Engineers are Smokin' Hot

My university has posted this recruitment ad on their homepage. I'm not sure if it's targeted at 18-year-old women or 18-year-old men. Is the intended message "You can be a woman, can study engineering, and can STILL be smokin' hot," or is it "You can come study engineering at RIT and STILL meet some smokin' hot (and fast!) women"?

The male voiceover says "Around here, there's only one thing we expect from our students..." and then the on-screen text flashes the phrase "Beautiful Solutions."

Anecdotally, the women in the video are not actually on the Formula team.

Update: The women in the video apparently are on the Formula team in some role, but not in the roles portrayed. Also, after the college president received negative feedback "from a number of people," including students, the video was taken down from the RIT homepage.

Gendered Language and Textbook Examples

I've been going over rough drafts of term papers, and I have as many students writing about "the future of mankind" and "the well-being of men" as ever. When I suggest that they consider writing of "human well-being" instead, they look puzzled. Wasn't gender-neutral language something that was adopted by professional and academic writers in the 1980's? Thirty years ago?

My kindergartner showed me a page in his math workbook. There were little pictures of people to count: girls dressed as dancers and boys dressed as soldiers (yes, with little rifles complete with bayonets!). I asked him if he knows any real-life dancers: yes, one, named Jeff. I asked him if he knows any real soldiers: yes, one, named Jenn. Will those real-life examples override the images which are put before him?

I was considering which textbook to adopt for a critical thinking class and came across this McGraw-Hill quiz. The 10 quiz questions concern a Senator ("he"), a Professor ("he"), Mr. Equalminded, Tom, and Mr. Theist. There are no feminine pronouns on the quiz. I thought we were free of this by now. How do these texts make it past the review process?

CfP: Feminism and Climate Change

CALL FOR PAPERS

Hypatia: Special Issue on Climate Change

March 15, 2012 submission deadline

Volume 28, Number 3, Summer 2013
Guest Editors: Nancy Tuana and Chris Cuomo

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy seeks papers for a special issue on Climate Change. We welcome new feminist scholarship on the scientific, ethical, epistemological, economic, and cultural dimensions of current global climate change, as well as case studies that critically engage specific questions in local, regional, national, and/or global contexts. In addition to essays developing feminist analyses of the science, ethics, and politics of climate change, we encourage investigations of the gendered, neo-colonial, and other power-laden frameworks which shape the discourses and power flows that influence various parties’ understandings of and responses to climate change.

There has been a great deal of work in the natural and social sciences on various aspects of climate change, and there is increasing acknowledgement in the literature that extreme weather events and ecological disasters tend to have greater negative impacts on women, girls, and those who lack economic and social power. Nonetheless, little attention has been given to the complex ways in which hegemonic conceptions of gender, race, nation, and knowledge are implicated within institutional frameworks of climate policy, media representations of scientific knowledge, and suggestions of planetary redemption through "eco-engineering," carbon markets, or profit-generating green technologies.

In addition to critical case studies focused on specific regions or trends, some questions and issues that might be considered in this special issue include (but are not limited to) feminist analyses of the following topics:

• Geopolitics of climate change treaties and political processes
• Ethics and politics of approaches to climate justice, including cosmopolitanism, human
  rights, human security, indigenous rights, and eco-centric perspectives
• Critical analyses of industrial, scientific, policy and activist discourses
• Climate change denial and epistemologies of ignorance
• Intersections and tensions of development ethics and climate ethics
• Epistemologies and ethics of climate modeling, including economic models
• Naturalization of fossil fuel dependence and consumerism
• Climate change and the resurgence of reactionary notions of population control
• Critical analyses of the influence of popular media, from misinformation to education

Deadline for submission: March 15, 2012
Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography, prepared for anonymous review, and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words. For details please see Hypatia's submission guidelines
Please submit your paper to manuscript central. When you submit, make sure to select “Climate Change” as your manuscript type, and also send an email to the guest editors indicating the title of the paper you have submitted: Chris Cuomo: cuomo@uga.edu, Nancy Tuana: ntuana@la.psu.edu

Parental Choices

I think a lot about my parenting but don't often write about it. But there are two independent things in the news lately that have provoked similar responses, and I want to explore them.

