So the New York Review of Books sent its e-subscribers a cheery note:

Below you will find links to the first forty-nine posts published on the NYRblog since its inception last month. If you haven’t been following the blog, we invite you to visit, participate in the comments, and send us your thoughts. You can also follow the Review online via Facebook and Twitter , or through our RSS feed.

Sounds jolly, until you scroll down and notice that among those 49 bloggers are two, and only two, women writers.  The percentage isn’t immediately obvious because two articles are co-authored, but I make the percentage of women authors 4%.

That is remarkable.  That’s what the percentage of full professors in physics used to look like before NSF and others got going on correcting the situation.  Now women show up in all sorts of fields.  For goodness sakes, what is going on with the NYRB? 

Is there a kind of male intellectual approach that shows up across many disciplines and that the NYR particularly values?  It would be interesting to figure out if that is so and why.  For example, why would they ask John Searle to write on Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge, rather than some feminist philosopher who might have been more balanced?  Did they think of the topic as sort of a guys’  thing?  Or perhaps they don’t know any women working in the field, much like our colleagues?

There’s a lot of regret that there aren’t more public intellectuals that gets expressed when we profess woe at the state of public discourse.  Perhaps if women have more venues, the dearth would seem less.

In all fairness:  I haven’t counted up the occurrences of women authors in the published journal.  In addition, the NYRB responded to an earlier complaint of ours, so I assume such issues matter to them at least a bit.

I’ve never been a big Thanksgiving traditionalist, so this year I suggest being thankful that the world contains awesome singing philosophers like Carrie Jenkins, who write gloriously nerdy songs about Quine. For more from the 21st Century Monads, go here.

It prevents sin, apparently. And you can rap about it.

The Kant Yearbook

is now accepting submissions for its third issue in 2011. The Kant Yearbook is an international journal that publishes articles on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It is the Kant Yearbook’s goal to intensify innovative research on Kant on the international scale. For that reason the Kant Yearbook prefers to publish articles in English, however articles in German will also be considered. Each issue will be dedicated to a specific topic. The third issue’s topic is

anthropology

All papers, historical or systematic, related to Kant’s anthropology and its theoretical or practical aspects are welcome. We also encourage papers on the contemporary significance of Kantian anthropology.

The Kant Yearbook practices double-blind review, i.e. the reviewers are not aware of the identity of a manuscript’s author, and the author is not aware of the reviewer’s identity. Submitted manuscripts must be anonymous; that is the authors’ names and references to their work capable of identifying them are not to appear in the manuscript. Detailed instructions and author guidelines are available at http://kantyearbook.uni.lu (http://philosophie.uni.lu). For further information contact the editor or the publisher Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York (www.degruyter.com). Paper submissions should go to dietmar.heidemann@uni.lu

Deadline for submission is

June 15, 2010

A glossy folder for jj-spouse just came through my mailbox with the following note on it:

Because of your active membership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Subaru marketing affiliate, you may be eligible to participate in the VIP Partners Program.

And get a Subaru for less. 

Being an active researcher myself, I googled for some information about this surprising role for the AAAS, having first ascertained from jj-spouse that it was indeed surprising.  I found that Subaru is now the Premier Automotive Sponsor of the AAAS.  And, in addition to giving members of AAAS up to 3k off of new cars, Subaru now sponsors all sorts of prizes for students, school teachers, books and films.  All for K-12, but still a really good thing.

So just imagine if the American Philosophical Association got some corporate sponsor.  Who would it be and what could we get?  I don’t know that my imagination is up to it, but I can try to start it off:

Fox News is now the Premier News  Network of the American Philosophical Association.  It will sponsor research on favorite philosophical topics such as the merits of upholding traditional values over attempts to introduce diversity.  Special funds will be available for conferences featuring all white male keynote speakers.  Free advertisement for all male departments will be carried on the network.

Let us know what you think!

The words are from Caster Semenya, who is the topic of an article by Ariel Levy, in the New Yorker, Nov. 30, 2009.  The article places the questioning of  Caster Semenya’s sex in a complex context.  The article opens with the poverty of the region CS grew up in:

The land is webbed with brambles, and the thorns are a serious problem for the athletes, who train barefoot. “They run on loose stones, scraping them, making a wound, making a scar,” Sako, a tall, bald man with rheumy eyes and a big gap between his two front teeth, said. “We can’t stop and say we don’t have running shoes, because we don’t have money. The parents don’t have money. So what must we do? We just go on.”

Another factor in the picture is the enforced categorizations from the colonizers:

South Africans have been appalled by the idea of a person who thinks she is one thing suddenly being told that she is something else. The classification and reclassification of human beings has a haunted history in this country … Taxonomy is an acutely sensitive subject, and its history is probably one of the reasons that South Africans—particularly black South Africans—have rallied behind their runner with such fervor. The government has decreed that Semenya can continue running with women in her own country, regardless of what the I.A.A.F. decides.

Does she look like "a drag queen," as some have said?

Another comes from the dehumanizing curiosity of the European look:

South Africans have compared the worldwide fascination with Semenya’s gender to the dubious fame of another South African woman whose body captivated Europeans: Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus. Baartman, an orphan born on the rural Eastern Cape, was the servant of Dutch farmers near Cape Town. In 1810, they sent her to Europe to be exhibited in front of painters, naturalists, and oglers, who were fascinated by her unusually large buttocks and had heard rumors of her long labia … Many South Africans feel that white foreigners are yet again scrutinizing a black female body as though it did not contain a human being.

 

In addition, the article picks up on the  immense complexity of the biology of sex and secondary sexual characteristics.  The facts make it clear that it is hardly likely for there to be some simple texts for sex; Ann Fausto-Sterling’s words on natural kinds are made especially relevant.  That is in contrast to the  role of gender duality:

There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married? (Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.) We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.

And there are still other issues:  the politics of sports organizations, the way CS,  a child, was poked and prodded without  any parental consent, and more.  And, finally, the  impact of it all on the child, who has decided she can only walk away.

Addition: Here’s a link to a piece on Caster Semenya by Judith Butler.  Do note that Butler’s piece is more an opinion piece; she  is not trying to get the details of the biology right, and that’s one of several respects in which the much longer NYorker article has more information.  In particular, levels of testosterone do not necessarily tell us whether the hormone can be used; some intersexed people may have higher than average (for females) levels of  the hormone without being able to use them.  (Thanks to Rob.)

The New Directions in Metaphysics conference coming up at Nottingham takes things in a rather old direction in at least one respect: gender. For contrast, one might check out the forthcoming New Waves in Metaphysics volume. (Thanks, R!)

…according to this story. The evidence? Oh, you picky, picky people. Nothing relevant that I can see, from this Guardian story. The study doesn’t seem to even concern whether or not women’s views of their husbands are accurate, despite the way it’s being reported. (Thanks, Andrew!)

There are a lot of versions of this video on the web, some of which show the officer “shoo-ing” the cat off. It does not appear, however, that the cat was at all hurt, or even deterred, by such action.

Many thanks to JT!