Thus Spake Zuska

Isn't Rape Really Just All About Sex?

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:59:28 -0500

I know I'm supposed to be posting installment three in the work-life balance series - and it's coming tomorrow, I promise - but I was distracted by this post by Isis's new co-blogger. I think there's a relatively strong consensus that this invention is clearly a bit of Technology Gone Bad.

In a really old Saturday Night Live sketch, Gilda Radnor and Dan Akroyd play a befuddled couple at home in the kitchen, arguing over Shimmer. It's a floor wax. No, a dessert topping. But wait! Spokesperson Chevy Chase pops in to tell them it's BOTH!!!!!

What does this have to do with understanding rape?

Well, commenter hibob has set down a long stupid argument on the comment thread of that post by Set Oculus at Isis's blog, trying to make the case that rape is mostly motivated by sexual desire. Because this is patently stupid, it has naturally riled everyone up, and lots of people are saying no, rape is violence. Floor wax! Dessert topping! Floor wax! Dessert topping!

In the midst of all this some commenter named Dick left this remark about the useless Technology Gone Bad that sparked the original post:

Fascinating! Do you suppose it will work equally well with variants of rape like when the assailant shoves a gun barrel up the vagina? Or ass? Just wondering.
Also: at what age should I recommend to my friends to have their daughters start using this? Babies get raped, too, sometimes.

Dick's comment reminded me of something I once wrote in an essay critiquing Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape.

According to Thornhill and Palmer, feminists insist on a monolithic account of rape as a violent act that has nothing to do with sex. This, along with feminists' inability to embrace evolutionary theory, prevents feminists from producing accurate accounts of why men rape and so from arriving at useful solutions. This claim itself misrepresents feminist perspectives on rape. As Natalie Angier notes, "Most of us have long known that rape is about sex and power and a thousand other things as well, and that rape is not a monolithic constant but varies in incidence and meaning from culture to culture and epoch to epoch." Angier also rightly notes that it is feminists who "sought to have the word 'rape' replaced in the legal lexicon by the terms 'sex crime' and 'sexual battery,' the better to include offenses that don't involve intercourse but are clearly sexual in nature, such as...forced fellatio, anal penetration, the shoving of a gun barrel up the vagina, and the like." Rape clearly is not limited to a single type of behavior or pattern of behavior that is found in every case. Feminists have always been attentive to this reality, and to the fact that in the real world of sexual offenses it is difficult to ignore the ways in which sex and violence are often fused.

When douches like hibob are trying to figure out what "causes" rape, they would do well to remember that rape - more accurately, sex crimes and sexual battery - have myriad manifestations and causes. In the same essay from which the paragraph above is taken, I also quote Mart Carmill: "...it's a mistake to argue about the causes of rape...We define [rape, murder, and war] by their properties and their effects, not their causes, and there's no reason to think that acts that share an effect also share a cause...[A]ll homicides share the same effect...but they don't all have the same cause...Seeking the cause of murder, war, or rape may be a fundamental mistake, like asking for the cause of things that weigh 10 pounds."

So, Douchey McDoucherson commenter hibob, lay off the "where's yer proof, and yer data, and how do you know rape isn't caused by sexual desire". Give it a rest. Why don't you take up something more profitable - like investigating the cause of things that weigh 10 pounds.

------------------

The reference to Angier is her article "Biological Bull," in Ms. June/July 2000: 80-82.

The quote from Matt Cartmill is from his article, "Understanding the Evil That Men Do." The Chronicle of Higher Education 46 (39) 2000

My essay from which the paragraph above is excerpted is "They Blinded Me With Science: Misuse and Misunderstanding of Biological Theory" in Fundamental Differences: Feminists Reply to Social Conservatives ed. Cynthia G. Burack and Jyl J. Josephson, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

Work-Life Balance 2: On Stepping Up To The Plate

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:03:02 -0500

First post in this series can be found here.

ScientistMother really wants DrugMonkey to step up to the plate already. She says that DM laid out his own responsibility to deal, on-blog, with work-life balance issues and to share the details of how it goes down at his own home. Find the full quote in the comments at her post or here in Doc Free-Ride's post.

As is generally the case, I have a few things to say about this.

For starters, I do not agree with ScientistMother's interpretation of that quote. I have no idea what DM had in mind, but I think you can read that quote as him talking about his IRL practices as a PI, and offering them as an example for how other male PIs could behave to create an environment that makes it more comfortable for females in and around their lab to combine parenthood with careers. This is consistent with the DM blog operation of offering advice on how to do the whole PI thing. I do not see anything in that quote to suggest that DM is laying down an imperative, for himself or other male science bloggers, to talk about personal domestic arrangements regarding work-life balance. That, in fact, would be entirely inconsistent with him not offering lots of personal information about himself on the blog - if, for no other reason, for purposes of protecting the pseud.

To go on from there: I feel a particular icky feeling whenever anyone tells any blogger "you MUST write about X!" for a coupla reasons. One, I've been on the receiving end of that statement a gazillion times myself and it's just ridiculous. Really? I must write about X? Hahahahahahahhaha! Any writer must write about whatever that writer must write about. You cannot choose a writer's subjects for her or him. How happy would ScientistMother be if I showed up on her blog and DEMANDED that she MUST write about native plant gardening? NOW! Because it is urgent that the people be informed! Seriously, I am very passionate about native plant gardening. It is an important topic. Why do you not share my passion and outrage? Why do you not drop what you are doing and BLOG THIS INSTANT ABOUT THE LOSS OF OUR NATIVE HABITAT AND THE NEED TO TURN OUR SUBURBAN LAWNS INTO NATIVE PLANT WILDLIFE REFUGES, DEAR GOD, THINK OF THE BIRDS!!!... But I digress.

