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.

Most Influential Feminist Philosophy Texts January 31, 2010

Cressida Heyes, the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta has compiled a rough bibliography of those texts nominated in January 2010 as “most influential in feminist philosophy” by subscribers to SWIP-L and FEAST listserv. The list is here.

The Sunday Cat gets behind the scene: Addition January 30, 2010

and is just a bit disappointed.

Where’s the actual cat?!?  Who, after all, inspired the whole thing.  So specieist!

It shows the extent of the disappointment that the following from Simon’s cat was left out:

 

 

 

Why are Nepalese women killing themselves? January 30, 2010

Unfortunately, the answer is unclear, but apparently, suicide is the leading death cause in women aged 15-49 in Nepal. This is puzzling, because worldwide, suicide isn’t even in the top 10 in causes of death (WHO stats here).

I haven’t been able to find detailed stats on mortality rates in Nepal, but generally, men are far more prone to suicide than women. It is just flabbergasting that suicide is the number one cause for mortality in women, in a country which used to have perinatal circumstances as a leading cause for death. It would probably be overly optimistic to think that the perinatal circumstances have improved so dramatically that it fell behind as a major cause of mortality.

When googling for mortality causes and rates, I did come across this interesting WHO graph about suicide in the world. The red bits are where suicide rates are higher. So that’s one huge block of red in the Orient.

But still. It is worrisome that suicide is risen so high amongst women in the reproductive age in Nepal.

It is bit of a sad possibility that both the practice of forced marriages and the custom of outcasting widows has to do with it, but there are no data on that.

Transgender rights in Pakistan January 29, 2010

There’s a brief and fascinating report (here, and more here) on the hijra of Pakistan – transgender people who have been marginalised but ‘tolerated’. Apparently, a number of pieces of recent legislation have been passed to affirm their civil rights – and under consideration is the move of including a third gender on official documentation.

Spurred by the forceful chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was restored after countrywide protests last year, normally moribund authorities have been ordered to ensure hijras enjoy the same rights as other Pakistanis, in matters of inheritance, employment and election registration.

Police have been warned to cease harassment and intimidation. Pakistan’s national database and registration authority, which issues ID cards, has been told to research a third option under the “sex” column.

“Times are changing,” said Almas Bobby, leader of one of the largest group of hijras in Rawalpindi. “Our community feels good for the first time in 60 years.”

These changes, apparently, were instigated by lawyer and Islamic scholar Muhammed Aslam Khaki who took up the defence of their rights having read about the brutal treatment to which hijra were vulnerable .

A new take on recovered memory syndrome January 28, 2010

An important number of people sincerely believe that they were victims of sexual abuse when they were children, that  they forgot it,  and that they recovered memories of the abuse when they were adults. 

Are they right?  Can you really forget and then remember such abuse?  Or are the seeming memories in some ways created later, perhaps by post-hypnotic suggestion.

My understanding is that a lot of recent research has changed a great deal in what we know about memory.  We are not passive recorders of our experience; everything that happens to us is not retained somewhere in the brain, and memories can easily change over time.  At the same time, very serious issues have been raised about whether we do forget horrible abuse.  If it does seem, as many claim, that it is unlikely that we forget severe abuse, a lot of people’s claims about past severe abuse are de-legitimized.  We have the sort of case where, many others worry, the abuser wins twice.

But what if an experience, perhaps a very bad one, is not experienced as abuse at the time?  Seen from the present, it may seem much more abusive than it did in the past.  But if it was not experience at the time as dreadful abuse, perhaps it won’t initially be retained as one of our obvious memoies.  If this is correct, then people might come to  remember sexual abuse after having forgotten about it. 

A new book, The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children–and its Aftermath, based  on about 200 interviews with survivors of abuse, opts for  the  latter account.  When the research was first initiated it was highly controversial and the author was warned by her advisers that it could finish off the possibility of an academic career for her.  As recounted in the sympathetic NY Times review:

[At the start of her research] Dr. [Susan] Clancy figured she knew what she would find: “Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening — overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.”

But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. Only when the child grew old enough to understand exactly what had happened — sometimes many years later — did the fear, shock and horror begin. And only at that point did the experience become traumatic and begin its well-known destructive process.

Dr. Clancy questioned her findings, reconfirmed them and was convinced. Her audience, when she made the data public, was outraged.

First, her data flew in the face of several decades of politically correct trauma theory, feminist theory and sexual politics.

Second, Dr. Clancy found that the world had little appetite for scientific subtlety: “Unfortunately, when people heard ‘not traumatic when it happens,’ they translated my words to mean, ‘It doesn’t harm victims later on.’ Even worse, some assumed I was blaming victims for their abuse.”

