February 2011

Senior New Zealand Police Minister Continues to Endorse, Encourage, Enable Prison Rape

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2011-02-28 15:00

Photo via Stuff.co.nz. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo of NZ Police Minister Judith Collins via stuff.co.nz

New Zealand blogger Maia says the recent earthquake seems to be giving the local justice department head an opportunity to further indulge in rape culture and, by extension, homophobia.

From the [New Zealand] Herald: Police Minister Judith Collins said the actions of looters was akin to “people who rob the dead”. She expected to see the judiciary throw the book at looters.

“I hope they go to jail for a long time – with a cellmate.”

Judith Collins introduced widespread double-bunking; she championed it in the media. When people who had actually done research suggested that it would lead to more prison rape and violence, she shrugged those statements off.

And now she’s telling us that, for her, abuse and violence between inmates is a feature of double-bunking, not a bug. She is not explicit, but we live in a culture where threats of rape in prison are common enough that she doesn’t need to finish the thought by telling us that the cellmate is large and called Bubba. By signalling that she thinks looters should be subject to rape and violence from their cell mates, she has acknowledged that her policy of introducing cellmates is responsible for increased rape and violence.

Source: Alas, a blog

This is pretty cool.  I'm glad she brought it up.

Few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that it will be the new, the young, the white, the middle-class, the petty-criminals, or the white-collar criminals who will become the victims of prison rape when inmates are “doubled up” unsupervised in cells.

Similarly, few things identify rape culture quite like the assumption that if assertions like Collins’s are true then the prison system rewards, encourages, coddles, or even tacitly recruits those who really are prison rapists by providing them with more victims.

And finally, few things identify rape culture quite like the general failure of progressives to push back on the previous two assumptions.

While rates of rape and sexual assault seem to be in decline in the general population, prison rape remains a huge reservoir not only of future perpetrators but of current ones! And of current victims. Thanks so much for bringing this up and for making the connection so clearly.

Couple other little assumptions in there

  • That only prisoners sexually assault or rape prisoners
  • That only male prisoners sexually assault or rape fellow prisoners
  • That (dreadful as it sounds) rape and sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to one in prison.
  • That sex between prisoners is inevitably non-consensual, or that loneliness and isolation can never be so great that otherwise straight prisoners never seek or form intimate or sexual bonds with each other.

But the main thing is that New Zealand's senior police official thinks that "tough on crime" means incorporating prison rape into corrections policy rather than opposing or working to minimize it.  She's not alone.


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Simplified Access to Contraception Cuts Abortion Rates in Half So Anti-Choicers Want to, What Else, Eliminate It

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2011-02-28 12:41

Sungold has what might help explain the right's otherwise inexplicable* intolerance of contraception.

Here’s an item from the annals of “no shit, Sherlock!” science: A UCSF study shows a stunning decrease in unintended pregnancy and abortion when women are dispensed a year’s supply of birth control pills at once. What’s stunning is not the basic trend line, but the magnitude of the study’s findings. Science Daily recaps it:

"Researchers observed a 30 percent reduction in the odds of pregnancy and a 46 percent decrease in the odds of an abortion in women given a one-year supply of birth control pills at a clinic versus women who received the standard prescriptions for one — or three-month supplies."

Can I rephrase those numbers? Pregnancy declined by nearly a third, and abortion by nearly half!

Source: Kittywampus

More contraception means fewer abortions.  Since at least the 1980s hard-core anti-abortion activists have worried (correctly in my view) that there's an abortion rate threshhold below which the "squishy middle" will lose interest.  Since the hard-core's goal is absolute elimination of abortion (or at least abortion rights), again at least in the 1980s, they made a strategic decision to oppose any and all initiatives that only reduce abortion rates.

Consequently contraception is to an anti-choicer as garlic is to a vampire: a horror to be avoided and eliminated at all cost.

Cutting abortion demand by half is the last thing those assholes want.

See also

*Until maybe the middle 1970s there were on balance probably more highly-placed Republican supporters of birth control than Democratic ones it seems particularly hard to understand.  In 1947 George W. Bush's not particularly liberal grandfather Prescott Bush was nevertheless the first nationwide capital fundraiser for Planned Parenthood!  This connection probably cost him a Senate seat in Connecticut when Democrats teamed up with Catholic churches to oppose his election.  He lost by only 1,000 votes, but he still lost.  Nor was the Bush family unusual.


