 

Exercise 13: Justice. No one used the word, or even from what I remember the concept, of justice in these definitions during our first attempts to understand these words. Does the concept of justice belong in the definition? Is gender active or passive? Are we better defining gender first and then looking at the implications for in/justice? Or are we better off specifically defining gender in part in relationship to how it contains or enacts in/justice? As a separate matter, note that I’ve been using pretty common psychological testing schemes: present one exercise, with attention to certain details, but actually testing and examining different details. Did you feel trapped? Do you feel like the exercises were unfair in having both a surface point <b>and</b> an unstated expectation that you would likely reveal what I’m calling gender naïveté and gender obsession? Is the experience of a gender-trap familiar to you? If you aren’t trans*, is it possible to see how the relentless examination of so many aspects of a person’s look, behavior, and context might be harmful? For trans* folks: do you find your response to be more often one of exhaustion or pain, or do you find yourself to be cultivating ignorance of the relentlessness of gendering as a coping strategy? Both?

 

Exercise 14: 4th Report. Unlike other reports, there is no part of exercises 12 or 13 that I’m not encouraging you to report back. Post as much of that thinking as you are comfortable making public. Only after that should you feel free to pick out individual portions of this post for free form response, but, yes, once 12 and 13 are done, anything in here is fair game for any type of serious response.

 

Previous Workshop Thread.

=============================

Notes:

*I’ll let you all work on that for a while. Clearly we have some great minds working this stuff out here. If y’all want me to go into that metaphor more later, I might.

** It seems highly unlikely that the apparent targeting of MtF PoC over other trans* people does not reflect a reality of greater actual targeting of MtF PoC. But we’re frustratingly unable to know for sure, or to quantify those risks.

***See, e.g., Mayo, C and Henley, N M. Gender and Nonverbal Behavior.

 

 

 

It’s not the accent you hate. It’s the people.

Vocal fry is in the news again! Bethany Brookshire explains:

Bringing to mind celebrity voices like Kim Kardashian or Zooey Deschanel, vocal fry is a result of pushing the end of words and sentences into the lowest vocal register. When forcing the voice low, the vocal folds in the throat vibrate irregularly, allowing air to slip through. The result is a low, sizzling rattle underneath the tone. Recent studies have documented growing popularity of vocal fry among young women in the United States. But popular sizzle in women’s speech might be frying their job prospects, a new study reports. The findings suggest that people with this vocal affectation might want to hold the fry on the job market — and that people on the hiring side of the table might want to examine their biases.

I’m at a liberal arts college that is attended by at least 60% women, and I hear it all the time — and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People have different voices, there are patterns that mark men and women, young and old, regions and races, and it’s no big deal — I actually find that the vocal fry becomes more common as people become less formal and more friendly, so it’s more a signature of a kind of knowing familiarity.

I thought that if it were off-putting in a job interview, as that study finds, it might be because that’s a situation with an expectation of greater formality, or as Language Log suggests, it’s because the recordings used in the study were a bit forced, and people trying to use an unnatural (to them) style of speaking can easily come across as insincere. But surely we don’t judge people by small variations in their speech, do we?

I forgot. People suck.

In an article on vocal fry on NPR, the commenters persuade me that there probably actually is considerable discrimination going on.

Ms. Eveleth admitted that she “sometimes” catches herself in her own high rising terminal (“upspeak”). How could she miss it, considering the number of people it must cause to void the contents of their stomachs?

More alarming than Eveleth’s contemptible defense of creaky speak was prominent on-air talent Rachel Martin’s claim that she’d never even heard of “vocal fry”. This is the state of broadcast journalism.

Upspeak bothers you? So much that you want to vomit? I suggest that the problem isn’t so much with the speaker as it is with people who want to so thoroughly police others’ speech patterns to the degree that they feel physically ill when they hear variants. I’m wondering how this commenter reacts to a Southern accent, which I find lovely, or to a Black American accent (which I also heard all the time when I worked at Temple University), or, horrors, the pitch accent of so many people in the upper Midwest.

Vocal fry is so subtle that most people don’t recognize it as a discrete entity, but apparently it is an indictment of all of journalism that a reporter should fail to deplore it with the vigor this commenter demands.

This one is even worse.

Also funny that Rose Eveleth doesn’t think vocal fry would interfere with job performance. I’d suggest that she consider how impossible it is to work with someone who habitually scratches out the final words of every statement. Vocal fryers don’t hear each other doing it, I guess. A community of unconscious croakers.

It’s not just women, either. You hear it in interviews with young male media hipsters. Guy Raz of the Ted Radio Hour has a curious sing-song vocal fry.

Awareness is the first step toward a cure. America needs mass speech therapy in the worst way. Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech all constitute a national cultural emergency.

Edit: On second listening, Ms. Eveleth is not that bad a fryer, mostly lapsing into it in the egg story. And fortunately, Rachel Martin is completely fry-free, and a full vocalizer.