Namely, why is it that there is such controversy over "the right way" of raising kids when so many ways seem to do just fine? And the higher-level question, what should guide us parents in decisions about how to raise our kids, and, in particular, how we allow them to spend their (non-school) time? Why does the baseline belief seem to be that parents should conform to a typical parenting mode, something that comes from outside of themselves and is rather like a community standard? Why, that is, when we are a multiplicity of communities and do make these decisions for ourselves all the time? Why not also make those decisions for our very young children (assuming that children will be able to make more and more decisions for themselves as they grow up)?

Here are two stories:

1. via Feminist Philosophers, a Canadian mother who hasn't revealed the gender of her infant receives media attention, much of it negative.
2. the National Association for the Education of Young Children released guidelines advocating incorporating electronic technology (computers, etc.) into all early childhood educational settings (including preschools and outdoor summer camps).

My reaction to the mother who won't reveal the gender of her infant is to wonder "Who cares?" Some even call it child abuse, in part, no doubt, because she lets her toddler and her pre-school boy wear dresses and long hair. But who cares? Some grown men wear dresses. Let them. Some men, e.g. Moroccans and Egyptians, wear long robes as a matter of cultural identity and dress their boys that way, too. Children seem to do just fine in this world so long as their clothes are safe and comfortable.

Likewise, some parents clearly do want to make this choice for their young boys: you will wear boy clothes in boy patterns. That seems fine to me, too. In my house, we don't wear images of violence or meanness--no sharks with huge teeth or skulls or guns on our t-shirts. (We do have lots of pictures of trees!) This is due to me exercising influence as a parent. I made the decision, and as my boy grew older I let him know why. He may challenge me sometime, but that will be between us, and I don't see why it's anyone's concern whether I make it a matter in which I give him freedom or enforce my authority.

The second problem seems different. In the absence of evidence, why would an educational body recommend some technologies over others (gameboys rather than baseballs, cellphones rather than soap bubbles) across all contexts? The impulse seems to me related to the background belief in the first case: electronic screens are something we all do now, so childhood exposure should prepare little ones for it.

I don't see why, in these cases, we would treat little ones as smaller versions of young adults. It might be disruptive for a 7th-grade boy to wear a dress to junior high. He would get teased, among other possible problems. But a toddler? Not so much. It might be deficient for a 7th-grader to lack computer skills these days. But a toddler?

The Tiger Mom gets called out for being too strict, too demanding. The hippie mom gets called out for being too lenient, for misguiding her child's gender image. But both have kids who seem well-adjusted.

Both of these parents are self-conscious about their parenting, and that seems to me to be what matters. Both are proud of their kids, and of themselves, for reaching their goals.

But I don't withhold judgment entirely. The parents I don't understand are the ones who don't like how their children have become but continue to raise them to be that way. I don't understand the parents who seem concerned that their child gets in trouble for bringing toy weapons to pre-school and drawing images of weapons and violence--and yet the child continues to have access to those objects and ideas. In the case of a 5-year-old with a fetish for swords and parents who are disturbed by it, why not inundate that child with musical theater? How can there be room in a young brain for laserguns when it's filled with Rogers & Hammerstein?

Sometimes I think I'm just lucky: my boy loves to play UNO with me and work spatial puzzles! We hike together, we sew together, and we watch nature documentaries. But really, that's just childhood. Little kids know what they know, and they don't know what they don't know. I'm mystified by parents of little kids who say "I wish my kid didn't love X so much"--unless that parent secretly loves X, too.

Philosophical language and the gender norm

The surprising encounter with the accusation that someone who fails to articulate disagreement is a 'wuss' has heightened my sense of gender normativity in language over the last few days. (This is public radio, not Howard Stern!) I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who sees gender bullying played through language games.

Reading essays in Paul Horwich's Truth, Meaning, Reality (2010), he writes in "A World without Isms":

Of course it was wishful thinking for me to have suggested in my title that this could spell the end of all 'isms'. For there was bound to be one for the very point of view that I'm recommending. "A bloodless quietism" is how Crispin Wright has labeled it—"the bland perspective of a variety of assertoric 'language games', each governed by its own internal standards of acceptability, each sustaining a metaphysically emasculated notion of truth, each unqualified for anything of more interest or importance." Well, Crispin, sorry for being so anemic, boring, and effeminate...

