They’re different: look for it from day 1! February 9, 2010

Check out this awesome advice to new mothers. I especially like the way that she acknowledges you may not actually perceive these differences, so you should look for them:

Boy or girl? That’s the first question people ask when they hear you are having a baby. And according to child psychologist Dr Pat Spungin, the answer makes a huge difference to your baby’s personality and progress, from the very moment he or she arrives in the delivery room. ‘Gender affects everything – from how well babies make eye contact in the first week of life, to whether they’re easy to potty train at 18 months,’ she says. The differences are very important for parents to be aware of, yet it’s so easily overlooked.’

The amazing thing is that the full article actually acknowledges the ways that parents’ reactions shape the children, and the ways that parents differentially classify the same behaviour in boys and girls.

I particularly liked the closing line (after explaining the boys are unsociable, slow to potty train, slower to talk, etc).

Does it all seem weighed in favour of girls? Not in the long term. Your son is likely to earn up to 25% more than most women, be bigger and stronger, and has better odds of becoming Prime Minister. Plus he is less likely to have to worry about domestic chores (apparently, there is no society where men are the primary caregivers). Oh, one more thing about a boy. He never stops loving his mummy.

Query from a reader February 8, 2010

MV writes:

Next Fall I’ll be teaching an interdisciplinary humanities honors seminar on 20th Century Intellectual History, which is effectively a broadly humanities-focused course that could be called “Important Works published between 1900-1999 the Professor Wanted to Read this Semester.” The presumption is that we read a book a week, and ideally something that looks impressive sitting on the bookshelf in a Great Works sort of way.

I’ll be teaching 4 or so units on different subject matters, and I’m thinking about doing a unit on feminism. There is obviously an embarrassment of riches of great 20th century feminist texts, whether philosophical, literary, journalistic, or historical. What I’m looking for, though, is some intelligent dissent. I’m hoping you can help me with that because not much is coming to mind. Ideally, the writing would be some Impressive Book, but it need not be. If the best stuff is a series of disconnected articles or other media, that’s fine. The important thing for my purposes is to get the best critical work on the table, regardless of whether it is popular, academic, philosophical, literary, or other.

Thoughts about what I should take a look at?

APA Eastern Division Paper deadline February 8, 2010

It’s Feb. 15 & here’s the  online submission page.

You need a 3,000 word paper and a 100 word abstract.  I assume the word length does not include bibliography.

So if you’ve got the extra paper here or there, do think of putting it in, expecially if you are already on the East Coast or have to go to the meeting for the job market (gasp!).

And now back to madness in the UK February 8, 2010

The University of Sussex is enacting massive cuts, including the elimination of Early Modern History. Other highlights include closure of the subsidised childcare facility and the sexual health clinic. (H/T Leiter.)

When Philosophers Get Discussed on Late-Night TV February 8, 2010

A bit of light relief:

And, for you British readers: I think she meant ‘leather trousers’.

More from UK academia February 8, 2010

The fun just never stops over here.

Universities across the country are preparing to axe thousands of teaching jobs, close campuses and ditch courses to cope with government funding cuts, the Guardian has learned.

Do consider joining the Facebook group Save Higher Education (UK).

It’s not just the buildings February 7, 2010

that King’s is spending money on while firing staff.

“A need has been identified to invest in a number of areas of strategic investment and growth through six new appointments for 2010-11 at a cost of £320,000″ in such areas as “Culture and Identity” and “Digital and Visual Cultures.”

So it’s not just about valuing buildings more than academic integrity/people/contracts/philosophy. It’s also about bureaucrats, not academics, determining what topics are worthy of pursuit by the academics. Just when I think I can’t be more disgusted by their plans…. For more, so the “restructuring” plan. (Via Leiter.)

A puzzling analogy between honour killings and filmstars February 7, 2010

According to Liz Jones of the UK Daily Mail, the stardom of Emma Watson is just as shameful to “our” society as honour killings are to the societies where those happen. Read the article here.

