In case you didn’t need other reasons to be skeptical of today’s proposed “boobquake” response to (yet another) religious leader’s claim that women’s immodesty brings down the wrath of god, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy point out a strictly pragmatic, statistical problem that…

...has to do with the number of earthquakes around the world. Here is a table from the USGS giving the number of earthquakes per year listed by magnitude:

As you’d expect, there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. The idea of Boobquake is to debunk the cleric by saying that women can reveal their boobs and not start a seismic event (ignoring perhaps the tremors caused by geek guys habitually running to their computers every few minutes and checking for updates). But without defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

We also know that supernatural thinking makes people see correlations where none exist, and to also retroactively assign credit after an event to something that happened before it. They cling desperately to such measures like a drowning man to a life preserver. And when the parameters (like time and size) aren’t defined in advance, that makes uncritical thinking easier. If there is even a modest earthquake today, then that cleric can declare victory. If there’s a big quake, then it’s more like sending that drowning man a motorboat!

He said it here.

Of course a table similar to the USGS earthquake table could be drawn showing the number of dire imprecations and condemnations made by clerics, ministers, rabbis, priests, shamans, and right-wing pundits blaming women or LGBT people for earthquakes and, well, everything they think is wrong with the world. Although it would be a much bigger table. Which means on any given day it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And as the Alice character in the Dilbert comic said years ago, “if success is impossible then… I’m… free! The result will be the same no matter what I do.” So today, just like any other day, wear whatever you wanted to wear anyway.

Photo by Flickr user Wombatunderground1. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Feminist* author Courtney Martin, widely respected-by-feminists* blogger at premier feminist* website Feministing* quotes Australian feminist* porn-for-women blogger Ms. Naughty by way of decrying…

...censorship prompted by decidedly non-feminist Australian Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett. The censorship in question? Small breasts, which at least in Joyce and Barnett’s understanding of anatomy, are found only on underage girls.

Quoth Martin…

So many jokes come to mind here, but I’m going to leave the analysis to Ms. Naughty on Australia’s weird ban:

Why ban small boobs? I can only assume it stems from paranoia that flat chests somehow stir up the pedophiles. And you only need to mention that “p” word to start a full-scale moral panic in Parliament.

Shall we put such hysteria aside and look at what this ruling is saying to Australian women? Basically, it’s classing a certain normal female body type as obscene. It’s declaring all flat chests to be automatically juvenile, something that should not be viewed by anyone because of a fear that it will stir up “base instincts” in certain people.

“Can the Classification Board be any more insulting or sexist?”

Read the quote in context here.

For what it’s worth Barnett and Guy have also pressed the board to outright ban all depictions of female ejaculations and, even weirder, they’re evidently working to restrict photos where inner (but not outer!) labia are visible.

So far anyway the comments at Feministing have been pretty positive in the sense that even those who aren’t totally thrilled by porn still think impositions like this are going too far.

In fact, pretty much around the world people of all stripes are taking a… pretty dim view of the board’s actions.

So I’m going to be contrary and try to give the stupid morons the benefit of the doubt.

Opposition to the small-breasts ruling have been pretty hyperbolic and the analysis has sounded a bit slippery-slope-y so I thought I’d look around and see if I could find the real scoop.

Turns out there’s not a lot. In fact the only credible source of a pro-small-breasts-ban line of reasoning comes from the the Australian anti-censorship site that seems to have broken the original story, SomebodyThingOfTheChildren.com.

According to them the Australian Classification Board says their intention is to ban only images of underage models. Well, and images of small-breasted of-age adults if they might be mistaken for underage models.

In other words even though there’s surprising unanimity in choosing to illustrate articles with photos of actress Keira Knightley, it’s at least somewhat likely magazines and videos depicting her wouldn’t be covered by the ban because she’s known to be an adult.

On the other hand, publications the board evidently has completely banned include 18 U.S. C. 2257-compliant U.S. magazines with titles like Barely Legal, Finally Legal and Purely 18. In other words publications that expressly intend their models to be perceived as of-age adults… and who, since the publications are under perpetual threat of F.B.I. investigation, are verified to be actually of-age adults.

