Tag Archives: gender

Idea Soup

LGBTQ Soup

LGBTQ_flag.svgAt some point we will have all moved on to a post-prudish, post-voyeuristic, post-exploitative, post-coming-out, post-gender identity world; we’ll all be celebrated as individuals, and discrimination will no longer exist.

Slap! Well, that’s quite enough of the pipe-dream for today, let’s get back to the complexity of present day reality. So, here’s a quick snapshot of where we are on the gender-label issue. Keep in mind, the “snapshot” is courtesy of the Guardian and the “we” refers to the British — both very peculiar institutions.

From the Guardian:

When Rugby League’s Keegan Hirst came out as gay this week, he said that he had been hiding for a long time. “How could I be gay? I’m from Batley, for goodness sake. No one is gay in Batley.” If the 27-year-old Yorkshireman had been a few years younger, he might have found some people in his hometown who are at least sexually fluid. A YouGov poll this week put the number of 18- to 24-year-old Brits who identify as entirely heterosexual at 46%, while just 6% would call themselves exclusively gay. Sexuality now falls between the lines: identity is more pliable, and fluidity more acceptable, than ever before.

The gay-straight binary is collapsing, and it’s doing so at speed. The days in which a celebrity’s sexual orientation was worthy of a tabloid scandal have long since died out. Though newspapers still report on famous people coming out and their same-sex relationships, the lurid language that once accompanied such stories has been replaced by more of a gossipy, “did you know?” tone, the sort your mum might take on the phone, when she’s telling you about what Julie round the corner has been up to. And the reaction of the celebrities involved has morphed, too, into a refusal to play the naming game. Arena-filling pop star Miley Cyrus posted an Instagram of a news story that described her as “genderqueer” with the caption, “NOTHING can/will define me! Free to be EVERYTHING!!!”. Kristen Stewart, who has been followed around by insinuations about the “gal pal” she is often photographed with for a couple of years, finally spoke about the relationship in an interview with Nylon magazine this month. She said, simply, “Google me, I’m not hiding”, but, like the people surveyed by YouGov, refused to define herself as gay or straight. “I think in three or four years, there are going to be a whole lot more people who don’t think it’s necessary to figure out if you’re gay or straight. It’s like, just do your thing.”

It’s arguable that celebrities such as Stewart are part of the reason for those parameters becoming less essential, at least in the west. It shouldn’t fall to famous people to define our social attitudes but, simply, visibility matters: if it is not seen as outrageous or transgressive that the star of Twilight will hold hands with her girlfriend in the street, then that, in a very small way, reinforces the normality of it. If Cara Delevingne tells Vogue that she loves her girlfriend, then that, too, adds to the picture. The more people who are out, the more normal it becomes; the less alone a confused kid in a small town looking at gossip websites might feel; the less baffled the parent of a teenager who brings home a same-sex date might be. Combine that with the seemingly unstoppable legislative reinforcement of equal rights, too – gay marriage becoming legal in Ireland, in the US – and suddenly, it seems less “abnormal”, less boundary-busting, to fall in love or lust with someone of the same gender.

“I would describe myself as a bisexual homoromantic,” says Alice, 23, from Sussex. For the uninitiated, I asked her to explain. “It means I like sex with men and women, but I only fall in love with women. I wouldn’t say something wishy-washy like, ‘It’s all about the person,’ because more often it’s just that I sometimes like a penis.” She says her attitude towards sex and sexuality is similar among other people in her peer group. “A lot of my friends talk about their sexuality in terms of behaviour these days, rather than in terms of labels. So they’ll say, ‘I like boys’, or ‘I get with girls too,’ rather than saying, ‘I’m gay, I’m a lesbian, I’m bisexual.’”

She says that even among those who exclusively date people of the same gender, there is a reluctance to claim an identity as proscriptive as “gay”. “Most young people who are gay don’t see it as a defining property of their character, because they don’t have to, because society doesn’t constantly remind them of their difference.” However, she is careful to point out that this is very much the case in the small, liberal part of London where she lives now. “[Not defining] is something I feel entitled to as a person who lives in London, but I didn’t feel entitled to it in a small town in the home counties. I’ve never experienced discrimination about my sexuality, but I’m aware that it’s because I ‘pass’ [as straight].”

In fact, among the young British people I spoke to, geography is vital. Lucy, 25, wonders if the number of people who say they are not straight really tallies with the number of people who are actually acting upon those desires. “Saying you’re sexually fluid means you’re part of a movement. It means you’re seen as forward-thinking,” she says, suggesting there is a certain cachet attached to being seen as open that does not come with affirmed heterosexuality. She also believes it is more of a metropolitan story than necessarily representative of Britain as a whole. “If I went back to my home town in the Midlands, we wouldn’t sit around talking about ‘sexual fluidity’. You’re a ‘dyke’, or you’re not. There’s only one type of lesbian there.”

Read the entire story here.

Image: Gay Pride Flag. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Idea Soup

Justice Kennedy

Anthony_Kennedy_official_SCOTUS_portrait

This story from the Guardian sums up the historic decision on same-sex marriage issued by the US Supreme Court on June 26, 2015.

An excerpt from the 103 page opinion written for the majority (5-4) by Justice Anthony Kennedy:

The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity. The petitioners in these cases seek to find that liberty by marrying someone of the same sex and having their marriages deemed lawful on the same terms and conditions as marriages between persons of the opposite sex. 

