azspot:

M. Wuerker

Giving Women the Access Code   →

There is an overwhelming gap between males and females in both engineering and computer science, and it’s not because males are wired any differently. Women are raised to believe that these areas just aren’t meant for them—genetically and socially. 

TL;DR Holler, quantitative reasoning girls, don’t take no for an answer, don’t take reduced wages for an answer. 

"School isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. In the race to get into college, get a job and “succeed” in life, we’ve forgotten the true purpose. We aren’t able to genuinely learn at school, because what is taught is merely useless facts, meant to swallow then spit back out. No deep meaning is instilled, because our goal is to pass the test. To me, this is sad. Few people learn to know anymore, they go to school solely because it’s required. They go through the motions of learning, but it’s all a facade. And people wonder why students in the U.S aren’t getting the jobs they want? It’s inpart because the education they actually have, doesn’t match up to the education they have on paper…and it shows in the real world. Regurgitation of material can allow students to pass the test, but in the real scheme of things, that’s not the ultimate goal. The real test should be if students can apply the material in a situation where it’s called for, even if *gasp* this ocassion doesn’t arise in the same course. Students are beginning to recognize these things and should let their teachers hear their views. #Studentsunite Together, we can make a change."

—Tara S.’ Comment on A Dictator Unwilling to Step Down « Cooperative Catalyst (via the blog of a doctor of nothing) (source: lockedupforyearsinameasureofmind)

(Source: coopcatalyst.wordpress.com)

"But where is the condemnation of the culture of violence fetishization? Where are the tough questions for those Christians who support the NRA, paying dues to an organization that spends millions to continually expand access to weapons of violence in a nation with more guns – and more gun violence – than nearly any other? Similarly, where is the condemnation of a system that is so broken that thousands of people can be deprived access to health care to the point of dying? Where are the tough questions for those Christians who demonize and promise to repeal attempts at making that system better, such as the Affordable Care Act? Are the victims of gun violence no less our neighbors than the victims of abortion? Are the children dying from preventable diseases in our own country no less our neighbors than the children dying in their mothers’ wombs?"

—If Trayvon Martin Were a Fetus, Christians Would Be a Whole Lot More Upset (via azspot)

(via revolutionofconsciousness)

deathsy:

The rest of the list from the linked source:

 

Relationships, Sex, and Sexuality

1. For different-sex couples, women are expected to take their husband’s name, or at the very least hyphenate, but many men still balk at the idea of even considering adopting their wife’s name. If a woman decides to keep her name, both partners areinterrogated and shamed by friends and family.
2. For same-sex couples, people think it is okay to ask “who’s the woman/man of the couple?”
3. Women are seen as the “gatekeepers” to morality/sexuality, charged with the duty of fending off the advances of men. If they fail then they were “asking for” it and/or are “damaged goods”. Their clothing/actions will always be questioned to see if they were “leading on” the man at all.
4. Men are seen as “beasts” who are unable to control their “raging hormones” – which absolves them of guilt for “improper” sex (anything from date rape to sex outside of marriage) but also paints them as uncivilized brutes.
5. Women are “sluts”, men are “players”.
6. Women’s worth goes down according to how many sexual partners people think she has had.
7. Men’s worth goes up according to how many sexual partners people think he has had.
8. We live in a rape culture where many people continue to blame the victims of rapeand domestic violence.
9. We buy into the myth that all men (even minors) are, at all times, willing to fuck a “gorgeous” woman and any man who would pass up sex with a remotely attractive woman is deserving of ridicule.
10. Wives/mothers are still expected to do most of the home/childcare, even if they have a job outside the home.
11. Fathers/husbands are seen as bumbling dolts who are mentally incapable of cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, or any other traditionally feminine task.
12. There are significantly more stay-at-home moms than there are dads.
13. Men are expected to pay on a date, and some men expect women to put out for this “service”.

