Dating tips for the 1938 woman

This is too good not to share. PBH3 has found an 1938 Dating Guide for single women, and it’s a goldmine of unintentional hilarity. Here’s an example of one of the tips:
Pssshhh, who cares about women’s interests! All they do is talk about clothes anyway!

Go check it out. If it doesn’t make you laugh, it’ll at least make you thankful for how far we’ve come. If I had to live up to 1938 dating standards, I think I would end up being a lonely cat lady. I mean, how do they expect women do get through the night without passing out from drinking too much?!?

Anti-Porn & Anti-Sex Worker Bingo!

Man, I wish I would have had this before I attended that Porn & Popcorn event. Would have made it a lot more tolerable to yell “Bingo!” halfway through (click for larger).
Of course, that blog entry is still getting spammy anti-porn and anti-me trolls posting from who knows where. Maybe I should just play bingo with those comments – probably could get a blackout fairly quickly.

(Hat tip to Lauren, Via Feminisnt (Warning, NSFW))

Abortion & the value of human life

Abortion has been on my mind a lot recently. Not for personal reasons. We’ve been discussing it in my biomedical ethics class, though I’ve unfortunately missed a lot of the discussion because of my grad school visits. On top of that, Angie the Anti-Theist, a blogger I follow, has been generating a media storm because of her decision to live-tweet her abortion. I fully support what she is doing – it’s sad that talking about a legal medical procedure results in shock, hate mail, and death threats.

It probably does not surprise most of you that I am extremely pro-choice. The odd thing, though, is I don’t talk about it a lot. I’m always wary of getting into abortion debates, because I feel like it’s one of those topics that’s a lose-lose situation. No one is going to change their minds, and I’ll just get cranky at the particularly stupid comments. But I also know how important it is to speak up about how I feel:

Even if you could convince me that biological human life begins at conception, I would still be pro-choice.

Emotional arguments about beating hearts and fingers and brainwaves don’t affect me at all. Abortion is unfortunate, but when it is the lesser of two evils, it should be an option. The whole “when does life begin” debate is totally irrelevant to me. And why do I say that?

Because I don’t think we can honestly say all human life is of equal value.

I’d love to be a perfect liberal and say that all human life has infinite value and can never be compared or weighed, but I’d be lying to myself. I’d wager that none of us treat all human beings as having equal value when it really comes down to it. For example, think of this thought experiment:

You have the choice of killing one person or killing five people. They are equivalent in every way (job, age, personality, number of family of friends, etc). Do you kill one person or five? Most of us would say to kill the one. While killing anyone is unfortunate, in this case it is best to minimize the amount of total harm done.

But let’s change it up a bit. What if the one person was a loved one – one of your parents, one of your siblings, your spouse, or your best friend. Would you still kill that one person to save the other five? Most people would not. This illustrates that there is something more to our decision making process than all humans having equal value.

Maybe that’s a bit subjective because of our biology – through evolution we’ve slowly adapted to favor kin over non-kin. And since I don’t believe we should simply be the product of our biology, let’s use a more telling thought experiment: how we treat age. If there was a burning building and you could only save one person, do you save the 25 year old or the 80 year old? Most people say they would save the 25 year old, with their reasoning being that the 80 year old has had time to live a long, fulfilling life.

Replace that with an fetus and a 25 year old.

If we’re using a simple metric of “total years lived,” you could argue the fetus would win – the 25 year old already has lived 25 years, after all. But is number of years lived the only thing we use to assign value to human life? Again, I’d argue no. If there was a burning building and you have to save one of two people of equal age, who would you save: An elementary school teacher or a brain-dead person? A charity worker or a sex offender? A cancer researcher or a grocery bagger? The President or a unemployed alcoholic?

We feel bad about making judgement calls about people’s worth, but it’s something we do. That grocery bagger could be a great human being – but all things being equal, we see the cancer researcher as contributing more to society. Likewise, there are other negative traits we see as detracting. These traits all have fairly subjective value – what’s worse, a sex-offender or an unemployed alcoholic? – but most of us still make these judgements. I’m not at all advocating eugenics or the widespread purging of unemployed alcoholics – I’m just trying to make a point that unless your answer to those questions is “I’d flip a coin,” then you don’t view all human life as having equal value.