 

The momentous legal opinion paves the way for a little more equality. Thank you, Justice Kennedy — and now the work in welcoming the four arch-conservative justices into the non-constructionist, non-textualist 21st century must continue apace.

From the Guardian:

His prose may lack the fiery eloquence of his US supreme court colleagues Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, or the razor-sharp precision of chief justice John Roberts, but the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy – granting a constitutional right to same-sex marriage across the United States – will go down as one of the most important legal documents in the history of the American civil rights struggle.

Court-watchers were left in little doubt where most of the nine justices stood on marriage equality after two and a half hours of extended oral arguments held the hushed halls of the nation’s highest tribunal spellbound in April.

On one side, the court’s traditional liberals: Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were withering in their view of the arguments advanced by Republican-controlled states that wanted to hold back the growing tide of legal rulings that backed gay marriage.

On the other side of the bench were the more reliably conservative members of the supreme court – Scalia, Samuel Alito and the typically silent Clarence Thomas – who believed not just that marriage should remain solely between a man and woman, but that the court had no right to voice its opinion on the matter at all.

More inscrutable, however, were Roberts, who barely said a word throughout the entire hearing, and Kennedy, who seemed genuinely unsure which way to lean: he expressed concern for the consequence of either ruling.

Kennedy, the 78-year-old former lawyer from California appointed to the bench by Republican president Ronald Reagan a generation ago, is seen – in theory – as one of the conservative majority. But in practice, he has long been the most enigmatic of the swing voters on some of the most defining stories in American history.

On Thursday, he had joined Roberts in defending Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms from yet another legal onslaught by conservative critics.

But on Friday, the day same-sex marriage became the law of the land, Roberts had decided to stay firmly in the conservative camp.

And so Kennedy became the one man to effectively determine a decision that will directly affect millions of Americans in love – and redefine a core legal and social bedrock for all of them, perhaps forever.

…

The closest Kennedy came to capturing the emotion felt by campaigners and protesters on both sides of the argument was when he was describing the institution at the heart of the argument.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” he wrote. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.”

Those who know the court best are in little doubt as to the significance of Kennedy’s words.

…

But on a day when a funeral for victims of the Charleston church shootings cast a long shadow over the ongoing battle for racial equality, the decision was a source of hope for many.

“America should be very proud,” said Barack Obama in an emotional statement from the White House rose garden.

“There’s so much more work to be done to extend the full promise of America to every American,” he added. “But today, we can say in no uncertain terms that we’ve made our union a little more perfect.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: Anthony Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2011. Public Domain.

Idea Soup

Women Are From Venus, Men Can’t Remember

Yet another body of research underscores how different women are from men. This time, we are told, that the sexes generally encode and recall memories differently. So, the next time you take issue with a spouse (of different gender) about a — typically trivial — past event keep in mind that your own actions, mood and gender will affect your recall. If you’re female, your memories may be much more vivid than your male counterpart, but not necessarily more correct. If you (male) won last night’s argument, your spouse (female) will — unfortunately for you — remember it more accurately than you, which of course will lead to another argument.

From WSJ:

Carrie Aulenbacher remembers the conversation clearly: Her husband told her he wanted to buy an arcade machine he found on eBay. He said he’d been saving up for it as a birthday present to himself. The spouses sat at the kitchen table and discussed where it would go in the den.

Two weeks later, Ms. Aulenbacher came home from work and found two arcade machines in the garage—and her husband beaming with pride.

“What are these?” she demanded.

“I told you I was picking them up today,” he replied.

She asked him why he’d bought two. He said he’d told her he was getting “a package deal.” She reminded him they’d measured the den for just one. He stood his ground.

“I believe I told her there was a chance I was going to get two,” says Joe Aulenbacher, who is 37 and lives in Erie, Pa.

“It still gets me going to think about it a year later,” says Ms. Aulenbacher, 36. “My home is now overrun with two machines I never agreed upon.” The couple compromised by putting one game in the den and the other in Mr. Aulenbacher’s weight room.

It is striking how many arguments in a relationship start with two different versions of an event: “Your tone of voice was rude.” “No it wasn’t.” “You didn’t say you’d be working late.” “Yes I did.” “I told you we were having dinner with my mother tonight.” “No, honey. You didn’t.”

How can two people have different memories of the same event? It starts with the way each person perceives the event in the first place—and how they encoded that memory. “You may recall something differently at least in part because you understood it differently at the time,” says Dr. Michael Ross, professor emeritus in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who has studied memory for many years.

Researchers know that spouses sometimes can’t even agree on concrete events that happened in the past 24 hours—such as whether they had an argument or whether one received a gift from the other. A study in the early 1980s, published in the journal “Behavioral Assessment,” found that couples couldn’t perfectly agree on whether they had sex the previous night.

Women tend to remember more about relationship issues than men do. When husbands and wives are asked to recall concrete relationship events, such as their first date, an argument or a recent vacation, women’s memories are more vivid and detailed.

But not necessarily more accurate. When given a standard memory test where they are shown names or pictures and then asked to recall them, women do just about the same as men.

Researchers have found that women report having more emotions during relationship events than men do. They may remember events better because they pay more attention to the relationship and reminisce more about it.

