Shocked and amazed

Posted on Friday, November 17, 2017 by nosleepingdog

There is a play by Moliere (The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670) in which an unsophisticated character is astonished to learn that he had “been speaking prose all my life, and didn’t even know it!”

Like him, apparently, about half the population of the United States—the male half— is shocked and amazed to learn that the other half of Americans have been living with sexual harassment, pressure, innuendo, and sexual assault, since puberty or before.

Once we wise up to the situation, as women or girls, we mostly realize that we are in fact prey and men are the predators. Wherever we go some of the men around us are undressing us mentally, fantasizing about doing things to us, just waiting for the moment alone in the elevator, or the back office, or behind some bushes, or in his car, when they can act on these impulses. Of course until the looks or leers or remarks or lecherous acts begin, we might not know for sure about a particular man. But if there are half a dozen men in your workplace you can feel pretty sure at least one of them is in this category, and a certain intuition may pick up on clues. Or perhaps someone else, male or female, will bravely let fall a remark about being careful around so-and-so.

But they’re still the ones with the power even if you’re forewarned. It is not merely that most men are physically stronger than most women, it never comes to that in most of these events. It is that men with power, even a little bit of power, target women that they have power over. It might be the woman’s timid personality, it might be her youth and inexperience, or the man’s position. He doesn’t need to be Harvey Weinstein or Bill O’Reilly or Donald Trump or Bill Cosby or Bill Clinton, doesn’t need to be famous or rich. If you’re a counter worker or a sales clerk or a babysitter for his kids or someone whose life will be made very difficult if you speak up, that is all that is necessary.

And let’s face it, the flood of accounts of abuse that have come out over the past couple of years, over the past couple of months, mostly haven’t come as any big surprise to people who’ve been around these men or known of them for years. But the women knew what reception they’d get if they spoke out.

At least if you’re raped or humiliated by a rich corporate guy you might be able to get a lawyer and negotiate a settlement which will of course include a non-disclosure clause. Your silence for his immunity and continuation of the behavior. But right there, in that sort of case, it’s not just the woman and the man who groped her and made her feel demeaned who are in the know: quite a few people know something or everything, her lawyer and his corporation’s lawyer, and the bosses and co-workers of those people, and his corporation’s financial officer and risk management person and on and on. Maybe she tells her best friend, or her sister (not her husband, that’s a quick ticket to being damaged goods in his eyes) or maybe she just makes nonspecific warning remarks to other women she sees being drawn into the attack zone.

But mostly women keep quiet. And so, it seems, do boys and men who’ve been harassed or assaulted. As with children who are mistreated or sexually abused, the power and credibility is all on the other side. The coach, the scout leader, the church youth group pastor, the friend of your dad’s, your uncle or grandfather—when they deny it who will believe you?

It’s a jungle out there, guys, and it’s mostly you XY chromosome humans making it that way. Women as prey, women as property, women as less than whole powerful people; we’ve always lived with it. Now you men know about it too, or should I say, have no excuse for pleading ignorance any more. What happens next?

Predatory men will not go quietly

Posted on Monday, October 30, 2017 by nosleepingdog

From splinternews.com:

On Tuesday night, The New York Times, Politico, and The Atlantic all published stories detailing numerous sexual harassment allegations against Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic’s famed literary editor for over 30 years before he left the magazine in 2014. Wieseltier had been accused of “workplace harassment” on an anonymously crowdsourced list of “Shitty Media Men” that was circulating among women in the media. Over the past week, after the list was brought to the public’s attention, a group of female ex-TNR staffers started exchanging emails about their own “Leon stories.”

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.182.1_en.html#goog_1040533468

“I wouldn’t call it an ‘open secret,’ it was just the way he was,” one former female TNR staffer told me. “Open secret implies that anybody else in management understood it was shameful and shouldn’t be done, which was definitely not the case… It was a culture there, there were a lot of other problems. There’s a reason why someone like Leon has lasted as long as he has at a place like the New Republic—that doesn’t happen by accident.”