The Public Sphere

1. Men continue to be a clear majority in the government, prominent positions in businesses, and other public places of power.
2. There have been so few female leaders in most countries. For instance, in the Group of Eight:
   • America has never had a female president.
   • Canada’s first, and only, female prime minister was Kim Campell [1993].
   • Britain’s first, and only, female prime minister was Margaret Thatcher [1979-1990].
   • France’s first, and only, female prime minister was Edith Cresson [1991-1992].
   • Italy has never had a female prime minister.
   • Japan has never had a female prime minister.
   • Russia has never had a female president.
   • Germany’s first, and only, female Chancellor is Angela Merkel [2005].
3. Pakistan, which is held up by many Americans as a “backward” country regarding women’s rights, elected a female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, twice while Americans were still debating whether or not America was “ready” for a female president (here are some other female leaders who have been elected while America has been dragging its feet).
4. There are still areas in our so-called “equal” societies where sex discrimination,sexual harassment and the glass ceiling are alive and kicking.
5. It’s considered “big news” when articles tell mothers who work outside the home that they “can’t have it all”, but not so much when articles call for work reforms and male responsibility.
6. Women in the sex trade, even those who have chosen the life, are treated as sub-human on a regular basis.
7. It is not seen as sex discrimination to include harmful (and expensive!) items such as makeup and high heels in the requirements for a woman’s dress code while having no such constraints on the men’s dress code.
8. Women are still discouraged from entering the sciences by social stereotypes, lack of job availability, and the continuing belief that women just aren’t smart enough.
9. It is considered appropriate to attack a female public figure because of her appearanceand fashion sense.
10. One of the first ways to discredit women who speak up in public forums is to threaten sexual violence.
11. Women are disproportionately affected by fat discrimination in the workforce and other places.

Appearance, Bodily Sovereignty, and Personhood

1. Men’s bodies belong to no one but themselves; women’s uteri are seen as the property of men, the government, and even strangers.
2. Women’s place as full-fledged legal and social adults is not assured.
3. Women are seen first and foremost by their physical attributes and secondly by theirrelevant qualities.
4. The double-standard of beauty is camouflaged under myths of empowerment and liberation.
5. Women feel the need to undergo a potentially dangerous operation on their healthy vaginas in order to please their husbands/boyfriends by striving towards an unrealistic beauty standard set by mainstream porn.
6. It is seen as appropriate for stranger and friend alike to give unsolicited comments on a woman’s appearance: her weight, fashion, leg/armpit hair, etc.
7. Eating disorders, caused primarily by our society’s unhealthy obsession with fat, are still rampant among women (significantly more than among men).
8. There are contests like “Pimp My Ride”.

And many, many other reasons.

(via thisnewscandal)

Why Benevolent Sexism Matters   →

Benevolent sexism: the culture of gender traditions that feed the fire of hostile sexism towards women, in a manner that seems sympathetic and proper but is in fact subtle and dangerous. Benevolent sexism is widely-accepted and encouraged by the men and women whom it is inculcated in. 

TL;DR @ article: We think the proper way to treat a woman is with patronizing affection and insisting on conventional chivalry and bringing attention to her physical appearances, but these actions are often social illusions that place women in subordinate positions and prevent them from exploring their identities. Much of what is given to them is not wanted, and much of what is wanted (ex. women who appreciate chivalry and gender norms etc.), is only wanted because it has been fabricated, instilled in growing girls by patriarchic media and norms, resulting in a lack of actual fulfillment and equality. Benevolent sexism ultimately cripples women’s abilities to challenge inequality and prevent discrimination. 

