Skepticism

Skepchick Quickies 4.6

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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16 Comments

  1. The “Acceptable Levels” hing made me spit out my coffee laughing. Wow, not “Eliminate” or down to ‘Zero” or “No tolerance” but “Acceptable levels” you know two to three hundred…whatever the market can handle.

  2. RE: Sex Scholar
    “Mosher’s scholarly aim soon became clear: to prove that women were not inferior to men, and that frailties chalked up to sex were really the effects of binding garments, insufficient exercise and mental conditioning.”

    That was in 1894.

    Sorry, Baby Boomers, you didn’t invent feminism.

  3. If that wacky guy from the Vatican is right and this Onion piece was inspired by the devil, I’m becoming a Satanist right now. I’m an atheist, so I have the baby-eating part covered already.

    Now, perhaps this is a personal bias of mine, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the pope actually said something to that effect. After all, they’re already saying in their own defense that there are proportionally no more child molesters in their ranks than in other professions. (Never mind the fact that other professions don’t usually engage in institutional cover-up of crimes committed by their members, which is the whole point here.)

  4. @Andrés Diplotti: “After all, they’re already saying in their own defense that there are proportionally no more child molesters in their ranks than in other professions.”
    (emphasis mine)

    Strictly speaking, if there were anything to the idea that religion makes people more virtuous, shouldn’t there be proportionally significantly fewer?

  5. As a “goodwill measure,” Cardinal Re said all churches will also be required to display a sign next to the altar showing the number of days since the last molestation.

    This would be so easy to photoshop. Just sayin’…

  6. “I am a scientist” t-shirt campaign:

    Is this THAT much different than putting an “I am a Christian” shirt on your child?

    Future Scientist, Future Engineer, Future Religious Leader.
    Why do we do this to our kids? (It’s different if it’s your shirt, and YOU put it on. I think that’s awesomely geeky. In a good way.)

  7. @larsonp: Yeah, I know. No kid would ever say, “I want to be a scientist when I grow up.” And certainly no parent should ever react to that with positivity and buying a shirt that reflects that kid’s dreams.

  8. @Steve, what’s stopping you, really, apart from the fact it’s already someone else’s joke?
    I see a motivational poster in my mind already …

  9. As long as the shirt reflects the aspirations of the kid and not the parent, then I think it’s cute – no different to the toy Post Office my parents bought me when I was five and determined that one day a Postmistress I would be. Or air hostess, or vet, etc. It’s no less valid for a kid to want to be a ballerina than a scientist, so one hopes the shirts are bought in that vein rather than any sort of pressure motive. Mostly though, I assume that if a kid doesn’t like the shirt, he or she is going to refuse to wear it, so I doubt there’s a problem.

    That said, I saw a little kid today, about four years old, wearing a shirt that said “yes I am awesome, get used to it”, and that bothered me. Your kid is not awesome, he is the same as all the other kids, and life does not owe him jack. Get used to THAT, parent.

  10. @Tracy King:

    Got it! When I see the 7-year-old at Wal*Mart wearing hot pants with “Porn Star” on the butt, I should hope that is the child’s aspiration and not the parents.

    Wait…something is wrong here…

  11. @Tracy King: My only concerns when I had any say whatsoever about what my children wore was clean and does not any embarrassment. Now that my daughter has a very curvy figure I have other concerns but mostly keep them to myself.

  12. @durnett: You clearly aren’t aware of the history of feminism if you think “Baby Boomers” have ever laid any claim to being the first feminists. FTM, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] predated Clelia Mosher’s observations on the deleterious effects of such things as corsetting and “modesty” by a hundred years.

  13. Reading down through “the sex scholar” made me think: I would have probably come down on the (from here) obviously incorrect side of the majority of opinion of feminine hygine best practice at the time. I wonder in a hundred years from now people will look back at us and think “they really believed that?” about.

    I mentally excluded stuff like slavery, and raceisim from the ‘that was dumb’ and put them in the ‘that was immoral’, so I think the discrimination against homosexuals will get moved into the same ‘that was immoral’ catagory. The reason they were discriminating against women here was in part “science” that mosher was trying to fix.

    I wonder what our current blindspot in science is.

  14. @qyiet:
    I wonder what our current blindspot in science is.

    I think psychology is our most obvious current blind spot. The nature vs. nurture thing that was at the root of the female sexuality issue 100 years ago is still leading to a lot of false assumptions to this day. And not just concerning the male/female dichotomy, but pretty much anything to do with the “mind”, all the way down to psycho-killers and what makes them tick.

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