So back to abortion.

To me, a fetus is on the bottom of the totem pole. A fetus does not feel emotional pain, does not have conscious thoughts, and does not have dreams to be a big shot football player some day. It does not have friends or families that it has made intimate connections with. It does not have career or life goals. It does not fear death because it does not have the mental capacity to understand what death is. It does not have a fated trajectory in life (you can’t argue that this was the person who would go on to cure cancer). And in the case of a woman seeking abortion, it will not be missed by loved ones because it is not even wanted to begin with.

And to me, these are the things that make us human and give us worth. Not heartbeats or brainwaves or unique genetic composition. If a woman decides that continuing a pregnancy will severely detrimentally affect her life, she has every right to have an abortion. She has all of these attributes, and her quality of life far outweighs the existence of insentient cells.

Yes, quality of life, not just her life itself. To me, the value of an unwanted fetus is low enough to not outweigh quality decisions. An unwanted pregnancy going to make you have to drop out of school? Quit your job? Be depressed and stressed? Feel free to choose an abortion.

Obviously not everyone is going to agree with me. There are women out there who can see four cell zygotes as God-sent little babies. And to those women I say: Great! That’s why I’m pro-choice. If you don’t see unwanted fetuses as parasitic clumps of cells, then don’t get an abortion. But this is one of the few areas that I will concede that philosophy does trump biology – that DNA and physiology alone cannot answer this ethical issue.

Note: There are many points about abortion that I have not addressed in this post, and they will likely come up in the comments. I will probably cover them in the future.

Australian PM: PhDs are a women's excuse to not have babies

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was recently giving a speech about the nation’s aging population and the problems it will cause. Seems like a serious topic that needs discussing – but it got interesting when he met Nina Funnell, researcher and reporter.

Arguments were made about superannuation and the strain on healthcare. But there was a deeper message: young people (women in particular) are failing in their civic duty to reproduce. Apparently, gen Y is to blame for the inverted population pyramid.

There were hundreds of people in the room but only a handful under 30. As one of the under 30-crowd, I shuffled nervously, hoping no one would recognise me – and my empty womb – as the deeply unpatriotic and traitorous felons that we are.

After Rudd came off stage, he spoke to me and the few other under-30s (we had congregated for strength in numbers). He extended his points about the problems with the ageing population and the financial problems gen Y will incur when the baby boomers become pensioners.

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

…I can’t imagine how a politician, someone who should theoretically be a master of political correctness and choosing his words carefully, would say something so horrendously stupid. Yep, women choosing to further their education is really just an excuse to get out their Ultimate Duty of Making Babies. Not because of, you know, the pursuit of knowledge, a passion for research, the desire to teach others, the excitement of discovery, the satisfaction of exploration, or the joy of personal fulfillment. Nope, it’s because we don’t want to patriotically pop out babies for the motherland.

Another annoying part is that multiple factors make many women feel like motherhood and academia just don’t mix. How can you balance morning sickness with field work? How can you do lab work with dangerous chemicals that you’re not allowed to use? How are you expected to write your thesis when you’re taking care of an infant? These are all daunting challenges.

Are women getting their PhDs with the nefarious plan that they can use these things as excuses to avoid reproduction? Of course not. Plenty of women want to have children, but put it off because they feel it’s impossible in the current academic environment. The solution isn’t to stop women from getting their PhDs. What we need to do is develop ways to make motherhood easier for academics. Make day cares more available at Universities. Make pregnancy leave a viable option for grad students. Take pregnancy into account when evaluating publications when I woman is up for tenure. Encourage men to spend more time with their children, rather than assuming that’s mom’s job.

Many women have survived grad school and motherhood simultaneously because they had appropriate accommodations. This should be a cause Rudd can rally against: I mean, all he wants us to do is breed, right? He won’t care if we happen to get a little smarter at the same time.

Australian PM: PhDs are a women’s excuse to not have babies

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was recently giving a speech about the nation’s aging population and the problems it will cause. Seems like a serious topic that needs discussing – but it got interesting when he met Nina Funnell, researcher and reporter.