Which means that, yup, even if accusatory articles are hyperbolic the underlying story appears to be accurate: in Australia pornographers are now officially required to discriminate against women with small breasts.

Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett, and no-doubt Russ Meyer approve.

\* I’ve been debating a bunch of anti-feminists who claim all feminists are man-hating, hairy-legged, lesbian-separatist, female-supremacist sex haters lately and, at least according to them this post, nor Courtney’s, nor Ms. Naughties can exist, let alone say anything that isn’t straight-up conservative about erotic images of adult men and women. So I thought I’d emphasis the point. Not that it would matter — they’re inclined to see feminism as an evil monolith than Mary Daly was inclined to see men, period, at all. So I thought I’d rub it in.

Yet another non-cliché mention of breasts I’ve noticed this week. Jessica of Feministing says

I was sick in bed yesterday (actually, still am) so I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up on some movies I’ve been meaning to watch: Itty Bitty Titty Committee was one of them.

It was awesome, super fun and interesting. And I have to say, I was really pleased to see it not too far down iTunes “top rented” lists. Nice. C(I)A rules.

Read the quote in context here.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying the movie is about Anna, a young, still-sort-of-coming-out lesbian who meets a group of activist lesbians. The activists work to reclaim space for acceptance and self-acceptance of women by, among other things, spraying graffiti on the walls of… the plastic-surgery clinic in which Anna works where… breast implants are a fairly important part of the business.

Photo by Flickr user zmxncbv.com. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Last week it seemed like more people than usual were (coincidentally) talking about vasectomies. This week I’ve noticed more than the usual number of posts about breasts. As a result I’ve got a couple of things I want to say about breasts as well. Here’s a good place to start. Dr Petra Boynton, tipping her hat to a post by Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre

As you may know, one thing that winds me up nearly as much as dodgy surveys for PR purposes it’s using fake formulae to promote products. The formulae I’ve taken most issue with have been those supposedly identifying ‘perfect’ breast and sizes or what the ideal Page 3 girl’s vital statistics should be, although there have been formula created for just about any purpose you can imagine – anything from the perfect consistency of a biscuit through to which day of the year is the most depressing.

None of the formulae ever really make any mathematical sense, but then they’re not supposed to. They are designed simply to get a product mentioned in the papers. And that message is always emphasised by the appearance of a ‘scientist’, ‘psychologist’, or ‘boffin’ (often from Cambridge University) who will give weight to the maths. They can get pretty shirty if you tell them their formulae don’t make any sense – or have been written for them by a PR company. But despite invitations from the media and other scientists to defend their work none have so far accepted challenges to the accuracy of their formula. Instead they make the claim that they are leading the way in science communication or are using these PR opportunities to raise our interest in psychology, science, or mathematics.

Read the rest of her post, and follow the links I haven’t included, here.

We’ve heard discussion of beauty ideals for thousands of years — of proportions and ratios, of ideal weights, of complexions, of hairstyles, of curves or lack thereof, and of course of ideal behaviors. (There’s been… considerable differences of opinion, varying wildly not just from country to country or century to century but sometimes from one decade to the next.)

Oddly, according to a credibly-researched presentation I heard last winter on the history of the brassier from a fellow student in the sex ed, women’s studies, and communications course I was in, there was almost no discussion of the ideal breast size until garment manufacturers settled on a standard for bra sizes right around the middle of the 20th Century.

Sure, bras had been around for a few decades (and obviously, before bras there had been corsets that did similar duty.) But standardized bras had something the earlier bras and corsets hadn’t: cup sizes.

Industrial society, with it’s recent appreciation for economies of scale, already had a bigger-is-better attitude about a lot of things, but at least in terms of breasts there hadn’t been much discussion in the early 1900s about whether, say, Mae West’s ample bosom was superior to Mary Pickford’s slight one.

But suddenly there was a single measurement. And suddenly there was the opportunity for comparison. And suddenly there could be competition. And suddenly there could be (by-definition post hoc and easy to mock) “formulas for perfect breasts.”