Scientific American Man
I have childhood memories of my grandfather’s large collection of Scientific American magazines, dating back to 1917. My mother eventually convinced my father that storing them in the garage was not the best use of that space, so those delightful drawings and earth-shattering discoveries are long gone from my grasp. Instead, I’m left with the current Scientific American, which, apparently, doesn’t much like science. Or, at least, it aims to put the “man” in it.
In true credit to the fact that putting a woman in charge doesn’t make something feminist, the publication is now under the editorial eye of Mariette DiChristina. I don’t know how she plays into the mess that is columnist Jesse Bering, the recipient of the venomous waves I’m emitting from my mind.
I really do like that he purports to take a new approach to science, integrating methods that the rigors of science have worked hard to crush. Much of this is the work of feminism, arguing that there isn’t one absolute truth or dominant narrative, and to insist that there is one is to crush alternatives. That said, it boggles my mind how he can be so hateful towards women.
He’s currently under fire for his evolutionary psychologist’s perspective on women and their periods, but, while he’s reaching into territory that might intrigue and bring more women to science, he does it an way that reinforces the “chicks need not apply” mantra. This is not our story. I just want to point to the smart responses that this has elicited, most notably from Elysia.
I get it.. this guy is an attention seeker, whose science is wacky and biased, but the question persists: why does he write for Scientific American?
A Few Things You Can Do To Make Me More Comfortable At Your Wedding
Wedding Fest 2009-2010 has ended!
- Give everyone a plus one, or no one a plus one. For Christ’s sake, don’t make me show up and keep answering the question “Where’s your girlfriend?!” from surprised wedding-goers with “She wasn’t invited.” Your wedding is about romantic love (everyone gets a plus-one), friendship (no one gets a plus-one), or family (please, don’t even invite me.) I know, I know. Money, space, blah, shut the fuck up. You’re throwing a wedding with 125 people at it. My plus-one isn’t going to break the bank. But taking off everyone’s boyfriend you don’t REALLY like but tolerate might save you some cash.
- Recognize that it sucks that you can get married and gay people can’t. I used to fucking hate when people put that note in their program, and then one of my best friends did it, and the language of it worked. It’s not that hard. You are exercising a right not everyone has. Deal.
- Do not give me too much alcohol and not enough food during the cocktail hour. I will be drunk. I will want to be inappropriate. Just “run out” of drinks for a few minutes.
- If you’re getting married at a weird time, tell us how to dress. That way no one looks ridiculous except on purpose.
- Do not force all the women you perceive as single to catch the bouquet. Sometimes I try for it, others I don’t. Don’t make me feel like shit if I want to ignore you. Also if you play “Single Ladies” more ladies will become single for the bouquet toss. And please, do not toss the damned garter. Let dudes catch the bouquet.
- Listen to the language of your ceremony. All traditional weddings are performed saying “this man and this woman.” How about “these people”? Using the traditional language is constant reminder during the ceremony that this is a heterosexual institution, and us dykes and faggots aren’t welcome in it. It actually hurts to listen to it.
Eye do declare
This article on finding the Afghan woman who graced the covers of National Geographic in 1985 gets at so much of the weirdness the National Geographic legacy.
She didn’t want her picture taken, yet her image has become emblematic of ethnic conflict. Her personal story unknown, and unimportant.
Even now, when the magazine goes back to try to fill in the story, she cannot speak it. It’s filled in by her brother.
She longs for the order of the Taliban days, even as she stands in for its wrongs to Western eyes.
It’s such an amazing example of orientalism, and how it’s still part of us.
Despite that, the image is arresting, and knowing her story is fascinating. I long to be fascinated, to fill in abstracts with knowing, even as my knowledge is invasive of her dignity.
I don’t know if it’s better or worse humanizing this image, since our attempt to fill in a story only emphases the gap between our framework and the possibility of knowing. The story itself breaks down into a tally of how she spends her days; her asthma; her timeline. Is that humanizing? Or is it the eyes?
In a fit of glory..
“When you get caught up in ramifications and implications, doesn’t the love get sucked out of the equation? Don’t logic and dogma evaporate in intimate, romantic situations? Or maybe it’s just that I have a new perspective… because Tuesday I got engaged.”
…yet another Jezebel editor gets engaged and immediately changes their outlook on silly things like dogma.
sez Wikipedia: Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from.
The Orient of Business
So, it’s been about a year since anyone has touched this blog. I was content to let it fester in the murky muck, as perhaps we’re all too busy with more important things and the blog never hit its mark.
That is, until I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Sociological Images, and it struck me how amateur one of the posts is. Don’t get me wrong, most posts are great — but I thought we were ready to move past a post-colonial theory 101 class’s first take on Orientalism. In a series of topical postcards, they present it as though it’s all about exoticizing the foreign, specifically the non-Westerner.
This article actually made the case to me that I would’ve probably taken part in objectifying the Other, rather than showing how insidious the ways consumption and identity work (construction of Self through Other, blah blah blah). If you were living in a relatively closed and industrial society, wouldn’t you be fascinated by something, gasp!, new? People going out to seek that new may have had a hand in producing that novelty, to the detriment of the oppressed and personified Other, but the superior sense of self that came about wasn’t the product. Rather, it was the byproduct — and that’s what makes this so treacherous. So festersome.
All this is to say, that it made me realize that I wanted to focus on venting about the business class that I’m taking (in an attempt to market myself better as a good worker bee).
I’ve censored myself in my business 101 class a few times, unwilling to dig into the essentialist statements, like, for example, “women are more likely to follow an ethics of care while men tend to prefer an ethics of justice.” Do business folk even realize what that means? Why it might mean that? And why is it so judgmental when it talks about arbitrary women who make decisions based on empathy but avoids saying much harmful about men who follow rules blindly, except that their standards are sometimes too rigid? Or does rigid not have the same stigma that arbitrary does?