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Jesse Bering Claims Lesbians are Funnier Than Straight Women, Thinks Sociobiology and Butch Brain Cells Explain Why

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2011-02-27 01:07

Jesse Bering just can't get enough of that sociobiology. This time, in a post about how an allegedly tiny number of female humorists are "crowded out on the roster of female comedy all-stars by a long list of Sapphic wise-girls" he volunteers the following explanation for why there are two, like, totally different kinds of senses of humor, one, "humor production" for boys, another, "humor receptivity," is for girls.

And of course, maybe because it's about men being "productive" and women just "receptive," Bering naturally gravitates to the sexual selection solution.

The authors [of the study Bering is expanding on here] interpret these data, and similar data, by drawing from psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s ideas about the evolution of humor. Miller has argued that ancestral males’ ability to produce entertaining humor demanded a set of heritable cognitive skills, including intelligence and creativity, and thus was a hard-to-fake signal of genetic quality. Due to the sexes’ differential investment in reproduction (just at a coital level alone, about 90 seconds versus 9 months), women would have evolved to be more receptive to signs of genetic quality than males. Men, meanwhile, would have been on the lookout for women who responded positively to their humor.

Source: Scientific American

If Miller really thinks that then he's an idiot. Not because it's implausible, though it is. But because maybe, just maybe, not everything about "reproductive fitness" is about the reproduction part.

For instance I wonder if... naw... couldn't possibly be... you could test his hypothesis by assessing whether men are more likely to joke around women (which would help confirm his hypothesis) or around mixed company (which would be the null hypothesis if one wasn't a sociobiology fetishist) or around other men. Which it seems to me would be at least as effective at helping men defuse tension between rivals, boost morale when things looked bad, enhance camaraderie and thus group bonding, and so on.

What are the odds that male bonding, morale boosting, and tension defusing might increase men's likelihood of surviving long enough to be reproductively successful? Oh, right, silly me, the only possible sources of selective pressure in humans were spreading seed and avoiding leopards.

Similarly, if I was to try and test the "humor receptivity" side of Miller's hypothesis I might also look to see if more women are found in comedy audiences, whether men and women are equally likely to appreciate other people's humor, or if men are more likely to listen to and laugh at other men's jokes.

Oh, and hey, here's Bering with another welcome notion:

Researchers who study homosexuality have discovered that the brains of many lesbians were over-exposed to male hormones during prenatal development, influencing not only their adult sexual orientation, but also masculinizing other behavioral and cognitive traits in which there exist innate sex differences. This is not true of all lesbians, but it is especially true for those who exhibit male-typed profiles. So it is not implausible that some lesbians’ courtship strategies would largely mimic opposite-sex-typed patterns, including a differentiated capacity for humor production that attracts female attention. This would not be a conscious strategy, it must be emphasized, and indeed this is what many critics of evolutionary psychology repeatedly fail to realize.

And finally, if I was to try and test Bering's "lesbians have little penises inside their brains that make them act like men" hypothesis, and maybe backup Miller's humor-receptivity hypothesis, I might check out the audience composition of women comedians (lesbian and otherwise.) Would we see more women in the audience, equal numbers of men and women, or more men? Remember, if any men at all show for women comedians, or appreciate their senses of humor, that's going to substantially complicate the "women evolved to laugh at men's jokes" notion.

Also, yeah, I guess the first thing people always say about humorists like Lucille Ball, Mae West, Mary Tyler Moore, Christine Lavin, Moms Mabley, Gracie Allen, Roseanne Barr, Carol Burnett, Imogene Cocoa, Phyllis Diller, Fran Dreshcher, Terry Garr, Valerie Harper, Gilda Radner, Tracy Ulner, Ana Marie Cox, Nikol Hasler, Totie Fields, Madeline Kahn, Fanny Brice, Jane Austin, Tina Fey, Louise Lasser, Amy Poehler, the Roach sisters, Sarah Haskins, Erma Bombeck, Goldie Hawn, etc. is "what a bunch of dykes."


