Jen offers “The Justifications for Saying ‘Cunt’” bingo card. Hilarious but pathetically true.

I got nothin to add. Just go play Cunto.… Read the rest

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There are so many ways not to do that. It seems so simple, yet somehow, it proves elusive.

One way is:

If you disagree with a woman, or several women, don’t introduce your disagreement with that familiar Shakespeare tag “the lady doth protest too much.” That’s especially true if you are a man.

Let me explain. (Yes, of course it’s obvious; of course it shouldn’t need explanation; but apparently there are always people who profess not to understand.) There is no need for such a preamble. It is entirely normal to disagree with people by just disagreeing with them. There is no need for a preliminary throat-clearing in which you disparage whatever perceived group your object-of-criticism belongs to via an … Read the rest

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Nidhi Dutt experienced a little “Eve teasing,” or as you might call it, assault, in Bombay one afternoon.

My colleague and I were piling into a rickshaw, heading back to the bureau. And that’s when it happened. We were suddenly surrounded by a group of boys, barely teenagers.

At first the whole thing seemed harmless, if a little predictable – the cheery interest of a group of bright eyed, smiling boys.

Their approach was not unusual, foreigners and cameras make for an unmissable attraction in India.

But it was only a matter of minutes, possibly seconds, before the smiles turned into a blur of pawing, grabbing hands. Their indecent behaviour was punctuated by cheers, laughter and explicit comments in Hindi.

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Oh lordy, it just never ends.

Staks Rosch did an Atheist of the Year contest at the Examiner, asking his readers to nominate candidates and giving them two days to do it. And the nominees are -

• Dave Silverman
• Ricky Gervais
• Hemant Mehta
• Matt Dillahunty
• George Takei

Lisa Ridge did a Facebook post gently wondering why there were quite so few women, as in, none. I read the post and Staks Rosch’s comments and a post he’d written on the subject, and got somewhat warm under the collar. From the post:

I started with an open nomination process in which people could suggest nominations and make a case for their nominations. I would then take that into account

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Frat boys are such fun. The very word reminds me of fun-loving George Bush, whom I usually thought of as frat boy. Some frat boys at the University of Vermont sound super fun.

The fraternity circulated a questionnaire to its members, asking their names, major, favorite frat-related memories, favorite actor, and who they would pick to rape. Just normal questionnaire stuff, you know.

Another source:

We were sent a copy of the questionnaire, which mostly consists of benign questions like name, birthday, major, amount of time with SigEp and favorite SigEp memories, hobbies, future goals, etc. It’s actually kind of nerdy and cute, until you get to the final three “personal questions.”

1. Where in public would I

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Oh look, we’re back on this corner again. Some drearily unthinking guy writes a patronizing “funny” article story about women for Nature, people say how drearily unthinking it is, and everybody says “oh lighten up, ladies.” It’s just a joke, huh huh huh. Jokes never do any harm, any fule kno that.

In a pig’s eye, says Christie Wilcox at SciAm blogs.

Reinforcing negative gender stereotypes is anything but harmless.

It was Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson who, in 1995, first coined the term stereotype threat. It refers to how the knowledge of a prejudicial stereotype can lead to enough anxiety that a person actually ends up confirming the image. Since that landmark paper, more than 300

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So there’s this atheist comedian Kate Smurthwaite who did a BBC1 chat thing which went viral, and she got the kind of comments that women get. She posted a selection, and they’re…the kind of comments that women get. There was one about the trash-talking cunt getting her tongue ripped out, and more than one about how she needs to be gang-raped.

And she comments a little.

Interesting to see how a lot of people actually feel. I know almost no-one
would say these horrid things to my face. So in a sense it’s good that the
Internet lets women and other groups see how much some people really hate us.

In a sense, but only in a sense. It’s … Read the rest

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Oh yay. One of many items I made a note to follow up from Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender was an essay by Sally Haslanger, a philosopher at MIT, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone),” from Hypatia, 2008. Then yesterday I happened on and re-read an article by Julian Baggini on the scarcity of women in philosophy, and how does it start?

Sally Haslanger is angry. “I entered philosophy about 30 years ago,” she told me at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in Boston. “I had a budding feminist consciousness, and I thought then that there weren’t enough women on the reading lists in my classes or among my teachers. But

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Via Peteryxx, on the stereotype thread - an article on why so few movies pass the Bechdel test.

The “Dykes to Watch Out For” test, formerly coined as the “Mo Movie Measure” test and Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel…

To pass it your movie must have the following:

1) there are at least two named female characters, who

2) talk to each other about

3) something other than a man

I’m not sure I need to read any more to know why that’s not going to fly. It’s because movies are about men.

That was easy.

When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I

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