Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the lovely IHaveALargePenis explains that it’s not sexism holding back women in science and technology. No way! It’s just that women are inferior at science and technology. No sexism involved at all!
Maybe IHaveALArgePenis should have taken an English class or two and learned what “irony” is.
Also, uh, how exactly are security cameras supposed to guard against sexism? This is a new one to me.
Thanks to Wrecksomething on the AgainstMensRights subreddit for pointing me to this mantastic quote.
Thanks for reading and summarizing this so I don’t have to.
Why do MRAs blame “learning approaches taken in classrooms” for the poor academic performance of boys when the latter is a recent phenomenon and the former has changed little in 100+ years?
Personally, I blame femme-phobia. When the worst thing a boy can be is “like a girl,” and girls are academically successful…
Yes, I’ve noticed that all the uni-level biology courses I take get much easier when there are lots of women enrolled. And even easier than that when the prof is a woman.
Seriously, we all just stand around ooo-ing and aww-ing at cute animal pics, then get graded based on who comes up with the cuddliest names for each specimen.
That’s totes how it is. Really. It’s only those evil male profs who make us to math-y things like Hardy-Weinberg equations or Shannon indexes.
Really, I swear.
Katz — I’m thinking it might be easier to assign each drug it’s own line then. Number them and use their number for yes and 0 for no, it should chart like this if you put weight on one axis and the drugs on another. That make sense outside my head?
Whoops, the grey line should be labelled as weight, not time. (And please ignore my color choices, did that quick on the iPad so my choices weren’t exactly great)
@Monster, I actually ended up studying something completely unrelated to traditional ‘hard science’ and I would avoid former classmates that I would see in the train because inevitably we would talk about university and they’d have this look of pity/detachment when I couldn’t justify my study choice on their terms. It was like I had become one of those other people that didn’t matter so much anymore, definitely an eye-opening moment for me.
RE: Kittehserf
rabbitwink, there was an item in the paper here saying that there’s a push for it to be made illegal to use anything but French there, in things like restaurant menus. Is that true?
In my linguistics classes, there was the joke that the only place Frencher than France was Quebec. (Because even the French have ‘Stop’ on their stop signs. The Quebecois have… er, whatever French is for ‘STOP.’)
RE: Deoridhe
I know a bit about the public housing here, but I was discouraged from even trying, since the waiting list is for years. Now that SSI is actually a thing for me, though, I might give it another look-see.
I’ve never actually lived alone. (Well. ‘Alone.’ You know what I mean.) Given a choice, I actually prefer to live with other people, so I’ll actually probably hunt the co-ops or put out a Housing Wanted ad in the queer newsletter here. But I’ll definitely keep your thoughts in my back pocket! Thanks!
RE: Falconer
That’s funny. Balancing chemical equations was actually way more fun for me than straight multiplication. It felt like a puzzle. I felt the same way regarding figuring out electrons in ionic compounds; I had a really good strategy that I felt immensely proud of, and it made ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE to anyone I attempted to explain it to. (But I was likely a shitty ‘splainer.) I’m okay at math, but it’s deinitely NOT my realm of interest.
RE: misery
I was mocked in college for studying linguistics. I can only imagine the horror people would’ve had knowing that I’m now a working artist. It’s the most “useless” a thing one can do!
Riu and Rising Phoenix are 11 km apart? Huh.
Argenti, I’ll try something like that.
In other news, Reddit again denies rape culture by proving rape culture. (Link goes to SRS, so that at least you can read the poop, if you read the poop, well-filtered through mockery.)
Also, off topic but aaaaugh I am so tired of being wtf!sick. I want to have my strength back and write and go to the Social Security office and be able to walk freely and STUPID HUMAN FALLIBILITY!
At least I have trolls to soothe me.
LBT – worst thing is, I’ve had Quebecois friends who couldn’t read French (as in, French from France) because all they knew was Quebecois dialect. I seriously hope that’s not the sort of French the government wants for their monolingual wot-us-hate-tourists-paradise.
Well this post certainly showed me why women aren’t enrolling in STEM classes…Though it’s not for the reasons explained in the post…
@misery – ah, they sound like an insufferable bunch of arseholes. Sorry you had to deal with that. I frequently meet people rather like that…have to explain my area of study to them and deal with all the ‘Right…so whats that good for again?’ condescension. (If they are so bleedin’ smart, why don’t they know what it is already, hmmm!?) I don’t get that attitude at all…like, OK some things are objectively more useful than others, but the world would totally suck if everybody only decided to study STEM and ditched all the other stuff like art and literature and designing shoes and decorating cakes and running little tea rooms and all that other stuff.