(Source: historicalcontext)

stratifiedsquamousepithelium:

The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance: For those who think I rant about the patriarchy and misogyny too much

queen-gertrude:

TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE CULTURE, STREET HARASSMENT 

thelittlekneesofbees:

To the first man, who I met by the Eiffel Tower my second week in Paris, when I didn’t know better.  Who took me out four times, who waved little red flags that I tried to ignore.  Like asking me outright if I was a virgin on the first date, like calling me five different pet names when I’d asked him not to throughout the second, like saying he’d heard that feminists were not real women during the third, like disappearing for a week and a half after the fourth.  Who, as it turns out, was not the bullet, but the careening fourteen-wheeler that I narrowly managed to dodge.  Who admitted that he hit the young woman that his mother was trying to force him to marry.  Who didn’t want to marry her because he believes in romantic love.  Who doesn’t see the contradiction in those two sentences.

To the guy in my medieval literature class, who lent me one of Camus’ plays and showed me around the library.  Who wants to use his French education not to escape to the West, but to go back to his third-world home country to teach at its eight-year-old university.  Who I admired until he asked me what my American boyfriend had thought about me coming to Paris, until he demanded to know why I didn’t have one (a boyfriend, that is), until he asked if it was required that I marry an American.  Who reached out and touched my earrings, without asking, the next time he saw me.  Who won’t take a hint. 

To the PhD student who tried to take me up to his apartment after a five minute conversation, when I had just wanted to get lunch, who said there’s a first time for everything.  Who told me that we were university students, living in a 21st century democracy, and that relations between men and women were different now, so what was I so scared of?  Who recoiled in shock when I told him that I had friends who’d been raped, and by other university students, at that.  Who does not have to think about rape on a daily basis.  Who insisted on paying for my lunch, because “it was a matter of honor.”  Who then physically prevented me from handing my money to the cashier, when I was trying to make it clear that this was not a date.  Who didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t want a boyfriend, five times.  Whose number I blocked the moment I stepped on the metro.  Who has called me three times since.  Who told me he wants to go into Senegalese politics.  Who, I can only hope, will listen to the women of his country better than he listened to me.

To the delivery guy on the red motorcycle idling outside of the apartments on Avenue de Porte de Vanves, the ones I walk past every day, who said bonsoir and who, because I said it in return to be polite, followed me to the metro as I walked, head twisted down, pretending that I didn’t understand the language I’ve studied for eight years.

To the two men Thursday night in le Marais, swaggering drunk toward me, ignoring the male friend standing by my side, who leered at my chest and slurred, “Bonsoir, comme tu es mignonne,” as I shoved past them, trying to sound angry, not afraid.  Who left me feeling fidgety and panicked, so when I took the night bus in the wrong direction and found myself alone with two other strange men at a bus stop at 2:30 A.M., I let the cab driver fleece me out of 25 euro just to take a taxi home.

To the group of teenage boys loitering on the corner by my apartment, who decided to sound a siren at my approach because I was wearing a knee-length dress and a bulky sweater.  Who made me regret forgoing tights because I had wanted to feel the spring air on my calves for once.  Who will never have to wear an itchy pair of pantyhose in their entire lives.  To whom I said nothing, because I still have to walk past that corner twice a day for the next three-and-a-half months, because there were five of them and one of me. 

To the three men standing on the corner of the periphery five minutes later when I was crossing the street.  To the one who motioned for his friends to turn and look at me, quick, and then left his wolf-whistle ringing in my ears, shame like sunburn covering my face.  Who didn’t care that it was broad daylight.  Who made me wish that I could swear a blue streak back in French, without my accent betraying that I am American, which is another word for “easy” here.

To the two men at sunset on the bridge by Saint Michel, in the middle of tourist central, who made skeeting noises at me, like a pair of sputtering mosquitoes, to get my attention.  Who laughed when I flipped them off, and who kept hissing at me anyway.  Who forced me to keep checking over my shoulder, all the way to the metro, to make sure that I wasn’t being followed.

But also to the French friend who blamed my problems with French men on my university in the northern suburbs, a Parisian synonym for emeutes, gang violence, and immigration.  Who insisted that if he brought me to his upper-crust private (white) university—where the French elite reproduces itself into perpetuity—I would meet nicer French guys.  Who forced me to defend the men who’d harassed me against his barely-veiled, racist critique.

