In The State Of Florida – Marissa Alexander Had A Gun Permit, Stood Her Ground, Did Not Shoot Or Kill Anyone and Faces 25 Years In Prison,Lincoln B. Alexander Jr on behalf of Marissa Alexander
Talking to a customer yesterday, she said she worked at a book store.
I asked her, “How’s your gender studies section? Every time I go into a book store their gender studies section is next to non-existent.”
She asked, “Gender studies? Like male and female relationships?”
“No,” I said, “like women’s studies type stuff”
“Oh. Well there’s a health/cookbook section, you might find something there”
Me: *facepalm*
Washington– At a campaign event at a bowling alley in Wisconsin today, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum told a boy who reached for a pink bowling ball: “You’re not gonna use the pink ball. We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera.” Santorum went on to say “Friends don’t let friends use pink balls.” The comments were tweeted by Reuters reporter Sam Youngman.
“This is another example of Rick Santorum intentionally making ignorant statements that have a real impact on LGBT people,” said HRC Vice President of Communications Fred Sainz. “Whether he’s comparing our marriages to inanimate objects, saying our children would be better off with a parent in prison as opposed to two loving same-sex parents, or calling open military service a ‘tragic social experiment;’ he’s proven that he thinks LGBT people are second-class citizens not worthy of dignity or respect. In this case, he’s advancing tired gender norms by implying a boy should be ashamed or embarrassed to use a certain color bowling ball.”
Santorum’s anti-LGBT record speaks for itself: in addition to his frequent and vitriolic remarks about issues like marriage equality or LGBT families, he consistently voted against workplace protections while serving in the U.S. Senate, and was an early and vocal supporter of the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act.
“Kids have enough to worry about,” added Sainz. “They don’t need Rick Santorum telling them that using a pink bowling ball is a bad thing.”
I’m sure in your day to day life, you’ve experienced sexism and racism. I’m curious about something. Do you feel that racism is more prevalent in your life? Or sexism? Or is it a combination of both? Do you have any examples or stories you want to submit?
O.M.G. There are no words that could possibly articulate the amount of rage I’m feeling right now due to this asshole’s douchebag slut-shaming.
In response to the Obama administration’s requirement that all healthcare plans provide birth control, Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO), in another effort to pander the 1% of the female population who have never used birth control and the men who want them to be barefoot and pregnant, introduced an amendment to the transportation bill (that’s right, transportation bill) that would allow any employer to deny any coverage on any whim. From Think Progress:
(6) RESPECTING RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE WITH REGARD TO SPECIFIC ITEMS OR SERVICES —
“(A) FOR HEALTH PLANS. — A health plan shall not be considered to have failed to provide the essential health benefits package described in subsection (a) (or preventive health services described in section 2713 of the Public Health Services Act), to fail to be a qualified health plan, or to fail to fulfill any other requirement under this title on the basis that it declines to provide coverage of specific items or services because —
“(i) providing coverage (or, in the case of a sponsor of a group health plan, paying for coverage) of such specific items or services is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan; or
“(ii) such coverage (in the case of individual coverage) is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the purchaser or beneficiary of the coverage.
Think Progress goes on to say:
Under the measure, an insurer or an employer would be able to claim a moral or religious objection to covering HIV/AIDS screenings, Type 2 Diabetes treatments, cancer tests or anything else they deem inappropriate or the result of an “unhealthy” or “immoral” lifestyle. Similarly, a health plan could refuse to cover mental health care on the grounds that the plan believes that psychiatric problems should be treated with prayer.
Medicine does not have a morals clause. Doctors don’t refuse to treat people because they deem them to lead immoral lives. But for one moment, let’s imagine that Blunt’s amendment to the transportation bill became law. People who work for Jehovah’s Witnesses could be denied blood transfusions. Scientologists are against most medications. Some are religiously opposed to vaccines. In reality, any number of medications, treatments and preventative measures could be not covered because an employer simply doesn’t agree with them.
Just one month ago, Blunt underwent a heart procedure. Thankfully, he has appeared to make a full recovery, but an argument could certainly made that his employer (in this case, the US taxpayers) are morally opposed to the procedure since heart disease can be the result of an immoral lifestyle of gluttony and sloth. A more realistic moral objection could be made on the basis that his procedure, a heart stent, is costly and ineffective. Of course, there’s always the chance that his heart problems are through no fault of his own, just as there’s a damn good chance that birth control pills are being used for many completely non-sexual uses. It’s bad enough that insurance companies are making medical judgments, against our doctors’ wishes. Do we really want our bosses having the ability to deny us treatment as well?
Blunt’s amendment died without debate, thanks to Harry Reid, but not without more grandstanding.From ABC News:
“They won’t allow those of us who are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution to even offer an amendment that says we believe in our 1st amendment right to religious freedom,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “This is a day I was not inclined to think I would ever see. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life defending the 1st amendment, but I never thought I’d see a day when the elected representatives of the people of this country would be blocked by a majority party in Congress to even express their support for it regardless of the ultimate outcome.”