People also remember their own actions better. So they can recall what they did, just not what their spouse did. Researchers call this an egocentric bias, and study it by asking people to recall their contributions to events, as well as their spouse’s. Who cleans the kitchen more? Who started the argument? Whether the event is positive or negative, people tend to believe that they had more responsibility.

Your mood—both when an event happens and when you recall it later—plays a big part in memory, experts say. If you are in a positive mood or feeling positive about the other person, you will more likely recall a positive experience or give a positive interpretation to a negative experience. Similarly, negative moods tend to reap negative memories.

Negative moods may also cause stronger memories. A person who lost an argument remembers it more clearly than the person who won it, says Dr. Ross. Men tend to win more arguments, he says, which may help to explain why women remember the spat more. But men who lost an argument remember it as well as women who lost.

Read the entire article here.

Arts and Letters, Idea Soup

It’s a Woman’s World

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Well, not really. Though, there is no doubting that the planet would look rather different if the genders had truly equal opportunities and pay-offs, or if women generally had all the power that tends to be concentrated in masculine hands.

A short movie by French actor and film-maker Eleonoré Pourriat imagines what our Western culture might resemble if the traditional female-male roles were reversed.

A portent of the future? Perhaps not, but thought-provoking nonetheless. One has to believe that if women had all the levers and trappings of power that they could do a better job than men. Or, perhaps not. It may just be possible that power corrupts — regardless of the gender of the empowered.

From the Independent:

Imagine a world where it is the women who pee in the street, jog bare-chested and harass and physically assault the men. Such a world has just gone viral on the internet. A nine-minute satirical film made by Eleonoré Pourriat, the French actress, script-writer and director, has clocked up hundreds of thousands of views in recent days.

The movie, Majorité Opprimée or “Oppressed Majority”, was made in 2010. It caused a flurry of interest when it was first posted on YouTube early last year. But now it’s time seems to have come. “It is astonishing, just incredible that interest in my film has suddenly exploded in this way,” Ms Pourriat told The Independent. “Obviously, I have touched a nerve. Women in France, but not just in France, feel that everyday sexism has been allowed to go on for too long.”

The star of the short film is Pierre, who is played very convincingly by Pierre Bénézit. He is a slightly gormless stay-at-home father, who spends a day besieged by the casual or aggressive sexism of women in a female-dominated planet. The film, in French with English subtitles, begins in a jokey way and turns gradually, and convincingly, nasty. It is not played for cheap laughs. It has a Swiftian capacity to disturb by the simple trick of reversing roles.

Pierre, pushing his baby-buggy, is casually harassed by a bare-breasted female jogger. He meets a male, Muslim babysitter, who is forced by his wife to wear a balaclava in public. He is verbally abused – “Think I don’t see you shaking your arse at me?” – by a drunken female down-and-out. He is sexually assaulted and humiliated by a knife-wielding girl gang. (“Say your dick is small or I’ll cut off your precious jewels.”)

He is humiliated a second time by a policewoman, who implies that he invented the gang assault. “Daylight and no witnesses, that’s strange,” she says. As she takes Pierre’s statement, the policewoman patronises a pretty, young policeman. “I need a coffee, cutie.”

Pierre’s self-important working wife arrives to collect him. She comforts him at first, calling him “kitten” and “pumpkin”. When he complains that he can no longer stand the permanent aggression of a female-dominated society, she says that he is to blame because of the way he dresses: in short sleeves, flip-flops and Bermudas.

At the second, or third, time of asking, interest in Ms Pourriat’s highly charged little movie has exploded in recent days on social media and on feminist and anti-feminist websites on both sides of the Channel and on both sides of the Atlantic. Some men refuse to see the point. “Sorry, but I would adore to live such a life,” said one French male blogger. “To be raped by a gang of girls. Great! That’s every man’s fantasy.”

Ms Pourriat, 42, acts and writes scripts for comedy movies in France. This was her first film as director. “It is rooted absolutely in my own experience as a woman living in France,” she tells me. “I think French men are worse than men elsewhere, but the incredible success of the movie suggests that it is not just a French problem.

“What angers me is that many women seem to accept this kind of behaviour from men or joke about it. I had long wanted to make a film that would turn the situation on its head.

Read the entire article here.

Video: Majorité Opprimée or “Oppressed Majority by Eleonoré Pourriat.

 

Idea Soup

The Spacetime Discontinuum

Einstein transformed our notions of the universe, teaching us, amongst other things, that time is relative to the velocity of the observer. While he had in mind no less than the entire cosmos when constructing his elegant theories, he failed to consider relativity in the home and workplace, and specifically how women and men experience time differently.

From the WSJ:

Several years ago, while observing a parenting group in Minnesota, I was struck by a confession one of the women made to her peers: She didn’t really care that her husband did the dishes after dinner. Sure, it was swell of him, and she had friends whose husbands did less. But what she really wanted, at that point in her day, was for her husband to volunteer to put the kids to bed. She would have been glad to sit in the kitchen on her own for a few minutes with the water running and her mind wandering. Another woman chimed in: “Totally. The dishes don’t talk back to you.”

According to the American Time Use Survey—which asks thousands of Americans annually to chronicle how they spend their days—men and women now work roughly the same number of hours a week (though men work more paid hours, and women more unpaid). Given this balanced ledger, one might guess that all would finally be quiet on the domestic front—that women would finally have stopped wondering how they, rather than their husbands, got suckered into such a heavy load. But they haven’t. The question is: Why?