And also to the American friend at home who nearly rolled his eyes as he half-listened to my stories, who said, “Oh god, it’s hard being so attractive, isn’t it?” as if I was being vain.  Who laughs and does not understand why I always duck out of the frame of photographs, who knows nothing of what my body means to me. 

And that’s just two months in Paris. 

To all the Italian men who made me wish I had dyed my hair black before studying in Florence, who kept me from going out dancing because I got sick of feeling them creeping up behind me, sneaking their hands around my waist (and lower) when I’d already said NO three times.

To the six-foot-something Georgetown student who prided himself on protecting the girls from being groped on the dance floor.  Who chose to write about the rape of the Sabine woman for that week’s assignment.  Who described the way her breast slipped free of her tunic when she fell, as if he was writing a porno, not a rape scene, who had the woman fall in love with her Roman rapist the next morning, after he spun her a tale of the coming glory of his country. Who said “in a fit of passion, she thrust herself upon his member” and was not joking.  Who ended the story with the titular character saying to her children that she had been raped, but only at first.

To the seventh-grade boy who told my younger sister that he could rape her, if he wanted to.

To the gang of twenty-five year-olds in the Jeep who hollered at her as they drove past, leering at her thirteen-year-old body dressed in sweat pants and a tank top.  Who made my sister, fearless on the soccer field and in the classroom and in the karate studio, run home crying. Who were the reason she became afraid to walk the dog by herself in our “safe, suburban” neighborhood.

To my father, who said, “What white male privilege?”  Who was not being ironic.

(via itsneverwritteninstone-deactiva)

"There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse."

—This Teju Cole piece from The Atlantic  on The White Savior Industrial Complex has already made the rounds of the Tumblrs and the Twitters this week, but I wanted to quote this part anyway. You should obviously read everything that Teju Cole wrote because it is brilliant and so incredibly important, but this passage is unparalleled. It is probably the smartest thing I’ve read on the Internet so far this year, and considering how many smart thinkers I have the privilege to read on a regular basis, that’s saying something. Cole speaks to something so critical about the nature of the complicated experience of agency and dialogue from within the marginal space with this passage, an element that is so overlooked even by those sympathetic with movements for equality. (via thepoliticalnotebook)

(via dishabillic)

"What you get in this Tumblr scene is imitators of imitators of imitators, each less skilled than the one before them"

—The Tumblr Trap (via nevver)

(via nevver)

los tigres de antigua: okaytight: tigersofantigua: bruh fox news commentators will be talking...   →

okaytight:

tigersofantigua:

bruh fox news commentators will be talking about “why can’t we say that word”

can i call it

i’m callin it

The Official Drinking Game:

“It was a slip-up” = one shot

“It means something different now” = two shots and a side-eye

“They shouldn’t say it…

I’m not even sure they’d pass it off as calling someone the n-word as okay—

He stopped mid-word, right? There’s nothing else he could have possibly been saying, but knowing them… they could come up with anything. They could say Santorum was something else, even if that’s impossible. Supporters will eat it up. 

I can’t decide which is worse. 

(Source: cyberterrorist, via cyberterrorist)

Are you serious, presidential “candidates” calling the President of the USA the n word?

zikrayat:

GET OUT JUST GO AWAY NEVER COME BACK

For a link: 

My fucking God there’s always been so much implied and so much explicit that’s so fucking wrong but how, how can anyone not see how blatantly unacceptable this is? How do you not see all of the bad policies and views and language and hatred? THIS GUY GETS VOTES. PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIKE HIM. PEOPLE STILL LIKE HIM. 

