In case anyone missed the news, “the new Hypatia Editorial Offices at Villanova University are up and running!” As of July 15, Hypatia welcomes new submissions!
Month: July 2013
Lessons from Juror B37
There are all sorts of lessons we can learn from the interview B37 had with Anderson Cooper. I’ll mention two. Add in others if you want.
1. Implicit biases can operate as described in most papers on it.. E.g., you can firmly believe no one in your group is a bigot while demonstrating your own bigotry. Thus your group may decide that Zimmerman is a fundamentally good person, while Trayon contributed a lot to his own death.
2. One can activate implicit biases in others in much the same way that one can activate stereotype threat. That is, one just needs to get people using concepts closely associated with, e.g., a frightening situation with Africam American men in order to activate the belief that black men are dangerous. Just having someone testify about a house-breaking by Black Men to get a jury ready to see a black kid as dangerous. Points to the clever defense.
See part of the interview here:
What do you need to disclose for meaningful consent?
In the UK, you can legally conceal your marital status, wealth, HIV status, and age, but apparently not the gender you were assigned at birth.
The young relationship started as so many do these days — online. Thirteen-year-old “Scott” and 12-year-old “M” developed a friendship that over the course of three years and many instant message conversations, bloomed into romance. M began calling Scott her boyfriend — they even talked about getting married and having kids. After M’s 16th birthday, Scott, then 17, traveled from his home in Scotland to visit her in England. They watched a movie, kissed and, before long, things went further.
It may sound like a sweet story of teenage love — but Scott was sentenced by a court in England to three years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender for life as a result of the relationship. That’s because Scott was born Justine McNally and assigned at birth as female. In an appeal of McNally’s sentence, which was made public late last week, a U.K. court reduced McNally’s sentence but affirmed that the 18-year-old had violated M’s sexual consent by presenting as male. It was deemed a “deception” and “abuse of trust.”
I have no idea how this kind of affront to the rights of trans* people is legal. Read the rest of the story here.
How to be right for the wrong reason
Hot off the multi-media press: a veiled putative video parody posted to YouTube yesterday by a group of University of Colorado Boulder students, describing a movement they call #BroChoice. “A bro-choice is where I am pro-choice because I am a man and if women don’t have access to abortion on demand then I won’t get laid as often”:
“Equality must never be the icing on the cake”
The Fawcett Society has published a report today warning the UK Government not to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty:
The Fawcett Society has today warned the government against taking a ‘dramatic backwards step’ when it comes to women’s equality and rights.
In a report published today (16th July 2013), ‘Red Tape, Red Line: five reasons why government should not “drop its duty” to tackle women’s inequality’ Fawcett considers the UK’s ‘equalities architecture’ – specifically the way in which different laws and organisations concerned with progressing equality and / or preventing discrimination have come about in the last 50 years. It then goes on to examine what has happened since May 2010 when the Coalition Government took power.
The report exposes:
– The abolition or weakening of key institutions concerned with progressing equality in the UK
– An on-going reduction in legal requirements with regards to equalities and so a greater reliance on voluntary action to prevent discrimination
– The dangers of abolishing or weakening the Public Sector Equality Duty, which is currently under ‘wholesale review’
It sets out alternative actions government could take instead if it genuinely wants to improve its own effectiveness and that of the wider public sector in tackling discrimination against women and other groups.
We’ve blogged about the Government’s plans before, and its review of the Equality Duty is due to be published soon. If it recommends scrapping or weakening the duty, it’s going to turn the clock back decades. Please consider writing to your MP, or – if petitions are your thing – sign the petition at change.org. They need to know that people care about equality, even when times are hard.
New APA website “Group” – Women in Philosophy
Members of the American Philosophical Association, take note: One feature of the new APA website is that people can create a member profile and join “Groups” including Women in Philosophy (at the bottom of the Groups page). (You might need to be a member to access this…but to get to it after you login, go to “Membership” menu and on the pull-down “Member Groups”.) Also, people can suggest new groups. Thanks, Sally Haslanger, for writing us to suggest we call this to APA members’ attentions!