Don’t look for the issue to be over. In an effort to distract voters from the improving economy, more Republicans will be adding useless amendments like Blunt’s, to unrelated and necessary bills…wasting their time and our taxes.
MADELINE Heilman at New York University once conducted an experiment in which she told volunteers about a manager. Some were told, “Subordinates have often described Andrea as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. She is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees’ creativity.”
Other volunteers were told, “Subordinates have often described James as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. He is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees’ creativity.”
The only difference between what the groups were told was that some people thought they were hearing about a leader named Andrea while others thought they were hearing about a leader named James. Heilman asked her volunteers to estimate how likeable Andrea and James were as people. Three-quarters thought James was more likeable than Andrea.
Using a clever experimental design, Heilman also determined that four in five volunteers preferred to have James as their boss. Andrea seemed less likeable merely because she was a woman who happened to be a leader.
The existence of unconscious sexism can be scientifically proved in laboratory experiments. We know that unconscious sexism caused the laboratory volunteers in Heilman’s experiment to find Andrea the manager less likeable than James the manager, because two groups of volunteers, divided at random, reached different conclusions about the likeability of the managers. Since the only thing that varied between the groups was whether they were told the manager was named Andrea or James, we can confidently say the outcome was produced by that single difference.
Bias is much harder to demonstrate scientifically in real life, which may be why large numbers of people do not believe that sexism and other forms of prejudice still exist. Many people think we live in a “post-racial” and “post-sexist” world where egalitarian notions are the norm. Indeed, if you go by what people report, we do live in a bias-free world, because most people report feeling no prejudice whatsoever.
What would be remarkably instructive in real life would be if women in various professions could experience life as men, and vice versa. If the same person got treated differently, we would be sure sexism was at work, because the only thing that changed was the sex of the individual and not his or her skills, talent, knowledge, experience, or interests.
Joan Roughgarden and Ben Barres are biologists at Stanford University. Both are researchers at one of the premier academic institutions in the country; both are tenured professors. Both are transgendered people. Stanford has been a welcoming home for these scientists; if you are going to be a transgendered person anywhere in the United States, it would be difficult to imagine a place more tolerant than Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ben Barres did not transition to being a man until he was 50. For much of her early life, Barbara Barres was oblivious to questions of sexism. She would hear Gloria Steinem and other feminists talk about discrimination and wonder, “What’s their problem?” She was no activist; all she wanted was to be a scientist. She was an excellent student. When a school guidance counsellor advised her to set her sights lower than MIT, Barbara ignored him, applied to MIT, and got admitted in 1972.
During a particularly difficult maths seminar at MIT, a professor handed out a quiz with five problems. He gave out the test at 9am, and students had to hand in their answers by midnight. The first four problems were easy, and Barbara knocked them off in short order. But the fifth one was a beauty; it involved writing a computer program where the solution required the program to generate a partial answer, and then loop around to the start in a recursive fashion.
“I remember when the professor handed back the exams, he made this announcement that there were five problems but no one had solved the fifth problem and therefore he only scored the class on the four problems,” Ben recalled. “I got an A. I went to the professor and I said, ‘I solved it.’ He looked at me and he had a look of disdain in his eyes, and he said, ‘You must have had your boyfriend solve it.’ To me, the most amazing thing is that I was indignant. I walked away. I didn’t know what to say. He was in essence accusing me of cheating. I was incensed by that. It did not occur to me for years and years that that was sexism.”
By the time she was done with MIT, Barbara had more or less decided she wanted to be a neuroscientist. She decided to go to medical school at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. Gender issues at med school were like the issues at MIT on steroids; one professor referred Barbara to his wife when she wanted to talk about her professional interests. An anatomy professor showed a slide of a nude female pin-up during a lecture.
During the first year of Barbara’s residency, when she was an intern, she found herself clashing with the chief resident. “When you have to learn to do a spinal tap or do a line, at some point only one person can do the procedure. What I noticed is that every time a male resident would do the picking, he would pick a guy to do the procedure. I had to often say, ‘He did it last time. It is my turn this time.’ “
But things changed in large and subtle ways after Barbara became Ben.
Ben once gave a presentation at the prestigious Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A friend relayed a comment made by someone in the audience who didn’t know Ben Barres and Barbara Barres were the same person: “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but, then, his work is much better than his sister’s.”
Ben also noticed he was treated differently in the everyday world. “When I go into stores, I notice I am much more likely to be attended to. They come up to me and say, ‘Yes, sir? Can I help you, sir?’ I have had the thought a million times, I am taken more seriously.”
When former Harvard president Larry Summers (who went on to become a senior economic adviser to President Barack Obama) set off a firestorm a few years ago after musing about whether there were fewer women professors in the top ranks of science because of innate differences between men and women, Ben wrote an anguished essay in the journal Nature. He asked whether innate differences or subtle biases - from grade school to graduate school - explained the large disparities between men and women in the highest reaches of science.
“When it comes to bias, it seems that the desire to believe in a meritocracy is so powerful that until a person has experienced sufficient career-harming bias themselves they simply do not believe it exists … By far, the main difference that I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect: I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”
Joan Roughgarden came to Stanford in 1972, more than a quarter century before she made her male-to-female transition in 1998. When the young biologist arrived at Stanford, it felt as though tracks had been laid down; all Roughgarden had to do was stick to the tracks, and the high expectations that others had of the young biologist would do the rest.