(Source: radicalijtihad)

"I am sick to death of people who celebrate “the family” making excuses about why other people’s children are expendable. I am sick to death of politicians who are more concerned about protecting zygotes than about the teenagers on whom they seek to balance their budgets and advance their careers. (Barney Frank’s line about conservatives’s believing that life “begins at conception and ends at birth” was not entirely a joke, although it’s always been treated as one.) I am sick to death of opportunistic yahoos who can look at this country’s unhealthy attachment to firearms and declare that the actions of George Zimmerman, while unfortunate, were pretty much what the Founders had in mind. I am sick to death of the steady drip-drip-drip of all the topical anesthetics we mix up whenever something like this happens. Had Emmett Till been killed in 2012, there’d be at least three people sitting in the CNN Green Room right now — and probably 15 of them sitting offstage at Fox — waiting to explain how unfortunate it was that the lad so transgressed against local custom that circumstances dictated that he be beaten to a pulp and tossed into the river tied to a cotton-gin fan. I am sick to death about how we can argue about anything simply to argue about it, and then move along to the next argument, as though anything at all has been settled."

—Charles P. Pierce (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn   →

Redish has been teaching at the University of Maryland since 1970. When he started, he lectured because that’s the way he had been taught. But after a few years in the classroom, Redish was meeting with one of his mentors, a famous physicist named Lewis Elton who had begun doing research on education.

“He asked me, ‘How’s your teaching?’”

Redish told him it was going well, but that he seemed to be most effective with the students “who do really well and are motivated” about physics.

Elton looked at Redish, smiled, and said, “They’re the ones who don’t really need you.”

“Imagine two students sitting next to one another, Mary and John. Mary has the right answer because she understands it. John does not. Mary’s more likely, on average, to convince John than the other way around because she has the right reasoning.”

But here’s the irony. “Mary is more likely to convince John than professor Mazur in front of the class,” Mazur says.

 “She’s only recently learned it and still has some feeling for the conceptual difficulties that she has whereas professor Mazur learned [the idea] such a long time ago that he can no longer understand why somebody has difficulty grasping it.”

(Source: world-shaker, via overcomplicatingismyforte)

To My Fellow White People: An Open Letter   →

Some of you–not going to name names, you will figure out who you are– are saying, or thinking, that in one way or another Trayvon is at fault for his own murder. You are saying, or thinking, “He should have known that he looked suspicious with that hoodie on.” “He should have known that someone like him would come across as threatening.” “He shouldn’t have felt afraid of the large man following him and chasing after him.” You are saying, or thinking, exactly the same sort of thing that some of you say, or think, about rape victims: They should have known what a dangerous world it is for them out there and they should have dressed and carried themselves accordingly, so as not to invite bad things to happen to them.

Never mind, of course, that the people who do these bad things are responsible for what they say, think, and do, too. Never mind, of course, that the people who actually do racist, sexist things are emboldened and enabled by the way that good folks who would never, ever in a million years think of doing such things continually blame their victims and not them. No, racists and rapists are just a fact of life in your worldview, like severe weather; women and people of color have to dodge them, take cover, be on the lookout, but we certainly can’t think that there’s something we might do about them.

Some of you get angry when I talk like this. You protest that you would never do racist things or commit rape. You are just making an observation. You don’t mean to say anything racist or sexist. Then I point out to you the difference between intent and impact. You might not mean to say racist things, but the things you are saying just are racist. The very fact that you have to appeal to the purity of your intentions to cleanse your words should provide you with a hint. Neither your good intentions or mine have magical powers. If you said something that was racist, your good intentions, assuming they are good, mean at best that you need to be far more careful in what you say and think. Learn from it in all humility and try to do better next time. Trust me, I’ve been there many times.

Some of you get even angrier at being told this. How unfair, you protest! Isn’t it a free country anymore? Now I have to police what I say and think? Yes, of course you do! I was raised in rural Kentucky to believe that people are supposed to think carefully before they say things and consider the impact my words have on others. This is just what good people do. However hard it is in practice, it isn’t all that complicated a concept. Why is this somehow forgotten, though, when the others aren’t other white people? Do you really want or need me to answer that question out loud?

(Source: azspot, via dishabillic)