Gosh, on the heels of that disturbing study on the attitudes of children yesterday comes another figure out of the UK, this time from an online poll of over 1000 respondents, that more than 50% of women believe rape victims bear some responsibility for their attack.

The poll was administered by Haven, a safe refuge for female survivors of abuse, and called ‘Wake Up to Rape.’ The responses were startling:

A fifth of the women said the victim was partly responsible if they went back to the assailant’s house and a 10th said taking a drink from a stranger had unforeseen consequences.

Twenty per cent of women surveyed said they would not report a rape to police, with half of those citing shame or embarrassment as a reason.

Furthermore:

One in eight thought a victim who danced in a provocative manner on a night out was also to blame for any consequences.

In a more striking finding, 14 per cent of the women told the surveyors that 14 per cent of women believe most rape accusations were cooked up.

More than a third of women thought that rape victims who’d gone back to a man’s place for a drink were partly to blame for the attack, compared to less than a fifth of the male respondents.

Interestingly, it was mostly women aged 18-24 who espoused these opinions. This is a really frightening social regression after the lengths feminists have gone to to get courts to recognize any form of non-consensual sexual activity to be rape. It’s a bizarre form of self-denial that women put themeselves through to think that it won’t happen to them if they behave in a certain way. The issue is not that women look or act a certain way and put themselves in vulnerable situations. It’s that men choose to rape. It’s that rape, in the words of Susan Brownmiller, is a tool of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear for the purposes of maintaining male dominance.

This wasn’t something I truly grasped until I read the title of Andrea Dworkin’s speech to the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men: “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape.” Read it! It’s incredibly moving. Here’s an excerpt:

We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.

I would argue it’s also institutionalised by the socialisation of women to believe in the system. To believe that we play a role in our own abuse. To believe that men have this right – this male sex right – over our bodies, over our actions, over us. Systems naturally want to reproduce themselves and the shit we are fed in the media is for this purpose – the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s subordination. Somehow, somewhere we’re being told we’re to blame for men’s violence and that voice is so pervasive it’s reaching children, who are parroting this belief.

Again… dangerous. Dangerous stuff.

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In one of the most disturbing news stories of the year, the BBC had an article today on research of schoolchildren that has found most students think violence towards women is okay if there is a reason behind it. The examples of times when it’s okay? If the woman has an affair or is late making dinner.

The research was conducted in Glasgow with 94 primary children aged 11 and 12 years. The children were questioned in depth about their attitudes and aspirations towards gender roles and behaviour. The children were asked to consider if it was okay for a man to punch his wife/girlfriend if he found out she had had an affair. Nearly all the children thought this was justifiable. In a second scenario, roughly 80% of the children said a man was justified in slapping his partner because she did not have the dinner ready on time.

Edinburgh Napier University researcher Nancy Lombard says of her findings:

“The children didn’t agree with violence, but gave reasons to try to justify it if the woman had done something ‘wrong’. The old saying of ‘If he pulls your pigtails it means he likes you’, translates into violence in adulthood which girls accept as normal.”

Another disturbing finding of Lombard’s study was that girls expected to modify their behaviour and narrow expectations once they were married and had children.

One of the girls said: “I want to be a dancer or a doctor.”

But she added: “When I grow up I’m going to have two babies and work part-time in the shop down the road.”

Lombard argues that gender role stereotypes are limited girls’ perceptions of life options and their behaviours in order to ‘accommodate’ men and boys. Honestly, while part of me is surprised by these findings, another part of me isn’t. The socialisation of girls to fulfill gender roles of nurturers and carers starts very early, and I think has gotten stronger with the advent of marketing to children. Toys that used to be gender-neutral are now much more gendered, to the point that even Lego blocks are marketed separately towards girls and boys. This has been found to be deeply embedded at all levels of marketing.

What’s the implication? These are stereotypes that reflect male dominance exacerbate social inequalities for women in all areas of their lives, from the workplace to the home. And clearly this is resulting in some sort of perverse regression to fifties-era gender ideal-types and norms of social behaviour. The next generation is clearly growing with expectations that women exist for the sole purpose of serving men.

Dangerous!

