- Vaccinate your baby – a wonderful resource on vaccination. (Via Derek of Skepticality.)
- Kaylia alerts us about the prospect of the America’s Spiritual Heritage” resolution.
- Sad: “Parents charged with manslaughter in the death of their baby could have saved her life if they hospitalized her sooner rather than allegedly using homeopathic remedies for a severe skin disorder.” (Thanks to gr8googlymoogly.)
- Recession prompts gender role reversal. (Thanks to Durnett.)
- How Kevin Bacon sparked a new branch of science. (Thanks to Steve.)
The gender role article is such tripe! A fellow gets ribbed for going into nursing? What decade are these folks living in? Is the guy in a f/m relationship losing his job really a gender switch? Both people were working! Gahh. *cough, sputter*
Baconology? H’m… Methinks it’s time for breakkies. Kashrut be damned.
The role reversal thing made me laugh. With rage. Blatant sexism aside, they simply butchered logic.
Not a single example they provided could be legitimately referred to as “role reversal” – since nothing was “reversed”. It’s a shame: Recession prompts men to challenge traditional roles could have been an interesting article.
From the Gender-Role-Reversal article:
Um, perhaps in a gender role reversal, Rick will tearfully demand a divorce because Eleanor has changed into someone he just doesn’t know anymore.
Well, we are maybe only about 6.6 degrees from the guy who wrote that BS non-role reversal piece. So here, I’ll kick one of you and you can pass it along until it gets to Dan Harris. ;p
@Eliza: Bonus points if you find a way to kick Kevin Bacon in the process
The thing that bugs me about the 6-degrees article is:
“Organisers of the experiment believe the other 37 chains broke because of the apathy of individuals who failed to send the parcel on.”
That smells of cherry-picking. Only 3 out of 40 made it at all. The rest are assumed to have failed because of apathy. They’re essentially dismissing over 90% of their results as irrelevant. What if they failed because the number of degrees of separation was so large that there was no clear path?
When Durnett sent us that link yesterday, I read it and thought perhaps I should be skeptical… could someone have hacked into The Onion and ABC and switched the content? No? Oh, then you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Unfortunately, my little family has spent several evenings in the ER this year with migraines, flu, and that pesky Mr. Elyse almost dying from asthma thing… and we have yet to be treated by a single male doctor. (Though, once hubby was admitted to the hospital, he was seen by a male resident… but the attending was a woman). Not only do the woman ER doctors seem to outnumber the man docs, but the man nurses seem to far outnumber the woman nurses.
I guess I just live in Recession Bizzarro World.
Also, I love how they make it out like some dude was a really successful banker, but he lost his job so he started filling out applications at the hospitals for nurse jobs. Like a career change to nursing is just as easy as becoming a barista.
Other than that, I don’t have a comment about that article. :)
Gender role crap.
My dad did the cooking and the cleaning when I was growing up… this has inflicted terrible scars on me as an adult because I strongly believe that it is the man’s role to do the cooking and cleaning.
Anthroslug: Take Note.
Oh and can I just say
COTW @@Eliza:
And… my name AND my blog in the Quickies? How freakin’ cool is that?
I’ve been following ABC News (the American versions, not the superior Australian version) for years and have noticed a steep recent increase in woo-ity.
At first it was just that some bright young MBA decided that they should use the news feed to drive traffic to Good Morning America and Teh Voow with tidbits that almost sounded like news, but were fluff pieces with side orders of alt.med and superstition. Then we had big foot and Bermuda Triangle articles. Now this piece of tripe. I guess they fired too many reporters and are having to dig through the old news stories from the 1950s.
@Chasmosaur:
I know! When I read that I thought, “What an asshole!” She lost respect for her husband from seeing him in an apron? Does that mean she didn’t respect herself before?
That article, plus the eighty seven cold calls I just made, has ruined my day.
@Elyse: To be honest, I prefer female physicians. The ones I have seen have all been far better listeners and questioners than the males. Could be luck of the draw or something else, of course.
