Quickies
Quickies: Ski jumping, emoticons, Facebook & gender, and the princess problem
- Women break an Olympic barrier, keep reproductive organs intact – The first Olympic women’s ski jump was held Tuesday and guess what? Women ski jumpers…are good at ski jumping. From Criticaldragon1177.
- The human brain now reacts to emoticons as real faces – :) Pretty cool, right? :D From Dan.
- Facebook opens up LGBTQ-friendly gender identity and pronoun options – “We also have added the ability for people to control the audience with whom they want to share their custom gender. We recognize that some people face challenges sharing their true gender identity with others, and this setting gives people the ability to express themselves in an authentic way.”
- The princess problem – “Kids are big on symbolic representation. The symbol for a princess is a blonde white girl in a pink dress.”
- Cute Animal Friday! Sophie the kitty’s first time seeing snow. From nowoo, are quokkas the most adorable marsupial?
I could see how somehow could think that a woman’s uterus might fall out during the trampoline, but if your wombs have survived both that and the *moguls*, I’m pretty sure you’re okay with the ski jump.
Dtkgreg,
People actually once believed in something called the wondering womb,
http://www.classics.uwaterloo.ca/labyrinth_old/womb.htm
so in a way its really not that surprising that people actually believed that women couldn’t be ski Jumpers without damaging their sex organs. The only thing about it that is really so shocking is that took the Olympic committee so long to realize that wasn’t the case.
So if we really wanted to make sure that a ski jumper’s uterus was safe, we could just put some noxious substances in her underwear to frighten her uterus back up inside her body.
Science, people! And Traditional Medicine at that!
I’m going to remember the “wandering womb” the next time someone hits me with that “knowledge of the ancients” b.s.
Dfkgreg
That would keep the womb where it belongs ;)
Seriously through, it probably would be a good idea if you brought up the “wondering womb” just to show people how far we’ve come. Its hard for people now a days to even imagine how people used to think like that.
Keep Al Capone in St. Valentine’s Day!
That YouTube video had an error.
What’s interesting is, we have a gender-neutral pronoun already: “They”. Chaucer and Shakespeare both used it. But an 18th century grammarian named Anne Fisher decided the singular “they” didn’t exist. Because, you know, those guys never contributed anything to literature ever. LOL Anne Fisher, my love for thee can afford no better term than this: Thou art a villain.
… who said in 2005 that ski jumping “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”
Ladies. Not women. Ladies.
Gian-Franco Kasper.
Here is a good article in Slate about this issue: http://www.slate.com/blogs/five_ring_circus/2014/02/12/sochi_olympics_women_how_the_international_olympic_committee_infantiilzes.html
Reading it made me think about other, similar instances where women are treated this way. There are even worse scenarios than ski jumping, which is at least a physically demanding sport. I wonder why, in 2014, we still have men’s and women’s golf. In golf, women hit from the “ladies tees.” Why? Either they can hit the ball or they can’t. And, I’ve seen men who are 5’4″ and 150 pounds smack the ball 300+ yards. I still cannot fathom why professional women’s golfers are said not have the same ability.
I guess we are moving in the right direction. But, to be honest, I wasn’t even aware that women weren’t allowed to compete in ski jumping at the Olympics until I learned that they had been permitted to do so this year. I find the prohibition paternalistic and reprehensible, and I’m glad its gone. However, the fact that they have to jump from smaller hills may well be a worse insult.