Arguments were made about superannuation and the strain on healthcare. But there was a deeper message: young people (women in particular) are failing in their civic duty to reproduce. Apparently, gen Y is to blame for the inverted population pyramid.

There were hundreds of people in the room but only a handful under 30. As one of the under 30-crowd, I shuffled nervously, hoping no one would recognise me – and my empty womb – as the deeply unpatriotic and traitorous felons that we are.

After Rudd came off stage, he spoke to me and the few other under-30s (we had congregated for strength in numbers). He extended his points about the problems with the ageing population and the financial problems gen Y will incur when the baby boomers become pensioners.

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock.

…I can’t imagine how a politician, someone who should theoretically be a master of political correctness and choosing his words carefully, would say something so horrendously stupid. Yep, women choosing to further their education is really just an excuse to get out their Ultimate Duty of Making Babies. Not because of, you know, the pursuit of knowledge, a passion for research, the desire to teach others, the excitement of discovery, the satisfaction of exploration, or the joy of personal fulfillment. Nope, it’s because we don’t want to patriotically pop out babies for the motherland.

Another annoying part is that multiple factors make many women feel like motherhood and academia just don’t mix. How can you balance morning sickness with field work? How can you do lab work with dangerous chemicals that you’re not allowed to use? How are you expected to write your thesis when you’re taking care of an infant? These are all daunting challenges.

Are women getting their PhDs with the nefarious plan that they can use these things as excuses to avoid reproduction? Of course not. Plenty of women want to have children, but put it off because they feel it’s impossible in the current academic environment. The solution isn’t to stop women from getting their PhDs. What we need to do is develop ways to make motherhood easier for academics. Make day cares more available at Universities. Make pregnancy leave a viable option for grad students. Take pregnancy into account when evaluating publications when I woman is up for tenure. Encourage men to spend more time with their children, rather than assuming that’s mom’s job.

Many women have survived grad school and motherhood simultaneously because they had appropriate accommodations. This should be a cause Rudd can rally against: I mean, all he wants us to do is breed, right? He won’t care if we happen to get a little smarter at the same time.

Blag Hag 2010 Census Results

I want to thank everyone who participated in my Blag Hag 2010 Census! 467 people filled out the survey (before I closed it due to eagerness to crunch the numbers), which is absolutely amazing. I was expecting something like 50, but I guess you guys like data just as much as I do. Considering that I have slightly over 1000 subscribers (holy crap!), we did almost as well as voter turnout for the US Presidential elections! Feel special, or maybe depressed, depending how you interpret that.

Because I got a decent sample size, I actually felt safe doing some statistics and trying to interpret the results. Now, as a warning, it’s been a couple of years since I took a statistics class. It is highly probable that I screwed something up, that there was a more appropriate test to use, that one of the first five commenters will correct me, etc. I think we can see some interesting trends here, but it’s no scientific study. Also keep in mind these results don’t necessarily apply to atheists as a whole, just the atheists who read my blog and like to take surveys. Take it with a grain of salt!

Before we get started, here is how I indicated statistical significance on graphs:
* P-value less than 0.05
** P-value less than 0.01
*** P-value less than 0.001
**** P-value less than 0.0001

As always, click the images for a larger, nicer version.
We had 335 males, 135 females, and 7 transgendered readers. This actually surprised me a bit. As you can see, male readers vastly outnumber my female ones. People always ask “Where are the female atheists?” and I usually reply “We’re out here!” I know a lot of female atheists aren’t outspoken enough to want to go to club meetings or be visible, but I would have thought there would be more equal ratios on a blog written by a female atheist that often talks about feminism. My ladies are still drastically outnumbered!

I have a couple of hypotheses.

  • Females hate filling out surveys (unlikely)
  • Male atheists currently do, in fact, outnumber female atheists.
  • Male atheists currently tend to read blogs more than female atheists.
  • My blog is new, so more females haven’t found it yet.
  • This is a better sex ratio than other blogs. Who knows, maybe blogs like Pharyngula and Friendly Atheist have a 9:1 ratio.