This move allows the unconscious (and unthinking) sexism to be its own insult.

Why I'm Ambivalent About Women's History Month

March is Women's History Month. Eventually, it would be nice to be able to do away with it.

Women's History Month serves a purpose in foregrounding women's history and thus helping educators to brush up on histories they might otherwise overlook. But the goal of that attention is to mainstream this history--to make it easier and more natural to include the lives of women and their historical influence into the curriculum.

But these efforts have to be sincere, and they have to be useful. We feminist scholars and educators have a duty to use Women's History Month to include women in our syllabi and our lectures, and then to keep including them, even in months where we don't get the reminder.

What doesn't work is to focus attention on women in a way that can be used to further belittle, marginalize, or trivialize. Because by calling out women for special treatment, we're already taking the risk of reinforcing the beliefs that people come with--so the occasion has to be used effectively to redirect or change those beliefs, not re-entrench them.

In my last post, I mentioned that the Women's and Gender Studies Program on my campus was celebrating International Women's Day. They've also celebrated Women's History Month--by sending around a homemade image to all faculty and staff with the suggestion that we use it for our "desktop wallpaper" during the month of March.

It is a composite image of 6 of what I take to be their ideas of prominent and influential women in history:

1. Queen Elizabeth I (nice start)
2. Frida Kalho (well, OK)
3. Harriet Tubman (so far, so good)
4. Oprah Winfrey (judge for yourself)
5. Marge Simpson (blue hair and so influential! DOH!)
6. a busty image of Eve (SEDUCTRESS!!! ORIGINAL SIN!!!)

It is a 72KB file, it is not sized to fit my screen, and it uses the Comic Sans font.

I could not make this stuff up.

Why I Hate International Women's Day

I don't hate it for its Soviet roots.

The Wikipedia caption for the poster at right:

The 1932 Soviet poster dedicated to the 8th of March holiday. The text reads: "8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery" and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!". Originally in the USSR the holiday had a clear political character, emphasizing the role of the Soviet state inthe liberation of women from their second-class-citizen status.

Indeed, I'm all in favor of liberating women from the status of second-class citizen. And I think that doing so means demanding equal treatment for women in education, employment, and politics. Those are difficult tasks, and they require work on a daily basis, and I have no problem with a day that calls attention to the politics of gender.

But what I do have a problem with is a patronizing day for celebrating femininity analogous to Valentine's Day or Grandparent's Day. In Italy, and in some other countries, men give women flowers or chocolates on March 8. And then they elect, and tolerate, Berlusconi.

This gets personal:

At my university there is Women's and Gender Studies program, and it has an event budget. But it has not brought in an academic speaker in years, and its only event this year will be to hand out tulips to women--for being women--in the student union tomorrow. No political involvement on campus, no programming. Just tulips--symbols of love, symbols of unblemished beauty.

We also have a Women's Center, part of the Student Life part of campus. To recognize International Women's Day, they're holding a henna workshop.

Great. Flowers and make-up. So much for being modern women.

Being a Good Girl

A student I was privileged to have in my feminist theory course last term is a graduate student in the fine art photography/video program. I've found myself thinking quite often about her work, which simultaneously portrays and critiques stereotypes of good girls. The stereotypes she chooses juxtapose images of good little girls with conformist adult women, and juxtapose past norms for female discipline with contemporary expectations.

I haven't developed expertise in thinking about visual culture and art, but I'm immediately struck by the difficulty of what she proposes to do. How can an image simultaneously present a role and critique that role, and do so with multiple levels of meaning, making depth available to the viewer. And all while anticipating the expectations and assumptions that viewers will--or won't--bring to what they see.

This conundrum, which I expect is common in photography--especially in photography that reaches toward social commentary--is also familiar in feminist theory. For instance, consider my post below--on the one hand, in striving toward gender equality, we hope that, soon, gender won't matter, but for the sake of the striving, we must call attention to it. A point has to be made, but in making that point we risk undermining the eventual goal. This blog on politics and photography often addresses similar themes.