Dr. Clancy reports that she became a pariah in lay and academic circles. She was “crucified” in the press as a “friend of pedophiles,” colleagues boycotted her talks, advisers suggested that continuing on her trajectory would rule out an academic career.

Some of the comments on it at Amazon.com are deeply unsettling.  I certainly can’t simply dismiss them, but there is quite a bit of recent work that might at least mitigate their force.

It seems we can find a psychological syndrome can be largely constructed by therapeutic and medical authorities.  One person who has done a lot of early work on this is Ian Hacking.  See his Mad Travelers, The Re-Writing of the Self and The Social Construction of What for his very interesting thought.

Another recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, examines in some detail the issue of how much cultural beliefs affect the manifestation of mental problems.  There’s now an extended community that sees a mental syndrome as due to far more than facts about individuals and their experience.  The symptoms we see are in part the result of self-interpretation in the light of permissible ways of thinking in the culture.   Among other things.

On Chris Matthews’ Forgetting January 28, 2010

A lot has been written already on Chris Matthews’ declaration that he forgot for an hour that Obama was black. And I think Pam Spaulding may well be right when she writes:

What it boils down to is that there’s something about being “black” to forget—such as um, being articulate, or educated, or perhaps in his mind, standing up there and doing the whole SOTU thing in the wake of a whole lot of white guys and guess what? He’s not all that different from any of them

But one of the things I think is most interesting– and potentially useful, educationally/politically speaking– is Matthews’ tacit admission that Obama’s blackness is in the forefront of his mind the rest of the time. It’s refreshing to have someone not insisting that they don’t see race. The fact is we all do see it, and it affects us– if not consciously, then unconsciously. And the sooner we all acknowledge that the better.

Apple’s Ipad: What’s in a name? January 28, 2010

How about  a golden opportunity for some new jokes, such as:

“so will the 64 GB one be called the maxi-pad?”

Fast Company also tells us:

Apple’s ipad not the first choice for women.  Period.

And, unbelievable though it is, the name was  anticipated in this video from 2007:

 

So how did Apple’s branding end up so last year?  Here’s one explanation from Fast Company:

Seconds after the name was announced social networks lit up with not-so-fresh one-liners from both men and women (a CNBC anchor mentioned her very candid thoughts on-air). About an hour after the announcement #iTampon was a trending topic on Twitter.

But it was the females in the crowd who read more into Apple’s menstrual pun. They seemed to think Apple’s name was indicative of a male-helmed team oblivious to the fact that they were pushing an insensitively-named product. “Surely no women were involved in naming it the iPad” was a widely-reTweeted sentiment. Another: “iPad: Proof not enough women work in the Apple Naming Department.”

Many thanks to PJ, jj-son.

Math Anxiety Passed on From Women Teachers to Girls January 27, 2010

Rob sent us a story about this important study:

To determine the impact of teachers’ mathematics anxiety on students, the team assessed teachers’ anxiety about math. Then, at both the beginning and end of the school year, the research team also tested the students’ level of mathematics achievement and the gender stereotypes the students held.

To assess stereotypes, the students were told gender neutral stories about students who were good at mathematics and good at reading and then asked to draw a picture of a student who was good at mathematics and one that was good at reading. Researchers were interested in examining the genders of the drawings that children produced for each story.

At the beginning of the school year, student math achievement was unrelated to teacher math anxiety in both boys and girls. By the end of the school year, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls, but not boys, were to endorse the view that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.” Girls who accepted this stereotype did significantly worse on math achievement measures at the end of the school year than girls who did not accept the stereotype and than boys overall.

Yet more evidence against the innateness of differences in maths performance. And also a really fascinating example of the way a variety of forces– gender stereotypes, something like copying of same-gender teachers, anxieties being passed down through generations– all combine to produce an important effect. For more, go here.

This is scary: you believe you are acting honorably & wisely, January 26, 2010

but you are not.

For readers of this blog, this worry may signal a familiar theme:  the extent to which unconscious biases can be completely outside the awareness of well intentioned people  while  still leading them to act.  And now there’s a good book by a leading science journalist, Shankar Vedantam, called The  Hidden Brain: How  our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars and save lives, which takes a good look at what we know about unconscious biases and the ills they can cause.

There’s a very common theoretical position behind the kind of mainline research he is looking at:  at almost every moment of your waking life you are in charge of a large jointed physical object – one with jiggly bits – that you have to negotiate safely through a very complex physical environment and an exceptional and fairly unique social environment.  Your world is full of information and you need to pick up tons of it, from the fact that the pavement beneath the two little platform this object is positioned on to the emotional reactions of the people you are talking to.  And if you get some of it wrong, you might be in big trouble, from a damaging fall or a lost love interest.

