Sully has a new part of the Dish: Ask Andrew Anything. His latest underlines the beginning of a discussion that needs to happen in a world in which maleness is challenged.
I love the thought and earnestness of these little clips. However, I don’t think Andrew is entirely right in his description, but he is attempting to circumscribe a word that has meaning for a human sex (male) but isn’t necessarily present in all members of that sex and/or only members of that sex.
Biology and culture are hard hard hard to separate. But he may highlight something here that is at the core of this reinvention and reintegration of the masculine into identity.
I do not mean male in a biological sense, here, but instead a spectrum of behavior informed by biological trends. Males tend to be larger, have more musculature, and certainly have much more testosterone. These are, of course, tendencies within our species and not rules. Women produce testosterone just as men produce estrogen and need those hormones to be healthy. So what is Andrew getting at?
What I’m hearing is an effort to rephrase masculine/feminine within the context of an individual’s personality. Think Myers-Briggs. It isn’t better or worse to be introverted or extroverted, they are simply personality traits. Straight or gay? High libido or low? Vanilla or kink? Masculine or feminine?
Most of us sit somewhere between the spectrum endpoints listed. Thus, females can be very masculine and men can be very feminine and that can be a great thing. In fact, I’d argue the dynamism is what makes for the most interesting and world-changing individuals.
I’d love to hear how femininity has been essential to Sully’s identity. It’s been key to establishing mine.
Nature is a big deal. Vaunted and ancient, Nature publication is a serious endorsement. Womanspace, a poorly written story with truly embarrassing stereotypes, does not deserve such an endorsement. Ed Rybicki’s story about how women enter a parallel dimension making them good at shopping and womanly behaviors is frightening in how oblivious both the author and his editor, Henry Gee, are to how harmful the themes and ideas propagated within the story are. An actual paragraph from the story:
At this point I must digress, and mention, for those who are not aware, the profound differences in strategy between Men Going Shopping and Women Going Shopping. In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.
One winces at the idiocy on display here. Then one grieves for his wife and daughter, who likely endure his unintentional slights daily.
And within Rybicki’s unintentional meanness lies the tragedy. Christie Wilcox explains the irrelevance of intention and the impact:
I get what Ed was trying to do – he was trying to be funny. I might even be able to turn off my internal angry feminist for a moment and say that he didn’t mean to reinforce gender stereotypes, and instead was trying to tell a cute story about his wife. He wasn’t trying to be a complete jerk.
The thing is, a guy doesn’t have to be a complete jerk to be sexist. There are plenty of charismatic misogynists out there – guys who don’t notice how they say things that demean women, especially when they’re trying to be complimentary. They don’t even realize how their frivolous and yes, sometimes even funny, comments contribute to the derision of women in society and in STEM fields in particular.
A commenter here, for example, began a supportive comment on a post of mine with: “I think Christie is correct, and I’m not just saying that because according to her profile picture, she’s absolutely beautiful. [emphasis mine]“. I get it. He wastrying to be flattering – but instead, he implied that my looks are the most important factor in whether or not something I write is correct. It’s hardly the first comment I’ve received like that.
Commenter Peiter von Dokkum nails it down further:
What this story highlights is the issue of unintentional, subconscious bias, which is something that our community has to come to grips with. As is clear from his comment the author sees himself as supportive of women scientists, and merely intended to illustrate his own helplessness in the face of everyday obstacles. However, the story places women and men in fundamentally different categories: women are well-organized and domestically-oriented whereas men are useless in everyday life but come up with theories about the universe. It is this subconscious categorization which hurts women when they are climbing the academic ladder. I believe that men on search committees generally do not see themselves as biased, but that many men have subconscious notions about women which impact their chances of getting hired.
Things are better for female scientists than they were a few decades ago, as the overt sexism of the past is slowly dying out. Unfortunately subconscious biases still exist, as illustrated by this story. I am somewhat hopeful that these biases can be remedied, precisely because they are unintentional; it may help, for instance, to discuss these issues on search committees prior to interviewing candidates.
There is a wonderful compendium of retorts to the garbage that is Womanspace. The volume and quality of the negative response is heartening. Thank goodness for the instant retort made possible by the internet.
Richard Herring calls-out our biases and preposterous perceptions of those in wheelchairs in the hilarious, intelligent way that only the Brits can. It’s one of the best conversations around disability I’ve ever heard.
Wait for the wobbly comedienne around the 12 minute mark. It’s a highlight.
Makes me miss good AM radio. Ah the beeb.
We’re at something of an impasse here. Those interested in politics aren’t interested in science. Those interested in science are frustrated by politics. Few from either group know how to communicate with the other. We’ve been divided and thusly conquered.
What’s a disenchanted generation to do? Squat in a park and make cardboard signs? Or get in the lab and create a coup by pursuing the science, building the companies and creating the technologies we want to see exist?
Esquire has selected Andrew Sullivan as one of their Americans of the Year. I’ll take it a step further and say he is the Greatest Living American.
Why? Here’s why:
I arrived here, and you had people brawling over everything that mattered, and just presuming to do so, honoring no protocol or pecking order, and showing precious little deference to position… This was so different from the land of my birth. This was the America of my dreams.
Of course, he was already American, certificate or not. He was as American as the first American, who was not American at all but who left a place far away and arrived in this new place as a very different person. That is, of course, the essence of Americanism, which is to say that the immigrant with a vision of America may be more American than the baby born on this soil ten generations hence.