Whitney considers a related question in this post:

Do you have to rebel to be liberated? Does liberation dictate a change in appearance or only a change in mindset?

And this is a puzzle which I saw the young feminists in my course struggling with. On the one hand, they felt that they wanted to graphically mark their feminist consciousness--by how they dress or by not wearing make-up. But they also, rightly, questioned whether marking themselves was either required by feminism or effective as a feminist action. (And it's true, the people I know who have adopted a hippie persona are rarely radical, and the radicals I know don't usually look it but live their lives in ways that set them outside the mainstream. More on this thought soon.)

Below is one of Whitney's video installations. My first reaction was to love it--it's beautiful, and it seemed to me to find that tension point between, on the one hand, showing how much care feminine appearance and performance requires, and on the other hand, showing that the costuming, while perhaps adopted to fit others' expectations, also becomes adored in its own right, as we fit ourselves inside the role we are expected to inhabit.

Interestingly, Whitney reported that all of the women she has shown it to say they like it for reasons similar to mine, and all they men she has shown it to describe it as trite or clichéd--including my male colleague who does aesthetics.

Untitled from Whitney Warne on Vimeo.

Access to Power

Here's one of those questions on which my intuitions pull in opposing directions.

How important is it for us in academia to have informal access to folks in positions of authority? And if informal access to people in power is a good thing--either for the people who get the access or those in the positions of authority, then how important is it that the access be fair, especially given that people in positions of authority have very real, burdensome demands on their time?

Here are some reasons to support informal access:

1. In organizations and communities with democratic elements, informal meetings across levels of hierarchy strengthens the impression of equality.

2. Those in power can lose touch with "regular folks," and formal means of access deliver messages that are funneled along only certain lines, often adversarial ones. Say there is some sort of structural problem that could lead to a grievance, isn't it much better for someone in a position of power to hear about the potential problem before it becomes serious? Plus, informal access is more likely to create positive relationships rather than adversarial relationships.

3. If people in a community or organization feel close to figures of authority, perhaps they are more likely to be supportive of the community or organization in general.

But here's the concern. Genuinely informal, causal, social interactions are more likely to happen in social circles that are coincident with the leader's own social milieu, but that can serve to entrench the interests of that social milieu while doing nothing to create access for others.

Here are some examples, and I'm genuinely conflicted about most of these:

1. The dean's office runs a series of breakfasts. They are open for anyone on faculty or staff to stop by and chat or share ideas and problems. However, they take place while some people are teaching and are always held at the same time.

2. A provost holds frequent private parties at his home. Invitations are offered liberally and generously. But there is a group of regular invitees, and these become known around campus as the provost's inner circle.

3. A provost with a very busy schedule creatively schedules his downtime as a chance for students, faculty, or staff to chat with him informally. This regular 3-mile running event is called "Pace the Provost." He has a 20:34 5K time.

4. A dean holds informal "meeting hours" at a local pub, after hours. Some untenured faculty make it their business to attend, figuring that sharing beers with the dean is a form of insurance.

What do you think of these cases?

I don't see a problem with #1. Presumably if the dean's office is reaching out, they'd be open to individuals setting up meetings. #2 is slightly more problematic. However, public figures still have private lives. And it seems to me like a provost is actually rather removed from decisions that will affect faculty members as individuals (except for tenure decisions).

#3 raises a different problem. On the one hand, it's very creative, and, as a runner myself, it sounds fun. But then, it creates access for certain people (runners, more likely men than women) and not others (if you're fat or blew out your knees, too bad).

#4 creates the most conflict between my intuitions. On the one hand, extending business conversations in more comfortable surroundings sounds absolutely unobjectionable. On the other hand, of these 4 situations, this one seems the most likely to result in someone receiving favorable treatment--not as a result of conscious favoritism, necessarily, but as a result of having had the chance to develop regular old familiarity and trust.

What Do You Know?

Wikipedia is asking for more female contributors.

This is important in that it recognizes that, if Wikipedia says something about our cultural worldview, then the perspective of that worldview is skewed if those who write it don't represent the full diversity of interests.