It does behoove us all to think once in awhile about what forces shape our interests. It's at best disingenuous to say about an issue as gendered as work-life balance that you just don't want to talk about it, without thinking a bit about why that might be so. I mean, the vast majority of male science bloggers seem to find that there is nothing they need to say about balancing work and life, whereas a whole lotta female science bloggers seem to feel the opposite. These are not just random personal choices based upon What I Think My Spouse Might Feel If He/She Reads My Blog, or What I Find Personally Interesting Which Just Happens To Never Be Work-Life Balance And That Has Nothing To Do With Me Being A Man.

Please note, I am speaking about science bloggers who are men as a group. As a group, men science bloggers tend not to blog about work-life balance. You can certainly find a post here and there. What we do not know, about any individual male science blogger, is this: What is he doing besides blogging? Is he commenting on other blogs when work-life balance issues come up, maybe under a pseudonym or as anonymous? Is he reading and thinking and learning, but doesn't feel ready to comment or blog yet? Is he doing ally work in real life that we don't know about, and his blog is narrowly restricted to a certain set of topics that don't happen to include the particular work-life balance issues we might like to hear more male science bloggers talk about?

For any given male science blogger, there could be any one or several very valid reasons why he chooses not to blog about work-life balance (and other issues dear to our hairy-legged feminazi hearts). But is the issue even on the male science blogger radar screen as potentially blogworthy? When the answer is consistently "no" time after time, I think it's of interest to ask why. And it does seem more likely than not, that it is NOT on their radar screens at all, rather than that 99.9% of male science bloggers have given serious thought as to whether they should blog about work-life balance and finally concluded it just wasn't right for them right now, or didn't fit their narrow blog focus.

But let's say our hypothetical male science blogger has decided he must now jump into the fray, and begin blogging his little heart out about work-life balance. ScientistMother, or Isis, or me, or the whole feminist science castrating blogosphere has shamed him and in order to hold onto what's left of his dick, he will write A Post.

A post about balancing work and family. He will speak of laundry folded, dishes washed, diapers changed, lunchbags packed, domestic duties carefully negotiated with his better half. Then everyone will be all "Aww, a dude wrote about balancing career and family! That is so awesome! He is so progressive! Things are getting better!" Some women (and maybe even the man) will gnash their teeth in despair about how he reaps praise for speaking of doing that which is considered her duty, that which, when she speaks of doing it, leads to snide remarks about mommy bloggers in the comments section and at social media conferences for the sci-bloggy twitterati.

And THEN some shrill bitter feminazi like me will come along and point out how the dude gets it all wrong, or misses some important point, or just wants a cookie for doing what he should be doing anyway. And some portion of people will be all "that is so right! that dude thinks he deserves a medal because he changed a diaper once!" and some other portion of people will be all "it is caricature feminists like you who are ruining Feminism For Everyone!" And some tiny portion of people might read both the original post and the critique post and think about what was said in the OP and the critique and what it all means. But by then the blogosphere has swept on to the next thing, and our man will probably go back to SOP, which involves not writing about Official Ladee Stuff, like balancing work and family.

Even if fifty dudes got together and wrote A Post, on the same day, about balancing work and family, it would still be like that Special Section on The Rare and Strange Creatures Known as Women-in-Science published annually by Glamour Journal. "And now, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this special news bulletin...blah blah blah...gender...blah blah...work/life balance...blah blah blah...things are getting better...blah blah blah...Marie Curie reference....blah blah blah...young assistant professor with kids and supportive husband and cutting edge research program struggles to make it all work...blah blah blah...statistics....blah blah...useful websites...blah blah...things are getting better...blah blah blah...hire a housekeeper...blah blah blah...Now, back to our regularly scheduled program, presented to you in full from where we left off."

No, a handful of men science bloggers taking some personal inventory is not going to change institutional structure, even if it would feel personally supportive to the friends and/or readers of those men science bloggers. It is not paradigm shifting.

Looking at this as if it is something that requires us to speak from a deeply personal space, keeps this issue a personal one, and therefore really risks obscuring the politics that surround it. It keeps it an issue that "belongs" to women, who are the ones who "have the experience" and the "right" to talk about it, after suitably notifying the spouse - but he doesn't, because he doesn't "own" the experience the way she does, even if he asks nicely if he can talk about it, because he'll surely get it wrong, just like he does when he tries to do the laundry all by himself. In reality, it is a subject that is just as amenable to scholarly analysis and discussion as anything else we blog about.

I am not knocking the personal anecdote approach - it has clearly been deeply meaningful and helpful to many women to have that kind of information sharing out there in the blogosphere. And much of the best of that writing has been a scholarly exploration in its own right, of the lived experience of scientists who are women. What I am saying is, that is not the only thing that can be done.

If I were a married man with children, I might well be leery of blogging about how I negotiate the home balance with my spouse on my science blog, even if I weren't concerned about privacy or protecting a pseud, because I'd be afraid of pissing off my spouse, and pissing off the feminist blogosphere. That's my cookie to the men science bloggers who have ever even gotten as far as thinking about blogging about work-life balance: Zuska feels your pain.

