The invisible gorilla on the radiology slide

Nice twist on a famous study.  (Thanks, Jender-Mom!)

What is feminism?

What they say and what it all means explained in a chart,http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/02/the-wot-is-feminism-chart/

Thanks Butterflies and Wheels! And thanks RC for the link.

 

 

Rape and Gender

Rebecca Solnit’s smart, trenchant, thorough and  distressing Al Jazeera piece on rape is, alas, as important now as when she wrote the first two iterations of it in the 1980s and 2000.

Here’s an excerpt:

There is… a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent, including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

[Trigger warning: explicit discussion throughout about rape, rape threat, assault and murder.]

Thanks, EM.

Charlotte Witt on Baby Boxes

Feminist philosopher Charlotte Witt has an excellent piece in the Boston Review.

There is a hidden political dimension to the debate over children’s right to know. The debate presupposes a bionormative view of the family, which holds that families formed via biological reproduction are the gold standard or Platonic form of the family. The implicit bionormative assumption emerges in the thought experiments above. When we ask about children placed in baby boxes (and subsequently adopted), our intuitions might favor the notion of a right to know. But when we consider families formed by biological reproduction, our intuitions do not line up to support such a right. Rather, we think that the mother who is estranged from her family of origin, or who does not know who or where the father is, has the right, and, indeed, the obligation, to determine what to tell her child about family and ancestry, and what not to tell her. It is a question of the child’s welfare, not the child’s rights. In the case of families that do not meet the bionormative standard, however, we are more likely to favor a child’s right to know. This indicates a tacit priority granted to biological or genetic ties.