Feminism

Women More Neurotic Than Men – Official

~ Cheryl

Rats! Sometimes science can be very inconvenient.

Apparently some clever folks in Sweden have discovered that women’s brains are more susceptible to the influence of serotonin, and worse at getting rid of it, than the brains of men. And this means that they will be more prone to anxiety and depression. The problem has been found to be particularly acute in women who also have serious problems with PMS. So there it is, proof of what men will doubtless say they knew all along.

I am not going to be depressed about this. Really, I’m not.

Don’t Need Men

~ Cheryl

Via La Gringa I find this article about making sperm cells from women’s bone marrow. Who needs parthenogenesis anyway? This way we don’t get clones. Of course, as the article points out, there’s a big difference between making a sperm cell and getting it to fertilize an egg, but it is a big step along the way.

Carnival

~ Cheryl

Carnival - Elizabeth Bear Bit of a shame, this one. Carnival starts off superbly. I love the setting, in which Bear manages to have a go at both feminist utopias and eco-fundamentalists without ever losing sympathy with the ideals that got her galaxy to the desperate state it is in. But towards the end I felt the plot tried to wrap up far too much, far too quickly, and with far too much hand-waving, thereby wasting much of the set-up. I shall leave you with some choice quotes:

The only significant natural predator that human women have is heterosexual men.

And as a consequence (though this comes earlier in the book)…

In previous societies – in all recorded societies, other than the New Amazonian – when a women died by violence, the perpetrator was almost always male. And almost always a member of the woman’s immediate family, often with the complicity of society.

And finally, on a different tack:

Kusanagi-Jones didn’t think those anything special. Perhaps they’d be more meaningful in context, but it seemed to him that their status as cultural treasures was based on their provenance rather than their art. They were historical works by women; it might be enough for the New Amazonians, but Kusanagi-Jones hoped his own aesthetic standards were somewhat higher.

Writing the Other

~ Cheryl

My usual trawl for interesting science stories turned up this announcement about a couple of academics trying to find out whether authors can actually write characters of the opposite sex. As this is the sort of topic that is liable to generate a flame war on LiveJournal I’ll just note that it is a shame the work is focusing on Italian literature because it might be useful for the researchers to take a look at a gentleman called James Tiptree Jr.

Much more appropriate, however, would be for them to read this interview with Kelley Eskridge in which she talks about writing her character, Mars, who in the space of several stories has yet to confess to a gender, one way or another. Writing a character of the opposite gender is one thing; managing to write a character who never gives a clue as to its gender is quite another.

One of the things that rather depresses me about gender politics is that most of the time you escape one stereotype only to be oppressed by another. It isn’t just conservatives wanting us to adopt “traditional” gender roles. Feminists look down on women who do present “traditionally”. Gays and lesbians look down on bisexuals, and argue amongst themselves as to whether it is more politically correct to pass for straight or to be out and proud. And everyone has it in for transsexuals. What Eskridge has to say seems much more sane to me:

I do what I want. I do what feels good to me and what I think best expresses me. So I don’t have a problem with people having a gender or expressing gender along expectation lines. I think people should do what they want and be who they are.

(I hasten to note that this is taken out of context and that Eskridge is talking about gender expression, not saying that anyone should be allowed to do anything they want.)

Loud and Queer

~ Cheryl

So last night I went to a reading in San Francisco. But this was not a science fiction reading. It was a promotion for Word Warriors, an anthology of work by women performance poets. This is not an art form I have followed very closely (though I do have a lingering fondness for John Cooper Clarke), and I guess that many of you will be unfamiliar with it too, but if you can just imagine an entire anthology full of people who have the same boundless energy and room-sized personality as Ellen Klages then you won’t go too far wrong.
Continue reading →

Pause for Thought

~ Cheryl

I’ve been having a quick spin through the blogosphere looking for other Transgender Day of Remembrance posts and I came across this:

I also want to see the day that killing a transgender person is not seen as socially acceptable behavior and the person who does so gets the same level of punishment as someone who kills a non-transgender person.

Yes, actually, that would be nice.

Remembrance

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. This is an event that began eight years ago in San Francisco and has since spread to many cities around the world. It asks us to spend a few moments remembering those people who have been killed because their gender expression was somehow different from other people’s social norms. This is, of course, not an issue that many people are aware of, so here are a few brief numbers:

  • In the USA transgendered people have roughly a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, as compared to 1 in 18,000 for the general population (HRC)
  • A UK survey of almost 900 transgendered people found that more than a third had attempted suicide at least once (PFC)

There’s not a lot you can say after numbers like that.

