Generalising

Just in case we wimminz hadn’t got the message yet, today’s xkcd sets it out for us:

The “typical internet user” has a penis.

Like, obv.

I am not a great fan of salads as actual meals. In my view, a salad counts towards your daily calorific intake the way oxygen does, and I probably consume them both with the same enthusiasm.

(And while I’m here, a quick thought. Nightline, that bastion of journalism, did a televised debate about whether it’s “okay” to be fat. Er. Anyway, anti-obesity activist MeMe Roth said this:

“We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we’re behaviorally and neurochemically dependent upon food.”

Seriously. Seriously, she actually said that. Dependent on food. Like, I am so dependent on food, I can’t go a whole day without a fix of it. Sometimes my physical and emotional health suffers because I haven’t had any!

…ah, you get it. That people can actually say things like that – yeah. This comes entirely courtesy of Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose, which, for what it’s worth, is one of my favourite feminist blogs out there. I’m not much of a fat activist – to my sorrow and exceedingly large dollop of privilege, I pretty much resemble the societal ideal for how women should look in terms of body shape, only shorter, smaller breasts and a bit too brown – but certainly I agree with the central tenet that the media preoccupation with obesity, and body size, and the purported health dangers of the former, is not value-neutral science but comes with its own assumptions and prejudices. At its worst, it’s a well-disguised way to damage women, to make them sweat and obsess over their bodies, to drive them to constant distraction as a means by which they can be controlled. (Hey, the population is fifty-one percent women, the patriarchy can’t be everywhere.)

And more than fat acceptance, Kate Harding writes well about feminism, really well – unlike the mainstream blogs, she doesn’t tolerate racism, ableism, or in the case of Feministing a couple of days ago, just plain information fail. Consider this a rec.

This was going to be a recipe, wasn’t it? Normally I don’t approve as salads as main courses. Normally. But this one has lots of protein, and is tasty, and just about passes muster if you weren’t that hungry to start with. And, hey, it is tasty and you can always have some cake after.

You need:

-one large pepper, preferably red;
-handfuls of rocket, or baby spinach, or both, or anything else green and leafy;
-feta cheese, about 100g;
-a couple of slices of good ham;
-cherry tomatoes, a few;
-pine nuts or sunflower seeds or both;
-a small red onion or half a big one;
-nice olive oil.

De-seed the pepper, chop into rough chunks, halve the cherry tomatoes, cut the onion into slices. Put them all in a baking tray, douse well with lots of the nice olive oil, stick them in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty minutes. (You’re not trying to roast them properly – just till the onion is edible and the tomatoes a bit squishy.)

Cut the feta cheese into chunks and crumble those into a big bowl. Rip the ham into small strips, and after the twenty minutes, add the ham to the baking tray and put it back in the oven for another five minutes, until the ham is curling at the edges.

Then, pour the contents of the tray into the bowl with the feta, mix well and be sure all the oil gets into the bowl, it’s lovely. Stir well, pour in some pine nuts or sunflower seeds, add handfuls of rocket or spinach, keep stirring until it’s alll mixed. Presto, done. And have some cake afterwards for the carbohydrate.

BBC News:

Sachin Tendulkar created history with the first double century in one-day internationals as India thrashed South Africa by 153 runs in Gwalior.

The Guardian:

…the accolades that poured out of Gwalior after Sachin Tendulkar became the first batsman to score a double hundred in a one-day international, to lead India to victory over South Africa by 153 runs.

The Telegraph:

…the news that Sachin Tendulkar has scored the first double-hundred in one-day internationals.

…and, judging by Google News, around a thousand other journalists saying pretty much the same thing.

Of those thousand news stories, however, only one – the Independent Online in South Africa – manages to actually include a small but salient point:

…while Tendulkar is the first man to reach the magical number, [Belinda] Clark did it 13 years ago, against Denmark in the Women’s World Cup in India in 1997.

For those who follow the sport (unlike me, I admit), there’s an interesting article here on cricketing firsts which were actually first obtained by women.