She draws a comparison between the victims of honour killings, like the poor Turkish girl Medine Medi, who was buried alive by her father and grandfather for having been talking to boys, and women in the “West” who suffer from the obsession with youth:

But can we in the West really claim the moral high ground when it comes to condemning these ‘honour’ killings’?

I would counter that the number of women harmed psychologically and physically by the West’s obsession with extreme youth far outstrips the number of women who are murdered for adultery, or even for the ‘crime’ of being the victim of rape in Islamic countries.

Apart from the fact that, given the choice, poor Medine would probably have preferred to be in Emma’s shoes, there are some things that grate me in this article.

I get the impression that Liz jones rather reduces Emma Watson to being a mere object with the property of “extreme youth” (I would think a new born baby is extremely young, but since being newly born happens to everyone, you can hardly call it extreme, I guess?) rather than the smart and self-determined young woman she appears to me to be. Kudos to Emma, really.

And I agree that it is likely that women in “the West” suffering physically or psychologically from the obsession with youth (which I think is there) outnumber the victims of honour killings (ergo, the ones that actually ended up dead), but the comparison is skewed.

I think it is highly likely that a lot of women in societies where honour killings take place suffer psychologically from anxiety and from their lack of freedom due to the threat of getting killed if they are believed to have consorted with guys. Also, the situations where the woman doesn’t end up dead, but just physically assaulted due to such suspicion should be taken into account if you are going to make a comparison of the suffering, if such a comparison is possible at all.

Honour killings should be stopped, there is no doubt in my mind about that. And I would really like it a lot better if there wasn’t such an obsession with youth in the world (not just “the West”, by the way, whatever “the West” may be, but that’s another matter), but I cannot possibly put an appreciation for young stars like Emma Watson on a par with burying your daughter alive for shaming the family’s honour.

(Thanks to @AllenStairs for bringing the article to my attention)

The Sunday cat celebrates the many forms of auto- February 7, 2010

eroticism, even in the attenuated form many of our beloved feline fellows are left to experience.  But extremes remain problematic. 

Judge this one for  yourself:

 

MANY thanks to  Jender and CD! 

“The female gaze” February 6, 2010

“The Female Gaze” was an exhibition at Cheim and Read, in NYC.  It is about women artists looking at women.  It seems to me important to remember that it is a curated show, so there is a layer of choice between us and the artists.  Still, there are important  and biting critiques of the Western tradition. 

  The video below starts out being a bit jerky and hard to watch, but it is worth sticking with; James Kalm, artist and critic, has done a lot of these quite casual looks at important exhibitions.  You can view pictures of the exhibition pieces here.

James Kalm also has a video of an exhibition of works by the important artist, Joan Mitchell, who is in the gaze exhibition. 

What are you thinking about? February 6, 2010

Anything you care to share about:  the terrible weather, horrific job scene, disasterous economy?  The restructuring of (some?) universities in the UK? 

If you are not in the USA, is your government looking any less disfunctional?

What about what you are teaching?  Writing?  Reading?  Viewing?

What’s the world look like from your point of view?

Yes, one wonders. February 5, 2010

From the Times Higher, regarding the King’s situation– it’s now clear that all faculty in Arts and Humanities will have to re-apply for their jobs.

In light of the cuts, he queried why King’s went ahead with the £20 million purchase of the east wing of Somerset House in December 2009.

cfp: Avatar February 4, 2010

From the Journal of Religion, Nature and Culture.  Information here.

(Thanks to lga.)

Save King’s Philosophy Jobs February 3, 2010

As we noted a couple days ago, King’s College London is terminating the contracts of permanent members of staff, including full professors. Now there’s a letter you can sign to protest. To do so, go here.

Is there a word for it? February 3, 2010

We’ve just had this question from reader SG, and we don’t know how to answer it. Do you? We’d be very grateful for your thoughts.