But let me repeat myself: speaking from the deep well of personal experience and sharing intimate details of daily life is not the only way to write about work-life balance. This is fortunate, because work-life balance, life native plant gardening, is something I care about a great deal. Unlike native plant gardening, I currently have no experience with work-life balance. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I have no work to balance with my life. And yet, amazingly, I am able to think in a critical and intellectual manner about the topic, and to care about the topic because I understand that it remains relevant to huge swaths of the population, even if it isn't personally relevant to me right now.

Why, gosh! I am even able to recognize that work-life balance is an issue for Mr. Z, who has a job! And that dude is a man!

I'm fine with stirring the pot on the internet, but not in anyone's personal life. That's why I just can't encourage any particular man to start blogging shit about what he does or does not do at home to help out the little missus - that's a whole different project from critiquing institutional structures. So in the next post, we shall explore what possibilities remain to us to talk and write and blog about work-life balance, if we are not going to dip into the Well of Personal Experience.

Work-Life Balance 1: Women, The Media Totally Support You!

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:33:52 -0500

Work-life balance: people have been talking about it.

Wait, that's not right. Women have been talking about it. And have been talked at about it, by some people. Doc Free-Ride has a good round-up of a most recent skirmish of opinions on the topic in the sciencey blogosphere. If you have not been following this, please do give Doc Free-Ride's post a read.

Where to begin?

Science Careers says all you married ladies with kids should hire housekeepers. And get over it already, will you?

Last year, when Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, learned that she had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, she was folding the laundry. It was a seemingly trivial detail, unrelated to her science, but it got plenty of play in the press. "Is it true that you were doing laundry when you got that early morning call from Stockholm?" The New York Times interviewer asked the Nobel laureate in a conversational Q&A. That opening question underscored the fact that women researchers -- even the nation's top women -- have domestic responsibilities.

No, I don't think so. It underscores the fact that the media feel an overwhelming tingly urge they can't resist to portray scientists who are women as DON'T WORRY THEY'RE WOMEN!! THEY DO HOUSEHOLD CHORES! AND ARE STILL PRETTY! NOT THREATENING TO THE NATION'S MASCULINITY, AT ALL!!!!!!!! ahhhhh! yeah! that's better.

Anyway, Science Careers is urging you - yes, you, little lady! - to hire yourself a housekeeper. "No doubt some women scientists put a high priority on housework, but they are almost certainly few. For the rest, it might make sense to employ a maid, or whatever you call the male equivalent, to help with the housework." Maybe you don't put a priority on housework, but the world does, and will surely judge you as a failure if your house is dirty, or laundry unfolded, no matter what prize you win. The important thing is, your Nigel is off working as if he has a wife at home to take care of the housework, and if you want to succeed in science, that's the model you are going to have to adopt. So you'd best hire yourself a wife sooner rather than later. And yes, it's on your shoulders, because just as the housework is your responsibility, so too is the outsourcing of it. You can't expect Nigel to help with that, either. No point in trying to critique any of that, or even in trying to talk to Nigel about it.

Well, this incredibly positive message was not universally welcomed. Resulting in a Very Special Message ~~To You Whiny Bitchez~~ For Men, about how I Really Thought All This Was So Obvious I Didn't Have To Bother Saying Any Of It But Since You Nagged Me Into It, Here's A Blog Post With A Non-Pology In Which I Explain How I Totes Get Everything About Gender.

"Special" messages for men, in my opinion, mean something like this: In the normal course of events, you would not have to divert your manly attention from important topics to something so trivial as work-life balance, with all its estrogenic whiff. But on this very special occasion, when the little misses have got their knickers all in a knot, perhaps we can, in our manly magnitude, agree that it might be nice to at least look as if we thought this issue had something to do with us.

The goal is for those choices to be freely made and not coerced. So men, and women: It's up to you and your partner to set the terms, but please make sure those decisions are made as freely as can be achieved...you can ease those pressures by being supportive of your partner and helping them to choose -- or, rather, to negotiate with you, from a position of strength, a domestic arrangement that works well for both partners.

This is very odd phrasing indeed. Be supportive of your partner and "help them" choose? "Help them" negotiate an arrangement? Like, when he "helps her" with the laundry and the dishes, which are her jobs? In a really equal arrangement, you'd be choosing and negotiating together. I completely respect the fact that Mr. Austin does not wish to be in the business of giving specific relationship advice to anyone - lord, who does, if they aren't getting paid by the hour to do so! But how hard is it to write a sentence in which you at least pretend that two people in a relationship ought to be equally responsible for the domestic arrangements? Otherwise, that paragraph above is just a fancy rewriting of "it's her responsibility to choose and negotiate domestic arrangements, and your responsibility to look soulfully at her and say 'honey, I totally support whatever you choose to do' and then maybe give her a dozen red roses on Valentine's Day."

Well, I'll tell you what I choose. I choose not to read one more dumbfuck article about how you, little lady, fortunate to have enough disposable income, need to pay some poorer lady to do stuff for you so that you can work the crazy husband-with-a-wife-at-home schedule that corporate America and academic science deems minimally acceptable, and get over the guilt already that society dumps on your head each and every day, and don't even think of challenging the patriarchal norms of family and institution because we sure as hell aren't going to acknowledge in the slightest that they exist in this article.

Next up: what's the difference between criticizing how the media deals with the work-life balance issue versus asking/demanding that some particular man, or all male science bloggers, blog about how they handle work-life balance issues at home?

Aunt Betty's Spaghetti Sauce

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:53:18 -0500

Just because I need a change of pace once in awhile.