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I wanted to blog on this last week when I first heard the story that ‘baby brain,’ or ‘mumnesia,’ as it is sometimes called, has been found to have no scientific basis, and since the story broke news services around the world have taken a bizarre amount of delight in declaring the myth debunked.

The findings come from researchers at Australian National University Researchers, who say they have evidence pregnant women perform just as well in cognitive testing as they did before becoming pregnant. The ANU researchers had recruited 2404 women from the electoral roll, assessing 1241 in 1999, 1126 in 2003 and 1058 in 2007 in four areas of cognition: speed, working memory and immediate and delayed recall. What women identify as being reduced cognitive ability, the article of the findings suggests, is adaptive, shifting attention to the baby.

Now, I’ve never had a baby nor been pregnant, but I’ve asked several pregnant friends about this phenomenon, as I was sceptical myself of its existence. Without fail, every one of my pregnant friends attested to its veracity. Perhaps this is why women have come out vehemently against these findings.

Victoria Trenouth, a 28-year-old English teacher who became a mother for the first time last month when she gave birth to George Bell, said she suffered from baby brain while pregnant.

”I had a terrible, terrible memory … I couldn’t spell, I couldn’t get my words out, I couldn’t remember what I was saying. I spent 20 minutes trying to have a hot shower and screaming at my husband because I thought there was no hot water and it was on cold and he said try turning the hot tap on.”

The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting opinion piece describing one woman’s experience with pregnancy:

Whether or not baby brain is measurable by tests, there is no doubt that pregnancy and breastfeeding are exhausting and in some case debilitating experiences. And that’s just for the dads. It must be really bad for the mums.

Cathy Warwick of Britain’s Royal College of Midwives told the BBC: “The physical and emotional stresses on a woman’s body from pregnancy can make women feel more tired than usual.

“As we all know, tiredness – for men as well as women – can make us lose concentration and cause us to function less effectively.

“This is why midwives encourage pregnant women to take appropriate rest breaks, at home and at work. Many pregnant women will need this rest, and all of them deserve it.”

I can’t help but think that this study is akin to the numerous scientists who claim to prove the female orgasm doesn’t exist. Apparently a team of researchers at King’s College in London have found “fairly conclusively” that there is no such thing as a g-spot.

Apparently their findings are based on a massive twin study in which, because they could not document that twins both felt the same g-spot sensations in the same place, no G-spot could, in fact, exist.

Some 4600 twinned women were enrolled in the UK research. Of these, 1875 women responded to the sex questions, and of that number, the study excluded women who hadn’t had intercourse and those who identified as lesbian or bisexual (keep those in mind — we’ll get back to them in a bit). They were left with 1800 women aged 23-85 (mean age 55) whose responses were considered in the preparation of their report on the G-spot.

Those women responded to a very interestingly-worded question about the G-spot: They were asked whether they believed they had “a so-called G-spot.” And because too few women said they believed they did, the researchers concluded that the G-spot is a “perception” caused by “non-physical factors” that “heighten sexual sensation.” That is, women may have mental G-spots, but not actual physical ones.

So what do the lead scientists of the study have to say about their findings? Something really ridiculous:

Dr. Spector also has some choice words for women who believe they have G-spots: “This is by far the biggest study ever carried out and shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective. Women may argue that having a G-spot is due to diet or exercise, but in fact it is virtually impossible to find real traits.”

Listen to the methodology of this sex study:

The scientists in this study asked women if they believed they had a G-spot, and if they didn’t, the researchers accepted that none was present. They did not ask searching questions that would help them evaluate whether the women’s belief might be backed with experience… in fact, they excluded from their sample those women who were most likely to have had G-spot experience, the lesbian and bisexual women who, the researchers decided, would skew the results by being more likely than the heterosexual women to have used their fingers. Instead they seemed to be grasping for evidence that the G-spot existed in heterosexual women who were less likely (they guessed) than their lesbian counterparts to have sex in a way that’s most associated with G-spot stimulation and pleasure.

Okay, well, this is something that’s been happening to women for centuries – because some men and scientific methods can’t prove something women claim they experience, these men and their science deny the possibility of its existence.

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A report commissioned by the UK government has found that gap between rich and poor is widening to levels worse than it was 40 years ago. The National Equality Panel found that “deep seated and systemic differences” remain between the wages and employment of men and women, and between majority and minority groups in the country.