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"Pro-Life" War on Polluters Escalating? South Dakota Wants "Justifable Homicide," Georgia Says Death Penalty

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2011-02-26 23:42

Speaking of draconian "fetal protection" laws with unintended spillover effects, Jen Phillips says they're at it in Georgia too.

Under [Georgia] Rep. Franklin's bill, HB 1, women who miscarry could become felons if they cannot prove that there was "no human involvement whatsoever in the causation" of their miscarriage.

Source: Mother Jones

And... if she can prove that she lived downwind of, say, a peanut, peach, or cotton farmer who sprays chemicals known to cause miscarriage, spontaneous abortion, or even failure to implant, or, oh, say, a paper plant that emits other chemicals known to do likewise does Rep. Franklin propose merely letting her off the hook and go after the party now guilty (under his terms) of either negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter?

Somebody's got to start asking these questions. If not of the likes of Rep. Franklin in Georgia, or Rep. Phil "justifiable homicide" Jensen in South Dakota, or all the wannabes and copycats in Nebraska, Iowa, and elsewhere then perhaps manufacturers, distributors, and users of those chemicals might be able to help out with an answer.

Because it seems to me that if they can't prove the pesticides, pollutants, and industrial materials to which their "human involvement" exposed any woman who miscarried then... shouldn't they then be subject to Mr. Franklin's death penalties and Mr. Jensen's "justifiable homicides?"

Again, has anyone contacted them do see if they support these initiatives?


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Who Do You Want Your Definition of Feminism to Come From Betty Freidan, Who Loved Men, or Phyllis Schalfly, Who Hates Women?

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-02-24 22:14

Shannon Kelley, responding to a whole litany of anti-feminist lies originated by career lawyer, writer, national-level political consultant, prominent and influential conservative stalwart, and... professional propagandist for limiting women to domestic duties Phyllis Schlafly, includes this kind of foundational-to-feminism point:

Betty Friedan, pied piper of those dirty, man-hating feminists, once said that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men”?

Source: Undecided

Since one of (heterosexual) men's greatest anxieties is that women don't freely and fully love them you'd think there'd be more common ground between feminism and men's rights activism.

And so when you don't see common ground between them it's a good idea to look for any obvious obstacles.

And for me the most obvious obstacle is the concern would be people like Phyllis Schlafly who, based on both time spent in her public career and on whatever little amount of private or family life she's ever bothered to take time for, has never shown much in the way of love for anyone.

Anyway, I'd pick Betty Friedan's generous feminism to Schlafly's pinched misanthropy any day of the week.


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Searched for Origin of "Coerced Paternity After Oral Sex" Story, Found Sherry Colb's Interesting FindLaw Blog Instead

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-02-24 19:03

So about a week ago Amanda Hess mentioned a peculiar paternity case that's making the rounds of the blogosphere lately... even though the case in question was decided back in 2005.

The saga of Dr. Richard Phillips and Dr. Sharon Irons continues: "Phillips accuses Dr. Sharon Irons of a 'calculated, profound personal betrayal' after their affair six years ago, saying she secretly kept semen after they had oral sex, then used it to get pregnant," the Associated Press reports. After toiling in Chicago courts for years, "An appeals court said [Phillips] can press a claim for emotional distress after learning a former lover had used his sperm to have a baby. But he can’t claim theft, the ruling said, because the sperm were hers to keep." Irons, who has established Phillips' paternity of the child, claims that she and Phillips had sexual intercourse on multiple occasions during their relationship..

Source: TBD

As I usually do when stories that resemble "evergreen" memes crop up I started looking for any other references to either of the two doctors and... pretty much couldn't find anything that wasn't related to the 2005 appeals court ruling.  Nothing about the initial ruling, nothing about other allegations, nothing about the child who'd now be a 10 or 11 year old, and definitely nothing about whether Dr. Phillips might have come to appreciate having a child even if (as he alleges but she disputes) Dr. Irons conceived the child in a very deplorable manner.  (I'd be bloody horrified to learn I had a child I didn't know about because I really, really enjoy being a father and it would totally gut me to miss out on the first two years of one of my children's lives, even if the mom was a total dick.)

Anyway, the only serious non-knee-jerk discussion of the case I found was this pretty cool and even-handed consideration of the case and its circumstances by Cornell Prof Sherry Colb at FindLaw, again, back in 2005: When Oral Sex Results in a Pregnancy: Can Men Ever Escape Paternity Obligations.