@Kaylia: Just read your blog and my first reaction was “Here they go again!” It reminds me of the National Day of Prayer BS all over again. It’s even a similar cast of characters.
What part of “The US Government should have no role in promoting religion” do they not understand?
@QuestionAuthority: Exactly!
I think it comes down to what people want/expect from the government.
Thanks for the vaccine link, particularly. I wish I had that two days ago when I got into an interwebs debate with a friend of a friend who was an anti-vaxer.
I thought the same thing about the woman who ‘lost so much respect’ for her husband. WTF?
I do completely get that being the primary breadwinner is stressful and it has been interesting for me the past year as @phlebas lost his job and was doing primary contract work. I am not the only breadwinner but when he wasn’t working, there was definitely additional stress for me. But I think that’s true about anyone who suddenly becomes responsible for someone else financially, regardless of gender.
I think that’s a far more interesting topic and the additional stress and changes in relationships that it can place on a family when only one person works when previously two people did.
My dad taught my mom how to cook after they got married.
My brother and I had a doll house when we were kids.
Woe-is-me, we were practically raised in a same-sex household! We’re fractured adults now, incomplete people, testimonies to why the Christian Right is right!
Or we’re both competent, well-adjusted human beings that were raised by loving parents who didn’t enforce silly gender roles based on arbitrary definitions of what goes to which.
One or the other!
@Masala Skeptic:
You have a good point. I am 1. a woman and 2. not the breadwinner.
When I stopped working, we didn’t lose our primary income. I didn’t make much to begin with, but it was enough to make a difference in how comfortably we lived.
Now that I’m home, with no income, we have to budget to the dime. There’s no extra money for extra anything.
It weighs on my husband because he’s our one income… but it’s not like I feel all fantastic and fuzzy knowing what a difference a couple hundred bucks a month would make.
If your income is something your family relies on to get by (mortgage, rent, food, electricity, toys, diapers, books), you don’t need a penis to be devastated by losing your ability to provide or even contribute.
(Also, do you call him @phlebas at home? “At phlebas, could you pick up some milk on your way home?” If you do, that’s awesome)
The role reversal stuff is certainly crap as others have said and if my situation and that of most of my friends is representative. I’ve been married almost 23 years and do all the grocery shopping and cooking which has/had nothing to do with the economy. My Dad was a good cook as was my grandfather. So what! And my wife made both of my aprons after she got fed up with the cooking spots on my shirts. That’s right, my wife does most of the laundry! And even before my wife and I got married we agreed that we’d be a two income household as much as possible.
And the homeopathic dead kid stuff is not as rare as you may think. I’ve seen a number of very sick kids including two children who spent weeks in pediatric ICU’s after parents tried to manage treatable medical conditions with herbal remedies and new age nostrums.
National Pizza Day…, fine. National religion sanctioned by the government anything day…, not so fine.
@Elyse:
No, but I’m TOTALLY going to start doing that :)
That stupid gender reverse article sounds like it was written in the 1970’s. I’ve been doing all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry etc since I was a single dad. I love my wife but her cooking could be classified as a WMD. She makes something like twice as much as me and helps out with the cleaning by hiring a cleaning woman to come in twice a month to give the house a really good cleaning. That and she pays a lot more of the bills than I do.
I side with GabrielBrawley. This was just a stupid article that got lost in a time warp.
My wife and I have swapped duties frequently to kepe the household going. It’s called “being a parent.” When I’ve been laid off from jobs, I’ve taken up more household chores. It beats sitting around feeling depressed after finishing job searching for the day.
It would drive the Oxymorons (the “Religious Right”) nuts if they knew that in almost 30 years of marriage, the only time I have made more money than my wife was when she was out of work.
It doesn’t mean it’s a role reversal. As I liked to say to my kids, “English is not like Spanish. There are no ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ words. There is no such thing as “women’s work” or “men’s work.” There is merely work. So, get to work!”
I was taught to cook and do laundry. My sister was taught how to fix cars and mow the lawn. My parents were into cross-utilization before there was such a term.
There was a time when sex (“gender”) roles made a lot more sense. We’re coming out of that time, which means it really is a switch.