Once when I was home visiting mom, I took her to a church spaghetti supper where we met up with her sister, my beloved Aunt Betty. This was at a time when I still couldn't really eat anything with onion in it, without immediately getting a migraine. Of course, the spaghetti sauce for the church dinners was chock full of onion. No problem, I said, you ladies enjoy your dinners and I will get something to eat later.

This was not acceptable to Aunt Betty.

She went into the church kitchen and whipped up a spaghetti sauce just for me. And it was DELICIOUS! This is how she made it.

3 T. olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
2 pats of butter

Saute the garlic in the olive oil and butter until just golden

Add 1 can Hunt's tomato paste (Aunt Betty insisted on Hunt's. You can try others. I'm just telling you what Aunt Betty said.)
Add 2 cans of water

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Add parsley (Aunt Betty used dried, but she said of course fresh parsley is delightful.)

Cook down to "right consistency". Don't put a lid on it.

And there you have it. If you are home some evening with a box of pasta and a can of tomato paste and bulb of garlic and don't know what the heck to have for dinner, you can make Aunt Betty's tomato sauce. It will not give you a migraine.

Who's the Audience for Tierney's Shtick?

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:08:48 -0500

Over at Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker says "I wanted to know what actual female scientists thought" about the boring blah blah John Tierney barfed up this week in the NYT. And then gives links to four different responses, included the fabulous Isis's awesome take on why she is bored to tears with this topic.

Personally I would rather be forced to watch the second Transformers movie on constant repeat for the next 10 years than continue to have this discussion, but since the New York Time's John Tierney seems to have his head shoved so far up his own ass that his can lick his own tonsils, I suppose we must. But, just know that I am doing it for the people. Not at all for my own amusement.

Indeed.

Isis makes the case in her inimitable and infinitely hilarious manner, but it is, as she states, tedious and boring beyond belief to have to go over this ground again and again. The only point in doing so is for the people - to equip any readers in need with useful talking points, jabby little things they can poke at clueless douchebags who are likely to come up to them and say "But I read in the NYT that 'Physics needs genius men or western civilization will CRUMBLE! 7th grade SAT scores CLEARLY show gender differences! Innate! Biology!' "

Because what Tierney's saying isn't new. He isn't making any new arguments, covering any new ground, he certainly isn't being "daring", he hasn't put forth anything that wasn't mocked, rebutted, deconstructed, and debunked a hundred different ways to death before this.

So why is he saying it? Is he really just that stupid that he is completely unaware of all the arguments against his points that have gone before him? Is he really that incapable of interpreting data, or of using google, or of researching a topic thoroughly to find out ZOMFG! There really ARE valid arguments against this stupid steaming pile of horseshit I've just typed!

No, of course he's not stupid, and he's not incapable of doing the research. He's not talking to us, either. He doesn't give a rat's ass what Zuska or Isis or any of the readers of our blogs or any other women scientists think about his steaming pile of misogynist horsecrap.

He is talking to those people who aren't sure. Who maybe never thought too much about this topic before. Who can be stirred to unease with visions of peoples' free speech being stifled with turns of phrase like this:

I'm all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:

See, I like the little ladies, I do! Let 'em go into science, if any of them actually want to, and "fulfill" themselves, till they get distracted with a pilates class, or a baby. But Jesus God, they are going to ship real manly men off to the gulags, and no one is going to dare to say what they really think anymore! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR FREEDOMZ, PEOPLE???!!!?!??!

Dr. Summers was pilloried for even suggesting the idea...

They came for Larry, and I did not speak up. Now they are coming for all of the manly man scientists. Will you speak up? Because when they come for you, there will be no one left to speak up. They will all be zombies in state-run feminist workshops.

Would it be safe during the "interactive discussions" for someone to mention the new evidence...How could these workshops reconcile the "existence of gender bias" with careful studies...

Manly man scientists will be FORCED to do touchy-feely shit about gender that has NOTHING to do with evidence or careful studies!!!!!!! Science will be killed!!!!!!

Some have claimed he was proved wrong by recent reports of girls closing the gender gap on math scores in the United States and other countries. But even if those reports (which have been disputed) are accurate, they involve closing the gap only for average math scores -- not for the extreme scores that Dr. Summers was discussing.

"Some" = those angry activist women who are trying to take away your freedom of speech. Can you trust them? Would you give as much weight to the "claims" and "reports" of "some" as you would to a manly man like Dr. Summers and his X-treme scores? I think not.

But before we accept Congress's proclamation of bias, before we start re-educating scientists at workshops, it's worth taking a hard look at the evidence of bias against female scientists.

I've just given you a lot of blah blah with numbers and percents and right tale of the distribution, and I know you, John Q. Public, are mostly math illiterate and don't like to be made to think too hard. What you do understand, however, is Congress taking away your freedomz!!!! And the freedomz of other manly men! Are you going to let Congress send manly men scientists off to the gulag to be re-educated Soviet style? Let's take a hard manly look at this so-called evidence for the so-called bias against female scientists. Puh-leeze.

Tierney's column isn't written to be accurate, or survey the literature, or communicate with women scientists. It's written to get across a subtextual message to an audience of the general public, who doesn't want Congress taking away their freedomz, and conservative male scientists, who by god do not want to be forced to sit in one more goddamn workshop just because some stupid women still have their panties in a twist over Larry Summers, let it GO already, ladies, will ya? I'm tryna get some science done over here!

