Emily Willingham has A PROBLEM with the NY Times’ op-ed on the lack of sexism in academic science:
I can’t speak to the symmetry of the faces of those who penned the op-ed, but I can certainly highlight their inability to align their own words with their own data, or even their own words with their other own words. Their editorial and their paper are riddled with self-contradictory observations and internal inconsistencies. They seem to be arguing that the problems with gender imbalance in science aren’t the fault of sexism in the academy but instead trace to kindergarten and grade school and to the ‘choices’ that women (actually, girls) make. I’m all good with recognizing the problems with early inculcation in gender stereotypes, but that doesn’t exculpate the academy, and neither do these authors’ data. It’s also unclear to me why they believe the ‘academy’ needs a rousing defense against these valid accusations of sexism–and worse–as though it were a much-beleaguered long-suffering warrior fending off an undeserved piling on.
I hope you read Ruth Scobie’s weird, delightful meditation on The Ghosts of Anne Lister, because it was both great, and came out on Friday afternoon, when sometimes you’re too busy arguing about candy corn to read things.
I HAVE never been big on titles. Many people I interact with outside my job don’t even know that I am a professor, or that I have a doctoral degree. When I introduce myself in public, I’m Carlotta Berry.
But when I introduce myself in the classroom, I’m Dr. Berry. And I insist on being Dr. Berry.
Titles in the academy are inconsistent at best. I have colleagues who would prefer to be called by their first name, or nicknames like “Bone Saw.” But they are mostly men, and almost all white, and they have that luxury. As an African-American woman in a mostly Caucasian- and male-dominated field, I don’t.
Ebola on the maternity ward:
By this formulation, according to Nir Eyal, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School who has studied disaster triage, pregnant women rank low on the priority list. If something like the Kikwit mortality rate applies to the present Ebola outbreak, then around five per cent of infected pregnant women survive, compared with thirty per cent of the general population. As Eyal put it, “That means what’s needed to justify giving regular priority to a pregnant woman is a willingness to allow six other people to perish to save her.” But if the Kikwit figure is wrong, Eyal added, then the exclusion of pregnant women from Ebola wards is, too.
It’s possible that the perceived high mortality rate is self-perpetuating: health workers believe that pregnant women are likelier to die from Ebola, so these patients receive suboptimal care. Suppose pregnant women were prioritized: Would more aggressive intervention improve their survival rate? No research appears to have addressed that question (though it’s worth noting that the first reported survivor of Ebola in Sierra Leone was a pregnant woman).
this is beautiful and kind and full of self-awareness and love, which are the two most important things you can bring to being a parent or, like, a person in relation to other people in this fucked-up world:
People say you parent the way you were parented — and to some primal degree, that will always be true. That mimicry is what happens by rote and without intention. I was parented impatiently, spoken to in tones that often made me feel as though I was annoying, as though my presence, my movement, any unfavorable behavior served to make life harder for everyone else. Mine wasn’t an abusive household, just a short-fused one. So many little offenses seemed to set our inner lights flickering. So many irritants threatened to dim our daily joy. I know now that we were all stretched taut with stress. I’ve learned what it is to be a parent nearly drawn and quartered by life’s pressures. It’s the kind of lesson that rewrites the role my mother plays in my memories. I can revisit any one, with the distance of decades and all the wisdom and shame attendant to raising a child, and I’m hard-pressed to decide who was right or wrong, what was fair or unfair.
By the time I’d become a mother at the age of 30, I’d forgotten what it was like to be that child, the one ever striving to make herself smaller, less inconvenient, brighter. It was a curious amnesia, as I still find myself, at nearly 35, actively fighting an impulse to shrink. I see that urge growing in my daughter whenever I lose my temper.
wanna see my daughter in a costume? okay just this one time:
One more ghostly link, surely?
“In the first few years of Spiritualism, you had to go see a medium if you wanted to experience spirit rapping,” he says. “You hoped one came to your town, so you could pay 50 cents and sit in at a séance. Our earliest evidence shows that tables and chairs started mysteriously moving in the presence of the Fox sisters. Before long, the Spiritualists were attributing the movement of the tables to the spirits. Then, the information got out there that any family could sit around their kitchen table, clear off the silverware after dinner, and put their hands on it and if they waited long enough, it would start to move on its own. You could ask the table questions, and it would rap out responses. You could do this alphabet-calling thing that the mediums had been doing.”
AfterEllen has made some VIDEOS:
As women of the LGBT persuasion know, there are many terms, phrases and shorthands we use to describe things that are unique to our community. This can be as tame as “equality” and as offensive as “carpet muncher”; as sexy as “androgynous” and as confounding as “futch.” So we brought in some experts (comics, writers and actors) who were quizzed on some choice words that are supposedly part of our lexicon. (Like, does anyone actually say “wusband”?) We’re calling this The Lphabet.
Why innocent people plead guilty (make some tea first, settle in for a meaty read.)
breaking: all missing white dudes from street harassment video found in comments section
— Splatterhouse (@Matterless) November 1, 2014
