Tag-Archive for » sexism «

January 30th, 2010 | Author: sarcozona

Dollhouse is over.  It was a great show.

When Americans say they want to cut NASA’s budget, they think they’re talking about a budget of more than 600 billion instead of about 15 billion.

Female orgasm described as ‘abhorent’ and  banned on film in Australia along with small breasted women.  Unsurprisingly, the standard does not apply to male orgasms or small penises.

Homoerotic subtext isn’t enough:

I want those main characters to fall in love and make out because it means that fans of their characters will have to come to terms with their gayness, exactly like they would have to do in real life. It’s one thing to start out a book … introducing your main characters as gay from the start. Because from the outset the reader knows, the reader can choose whether they approve, or tolerate, or whatever. They can put that book down and walk away.

But reality doesn’t let you choose. Reality is when your best friend turns to you and says, “the thing is, I’m gay,” and your entire world turns upside down.

The phenomenon of mansplaining; I am never sure whether to laugh at or smack the men that do this.

Women today aren’t more promiscuous than 60 years ago. They just don’t have to hide it.

bookstore

This is what my favorite used bookstore/cafe looked like after the 3rd day of snow. Then it snowed 2 more feet and flooded the place.

Pirates buy more music. The only music I don’t buy is music from labels in the RIAA.

We know remarkably little about soil, so very cool and basic discoveries happen all the time.  We just figured out that we were very wrong about which water is where when in the soil.

Suicide is labeled the #1 cause of death among Nepalese women.  A better label would probably be sexism or oppression.

owl wow

Rotifers are extraordinary.

Late term abortions in America are almost impossible to get and very dangerous to perform, despite their legality.

Toxification of our environment is a much more serious issue than most people realize.  This is just a little too close to A Handmaid’s Tale for comfort.

Michele De Lucchi

Michele De Lucchi

Transportation costs associated with sprawl probably contributed to the mortgage crisis.

Ghandi may have been good for India, but he was horrible for women.

Disgusting things like this are why mandatory partner notification for abortion is a bad, bad idea.

Stop blaming the victim!

Left to my own devices, I never would have been raped. The rapist was really the key component to the whole thing. I was sober; I was wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt; I was at home; my sexual history was, literally, nonexistent—I was a virgin; I struggled; I said no. There have been times since when I have been walking home, alone, after a few drinks, wearing something that might have shown a bit of leg or cleavage, and I wasn’t raped. The difference was not in what I was doing. The difference was the presence of a rapist.

Domination without hegemony?

truth

Senator Jim DeMint: If we have the government making decisions about the most personal and private part of our lives, it is so naive to think that that coverage is not going to include a number of things that cause people of faith a lot of heartburn, whether it's funding abortions, whether it's rationing care, whether it's funding medical marijuana, whether it's euthanasia

January 18th, 2010 | Author: sarcozona

From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves.  Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular.  Even though Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of Augustine.  The letters of Jerome teem with loathing of the female which occasionally sounds deranged. Tertullian had castigated women as evil temptresses, an eternal danger to mankind …. Augustine is clearly puzzled that God should have made the female sex: after all, “if it was good company and conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better arranged to have two men together as friends, not a man and a woman.” Women’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease.  … Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny …

December 29th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

Father most certainly does NOT know best.

Some men go to strip clubs at least in part because they don’t know how to tell their guy friends they like them.

The link above explains that women are glue.  This also suggests that women most certainly aren’t people.

Jimmy Carter publicly denounces Southern Baptists because of their misogyny.

Who’s lying about climate change?

Money is the only good reason to get married.

Conservatives haven’t changed much at all since the New Deal.

December 20th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

More evidence that our drug policies are just wrong.

Evolving to eat meat helped humans live longer.

American evangelical influence is likely to cause Ugandan gays to be executed.

How did health care reform turn into a subsidy for health insurance companies?

It makes me livid when good ideas get shut down because politicians are more interested in support from corporations than their constituents.  Pharmaceutical companies freaking out about having to become more competitive are how we lost one great cost-saver in the health care bill this week.

HIV is a tricky bastard. A promising microbicide failed to work in large scale trials.

If we found other intelligent life, would we be able to communicate in any meaningful way? I recommend we start trying with octopuses.

A great story demonstrating that the pay gap is alive and well, sexism still has large effects in women’s lives, and that women are just as qualified as men.

