derivative work

Broadsheet @ salon.com is usually a pretty fair source for recycled news and commentary about women, gender, and sexuality. But Tracy Clark-Flory’s recent commentary about yet another celebrity sex tape — Kendra Wilkinson, who I had to look up after reading this article — is possibly one of the most pointless articles on the phenomena [...]

A health blog (why a health blog?) at the NYT covered research showing that as the 20th century progressed, more and more women followed in their father’s footsteps, career-speaking. Men have for a long time followed in their fathers’ footsteps at a rate of about 30%; women born in the 1910s followed in their father’s [...]

The New York Times covers research showing that marital happiness increases when the kids leave home. Contrary to popular opinion, which has suggested that parents — particularly moms — suffer depression from “empty nest syndrome”, research published in November in Psychological Science found that “marital satisfaction actually improves” when the kids leave home. But if [...]

Ah, generally I am always happy to read a Dahlia Lithwick piece. She’s insightful, and a clear writer. But she blew it on her recent piece on affirmative action, “The Downsides of Diversity: What Clarence Thomas might have to say about Sarah Palin” (Newsweek; Slate, 2008/8/29). In the article, she reminds the reader, bemused by [...]

A Louisiana state Representative is considering a plan to pay poor women to have their tubes tied, to stave off additional reproduction by undesirables. One wonders just how bad history classes have to be in Louisiana for John LaBruzzo to have actually failed to learn about the many, many times governments have tried programs like [...]

Wow, after four men, a female human being’s genome finally got sequenced. Go Dutch. Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 27—Geneticists at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have announced the first complete sequencing of a woman’s genome. The announcement was made at Bessensap, an annual meeting bringing together scientists and the press in the Netherlands. The DNA of [...]

Canadian Club (“CC”, not Creative Commons) has been running these really offensive & annoying ads aimed, apparently, at a very small demographic: straight white men with masculinity issues and daddy issues. My partner pointed them out to me — plastered on bus stops in our ethnically diverse and progressive, queer-friendly community — and we enjoyed [...]

Source: More Clarity About Abuse, Intermarriage, Child Breeders, andthe Fundamentalist Churchof Later Day Saints, Sara Robinson, Orcinus, 2008/4/25 [Warren] Jeffs was convicted last year in Utah of forcing a 14-year-old girl into marriage with an older cousin. I’m sick of these quotes that just talk about “marriage” and accept the use of that word. If [...]

There’s been a blog flurry about the use (dare I call it “appropriation”?) of the term “open source” for a project aimed at facilitating gropes of women’s breasts at SF cons. The project was called the “open source boob project” and proposed to pass out buttons so that people (“women”) could affirmatively opt-in to the [...]

Great article by Rebecca Traister at Salon.com about sexism lurking behind the shrill Obama support. Notes and thoughts: * It’s not Hillary’s “shrillness” that’s discomfiting; it’s the shrillness of boys’ support for Obama & hatred of Hillary. Dana Lossia quoted: “People can always come up with reasons they don’t like the candidate they’re not supporting. [...]

So Geraldine Ferraro revealed her cluelessness about race issues with her “I’m being attacked for being white” comment. She also revealed, as my partner astutely pointed out, that she must have almost no people of color in her close circle who could help her out by explaining exactly what was wrong about the comment about [...]

A friend‘s FaceBook entry pointed me to an amazing article in Bitch Magazine: “Hard Times” by Sarah Seltzer. Seltzer defines and describes the pattern and statistics of the reviews of books by women, describing both the gender disproportionality, and an editorial pattern of assigning writers who are likely to dismiss feminist works.

A few days ago, the Village Voice wrote an article about a series of World of Warcraft-inspired porn; their article was duly picked up by BoingBoing. Strangely, BoingBoing missed the IP angle — that “Whorelore”‘s original name was “Whorecraft” but they ran into an “IP” issue, presumably trademark. You can still see “Whorecraft” on some [...]

open source install fest at Bay Area schools, Sat March 1 (linked at badgerbag) Liz Henry, Annoyingly sexist framing of Google VP Marissa Mayer Heather Morrison, No to author’s rights? Let your librarian know!, Poetic Economics (link from open access news) Jonathan Eisen, Editorial: PLoS Biology 2.0, 6(2): e48 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060048 (2008) – a moving essay [...]

My partner and I agree on one thing about the Democratic race: That sexism has played a major role in the treatment of Hillary Clinton. A friend of ours recently pointed out that if the genders were reversed — if Barack Obama were a woman, with little experience but inspiring rhetoric — Obama-as-woman would never [...]

This rant about sexism in open source communities brightened my day.

In Venezuela, the National Assembly is considering restricting all baby names to a total list of 100 names. This will eliminate the wide variety of inventive names that people assign, and will eliminate names that “generate doubt” about gender. NYT 9/5 Because there just aren’t enough laws dictating gender now.

A friend just sent me a link to this fan video about the TV series “Supernatural”. What an awesome demonstration of the power of technology to enable media criticism. A thousand feminists could comment about exploitative or graphic visual depictions of violence against women in a series or on TV generally, and it would never [...]

How to give a great man-to-man hug — a hilarious video from the developing world of masculinity studies. I went to it on the off-chance that it was actually funny, and was well-rewarded for my optimism. Kitty not happy tshirts at work: The salon.com column “dear cary” handles various ethics and manner type issues, and [...]

Surprise, having kids and a husband* make it less likely that women will get tenure-track positions or achieve tenure. See the “Marriage and Baby Blues: Re-defining Gender Equity” report (PDF) by Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden (2003). Thanks to my partner (a postdoc) who sent me this illustrative graphic from the report. … * [...]