Part of the problem is that averages treat all data as if they’re the same and therefore combinable, which often results in a kind of absurdity. On average, human beings have half an Adam’s apple, but no one thinks to lump men and women together this way. Similarly, we should not assume that men and women’s working hours are the same in kind. The fact is, men and women experience their time very differently.

For starters, not all work is created equal. An hour spent on one kind of task is not necessarily the equivalent of an hour spent on another. Take child care, a task to which mothers devote far more hours than dads. It creates much more stress in women than other forms of housework. In “Alone Together” (2007), a comprehensive look at the state of American marriage, the authors found that if women believe child care is unevenly divided in their homes, this imbalance is much more likely to affect their marital happiness than a perceived imbalance in, say, vacuuming.

Or consider night duty. Sustained sleep deprivation, as we know, consigns people to their own special league of misery. But it’s generally mothers, rather than fathers, who are halfway down the loonytown freeway to hysterical exhaustion, at least in the early years of parenting. According to the American Time Use Survey, women in dual-earner couples are three times more likely to report interrupted sleep if they have a child under the age of 1, and stay-at-home mothers are six times as likely to get up with their children as are stay-at-home fathers.

Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, the author of the best-selling parody “Go the F— to Sleep.” At one point in the discussion, he conceded that his partner put his child to bed most nights. He may have written a book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house, it was mainly Mom’s problem.

Complicating matters, mothers assume a disproportionate number of time-sensitive domestic tasks, whether it’s getting their toddlers dressed for school or their 12-year-olds off to swim practice. Their daily routine is speckled with what sociologists Annette Lareau and Elliot Weininger call “pressure points,” or nonnegotiable demands that make their lives, as the authors put it, “more frenetic.”

These deadlines have unintended consequences. They force women to search for wormholes in the time-space continuum simply to accomplish all the things that they need to do. In 2011, the sociologists Shira Offer and Barbara Schneider found that mothers spend, on average, 10 extra hours a week multitasking than do fathers “and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and child care.”

When fathers spend time at home, on the other hand, it reduces their odds of multitasking by over 30%. Which may explain why, a few years ago, researchers from UCLA found that a father in a room by himself was the “person-space configuration observed most frequently” in their close study of 32 families at home. It may also explain why many fathers manage to finish the Sunday paper while their wives do not—they’re not constantly getting up to refill bowls of Cheerios.

Being compelled to divide and subdivide your time doesn’t just compromise your productivity and lead to garden-variety discombobulation. It also creates a feeling of urgency—a sense that no matter how tranquil the moment, no matter how unpressured the circumstances, there’s always a pot somewhere that’s about to boil over.

Read the entire essay here.

Idea Soup

A Female Muslim Superhero

Until recently all superheroes from the creative minds at Marvel and DC Comics were white, straight men. But over time — albeit very slowly — we have seen the arrival of greater diversity: an Amazonian Wonder Woman, an African-American Green Lantern, a lesbian Batwoman. Now, comes Kamala Khan, a shape-shifting Muslim girl, from New Jersey (well, nobody’s perfect).

Author Shelina Janmohamed chimes in with some well-timed analysis.

From the Telegraph:

Once, an average comic book superhero was male and wore his pants on the outside of his trousers. We’ve been thrown some female heroines along the way: Wonder Woman, Lara Croft and Ms Marvel. The female presence in comics has been growing over the years. But the latest announcement by Marvel Comics that a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim American girl from New Jersey will be one of their lead characters has been creating a stir, and for all the right reasons. Kamala Khan is the new Ms Marvel.

The series editor at Marvel, Sana Amanat says the series is a “desire to explore the Muslim-American diaspora from an authentic perspective”. Khan can grow and shrink her limbs and her body and ultimately, she’ll be able to shape shift into other forms.

Like all superheroes she has a back story, and the series will deal with how familial and religious edicts mesh with super-heroics, and perhaps even involve some rule breaking.

I love it.

As a teenager, I wish I could have seen depictions of struggling with identity, religion and adolescence that reflected my own, and in a way that made me believe I could be powerful rather than confused, marginalised and abnormal.

Kamala Khan will create waves not just for teenagers though. Her very existence will enable readers to see past the ‘Muslim’ tag, into a powerful and flawed multifaceted human being. Fantasy, paradoxically, is a potent method to create normalisation of Muslim women in the ordinary mainstream.

Usually, Muslim women in the public eye including fictional ones, are cast in a long tradition of one-dimensional stereotypes, meek, submissive, oppressed and cloaked females struggling to escape from a violent family, or too brainwashed to know that she needs to escape.

Instead, Marvel Comics has created the opportunity to investigate the complexity of a Muslim female character to the backdrop of a different history: the tradition of superheroes. Fraught with angst in her daily life, we can now explore Muslim women’s relationship with power (and in Khan’s case, with giant fists). She is contextualised not through politics but through the world of superheroes.

Comics and cartoons are increasingly giving space to Muslim women to be explored in new contexts, offering the opportunity for better understanding, and ‘normalisation.’ Yes, I’m using the word again, because sometimes that’s all we long for, to be seen as normal ordinary women.

