feminist blogs

If you’ve kept track of the scant number of posts I’ve contributed to Feministe over the past half-year, you may have realized that I get very irritated when I come across blatantly misleading “science” reporting. (I guess it must come from being raised by scientists, then working in the media.) So my eyeballs bulged and turned a hilarious shade of pink when I came across this lead for a “Health” story on the BBC News site courtesty of Feministing:

Humour ‘comes from testosterone’
Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his “amusing” hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Previous findings have suggested women and men differ in how they use and appreciate humour.

Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones.

What we really need to do is find out the gender of whoever research and wrote this story for the BBC, because few things are funnier than someone who’s supposed to be a journalist, working for the largest broadcasting company in the world, making a complete ass out of themselves. Not to mention spreading the story to all sorts of other news services that seem to be taking the story seriously.

So, the first thing I always do with these science stories is find the original study: Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling. It turns out that Sam Shuster is a retired professor of dermatology. (Note to BBC researchers: this means he studied skin, not hormones or psychology.) Shuster wrote about reactions to his unicycle for the traditional end-of-year issue of the British Medical Journal. This season, the BMJ also features densely written scientific papers on which brand chocolate bar doctors ought to use to demonstrate bone fractures and whether magical powers are heritable, based on an analysis of Harry Potter novels. In short, it’s clearly a joke. I would blame the notoriously dry wits of the British for the confusion, but it seems all too likely that the BBC reporter is… also British, albeit maybe not a doctor with enough time on hand to write witty, self-referential papers about the statistical mistreatment of orthopedic surgeons in medical journals.
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Attitudes like Sherri Shepherd’s are why there are still so many queer & trans youth out on the streets. At least attitudes like hers in kind, if not in degree. She tried to make some kind of point about how she wouldn’t just go off at her son if he wanted to wear a dress… but you know, if you have a serious problem and even a moral opposition to some part of your child that they can’t change about themselves? And you say that there’s no place for that in your house? It’s only a hop, skip and a jump before they have no place in your house. Seriously… how many more generations before good parenting means letting kids grow up, whether they’re trans or not, straight or not, while expressing their gender however they want to?

I found the clip via Feministing, where there’s some trans 101 going on in the comments as usual, along with people tsking at Barbara Walters for assuming that a child might be trans. That’s funny, I watched the video and it seemed to me like she spent more than half the time saying that it’s quite possible the child isn’t trans–which is quite true. When you take a step back, it starts to look really obvious which is the possibility that nobody wants to deal with or think about, isn’t it? Also, the question came up: is it all right to forbid your son from wearing a dress for his own safety? It’s not a bad question. But I think it needs to be asked with the understanding that for a whole lot of trans people, it’s far more than an issue of whether people are going to make fun of you or beat you up. And asked with the goal in mind that regardless of who a kid grows up to be, we ought to be working towards a home and school environment where kids are protected from persecution based on gender expression.

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with my roommate Ariel, who is not only a calendar pinup girl but also a Young Jewish Leader of America.^TM I mention this because she pointed me to Jameel’s translation at the Muqata, of an article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It’s about a small group of haredi (aka “ultra-Orthodox Jewish”) women who have adopted the traditionally Muslim burqa.

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That line comes from an article in today’s New York Times, and no, it’s not a quote from some MRA talking about divorce laws, or Bill O’Reilly sounding off about Hillary. It’s a piece by a woman named Kelly Valen about her brief membership in a sorority in college. Since it’s about a woman’s experience, it’s of course in the Sunday Styles section between an article about the Hello, Kitty! vibrator and an ad for thousand-dollar purses.

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