I don't buy the line that it's because women don't use computers as much or in the same ways as men. I think the cause is a more broadly rooted phenomenon--women being less like to recognize their own epistemic authority or to recognize that what they have expertise on counts as knowledge.

We philosophers have a word for this--agnotology, or the epistemology of ignorance. Some sorts of things are deemed worth knowing, and others not; and social practices, some of them gendered, dub people experts. Feminist philosophers have examined how cultural values shape the understanding of what counts as knowledge--including Nancy Tuana, Shannon Sullivan, Lisa Heldke, Nancy McHugh, and Carla Fehr.

Thanks to Zoe for the link!

Neurosexism

Cordelia Fine's fantastic analysis of "neurosexism" and exposé of the sloppy reasoning that feeds misconceptions about gendered brain differences to the popular press is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Carol Tavris.

This is a good book to use in class--not just a class on feminist theory, but also in a philosophy of science class that examines the structure of evidential claims and the ways that values can influence scientific research and the communication of science.

From the review:

Fine’s romp through the fields of neurosexism is sandwiched between two other sections; in the first, she explores the unsexy, low-tech, but primary causes of gender differences in achievement: the persistence of discrimination, subtle and blatant, that convey the message to women – “You don’t belong here”, and the institutional rules, explicit and implicit, that impede advancement – or make it possible; after all, the international rise of women in law, medicine, science, bartending and the military did not occur because their brains became less lateralized. The final section examines the socialization of children and the phenomenon that draws so many parents to the notion that sex differences are innate: the sex-stereotyped play choices and behaviours of their toddlers. Parents aren’t wrong in what they observe. They are wrong only in assuming that their child’s preferences at the age of three, four or five has anything at all to do with what that child will grow up to become.

Academic Discrimination and Pregnancy

Dr. Isis has the details. UC-Davis is not looking good on this one. At least the chancellor has responded appropriately.

The only bright side I can think of is that it would be unimaginable if an explicit and supportive maternity policy for students didn't come out of the situation--eventually.

The apparent issue is that people lose their compass directions when it comes to making decisions about pregnant women.

Language Shapes--or Reflects--Reality?

More on language and gender.

What is the point of discussing how language interacts with sexism? Is the thought that by changing language, we can change sexist practices and behavior? Why not see things the other way around, that the language we use describes and emerges out of our social reality. From this latter perspective, the way to change social inequality is to treat people equally and to put into place policies, institutions, and practices that treat people equally. Once that is done, we will naturally use non-sexist language. (The degree to which language shapes thought has been controversial and difficult to test: more on that below.)

I suppose the thought is that words like 'policeman' describe the way our social reality is, for the most part, and once there are more policewomen, then we will use that word more often.

But why not use words like 'police officer' and 'firefighter,' which don't demand gendering of their subjects?

The argument in support of prioritizing language change starts with these two points:

1. If you are concerned about sex inequality--and other forms of inequality--then you will not want to participate in communicating in ways that reinforce the perception of inequality. It is not the case that everyone who is concerned to create conditions of equality has thought about the ways that our language does this, and so discussing it is often welcome.

2. If you are concerned about sex inequality, then changing your language is an easy thing to do. It does not require a large investment of time or thought, and adapting our language to contexts and commitments is something we do all the time.

Some of the arguments against prioritizing changing sexist to gender-neutral language ignore the above points. They claim either that:

1. it is ineffectual. But much of the labor that we put into supporting equality is ineffective on the small and immediate scale; the motivation for doing so is consistency between thought (a commitment to equality) and action.

2. even if it is effectual, the results are not as dramatic as achieving workplace equality, etc. But if language is used to devalue some people, then changing it may assist these other goals. In addition, it does not reduce in any way the effort to achieve other forms of equality.

3. it is coercive. But changing how I speak does not coerce others into changing how they speak.

That third point is telling. Surely part of the movement towards gender-neutral language does involve changing policies or norms (using peer pressure) to decrease how acceptable it is to use language that is deployed to exclude, ignore, or belittle others. For instance, professional organizations and journals have set standards for non-sexist language usage. Here's the APA's, from 1986.