I made these pancakes, but with whole wheat flour and extra buttermilk.  They will make any day better.  I promise.

Sexism makes you worse at math.

Bill Smith, untitle (calibreted arterial system), detail, 2006, mixed media

Bill Smith, untitle (calibreted arterial system), detail, 2006, mixed media

You aren’t funny, you’re an ass.

Dear Obama, please stop being such a failure.

December 12th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

Testosterone doesn’t actually make people selfish; it promotes fair play.

It’s not that feminists don’t have a sense of humor, you’re just not funny.

China really isn’t getting better about human rights abuses.

Fantastic essay by Asimov on “The Relativity of Wrong.”  I feel like this would be especially good to read in intro science classes.

Having health insurance doesn’t necessarily make healthcare affordable or accessible.

Large animal farms (actually large farms period) do incredible environmental damage with human victims.  Dairies in New Mexico have led to contaminated water in a region where water scarcity is a growing issue.

We thought flowering plants had such an advantage because of their flowers.  Actually, it’s their veins!

Teeny tiny orchid discovered by accident

Teeny tiny orchid discovered by accident

The Discovery Channel clearly doesn’t appreciate the women who watch their shows.  Otherwise why would they put out such offensive ads?

Comic books and vagina dentata.

October 10th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

Japanese farmers grow the most beautiful apples.  The process is incredibly labor intensive, however, and may die out in the next generation or so.

Anti-Ballistic Missile Complex

Anti-Ballistic Missile Complex

Peg Mullen, the Cindy Sheehan of the Vietnam war, died last week.

Why aren’t more women philosophers?  It’s the same reason most women steer clear of computer science: the large proportion of arrogant, sexist pricks currently in the profession.

Abigail Reynolds - The Music Room

Abigail Reynolds - The Music Room

Hope you like bugs – one of their major predators is on the way out.  And amphibians aren’t the only ones in trouble: 20% of mammals, 12% of birds, 5% of reptiles, and 4% of fish are in danger of extinction.

Just one more woman on a committee or in a group can make an incredible difference.  I’ve been in math classes where I’m the only woman and math classes where I’m one of just a few women.  FSP really captures the difference in the dynamic in her post.

On COROT-7b, it rains rocks into lava lakes.

ExxonMobil is still funding climate change denial PR.  Since we’re  going to hit peak oil in the next 20 years and there’s no way we can change things fast enough to prepare for that, they’ve set themselves up for some incredible profits.  Unfortunately, their profits won’t help us much.

Think ecosystems don’t provide absolutely essential “services” for humanity?  Check out what cutting down part of a forest has done to an entire country.

October 03rd, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

It’s more expensive to be gay.

The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping with Chicks.  I’m beginning to think straight women don’t actually exist.

Mac vs. PC hilarity.

Another health insurance company screws over another sick person.

Frat boys that aren’t awful human beings.  Hooray feminism!

cute attack: baby pygmy hippo

cute attack: baby pygmy hippo

Nike resigned from the board of the Chamber of Commerce in protest of the chamber’s position on climate change.  Other companies flat out resigned their memberships.  It’s good to see companies recognizing climate change is going to start affecting their profits.

I feel like the appropriate punishment for these sorts of crimes would be to deny them modern medical care.

Second wave feminism has a bad reputation, but without it, women would still be writing songs like this:

Every native fish in AZ is in trouble, and several have already gone extinct.  Drastic times call for drastic measures.

A new spider species was recently discovered and named after David Bowie.

Heteropoda davidbowie

Heteropoda davidbowie

Warming can fundamentally change interactions in an ecosystem.  This means that many of our predictions about what’s going to happen to ecosystems with climate change could be very, very wrong.

The Finance Committee killed the public option this week and then approved money for abstinence only sex-ed, which is the proven best way to up teen pregnancy and std rates.  I’d like to point out that democrats Lincoln, Conrad, and Baucus voted down the public option.  I suggest letting them know how you feel about their vote, especially if you come from Arkansas, Montana, or North Dakota.

Laurent is finally blogging again – I adore his silly botany posts.  Here’s a great one about how purple toothwort protects its nectar.

September 12th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

Oh so true snippets of fundie culture.

The Princeton Guide to Ecology just went to the top of my wishlist.  Yes, even above the lovely shoes I posted earlier this week.

