Francis Collins made a triumphant declaration about his plan to “end sexual harassment”! Hooray!

Read my @nature article w/Mike Lauer & @NIH_COSWD on ending sexual harassment in all #NIH-supported environments: https://t.co/OhsB9RwUxO

— Francis S. Collins (@NIHDirector) March 4, 2016

Only…it was initially published in a closed-access journal, Nature (the article has since been opened up). And, say, Nature is a UK journal — why is the head of the NIH publishing his grand proposal to end all harassment in NIH supported institution there? It struck a lot of people as weird and tone-deaf.

And then I read the “article”. Rarely have I read something so empty outside of administrative memos from high-ranking academic bureaucrats. It’s truly impressive. The physicist will be jealous that the biologists have managed to create the most perfect vacuum known to humankind.

Here it is, sprinkled with a few annotations from yours truly.

As the leading US government funder of scientific research, we at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are deeply concerned about sexual harassment in science (Nature 529, 255; 2016). With the help of colleagues in government, academia and the private sector, the NIH aims to identify the steps [Isn’t “aims to identify the steps” kind of an empty way to say “do something, but we don’t know what”?]necessary to end this in all NIH-supported research workplaces and scientific meetings.

In September last year, we restated our expectation that organizers of NIH-supported conferences and meetings should assure a safe environment, free of discrimination (see go.nature.com/zmukk8).

Over the next few weeks to months, we plan to work with governmental, academic and private-sector colleagues to identify potential steps [“we don’t know what”] to translating our expectations into reality. An important first step will be to gather as much data as possible [“we’re going to flounder around for a while, trying to figure out what we’re doing”] to more fully understand the nature and extent of sexual harassment among scientists. These data should guide us in determining what kinds of policy and procedure are most likely to help. [“not that we have any policy, obviously”] We will also work to determine what levers [“We’ll figure out something to kick some butt, but we don’t know what”] are already available to influential stakeholders — us as funders, as well as university administrators and departments, journal editors, and organizers and hosts of scientific meetings.[stakeholders=buzzword for everyone involved. “We don’t even know who we’re going to work on yet”]

We owe this [What do you owe?] to our colleagues and the public, who trust in our ability to make the biomedical research enterprise the best that it can be.

Yeah, that fluff was a great use of page space in a high-ranking science journal. How about sparing us the finger-flapping until you’ve actually got something to say?

Hope Jahren has an excellent op-ed on sexual harassment in academia. I’ve always wondered how guys have the gall to even start these unsavory relationships, and she shares some of the email she’s received.

The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes. Sexual harassment in science generally starts like this: A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: “I need to tell you,” or “my feelings.” The opening lines refer to the altered physical and mental state of the author: “It’s late and I can’t sleep” is a favorite, though “Maybe it’s the three glasses of cognac” is popular as well.

The author goes on to tell her that she is special in some way, that his passion is an unfamiliar feeling that she has awakened in him, the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself. He will speak of her as an object with “shiny hair” or “sparkling eyes” — testing the waters before commenting upon the more private parts of her body. Surprisingly, he often acknowledges that he is doing something inappropriate. I’ve seen “Of course you know I could get fired for this” in the closing paragraph; the subject line of the email sent to my former student was “NSFW read at your own risk!”

I still can’t quite imagine it, but at least she has now spelled out the obvious warning signs.

And then, sadly, she describes the usual course of events, which is usually denial and blame from all the institutional resources that ought to be helping the student out. Here’s what she advises the women targeted by such behavior:

I teach her to draw strong professional boundaries and then to enforce them, not because she should have to, but because nobody else will. I insist that she must document everything, because someday he will paint this as a two-way emotional exchange. I wearily advise her to stick it out in science, but only because I cannot promise that other fields aren’t worse. And I hope that this is enough to make him stop. But it never, never stops.

Now that’s depressing.

Otherwise, I might have to pursue this alternative career path.