On the one hand, she says, the law is and has been since roughly the Code of Hammurabi that "when a baby comes into the world, both the man and the woman whose genes led up to the child's existence are ordinarily responsible for the care of that baby, regardless of whether the child was 'wanted' by both parents."  On the other hand "even if one accepts that intercourse equals consent to paternity, what happens when a man does not consent to intercourse? Does he still bear the risk of becoming a father? The case of Phillips and Irons ... tests our intuitions about that very question."

While Colb clearly accepts Phillips's claims for the sake of the argument she does nicely construct hypothetical cases where a man unambiguously (and, significantly, non-sexually) could become a biological partner.  And asks, correctly, why would a victim be held responsible for the care of a child he literally had only an absconded-with biological connection to.  (Colb doesn't mention it but see also the extreme-outlier statutory-rape/paternity mix-up case I mentioned a few posts ago.)

You need to read her post for the details, the upshot of which makes you realize that not only are there no easy questions, there are no easy answers either.  But in the end Colb comes down, narrowly and tentatively on the side of not holding a biological parent legally, economically, or physically responsible who literally has no responsibility for the creation of his child.

To which I would just add, implies, strongly, that the same must be true of holding legally or economically responsible a biological parent who equally literally has no responsibility for the creation of her child.  An item which, if Colb's opinion were made law, would offer an entirely non-"privacy penundrum" foundation for quite a bit of law regarding reproductive choice.  Egregious "no exception for rape" clauses being only the most obvious.

And finally, no, I never did find out anything else about that now-old appeals court case except a few terse newswire accounts and a lot of angry people's speculations and opinions thereof.  (Even Colb's post, while informed in terms of the law, is speculative in terms of the actual case.)  Nor is there any reason why such an old story would find itself revived.

Still, I'm glad it did.  Turns out Colb has written a ton of articles on legal issues near and dear to most of our hearts.  She doesn't always come down on my general side of issues but she usually does.  At this rate I'll be up all night reading pretty interesting treatments of gender, rape, reproductive rights, LGBT rights, etc, from her FindLaw blog.


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Evidence that Homo Sapiens Were Cognitively "Modern" in the Pleistocene Makes Isolated "Supriority" Claims Awkward

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-02-24 14:20

Image from American Scientist. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Figure 8. A GEICO advertising campaign featuring urbane cavemen posed this question: Who are you calling archaic? Archaeological evidence now shows that our species has always possessed the capacity for wide behavioral variability. (from the American Scientist article.)

John J. Shea, dismantling the idea that "archaic" Homo Sapiens were intrinsically less "advanced" than we are today, finds a really killer way to put it (emphasis mine.)

The hypothesis that there were skeletally modern-looking humans whose behavioral capacities differed significantly from our own is not supported by uniformitarian principles (explanations of the past based on studies of the present), by evolutionary theory or by archaeological evidence. There are no known populations of Homo sapiens with biologically constrained capacities for behavioral variability. Generations of anthropologists have sought in vain for such primitive people in every corner of the world and have consistently failed to find them. The parsimonious interpretation of this failure is that such humans do not exist.

Nor is there any reason to believe that behaviorally archaic Homo sapiens ever did exist. If there ever were significant numbers of Homo sapiens individuals with cognitive limitations on their capacity for behavioral variability, natural selection by intraspecific competition and predation would have quickly and ruthlessly winnowed them out. In the unforgiving Pleistocene environments in which our species evolved, reproductive isolation was the penalty for stupidity, and lions and wolves were its cure. In other words: No villages, no village idiots.

Source: American Scientist

Now what possible bearing could an article arguing (through an analysis of stone tool use over the last 200,000 years or so) that humans have been cognitively versatile, plastic, and otherwise "modern" almost since we became a distinct species have on a progressive sex, relationships, and gender blog?

Well, beside the obvious I mean.