How do you cope?  You could not cope with all this consciously, so an enormous amount is taken care of by your extraordinary brain.  You get the results, but you do not get the input and you are most often not aware of the selection process or what in the environment is tilting that process. 

And Hume was really right:  your mind picks up the patterns in the world and anticipates their continuing. 

Just from this, you can see there’s a huge downside.  If someone doesn’t act in accord with those patterns, your reaction can be very negative in ways you find it hard to justify rationally.  Your brain is conservative, one could say, though if you are reading this, you probably are not.  Others can figure out how to manipulate the brain in ways you will almost certainly not notice.  In fact, it becomes not so surprising that you feel sure you are doing the honorable and wise thing, while you are not.

Malcolm Gladwell talked a bit about the unconscious mind in Blink, but the present book is much more focus on the area and at least some of the ways in which the brain is guiding decisions and actions you would not approve of if you really got what’s going  on. 

It may not be a book for academics in the relevant field unless you enjoy quick gossipy reads that includes stuff about an academic couple in trouble (all my idea of fun, I have to say).  But for all of us who are not engaged in the experimental background, it’s got a lot to think about. 

In addition, there’s a very valuable discussion of it on Salon, brought to our attention by Mr. Jender.  It gives you a bit of a sense of the book and, even more importantly, it raises the MORAL ISSUES!  Given that most of us are more inclined toward racist and sexist actions than we think, how should  we judge our moral responsibility for such actions?  And how about those of others?  It’s pretty awful to think that society’s attitudes result in poor health care for minorities (or overweight people), but the attitudes are ours, for goodness’ sake, even if we do not want to own them.

(Thanks to Jender, Mr Jender, and AB who also sent us this link.)

So have a think and let us know what you think about moral responsibility and things like that…

Are you writing a doctoral thesis on Irigaray? January 26, 2010

If  so,  this looks like a wonderful opportunity for you:

Invitation to the Seminar of Luce Irigaray 14 – 19 June 2010

 Since 2003, Luce Irigaray has held an annual seminar for researchers doing their PhD on her work. The seminar offers the opportunity to receive personal teaching from Luce Irigaray and to exchange ideas, methods and experiences with other participants. The seminar was hosted by the University of Nottingham during the first three years (see Luce Irigaray: Teaching edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green, and published by Continuum, London & New York, 2008), by the University of Liverpool the fourth year, by Queen Mary, University of London the fifth year and by the Goodenough College of London the sixth year. In 2010, it will be hosted by Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in Ireland.

The framework of the seminar is this: a group of fifteen researchers doing their PhD on the work of Luce Irigaray stay one week on the university campus. The schedule includes: a presentation by each researcher of the aspect of their PhD which most focuses on the work of Irigaray, the discussion of this presentation by the group, comments from Luce Irigaray herself and her answers to questions raised by each participant. Also included are sessions devoted to the explanation of key-words or key-thoughts chosen by the participants. Personal meetings with Luce Irigaray are organised on the last day. The participants pay for their travel, but receive hospitality from the university. The seminar is conducted in English.

The participants in the seminar come from different regions of the world; they belong to different cultures, traditions and fields of research – Philosophy, Gender Studies, Religious Studies, Literature, Arts, Critical and Cultural Studies, etc. The themes of their research include, for example: the treatment of personal or cultural traumatic experience; the resources that various arts can offer for dwelling in oneself and with the other(s); the maternal order and feminine genealogy; the interpretation and embodiment of the divine today; the contribution of sexuate difference to personal and social development; new perspectives in philosophy etc. In each of these fields, diverse domains, approaches and methods are represented. To date, participants have come from Australia, Vietnam, Korea, India, Sri Lanka, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Latvia, Spain, Italy, Ireland and from different regions and universities of the U.S.A. and of the U.K. Beyond the multicultural teaching which results from such a gathering, the participants learn to live together and to share in difference during the time devoted to the work, and also during meals, walks, personal meetings etc. The atmosphere of the seminar is intense but friendly and joyful, and its outcome highly successful for both the research and the life of each participant.

If you are interested and would like to participate in such a seminar please send, as soon as possible, a CV, a PhD abstract (1 page) and a presentation of the issues and arguments of your PhD that most focus on the work of Luce Irigaray (5-6 pages) to Luce Irigaray (by mail: 15, rue Lakanal, 75015 Paris, France). After receiving this material, Luce Irigaray will tell you if you can participate in the seminar of 2010. You will be contacted for further practical information by Marita Ryan at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick after the selection of the candidates.  

Women at the joint UK session January 25, 2010

My count makes women 16% of the invited speakers. 

Could we hear from feminist philosophers who have some background knowledge what they think of that?  For example, is  this  an improvement?  Just what you’d expect? Or…???

