Precarious, Performative, Playful, Potential...Perspectives!

Given the guided introduction to scientific literacy Kaye provided us on Tuesday evening , hopefully not only the Mawtyrs in the room and on the screen will be interested in giving a close-reading to the recent Science magazine article on The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education. Particularly interesting in this regard is Jane McAuliffe's response to the report: that women's colleges "buck the trend" of women avoiding science.....

I had a lot of issues with the study we read on gender differences in testosterone and financial risk aversion.  One of the bigger issues I saw was the sample population they used.  Though they defend their choice of participants ideal for this study, since they were already familiar with financial risk, were fairly demographically homogenous, and provide some measure of risk among professional financial decision makers.  However, this group may also be overly homogenous in testosterone levels, offering only a sliver of possible data.  They report that other studies have found correlations between testosterone and career choice, and concede that greater testosterone among the subjects may reflect the greater risk-taking in that industry.  The selectivity of this sample is incredibly problematic to the generalization of their data.  Such selective sampling cannot generalize to the general population.  This is also true of the negative correlations they found.  Though there may be a negative correlation in the part of the population distribution represented by the sample, the relationship between variables may not be the same elsewhere in the distribution. For example, for the figure below, if you sample between a population with X values between 70 and 80, the X-Y relationship will appear to have a negative, linear correlation.  However, if the whole population distribution of X is represented in the sample, it becomes clear that this is not the case.

I was lucky enough to be invited by my daughter, who's been involved for the past week in  "Occupy Philadelphia," to attend a Meeting for Worship @ the base camp, hosted by Philadelphia Central Monthly Meeting this past Sunday morning. I have been a Quaker for 25 years, and most of my worshipping has been done in musty-smelling meetinghouses. This service was remarkable, in my experience, for being 1) in the open air 2) in the center of Philadelphia, with tourists and visitors mulling around --sometimes walking among-- the worshippers.  A worship space w/ no walls! It was also remarkable because we began in the dark and, an hour later, @ noon, were all sitting in the light.

It was perhaps most remarkable, though, because @ the rise of Meeting we used the "people's microphone," an innovation that arose when the first group to "Occupy Wall Street" was unable to get permission to use a sound system. It works like this: one person speaks--a brief, concentrated phrase (one of the nice benefits here is the distillation that happens), something like "I am Anne Dalke"--and it is repeated by 70 voices strong, all shouting, "I am Anne Dalke." Then I say, "I have been a Quaker for 25 years," and they all shout, "I have been a Quaker for 25 years."

The excerpt below is taken from an interesting article from the Gawker by Ryan Tate in the Censorship and Authoritarianism section:

"The internet allowed people around the world to express themselves more freely and more easily. With the App Store, Apple reversed that progress. The iPhone and iPad constitute the most popular platform for handheld computerizing in America, key venues for media and software. But to put anything on the devices, you need Apple's permission. And the company wields its power aggressively.

I've found this week's readings to be both interesting and salient, especially in comparison to Elly Teman's Birthing a Mother (which I have been reading for another class). Teman's book is an ethnographic exploration of surrogacy in Israel. It examines the process of surrogacy as perceived by both the surrogate and the intended mother, and it addresses the construction of motherhood within the particular context of Judaism and nationalism of Israel.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/18/what-makes-a-body-obscene/

Andrej Pejic is a young male model whose career is centered around his androgynous look, successfully modeling both male and female clothing lines. Sometimes in the same show. Last winter he was featured on the cover of New York based Dossier Journal (picture above) hair curled and shirt in the process of being removed. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores "bagged" the magazine - a practice usually reserved for explicitly pornographic magazines.

In our culture male chests are not viewed as pornographic. We see them all the time as a ubiquitous feature on many men's health magazine covers. Even if we hold off on the greater question of why male torsos are appropriate and female torsos obscene, why would America's two largest booksellers (at the time) force a pornographic blinder on what they knew and accepted to be a male figure? 

Miranda Lambert - "Only Prettier"

There are a few things that I always do when I go home for academic breaks: I spend time with my family, I catch up on sleep, and I swim laps at the local YMCA. Before coming to Bryn Mawr, I was a competitive swimmer for twelve years and swam in both club and Y leagues. When I was in high school, I brought a lot of my academic and pesonal stress to the pool, and my coach and I had to make an agreement: my nightly two-hour practices would be a time when I couldn't think about anything other than the set. The pool was my sanctuary, and I still view it as such.

Last week, I met my dad at the pool one afternoon to swim for a little while. After saying hello to my old coach, I hopped in and did a warmup. While stretching before completing my main set, another swimmer a few lanes over randomly called out to me. Now, when I swim, I'm in my own world and don't appreciate being interrupted; though a little bothered, I answered the gentleman's question about whether I was the new coach (I am not), whether I swam there on the swim team (I did), and where I went to school (Bryn Mawr). When I said the name of my school, I was greeted by a strange yet familiar expression: he had never heard of it. "It's a women's college outside of Philadelphia, one of the original Seven Sisters," I went on to explain, thinking that would be it.

"Oh, so you must be a man-hater," he responded. "You're anti-man, right?"

I greatly enjoyed the readings for this week; I felt that they all built up on each other and I found myself reading all of the articles with interest, learning something new. What most interested me was the stress put on the environment as a factor in testosterone levels and linked to that, behavior. Not only does our culture stress testosterone as a metaphor for manhood but it is high susceptible to the environment, creating complex correlations and facilitating risk (The He Hormone). Both physical and mental performance depend on testosterone levels in both men and women. I was actually incredibly offended in The He Hormone when, right after we hear about Toys “R” Us trying to make different sections for boys and girls in their stores and Fox Family and their “boyz” and “girlz” channels that Matt Ridley starts drawing lines between male and female behavior and ending with, “…a feminine paradise would have arrived.” By saying that, he draws gender binaries just as strong as those drawn by Toys “R” Us and Fox Family. I was very disappointed that his statement was even included.

http://www.msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/10/11/thoughts-on-slutwalk-from-a-wheelchair/

I came across this article which I gives another lived experience of what it is like to be wheelchair-bound. The picture of the lady holding a sign that says "disabled women are not sexless! We want sex and relationships - not rape." is particularly powerful and I think drives home the idea of people with disabilities being sexless.