Setting standards for non-sexist language use in professional contexts seems analogous to setting standards for non-sexist behavior. Surely, speaking is behavior, and it might be interpreted as even more important than behavior, which returns us to the earlier question, does the language we use (its categories, its affective content) shape the way we see the world, the way we think?

Research by linguistic psychologists suggests that it does. Lera Boroditsky asks:

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does.

...

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions.

All men are created equal

Another thought on language and gender.

Sentences such as "all men are created equal" are ambiguous. Does the word "men" refer to men, or does it refer to men and women? Usage today is mixed, with most people saying "people" when they want to refer to men and women, and some people using "men" to refer to all members of humanity.

But when this phrase was written in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to announce the value of democratic government and speak against the divine right of kings, it did refer to men specifically, and in particular to white, property-holding men. For this reason, Elizabeth Cady Stanton referred to but modified the phrase in her 1848 Declaration of Sentiments to say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal."

Some students in my feminist theory class say they see no harm in referring to humanity as men. One argument given in favor of this practice is that everyone already knows that 'men' in this context means 'everyone.'

However, the question of whether 'men' really means 'men and women' (or even 'white men and black men') becomes politically relevant in the context of originary interpretations of the Constitution. Originalists believe that the Constitution grants only those rights which were actually intended by the people who wrote it or who approved its later amendments.

At times, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia appears to be a strict originalist. For instance in an interview he recently denied that the 14th amendment can be used to protect the rights of women (in spite of decades of Supreme Court precedent). While saying that it could be used to deny them those rights.

From what I can tell in this interview, he does not deny that women can be given civil rights. But any rights that women have (other than the right to vote), would have their origin in legislation. Unlike men's rights, they are not constitutional rights.

Here's part of what Justice Scalia has said:

Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't.

More here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darren-hutchinson/post_1524_b_804382.html

Gender embedded in language

My feminist theory course talked about language today, and one of our exercises was to list some ways that gender is embedded in common expressions and ways that language is constrained by the gender of the user or the gender of the referent.

For instance, there are many more negative words referring to women's genitalia than to men's, and those words themselves can often be applied to a person to indicate that they are worthless, weak, cheap, or cowardly. Women and objects are beautiful, but most men don't want to be called beautiful, even if they are. Only women are described as shrill, and if a man performs in a way that would get a woman called shrill, he is unlikely to

be judged negatively at all.

The linguist at Dinosaur Comics does a great job with this, as usual:

To Every Debate, Two Extremes

Forced abortion. This is not a policy I would have thought would get much traction in the US. Right? How would you expect to hear forced abortion described? As a human rights violation, no?

I'm teaching the subject of abortion debates in an upper-division feminist theory course right now. It's the second time I've taught about abortion debates at my current institution. Since it's the topic least likely to elicit rational discussion, I try to leave it off my agenda. But I'm using this great textbook which deals with the topic so nicely, I figured I'd give it a try.

The consensus which was voiced most clearly in the classroom was that--hold on to your hats--women should be legally forced to have abortions if the father of the fetus does not want to pay child support. One student argued for this idea and then, one by one, the other three males in the class jumped on board. Oh, to be fair, one student said that he wouldn't go so far as to require forced abortion, but men should be relieved of providing child support if the pregnant woman won't get an abortion when her partner asks her to. And another said that he's less in favor of forced abortion than he is in favor of the idea that abortion should be available to women only when their sex partner signs off on it. Which is to say that only men should be able to make decisions about women acquiring an abortion.

Out of about 25 women, only one spoke in defense of women's right to not have unwanted medical procedures forced on them.

Why did these students think that forced abortion is a position they could support in a feminist theory classroom, especially after reading a long and sensitive chapter in a feminist theory textbook? And where were the feminist voices? One student told me privately that the views expressed were so ignorant of what we had been discussing that it was impossible to know where to start. But I also worry that at this university, where women make up less than a third of the student body, students have become resigned to overt sexism.

An additional note: any ideas about whether I should return to this discussion in the next class meeting? It seems to me that a class occurrence this far from the basis for the rest of our discussion deserves more attention and can best be dealt with using humor. But, ummm, I don't quite know how to joke about serious proposals for forced abortions. Ideas?

