Sex DNE Gender!

Cool article "How Boys Become Boys (and Sometimes Girls)" by Scientific American about how embryos slated by X and Y chromosome allotment to become boys instead develop into girls (welcome - more girls!), and sometimes vice versa.

If Sox9 is somehow switched on in a genetic female—an embryo with two X chromosomes—it causes male gonads to form; if it fails to turn on in males, the cells it controls will become follicle cells, which mature into ovaries."

My only qualm is that, though it appears that this study and article have just as much potential application for how "Girls become girls (and sometimes boys)", this reciprocity was really only seen in one sentence in the article. I know, I know, gene expression anomalies cause genetic boys to become girls much more often than girls become boys (more X chromosomes have more control that just having one Y chromosome). But the study looked at both - how (genetic) boys become girls, and how (genetic) girls become boys. To me, the framing of this article is too reminiscent of recent studies about effects of stress on women during pregnancy on a child's gender, and how this was portrayed "we still don't know how to advise women in how to make boys". Chilling.

Real Posts Now

In an effort to start blogging more over the summer (during which I will be in Germany) I may as well start posting now.

First, please tell me why the BBC posts this garbage. Someone please enlighten me.

One gem:

"The study suggests sex hormones can alter the workings of the voice box, but the change may be too subtle to pick up in many situations."

(emphasis mine)

My question is, then, why this study? If the change is too subtle to pick up? Is this an ascertainment bias thing - you want to prove something, so you go out and find information/data that supports it? My suspicion is that it might be. Unless this professor did a study on men's voices, as well, which didn't get reported.

So a second question would then be, are there studies on men like this? I.e. "Men under more influence of progesterone 'sound sexier'". My suspicion is that this study would be portrayed vastly differently. First off, this study would never be done, or at least never reported on by the BBC: we're much more interested in what makes women sexy than men. Secondly, if this study were done, my guess is that the title would be more like "Women view men as sexier with higher progesterone levels". As in, here you have the women falling all over themselves to get at these men (this would be the implication). Whereas in the study the BBC reports on, the men rate very scientifically the attractiveness of the woman's voice, and then they are sexier, because the men say so. Don't worry, men are very objective.

Also, there was this classy quote from the professor who did this study:

"While it's possible, the other issue is that women do have mood changes across their menstrual cycle, and people might just be attracted to a happy-sounding woman, rather than a fertile one."

So difficult to avoid running into sexist tropes when talking about this kind of research! Makes me wonder if it really has much scientific value at all. Of course, it's the only kind of science the BBC reports - relatively useless, psuedo-sexist science. "Women in high heels actually happier, healthier, one scientist reports". "Men funnier than women, says unicycling professor" (although that one, I think, was a very interesting joke the BBC completely misreported.)

It seems mandatory, as well, that the BBC has to catch the professor of whatever research report guessing why their research is the way it is, and it's inevitably something offensive. I don't know whether it's the professor's fault, really, or the BBC's fault for reporting these studies this way. But please, this just sounds like a 1950's commercial. Unhappy? Your man will never love you! Aiyo.

And, before you jump on me for "something that couldn't possibly be sexist! After all, it's science!" please read this.

Good Piece!

Politics and Misogyny


By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 15, 2008

With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s win in New Hampshire, gender issues are suddenly in the news. Where has everybody been?
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If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.

Little attention is being paid to the toll that misogyny takes on society in general, and women and girls in particular.

Its forms are limitless. Hard-core pornography is a multibillion-dollar business, having spread far beyond the stereotyped raincoat crowd to anyone with a laptop and a password. Crowds of crazed photographers risk life and limb to get shots of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears without their underwear. At New York Jets home games, men regularly gather at Gate D to urge female fans to expose themselves.

In its grimmest aspects, misogyny manifests itself in hideous violence — from brutal beatings and rape to outright torture and murder. Fifteen months ago, a gunman invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

The cable news channels revel in stories about women (almost always young and attractive) who come to a gruesome end at the hands of violent men. The stories seldom, if ever, raise the issue of misogyny, which permeates not just the crimes themselves, but the coverage as well.

The latest of these obsessively covered stories concerned a pregnant marine, Maria Frances Lauterbach, who had complained to authorities that she had been raped by a fellow marine. Her body was found last week buried in a backyard fire pit in North Carolina.

It just so happens that the Democratic presidential candidates are campaigning this week in the misogyny capital of America: Nevada. It’s a perfect place to bring up the way women are viewed and treated in this society, but don’t hold your breath. Presidential wannabes are hardly in the habit of insulting the locals.

Prostitution is legal in much of Nevada and heavily promoted even where it’s not. In Las Vegas, where prostitution is illegal but flourishes nevertheless, Mayor Oscar Goodman has said that creating a series of legal, “magnificent” brothels would be a great development tool for his city.

