random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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 [...]
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 you are [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 of [...]
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 about why Eisen [...]
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 [...]
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.
…
* I say “husband” [...]
Good going, NYT — on their new “http://midtermmadness.blogs.nytimes.com/”, which offers an array of commentators, professors, and pundits to comment on the 2006 elections … they’ve given us six (6) men, all apparently white, and dare I guess their class backgrounds? Way to seek a diversity of opinion.
(1) Today’s NYT article on “tough questions” for gubernatorial candidates on abortion: all the gubernatorial candidates quoted are men. [NYT 6/5]
(2) Mercury Rising discusses what happened to Wen Ho Lee after the racist government debacle a few years back. [sideshow 6/4]
(3) I don’t believe I’ve plugged Ann Bartow’s “Fair Use and the Fairer Sex” [...]
Yet another instance of boys-read-boys makes the news. This time, Dave Itzkoff’s new “It’s All Geek To Me” column in the NYT. My partner thought I’d be excited — and I was — to see science fiction getting a column in the NYT. Alas, though, it’s only a boy-reads-boys column.
The first column (March 5, [...]
Then-mere Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) wrote in “Introduction to Christianity”, his “best-regarded book”:
“Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a constant temptation, so for the unbeliever, faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world,” he wrote. “In short, there [...]
NYPL hosted a panel a few weeks ago on the Google Print issue. I noticed that there were no women on the panel. This was shortly after I’d seen a flyer for a conference Yale was hosting on Search, which also had very very few numbers of female speakers or commentators. I’d [...]
This article is the first time I have seen NYT coverage of the missing women in the maquiladoras towns along the border — a rash of killings and disappearances that has affected literally hundreds of women, many of whom worked in US-owned factories.
Searching the NYT archives since 1996 (”missing women maquiladoras”, “missing women Juarez”) I [...]
