- Smart girls wear short skirts, too – Amanda Marcotte’s rebuttal to this NYT article which, “conflates women having sex with men and actual social inequalities between college men and women.”
- Help stamp out quackery – From Thais.
- Small town UFO scare revealed to be alien hoax – From Damien.
- Debunking women’s intuition
Amanda Marcotte has posted more about the issue on her blog.
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/how_to_fix_social_inequalities_on_campus
I think the first article misses the point, somewhat.
The problem isn’t that young women want to have sex, it’s that they feel like the only way to go about it is to play to male objectification. The author says “If a young man spends his weekends partying and flirting with women, and spends his time in the classroom pulling down As, we don’t see that as a contradiction,” but going to a party where the invitation read “Hey ladies… Whether your dressing up as a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty schoolgirl or just a total slut, we invite you…” can’t really be equated with flirting.
There’s nothing wrong with women wanting to be sexy and obviously nothing wrong with having sex, but it’s a valid question as to whether the women are really in control.
Never go to a college party where the person writing the invitations doesn’t know the difference between your and you’re.
I don’t know that I agree with Amanda Marcotte’s assertion that the NYT article conflates sex with actual social inequality. The original article points out many social inequalities- including the discrepancy between male and female dress at college parties. I thnk that’s an interesting question to ask- why do young women feel that to be attractive they have to present themselves as sexually available whereas men need only show up (perhaps wearing a nice shirt and some hair gel)? Further, should dressing in a short skirt really be perceived as making the wearer sexually available? The NYT piece made me reflect on why I want to dress a specific way when going out. Perhaps I missed the point but I didn’t get the sense that the author was looking down on young women having sex. I thought she was asking who really held the sexual power on our college campuses.
Yeah–I’m just not seeing Ms. Marcotte’s angle on the NYT article–she seems to have locked in on a few lines, and interpreted them without considering the context. The “dress like some sort of slut” Halloween party was pretty obviously an exercise in objectification, not empowerment. Marcotte’s position seems to be one of extreme compartmentalization–she looks at any given item in the NYT article and evaluates it without any sort of consideration of possible patterns or broader implications.
It seems that people haven’t learned to “Stamp out Quackery” in over 50 years. The same kind of garbage is for sale still.
Why is it that a skeptical blog hasn’t covered this new study published in Nature?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7361/full/nature10343.html
Would really be interested in reactions from the skeptical community here…
Uh, maybe you should be asking on a climate blog?
The Nature article was only published 6 days ago and is pretty technical; maybe it’s a little early for secondary and tertiary sites like Skepchick to have digested and understood it?
But you can submit it as a link on the “contact” page (button at the top of this page) and maybe one of the Skepchicks will blog about it.
Bad Astronomy has a post about this today. As usual, the AGW denier community is completely misrepresenting the study. Phil has lots of links to relevant sites for further information.
I suspected as much since even in the part before you have to pay $32 to read more it says, Model calculations suggest that almost half of the global cloud condensation nuclei in the atmospheric boundary layer may originate from the nucleation of aerosols from trace condensable vapours, although the sensitivity of the number of cloud condensation nuclei to changes of nucleation rate may be small. Emphasis mine.
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Let the hand waving ensue.