Also, I have to say, that if a professor wants to do porn in their spare time as a hobby, and it doesn’t affect their work, the University of Manchester has no good grounds for carrying out an internal investigation, and I should hope that at the end of it all, they would simply shrug their collective shoulders and recognize that it’s none of their business.

The Handbook of the Mount Saint Charles Academy, a Christian school, starts well.

Mount Saint Charles Academy admits students of any race, color, national origin or ethnic background to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or ethnic background in the administration of educational policies, loan programs, and athletic or other school administered programs.

Notice anything missing? Nothing about sexual orientation, and nothing about transgender…oh, wait. They do have a statement on that last one.

Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students. Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.

What special accommodations do you need to make for transgender students? Do they have special plumbing? It seems to me that transgender students are able to use the facilities they already have for men and women in the school, so this is a very strange restriction.

You know, if you lack something you need to support a set of your students, the right answer is to fix your facilities; the easy answer is to kick out those students. But that’s also the wrong answer.

Especially when your handbook babbles about the compassion of Christ.

A little story from a big city hospital:

“When you work on the east side of our hospital, psychiatric patients are a dime a dozen,” he said.

But this patient is different. She’s put together. She’s lucid. She’s got an incision.

A group crowded around the computer to see her x-ray.

“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice,” he said. “But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.”

It turns out this 20-something woman was being pimped out by her boyfriend, forced to sell herself for sex and hand him the money.

Yeah, some days, you start to see the virtues of extinction.

Vyckie Garrison has a terrifying post about the enforcers of Biblical patriarchy: the women who tell other women to serve men.

Admittedly, the public face of Quiverfull (also known as “Complementarity”) is overwhelmingly male: John Piper of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John MacArthur of Grace to You ministries, Dennis Rainey, radio host of Family Life Today, mega-church Pastor David Platt, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board and author of “Counter Culture” which calls on women to ditch feminism in favor of wifely submission, Voddie Baucham, author of “What He Must Be If He Wants To Marry My Daughter,” Scott Brown of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches (in which “family integrated” is code words for Quiverfull), “Kill The Gays” pastor, Kevin Swanson, the “pissing pastor,” Steve Anderson, and so so many more.

But honestly, no sensible woman would give these misogynistic jerks the time of day if it weren’t for the influence of dedicated Christian female mentors: the “older women” of Titus 2 whom the apostle Paul charged to “teach the younger women” to be obedient keepers at home.

I listened to about a minute of the saccharine-sweet, praise-god lecturing of Nancy Campbell and could take no more. Spare me.

I did laugh at one of Garrison’s explanations for why women actually fall for this patriarchal crap: They’re married to losers. How weak must a man be if he has to invoke the aid of the imaginary all-powerful ruler of the universe to make his marriage viable?

By the way, Garrison’s daughter has a heritable bone disease called Hereditary Multiple Exostosis, and she’s asking for help. That looks like a good cause. She sure can’t expect God to help her out.

Case #5623 out of uncountable myriads:

The Best of Tumblr

I really want to hear more from this knowledgable fellow, “all-because-we-fell-in-love”. I’d like to know where he thinks the penis goes in, or where the baby comes out. I’d also like to know where he gets the confidence to lecture women on their genitalia when he knows essentially nothing about them.

I have caught him in a gross error. He notices that MRA Paul Elam detests faux feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, and makes an erroneous generalization.

I turns out that Elam is one of the very few carbon-based life forms in this sector of the galaxy to actually believe that Sommers, who’s devoted most of her career to bashing feminists, actually is the feminist she pretends to be.

This is incorrect. A great many carbon-based life forms actually enthusiastically present Sommers as the very model of a modern feminist, and are disingenuously dumbfounded if you explain to them that she’s actually an anti-feminist. Unfortunately, that list of carbon-based life forms includes surprisingly many high-profile atheists, including Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins.

I think criticizing Futrelle instantly qualifies me for an official MRA membership card, doesn’t it?