The legislation Tierney's disingenuously writing about still has to pass the Senate. He's writing to rally the troops. He only sounds stupid when you aren't in his target audience.

Rearranging Pipet Tips...

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:38:55 -0500

A friend of mine (maybe YOU are that friend?) will be soon be leaving a job at Wackaloon Scientific Enterprises where said friend is supervised by sadistic micromanaging douchebags from hell with poor reading comprehension skills.

How best to spend the remaining time my friend must clock at WSE?

I suggest devoting large chunks of it to rearranging pipet tips in their boxes while singing some version of this song.

Oh it was sad,
Oh it was sad,
It was sad when the research went down to the journal.
All the postdocs and techs.
Little grad students lost their lives.
It was sad when the research went down.

Then when your time is up, shake off the dust under your feet, and blow out of Dodge.

Dress For Success! Or Not!

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:19:25 -0500

Ladeez! Please remember not to be too fat, because James Watson doesn't want to hire your ugly ass. Everybody knows fat people can't do science. But they don't care if we say so, because they are so jolly, and lack ambition!

Likewise, it is also not good to be beautiful and curvaceous, and wear clothes that fit you. For alas, Citibank will have to fire you. Your tailored clothing is "too distracting". You distracting ladee, with your distracting turtlenecks!!! Begone from our stolid gentlemanly banking establishment!!!!

Too thin, too thick, too sexy, not sexy enough - clearly, there is no good way for you to appear in public, ladeez. Why do you even leave the home? Unless you are on your way to a gentleman's club to do a pole or lap dance. (Thin ladeez with double D's only, please! All others, please stay home and mind the kids.)

Lying Stinky Oilbags Who Lie

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:50:56 -0500

HuffPo summary and link to NBC Today Show lying liar doing his lying here.

It "may be down to how you define what a plume is here."

Really? Yeah, who can believe those stupid scientists and their stupid librul observations and data.

Well, here's an idea, lying oilbag BP CEO Doug Suttles. Why don't you go down to the Gulf, and take a dive. Swim around a good long time through that area where "no massive underwater oil plumes in 'large concentrations' have been detected". Then come up, and try diving repeatedly through the oil pooled on the surface. After all that, you just climb straight into your corporate jet - no pausing to change or clean up. Fly on outta there to your home airport. Get in your fancy car and drive home. Go straight to you fancy hi-tech home theater room - I know you've got one - and settle down in one of those cushy leather chairs. Have your kids gather 'round close, and attempt to feed them a snack of some oil-laden dead sea creatures you scavenged while you were diving through those slicks and swimming through those underwater plumes that are not massive nor in "large concentrations".

Then just settle in and wait, while breathing your own noxious reek, in your sticky stinky gloppy scabrous oil slicked sheath, and hope that, eventually, some stupid scientist or ridiculous naturalist or tree-hugger environmentalist or local sucka comes along and pries you from your stinky oily nest and takes you off for a 45 minute scrub down with liquid dish soap, and then parcels you off to an entirely new home some several states away, where you will never see your children again, but at least you'll be alive.

You lying stinky oilbag who lies. You, and everyone at BP associated with thinking up, writing, approving, and creating your performance on the Today show. Lying stinky oilbag who lies, BP CEO Doug Suttles.

Zuska's Dreamy New Hunka Burning Love

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:13:52 -0500

oh. my. fucking. god.

I sooooooo wish I had thought of inventing FEMINIST HULK!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am in love with Feminist Hulk. In love. LOVE! Love, I say!

Hat tip Rebecca of Adventures in Applied Math.

UPDATE: Ms. Magazine interview with my new love!

Tierney Wah Wah NYT Whiney Blah Blah

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:19:42 -0500

Whiney McWhinerson barfed up something in the NYT. Doc Free-Ride has a good take on it here. I applaud her analytical skills. I read Tierney's whinefest and it was difficult for me to come up with anything substantive in response because all it sounded like to me was this:

wah wah gender police takin' away mah freedomz! Larry Summers a brave hero to all d00ds! Extreme scores at the right tail of the distribution! Physics needs genius men or western civilization will CRUMBLE! 7th grade SAT scores CLEARLY show gender differences! Innate! Biology! (possible social bias against women, but really, who believes that shit.) For the love of God, Congress, please don't ram Communist-style re-education of scientists down our throats! Or we will all die! DIE!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: As Doc Free-Ride noted in the comments on her post, Christina Agapakis posted a response to the Tierney wah wah over at Oscillator. In the comments below, Pteryxx offered a link to this fine post over at Jezebel. Good stuff.

A Well-Spent Afternoon

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:07:16 -0500

I made myself a nice lunch. Diced two small yellow squash, sauteed them in butter till just tender, plated and topped with some minced parsley from my herb garden...mmmm. Sliced up a kohlrabi and ate that too. Iced decaf coffee. Ate outside on the back patio, cats lolling about with Papa Cardinal chirping fiercely at them (because Mama Cardinal and, I think, babies are in the nest in the nearby arborvitae. Don't worry, Papa - I keep an eye on the kitties, too, and never leave them unsupervised.) Took out the spent flower stalks from all the iris in the garden bed by the street. (Really am gonna have to lift all those suckers this July and split...that will be a huge undertaking. The damn daylilies are invading the iris, too. Should have lifted and split them this past spring.) Poked around the burgeoning forest edge garden bed and found a spot where I could actually dig - better soil - and FINALLY GOT THOSE DOGGONE FOAMFLOWERS IN THE GROUND!!!! YAY!!!! Got out the short-tined metal rake and went at the leaf pile - spent the better part of half an hour turning it over, the accumulation of last fall's drop. (Note to self: really could use a pitchfork for this task.) Last year I composted leaves for the first time and after sifting got two rectangular recycle bins full of fine leafy crumble dirt, good for topping off planting beds, mixing in with soil to help break down clay, or placing around your ferns because I think leaf dust is sort of like fern food. This year we held back ALL of our leaves, not just a portion, to compost, so maybe I'll get even more. It's nice to throw a bit into the compost bin as well, along with the kitchen scraps - makes for good balance in the bin. All in all a well spent afternoon and a most excellent brain rinse.