It’s a national cultural emergency! Speech therapy must be administered immediately to eradicate all variation from General American!

Jebus. I’ve been all over the country, and one of the things I like is that people have their own unique ways of speaking — ways that are distinctive and regional and act as indicators of identity. I’ve been to the United Kingdom and heard the range of voices there — I don’t know what that is they speak in Scotland, but it deserves a more appropriate label than “English” — and that makes the addition of a faint growl to the end of sentences trivial.

This isn’t about language at all. These vocal variations don’t affect communication in the slightest. This is all about language as a marker for class, race, and sex, and providing the excuse of subtle differences in speech as a way to publicly air prejudices. That guy who detests “Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech” isn’t actually perturbed by how they speak — he has singled out a set of patterns associated with young women.

I also notice an omission. If we’re going to have mass speech therapy for the entire country, why is it to correct everyone to the General American standard? Flat and nasal isn’t pretty. If we’re going to do this and enforce uniformity, I’m going to insist that we use Shelby Foote as a model and get everyone to talk like that, with voices like soft music. Or maybe the casual, confident, laid-back style of Snoop Dogg. I also wouldn’t mind Sarah Silverman as a voice coach.

Anything but the boringly level voice of standard radio announcers everywhere.

So…when is George Will going to retire?

There ought to be a pasturage somewhere for out-of-touch old white men. His latest nonsense, in which he tells women to shut up about rape, will raise a few eyebrows.

They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

What exactly are these privileges one obtains when one is a victim of sexual assault? Name one. Show me one woman who covets being raped.

Will isn’t even aware of his inconsistency. He tries to do simple math and fails to recognize his failure.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12% of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.

Or that the 12% reporting rate is incorrect. The 20% number has been confirmed by the CDC, including both assault and attempted assault (an attempt can be traumatic, so there are no good grounds to exclude that), so it is likely very sound; the 12% reporting rate is an inferred estimate, because there is no directly measured number of unreported assaults — if there were, they’d be reported. So what should be understood from the “simple arithmetic” is that the frequency of reports is far lower than 12%.

But think about what Will is saying: being assaulted is supposed to be a “coveted status” that “confers privileges” on college campuses, but somehow, even with his inflated number, the vast majority of incidents are being kept secret by the victims. Why? Don’t they want their prize from the box of Cracker Jacks?

I’ll also note that Will complains that sexual assault includes nonconsensual touching as well as forcible penetration. I don’t get this attitude. Why does he want to narrow the definition of assault so much? Does he think it would be bad if someone walked up to him and shoved a dildo up his ass, but it’s OK if they instead slide their hand down his pants and gently cup his balls? There are a heck of a lot of things one could do to George Will short of literally raping him, and I think he’d agree (as would I) that a great many of them would represent criminal violations.

Perhaps he simply thinks all women ought to be accessible to a little involuntary fondling.

Online Gender Workshop 2*

You’ll note that we now have a separate thread for each exercise set. I won’t go back (if it’s even possible) to pull out exercises 5-8 and your responses from the first thread, but starting now we’ll be able to have people continue one discussion (on say, the video exercises, where it looks like Sundays wasn’t a great day for a lot of people) while the next begins.

Today’s exercise may be technically difficult for some of you, so I expect fewer people to complete it, but I hope everyone that joined us last week engages in the discussion. On the plus side, it requires a bit less time commitment than the video exercises, which may allow some people to catch up.

Exercise 9: Think of a gender neutral object. No. Not that one. Because gender, right? Exactly. That other one. Now you’ve got it. Ready? Sketch it. Sketch it without any context whatsoever to keep ideas about gender in relation to the object free from distractions caused by gender in relation to the context in which the object is drawn.

When finished drawing, upload that sketch somewhere (I recognize this won’t be possible for everyone).

Exercise 10: 3rd Report. Narrate a bit about choosing an object (whether or not you were able to post your sketch). Was it easy? Hard? Did the first thing that came to mind remain your choice? Now talk about the actual process of drawing. Did you stop, erase, and/or redraw at any point because of concerns that the sketch might not communicate gender neutrality?

In this report, provide a link to your sketch if you were able to upload an image.

Exercise 11: Discussion. Look at a number of the uploaded images. If there are any choices (or implementations of choice, through the image in the sketch) with which you disagree, say so. Provide an argument for gendering the object someone else considered gender neutral. If there are none with which you disagree, find someone’s comment that does disagree with one or more choices. Read that person’s argument and respond. Are you persuaded? Why or why not? You are welcome to defend your own choice in discussion, but if you do, you must do it using new arguments than the ones you made in exercise 10 when you initially discussed your choice and process.

 

Previous workshop thread. Next Workshop Thread.

*must. not. type. “:Electric Boogaloo.”

Damn you, Ed Brayton!