Just yesterday, the hashtag ‘#AsAMuslimWoman’ was trending on Twitter, offering mundane self descriptions from Muslim women such as: “Early mornings irritate me & I enjoy chocolate”, “I hate the District line in the morning. It’s cramped. And it smells funny”, and I’m “running my business, enjoying motherhood and living my Dreams”.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Kamala Khan, Marvel’s new Muslim superhero, on the cover of the new Ms. Marvel comic. Courtesy of the Marvel / Independent.

Idea Soup

The Best Place to be a Woman

By most accounts the best place to be a woman is one that offers access to quality education and comprehensive healthcare, provides gender equality with men, and meaningful career and family work-life balance. So where is this real world Shangri-La. Some might suggest this place to be the land of opportunity — the United States. But, that’s not even close. Nor is it Canada or Switzerland or Germany or the UK.

According to a recent Global Gender Gap report, and a number of other surveys, the best place to be born a girl is Iceland. Next on the list come Finland, Norway, and Sweden, with another Scandinavian country, Denmark, not too far behind in seventh place. By way of comparison, the US comes in 23rd — not great, but better than Afghanistan and Yemen.

From the Social Reader:

Icelanders are among the happiest and healthiest people on Earth. They publish more books per capita than any other country, and they have more artists. They boast the most prevalent belief in evolution — and elves, too. Iceland is the world’s most peaceful nation (the cops don’t even carry guns), and the best place for kids. Oh, and they’ve got a lesbian head of state, the world’s first. Granted, the national dish is putrefied shark meat, but you can’t have everything.

Iceland is also the best place to have a uterus, according to the folks at the World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report ranks countries based on where women have the most equal access to education and healthcare, and where they can participate most fully in the country’s political and economic life.

According to the 2013 report, Icelandic women pretty much have it all. Their sisters in Finland, Norway, and Sweden have it pretty good, too: those countries came in second, third and fourth, respectively. Denmark is not far behind at number seven.

The U.S. comes in at a dismal 23rd, which is a notch down from last year. At least we’re not Yemen, which is dead last out of 136 countries.

So how did a string of countries settled by Vikings become leaders in gender enlightenment? Bloodthirsty raiding parties don’t exactly sound like models of egalitarianism, and the early days weren’t pretty. Medieval Icelandic law prohibited women from bearing arms or even having short hair. Viking women could not be chiefs or judges, and they had to remain silent in assemblies. On the flip side, they could request a divorce and inherit property. But that’s not quite a blueprint for the world’s premier egalitarian society.

The change came with literacy, for one thing. Today almost everybody in Scandinavia can read, a legacy of the Reformation and early Christian missionaries, who were interested in teaching all citizens to read the Bible. Following a long period of turmoil, Nordic states also turned to literacy as a stabilizing force in the late 18th century. By 1842, Sweden had made education compulsory for both boys and girls.

Researchers have found that the more literate the society in general, the more egalitarian it is likely to be, and vice versa. But the literacy rate is very high in the U.S., too, so there must be something else going on in Scandinavia. Turns out that a whole smorgasbord of ingredients makes gender equality a high priority in Nordic countries.

To understand why, let’s take a look at religion. The Scandinavian Lutherans, who turned away from the excesses of the medieval Catholic Church, were concerned about equality — especially the disparity between rich and poor. They thought that individuals had some inherent rights that could not just be bestowed by the powerful, and this may have opened them to the idea of rights for women. Lutheran state churches in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland have had female priests since the middle of the 20th century, and today, the Swedish Lutheran Church even has a female archbishop.

Or maybe it’s just that there’s not much religion at all. Scandinavians aren’t big churchgoers. They tend to look at morality from a secular point of view, where there’s not so much obsessive focus on sexual issues and less interest in controlling women’s behavior and activities. Scandinavia’s secularism decoupled sex from sin, and this worked out well for females. They came to be seen as having the right to sexual experience just like men, and reproductive freedom, too. Girls and boys learn about contraception in school (and even the pleasure of orgasms), and most cities have youth clinics where contraceptives are readily available. Women may have an abortion for any reason up to the eighteenth week (they can seek permission from the National Board of Health and Welfare after that), and the issue is not politically controversial.

Scandinavia’s political economy also developed along somewhat different lines than America’s did. Sweden and Norway had some big imperialist adventures, but this behavior declined following the Napoleonic Wars. After that they invested in the military to ward off invaders, but they were less interested in building it up to deal with bloated colonial structures and foreign adventures. Overall Nordic countries devoted fewer resources to the military — the arena where patriarchal values tend to get emphasized and entrenched. Iceland, for example, spends the world’s lowest percentage of GDP on its military.

Industrialization is part of the story, too: it hit the Nordic countries late. In the 19th century, Scandinavia did have a rich and powerful merchant class, but the region never produced the Gilded Age industrial titans and extreme concentration of wealth that happened in America back then, and has returned today. (Income inequality and discrimination of all kinds seem to go hand-in-hand.)

In the 20th century, farmers and workers in the newly populated Nordic cities tended to join together in political coalitions, and they could mount a serious challenge to the business elites, who were relatively weak compared to those in the U.S. Like ordinary people everywhere, Scandinavians wanted a social and economic system where everyone could get a job, expect decent pay, and enjoy a strong social safety net. And that’s what they got — kind of like Roosevelt’s New Deal without all the restrictions added by New York bankers and southern conservatives. Strong trade unions developed, which tend to promote gender equality. The public sector grew, providing women with good job opportunities. Iceland today has the highest rate of union membership out of any OECD country.