Oh, and to my transgendered readers who thanked me for including that option, you’re welcome! Can’t forget you guys. Though I am going to apologize now – most of my analyses look for differences in responses between males and females, and your sample size was too small to work for any of my statistics. Sorry! Please don’t take it personally.
Not surprising that most of my readers fall close to my own age (22). The one bit that surprised me was that I was expecting to have a grand total of two readers over the age of 30. Nothing against my older readers – I just still feel very young and immature in many respects, and I was surprised that so many “adults” would enjoy my blog. So, thank you! There we no difference in the age distribution of males and females.

Now, onto the cool stuff!
I think this result was so cool because it didn’t surprise me. Many studies (and anecdotes) point to females having more fluid sexual orientations and more bisexual tendencies. Our results follow that pretty nicely, with the vast majority of guys considering themselves exclusively heterosexual. Or at least, that’s how they reported their sexual orientation on the survey. Who knows how honest people are even when it’s anonymous.

Oh, and one fun observation: My friends who responded tend to be gayer than my readership as a whole. I think I’m a bad influence on people. Maybe we should see how that chart changes once I get another year to recruit blog.

Favorite open responses:

  • “Science nerd” – The best sexuality ever.

Here readers were allowed to respond with as many answers as they wanted, hence the use of percentage instead of raw numbers. Unsurprisingly, “atheist” was the most common choice. The popular choices seem to be the positive labels – skeptic, humanist, secularist, freethinker – with terms with negative connotations not doing so well. And this supports my opinion that “Bright” comes off as a kind of douchey label that not many non-theists like, since it came in last.

The gender differences here are interesting. Men are significantly more likely to call themselves skeptics, freethinkers, and anti-theists. Anti-theists sort of makes sense, since I think some men are more likely to be aggressive and in your face about things (this does not mean aggressive female anti-theists don’t exist). The other two completely baffle me, though. Women aren’t using skeptic as much, even with the delightful pun of the Skepchicks? And…I have no idea about freethinker. Feel free to come up with your own hypotheses in the comments.

Another interesting thing to note is that men tended to list more labels for themselves than women did. Men used an average of 4.4 labels with a variance of 9.3, and women used an average of 3.7 levels with a variance of 5.7 (p less than 0.01). Of course, this could entirely be from the couple of terms that men like to use a lot more than women.

Favorite open responses:

  • “Awesome”
  • “Belief challenged”
  • “Human” – Two people said this, I liked it!
  • “Depends on my mood and whether I want to be annoying”
  • “Too lazy to be a secular humanist” – Ditto
  • “Shiny?” – I don’t know, are you shiny? Do we have a Twilight vampire amongst us?

Moral of the story: get PZ to link to your blog repeatedly. Seriously though, it seems being linked to by other respected, popular blogs is the best way to get new readers and to retain them. To put this in perspective, Reddit usually gives me as many hits as a Pharyngula or Friendly Atheist plug, but those people don’t tend to stick around. Getting linked to by a great blog is a level of quality control, since that blogger is saying that they like your stuff.

I wasn’t expecting to see any differences here, but there they are! Is this because Pharyngula does have more of a male bias? And what’s up with the ladies liking Google Reader suggestions so much? I have no idea, but thank you, Google Reader!

Favorite open responses:

  • “Girlfriend read occasional blog posts to me” – Aw, oddly sort of cute/cool!
  • “Divine Ordinance, a.k.a. Holy Handgrenade (I don’t remember. Shhh..don’t tell Jen)” – Divine Ordinance is an acceptable answer.

Women like posts on feminism a lot more than men – absolutely shocking! You guys better learn to love them, because they’re not going anywhere, haha. On the flip side, I have no idea why men like posts about me attending local atheist and theist events more than women. Hmmm, maybe because I tend to post a lot of photos when I go…

Other than that, the topics don’t surprise me. Politics is my least favorite topic to blog about since I don’t feel as well read in that area, and apparently my readers don’t love it either (not that they hate it, just that it’s not a favorite topic). Everything else I enjoy blogging about equally, and readers seem to enjoy them equally. Lesson: write about what you like!