The fundamental problem in all of this is that women and girls are dehumanized, opening the floodgates to every kind of mistreatment. “Once you dehumanize somebody, everything else is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

A grotesque exercise in the dehumanization of women is carried out routinely at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about an hour’s ride outside of Vegas. There the women have to respond like Pavlov’s dog to an electronic bell that might ring at any hour of the day or night. At the sound of the bell, the prostitutes have five minutes to get to an assembly area where they line up, virtually naked, and submit to a humiliating inspection by any prospective customer who has happened to drop by.

If you don’t think this is an issue worthy of a presidential campaign, consider the scandalous way that women are treated in the military and the fact that the winner of this election will become the commander in chief.

The sexual mistreatment of women in the military is widespread. The Defense Department financed a study in 2003 of female veterans seeking health assistance from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nearly a third of those surveyed said they had been the victim of a rape or attempted rape during their service.

The Associated Press reported in 2006 that more than 80 military recruiters had been disciplined over the course of a year because of sexual misconduct with young women and girls who had considered joining the military.

There continue to be widespread complaints from women about rape and other forms of sexual attacks in the military, and about a culture that tends to protect the attackers.

To what extent are the candidates of either party concerned about these matters? Do they have any sense of how extensive and debilitating the mistreatment of women and girls really is?

We’ve become so used to the disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous and even violent treatment of women that we hardly notice it. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed against women and girls every day. Fashionable ads in mainstream publications play off of that violence, exploiting themes of death and dismemberment, female submissiveness and child pornography.

If we’ve opened the door to the issue of sexism in the presidential campaign, then let’s have at it. It’s a big and important issue that deserves much more than lip service.

Although Knocked Up Was Sexist...

This disparity is on display in a whole series of recent comedies, from School of Rock to High Fidelity. It's also powerfully familiar to anyone who follows the so-called Mommy Wars. In that proliferating literature of family friction, women's lives seem to shrink to a series of pragmatic decisions about achieving balance, while men are concerned with domestic stuff only to the degree that they choose to be. In this regard, Knocked Up is in keeping with the zeitgeist: If, as Heigl delicately put it, the movie is a "little sexist," that is because it is the natural product of a culture evidently sold on the notion that women are so focused on domestic mechanics that they simply don't know how to allow themselves the playful inner lives men do, whether they're free-associating brilliantly with their friends, or lazily absorbed in video games. (The trope cuts both ways, of course: It allows men to be comedic geniuses, but it also means that husbands get portrayed right and left as childish dopes.) Just glance at a book like The Bitch in the House, where female essayists portray their male partners as slouches who don't get the job done until they're given a to-do list.

Stories about boys who have more fun than girls go back to Wendy and Peter Pan. But there was a time when romantic comedies, as Denby points out, were more egalitarian in their assignment of playfulness. These days, romantic comedies routinely depict a loss of some essential autonomy for the man, and a lesson in "balance" for the woman. A culture that assigns all that weight to what "men" and "women" want only makes it more difficult for couples to establish their own fruitful ratio of intimacy to privacy. The best moments in Knocked Up are those that suggest the world doesn't have to be this way—that of course women can possess playful inner lives too. There aren't quite enough of them. You leave feeling that what poor Debbie—and Alison—really wants is not a husband who knows to bring home pink cupcakes for a birthday party, but a culture that grants them the same indulgent latitude their partners get: the luxury of not having to be relentlessly responsible. Slacker, starring a woman. Barring that, of course, there's Juno, the story of a knocked-up girl from her own irreverent perspective—written, as it happens, by a female scriptwriter—now playing in a theater near you.

Enlightenment: that's what I want too. That's why my last serious relationship ended, so long ago, I think. I didn't always want to have to be the responsible one. It's taxing. Now I'm much less responsible (seeming), so others hopefully won't ask me to be constantly on top of things. That's not my job. At work as a lab tech it is, maybe, but if you're at home and have a significant other it should not just be your job. Bollocks to that.

Ah, the Y Chromosome

Interesting how some people attribute so much by ways of intelligence to the lilliputian Y chromosome. That poor guy must be packed with all sorts of good shit... the math genes, abstract thinking, self-reliance, ability to be more than sort of a semi-autonomous incubator on legs... my goodness.

Except WAIT... the Y chromosome is almost entirely composed of second copies of genes needed in two copies also found on the X chromosome, with the majority of its length consisting of non-coding DNA*. There is essentially only one gene, the SRY gene, which is involved in the determination of masculinity and all it entails.

That means the difference between men and women is determined by one gene, and then what? The ENVIRONMENT, you say? What a naughty word. Surely how we are brought up has no influence on our behaviors or our psyche. This would be tantamount to saying that society influences how men and women feel they need to behave. Never, I say. I am programmed by my genes to want to shave my legs and wear dresses, as well as to be bad at chess. No conditioning or lack thereof has caused these behaviors. No siree.



*Ridley, Matt. Genome. Figure out the rest of the citation yourself.

Sadly, I never had any barbies...

That out of the way, this stuff is what has got me so riled up:

Cheerleader Barbie!

As if girls didn't have an unreasonable enough standard to live up to! Woo!

as well as:

Barbie Serves Ken!