Over time, Scandinavian countries became modern social democratic states where wealth is more evenly distributed, education is typically free up through university, and the social safety net allows women to comfortably work and raise a family. Scandinavian moms aren’t agonizing over work-family balance: parents can take a year or more of paid parental leave. Dads are expected to be equal partners in childrearing, and they seem to like it. (Check them out in the adorable photo book, The Swedish Dad.)

The folks up north have just figured out — and it’s not rocket science! — that everybody is better off when men and women share power and influence. They’re not perfect — there’s still some unfinished business about how women are treated in the private sector, and we’ve sensed an undertone of darker forces in pop culture phenoms like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But Scandinavians have decided that investment in women is both good for social relations and a smart economic choice. Unsurprisingly, Nordic countries have strong economies and rank high on things like innovation — Sweden is actually ahead of the U.S. on that metric. (So please, no more nonsense about how inequality makes for innovation.)

The good news is that things are getting better for women in most places in the world. But the World Economic Forum report shows that the situation either remains the same or is deteriorating for women in 20 percent of countries.

In the U.S., we’ve evened the playing field in education, and women have good economic opportunities. But according to the WEF, American women lag behind men in terms of health and survival, and they hold relatively few political offices. Both facts become painfully clear every time a Tea Party politician betrays total ignorance of how the female body works. Instead of getting more women to participate in the political process, we’ve got setbacks like a new voter ID law in Texas, which could disenfranchise one-third of the state’s woman voters. That’s not going to help the U.S. become a world leader in gender equality.

Read the entire article here.

Idea Soup

Women See Bodies; Men See Body Parts

Yet another research study of gender differences shows some fascinating variation in the way men and women see and process their perceptions of others. Men tend to be perceived as a whole, women, on the other hand, are more likely to be perceived as parts.

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

A glimpse at the magazine rack in any supermarket checkout line will tell you that women are frequently the focus of sexual objectification. Now, new research finds that the brain actually processes images of women differently than those of men, contributing to this trend.

Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain and seen as parts rather than a whole, according to research published online June 29 in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Men, on the other hand, are processed as a whole rather than the sum of their parts.

“Everyday, ordinary women are being reduced to their sexual body parts,” said study author Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. “This isn’t just something that supermodels or porn stars have to deal with.”

Objectification hurts
Numerous studies have found that feeling objectified is bad for women. Being ogled can make women do worse on math tests, and self-sexualization, or scrutiny of one’s own shape, is linked to body shame, eating disorders and poor mood.

But those findings have all focused on the perception of being sexualized or objectified, Gervais told LiveScience. She and her colleagues wondered about the eye of the beholder: Are people really objectifying women more than men?

To find out, the researchers focused on two types of mental processing, global and local. Global processing is how the brain identifies objects as a whole. It tends to be used when recognizing people, where it’s not just important to know the shape of the nose, for example, but also how the nose sits in relation to the eyes and mouth. Local processing focuses more on the individual parts of an object. You might recognize a house by its door alone, for instance, while you’re less likely to recognize a person’s arm without the benefit of seeing the rest of their body.

If women are sexually objectified, people should process their bodies in a more local way, focusing on individual body parts like breasts. To test the idea, Gervais and her colleagues carried out two nearly identical experiments with a total of 227 undergraduate participants. Each person was shown non-sexualized photographs, each of either a young man or young woman, 48 in total. After seeing each original full-body image, the participants saw two side-by-side photographs. One was the original image, while the other was the original with a slight alteration to the chest or waist (chosen because these are sexualized body parts). Participants had to pick which image they’d seen before.

In some cases, the second set of photos zoomed in on the chest or waist only, asking participants to pick the body part they’d seen previously versus the one that had been altered.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: People focus on the parts of a woman’s body when processing her image, according to research published in June in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Courtesy of LiveScience / Yuri Arcurs, Shutterstock.[end-div]

Technica

Men are From LinkedIn, Women are From Pinterest

No surprise. Women and men use online social networks differently. A new study of online behavior by researchers in Vienna, Austria, shows that the sexes organize their networks very differently and for different reasons.

[div class=attrib]From Technology Review:[end-div]

One of the interesting insights that social networks offer is the difference between male and female behaviour.

In the past, behavioural differences have been hard to measure. Experiments could only be done on limited numbers of individuals and even then, the process of measurement often distorted people’s behaviour.

That’s all changed with the advent of massive online participation in gaming, professional and friendship  networks. For the first time, it has become possible to quantify exactly how the genders differ in their approach to things like risk and communication.

Gender specific studies are surprisingly rare, however. Nevertheless a growing body if evidence is emerging that social networks reflect many of the social and evolutionary differences that we’ve long suspected.

Earlier this year, for example, we looked at a remarkable study of a mobile phone network that demonstrated the different reproductive strategies that men and women employ throughout their lives, as revealed by how often they call friends, family and potential mates.

Today, Michael Szell and Stefan Thurner at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria say they’ve found significance differences in the way men and women manage their social networks in an online game called Pardus with over 300,000 players.

In this game, players  explore various solar systems in a virtual universe. On the way, they can mark other players as friends or enemies, exchange messages, gain wealth by trading  or doing battle but can also be killed.