CFP: SWIP at UK Joint Session January 25, 2010

SOCIETY FOR WOMEN IN PHILOSOPHY (SWIP UK) PANEL AT THE 2010 JOINT SESSION OF THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY AND THE MIND ASSOCIATION

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, 9TH – 11TH JULY 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS
At the 2010 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, there will be a SWIP UK panel of papers devoted to topics in any area of interest to women in philosophy.

We solicit full papers,(2500 words) plus 250 word abstract, suitable to be delivered in no more than 20 minutes with a further 10 minutes for discussion. We encourage submissions from graduate students. (As with
all the open sessions, papers accepted for this session will not be published in the Supplementary Volume of the Aristotelian Society.)

The closing date for submissions is *1st March 2010*. We expect to confirm which papers have been accepted by the end of March.

Please make sure that your submission is suitable for anonymous reviewing and attach a separate document with your name and contact details. Email submissions are preferred; please send your full paper, with an abstract, as either .doc or .pdf attachment to Dawn Phillips, at dawn.phillips AT warwick.ac.uk or send a hard copy to: Dr Dawn Phillips, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.

For information about SWIP UK, see http://www.swipuk.org
For information about the Joint Session at UCD, see http://ucdjointsession2010.com/

Speakers must be or become subscribing members of either the Aristotelian Society or the Mind Association, and register as a delegate for the Joint Session.

For details on how to join the Aristotelian Society, see http://www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk/subscriptions/index.html.
For the Mind association, see http://www.oxfordjournals.org/mind/access_purchase/price_list.html

Poor medical treatment is unhealthy January 25, 2010

… and a study has now shown that this is a key reason for some of the health problems faced by those* who are “overweight”. The article discusses a huge range or problems, including:
-Attribution bias, in which doctors assume that the weight is responsible for other problems and thus misdiagnose.
-Doctors refusing to perform procedures which are more difficult due to the weight.
-Lack of equipment properly sized to deal with heavier patients.
-Shaming tactics, like a woman with a torn ligament, whose surgeon refused to operate until she “stopped eating fast food” (which she didn’t actually even eat).

*Sometimes the article is couched in general terms, other times it focuses on women.

The Sunday Cat is rescued January 24, 2010

Damn good thing that a renowned climber was nearby.

(Thanks, Jender-Parents, and JJ!)

No Surprises Today January 23, 2010

More support for the claim that egalitarian marriages are happier, as well as more just, can be found in an article in the New York Times: “Over all, the evidence shows that the shifts within marriages — men taking on more housework and women earning more outside the home — have had a positive effect, contributing to lower divorce rates and happier unions.” The full story is here. “Women no longer need to marry up educationally or economically, so they are more likely to pick men who support a more egalitarian relationship,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research and education for the Council on Contemporary Families and author of “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.” The thesis that women who earn as much as more as their partners, and thus have real exit options and can bargain for more egalitariam terms of engagement, is best articulated in my favourite book about marriage and the division of child care and housework, Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power
by Rhona Mahony.

Objectification Silences Women January 23, 2010

In experiments with more than 200 people, researchers discovered that when a female believes her body is being sized up by a male, she’ll diminish her presence by speaking less. When a male believes a female is eyeing his physique, however, no such effect occurs. The study, published this month in the journal Psychological Science, explains that our culture has so taught women that they’re judged on appearance that they’ve come to evaluate themselves that way, ultimately self-objectifying. On the one hand, nothing in this study will much surprise feminist philosophers. On the other hand, it’s great to finally have social scientists studying the effects of objectification on women. An article on the study is here. The publication is called “Objectification Can Lead Women to Narrow Their Presence in Social Interactions” (from Psychological Science) by Tamar Saguy, Diane M. Quinn, John F. Dovidio, and Felicia Pratto.

Fight for election reform January 23, 2010

More specifically, in this case, fight back against the recent Supreme Court campaign finance ruling. To do so, you can go here and here to sign a petition. The wording seems a big weak to me, but it’s an Obama-organised effort, and I think it’s really important to demonstrate our support for it in order not to give them another excuse to cave.

CFP Just the Arguments January 23, 2010

From Philos-L:

Wiley-Blackwell is pleased to announce a call for proposals for Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, edited by Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone. The completed text will be a survey and presentation of 100 of the most important arguments in Western philosophy, wherein experts will write brief encyclopedia-like entries presenting arguments in their essence, including a representative quotation, explication of the context and aim of the argument, and the argument’s logical form.

I’m writing to urge all of you to think about arguments by women philosophers that might be well-suited to this volume, and to send in proposals if so. Go here for more information– but act fast, as proposals are due 1 February. If implicit bias does its usual thing, they’ll end up with 100 arguments by men (or maybe 99 if we’re lucky). So let’s see if we can avert that!