That your passing desire means you get to derail a woman’s life whenever you feel like it is the absolute definition of male privilege. Kieron Gillen (writer of one of my favorite comics, Phonogram) on sexism.
There’s been a lot of chatter about “post-genderism” and the like with the news of this recent work:
Virtual reality can get downright unreal. In this simulated realm, grown men given a new perspective on the world suddenly find themselves convinced that they inhabit the body of a young girl.
I understand the value of these experiments as a stepping stone in which we are learning how to project our experiences into a different sort of body and environment, and I understand the potential benefits that can come from this research (phantom limb mirror-boxes, for example, as well as some of the interesting work done by Henrik Ehrsson.)
But for people thinking that projecting into the body of a female somehow means you experience in the world as a female? You need to learn a lot more about phenomenal experience, cognitive science, and neuroscience. This may seem strange coming from someone who stresses the role of the body in cognition, but it really isn’t. This all calls for a much larger post than I’m planning to make here, but if you take seriously the brain-body-environment complex, you know that you can’t swap one aspect for a brief time and fundamentally change anything. A male doesn’t understand what it means to be female by changing what the body looks like any more than I understand what it feels like to be a female in a middle-eastern culture just by virtue of both of us having a uterus. These three things, brain, body, and environment, build up and create who we are over time. Having a female body is one small part of that process, but much more important is the way you are treated by your culture over time that builds the experience of being female (in that culture at that time, since there is no essential “feminine experience”). These experiments are mildly interesting as a step on the path, but they do not in any way, shape, or form, belong alongside the label “post-gender.”
Link to “Grown Men Swap Bodies with Virtual Girl” on Discovery.com
I’ll be asking this repeatedly via all of my web-presences, but since this one sits idle these days I probably won’t have to ask more than once here; it’ll just stay on top since I never blog.
I’m teaching a First Year Initiatives course in the Fall. These are basically first-year seminar classes designed to teach college- and learning-based skills to incoming students. The content is meant to be highly interdisciplinary, but the content is also secondary in these courses. The primary goal is to give them training in critical reading and writing, public speaking, etc., as well as get them introduced to the college environment and the surrounding community and its needs.
I’m teaching a class with a cyborg theme, because the knitting theme I wanted to do just seemed too tough to sell (I wanted to attract the right sorts of students and I haven’t figured out how to do that with a knitting-themed course yet). I’ll be working on my syllabus once the semester is over (May) and I hope to have a sizable list of books, stories, and articles, both fiction and non-fiction, to examine and consider for the class by then. I have a few non-fiction items already to look at, but I don’t have many fiction pieces (aside from “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). I welcome recommendations, and the ideal pieces will examine multiple facets of the cyborg concept (Hayles, Haraway, Stelarc, for example). The fiction pieces should do more than look only at the human-machine blending, although good fiction will always deal with more than one dimension. The social aspects, the economic aspects, and the philosophical aspects are all as important as the biological.
Please leave comments with recommendations, or also feel free to email me if you’d prefer that. And thanks in advance if anyone is still reading here and has something to contribute!
“Well, here goes. I really resent the term, but I use it because it’s recognized and accepted.
I’m gay.” …Link to post where James Randi renews my faith in the notion of progress in American culture, just because he feels safe enough to make this public declaration that shouldn’t even be news.
A new Rasmussen poll suggests that the Tea Party movement is far and away more popular than the Republican Party it seeks to influence — so much so that if it were a full-fledged political party, it would overtake the GOP on the generic Congressional ballot. Link to terrifying analysis on TPM.
Indian election authorities Thursday granted what they called an independent identity to intersex and transsexuals in the country’s voter lists. Before, members of these groups — loosely called eunuchs in Indian English — were referred to as male or female in the voter rolls. But now, they will have the choice to tick “O” — for others — when indicating their gender in voter forms, the Indian election commission said in a statement. Link to CNN article.
Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your 64 Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other anti-choice “progressive” Christians, men: Why don’t you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?
For example, budget hawks in Congress say they’ll vote against the bill because it’s too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won’t wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.
Read more by Katha Pollitt at the Guardian.
This one is worthy of a post in the Big Important Column of Things You Really Ought to Take Notice Of.
Scalzi succinctly and beautifully suggests a course of action for the SF Boys Club folk:
At this late date, when one of these quailing wonders appears, stuttering petulantly that women are unfit to touch the genre he’s already claimed with his smudgy, sticky fingerprints, the thing to do is not to solemnly intone about how far science fiction has yet to go. Science fiction does have a distance to go, but these fellows aren’t interested in taking the journey, and I don’t want to have to rideshare with them anyway. So the thing to do is to point and laugh.
There are few things I love more than a wonderful writer who, when exposed on a day-to-day basis, continues to be brilliant. When I read columns or blogs by authors whose books I otherwise adored only to learn they’re backwards, close-minded fools, their books become tainted and unreadable. Scalzi’s books take on an aura of betterness when I read his blog.
Accusations of sexism have been levelled at the horror fiction industry after a new collection of interviews with 16 horror writers failed to include a single woman. Link: British Fantasy Society admits ‘lazy sexism’ over male-only horror book
Newly minted brides should do more than vow to love their hubbies for a lifetime, say the majority of Americans. Some 70 percent of the respondents in a new study feel they should also take their spouse’s surname – and 50 percent say that it should be a legal requirement for a woman to take her spouse’s last name… When the respondents were asked why they felt women should change their name after the wedding, Hamilton says, “They told us that women should lose their own identity when they marry and become a part of the man and his family. This was a reason given by many.” Read more and weep at the Daily News.