Michael Nugent does it again: he has compiled a list of 1,000 Women Speakers Worth Listening To.
There goes every conference organizer’s excuse that they couldn’t think of any.
The Republicans want you to think he is a fringe candidate, a wacky loner who just said something outrageous. But when you look at the voting record of Minnesota's Republicans, it becomes really clear: they all vote almost exactly as Todd Akin would on every abortion-related bill that comes up.
It’s really rather stunning: Democrats and Republicans are extraordinarily polarized on this issue. With only a few wobblers, Democrats vote for issues that give women reproductive choices, while Republicans vote against them. If you don’t think there is a bit of difference between the two parties, just look at that one issue.
By the way, about those wobblers…they aren’t, really. If you look at the detailed voting records, you find that there are a few Democrats who are actually stealth Republicans — they consistently vote more like a Republican on women’s rights issues. One of them is, unfortunately, my own state representative, Collin Peterson. I never vote for him, and I can never vote for his Republican challenger, either. Can we please get a real Democrat to run for that office and topple him?
They just can’t get it right. The latest eructation of idiotic error comes from Tennessee, where Stacey Campfield makes shit up about STDs.
Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) falsely claimed on Thursday that it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact.
“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” he told Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a radio program on SiriusXM OutQ. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”
Do they have to take a Stupid Test to be admitted to the party? And score somewhere in the range of a flatworm?
Forgive me, I haven’t been keeping up with the Pussy Riot story — this is just the worst possible time of the year for me, with classes starting tomorrow. But I strongly recommend Eric Macdonald’s summary: this is a collusion between an old school tyrant, Putin, and the Russian Orthodox church to silence criticism, and to promote an unthinking, dogmatic nationalism. It’s not just Russia, either, but similar forces are at work in the United States, where God and Country are deeply entangled, and it’s a recipe for world-wide catastrophe.
The problem with Pussy Riot is that they see this clearly, and their music opposes both czar and patriarch. Look at their latest video and you can see their contempt for both.
(You don’t like their music? Tough. I thought it was wonderfully loud and angry and political, and if you don’t care for it, I’m pretty sure Lawrence Welk is still available in reruns on cable. Also, you don’t have to like it to respect the freedom of artists to express themselves.)
There’s also a third cause they’re clearly opposing: the historical confinement of women to very specific gender roles. I don’t know exactly what is going on in Russia, but it seems to be the women who are leading the charge against tyranny. Take a look at the Ukrainian FEMEN, too. Women are becoming the bravest of us all.
They aren’t just fighting against a tyrant and orthodoxy, but against the gender police. I’ve got to admire that.
I like much of what Steven Pinker writes, but I thought his book, The Blank Slate, was terrible for its black-and-white version of the nature/nurture argument. As a developmental biologist, I’m probably about as far to the plastic, environmentally-influenced side of the argument as you can get, and I don’t believe the human mind is a “blank slate”. I don’t know anyone who does (I’m sure they exist, spinning out endless wordy fables in humanities departments…but they’re not operationally significant at all in the biology departments).
Now Pinker gets cited by a British loon who wants to use his arguments as veiled racism, and of course he’s also anti-feminist. So he cheerfully cites Pinker in support, and unfortunately, this is Pinker setting up a false dichotomy…but it’s also Pinker writing wonderfully clearly and economically.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.
Oh, man, where to begin…
First, that’s straight from Christina Hoff Sommers, the one ‘feminist’ (she’s more of an anti-feminist) writer the misogynists love to quote. I have heard so many raving nutcases throw around the terms “gender” and “equity feminism” as authoritative put-downs of any attempt to promote feminist issues, when what they really are are silencing tools to misrepresent people’s views.
Equity feminism, as presented in that quote, is nonsense. It’s like those people who claim they “don’t see color”, and therefore they aren’t racist and are treating all non-white people equally. You can’t pretend to be color-blind or sex-blind in a culture that privileges white maleness! Yes, we want to promote equal opportunity for all, but you won’t achieve that by pretending that the historical and social consequences of sex and race don’t exist. Respect human beings as male, female, or trans; as black, brown, or white. Recognize the realities of culture and biology, neither of which are as discrete and binary as postulated there.
It’s like we’re all running a hundred meter dash, and some people get a 95 meter head start, while others begin 100 meters behind the starting line…and we’re all going to agree to turn a blind eye to those inequities because we’ve sworn to pretend that everyone gets a fair start. So no, I’m not an “equity feminist”.
But now look at that definition of gender feminists. I’m sure such creatures exist — in a country with a Tea Party, we all know by now that caricatures do come to life — but look at the details there. Pinker lists 3 defining characteristics, and I don’t agree with a single one of them. 1) Men and women have different biological predispositions (which cannot be reduced to trite cliches, like women are good at housecleaning and men like football), 2) social interactions are complex and cannot be distilled down to a single factor, and 3) there are multiple levels of interaction — individual, race, sex, class — that affect motives and outcomes. Gosh, I differ because I think human interactions are actually complicated!
So I read that nice clear statement by Pinker, and I have to conclude that I must not be any kind of feminist at all.
Either that, or Christina Hoff Sommers is full of shit.
Ah, a heartening article from someone reasonable. It’s good to see.
I will disagree on one point, though. I will not give up on the atheism movement. I will not give up on the skeptic movement. They must change and the barbarians must back down.
This sounds so familiar. You notice a bias in the speakers at a meeting (an obvious bias that everyone notices), and so you start suggesting to conference organizers that maybe it would be a good thing to do a little more outreach, get a little more diversity. I was doing that to atheist meetings 5 or 6 years ago, or perhaps longer…it’s been a longstanding issue. So now in 2012:
So here is a plea. Next time you are involved in organizing a meeting – make some effort to have a strong representation of diversity of speakers and participants. For example, if you invite lots of women for example and all say no – try to figure out why and see if you can fix the issue. Offer travel fellowships for students. Offer child care or child activity options (even if you cannot pay for it – at least make it easy for people). Make sure to advertise/promote the meeting to groups/institutions with a high representation of underrepresented groups. Don’t give up if your first efforts don’t work. Sometimes it can be difficult to make sure diversity levels are high. But keep trying … it will help make the conference better and also will help the field in general …
That’s Jonathan Eisen, talking about genomics meetings. I hope it works out for him. I can say that atheist meetings have gotten much, much better at representing more women (the race issue, not so much, but it is slowly improving there, even).
The next stage after that success, however, is pushback from the white men who had previously been the sole kinds of faces on the stage. They can’t quite start screaming at the women to get off the stage — that degree of bigotry is a little too naked, usually — but they will aim their fury at the people who brought them to the sorry state of having women equally represented with men.
The only answer to that, of course, is to keep on fighting.
I have completely tuned out the Olympics because the jingoistic, shallow American commentary makes me want to puke…but I was just sent this clip from the BBC coverage. Watch how it goes from Darwin to eugenics to Hitler to slavery in order to explain how so many black athletes excel at sprinting events…because, obviously, being able to survive shackling in a slave ship and a lifetime of menial stoop labor in the cotton fields clearly selects for genes of benefit in short foot races.
Who authorized that kind of drivel to even be made? It’s bad science and bad history.
Because there are some other burdens I don’t have to bear.
Really, I’m a tremendously privileged person. I just wish everyone in the world could have it as easy as I do.
Because there are some burdens I don’t have to bear.
