Comments | w1ldc47: Female is female, but male is just, well, normal.

w1ldc47

Female is female, but male is just, well, normal.

Jan 29, 2005 18:22

Grrrr.

An article I found via /. has the following headline:

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms. Grump. Now, I'm not especially interested in the article's contents, or what these results may or may not say about human behaviour, but I *am* pissed off at the wording of the title. Why? Because it turns out, when you read the article, ( Read more... )

Comments 6

see how articulate I am tonight... lilithcoyote January 30 2005, 02:55:01 UTC

*nodding along* Good post!

daphers13 January 30 2005, 04:23:31 UTC

hm, well, this has little to do with anything, but it might cheer you up a little:

lindsay and i were having a conversation about you today in the presence of her boyfriend and we were discussing when i first met you and decided you were a hippie based on your hairy legs which were less hairy than mine, but visible. and - here's an important part - we both consistently used male pronouns to refer to you because i make lindsay do it too otherwise i get confused. and at some point kevin started listening and was mightily confused as to why i would decide that a boy with hairy legs was a hippie. so we explained it to him and possibly got him to at least stop being quite so closed-minded for at least a minute.

it was funny. or at least it was funny to me in my taiko-high induced state.

q_pheevr January 30 2005, 19:55:39 UTC

Yup. Yup. Yup. Absolutely.

Londa Schiebinger, in Has Feminism Changed Science?, talks about things like this, and points out some cases where the problem is clearly not just in the headlines; as you suggest, the sexist assumptions infect the research itself as well.

Another example q_pheevr January 31 2005, 23:13:15 UTC

Just saw an ad promoting the U of T Floorball Club, and playing up the fact that, unlike in many other sports, women and men play together. The text: "We meet girls during the game." (Yeah, well, so do the members of the women's rugby team; what's your point?) I haven't examined their promotional materials in detail, so I can't testify as to whether they also have on that says "We meet boys during the game." Anyone want to place a bet?

anonymous February 8 2005, 17:33:46 UTC

ugh. An acquaintance of mine was telling me about this research, and she wound up her spiel by saying "and that's why men are hard-wired to watch porn".

So if that's the kind of take-home message people get from this kind of science, yeah, it is a big deal.

Anna Phor