Below is a graph of the results of the report for gender wage gap:

The report found that despite women up to the age of 44 having better qualifications than men, men are still paid up to 21% more per hour.

The report also found that religion and ethnicity are increasingly factors relating to one’s pay in the UK:

According to Panel Chair John Hill:

“Most people and nearly all political parties subscribe to the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’, but advantage and disadvantage reinforce themselves over the life cycle. It is hard to argue that the large and systematic differences in outcomes which we document result from personal choices made against a background of equality of opportunity, however that is defined.”

What the report’s findings show is that class divides remain extremely strong in the UK, affecting children as young as 3 years of age. Differences in educational attainment among pre-school children are so stark that researchers believe that each extra £100 a month in household earnings when children are very young is worth a month of cognitive development. Additionally, the report found:

the divisions of early childhood widened as children grew older. By 16, half of all boys receiving free school meals have results in the bottom quarter in England. Once at work, the divisions grow further, with ethnicity and gender dramatically coming into play. Within four years of graduation, boys who went to private schools are earning 8 per cent more than their peers.

Despite girls outperforming boys in education, women earn about 21 per cent less than men hour for hour. The report found that the only women who enjoy any “wage progression” as they become more experienced are highly qualified professionals working in the public sector.

In older age there are large differ-ences in wealth. One in ten households aged 55 to 64 has houses, pension rights and other money worth less than £28,000. The richest 10 per cent have more than £1.3 million.

Income inequality is among the highest in the developed world, with Britain ranked in seventh place behind countries including the US, Mexico and Turkey. At best, Labour has managed only to slow a growing class divide dating back to the 1980s.

This is alarming news, and not just for women, who are doubly disadvantaged by being underpaid regardless of class or ethnic group, but for the very notion of equality in the western world, which is really just an idea sold to the lower classes to convince them to keep working harder for less pay just to fatten the pockets of the people with money and power and influence and, apparently, pensions.

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So there’s this little thing called the “Global Financial Crisis” that has men all in a tizzy that women should even think about raising this old issue again.

In honour of this year’s “Equal Pay Day” (also known as “the point in 2009 when the average woman�s wages finally catch up with what the average man earned in 2008″) , I thought I’d point out the fact that, actually, it’s not teenagers who are hardest hit by the global financial crisis. It’s women.

While the ruling class � owners of banks, corporations and also governments � search for ways to make workers pay rather than pay with their own profits, women are among the oppressed groups who make the easiest, and therefore primary, target for cutbacks.
…
Unemployment and increasing conditions of poverty will also come down hard on women. Globally, the International Labour Organisation has projected an unemployment rate between 6.3% and 7.1%. Yet the global unemployment rate for women is expected to reach 7.4% (compared to 7% for men) or 22 million women worldwide.
…
The pay gap between men and women � where, over a lifetime, women will earn 77 cents of the male dollar � will inevitably increase, as wages and conditions are now harder to fight for. All of these conditions, as they grow worse, will compound into a situation that progressive women and feminists have been fighting against for decades: financial dependency and women becoming trapped in their circumstances.

In March of this year, the International Labour Organization’s Bureau for Gender Equality director Jane Hodges said: “Women�s lower employment rates, weaker control over property and resources, concentration in informal and vulnerable forms of employment with lower earnings, and less social protection, all place women in a weaker position than men to weather crises.” She added that “women may cope by engaging in working longer hours or by taking multiple low-income jobs but still having to maintain unpaid care commitments.”

In the UK, where the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has told the British government that �the economic climate is too fragile to impose equal pay reviews on business,” a new bill is now compelling companies to disclose their gender wage gaps. According to its proponents:

Ministers behind the Bill, including Harriet Harman, the Equalities Minister, believe that pay audits will shift the onus on to companies to show that they are being fair to their female staff, rather than leave it to individual women to take their employer to a tribunal for discrimination.

The new law will also ban secrecy clauses that prevent colleagues comparing their salaries. Almost a quarter of companies have these.

And now, with the financial crisis, women in the UK will have more to worry about than whether their company complies with these new audit laws:

“Employers are likely to fire women first, because there is a feeling that they, and their jobs, are not as important as the men,” said one female executive in a medium-sized London firm. “There is an idea that a woman will have a man lurking somewhere in the background supporting her. Employers will also be more reluctant to hire women of child-bearing age because they don’t want to pay for maternity leave.”