This was the statement that Wieseltier provided to Politico, which first broke the news:

For my offenses against some of my colleagues in the past I offer a shaken apology and ask for their forgiveness. The women with whom I worked are smart and good people. I am ashamed to know that I made any of them feel demeaned and disrespected. I assure them that I will not waste this reckoning. And I am profoundly sorry to my extraordinary collaborators at the journal we began together that the misdeeds of my past have made it impossible to go forward. My gratitude to them is boundless.

" I am ashamed to know 
that I made any of them 
feel demeaned and disrespected."

Good choice of phrasing, there. Women, their feelings, all that stuff is quite foreign to me, a powerful male animal. I’m shocked, shocked, that any of them could have felt that way.

So much smoother than, “I am ashamed that I thrust my hand down the front of her clothing and grabbed her breasts”. So much less disturbing than, “I am ashamed that I pushed her up against the wall in a dark corridor, reached under her clothing to put my hand inside her underwear, and…”.

And so much less susceptible to criminal charges, too!

These men are unrepentant alpha males, at least where women are concerned.

Weaseldick

Sometimes they even look the part, mane and all. (Photo of Wieseltier)

Note, in the excerpt above from Wieseltier’s disdainful self-exculpating statement, that he begins by offering a “shaken apology”. Shaken, surprised, caught unawares. The apology of an innocent man, who finds the rules have been changed without him knowing: he thought it was civil to force a woman, physically and by the power of his position and the circumstance, to submit to an assault of her person. Of course he did. He was “the New Republic’s famed literary editor for over 30 years”, how impossible that he could have been aware that his unwanted “advances” were brutish and criminal. Poor unschooled fellow, ignorant of the nuances of language and social behavior, he couldn’t have known.

The Oxford thesaurus, in the online entry for “civil”, says:

O my sisters, O my brothers, must women remain the never-to-be-freed slaves forever?

As a young woman forty years ago I thought so. Nothing so far has caused me to change my mind.

Terrorism begins at home

Posted on Sunday, October 18, 2009 by nosleepingdog

Hamas patrols beaches in Gaza to enforce conservative dress code

From today’s Guardian newspaper (UK) comes an article worth reading about the efforts of Hamas to “Islamize” the Gaza area of Palestine, where they are the elected government, by controlling dress and behavior–––especially of women, of course. Ownership must be maintained!

It began with a rash of unusually assertive police patrols. Armed Hamas officers stopped men from sitting shirtless on the beach, broke up groups of unmarried men and women, and ordered shopkeepers not to display lingerie on mannequins in their windows.

Then came an effort to force female lawyers to abide by a more conservative dress code, and intense pressure on parents to dress their daughters more conservatively for the new school term. Last week police began enforcing a new decree banning women from riding on motorbikes.

For the first time since Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections nearly four years ago, the group is trying to Islamise Gazan society. In public, Hamas leaders say they are merely encouraging a social moral code, and insist they are not trying to imitate the religious police who operate in some other rigid Islamic countries. But to many it feels like a new wave of enforcement in what is already a devoutly Muslim society.

Asmaa al-Ghoul, a writer and former journalist, was one of the first to run up against the new campaign. She spent an evening with a mixed group of friends in a beachside cafe in late June. After dark, she and another female friend went swimming wearing long trousers and T-shirts. Moments after leaving the water they found themselves confronted by a group of increasingly aggressive Hamas police officers. “Where is your father? Your husband?” one officer asked her. Ghoul, 27, was told her behaviour had not been respectable. Five of her male friends were beaten and detained for several hours….

Mostly the campaign focuses on what women wear. One startling poster decries the trend for young women to wear their headscarf along with tight jeans as a “satanic industry 100%”. It shows a red devil holding an image of a fashionable young woman and recommends a fuller, less glamorous head covering, counselling: “The right hijab is your way to heaven.”

Asked about his attitude to those few Gazan women who do not cover their hair, Abu Shaar said: “We tell them it is an essential element to being a Muslim. Wearing the headscarf is as essential as prayer.

