to this depiction of independent women. And this depiction of cats.
For more, see here. (Thanks, Mr Jender!)
Month: July 2009
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Be prepared to scream with laughter!
From the 2008 additions to the philosophical lexicon (stress mine):
bernard, n. (1) (from St Bernard) A shaggy dog story. Hence bernard, v. to tell such stories in lieu of making general arguments. “The risk one takes in bernarding is that one may be outsmarted.” Also baown. the punch line of a bernard. (2) A psychotic state in which one finds it impossible to visualise a bath without a naked woman in it.
I guess this is a reference to a certain well-known philosopher who had, among other things, a fondness for the metaphor of throwing out the bath… . And of course the image of a naked woman is just very funny, isn’t it. Or not.
Jimmy Carter Leaves Southern Baptist Church (Quite a while ago)
Why? For its views on women. My first thought, after ‘Good for him!’, was ‘why now?’ And the answer seems to be not a change in the church but Carter’s own involvement in a declaration regarding the importance of challenging sexism.
Former President Jimmy Carter issued a statement Sunday announcing he is leaving the Southern Baptist Church due to their treatment of women. Carter has been a devout Southern Baptist for more than sixty years, but differs ideologically on points where the religion justifies the subordination of women. His announcement comes after the Elders, a group of world leaders with which Carter is affiliated, released a statement on the issue of discrimination against women and girls by religion. In his statement, Carter calls “on all leaders to challenge and change the harmful teachings and practices, no matter how ingrained, which justify discrimination against women.”
I’m pretty sure Carter already thought the church was wrong before that statement was issued, but it seems as though issuing that statement and staying in the Church was just too much cognitive dissonance. I think it’s quite important to think about what can make people really take action for their principles, and this is an interesting example. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
Update: Reader rs has corrected the story form Ms that I cited above:
Actually, Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention some time ago, in 2000 (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/21/us/carter-sadly-turns-back-on-national-baptist-body.html). He did cite the church’s views on women then as one of his reasons for leaving, and this was not long after the church’s leaders had revised the “Baptist Faith and Message” in 1998 to say that wives should submit to their husbands, and in 2000 to state explicitly that women could not be pastors. Ugh.
This week’s statement goes into more detail than he did then on discrimination and the rights of women and girls.
Giving voice to implicit biases?
The following video may be hard to watch. Pat Buchanan is happy to say things many people wouldn’t. In fact, most people, I would guess, wouldn’t even let themselves consciously think like this. But we do know lots and lots of us have implicit racist biases, along with sexist ones and others. (We talk about them quite a bit on this blog.)
One consequence is that for a lot of people the best choice among people is a white person, particularly a white man. This video reminds us of what hidden views can underlie such choices..
The personae: Rachel Maddow, American TV liberal commentator; the first openly gay American to hold a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, where she completed her D.Phil. Pat Buchanan: Very conservative American political commentator, many shows and appearances on TV and Radio.
Orgasm a Day Campaign
I didn’t think I could still have ‘American-in-Britain’ culture shock. But it seems I can.
A National Health Service leaflet is advising school pupils that they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and that regular intercourse can be good for their cardiovascular health…
…Alongside the slogan “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”, it says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”
By the way, British sex education is not quite as the existence of this leaflet would suggest. In my informal polling of about 100 students this year (it came up in discussion– really!), I found only one or two who’d even been told how to use a condom. And one of them had been taught it in a school which also featured a religious education class telling her that contraception was wrong.
Still… Just *try* to imagine any authority in the US putting out a leaflet like that. (Thanks, EB!)
Spanish Abortion Law
Prime Minister Zapatero, who helped make Spain the 3rd country in the world to legalise gay marriage, is now working on liberalising abortion law.
Under the current law, Spanish women can in theory go to jail for getting an abortion outside certain strict limits — up to week 12 in case of rape and week 22 if the fetus is malformed. But abortion is in effect widely available because women can assert mental distress as sole grounds for having an abortion, regardless of how late the pregnancy is.