Favorite open responses:

  • “Reading about Jen’s boobs” – Got this from multiple people, almost all of them from my friends. Can’t exactly get annoyed, since I am the one writing about my boobs (seriously though, thought this was funny)
  • “The review of those wretched sex scenes were read aloud at a party I threw. Good stuff.” – This is made of ultimate win.

A lot of the free responses said that they loved the blog the way it was and to not feel like I needed to drastically change anything to improve. I didn’t consider this question an ultimatum or some drastic overhaul. I mainly wanted to know if 1. I should increase the attention I put on certain things that I already enjoy doing or 2. if I should start doing things I was thinking about doing. A couple of things:

  • Apparently you guys like my art! Thanks! It’s something I always want to do more of, but a piece of artwork takes something like 6 hours, compared to a short bout of writing. You’ll probably see a lot more art this summer, when I’ll have a lot of free time.
  • On the flip side, you guys don’t care about me making any money. Sadness. A gal’s gotta eat, you know.
  • I’ve avoiding rigid Daily features (like PZ’s Friday Cephalopod) mainly because that takes planning and I’m lazy. However, I may start doing a “List of all the random cool stuff I saw this week but didn’t have enough of an opinion to blog about it” thing. But with a better title. Anyway, I amass awesome links on Google Reader, so it wouldn’t be too hard to post them here.
  • Yeaaah, don’t hold your breath on the videoblogging. I don’t own a webcam/videocamera and I hate watching myself on video. Oh, and apparently Australians have a raging hate-on for videoblogging since their internet service is so shitty, as multiple responders explained. Don’t want to ostracize my readers down under!

Oh, and of course “More sexy pirate outfit photos” did really well, with men wanting them a lot more. Mind blowing. Maybe I can combine that with community building and contests, and make you send me sexy pirate photos of yourself! Much better than photos of me, right? …Right?

I’m saving the final open response suggestions for the next post, since this post is already getting massive enough. What do you guys think of these findings? Have any comments or hypotheses? Do you have any other things you want me to look at (if certain terms are correlated with each other, etc)? Just let me know, and I’ll crunch some more numbers! Data is fun!

Feminism at Purdue

My day started off a little rough. I missed the bus even though I was about 10 feet from the bus stop (Thank you, Mr. Driver), the walk to campus was freezing, and I was lugging our Darwin Day merchandise and poster along. I was hungry and tired. I plopped down on the bench, ready to zone out for an hour until my class, when my friend Mike thrust a newspaper into my hands.

“Noooooooooo!”

It was the Purdue Review.

For those of you who aren’t Purdue students, let me explain. We have a sane, balanced, and fairly well done student newspaper called the Exponent. If the Exponent is Purdue’s journalistic Superman, the Purdue Review is Bizarro. It’s a extraordinarily conservative student newspaper that seems to take all of its ideology from Glenn Beck, Fox News, and teabaggers. Yeah, we’re talking about some good stuff, here.

It’s only printed a couple of times a semester (thankfully). To make it worse, one of my ex-boyfriends is on their staff, but that’s a totally different story. If I’m in for a good rage, I’ll grab a copy – but most of the time I ignore it to keep my own sanity. But now it was being thrust into my hands, and I couldn’t ignore the title: POL 222: Women, Politics & Public Policy.

The Purdue Review was going to tackle feminism? You know I’m too much of a masochist to ignore that.

It’s such a pile of crap that it’s not worth picking apart: just go read it or Mike’s critique, since he actually took that class. It’s just some conservative student whining about how political science classes are so liberal and us liberals push feminism on everyone. He tries to make these arguments okay by asserting he’s totally against husbands abusing their wives. What a stand up guy. I mean, how can you not like a guy who thinks this?

It need not be said that the points raised in the class are incongruent with traditional conservativism. The role of the mother has always been to take care of her family and maintain the household. Even in nature, the young need to be with the mother for a certain amount of time before they can go about on their own.

Dear Tyler Martin, if someone ever invents a time machine, I will pay out of my pocket for you and all of your conservative friends to zoom back to 1900, so you won’t have to worry about us wandering out of the kitchen or depriving you of our baby making machinery.