The interesting thing about online games is that almost every action of every player is recorded, mostly without the players being consciously aware of this. That means measurement bias is minimal.

The networks of friends and enemies that are set up also differ in an important way from those on social networking sites such as Facebook. That’s because players can neither see nor influence other players’ networks. This prevents the kind of clustering and herding behaviour that sometimes dominates  other social networks.

Szell and Thurner say the data reveals clear and significant differences between men and women in Pardus.

For example, men and women  interact with the opposite sex differently.  “Males reciprocate friendship requests from females faster than vice versa and hesitate to reciprocate hostile actions of females,” say Szell and Thurner.

Women are also significantly more risk averse than men as measured by the amount of fighting they engage in and their likelihood of dying.

They are also more likely to be friends with each other than men.

These results are more or less as expected. More surprising is the finding that women tend to be more wealthy than men, probably because they engage more in economic than destructive behaviour.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of InformationWeek.[end-div]

BigBang

Male Brain + Female = Jello

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance.

Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be.

Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even w hen men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about.

Sanne Nauts and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands ran two experiments using men and women university students as participants. They first collected a baseline measure of cognitive performance by having the students complete a Stroop test. Developed in 1935 by the psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the test is a common way of assessing our ability to process competing information. The test involves showing people a series of words describing different colors that are printed in different colored inks. For example, the word “blue” might be printed in green ink and the word “red” printed in blue ink. Participants are asked to name, as quickly as they can, the color of the ink that the words are written in. The test is cognitively demanding because our brains can’t help but process the meaning of the word along with the color of the ink. When people are mentally tired, they tend to complete the task at a slower rate.

After completing the Stroop Test, participants in Nauts’ study were asked to take part in another supposedly unrelated task. They were asked to read out loud a number of Dutch words while sitting in front of a webcam. The experimenters told them that during this “lip reading task” an observer would watch them over the webcam. The observer was given either a common male or female name. Participants were led to believe that this person would see them over the web cam, but they would not be able to interact with the person. No pictures or other identifying information were provided about the observer—all the participants knew was his or her name. After the lip reading task, the participants took another Stroop test. Women’s performance on the second test did not differ, regardless of the gender of their observer. However men who thought a woman was observing them ended up performing worse on the second Stroop test. This cognitive impairment occurred even though the men had not interacted with the female observer.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Scientific American / iStock/Iconogenic.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Daddy’s Girl, Yes; Mother’s Boy, No

Western social norms tolerate a strong bond between father and daughter; it’s OK to be a daddy’s girl. Yet, for a mother’s boy and mothers of mothers’ boys it’s a different story. In fact, a strong bond between mother and son is frequently looked upon with derision. Just check out the mother’s body “definition” in Wikipedia; there’s no formal entry for Daddy’s Girl.

Why is this, and is it right?

Excerpts below from the forthcoming book “From “The Mama’s Boy Myth” by Kate Stone Lombardi.

[div class=attrib]From the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]

My daughter Jeanie and I use Google chat throughout the day to discuss work, what we had for lunch, how we’re avoiding the gym, and emotional issues big and small. We may also catch up by phone in the evening. I can open up to Jeanie about certain things that I wouldn’t share with another soul, and I believe she would say the same about me. We are very close, which you probably won’t find particularly surprising or alarming.

Now switch genders. Suppose I told you that I am very close to my son, Paul. That I love hanging out with him and that we have dozens of inside jokes and shared traditions. Even though we speak frequently, I get a little thrill each time I hear his signature ringtone on my cellphone. Next, I confess that Paul is so sensitive and intuitive that he “gets me” in a very special way.

Are you starting to speculate that something is a little off? Are you getting uncomfortable about the kind of guy my son is growing up to be?

For generations mothers have gotten one message: that keeping their sons close is wrong, possibly even dangerous. A mother who fosters a deep emotional bond with her son, we’ve been told, is setting him up to be weak and effeminate—an archetypal mama’s boy. He’ll never be independent or able to form healthy adult relationships. As the therapist and child-rearing guru Michael Gurian wrote in his 1994 book about mothers and sons, “a mother’s job…is very much to hold back the coming of manhood.” A well-adjusted, loving mother is one who gradually but surely pushes her son away, both emotionally and physically, in order to allow him to become a healthy man.

This was standard operating procedure for our mothers, our grandmothers and even our great-grandmothers. Amazingly, we’re still encouraged to buy this parenting advice today.

Somehow, when so many of our other beliefs about the roles of men and women have been revolutionized, our view of the mother-son relationship has remained frozen in time. We’ve dramatically changed the way we raise our daughters, encouraging them to be assertive, play competitive sports and aim high in their educational and professional ambitions. We don’t fret about “masculinizing” our girls.

As for daughters and their fathers, while a “mama’s boy” may be a reviled creature, people tend to look tolerantly on a “daddy’s girl.” A loving and supportive father is considered essential to a girl’s self-esteem. Fathers are encouraged to be involved in their daughters’ lives, whether it’s coaching their soccer teams or escorting their teenage girls to father-daughter dances. A father who flouts gender stereotypes and teaches his daughter a traditionally masculine task—say, rebuilding a car engine—is considered to be pretty cool. But a mother who does something comparable—like teaching her son to knit or even encouraging him to talk more openly about his feelings—is looked at with contempt. What is she trying to do to that boy?