Now I just need to find a spot for that ninebark and my year's planting of native plants will be accomplished. Maybe. I am really looking forward to the upcoming June 14 daylong seminar at the Morris Arboretum to be conducted by Professor Douglas Tallamay, Restoring Our Native Ecosystems. They may still have openings. If you live in the Philly area, and can afford it, think about attending. It should be an amazing day.

How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:23:06 -0500

Because sometimes I need to take a breather, here's this post about fun stuff.

(with apologies to Carl Sandburg...)

Delfest jams on little mud feet.
It dances looking
over mountain and meadow
on singing multitudes
and then moves on.

I can't believe I have to wait a whole nother year for Delfest 2011.

What is Delfest, you ask?

The third annual eponymous bluegrass festival founded by bluegrass legend Del McCoury was held this year, as in the previous two years, at the Allegany County Fairgrounds in Cumberland, MD. But it's more than "just" bluegrass, and more than just a music festival. It's a gathering of a tribe, a thoughtful approach, and a giving back to the local community in which the festival is embedded. Money was raised for local charities and food banks, and festival goers helped build walls for a Habitat for Humanity house. The festival campgrounds included a "family-friendly" camp area, and bathroom accommodations for those with disabilities. In general, it was a festival location that would have been reasonably easy for someone using a wheelchair to attend, with a little assistance from someone else. There was a grandstand overlooking the music meadow and even after the meadow turned to mud, one could have watched the show from the grandstand - or listened to the music broadcast very locally on an FM station.

The emcee dude who mentioned something from the stage about how this was a bit like Woodstock was both right and wrong, I think. Incredible music, and enough mud for all a good bit of the time. But I am pretty sure we had a more regular supply of food and water, easier access to high quality bath and shower facilities, and a helluva lot better organization. The food and drink vending was so amazing - I'll just mention Bearly Edibles quesadillas (using many local and organic ingredients, an excellent vegetarian choice, and minimal trash production) and the Buzzthru smoothies (dairy and non-dairy) and fab coffee drinks (organic, fair trade), for starters - not to mention the high quality merchandise vendors. It was practically the Ritz-Carlton of festivals.

Conversation overheard while waiting in line at BuzzThru early Sunday morning:

Tired, yet blissed out Festival Goer #1: I can't stand thinking about going back to real life after all this.

T,YBOFG#2: (thoughtful glance) This isn't real life? (pause) All the rest of that stuff is just a bad dream.

What Bluegrass Is

So much great music, and so many funny and lovely and thoughtful lyrics are echoing in my mind, but the one lyric that puts a stamp on the festival, for me, was sung (appropriately enough, by Del McCoury himself. I think the song is "Sweet Appalachia", but I'm not sure. What he sang, after pointing to the mountains that ringed the music meadow, in a beautiful bit of string music, went something like this: "Some folks call me hillbilly...[but] Appalachian is my name."

You might think you know what bluegrass is. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But do you know what it's become and where it's going next? A (partial) list of some bands you should be listening to, if you want to know:

Railroad Earth. Yonder Mountain String Band. Cornmeal. Uncle Earl. Greensky Bluegrass. Steep Canyon Rangers. Mountain Heart.

Not a one of those is like the others. They each have as distinctive a sound from one another, within the genre of bluegrass, as do the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, within the genre of rock. If you want to see someone do a major mind-blowing ten or fifteen minute jam, I'd pick Railroad Earth, Yonder Mountain, or Cornmeal before I'd go see the Stones, though. Plus, the tix are cheaper and none of their band members are on artificial life support.

Question: five white dudes, variously sporting long hair and ball caps, wielding a fiddle, banjo, upright bass, guitar, and dobro - can they produce a rocking, kickass jam cover of When Doves Cry? Answer: Yes, if the five white dudes are Greensky Bluegrass at the Saturday workshop session. What a cruel tease, though, when they playfully announced that Del McCoury was about to join them on stage to sing while they played Stairway to Heaven. Possibly the greatest Delfest musical moment that never was. Ha!

If the Andrews Sisters, Dolly Parton, and Del McCoury had all gotten together in a Big Love sort of way, they might have produced Uncle Earl. I've seen bluegrass bands fronted by women (Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, both of whom have magnificent pipes) and I've seen a few bands with one or two women (Cornmeal's Allie Kral can fiddle anyone else into the dust, and will fiddle your mind straight out to the Milky Way; the Biscuit Burners feature Mary Lucey and Odessa Jorgensen whose playing and harmonizing, especially on "Off to the Sea", is topnotch). But Uncle Earl is the first time I've seen an all-woman bluegrass band and it takes my breath away, to see women running the whole show, and running it so well and fine and fun and true.

