Back to the kitchen, ladies May 2, 2013

Feminist Announcement! We’ve got another thing to add to august list of Things Feminism Has Ruined. In addition to marriage, family, children, being pretty, the fabric of society, and aviator sunglasses we can now add something altogether more important: food.

And that’s because according to Michael Pollan – of The Omnivore’s Dilemma fame – women, and more specifically feminism, are to blame for the food ills of the contemporary western diet. In a recent interview with the NY Times magazine, Pollan opines that our love of carefully prepared food is:

a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.

Pollan further bemoans the fact that:

American women now allow corporations to cook for them.

American woman, Pollan fears, have lost the “moral obligation” to cook that they once felt. And this is a Bad Thing. Thanks, feminism!

I’m not even going to bother going into how ridiculous Pollan’s rose-tinted view of food in 1950s America is – Emily Matchar does that far better than I could over at Salon in her article Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig? 

Historical nonsense aside, the really striking thing about Pollan’s comments is how he seems to have internalized the idea that if home-cooking is anyone’s work, then it’s women’s work. So if the home-cooking isn’t getting done, it’s the women who aren’t doing it.

Though I suppose it’s not particularly mysterious that someone so fond of nostalgic call-backs to 1950s Americana might not have particularly enlightened ideas about gender norms. Let’s just hope his nostalgia for the food traditions of the American past doesn’t extend back too far, given the now conclusive evidence that the settlers at Jamestown were cannibals.

My advice to Princeton women April 3, 2013

Don’t take the advice of this op-ed too seriously.

The new pope on women in politics? March 14, 2013

Someone please tell me this didn’t really happen. (Seriously, if anyone knows more, please do say so in the comments.)

Women are naturally unfit for political office (…) The natural order and facts teach us that man is a politician par excellence, the Scriptures show us that woman is always the supporter of man, the thinker and doer, but nothing more than that.

From here and here (in Spanish), among other places — all seemingly in Spanish, so if you find it in English, please post that, too, in the comments.

UPDATE: This is probably not a real quote. The only reference I can find (until the last few days, that is) online is the one in the yahoo answer forum Kathryn linked below. My guess is that the comments here are correct, that the quote was fabricated in 2007, and is being picked up now. See swallerstein’s comments below for more pressing concerns regarding Pope Francis’s history.

“Everyone Can Be a Philosopher” March 13, 2013

Hey! Wanna feel happy about stuff for a few minutes? Feminist Philosophers reader Sophie Collins sent us the following remarks and image. So very awesome!

I’m a big fan of the blog, as a feminist philosophy undergrad, it’s great to see.

Just wanted to tell you a story that happened in my philosophy class today. I facilitate philosophy classes in primary schools, and today the kids were given the task to draw a symbolic picture which would represent what you need to be like, to be a philosopher. The picture was going to make part of an advert for a different school which needs a philosophy teacher.

Some kids drew speech bubbles, some drew thinking bubbles, some drew them very smartly dressed (because it is a job). Most drew stick people without a gender.

One drew herself, because she is a philosopher.   One drew a guy with a beard, for scratching.

We then brought the best bits of the pictures together to form one picture, for the advert.

I asked if the beard was needed. I said that I am a philosopher,and I don’t have a beard. We discussed it for a bit,and in the end decided to draw a person with pigtails and a beard, and a question mark next to their head to show that it doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl, everyone can be a philosopher.

Break the Box Campaign: Video about Gender Stereotypes March 10, 2013

I came across this video via Feministing.  It’s from the TAASA (Texas Association Against Sexual Assault) and is part of their “Break the Box” campaign.

I like how they visually represent stereotypes.  I also like that while their specific target is sexual assault, they are addressing gender stereotypes (for both men and women) as part of the problem.

Misogyny (et al.) at the Oscars February 27, 2013

NSFW: expletives

A row of Oscar awards

“This wasn’t an awards ceremony so much as a black-tie celebration of the straight white male gaze.”

An article by Margaret Lyons at   Vulture.com has been making the rounds on the internet: “Why Seth MacFarlane’s Misogyny Matter.“
(MacFarlane is the creator of Family Guy, and hosted the Oscars this year.)

Lyons does a nice job of summing up experiences that are all too common for many of us but haven’t sunk in to our cultures at large:

“Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn’t feel like joking. It’s dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, “I don’t think you belong here.” All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I’m stranded in a desert of every “tits or GTFO” joke I’ve ever tried to ignore.”