“Government-run” health care has problems, but it still works better than private insurance:

Compared with the employer-coverage group, people in the Medicare group report fewer problems obtaining medical care, less financial hardship due to medical bills, and higher overall satisfaction with their coverage.

Conservatives freaked out about Obama’s speech encouraging kids to work hard in school, calling the action “unprecedented.”  I guess they weren’t paying attention during similar speeches given by Reagan and George H. Bush.  (Though perhaps if they’d paid better attention in school they would have developed some critical thinking skills and we wouldn’t have to deal with their craziness.)  I think the response of the right in this situation is very telling – they disagree with Obama, so they won’t listen to anything he says.  This is why Republicans have blocked health care reform at every turn, why Republicans have become the party of “no.”  I’m reminded of a child being told something she doesn’t want to hear who covers her ears and yells.

There isn’t much justice in our justice system.  How many innocent people have we executed?

The myth of overspending:

Whether families are spending more than they should according to some moral notion—consuming too much of the world’s resources or buying things they could easily live without—is not the issue at hand. These data give us no clue about the right amount of spending. But they give us powerful evidence that excessive consumption is not why families are going broke. There is no evidence of any “epidemic” of overspending—certainly nothing that could explain a 255 percent increase in the foreclosure rate, a 430 percent increase in the bankruptcy rolls, and a 570 percent increase in credit-card debt. A growing number of families are in terrible financial trouble, but despite the accusations, their frivolity is not to blame.

A lot of people claim that being queer is wrong because it isn’t “natural.” Weird how different cultures consider different sexualities “natural.”

Ecological/environmental refugees are becoming much more common.

A corporate sponsor of the Tea Party Express, many of whose members believe that health care reform is “a secret plot to kill old people”, is paying millions of dollars for killing old people.

A ton of feathers – why micro-inequities suck.

April 11th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

The Girl in the Red Beret by Lina Mounzer.

Cocorosie redoes Akon’s “I Wanna Love You.” It’s an incredible juxtaposition – same music, same setting, very different perspectives.

Sex toy recycling program. They even give you a gift certificate when you send in old toys!

Teen girls on Chris Brown’s abuse of Rhianna.  People ask why women don’t leave their abusers more often and this is why: they think it’s their fault. And so do many of the people around them.

And why don’t more women report that they’ve been raped?  This is why:

But still, the police did not believe the victim.  Worse, they didn’t just laugh at her, as many other victims report happening to them.  They didn’t ask her if she really deserved it for X reason, or if she had sex with the gunman consensually and then just regretted it later.  They didn’t ask her if she really wanted to press charges, because hey, this could ruin this man’s life, you know!  All of these are outcomes far more than bad enough, and which still happen far too often, but didn’t happen here.

Instead, they accused her of a false report and put her in jail.

Majikthise has two good posts up on the economic crisis and the bailout.

Where I’d be applying to grad school if I were a physicist.

An eleven year old killed himself because of constant bullying and taunting for being gay.  This isn’t an isolated case.  Many children kill themselves or are killed by their peers for being queer or being perceived as queer.  The schools aren’t dealing with it.

Another school failure: a teenage girl was suspended for taking birth control at school.

A case where justice is very unlikely to be found.

March 28th, 2009 | Author: sarcozona

What gender expectations do to people.

Settlers of Catan really is the perfect board game.  I should buy my own soon.

China refuses to participate in an important awareness raising climate change action in order to celebrate “Serf Liberation Day” – when the Dalai Lama was kicked out of Tibet. Oh propaganda.

If the Obama Administration does go ahead and officially identify climate change as a threat to public health, the US will have to take more action on the issue.  Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of idiots in office who may make significant changes very very difficult.

There are so many awesome education tools and resources on the internet.  Youtube EDU is my new favorite resource. (Did you just call me a nerd for watching lectures on youtube?  Because I think this is way nerdier.)  Also, I think writing/editing/correcting wikipedia entries for classes is something that should be done more often – especially in grad classes.

One & two freaking awesome data visualizations from Flowing Data.

Just two recent examples of sexism in lower and higher education.

Many people think we should deport all of our illegal immigrants and support immigration raids (which target legal immigrants, too).  But they don’t understand what those immigration raids do.  They make a joke of our legal system, are unnecessarily cruel, and hurt EVERYONE in the community.

PZ has an awesome post up about the chronic underfunding of our nation’s universities and an important admonition for voters:

Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.