Comments?
Dear feminist philosophers. I have just lost a post. The point of it was really to ask if you had comments on a Guardian column by Gary Younge. So let me just ask what you think
Appeals for calm in the wake of such a verdict raise the question of what calm there can possibly be in a place where such a verdict is possible. Parents of black boys are not likely to feel calm. Partners of black men are not likely to feel calm. Children with black fathers are not likely to feel calm. Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.
But while the acquittal was shameful it was not a shock. It took more than six weeks after Martin's death for Zimmerman to be arrested and only then after massive pressure both nationally and locally. Those who dismissed this as a political trial (a peculiar accusation in the summer of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden) should bear in mind that it was politics that made this case controversial.
…
"Fucking punks," Zimmerman told the police dispatcher that night. "These assholes. They always get away."So true it's painful. And so predictable it hurts.
More fun news about people you can shoot in the US
From Think Progress:
A Texas jury acquitted a man for the murder of a woman he hired as an escort, after his lawyers claimed he was authorized to use deadly force because she refused sex.
Ezekiel Gilbert shot Lenora Ivie Frago in the neck on Christmas Eve, after she denied his requests for sex and wouldn’t return the $150 he had paid her, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Under Texas law, an individual is authorized to use deadly force to “retrieve stolen property at night,” and Gilbert’s lawyers cited that provision as justification for Gilbert’s action, reasoning that Frago had stolen $150 from him by taking his money without delivering sex. In a police interview played for jurors, Gilbert “never mentioned anything about theft,” a detective told the San Antonio Express-News. Frago, who was 21, was critically injured and died several months later.
That’s it. If anyone needs me I’ll be hiding under my bed with a stack of comic books trying not to read anything on the internet ever again. Because actual news is just too damn depressing.
The sunday cat is very glad she does not cavort with goats!
Women: not uninterested in sex after all
in scientific tests, women become aroused when they watch a film of two copulating bonobos (men don’t, by the way), and that they strongly deny this arousal when asked. The explanation, proffered tentatively by Bergner, is that female sexuality is as raw and bestial as male sexuality. But, unlike men, our animal urges are stoutly denied, by society and by ourselves, so that when they surface, it is not as a manageable stream, but as a rushing torrent that will sweep up everything it passes, even a pair of shagging primates.
An extract from Daniel Bergner’s book.
As they enrolled in the study, Chivers’ subjects identified themselves as straight or lesbian. They were shown images of sex between men and women, women and women, men and men, and a pair of bonobos (a species of ape). The subjects, straight and lesbian, were turned on right away by all of it, including the copulating apes. While they watched, they also held a keypad on which they rated their own feelings of arousal. So Chivers had physiological and self-reported scores. They hardly matched at all. Chivers’ objective numbers, tracking what’s technically called vaginal pulse amplitude, soared no matter who was on screen and regardless of what they were doing, to each other, to themselves. The keypad contradicted the plethysmograph entirely. The self-reports announced indifference to the bonobos. But that was only for starters. When the films were of women touching themselves or enmeshed with each other, the straight subjects said they were a lot less excited than their genitals declared. During the segments of gay male sex, the ratings of heterosexual women were even more muted.
Chivers put heterosexual and homosexual males through the same procedure. Strapped to their type of plethysmograph, they responded in predictable patterns she labelled “category specific”. The straight men did swell slightly as they watched men masturbating and slightly more as they stared at men together, but this was dwarfed by their physiological arousal when the films featured women alone, women with men and, above all, women with women. Category specific applied still more to the gay males. Their readings jumped when men masturbated, rocketed when men had sex with men, and climbed, though less steeply, when the clips showed men with women; the plethysmograph rested close to dead when women owned the screen.
As for the bonobos, the genitals of both gay and straight men reacted to them the same way they did to the landscapes, to the pannings of mountains and plateaus. And with the men, the objective and subjective were in sync. Bodies and minds told the same story.
How to explain the conflict between what the women claimed and what their genitals said? Were the women either consciously diminishing or unconsciously blocking out the fact that a vast scope of things stoked them instantly toward lust?