Feminist Rant Time

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Via the Feminist SF Blog I discover that Warner Brothers will no longer be making films with female leads. Apparently they made a couple of turkeys and found it easier to blame the actresses than the (probably male) directors. You can find the full story here.

I would happily promise to boycott Warner movies for a while, but as that would cause me little more inconvenience that promising to stop playing the flute, or watching basketball, I guess it would be an empty gesture.

Meanwhile one of my Finnish pals lays into that well known chauvinist pig, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Damned Biology

~ Cheryl

So ladies, ever had one of those days when you get up, think, “what shall I wear today?” and decide to go glam, or that you can’t be bothered? Think you have free will in this decision? Oh dear. Go read this.

“Near ovulation, women dress to impress, and the closer women come to ovulation, the more attention they appear to pay to their appearance,” said Martie Haselton, the study’s lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology. “They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably.”

I tend to be rather suspicious of psychology experiments, but this one seems to have been done with a fair amount of care. The sample size was rather small, but they did make a serious effort not to bias their definition of what “dressing attractively” meant.

Add this to my prevous post about women being more risk averse when they have high levels of estrogen in their bodies and it all starts to get rather scary. I’m sure that someone will be able to identify what hormones or whatever trigger the “sexy dressing” behavior pattern. Pheromonal warfare, anyone? (And yes, there will be things that work on men too. We know that, don’t we.)

Estrogen is Good for You

~ Cheryl

Here’s another one of those scientific studies looking at differences between women and men. Like any good scientific study it is highly stylized. It looks specifically at behavior in an economic bidding game. The women in the sample tended to make less money, on average, than the men, because they were more risk averse. Interestingly, however, this result only held true during certain parts of the women’s menstrual cycle. At other times they did just as well as the men in the game. It would seem, from the results, that having an elevated amount of estrogen in your system makes you more risk averse.

All sorts of nonsense can be talked about results like this. There will be people who claim that it “proves” that women make bad businessmen, for example, and therefore should not be allowed to run companies. This makes about as much sense as saying that, because Roger Federer is a better tennis player than Venus Williams, that all men are better at tennis than all women, so women’s tennis should be scrapped. Differences between individuals can be much greater than the average difference between genders.

What the study does show it what it says: people with more estrogen in their systems are, on average, more risk averse than people without. This probably means that, on average, women make worse gamblers and commodity traders than men. It may also men that, on average, they are less likely to do daft things like drive while drunk, or declare war on other countries. It would seem to me that those are probably good things.

24 Hour Comics Marathon

~ Cheryl

Joe Gordon writes with news of 24-hour comics marathon taking place at the ICA on Saturday. The idea is that various cartoonists will attempt to produce a 24-page comic in 24 hours, and will raise money for charity. More details from Joe’s FPI blog.

This year’s charity for the event is Childline. This is an organization I’ve been a bit suspicious of. When it was first set up it seemed to be feeding on public hysteria and its objectives appeared to include encouraging kids to report “suspcious” adults who would then be accused of paedophilia, satanic sex abuse, or whatever the tabloid newspapers were currently getting hot and bothered about. However, the organization seems to have grown up a lot. It is now part of the NSPCC, and in August in produced an excellent report on homophobic bullying in schools. This is an area where a helpline for worried kids can be hugely helpful, because in most cases the victims are afraid to go to teachers or parents for help on the very reasonable suspicion that this will only make things worse. To pull just one set of statistics out of the report, a study in Scotland found that only 15% of children subject to homophobic bullying at school reported the problem (compared to 69% for other types of bullying), and of those with the courage to ask for help, only 10% were happy with the outcome.

None of which is to say that phsyical and sexual abuse of kids isn’t a problem. But thankfully kids with such problems can often get help, and are treated sympathetically if they ask for help. The same is generally not true for kids who have concerns about their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Horrors of the Past

~ Cheryl

I have been meaning to write something about this Guardian book review for a couple of days. The book isn’t SF, it is a standard mainstream family drama. But the author credits Margaret Atwood and Charlotte Perkins Gilman amongst her inspiratons? Why? Because it is a feminist novel of course. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is about the fact that, in the UK, until abut 50 years ago it was possible for a woman to be locked up in a lunatic asylum for life for “transgressive behavior”, meaning things like eloping or wanting a divorce. All it took was one document signed by her husband or father, and a friendly doctor. Obviously that can’t happen now (the government doesn’t want the expense of looking after “lunatics” any more), but we should never forget how far we have come in such a short time. We could lose it all just as quickly if we do forget.