Experts also warn that the financial crisis may have a second wave effect on female pension provision, condemning more older women to poverty. Insurance group Scottish Widows reckons that the “pensions gender gap”, with only 46% of women preparing adequately for retirement, compared with 55% of men, is significant; that could widen if more lose their retirement provision along with their jobs. As Ros Altmann says: “There is already large inequality between men’s and women’s pensions and this will exacerbate it.”

I think it’s pretty obvious that the same concerns/statistics being drawn up in the UK and the US can be paralleled elsewhere. Unfortunately, uber-conservative CanWest media in Canada has come out with a timely report to say that, actually, women are doing better!

The report from Statistics Canada shows that between 1997 and 2008, the proportion of wives earning at least 45% of their family’s total income grew to 42% from 37%.
…
Overall, 65% of women were considered equal to their husbands in terms of weekly paid hours, up from 60% in 1997.

Spouses’ earnings and hours are considered “approximately equal” if each contributed between 45% and 55% of the total, the agency says.

“Even within a 12-year period, the gender wage-gap is continuing to narrow, so the combination of longer hours in the workforce for women and higher earning-power is allowing them to contribute significantly more to the total family earnings,” Marshall says.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how these statistics are misleading. Just because women are becoming a larger proportion of the bread-winners in families does not mean that their wages are in any way comparable to their male counterparts. Professor Marilyn Davidson of Manchester Business School argues that:

We have far more women in work, far more one-parent families, and far more female breadwinners. There certainly is a risk that the progress women have made could be thrown into reverse. The figures suggest that more female managers have been made redundant than male, and that the credit crunch is having an impact on young women leaving university. The predictions are for a sharp drop in recruitment and service industries will be hard hit, which will harm female graduates most.

So there. An especially unhappy “You’re Undervalued and Underpaid Socially and Economically Because of your Gender Day” in light of the current economic climate.

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It’s widely acknowledged both that blondes have more fun and that gentlemen prefer them (to look at? for sex? this part is unclear…), but new research out of the UK finds that while men may prefer to date blondes, they prefer to marry brunettes.

The information is the result of a poll done by hair “guru” Andrew Collinge of 3,000 men. Almost one in five say blondes are sexier than other girls, with just under half saying they had more outgoing personalities. However, when it comes to marriage, more than 50% said they would rather wed a dark-haired woman because they were more “dependable” and “sensible”. Apparently men are also under the impression that brunettes make the best homemakers and cooks. Here’s what Collinge had to say of his research:

It’s always been said that blondes have more fun and men obviously enjoy going out for dates with blondes as well as upgrading them to girlfriend status,” he said.

“But when it comes to marriage, men seem to opt for brunettes as they see them as more dependable and down-to-earth.

“This is really surprising when you think we’re in 2008 and the blonde versus brunette debate is still rumbling on – I’m surprised as I thought men were more modern than this! I’m obviously in the minority as I married a blonde.”

Clearly this doesn’t mean natural hair colour, so I guess I’m safe – lure them in while blonde, keep them by going brunette.

Are men really this simple???

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Science reveals all, and a new string of research conducted at the University of Rochester has shown that “men are far more attracted to women in red clothing or surrounded by red accessories than females who sport other colours.” Even more than simply being more attracted to them, men were also found to be more willing to spend money wine-ing and dining women in red.

To measure the amorous effects of red, the researchers gauged men’s responses to pictures of women under different colour conditions.

In one experiment, the pictures were framed by a border that was either red, white, grey or green. In other tests, the researchers digitally altered the photo so that the same woman was wearing either a red or a blue shirt.

“The women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colours,” the researchers concluded in their study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

As those in the field are always wont to draw some silly biological link to social behaviour, lead psychologist for the study, professor Andrew Elliot, noted that many cultures draw a link between sex and the colour red. What is the biological reason for it?

The sexual parts of female baboons and chimpanzees take on a conspicuously red hue when they are reaching ovulation. In similar fashion, many human females will become flush-faced when they are interested in a male, Dr. Elliot said.