A word of advice to the d00ds, though: try to remember that Uncle Earl is comprised of musicians and not fiddle players-cum-fuck fantasies. Do you send marriage proposals to members of Yonder Mountain String Band? Do you introduce the Steep Canyon Rangers by way of saying what lovely man meat is packaged so fine into those tidy suits? Then maybe just lay off the hogwash for the members of Uncle Earl's kickass bluegrass band, stop talking about how they bring a bouquet of flowers whenever they step on stage and stick to the praise of their musicianship, and if you must write your fanboy lustmail, please don't stamp and mail.

"Remember: sleep deprivation is an integral part of the Delfest experience."

We went to one late night show - Railroad Earth, Friday night. This started at 1:45 a.m. and ended around 4 a.m. May not have been too bad of a problem if we had not had to get up the next day for the Steep Canyon Rangers at 10 a.m. It's even worse than it sounds, because as you may or may not know, Delfest is an open taping festival, and I am in a co-dependent relationship with a taper. That means we had to arrive at the stage at least one hour prior to the start of the SCR show in order to obtain a prime spot for the micstand and allow enough time for a "relaxed" setup of the recording rig. "Relaxed" is a relative term. There is actually no "relaxed" in recording. Of that I may speak more in a later post.

The Bluegrass Audience

Who listens to bluegrass at Delfest?

A. Your friend's grandparents
B. That dude with the faux dreadlocks
C. Millennial youngsters with tattoos and piercings
D. Young married couples with small children
E. Middle-aged backpacker women with graying braids and Tevas
F. Deadheads, old and young
G. Ten-year-old Appalachian boys who clog dance barefoot in the mud
H. North American Tapers Society, East Coast Section
I. Retired couple from Seattle
J. A lotta lotta white people, a few brown folks
K. All of the above

A Clean(ish), Well-Vended Place

Trash management at the festival was handled by a company called Clean Vibes. Liberally available trash can sites helped keep the festival grounds clean, and each site provided at least one can marked "recycling" for cans and bottles, another marked "landfill" for other trash. "Landfill" was a nice reminder that your trash doesn't really go "away", it has to go somewhere, so be thoughtful about how much you generate. Each campsite was issued two bags on entry to the campgrounds - one for recyclables, one for landfill trash. At the end of the festival, the two bags could be deposited near trash can sites for pickup. (Lest I mislead you, I myself did not camp. I am too decrepit and migraine-prone to endure four days of sun, rain, and mud without some retreat to indoors.) A cell phone recycling tent, provided by Rock the Earth, was available on the grounds as well. I don't know how many people actually recycled their cell phones at the festival but it is to be hoped that the opportunity to do so helped make them aware that this is an option for the future.

Despite all this, at the end of each night's run of acts on the main stage, the music meadow was littered with trash. People, if you carry it with you onto the meadow, carry it over to a trash or recycling can. It's that simple. It's not like they were hard to find. Nevertheless, an amazing corps of volunteers set out immediately at show's end to sweep the meadow - and it is a very, very large meadow - which was generally spotlessly clean to greet the next morning's early show stalwarts.

Women of Delfest, I salute you. I don't know if you are sitters, squatters, or hoverers, but you do not seem to pee on the toilet seats. Or if you do, you clean as you go. It's a different world outside the real life festival. At the first rest stop, the very first stall I entered had urine all over half the toilet seat. Women of the bad dream world, please learn from the Delfest reality. Take better aim or deal with your scattershot.

Speaking of that which is generally not spoken of: a four day festival complete with muddy slop, and not once did I enter a bathroom stall that lacked for toilet paper, or find a sink set up that wanted for handsoap or paper towels. There may always have been some mud on the floors but the frequency with which those floors had to have been cleaned off was simply astonishing. And this was a volunteer operation. Women of Delfest, I hope you were slipping some cash in that tipbox every now and again.

Festival vendors were, it appeared, carefully chosen and as mentioned, of very high quality. My favorites were the following.

Blues Forkman - 100% recycled silverware art, including bracelets custom fit to your wrist and incredibly detailed renditions of banjo players, guitarists, a full drum kit, etc. If I were in the market for a wedding band today, I'd be getting it from Blues Forkman.
Elk Run Mining Co. - offered locally-mined stone jewelry. I am still pining for the loveliest highly polished bit of bloodstone set in sterling silver you've ever seen. The level of craft involved man it worth twice the price but alas, even the asking price was not within my reach.
The Dancing Skirt - upcycled silk/sari skirts and clothing. Exquisite fabric, and unbelievably reasonable prices. If I'd been a little less muddy and sweaty I'd have walked away with at least one, despite my likely having no occasion whatsoever where I could wear it.

A whole row of vendors in the music meadow was given over to non-profits.

Hail no! Del yeah!

Last year's thunderstorm/hailstorm/maelstrom is now the stuff of memory, legend, and for those who lived through it, mild-to-moderate PTSD. A sudden storm that came on with little or no warning, it blew away vendor booths and wiped the music meadow clean of everything but the mainstage, leaving heaps of tangled chairs and easy-up tents. People were struck by lightning. People were lashed by hail for 45 minutes. People were traumatized. And somehow the crew there emerged and put the pieces back together and got the show back on the next day. Out of the experience emerged, along with the PTSD, the "Hail no! Del yeah!" motto, which could be found on t-shirts this year, and "Del yeah!" got worked into many a band's performance. When this year's thunderstorm started approaching on Friday afternoon, people were understandably anxious. Happily, the threatened hail did not materialize, at least at the festival site, and all we got were rain, a delay in the show, squishy muddy toes, a few slides and falls in the mud here and there, and the distinct olfactory sensation of spending the rest of the festival in something like a cow pasture. Del yeah!

