Quickies
Skepchick Quickies 6.18
- Pentagon to open SEALS, Army Rangers to women – “Navy officials will open up the service’s Riverine Forces to eligible female candidates, beginning next month.”
- If you know someone who doesn’t believe in sexism, show them this – From nowoo.
- Can the gamification of female masturbation remove its social stigma? – NSFW if a cartoon genitals are NSFW. Via The Mary Sue.
- In the Ivory Tower, men only – Women in academia pay a heavy toll for having children.
I like the portrayal of women in Starship Troopers. Well still a bit trope-ish, it’s got a more honest portrayal of women in a combat role than I think many movies do.
If you know someone who doesn’t believe in sexism show them this. Crying now.
Oh, yikes. The comments on the first article are scary. Bitches always be destroying the boys’ club.
Gender inequities are frequently a sign of other inequities. The US tenure track system is absurdly dysfunctional on multiple levels.
One major structural issue is that higher education expanded very quickly in the 50s, 60s and 70s and then became static. So many universities have an aging faculty. Faculty lunch at MIT CSAIL does not look very different today than it was when I attended almost 20 years ago. The same is true at most universities, especially since retiring faculty tend to be replaced by cheaper adjuncts. For anyone with student loans, taking an adjunct position pretty much demands a private income or a spouse who can fund it.
There are many academics who have got tenure writing papers analyzing the protocols I have designed but I doubt that I could get a tenured position for designing them. I am not interested in that position but it strikes me as rather absurd.
Its not just the tenure committee racket, its the academic publishing racket that is a problem. Academic research is designed to produce papers, not knowledge. And being in with the in crowd on a publishing clique benefits the authors a lot. Blind peer review means nothing, I know my field well enough to be able to know who wrote a paper from reading the first page or two.
Moniqa Aylin,
What’s even more upsetting is all the up votes they got.
I responded enough in the comments about the military opening up the ranks of army rangers to female soldiers. I am not popular and as the down-votes pour in, I already knew what the response would be. I thought I would post a little of ‘the other side’ of things. Well to talk about the article directly, I feel that military is readying itself for the future, what the military needs to look like and what the face of future war will look like. Technology is changing the face of war. The military needs the very best and brightest, and using the biggest hammer isn’t always the answer. There is a lot of concern women being able to hand the job physically. This is a tricky area as most men can not handle this job and can not dream of a world where women can. Tricky, tricky and there is the military culture playing into the responses too. I think that the ranks should be open to anyone who meets the standard. This dividing line of sex, well honestly, I say why? Why does my sex have anything to do with job assignment. The military makes a standard and those that preform the job are to meet the standard. There was quite the concern about easing the standards. Well that will be debatable when that is the subject. I don’t know if they are changing the standards, although it is likely nor what the new standards will be.
Oy, brave women will be making history for sure. The US military is one of the most medievally minded militaries in the west and one of the biggest boys clubs in the US. It has a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE problem with sexual assault. The women joining are going to go through nothing short of the 9th level of hell to get into special forces combat positions. Brave women will change history soon.
I agree, it will be hell for them. They will be scrutinized by every last soldier. There are many female gatekeepers too. It is a military culture problem. I wish them the best of luck.