If you think my comment about maintaining ownership goes too far, note the enquiry of the police officers, “Where is your father? Your husband?” and the beating of the male companions. Women must not be allowed out in public without their owners being present to control them. Men are responsible for the behavior of “their” women, their wives, daughters, sisters; if they do not exercise that control, they may be punished too, a powerful example to other men. The excuse for honor killings, of disobedient women, even women who have been raped, is that these “immoral” women bring upon the family dishonor which can only be washed clean with their blood.

Some women are resisting the increased Islamization in Gaza:

When the Hamas-appointed chief justice, Abdel-Raouf al-Halabi, ordered a new uniform for all lawyers, which for women meant a headscarf and a jilbab – a full-length robe – he had not counted on the temerity of the response. Nearly all of Gaza’s 150 female lawyers already wear headscarves, but they challenged the ruling on the grounds that it had no basis in law. The chief justice was forced to back down.

“It was absolutely illegal,” said Dina Abu Dagga, a lawyer who has covered her hair since she was at university in Cairo.

It was not the chief justice’s right to change the dress code, she said. Under Palestinian law, that power rested with the lawyers’ union.

“We’re not against the hijab. I wear it myself,” she said. “We’re against imposing it and restricting our freedoms. Today you impose the hijab, but tomorrow it will be something else.”

But, unlike the lawyers with their union, most women do not have a “place to stand” in order to resist safely.

We are obsessed with terrorism, since 9/11. But only when it is directed against a national government. When women are threatened, murdered, and repressed, that is terrorism too: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (Merriam-Webster). What is more political than the subjugation, by fear and violence, of one portion of a population?

As politicians well know, religion can provide the best justification for terroristic acts, since they are being performed at God’s behest. Once a behavior (like not wearing a headscarf, or wearing one that is too revealing) has been linked with the devil, anyone who fits the description is risking their mortal soul, and endangering the entire society by their example. As Barry Goldwater famously said, “Extremism in defense of virtue is no vice”. Or “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”; much easier if it is someone else’s eye, or even your own daughter. [image below from a painting by John Singer Sargent, A Spanish Woman.]

If Babbage HAD built his “Difference Engine”

Posted on Monday, October 12, 2009 by nosleepingdog

Here’s a funny comics-version, from 2D goggles. Actually it is about mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace (1815 – 1852), but we all know that women never get top billing!

The comic was made for “Ada Lovelace Day”, to promote a film (to be offered to local stations by PBS) about this remarkable woman, and the film-makers need our help:

letters of support from people who have been influenced in some way by Ada and who are willing to help publicise the film, be a part of the interactive website, perhaps show the film, or contribute in any other way.

Rosemarie says, “I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American.”

If you’re not American, letters would still be useful of course! The deadline is the end of October.

Please write to:

Rosemarie Reed
On the Road Productions International, Inc.
310 Greenwich Street, 21F
New York, NY 10013
Or email Rosemarie directly, rreed40148@aol.com.

After some thought, I decided to write a letter based on my experiences giving books to kids at the food pantry, and the unabated gender gap I see in kids’ interest in science and math. Sure, the older kids are computer users, but computers are fun personal devices; they still display an aversion to math and science, especially the non-biological sciences. A few boys get drawn in by technology, but I don’t see it in girls. [I have a small sample size, I admit, and it is a rural area.]

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Ada Byron Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron (his only legitimate child); she married a nobleman, and was part of the social whirl of that class, dancing and entertaining. [Photo below from Wikipedia]

Wikipedia tells us that

During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer and her method is recognised as the world’s first computer program.
However, biographers debate the extent of her original contributions. Dorothy Stein, author of Ada: A Life and a Legacy, contends that the programs were mostly written by Babbage himself. Babbage wrote the following on the subject, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1846):

I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.

The level of impact of Lovelace on Babbage’s engines is difficult to resolve due to Babbage’s tendency not to acknowledge (either orally or in writing) the influence of other people in his work. However, Lovelace was certainly one of the few people who fully understood Babbage’s ideas and created a program for the Analytical Engine, indeed there are numerous clues that she might also have suggested the usage of punched cards for Babbage’s second machine since her notes in Menabrea’s memoir suggest she deeply understood the Jaquard’s Loom as well as the Analytical Engine. Her prose also acknowledged some possibilities of the machine which Babbage never published, such as speculation that “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”.

