2009-10-01 10:22 | Your links for the hour.

I have a backlog.

*) Alternet: 40 Books About Sexuality That You Have to Read

Some are articles, instead of books, but hey.  Nice to print out and save somewhere.

*) Rebel Raising: Is that child crazy?

If you lived in a world where you were constantly confronted by new things, which you were expected to assimilate and understand quickly and without showing concern? If you pretty much never got to choose your own activities? If you were regularly touched, lifted and restrained without your permission? If you lived at the mercy of, however loving, people who were in total charge of your comings and goings, your access to food and drink, your access to activities you enjoy?

I'm not trying to say that we all traumatise our children horribly for no reason. This is not mother-blaming central. But too often we don't see children as people; we don't think, hey, if I were taken from something I was absorbed in, strapped into a pushchair and hurried down the road without anyone checking I understood what was going on, would I scream and struggle? Probably.

*) Raising My Boychick: What is appropriate parenting advice?

I don't think there is no place for parenting advice; that is, to unwind that double negative, I do think parenting advice has its place. The point of the previous post was that while it's sometimes tempting to dismiss parenting advice from someone solely because of their child-less/free status, that's not actually a good enough (or good at all) reason.

So what is appropriate parenting advice? It certainly is not "unsolicited… not-so-masked criticism of [one's] parenting." That's inappropriate at any time, from any source, yet is one of the most common — and most infuriating — types of "advice" parents get, and why we get so defensive on the topic in general.

Advice on parenting is least likely to be received as an attack — or to phrase positively, is most likely to be listened to and reflected on, whether adopted or not — when it is: solicited; humble; experiential; and in line with the receiver's own basic parenting philosophy.

*) Fugitivus: Not a real post

I'm a pretty big believer that wherever you are, that's where you need to be. I don't want to say that's where you "deserve" to be, because that drags in ideas of entitlement and punishment that are really arrogant and cruel. But I do believe that individuals only stay in a place as long as that place is meeting their needs. Not all their needs, and maybe not always the good ones, but people don't stick around for free; there's got to be some return investment, even if that return investment is only "staying here helps me avoid something I perceive to be worse."

*) Fugitivus: Stuff What Boys Can Do

[...] asking men to be allies isn't really a cut and dry case. Privilege is its own kind of oppression; to maintain privilege, one must maintain a very specific and strict mode of behavior. Stepping out of that behavior strips you of your privilege, and leaves you vulnerable for a pretty significant degree of attack. There are times when an ally can pull an Afterschool Special, and there are times where even deigning to disagree could get a guy beat to within an inch of his life. I'd like to see, and hear, more ways that men can be allies in all the different contexts they find themselves in.

2009-01-28 16:59 | Female-only folk.

I remember a bit from the book Cunt by Inga Muscio, where she encourages the reader to spend a year only reading female authors, only going to female-owned businesses, and so forth.  It's a good idea, but I couldn't do it.  I know me well enough to know that there are things I want to do that would insanely benefit me that I don't get around to, so conceptual things like this?  Ha ha ha, ha.

Not to mention, I have comfort books, books I've reread a zillion times because I like the story and I'm comfortable with it.  I understand that the point of these sorts of things is to push one out of one's comfort zone, but… I dunno, maybe I'm bad at activism.  *shrugs*

Anyhow but, I do listen to Pandora Radio all day.  I have two stations on it – one for classical music (!!), and one for everything I like forever (in order to confound PR).  So, I made a new station, that'll just have female artists on it.  That means blended-gender bands (like Prozac For Lovers, I think) don't get in, either – female-only or bust.  (It doesn't mean female-only artists automatically get a thumbs-up.  See also certain Alanis Morissette songs.)  I seeded it with Poe, Garbage, and Aimee Mann, as those are three female-only artists I could remember off-hand.

I make no resolutions, because I am bad with follow-through.  But I am going to leave this station on here at work, and when I'm at home, and I'll continue to restrict it to female-only artists, and we'll see.

So far, holy crap there's a lot of stuff I forgot I loved.  Like "Ready To Go" by Republica, and "Cannonball" by The Breeders.  And there are a couple of songs that are already dead awesome, like a cover of "Spooky" by Imogen Heap, and "All The Things She Said" by t.A.T.u.

*hums*

2008-01-21 15:10 | Related items.

Awesome linkage.

• Amanda Marcotte talks about decreasing the risks of pregnancy, and just how full of shit that is.  bean comments in a way that sums this up well: "With regard to my stance, I agree that women should have as much information as is out there so they can make informed choices during their pregnancies. What I disagree with is the tone in which the information is usually presented: panic! You women must be perfect during pregnancy or ELSE!"
• Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women, by Caryl Rivers.  "Selling Anxiety does a great service to public debate by debunking the erroneous data upon which such shoddy journalism is based, and providing accurate information to counter sexist narratives. To wit: Workplace discrimination (not "women's choices") causes pay disparities, science doesn't prove men are biologically smarter, and research shows mothers with rewarding jobs have the hottest sex! The news just got a little less gloomy."
• How to support someone with an eating disorder?

2006-11-04 02:19 | I am in lust with science.

My book today is Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax.  I am in ♥s with this book.

Basically, Dr. Sax discusses the differences between boys and girls, focusing on those in the birth to teen age range.  What he seems to seek is to both show that raising children in a gender-neutral environment may be actively harmful to both genders and that different doesn't mean better.  I really appreciate the effort he's going through to emphasize that he's looking to improve how each gender is educated, not necessarily what.

Some of these differences are deeply neat.  I'd heard before of the fact that girls can generally hear better than boys, or that boys tend to be more aggressive than girls.  What I hadn't heard was this:

Apparently, there are rods and cones in one layer of the retina.  Rods are black/white sensitive, and cones are colour sensitive.  The rods and cones talk to the ganglion cells.  There are two types of those, magnocellular (large) and parvocellular (small); M cells talk to the rods, and P cells talk to the cones.  M cells send their information to the region of the cerebral cortex that handles spatial relationships, and P cells send their info to the region that handles texture and colour.

Every part of that above is different in males and females.  "We're not talking about small differences between the sexes, with lots of overlap.  We're talking about large differences between the sexes, with no overlap at all.  Every male animal had a thicker retina than any female retina, due to the males having more M cells…"

That is fascinating to me.  All of this book is fascinating to me.  And I haven't even gotten to his chapter of LGBTE (exceptions) kids yet.  *delighted*

2006-10-30 12:45 | Oh man, I love the library.

Yesterday, I hit the library and picked up, among other books, Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers.  I'm interested in learning more about feminism, and I've got the current events angle covered (via blogs), so I wanted something more… bookish.

Look, I just woke up, okay?

Anyways.  I like that they don't go from "This is how the patriarchy hurts women" to "Come, let us demonise men".  They walk the line between demonising and apologising-for fairly well, so far.  (I'm only a few chapters in.)  While I am all about dismantling the huge power difference, I happen to think that men are human as well, and don't care for the extremist "All men are scum" view.

They also discuss the "Women aren't inferior, they're superior" idea, and explore just how much damage that's caused.  For example, if the assumption that women are less competitive and more caring is taken as truth, why promote them up the corporate ladder?  Carol Gilligan, the originator of that idea, didn't intend for such repercussions to repercuss as they did.  It's possible to trace that men:Mars::women:Venus claptrap back to that idea, for heaven's sake.  This is the unfortunateness of letting ideas run free in the wild, I suppose.

I hope the rest of the book is as good as what I've read so far.  If not, I have three other gender studies books, so that's okay.