inapaste:

a moment of silence for all of the women who pursued an education in the sciences and were mansplained and condescended to so much that they left and were then used as justifications for why women are “just” “naturally” “bad at this stuff”

Apparently Glen Beck thinks being called a girl is the worst insult imaginable.

“His man card has been revoked by me, and that’s saying something” Beck said. “When I’m saying you’re a girl, you are absolutely 100% girl power.”

Referring to Obama’s nuanced approach to the [issue of head injuries in football], Beck continued, “You’re a full-fledged woman. I never heard anybody but a woman say that.” He explained that only women are concerned about the dangers of football and “every guy, even me, says ‘relax.’”

fozmeadows:

Image taken from tumblr.

Recently, SFF author Tansy Rayner Roberts wrote an excellent post debunking the idea that women did nothing interesting or useful throughout history, and that trying to write fictional stories based on this premise of feminine…

(Source: fozmeadows.wordpress.com)

“On average, women make up about 20 percent of lawmakers in the United States and abroad. We found that when women constituted 20 percent of a decision-making body that operates by majority rule, the average woman took up only about 60 percent of the floor time used by the average man. Women were perceived — by themselves and their peers — as more quiescent and less effective. They were more likely to be rudely interrupted; they were less likely to strongly advocate their policy preferences; and they seldom mentioned the vulnerable. These gender dynamics held even when adjusting for political ideology (beliefs about liberalism and egalitarianism) and income.

"In contrast, the men in our experiment did not speak up less or appear to lose influence when they were in the minority.”

“It is time to sit down practically and say where are we going to add pieces to our coalition. There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win. There’s just not enough of them.”

–Tom Davis, former Republican member of Congress

If your policies are alienating large numbers of voters, and your response is to think you can win if only you change your policies to appeal to larger numbers of voters, then you don’t really stand for anything, do you?  You’re just cynically seeking electoral victories.

Feel free to stand up for your principles.  Be my guest: run on an anti-woman, anti-civil rights, racist, classist platform.  Our democracy will show you exactly what we think of it.

(crossposted at theraspberrycontretemps.tumblr.com)

Pretty sure I’ve found the only article in the NYT archive that includes both “Edmond Burke” and “clitoral distention.” select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h…

— radleybalko (@radleybalko) October 17, 2012

In all seriousness, though, the NY Times article (from 1973) is pretty interesting - and sad. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that perhaps there are some mysteries better left to the joyous imagination, I have to think that Andrew Hacker’s dismissal of the importance of studying arousal mechanisms was nothing more than a big old case of male privilege.

Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again.