I really hope this festival does not outgrow its site, which is perfect.
Do not come to this festival. It is crowded and muddy and you don't like bluegrass. It could hail on you. This is not the festival you are looking for. Just go to archive.org and download some music.

Science FAIL

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 09:07:43 -0500

Just how dumb can scientists be when they skientifikally talk about "consuming" porn?

This dumb.

Pal MD points out that the wrong questions are being asked.

Fortunately, Skeptifem has a clarifying take on the whole stoopid science FAIL.

Uh yeah, I just want to point out that the consent of the women in pornography is questionable. Trafficked women appear in pornography. Women who are high on drugs appear in pornography. Some have notoriously abusive partners who force them into pornography with violence (Linda Lovelace was raped repeatedly this way). You have absolutely no way of knowing if you are watching someone being raped because the raped women are made to pretend to enjoy it.
Often pornography IS violence against women, so asking if porn causes that is a silly question. Normalizing that situation is horrible. Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don't think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture. People act like the rape of women in porn isn't enough, that it has to spread to other women for it to matter.

Emphasis added by me, to highlight that YOU ARE ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS, D00DS!

An Explanatory Note

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:26:48 -0500

I have put in (literally) decades of work acting on the assumption that folks are reasonable and well-intentioned, and trying to be effective and get messages across. Part of that time I was even paid to do so.

IRL, for the most part, I try to interact with people like that.

However, I'm sick to puking of seeing so much shit go down for so long and seeing so little change and seeing progress for women in engineering shudder and stall and hearing over and over and over and over again "we just have to wait for the old guard to die off and for spots to open up and for women to work their way up through the ranks and the younger guys will not behave in these stupid ways the older d00ds do and things are getting better and you can't make women go into engineering if they don't want to and men and women just prefer different career choices and it's a fact of life that women have babies and there's nothing you can do about it and we'd love to have on campus daycare for everyone but in these tight fiscal times we have to make tough choices and I know that Professors X and Y are not so good with students from underrepresented groups but nobody else really wants to do the student counseling job or the recruiting job and besides if they went back to their departments they wouldn't really be able to teach or do research and we think this research on how to make departments more welcoming to women is very interesting but we don't feel that we want to make any changes to what we are doing in our department at this time because our two women professors haven't told us that anything is wrong and things will get better as time goes on and if there were great women scientists they would have been nominated for the National Academy but the fact that they weren't proves there aren't that many and I would be more interested in hearing what you have to say if you weren't so angry and I can't help it if I'm staring at your boobs because evolution makes me do it and if you are going to wear that sexy shirt to the lab you have to expect to be treated like a sex object and if you are going to dress in a sack it just proves that all engineering women are ugly dykes and you really cannot expect to gain any allies for your cause when you are so angry and you are hurting the feminist cause and anyway why are you all worked up about privileged women academics who really have it pretty good when women in Some Other Country are being tortured and raped and anyway racism is the real issue* and things are getting better with each generation and my best friend is a woman scientist and she's never experienced discrimination and this is all just a bunch of political correctness liberal blather and I believe things are getting better and why are you so angry..."

My blog is not primarily about assuming that people are reasonable and well-intentioned and trying to get messages across to them. I'm not exactly sure what it's all about, but one thing it is about is a place for me to give voice to the decades of accumulated frustration and anger, to not have to talk reasonably and peaceably and calmly to douchenozzles that are driving me fucking crazy. Very few people who work for a living can ever afford to give voice to those feelings and thoughts in public, to analyze the douchebaggery for what it is. I couldn't when I was working. Now I can.

What can I say? I am a hairy-legged feminazi.

*anyway, racism is indeed the real issue AS WELL, you disingenuous douchebag.

Does "English-Only" Make Your Lab A Safer Place?

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:18:26 -0500

Prodigal Academic comments over at Isis's place:

Everyone speaking English is no guarantee of safety.
That is true, but since the lab was in the US, everyone in it is supposed to have a minimal proficiency in English. In practice, the net result was that the standard procedure was to use English first (allowing others to maintain a good awareness of what was going on around them in the lab), then confirm understanding in another language if necessary.

As a purely safety consideration, it makes a lot of sense to have a lab language. My group right now has 2 PhD students and 3 undergrads, all of whom speak decent to fluent English, and none of whom share another language in common. As it happens in my own lab, I don't actually care what language people use as long as everyone understands any hazardous conditions that may be present. If I see this not happening as the group grows, I may implement a similar English while setting up experiments rule.

When I began my PhD program, I had never set foot in a tissue culture lab before. I was an engineer, with a wee bit of chemistry experience from my M.S. But if you are intent on growing living cells, you are going to have to autoclave things. Or so I had come to understand.

I was a native English speaker, and so was everyone else in my lab. So, indeed, was everyone else that I interacted with regarding the use of the autoclave. Here's the extend of the instructions I got about using the autoclave:

"The autoclave is down the hall in room X. Put your stuff in this bin. For glassware you probably want to run it at such-and-so conditions. For liquids you probably want to run it at such-and-so conditions. Don't forget to put autoclave tape on your stuff so you know after what's been through the autoclave."

Everyone spoke English. Yay! But I am pretty sure I ruined some stuff for people, not to mention narrowly missed killing myself, before I finally haphazardly learned how to operate the autoclave.

Thoughts?