SHOES
Ah yes the old “female brain” joke. Don’t tell me, I already know – shoes, gossip, shopping, gossip, romance novels, gossip, bad driving, talking too much. Hahaha that’s such a funny joke. The millionth time every bit as funny as the first.
A leading doctor who is under investigation at one of Scotland’s oldest universities has come under fire for a ‘sexist’ image that was shown to medical students.
Professor John Paul Leach, a consultant neurologist who is head of undergraduate medicine at the University of Glasgow, displayed an graphic of the female brain as part of a teaching session with a large area designated the ‘headache generator’.
A tiny part is labelled ‘sex initiation’ gland while driving skills and ‘realisation of wants vs needs’ are shown as dots. A male equivalent of the slide was not created.
And if it had been it would have been all politics, current affairs, economics, cutting down trees, eating lunch, wars, explosions – the serious stuff.
The graphic of the female brain:
Ok now wait a minute. It’s a joke. Come on, it’s obviously a joke. He didn’t show it as, like, an actual medical slide. Lighten up.
Point taken. It’s a joke, just like the old jokes about Jews or the Irish or Rastus. That kind of joke.
Hur hur shopping, gold digging, SHOES, talk talk and more talk, gossip, Melrose Place, shiny things. SO FUNNY.
It has a long tradition, that image… normally without quite such offensive labels and paired with a “male brain” dominated by labels of “SEX”, I suppose to be equally denigrating to both sexes and thus amusing. I remember being slightly put out the first time I saw it included in an academic lecture as a joke (15+ years ago!), and I find it less amusing every time I see it, but this version is the worst I’ve seen. (…scratch that, I googled the image… there are worse versions now, gross.)
That’s horrible!!!
The only context where this should come up in an academic course is with the line, “So, you’ve probably all seen some form of this ‘joke’ before. Of course, it’s based on real stereotypes that have been used to justify sexist behavior, language and rules since the dawn of time, and it’s completely bunk. Here’s what brain science actually shows us….”
Any other presentation, by an authority figure such as a professor (or, for that matter, a student doing a presentation) is utterly appalling.
“Be Quite During the Game” yeesh.
Wow, none of the soft misogyny of complementarianism here—this really dials the woman hating up to eleven. What baffles me is the fact that heterosexual men who hold women in this kind of contempt continue to date and marry them anyway. Taking the image at face value, why deal with all the impulse shopping, gold digging, and talk-talk-talking in the hopes that your wife’s headache generator will fail to activate one lucky night (or, even more miraculously, her microscopic sex initiation gland will activate)? Surely you’d be better off settling for the hand and/or sexual aid of your choice than cohabitating with a person you despise who won’t have sex with you anyway.
Well, you see, she won’t want to have sex with you, but that doesn’t mean she won’t have it. She’ll have it whether she wants to or not.
As a migraine sufferer, I can vouch for the presence of the “headache generator” in my brain, but it’s less “not tonight dear” and more “there’s an icepick going through one side of my head, also I’m seeing blobs and I may throw up, please get me an ibuprofen and turn out the lights and I may be human again in an hour or three”.
Women are about 3 times more likely to suffer from migraine than men. I wonder how many women have had this agony disregarded as “silly female neurosis”.
Which makes it interesting to me that the only migraine sufferers I’ve known are men. I know, sample size and all that. It’s just another data point to suggest my family and friends are all backwards.
Well, it’s not just the sex, it’s the sandwiches, which the graphic seems to have ignored. The sandwich-making capability (and baby-making) of women is legend.