I’m a philosophy PhD student and am writing a paper on feminist and race critiques of objectivity in science. I want to connect these specific critiques, however, to a general category of critiques of kyriarchy. But, I can’t find a term to identify all these people who make critques of a kyriarchial society. (So, a word that would express what feminists, race theorists, and people who study all the other kinds of social oppressions have in common.)

Bees Do It II February 2, 2010

Those bees!  It seems we just found out that they can count, and now here comes another challenge to traditional conceptions of the mind and who has one.  It turns out that bees can recognize individual faces:

A honeybee brain has a million neurons, compared with the 100 billion in a human brain. But, researchers report, bees can recognize faces, and they even do it the same way we do.

Bees and humans both use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the components of a face — eyes, ears, nose and mouth — to form a recognizable pattern, a team of researchers report in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology.

You ever feel that bee you swotted has it in for you?  Well, that’s possible.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to disappear, one hopes February 2, 2010

From CNN:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to unveil the Pentagon’s plan for rolling back the controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay and lesbian service members on Tuesday [today]. 

Of course it has to get through congress, and they’ve made it clear that they don’t want to do anything  Obama wants to do.  So will there be opposition?

Here’s the kind of negative remarks CNN is reporting:

1.  “This successful policy has been in effect for over 15 years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels,” McCain said.

Successful?  Probably not in the eyes of the 13,500 people who have been discharged for being homosexual since it was implemented.

2.  At least one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Gen. James Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps — has expressed reservations about repealing the law.  “Our Marines are currently engaged in two fights, and our focus should not be drawn away from those priorities,” Conway said in November through a spokesman.

3.  Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute said the real test will be in the barracks, with the rank-and-file members of the military.   “We can talk about this delicately or we can just be fairly direct,” O’Hanlon said. “There are a lot of 18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden men in the military who are tough guys. They’re often politically old-fashioned or conservative; they are not necessarily at the vanguard, in many cases, of accepting alternative forms of lifestyle.”

I see, it’s the testosterone again. 

Of course, there are supporters, but CNN reports that their poll says the support in the country is lower that one might have hoped and expected:

In a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll in April 2009, 48 percent of Americans favored maintaining the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Thiry-seven percent opposed the policy because they believed it treated homosexuals too harshly, while another 8 percent opposed it because they believed it treated homosexuals too leniently.

Women-only food lines in Haiti February 1, 2010

According to various news sources, the idea  of women only came as a solution to problems of violence and unfair distribution.  See also CNN, which stresses the avoidance of violence.

Small Breasts Banned in Porn January 31, 2010

to protect the kids. Really. Because apparently women with small breasts look like kids, and so porn depicting them encourages paedophilia. So Australia has banned A-cups in porn. As well as female ejaculation. And no, that’s not about protecting the kids. That’s because it’s “abhorrent”.

I just don’t know where to begin. But it is fascinating to see how an anti-paedophilia campaign turns into a stigmatization of small breasts. (I’m also wondering if they insist on women with body hair. Because body hair’s actually something kids don’t have but normal women do. Bet they’re not insisting on hairy women in the porn flicks.)

Thanks, Mr Jender!

UPDATE: BW informs us there’s reason to doubt this one. Go here for more.

Philosophy Cuts at King’s London January 31, 2010

The story, is I understand it, is this. King’s College London is making redundant several staff members (including full professors) in the Philosophy Department, one of the top in the country. They are making Professor Shalom Lappin and Dr Wilfried Meyer-Viol redundant, claiming this is part of the elimination of computational linguistics. (There is no computational linguistics department, and Lappin and Meyer-Viol are full members of the philosophy department.) They are also forcing Professor Charles Travis to retire, in violation of his contract, which allows him to work past retirement age. Rumour has it they will also be forcing all members of the department to re-apply for their posts.

I urge you to join the facebook group Stop Philosophy Cuts at King’s College London. You might also consider emailing some of the following:

principal@kcl.ac.uk

lawrence.freedman@kcl.ac.uk

keith.hoggart@kcl.ac.uk

chris.mottershead@kcl.ac.uk

jan.palmowski@kcl.ac.uk

For more, see here.