It's a bit of a trick question but just in case, here's how Shea puts it

Dividing Homo sapiens into modern and archaic or premodern categories and invoking the evolution of behavioral modernity to explain the difference has never been a good idea. Like the now-discredited scientific concept of race, it reflects hierarchical and typological thinking about human variability that has no place in a truly scientific anthropology. Indeed, the concept of behavioral modernity can be said to be worse than wrong, because it is an obstacle to understanding. Time, energy and research funds that could have been spent investigating the sources of variability in particular behavioral strategies and testing hypotheses about them have been wasted arguing about behavioral modernity.

I... wonder if there might be other arenas where similarly hierarchical traditions might be interfering with our understanding of actual human behavior.  And what else we might be capable of.


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Do Men Have Some Catching Up to Do? Sure, But It's Not Women We Need to Catch Up With -- It's Our Own Supressed Potential

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-02-24 12:38

Image by Flickr user x-ray delta one. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Image by Flickr user x-ray delta one, Used under a Creative Commons license.

Reflecting Kay Hymowtz's latest lazy anti-feminist screed in the Wall Street Journal, Kay Steiger notes that

Kay Hymowitz and I might share a first name, but there seems to be little else that we share. She's written about dating and marriage in the past, saying, "By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him."

Source: Kay Steiger

Hymowitz is just so full of shit. That whole litany at the beginning about what men had "learned" by the beginning of the 20th Century? Any idea who all that learning, and the resulting behavior, was intended to impress? The prospective date's parents (mostly her father)... who at the time were still the arbiters of whether their daughter's "hand" would be given to the boy. For marriage or anything else.

The idea that increased empowerment for (young, single) women has automatically meant decreased power for their prospective young, single suitors is almost as novel as the idea that young single men have ever had very much power. Even if you were to buy Hymowitz's claims without reservation (which I wouldn't recommend) then the primary difference for young single men at the beginning of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st would be that decision-making power has shifted from young women's fathers to the women themselves.

And dear sweet mother of pearl let's not point out that Hymowitz's deprecation of today's callow, snot-nosed, "self-abusing" men is nothing compared to the combined scorn and anxiety heaped on them towards the end of the 19th Century.

It's not quite true that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Instead it's that those who don't know history doom us to hearing the same alarums raised generation after generation.

Do men have a little catching up to do? Sure. But it's not women we need to catch up with. It's residual patriarchy -- internalized and external -- that's holding us back.

I'd just add that patriarchy being a co-ed enterprise, Hymowitz's punditry is part of the problem for men, not part of the solution.

I'd also point out that, predictably, Hymowitz's subtext isn't that women make men small. It's the classic anti-feminist subtext that men are such sniveling losers that the only way to make them look big is to hold women back. The reason I like feminism is feminism's enduring faith in men's ability to rise to meet ordinary expectations. Anti-feminists? Not so much.

And she wants us to believe that feminists are the man haters!


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Obama Administration Proposes Requirement That Child-Support Dollars Should Be Used to Support Children

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-02-24 10:22

Monica Potts says

Somehow I missed this, but Obama's proposed Department of Health and Human Services budget would provide money to states to pass through more child support payments directly to families: Many states take a big hunk off enforced child support payments to recoup the cost of enforcement. It's a draconian practice that is especially hard on low-income fathers and mothers. Fathers with low-paying jobs struggle to make the payments, and less of it goes to their children. That is, after all, against the whole point of child support.

Source: TAPPED

Considering what a contentious issue child support is, and what its actual intention is (hint: to provide support for children!), this proposal seems like an all-round laudable no-brainer of a great idea.

And since it is a good idea you can expect New Red Menace Republicans to shut down the government before allowing it to pass.


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Yes, Male Tech Geeks Have Feelings and Emotions... and They Need to Find Outlets In Non-Tech Venues to Share Them In

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2011-02-23 01:52

Geek Feminism blogger Restructure! says, correctly, that there is zero intrinsic sexism in technology itself, or even room in tech to put sexism.  The problem, instead, is that the practice of tech is perpetually interrupted by those who want to bring

There is sexism in tech culture. However, I continue to love tech, because I think of the sexism as a separate, unnecessary appendage to pure tech. I cannot think of sexism as intrinsic to or inevitable in tech, because then I would be either self-hating, or I would have to give up my love for technology. Maybe my personal ontology is compartmentalized thinking in order to survive as a woman in tech, but I think it’s also true.

Source: Geek Feminism Blog

Contrary to gender stereotypes it's most often men in tech who want to talk about their feelings!  It's most often men in tech who won't leave their emotions at the door.