But the minute he started talking about a right no one had ever seriously contemplated, most who heard him reacted with Who the fuck are you? You don’t know what you’re talking about, you and your little essays. And you’re English! And that is how Sullivan came to be an American civil-rights pioneer: In the end, he didn’t know enough about America, outside his beautiful idealized version, to realize that what he wanted to do was simply impossible.
I cannot recall the source, but there is a quotation that binds me to this broken country in the way Sullivan too seems bound. I heard it as attributed to Thatcher, which for the old Tory ex-pat seems appropriate. It reads, “The governments of Europe were born out of war and history, whereas the United States was born out of philosophy.” Sullivan embodies the incessant battle of being American, of fighting for what is right, not because you hate America, but because you give a shit about it and will accept nothing less than what this country and it’s people deserve.
More than anything, though, Sullivan defines the American experience because he is self-defined. Bordered by two countries and two oceans, a space has been carved on this planet for a person to be autonomous, to self-govern, to self-create. Through a simple blog, he has shared that generative process with the world. And every step of the way, he was opposed, derided, and ridiculed, even by the very people he was fighting for in a country that didn’t want him. Through his writings Sullivan, Mark Warren put it so well, “continues to argue himself into existence every day.”
Were someone to challenge your right to exist – your right to be alive and who you are, as you are, could you argue your purpose, your place, your right to be, could you defend yourself? Could you make the case you deserve to persist?
Think on it. Then do it.
Sullivan has insisted on his right to be himself for the past 20 years. And he has changed the face and heart of our country because of it.
Right now, smartphones are touch screens. Why not make them bendable?
The obvious answer is that no one wants to interact with the phone this way, but the objects displayed on the phone. I don’t want to twist my phone to turn a page, I want to turn the damn page. Haptic holographics, baby.
Any thoughts, Bret Victor?
Do you like science? Do you like thinking about science? Do you like thinking about thinking about science?
Oh, well then do I have a gift for you.
Discover Magazine has launched their newest group blog, The Crux. The Crux is about science, meaning it covers everything scientific and Science itself, as an object of analysis. As the resident ethicist and futurist, I’ll add a much needed hyper-meta perspective to that detailed obsessed field while other brilliant minds blog about topics ranging from health care policy to astrophysics to neuroscience to economics.
Think of it as your one-stop-shop for finding how science has made your world better today.
You love science. You love me. You’ll love the Crux.
You can’t make this stuff up. In Scientific American, Eric Michael Johnson tells the sad story of Russian physiologist Il’ya Ivanov’s efforts to cross-breed humans with anthropoid apes. Ivanov was not planning to make super-soldiers, nor was he up to any comic book scale medical mischief. As is so often the case, Ivanov just wanted to see if a human-ape hybrid was possible via cross-breeding. As Johnson puts it, “Ivanov represents a scientist, widely respected in his field, whose dedication to find out if something could be done blinded him to ask whether it should be done.” Johnson’s investigation into Ivanov underlines the fact that this kind of atrocious research was conducted not by some rogue lunatic, but by a highly respected individual with the support of major institutions in Russia and France.
Once he got the support, here is how things went down:
With his small budget and use of Institut Pasteur’s facility Ivanov and his son traveled to French Guinea in Western Africa to carry out his artificial insemination experiments in March, 1926. However, his research was hounded at every turn. The “research station” had only two veterinarians on staff and Ivanov’s presence resulted in outrage that he might report on the atrocious conditions:
Ivanov explained that the hostility of the station’s staff arose from their fears that he would report back to Paris about the real problems at the facility. According to the documentation that he managed to see, about seven hundred chimpanzees had been bought from native hunters since the founding of the station in 1923, and more than half of them had died before they could be shipped to Paris for biomedical experiments.
Local hunters had kidnapped the chimpanzees from the wild as infants and all were still juveniles when Ivanov arrived. He only attempted to inseminate three females before being forced to abandon the project as useless. Desperate to make use of his limited funding, Ivanov then made the horrific decision to attempt the insemination of African women with chimpanzee sperm without their knowledge. He made a proposal to doctors at a local hospital about his experiment and was ready to proceed when the General Governor of French Guinea, Paul Poiret, rejected the plan. Out of options and funding, Ivanov and his son decided to return home.
The pursuit of science became a blinding force for Ivanov. Ivanov’s efforts were repudiated by the very foundations that supported him upon discovery of what he’d done to the African women.
My larger question here is what would Ivanov have done if successful? Raised the hybrid? How? In what conditions? With what expectations? His zeal to prove the possible did nothing to take into account the outcomes of his actions.
Discoveries open up not only new scientific possibilities, but new ethical obligations as well. We cannot remind ourselves of that too often.
Embodied cognition is the idea that my way of thinking is not independent of the body in which I live. My metaphors, imagination, and logical processes are influenced by my body’s position in space, relative height, closeness, or contact with other bodies and my perception of the environment. For those whose bodies have been modified or are outside of the species-typical spectrum (i.e. amputees) or, in the future, are largely cybernetic, the shape of the mind will change due to the different information coming in from a different body.
Samuel McNerney takes us through some simple associations between haptic response and judgment calls.
• Thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forward whilethinking about the past caused participants to lean slightly backwards. Future is Ahead
• Squeezing a soft ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as female while squeezing a hard ball influenced subjects to perceive gender neutral faces as male. Female is Soft
• Those who held heavier clipboards judged currencies to be more valuable and their opinions and leaders to be more important. Important is Heavy.
• Subjects asked to think about a moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth after the experiment than those who had thought about good deeds. Morality is Purity
Studies like these confirm Lakoff’s initial hunch – that our rationality is greatly influenced by our bodies in large part via an extensive system of metaphorical thought.
The entire essay is a must read.