Many mothers are confused and anxious when it comes to raising boys. Should they defer to their husband when he insists that she stop kissing their first-grade son at school drop-off? If she cuddles her 10-year-old boy when he is hurt, will she turn him into a wimp? If she keeps him too close, will she make him gay? If her teenage boy is crying in his room, should she go in and comfort him, or will this embarrass and shame him? Anthony E. Wolf, a child psychologist and best-selling author, warns us that “strong emotional contact with his mother is especially upsetting to any teenage boy.”

None of these fears, however, is based on any actual science. In fact, research shows that boys suffer when they separate prematurely from their mothers and benefit from closeness in myriad ways throughout their lives.

A study published in Child Development involving almost 6,000 children, age 12 and younger, found that boys who were insecurely attached to their mothers acted more aggressive and hostile later in childhood—kicking and hitting others, yelling, disobeying adults and being generally destructive.

A study of more than 400 middle school boys revealed that sons who were close to their mothers were less likely to define masculinity as being physically tough, stoic and self-reliant. They not only remained more emotionally open, forming stronger friendships, but they also were less depressed and anxious than their more macho classmates. And they were getting better grades.

There is evidence that a strong mother-son bond prevents delinquency in adolescence. And though it has been long established that teenagers who have good communication with their parents are more likely to resist negative peer pressure, new research shows that it is a boy’s mother who is the most influential when it comes to risky behavior, not only with alcohol and drugs but also in preventing both early and unprotected sex.

Finally, there are no reputable scientific studies suggesting that a boy’s sexual orientation can be altered by his mother, no matter how much she loves him.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

BigBang

Women and Pain

New research suggests that women feel pain more intensely than men.

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

When a woman falls ill, her pain may be more intense than a man’s, a new study suggests.

Across a number of different diseases, including diabetes, arthritis and certain respiratory infections, women in the study reported feeling more pain than men, the researchers said.

The study is one of the largest to examine sex differences in human pain perception. The results are in line with earlier findings, and reveal that sex differences in pain sensitivity may be present in many more diseases than previously thought.

Because pain is subjective, the researchers can’t know for sure whether women, in fact, experience more pain than men. A number of factors, including a person’s mood and whether they take pain medication, likely influence how much pain they say they’re in.

…

In all, the researchers assessed sex differences in reported pain for more than 250 diseases and conditions.

For almost every diagnosis, women reported higher average pain scores than men. Women’s scores were, on average, 20 percent higher than men’s scores, according to the study.

Women with lower back pain, and knee and leg strain consistently reported higher scores than men. Women also reported feeling more pain in the neck (for conditions such as torticollis, in which the neck muscles twist or spasm) and sinuses (during sinus infections) than did men, a result not found by previous research.

…

It could be that women assign different numbers to the level of pain they perceive compared with men, said Roger B. Fillingim, a pain researcher at the University of Florida College of Dentistry, who was not involved with the new study.

But the study was large, and the findings are backed up by previous work, Fillingim said.

“I think the most [simple] explanation is that women are indeed experiencing higher levels of pain than men,” Fillingim said.

The reason for this is not known, Fillingim said. Past research suggests a number of factors contribute to perceptions of pain level, including hormones, genetics and psychological factors, which may vary between men and women, Fillingim said. It’s also possible the pain systems work differently in men and women, or women experience more severe forms of disease than men, he said.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class]Image courtesy of CNN.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Language and Gender

As any Italian speaker would attest, the moon, of course is utterly feminine. It is “la luna”. Now, to a German it is “der mond”, and very masculine.

Numerous languages assign a grammatical gender to objects, which in turn influences how people see these objects as either female or male. Yet, researchers have found that sex tends to be ascribed to objects and concepts even in gender-neutral languages. Scientific American reviews this current research.

[div class attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

Gender is so fundamental to the way we understand the world that people are prone to assign a sex to even inanimate objects. We all know someone, or perhaps we are that person, who consistently refers to their computer or car with a gender pronoun (“She’s been running great these past few weeks!”) New research suggests that our tendency to see gender everywhere even applies to abstract ideas such as numbers. Across cultures, people see odd numbers as male and even numbers as female.

Scientists have long known that language can influence how we perceive gender in objects. Some languages consistently refer to certain objects as male or female, and this in turn, influences how speakers of that language think about those objects. Webb Phillips of the Max Planck Institute, Lauren Schmidt of HeadLamp Research, and Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University asked Spanish- and German-speaking bilinguals to rate various objects according to whether they seemed more similar to males or females. They found that people rated each object according to its grammatical gender. For example, Germans see the moon as being more like a man, because the German word for moon is grammatically masculine (“der Mond”). In contrast, Spanish-speakers see the moon as being more like a woman, because in Spanish the word for moon is grammatically feminine (“la Luna”).

Aside from language, objects can also become infused with gender based on their appearance, who typically uses them, and whether they seem to possess the type of characteristics usually associated with men or women. David Gal and James Wilkie of Northwestern University studied how people view gender in everyday objects, such as food and furniture. They found that people see food dishes containing meat as more masculine and salads and sour dairy products as more feminine. People see furniture items, such as tables and trash cans, as more feminine when they feature rounded, rather than sharp, edges.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Scientific American.[end-div]