Zapatero is now pushing for abortion with no restrictions up to 14 weeks, and for 16 year olds to be allowed abortions without parental consent. (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
“Women, girls, females, ladies, just can’t cut it”: Clarification
at math, physics, logic, philosophy or even chess.
Have you heard such remarks? There are lots of interesting details we might ask for later, but this initial survey just asks if you’ve heard a remark about the inferiority of women or girls in some area where we think abstract reasoning is required.
**Of course, most of us have probably heard of – or read of – someone’s saying this. So let’s just consider its being said in academic or busness/work/competition contexts. You’ve heard it personally, as it were.**
There are lots of areas in the arts where comparable things might be said, but let’s not include those areas in this first survey.
Thanks to lga for her comment, the first one on this post.
Sotomayor’s faux racism and power asymmetries
Racism is a seriously malignant and often unacknowledged force in a society. One might worry that a phrase like “faux racism” (i.e., not real racism) could diminish our sense of how bad racism is. Still, there are times when we need to get a grip on the fact that a judgement ostensibly based on race is not really a matter of racism.
Racism is also extremely difficult to discuss; the following might seem obvious and even simple minded. Or it might seem objectionable or in need of qualifications. Let us know!
During the hearing yesterday, Senator Graham, in his southern accent, asked Sotomayor if she realized how much trouble he would be in if he said he hoped that a wise white man would reach a better conclusion than a Latina judge. I think the session closed on his question, and I don’t know what “don’t rock the boat” answer Sotomayor did or would give. But the remark invites us to look at the difference between verbally analogous remarks.
There seem to me to be two directions at least we could take. One is to bring in standpoint theory directly, as Jender did previously. Originally, that theory’s proponents argued that oppressed minority positions can make truths perceivable that can’t really be discerned by others. We might now see it as saying that people outside a gender, race, class or national group may have insights, particularly about themselves, that the insiders are unlikely to know. In this latter version, it seems pretty obviously true, and we’ve taken note of that very recently, with the help of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A second, related approach is to look more directly at the power asymmetries between, in this case, Latinas and white men in the relevant society, the United States. White men, not Latinas, dominate in leadership positions in academia, industry, the law, medicine and the arts. Universities generally teach the history of white men, their theories, the science they have developed and the arts they produce.
In this context, the statement that a wise white man would do better than a comparably placed Latina (e.g., both are judges or artists or whatever) is to say that there is no need to open up the places of privilege that white men so thoroughly dominate. That position in effect underwrites severe injustices.
There is no such implication on Sotomayor’s part. There surely are many arenas in which at least some white men can and do experience failures in justice, but the privileging of learned opinion is in general not one of them. So what is her comment telling us?
A Latina judge of Sotomayor’s standing will be very well versed in white culture; after all, she went to Princeton and Yale. But white men are not well versed in the culture of Latinas. Consequently, when a decision is made where a Latina’s culture has relevance, she may very well be in a position to make a better decision, particularly if she is wise. She will be likely to have relevant experience that white men often don’t even know they are missing. We get this conclusion from the obviously true version of standpoint theory.
You might think there’s still some overstatement – hyperbole – in Sotomayor comments about a wise Latina. But it is in the cause of getting a place at the table and not a claim that a whole class of people don’t need to be heard. The context, with the asymmetries of power, make this clear.
Media on Sotomayor
Quite a damning video– watch it if you’re wanting to get really angry.
Gender and Chess
We’ve discussed stereotype effects before (For example, here). There’s a lot of data showing that if you activate a stereotype about a particular group during badly on a task, members of that group will do badly on the task (but not if you don’t). Women, for example, do less well on maths tests if reminded of their gender in some way (even just being asked if they live in single sex accommodation).
Now there’s an important new study on gender stereotypes and chess.
In this paper it is argued that gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess. Forty-two male-female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via the Internet. When players were unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males. When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent. When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male opponents…
…gender stereotypes can have a greatly debilitating effect on female players leading to a 50% performance decline when playing against males. Interestingly, this disadvantage is completely removed when players are led to believe that they are playing against a woman. This may, in part, occur because women choose a more defensive style when playing with men.
Pretty impressive results, and very good to know about. (Thanks, Vishal!)