I have just discovered a new blog: Geek Feminism. What a fabulous idea, sayeth I – it’s a great mish-mash of women in science, women in engineering, women in Star Trek fandom, women in all of those and more, and how their experiences are different from men’s experience, and how geek culture can be viewed through feminist eyes.

I’ve been reading back through the archives, and just read this post: On geekitude, hierarchy and being a snob. It’s a interesting post in itself, and worth reading, but there’s an insight in it that I don’t think the author gives the weight it deserves, so I’m going to talk about it. It goes like this:

I think that what I do is easy. Simple as falling off a log. Anyone could do it. Yeah, I know a lot of things that allow me to do what I do, but they’re just things you could learn if you took the time.

Now the eagle-eyed among you can spot imposter syndrome a mile off, and while I know in a vague intellectual sense that I must be at least competent at what I do – otherwise, why would universities have admitted me to study it and organisations have employed me to do it? – it’s an astonishingly hard thing to internalise. And particularly, particularly for women. Women who are told all the time that math is hard, and that excellence is not for them.

Now it is true that if you knew what I knew, if you had read the same books, you’d realise how easy some of my daily tasks are. But, notes the author, but an expert also confidently says, “No. That’s far harder than you realize.”

I’ve never thought of that before. But I know when someone says something about my field – usually, “But why don’t you just sue them?” or “But surely that’s illegal?” – that is patently stupid. I can prove the negative. And I can know something because of my feel for what I do – because of my abilities, training and instincts, and not (just) because I’ve read a lot of textbooks.

So maybe I’m not terrible at what I do. Maybe I’m as good at it as the rest of the world thinks I am. And if I am, imposter of imposters, maybe you are too.

In brief: the US House of Representatives passed the health care reform bill. It is called the Affordable Health Care For America Act and expands federal healthcare provision enormously – 36 million more people will be eligible for Medicaid, most employers will be required to provide healthcare coverage for their workers, and there will be a government-funded “public option”. Also notably, health insurers will be prevented from refusing coverage based on medical history (no more gender-based “pre-existing conditions” such as pregnancy, rape and domestic violence) and the exemption for insurance companies from antitrust legislation will be repealed.

So far, so hoopy. The Stupak Amendment, with which this Act has been passsed, is as follows:

“No funds authorised or appropriated by this Act… may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury or physical injury which would… place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed… or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.”^[1]

In other words, to get this Act passed, someone had to be the sacrificial lamb and 150 million American women were it. (Also, something else I have just spotted – the obvious women are excluded, women who want abortions for what are nauseatingly called “social” reasons, because pregnancy is not the right thing for them, but also, women who have mental illnesses which pregnancy would exacerbate are excluded, too.)

I actually have no further commentary to make on the issue, and I wondered if that were just me, but actually, I think there is nothing very profound to say about it. Institutional politics, particularly in the United States, is boring and it doesn’t yield to analysis. Feminist analysis of the narratives of privilege and oppression, that is interesting; so is sociological thinking about why people think the way they do such that amendments like this are seen as a good idea, but on the institutional level of why, in the specific instance, the House of Representatives has voted like this, I’m coming up with nothing. They voted like this because they’re misogynists, fundamentalists, or spineless; you can lobby them, but to be effective, you either run for the House of Representatives or wait for the current incumbents to die, or both. You can’t argue, you can’t write about women’s rights to their own bodies, you can’t talk about restriction of reproductive options as a form of control of women. Well, you can, but it’s a category error to think you can convince an edifice of misogyny to change their minds because that, I think, fundamentally misunderstands why they hold the opinions they do – it’s not because they arrived at them through logical argument.

(Evidence in point: thirty-nine Democrats voted against the reform bill. Twenty-one of them, besides Stupak, voted for the amendment. Institutional politics defies logical analysis.)^[2]

It will go to the Senate, but I’m not optimistic.

[2] From here. And yes, lawyers are allowed to run a defence in the alternative, but I suspect it’s not the same thing.