“It was clear when I got the job at Stanford that it was like being on a conveyer belt,” Roughgarden told me in an interview. “The career track is set up for young men. You are assumed to be competent unless revealed otherwise. You can speak, and people will pause and people will listen. You can enunciate in definitive terms and get away with it. You are taken as a player. You can use male diction, male tones of voice. … You can assert. You have the authority to frame issues.”
At the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, an outpost of the university about 150 kilometres from campus, Roughgarden ruffled feathers in the scientific establishment by arguing that a prominent theory that described the life cycle of marine animals was wrong. Where previous research had suggested that tide pools were involved in the transportation of certain larvae, Roughgarden reframed the issue and showed that the larger ocean played a significant role. The new theory got harsh reviews, but Roughgarden’s ideas were taken seriously. In short order, Roughgarden became a tenured professor, and a widely respected scientist and author.
Like Ben Barres, Roughgarden made her transition to Joan relatively late in life. Stanford proved tolerant, but very soon Joan started to feel that people were taking her ideas less seriously. In 2006, for example, Joan suggested another famous scientific theory was wrong - Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Among other things, the theory suggests that men and women are perpetually locked in a reproductive conflict. Men are supposed to be sexually promiscuous because they stand to gain from spreading their genes as widely as possible, whereas women are supposed to value monogamy because they can have relatively few biological children.
Even when women and men escape from this “battle of the sexes”, it is only because a temporary truce has been declared. A monogamous husband, for example, “forgoes” his natural inclination to infidelity because his partner offers him something of exceptional value - such as beauty or youth. The theory essentially suggests that conflicting goals are basic to all male-female human relationships - and even purports to “explain” why men rape women.
Using ideas from game theory, Joan published a review article in the prestigious journal Science, where she explained why she thought the theory was wrong. Thinking about sex purely in terms of reproduction was flawed, Joan argued. Sex was also about building alliances, trading, co-operation, social regulation and play.
Joan used the example of the Eurasian oystercatcher, a wading bird, in her 2006 paper. In particular, she looked at nests involving three birds, a male and two females. In some of these families, the females fought viciously with each other, whereas in others, the females mated with each other almost as often as they mated with the male. Nests where females bonded sexually were much more likely to have offspring that survived, compared with nests where the females fought each other, since the co-operative nest could call on the resources of three birds to defend offspring against predators. Sex between the females may not have produced offspring, but it had a powerful effect on the survival rate of offspring.
Where Darwin’s theory of sexual selection would argue that the competing interests of males and females are what produce a range of sexual behaviours, Joan’s theory of “social selection” offered a different viewpoint: conflict between Eurasian oystercatchers, as perhaps with conflict between human mates, was not the starting point of relationships but an unfortunate outcome. Co-operation, not conflict, Joan argued, was basic to nature. “Reproductive social behaviour and sexual reproduction are co-operative. Sexual conflict derives from negotiation breakdown.”
THE scientific establishment, Joan said, was livid. But in contrast to the response to her earlier theory about tide pools and marine animals, few scientists engaged with her. At a workshop at Loyola University, a scientist “lost it” and started screaming at her for being irresponsible. “I had never had experiences of anyone trying to coerce me in this physically intimidating way,” she said, as she compared the reactions to her work before and after she became a woman. “You really think this guy is really going to come over and hit you.”
At a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis, Joan said, a prominent expert jumped up on the stage after her talk and started shouting at her. Once every month or two, she said, ”I will have some man shout at me, try to physically coerce me into stopping …When I was doing the marine ecology work, they did not try to physically intimidate me and say, ‘You have not read all the literature.’
“They would not assume they were smarter. The current crop of objectors assumes they are smarter.”
Joan is willing to acknowledge her theory might be wrong; that, after all, is the nature of science. But what she wants is to be proven wrong, rather than dismissed. Making bold and counter-intuitive assertions is precisely the way science progresses. Many bold ideas are wrong, but if there isn’t a regular supply of them and if they are not debated seriously, there is no progress. After her transition, Joan said she no longer feels she has “the right to be wrong”.
Where she used to be a member of Stanford University’s senate, Joan is no longer on any university or departmental committee. Where she was once able to access internal university funds for research, she said she finds it all but impossible to do so now. Before her transition, she enjoyed an above-average salary at Stanford. But since her transition, “My own salary has drifted down to the bottom 10 per cent of full professors in the School of Humanities and Sciences, even though my research and students are among the best of my career and are having international impact, albeit often controversial.”
I asked her about interpersonal dynamics before and after her transition. “You get interrupted when you are talking, you can’t command attention, but above all you can’t frame the issues,” she said. With a touch of wistfulness, she compared herself to Ben Barres. “Ben has migrated into the centre whereas I have had to migrate into the periphery.”
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/how-the-sex-bias-prevails-20100514-v4mv.html#ixzz1kgWClAIn
(Source: mymilkspilt)
Via drst