Women, Explained

As the owner of zero television sets, I miss nearly all of what's going on in the media. Usually this benefits my life. But every once in a long while, I miss something worthwhile on the Idiot Box.

Sarah Haskins' segments on "Infomania" on Current TV haven't been produced since 2009, but don't they still seem current? And very useful for my Women's and Gender Studies course. Many topics, very funny. How many clips can I show in class before I get to the point where time would better be spent talking about Judy Butler?

Harassment and Humor

I'm teaching a course on Feminist Theory, and yesterday we discussed sexual harassment. Entirely by chance, that evening I watched Season 2, Episode 2 of the TV show The Office. The title of the episode is "Sexual Harassment," and it's streamable if you subscribe to Netflix.

First, let me say that I found it hilarious. I was laughing until tears were coming down my face. Part of what makes it so funny is that it works on several levels. If it were just offensive jokes, then it would be, well, just offensive. The humor requires the cognitive dissonance between the guys in the show thinking they're funny, when they're actually more pathetic and unlikable than funny. But everyone knows people who fall just short of their extreme. We can feel superior to them because we can see what they're missing--and the filming, of course, plays that up by showing the guys in the foreground cracking themselves up while the others in the office frown, cringe, and squirm. Those guys should be embarrassed for themselves, but they don't know any better.

However, I do worry about the effectiveness of shows like this for demonstrating the complete social dynamic if the viewer doesn't already get it. That is, I can perfectly well imagine some people I know watching this show alongside me, and laughing when I laugh, but laughing in sympathy with the poor guys who feel constrained by a sexual harassment policy rather than laughing at them in dismay and disgust. For example, a student told me recently that he has a family member who used to admire Stephen Colbert's conservative politics, thinking that Colbert was playing it straight!

Humor is an important tool for coming to terms with social anxieties, and it can be used to show the perspective of the overlooked other. And I'm glad to be living in a time when comedies make such effective use of improv. Still, I think the potential for multiple readings is an inevitable part of this brand of humor.

Here's part of another example (from Berit's blog) of the two (or more) readings that humor can allow:

Why Men Are Never Depressed

The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves.

You can never be pregnant.

Car mechanics tell you the truth.
The world is your urinal.

I have a family member who would routinely send me humor along those lines--but I know from talking to him that he thought this was funny because it is oh-so-true-and-right. Those poor ladies.

One theory of humor is that it works when it makes the hearer feel superior to someone. We tell Aggie jokes or Swedish jokes because we would never fall for the stupid idea that the Aggie or the Swede does. So a joke like this works for me because I interpret it as demonstrating the superiority of my own beliefs about gender difference and what they get me and the rigid, stereotyped beliefs expressed by the male voice here. Still, a certain kind of male can also relate to the joke by interpreting it straight--it shows the superiority of men over women. Am I wrong in imagining that this humor also has that straight reading?

Gender and Skepticism

A colleague told me a disheartening observation/hypothesis concerning the students in his epistemology class.

The class as a whole has generally had a positive reaction to the readings assigned thus far in the course but had a negative, even hostile, reaction toward the latest article they discussed, a marvelous piece by Miranda Fricker called "Scepticism and the Genealogy of Knowledge."

My colleague is a contextualist, a feminist, and a pragmatist anti-skeptic. "I just realized how, if I wanted to, I could once and for all turn the class opinion against the skeptic," he confided. "All I'd have to do is to consistently refer to the skeptic as 'she'."

Women in Politics: Not Even in Fantasyland

I just received a brochure from my county elections board about the newly required Sequoia "Imagecast" electronic voting machine. It will replace the mechanical devices that many counties in New York state have used for decades. Those old-fashioned lever machines have the drawback that they don't record individual votes for recounts, but they also have distinct advantages, such as their simplicity of use, not permitting overvoting, and having some of the lowest error rates of any voting method.

Oh, but that rant was off-topic!

On said brochure, there is an illustration of how to fill in a circle next to a candidate's name. The imaginary candidates are:

• Neil Diamond
• Carrie Underwood
• Kenny Rogers
• Luther Vandros [sic!]
• Pink Floyd
• Toby Keith

The hidden message? Women are as unlikely to succeed in politics as in the music industry.