Lindy West at Jezebel.com also posted an article about MacFarlane, coining the term “sexism fatigue.”  (I wouldn’t be surprised if another term for this already exists in the academic literature.  And if it doesn’t, it should.)

Sexism Fatigue: When Seth MacFarlane Is a Complete Ass and You Don’t Even Notice

“Seth MacFarlane will go on the television and make a joke about George Clooney having sex with a 9-year-old girl who is sitting right there, and your first reaction will be, “Well. At least he didn’t literally say she should get raped. Pass the cheese.”

That’s bad. A famous man making sexist jokes on a primetime awards show watched by millions of people is so banal and status-quo in our culture, that to me—a woman professionally committed to detecting and calling bullshit on sexism—it just feels like a drop in the bucket.”

West also coins another phrase in her article:

“Fuck the bucket.  If I’m not fatigued, I’m not caring enough. So fuck that stupid bucket.”

I hope there’s an equivalent term for this in the academic literature, too.

Sexcereal February 20, 2013

Now that I’ve stopped laughing and can breathe again, I can share this website that I came across through a Sociological Images article.

Sexcereal: The first gender-based wholefood.

Seriously though, I first thought this was a joke, because saying that men need testosterone and women need “balanced hormones” is the most ridiculous oversimplification of our biology, ever.

And then I remembered: ridiculous oversimplification of biology is the standard conception of gender in our cultures.

Gender and Uptalk

I’ve been thinking about uptalk a bit lately–someone suggested to me that it’s not a beneficial speech habit for women, as it might play in to negative stereotypes–and just came across this discussion of an interesting study on gender differences in the use of uptalk. The take-away:

As Linneman explains, “One of the most interesting findings coming out of the project is that success has an opposite effect on men and women on the show.”  Linneman measured success in two ways: He compared challengers to returning champions, and he tracked how far ahead or behind contestants were when they responded.  Linneman found that, “The more successful a man is on the show, the less he uses uptalk. The opposite is true for women… the more successful a woman is on the show, the more she uses uptalk.” Linneman suspects that this is “because women continue to feel they must apologize for their success.”

There’s another interesting discussion at Slate, In Defense of Upspeak.

Readers: What do you think?

Raising Female Leaders (in India) February 19, 2013

The February 2013 South Asia Newsletter of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab references important research results on Raising Female Leaders in India.

“A quota system for female village leaders in India [reserving for women in India a randomly selected third of the village council leader positions] changed perceptions of women’s abilities, improved women’s electoral chances, and raised aspirations and educational attainment for adolescent girls.”

Here is a policy brief [in PDF format] from April 2012 titled “Raising Female Leaders” summarizing ongoing research/data collection/analyses that confirm and clarify very promising policies and policy lessons regarding progress on deeply ingrained gender stereotypes (by Lori Beaman, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, and Petia Topalova). (This confirmation and clarification -even if no surpise to many – arguably very, very important for all sorts of reasons…)

Featured/previously published evaluations:
Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India. Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande and Petia Topalova. Science Magazine 335(6068), February 2012.

Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias? Lori Beaman, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande and Petia Topalova. Quarterly Journal of Economics 124(4): 1497-1540, November 2009.

Christina Hoff Somers on the Boys in the Back. February 3, 2013

In fact, Dr. Somers is the step-mother of a colleague of mine, and so I won’t dwell on the possible motives for her friendly voice for feminism in today’s NY Times. It would be very mean to suggest she has her eye on sales of the book she is about to reissue. (That book is called The War Against boys.) So let me just note that she relays some interesting ideas about why boys do less well in school than girls, as it seems. She does seem to think its due to universally shared male characteristics, like being feckless and lazy.

As our schools have become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, collaboration-oriented and sedentary, they have moved further and further from boys’ characteristic sensibilities. Concerns about boys arose during a time of tech bubble prosperity; now, more than a decade later, there are major policy reasons — besides the stale “culture wars” of the 1990s — to focus on boys’ schooling.

We addressed the research behind the idea that boys and girls have brains fundamentally different in the way Somers described. Cordelia Fine, who will be speaking at the Central APA in a few weeks, has recently made the idea even more implausible.

Still, we can probably all get behind her closing sentence: The rise of women, however long overdue, does not require the fall of men.