RE: Kittehserf
Quebec has everything bilingual now, I think. They lost a lot of business with the secession scare a while back; I can’t imagine them wanting to take the hit for forcibly monolingualizing everything, it’d suck ass.
RE: Monster
Exactly. I feel no regrets about studying linguistics, for instance. Am I using it for my job? Strictly speaking, no, but it sure is helpful for world-building in stories! Build a language, and you help build a culture.
That’s the wonderful thing about what I do; NOTHING I learn is useless. Everything can be useful for world-building, character-building, or the crafting process of writing itself.
I don’t know if the top level of government is involved, or it’s more local, but there was some really, really stupid shit going on with the monolingual policing. Like, an Italian restaurant got the heavies coming in telling ’em their menus had to be in French and nothing else. Real WTF level stuff.
RE: Kittehserf
Well, I come from the country that created fucking Freedom Fries, so I guess I can’t claim superiority. (Though one Southern politician apparently got so sick of that bullshit, he jokingly created a resolution to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Freedom or something.)
@ cloudiah
Guh, Reddit and rape culture. That’s a bad sign… but thanks for linking to a thread where people are calling out the bullshit instead of the actual victim-blaming thread. If I had a Reddit account, I would say something like, “Rape is not something that just happens to you when you’re not careful enough. It’s something that someone else does to you because they wanted to.”
You would think the fact that you get to dissect awesome things in bio would convince people it’s a pretty badass science.
Admittedly during college I took a “biology for humanities” course instead of the regular bio. It involved a shitton of reading medical journals, which meant a lot more outside reading so I could understand those medical journals. Not to mention having to review those articles, explaining whether I thought the results were valid and why. I feel like I got a lot more “applied science” out of the totally not real science class than if I’d tried going into a class where I memorized everything and forgot it as soon as finals were done.
Heh – I organised a boycott of dissection in fourth form science, on the grounds that killing animals for a bunch of moronic sixteen-year-olds to cut up was wrong.
I didn’t specify “moronic” at the time but probably didn’t have to. No budding scientists of any stripe in that lot. I was the only one who even went on to fifth form.
Kittehserf: LBT – worst thing is, I’ve had Quebecois friends who couldn’t read French (as in, French from France) because all they knew was Quebecois dialect. I seriously hope that’s not the sort of French the government wants for their monolingual wot-us-hate-tourists-paradise.
Really?
Because French films come to Quebec just fine, but Quebecois films going to France get subtitled. I’ve never had problems having my (Parisian) French understood in Quebec, and when there was confusion they wrote it out, and I did just fine understanding it.
I’m a bit tired at this point in the evening to delve into the whiff of subtle anglo colonialism I’m reading from some of the posters here, so I’ll just mention that the expectations of bilingualism are not exactly on an equal footing between Quebecois French and Americans/the rest of Canada. I don’t see people complaining as often that they can’t expect to be served everywhere in English in Mexico (though Gawd knows some American tourists are probably doing just that).
We’ve got legal abortion. It’s also covered by our state medical insurance and available without parental notification as long as you’re 14 or over. But Plan B cannot be gotten over the counter. Go figure. Also, the Liberals gutted our high school sex education classes (yeah, our Liberals are our right-wing, again go figure) so things aren’t looking up going forward, but yay! gay marriage.
pecunium – yeah, it surprised the hell out of me that a Quebecois friend couldn’t read standard French. She was bililngual, with English as her second language.
BlackBloc, I raised this because of the incident I mentioned (the Italian restaurant) that would have been bizarre in any language or region. I have no idea what the situation is in the rest of Canada, so please don’t assume colonialism is at the root of this.
pecunium — really? I cannot read a lick of Québécois, though I can usually get the topic of conversation in French (of course, I mean really fucking general topic here, but I’ve got fucking nothing with Québécois [besides auto-correct fixing the é’s, which is awesome])
Of course, what little French I can grasp is Latin, so a dialect of what is, to me, a really removed dialect…small wonder I can’t get any of it eh?
Ok, this comment sums to Québécois, it isn’t Latin, which is a no brainer >.< (long fucking day, but you knew that already)
Maths (as we say in Aus) and I are mortal enemies from way back in my childhood; I could never wrap my pink fluffy lady brain around anything more complicated than long division. My friend Christine however loves all that maths stuff, and is a statistician by vocation. And yet we both love to knit and crochet. The hive mind meld is incomplete in us. HOW CAN THIS BE?!?!
@LBT: I’m so happy that things are looking up. Here’s to a stretch of really good stuff happening for you.