Should I bring in the Phallus? Rigidly? (Note to self: don’t look up “phallus” while at on a public CPU, even if you’re intending to link to a wiki article about the symbolism within psycho-analytic & feminist theories).
But I hesitate to be too strident in the face of folk who base their findings on studying categories like “white men, ages 16-18” and “Hispanic single moms, ages 25-32” without interrogating what these categories mean or how the data relates to the category it is supposed to represent. Taxonomies, rather than systems. I’m there to learn from them for now… I think that this ties back into Orientalism in that it figures one set at normal and that there’s a mixture of identity and product at play.
The study of business, itself, may be one of the last great frontiers.
Taken Takes the Cake
I was sitting in the theater before Taken started, reading me some Location of Culture (well, the prologue to the Routledge Classics edition) and Michelle was out buying some popcorn and I was thinking, “I can’t wait to put away this Homi Bhabha and watch me some torture porn!”
Torture porn was the least of my worries.
(Spoiler! Spoiler! Since I know the hoards of you are going to see this movie!)
Dude, like it’s not enough that the audience cheered while Liam was on his torture mission. That, I expected. But … his daughter, a rich white chick from LA, was not taken for some ransom. Oh no. Some Albanians wanted to sell her into the sex trade, which turned out to be particularly lucrative given she was a virgin.
Because there is a huge problem with Albanians kidnapping Americans and selling them into the sex trade.
The whole final sequence basically involved the audience holding our breath while we waited to see if Liam could get to his daughter before she lost her virginity. To an Arab sheik. While wearing a white veil.
I’ll leave it to you to figure out if he did, but I will say I think they had a great time at the Purity Ball upon their return to the United States. After Liam Neeson killed like a million people. I think the US traded him so France would keep Roman Polanski. Or else the Christianist right has completely taken over our media and we just don’t know it yet.
HJNTIY, Take 309
Just when I think I can’t love Rebecca Traister on Broadsheet any more…
So if anyone else out there has a sentence they want to get off their chest, but especially if it’s about how women should just pull themselves together and stop being so damn crazy, get ready to ride the American Dream Train all the way to movie theaters!
Last night I was forced to admit my obsession with this book to someone I’d actually like to have a little respect for me in the morning. When it came down to it, there was no back-tracking, there was stumbling over words. His reaction was an undeniable what-the-fuck moment.
I’m a woman, I obsess. Maybe the book just isn’t that into me.
Building better unbalanced babes
What’s with the spate of weird dolls being proposed lately? Are we trying to build complexes into the women of tomorrow?
Showbiz Promotions announced they will not be producing an “Inspirational Caylee Sunshine Doll”, modeled after murdered toddler Caylee Anthony, due to general public disgust and outrage.
In her fourth full day as First Lady, Ms. Obama issued a statement criticizing the maker of Beanie Babies for marketing two new dolls called Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia, seemingly modeled on her children. “We feel it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes,” Ms. Obama’s press secretary said in a statement Saturday.
Protests? I protest!
This weekend I heard an interesting interview with Gene Robinson on NPR.
One of the callers asked how he could accept the invitation to offer his blessing at the We Are One concert on Sunday given his status as an openly gay minister and Obama’s gaffe having Rick Warren preside at the inauguration. She suggested that he should’ve declined in order to protest Obama’s choice of Warren.
Which got me thinking.. Why is protest considered the most authentic form of dissent? Can’t we disagree without choosing silence as our only out?
(I think protest can work well in terms of consumer debacles, where the free-market is supposed to sort out quibbles, but, dude, we should expand our vocabulary of indignation).
Edit: I think it’s also interesting that silence is also cited as one of the major weaknesses of the international community. For example, why remain silent when women are tortured and abused here and abroad? Or, taken from the new Whitehouse site: “Approximately 1,400 women a year — four every day — die in the United States as a result of domestic violence. And 132,000 women report that they have been victims of a rape or attempted rape, and it is estimated that an even greater number have been raped but do not report it. ” In that case, silence is deadly. Silence can both be a protest and a tacit approval. Can the tactics always be distinguished?
Get off my lawn, damn kids
Like many others, I have a love-hate relationship with Jezebel. Several times, the provocative-for-the-sake-of-getting-hits posts have brought me THIS CLOSE to commenting. This time I said, what the hell, and sent off something in response to a gleefully ignorant post in which the editor, after saying that we shouldn’t compare -isms, says that the worst thing that sexist behavior brings a woman is being called foxy while being black could garner you a noose in your doorway (“I think there is kind of a huge difference between remarking on my attractiveness and hanging a noose on someone’s doorway”). Hello? Let’s not compare, but let’s also not pretend that things like rape don’t exist. Or that verbal assault is insignificant.
While writing, however, I realized something else that makes me uncomfortable with the blog — the way they edit the comments. It feels like they’re the popular girls and they want a mix of sychophants and jokesters yipping at their feet. So many of the “worsties” comments go to people who disagree with the editors.
This is all well and good, except it makes me feel shaky about where my idea of feminism fits in with today’s feminists. While not a feminist blog, there is a bit of, ick, girl power vibe running through the Jezebellers posts. I’m all for girl power, but it’s nice when discussions and arguments and disagreements and hatred of the patriarchal institution can coexist with feeling empowered by your cooch.
And because of this, reading the site makes me now feel like an old ninny who is crashing the slumber party, but, on the other hand, the seriousness of overtly feminist blogs don’t allow me to indulge in celebrity gossip (without tarrying the significance, blah blah). Where’s the place for the vapid, pop-cult-loving and sometimes angry (but not for the sake of empty provocation) feminist? And why are those darn kids on my lawn ruining my fun?
The Shanty Kingdom 