Hey y’all! Covering quickies today so you’re going to get things like this:
- George Takei brokers Star Peace and warns of the dangers of Twilight. This may be my favorite thing on the Internet this year. (via Glenn… or actually, his wife)
- Calamities of Nature have a new take on the Peanut’s Christmas Special (via Gerald)
- Abortion ‘does not raise’ mental health risk (via Lesley) “The evidence shows though that whether these women have abortions – or go on to give birth – their risk of having mental health problems will not increase. They carry roughly equal risks.”
- Atheists donate an overwhelming amount to Doctors without Borders (via Agranulocytosis) “Many donations were tagged with messages such as “Because god won’t”, “Good without god” or even “Good without Zeus””
- Men’s magazines and rapists appear to use language indistinguishable from each other (via Cara) “Many of the rapists quoted in the study talked about coercing women or having sex with them even though they were initially unwilling. However, so did the lad mags.”
On my Xmas list is a guitar distortion pedal called the Atheist, and the proceeds go to… Google is Joe’s friend… Non-Believers Giving Aid. I get something cool, and people get helped.
The lad mags v/s rapists quotations article made me feel a little ill. I tried to guess which were which, and it was hard. It’s very discouraging that such attitudes are being instilled in young men. Sad.
George Takei rules!!! I hope there’s a place for a Whovian such as myself in the war against the Twilight-folk. Maybe we could have bowships! I hear those are great against vampires.
Of course abortion is no more dangerous to mental health than giving birth. In fact, I believe that giving birth may be more dangerous because the impending mental issues caused by childbirth can be spread to those around the mother via a vector we call a child.
To me, the most disturbing thing about the rapist/lad mag article was that I correctly identified 11 of 16 quotes. I should not be able to do that…
Those quotes are so insensitive and disgusting.
I sniffed out the lad mag ones by looking for those that try to look like “advice” (“she may”, “I think”) and use past tense (“I used to”, “I’ve given up on”). But there were a few lad mag ones I labelled as rapist quotes… :S
Love the Linus monologue!
The rapist/lad mag article looks like poor and misleading research. I agree the Lad Mags use inappropriate and demeaning language but the rapist connection is just trying to use guilt by association. I’m sure you could come up with a list of quotes from rapists and US presidents where readers couldn’t tell one from the other.
Additionally, the quotes look like quote mining as we don’t get to see the context of the quotes and thus we can’t fully understand what they mean. For example look at this one from a lad mag: “You do not want to be caught red handed… go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick.” It is ridiculous that they left out what someone didn’t want to get caught red handed at. The implication of getting caught red handed when given in the context of rape is that the writer is trying to avoid being caught raping. But if the Lad Mag article was talking about mutual public sex then the inclusion of that quote was ridiculous quote mining. The fact that the authors included the “you do not want to be caught red handed” with no explanation about the context makes me think they were just trying to make non-rape related quotes look rapey. Which brings me back to my point above that if you select the right quotes from any two groups you can make it hard to tell who said something.
However, again I want to emphasize that I think the language used in the Lad Magazines (and by rapists) is inappropriate, but using guilt by association is likewise an inappropriate way to prove a point. A better study would be determining whether the language in lad magazines was perpetuating sexist views that lead to rape.
Something must be wrong with me. I didn’t try to figure out which quotes were which, I was just repelled by all the sentiments and didn’t really care.
The atheist donation article was interesting. Glad to hear the donated so much money to DWB.
Also, the Reuters journalist who wrote the article … I’m pretty sure I’ve met the guy, have his card somewhere, need to double check the name. If it is him, he’s a British humanist.