Got a link you think we should know about? Contact us here.
Featured image credit: Jayel Aheram
Wait thirty minutes after eating before you swim or you’ll get stomach cramps and drown. Don’t read in low light or you’ll ruin your eyes. Eat your carrots! They’ll improve your vision. Feed a cold; starve a fever. Once you start shaving, the hair will just grow back darker and thicker.
I can’t even begin to explain how much awesome is packed into this song. The biology, the beautiful ode, having his supercool alter ego (as evidenced by the sweet sunglasses) sing harmony.
I haven’t always been very excited by the skeptic movement. It’s not like I believed in a lot of woo, but I just couldn’t get too worked up about Loch Ness or Bigfoot or UFO abductions. What’s more, as a non-scientist, I didn’t feel like I had anything to add.
As regular readers of this blog might know, I’m a lawyer by training, and I like to communicate to non-lawyers those legal concepts that aren’t immediately recognizable. My main passion has been human rights and I’ve spent a big chunk of my time since I graduated working to make the whole concept more popular in the United States. Skepticism and the promotion of science always took a back seat to my human rights work.
Then it occurred to me: Advancing human rights and promoting science and reason are the same thing. Let me explain.
I think they talk about the Masons a bit in one of the National Treasure movies…
When I lived with my mother, years ago, she and her dad spoke all good things about an organization that my grandpa helped out with. It’s called Job’s Daughters, and is an offshoot of the Masonic Lodge. I know relatively little about the Masons, other than it’s an all-male society that seems to saturate US history in subtle ways. They’re God-fearing and probably self-identify as Christian. Oh, and their effing symbol is EVERYWHERE. Anyway–the title “Job’s Daughters” should have already given you a general impression of the group. They reference the Bible in their name, so obviously they’re a Christian organization. What they don’t show you past the pictures of smiling girls’ faces is that the whole thing is weird, ritualistic, and is impressing girls to be inferior at the most fundamental level of its teachings.
Do you remember a few months ago when we here at Teen Skepchick featured a song by Adam WarRock from his album ‘The Browncoat’s Mixtape,” which was based on the short-lived but well-loved televisions series, Firefly? Well he’s back, and tune-ifying another TV program loved by nerds everywhere: Game of Thrones.
A couple of days ago one of the Skepchick quickies was S.E. Smith’s article ‘Get Your Antifemininity Out of My Feminism’. It’s a wonderful piece, and it expresses an idea I’ve spoken about before– that by undervaluing things that are seen as feminine, we undermine our goal of gender equality.
Antifemininity is misogynist. What you are saying when you engage in this type of rhetoric is that you think things traditionally associated with women are wrong. Which is misogynist. By telling feminine women that they don’t belong in the feminist movement, you are reinforcing the idea that to be feminine and a woman is wrong, that women who want to be taken seriously need to be more masculine, because most people view gender presentation in binary ways.
This is why I was especially frustrated by a recent study published by researchers at the University of Michigan, that showed that girls who were presented with a female scientist ‘role-model’ who displayed typically (and quite narrowly) feminine traits actually showed decreased interest in STEM fields.
Got a link you think we should know about? Contact us here.
Featured image credit: rocknroll_guitar
You know what would be great? If I could unscrew things without using my arm to apply the torque. You know what would also be great? If I could have some surgery done on a part that’s inside my body without doctors having to slice through the other bits of me that are in the way. You know what else is great? Bow ties and chucks.
As skeptics, we are dedicated to fighting woo and misinformation, however many educated, kind, intelligent people overlook one of the worst kinds of woo and use it to discriminate against others. What am I talking about? Language woo. Misperceptions and misunderstandings of what language is and how it works. I’m going to lay out a few myths about language that I’ve heard otherwise wonderful skeptics professing, and try to explain from the perspective of a linguist what’s wrong with the underlying premises. As skeptics, we should be wary of all kinds of misinformation, not just worried about bigfoot and anti-vaccers, so let’s start with the most basic of human traits: language.