The Difference Engine becomes reality after 150 years

Babbage never built his mechanical computer, but the London Science Museum did make a working version. It was finished in 1991 for the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth.

A view of “some of the number wheels and the sector gears between columns”

AdaLovelaceLondonScienceMuseumsReplicaDifferenceEngine.jpg

Difference Engine model photos source.

Ada Lovelace, “The Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace”, gave birth to three children (the firstborn was named Byron), and died at 37 of uterine cancer and being bled by her doctors.

Let’s support that film, with letters or emails to demonstrate demand for stations to show it! Here’s the email again, rreed40148@aol.com.

More about girls being turned off to math and science

Feminist Chemists cites a 2008 study by the American Mathematical Society:

In elementary school, girls do as well as or better in math than boys. In middle school, girls with an inclination for math begin to lose interest and fall behind, mostly due to peer pressure and societal expectations. Throughout middle and high school, social stigma and lack of appropriately challenging educational opportunities for the mathematically precocious becomes a hard reality in most American schools. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, often camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers.

A study published in June by the National Academy of Sciences found

“It’s not an innate difference in math ability between males and females,” says Janet Mertz, a UW-Madison professor of oncology and one of the authors of the article that analyzes and summarizes recent data on math performance at all levels in the United States and internationally. “There are countries where the gender disparity in math performance doesn’t exist at either the average or gifted level. These tend to be the same countries that have the greatest gender equality.”

Gender bias and expectations are not the only thing we have to worry about. It’s not just girls––boys are losing interest too, according to the AMS research:

”The U.S. culture that is discouraging girls is also discouraging boys,” says Janet Mertz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of oncology and the senior author of the study. “The situation is becoming urgent. The data show that a majority of the top young mathematicians in this country were not born here.”

[NOTE: While Janet Mertz was one of the authors on each study, the PNAS and AMS studies are two different projects. The latter, published Oct. 10 in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, was a comprehensive analysis of decades of data on students identified as having profound ability in math (Science News Oct. 13, 2008). The other study was published June 1, 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy. It looked at US and international data on students of all levels of ability, to answer three key questions: “Do gender differences in math performance exist in the general population? Do gender differences exist among the mathematically talented? Do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent? The answers, according to the Wisconsin researchers, are no, no and yes.” (Science News June 2, 2009).

You may remember the remarks of Lawrence Summers in 2005 (he was then President of Harvard, and is now an economic adviser to President Obama), to the effect that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. These two studies would support the conclusion that if innate differences do influence women’s lack of success in these fields, the differences are not in mathematical ability. Maybe we should look at “innate differences” in aggressiveness and willingness to withstand unduly competitive or even hostile treatment from colleagues and superiors. Or at insecurity and discomfort, innate or not, which arise in male academics and administrators when females display ability, competence, and promise. A few decades ago women rarely appeared in symphony orchestras unless they played the harp; auditions behind screens changed that! Did our musical ability transform itself overnight? Probably not. ]

[Photo from another good article on the AMS study]

Send an email for Ada and our kids, and consider how you yourself might interact with kids about math and science. Take a trip to the Science Museum if you are fortunate enough to live near one, read a book together, in general don’t act as if math and science are boring geek fare. Even if a lot of it is beyond you, as higher math seems to be beyond me, that doesn’t have to be true for the kids you know. Since I was in college, math has become much more important in biological sciences, ecology, even social sciences like history, so if I were a history major today I would probably need to take at least an introductory statistics class.

We all need to model a respect and interest for learning, to the kids around us. Kids start out as voracious learners: have you tried to learn another language lately? Hard, right? Babies do it, and young kids pick up second languages easily. They’re always learning, not just skills and processes but attitudes too, so let’s not convey bad attitudes about learning, reading, thinking!