Actually, what I hate most about tech news sites is that when I go there for technology news, there are off-topic comments about love and relationships. It’s typically men discussing being single; having trouble with women; being Nice Guys™; giving advice about what women really want; talking about how women have it easier; bragging about how even their grandmother/mother/wife can use technology X; and other sexist generalizations about women.

The problem, I think, is that it's not like men just can't talk about their feelings.  Men have feelings! The problem instead is that lacking acceptable venues to discuss them we almost uncontrollably let our personal feelings leak into all manner of places where they're not even slightly relevant.

Case in point: years ago I worked for a large software company.  One year the #2 executive in the corporation felt obliged to include a feelings statement while giving an award to the most productive programmer in the most heavy-iron project in hard-core of tech divisions in the company.  It evidently meant a great deal to the executive that he'd once seen this distinguished programmer in a bikini, but this fact was not, at all, relevant to the project, the programmer, the division, the underlying technology, the performance that led to the award being given, the award itself, nor, of course, the woman programmer in the nearly all-male shop who actually won the fucking award.

That the exec's remark produced WTF comments from a number of her male colleagues preempts potential allegations that such introductions of personal feelings in tech are either a) perfectly appropriate in technical discourse or b) inevitable in male-centric discourse.  Instead, it illustrates Restructure's point that men in tech are perfectly able to distinguish the difference between tech culture and male culture.

As an aside I'm... pretty sure it never would have occurred to the same exec to say to another awardee that "while giving this innovation and productivity award for core database-server coding I just want to add that I've seen this guy in the locker room and he looks pretty good in nothing but a white towel."  Which serves to illustrate the point that the feelings he was sharing weren't incidental but specifically male-gendered.

Another case in point: Last January the keynote speaker at a 2011 Australian Linux conference drew the following complaint from, among others, the blogger Mary, also at GeekFeminism:

This morning’s keynote by Mark Pesce included slides with the following
illustrations among others:

1. a pig and a duck apparently having sex
2. a black and white sexualised strangulation
3. a fetish scene with a woman in a mask spanking a man in a mask

Several of these were accompanied by a verbal metaphor to “being fucked” in case the visuals weren’t explicit enough.

Not to sound like a total prig here but while I probably wouldn't have a problem with any of those images in the context of a presentation on, say, erotica or fetishism at a sexuality conference I'd probably look askance if they were included in the same conference's budget presentation.  I certainly think it's, um, non-random that the speaker, Mark Pesce, felt compelled to express such non-germane feelings in a purely tech context.

Case in point: The "No-Sex" Class: The "Never Go Down on you either" ad.  I'm sure there's someone or other in tech who could argue all day that simple "booth babes" at tech trade shows somehow don't count as an insertion of non-tech feelings into a tech environment. But without such an intrusion of feeling into technical specification that ad, with it's sultry woman's face and the copyline "Don't feel bad, our servers won't go down on you either" wouldn't make... well... a lick of sense!

Final case in point: here's Cordelia Fine on psychologist (and literal gender essentialist) Simon Baron-Cohen's critique of her book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, which is among other things an extended essay on the impropriety of inserting topically gendered feelings into scientific inquiry:

The Essential Difference author and Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen generously acknowledged its scholarship, the instantly recognizable stereotype was nonetheless lurking in all its unalluring glory: I was “strident”; in pursuit of a “barely veiled agenda”; and guilty of the “mistaken blurring of science with politics.”

She said it here

Pot calling the kettle black much, Cohen-Baron? In what other scientific field is it so common to attempt to preferentially gather evidence in support of one's hypothesis ("men and women are different") instead of the more, um, conventional method of seeking to challenge, refute, or otherwise test it for confounding factors? That in itself would just be really crappy methodology. To object to having it called out by accusing one's opponent of stridency, or agenda pursuing, or confusing science with politics is obviously itself resorting to politics, rhetoric. Fine rhetoric point-scoring when preaching to the choir no doubt, especially if the choir tends to shower in the men's locker room. Just really crappy science.

Is it really too much to ask men in tech to first acknowledge and then find other fucking outlets to express their non-tech emotions? It doesn't just get in the way for women in tech, it gets in the way of tech!


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