Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
Hopefully, in our last workshop entry, we got an understanding of what social construction is, and what it isn’t. I’m a firm believer, as I said in that post, of people being better educated about social construction theory so that they can understand what is and isn’t being said when someone asserts, “Donkey is a social construct”.
It’s time for a retrospective on the Tim Hunt case. Dan Waddell and Paula Higgins look over Louise Mensch’s “contributions” to the story, and unsurprisingly, discovers dishonesty, distortions, and omissions: many of the people she claimed were contradicting the story of Hunt making a poorly done sexist joke were actually confirming it, but simply saying that it was a sad attempt at humor that backfired.
In the end, the parable of Tim Hunt is indeed a simple one. He said something casually sexist, stupid and inappropriate which offended many of his audience. He then confirmed he said what he was reported to have said and apologised twice. The matter should have stopped there. Instead a concerted effort to save his name — which was not disgraced, nor his reputation as a scientist jeopardized — has rewritten history. Science is about truth. As this article has shown, we have seen very little of it from Hunt’s apologists — merely evasions, half-truths, distortions, errors and outright falsehoods.
As he points out, the story would have been a brief flare-up that could have ended with an apology, Tim Hunt’s career would have continued on, maybe a little more wisely. Instead, Mensch and others turned it into a protracted mess in which they attempted to refute the facts, and now the label of sexism is attached even more firmly to Hunt than cyclins are.
Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
To understand gender, it is vital to understand how it comes about. While the etiology of individual gender identities is very much in doubt, the etiology of gender as a framework, as a concept, that is not in doubt: Gender, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is a social construct.
Few feminists would dispute that. However, when I taught courses on gender-related topics to people who already espoused the idea that gender is a social construct, it frequently, even typically, became clear that they didn’t understand the statement at all. So while many might not dispute it, the statement itself is not helping us. Indeed, it appears to be hurting us. So let’s add to the discussion another statement, more commonly disputed among feminists: Sex is a social construct.
There. That should make all the rest easy.
I was pointed to this very nice interview with Patricia Torvalds, daughter of the famous Linus. I was impressed. I can also say that Linus Torvalds seem to have had roughly similar parenting styles.
It’s yet another tale of misogynists building myths about feminists. Feminists are all out to get those hard-working, super-smart guys working in the tech industry, don’t you know.
Yesterday, Eric Raymond, a software development and open-source software advocate, published an explosive allegation on his blog: a recently disbanded group called the Ada Initiative, which advertises itself as helping make tech more welcoming for women, had been attempting to entrap men by using “honey pots” to seduce them and then accuse them of rape. “The MO was to get alone with the target, and then immediately after cry ‘attempted sexual assault,” wrote Raymond’s source, an IRC correspondent he doesn’t name but who he says has been “both well-informed and completely trustworthy in the past.”
Worst of all, these evil feminists have been gunning for a high-profile target: Linus Torvalds, the tech-hero founder of Linux. “Linus hasn’t spoken out about this; I can think of several plausible and good reasons for that,” writes Raymond. “And the Ada Initiative shut down earlier this year. Nevertheless, this report is consistent with reports of SJW [social-justice-warrior, a derogatory term used frequently in anti-feminist writing] dezinformatsiya tactics from elsewhere and I think it would be safest to assume that they are being replicated by other women-in-tech groups.”
Ibis3 will be our curator for an examination of news, media, arts, culture, politics, social media & the internet, women’s issues, and everyday life through a feminist lens.
The hot social issue around here has been the efforts to get a Gay Straight Alliance club established at Morris Area High School — it has been approved by the school board, but they immediately slapped up new rules to restrict the ability of that club to advertise its existence. The usual small town reaction has occurred: letters to the editor of the local paper! I’ve actually been rather happy with the response — most of the letters have a decidedly liberal bent.
Here’s one from Nancy Carpenter, of the chemistry discipline (a lot of the liberal glow, or should I say taint, is coming from the university community) which I rather liked.
Seriously, I don’t need a first century mystic to explain the complexities of the biology of sex to me, but if it makes some heads explode, I’m all for it.
They have one! Her name is Gina Loudon, and her qualifications are…
Loudon, a tea party activist who became a reality star after she and her husband joined ABC’s Wife Swap
She also has a Ph.D. in a “psychology related field” from an online university, and has published in such distinguished journals as Breitbart, WND, and Townhall. I wonder if the APA would agree with her title.
She’s also using her lofty position as the Fox News Psychology Expert to dispense dangerous stupidity. She’s against transgender surgery because — I love this, coming from a Tea Party Reality TV star — it’s anti-science.
And the science is on my side of this,she remarked.I’m not sure why the other side is deciding to be science deniers now. Johns Hopkins University ended their program because they realized that people who go through with the sex change surgery have a 20 fold increase in suicide rates as opposed to those who don’t.
As is pointed out at the link, she’s referring to a debunked study to make that claim. She seems to buy into the idea that transgender men and women are just mentally disordered, who need more therapy to get over it.
There’s a video of Loudon. I haven’t watched it. I have a personal rule against watching videos of anyone chatting with Steve Doocy — I only have so many brain cells to spare.
I think we all know that already, but his latest interview clinches it. He wants Roe v. Wade overturned, and he compares abortion to slavery.
Think about this. During slavery — and I know that one of those words you’re not supposed to say — but I’m saying it. During slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave, anything that they chose to do. And what if the abolitionists had said, ‘You know, I don’t believe in slavery, I think it’s wrong. But you guys do whatever you want to do.’ Where would we be?
You know, you could talk to the slaves, they could express themselves, they could speak about their anger and pain. A blastula or a fetus are not comparable to Frederick Douglass. And more, slaves were forced against their will to live in shackles — if you’re going to compare slavery to anything, it ought to be the women who are compelled to bear children against their will.
Rape or incest, I would not be for killing a baby because the baby came about in that way. And all you have to do is go and look up the many stories of people who have led very useful lives who are the result of rape or incest.
Shouldn’t the women have a voice here? All you have to do is go and look up the many stories of women who had abortions and lived useful, happy, productive lives afterwards, in careers that would have been cut short if they’d been forced into motherhood.
But oh, right, the women don’t matter in Ben Carson’s head.
He’s such a horrible person, without a thought in his head.