Anyway, after reading that annoyance, I had to go get some more change for the Darwin Day sale. As I was passing through the Stewart Center heading towards the bank, there were a bunch of tables set up for Valentine’s Day: Roses for sale, singing telegrams, creative writing majors selling love poetry (loved that idea). I was kind of oblivious, but someone stuffed a piece of paper in my hand.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”

“You too,” I mumbled, continuing to walk by. I peered down at the paper in my hand and stopped dead in my tracks.FEMINISTS?!?!

I literally walked backwards a couple steps to the table.

“There’s a feminist group at Purdue?! When did this happen?!” I asked the young lady who had handed me the valentine.

“Recently. Hey, you’re Jen, right? From the Non-Theists? I know you, but you don’t know me, because I don’t really come to actual meetings. Sorry if that’s kind of weird.” Oddly enough, this happens so frequently that it’s no longer weird to me.But I seriously can’t explain how excited I was. During my freshman year I was a member of Purdue’s chapter of the National Organization for Women. We did lots of awesome events, my favorite being Sex on the Mall, a giant sex ed fair on Memorial Mall. The group fell apart when the president graduated, and I’ve been severely lacking in my feminism ever since.

Am I going to have time to go to meeting for a new club in the final months before I graduate? Maybe, but probably not. But the mere presence of this club means so much to me, especially after reading some anti-feminist bullshit. It was serendipitous. To see seven awesome looking ladies happily passing out sex ed information and condoms as valentines totally made my day. Oh, and apparently they liked my feminist glee so much that they gave me another valentine. Woo, double the fun.

So keep up the awesome work, Feminist Action Coalition for Today! Purdue needs your voice on campus. (Though hurry up and get a website so I easily send oodles of people your way!)

Woman’s Last Stand

I know my 10 Most Sexist Super Bowl Ads post got quite a bit of attention. And by “bit of attention” I mean hordes of anonymous trolls calling me a fat, ugly, lonely, humorless, overreacting, man-hating lesbian who needs to either get back in the kitchen or get back to blogging about topics that don’t make people uncomfortable. These comments really don’t phase me, since 1) Obvious trolls crack me up, 2) Misogynistic comments prove my point, and 3) My lesbian friends are super awesome, so I take that as a compliment.

To all of you who actually left civil and enlightening comments, whether they agreed or disagreed with me, I thank you.

Anyway, since the internet is way too serious of a place sometimes, I figured I would share this spoof of the Dodge Charger ad:

I’d put a bet on how many comments it’ll take for someone to call me a hypocritical misandrist*, but I just ruined that by stating it here, didn’t I? Oops.

*Sexism is bad, regardless if it’s targeted toward women or men. I’m not sure how many times I need to say that. Maybe I should put that in big bold letters above my banner for newcomers, so they don’t shit bricks every time I blog about sexism. Of course, watching them shit bricks is kind of fun.

Woman's Last Stand

I know my 10 Most Sexist Super Bowl Ads post got quite a bit of attention. And by “bit of attention” I mean hordes of anonymous trolls calling me a fat, ugly, lonely, humorless, overreacting, man-hating lesbian who needs to either get back in the kitchen or get back to blogging about topics that don’t make people uncomfortable. These comments really don’t phase me, since 1) Obvious trolls crack me up, 2) Misogynistic comments prove my point, and 3) My lesbian friends are super awesome, so I take that as a compliment.

To all of you who actually left civil and enlightening comments, whether they agreed or disagreed with me, I thank you.

Anyway, since the internet is way too serious of a place sometimes, I figured I would share this spoof of the Dodge Charger ad:

I’d put a bet on how many comments it’ll take for someone to call me a hypocritical misandrist*, but I just ruined that by stating it here, didn’t I? Oops.

*Sexism is bad, regardless if it’s targeted toward women or men. I’m not sure how many times I need to say that. Maybe I should put that in big bold letters above my banner for newcomers, so they don’t shit bricks every time I blog about sexism. Of course, watching them shit bricks is kind of fun.