“It may well be that males have this deep-seated sense of red indicating sexual availability,” he speculated. “I think females can use that to their advantage – and to wear it or not, depending on their desires.”

Still, researchers found it was not simply enough to be wearing red to secure a partner for life; “Red did not change the way men rated the women in terms of likeability, intelligence or kindness – just their physical attractiveness.”

*sings* ladyyyyy in reeeeeeeeedddddd is daaaancing wiiith meee…

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Australian researchers believe they have found the gene responsible for male transexualism. Having studied the DNA of 112 male-to-female transsexual volunteers, researchers from Prince Henry’s Institute of Medical Research discovered that their subjects were more likely to have a longer version of the androgen receptor gene, which may cause weaker testosterone signals.

One study has shown that certain brain structures in male-to-female transsexual people are more “female like”.

In the latest study, researchers looked for potential differences in three genes known to be involved in sex development – coding for the androgen receptor, the oestrogen receptor and an enzyme which converts testosterone to oestrogen.

Comparison of the DNA from the male to female transsexual participants with 258 controls showed a significant link with a long version of the androgen receptor gene and transsexualism.

As I was reading though the article from the BBC News website, a colleague of mine read the headline over my shoulder and became very upset. Like myself, he is worried about implications scientific biological research will have on society. In other words, having identified this gene, does transsexualism become stigmatized as a genetic defect? Do we add this genetic mutation to the prenatal amniocentesis tests? Do we abort babies who may be genetically predisposed to transexualism?

And while I accept that sexual identity is biological, I am interested by Sheila Jeffrey’s position on transsexuality. Jeffreys argues that transsexuals reproduce oppressive gender roles and mutilate their bodies through sex reassignment surgery. Jeffreys maintains that transsexual surgery is an extension of the beauty industry offering cosmetic solutions to deeper rooted problems. She argues that in a society in which there was no such thing as gender, there would be no need to undergo such surgery.

One of the study’s co-authors believes there is something biological about gender, and this new research goes a step further in proving just that:

Co-author Professor Vincent Harley added: “There is a social stigma that transsexualism is simply a lifestyle choice, however our findings support a biological basis of how gender identity develops.”

The jury’s out for me on this one…

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Scientists today have confirmed the “virgin birth” of a hammerhead shark at the Omaha, Nebraska Zoo. The virgin birth was discovered through DNA testing that confirmed no genetic material from a male. The findings were published today in the Journal of Fish Biology:

“This first case was no fluke,” Demian Chapman, a shark scientist and lead author of the second study, said in a statement. “It is quite possible that this is something female sharks of many species can do on occasion.”

The scientists cautioned that the rare asexual births should not be viewed as a possible solution to declining global shark populations. The aquarium sharks that reproduced without mates each carried only one pup, while some species can produce litters of a dozen or more.

“It is very unlikely that a small number of female survivors could build their numbers up very quickly by undergoing virgin birth,” Chapman said.

Unfortunately, this miracle shark pup didn’t survive long, for it was quickly eaten by another aquarium animal. Scientists used the remains for their DNA test.

Before you go getting any ideas about asexual reproduction and doing away with men entirely, the (male) scientists were quick to warn that:

Absent the chromosomes present in the male sperm, the offspring of an asexual conception have reduced genetic diversity and, the scientists said, may be at a disadvantage for surviving in the wild. A pup, for instance, can be more susceptible to congenital disorders and diseases.

Me, I’ve long held that once we perfect female-female reproduction techniques (I hear splicing two ova is just as effective as ovum & sperm, without all those ambiguities of what the sex of the offspring will be), mother nature will take care of the rest.

So long, men!

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I’m a pretty big fan of my gmail account, and having recently discovered some of the new tools available for beta testing in their “labs,” I have begun adding the widgets I think are most innovative. Recognizing common emailing habits, the most recent is a tool that aims to stop you from sending drunken emails you’ll later regret.

I’ve been known to think, after a bottle of wine, that sending an email to someone on whom I have a crush letting them know that it’s 2am and I’m thinking of them is a great idea. I’ve also known the horror the next morning of realizing what I’ve done and not remembering if I said anything to completely embarrass myself.

Well, no more! Gmail’s new feature, called “Mail Goggles,” can be set to activate during whichever days and hours you set – say 12am to 4am Saturday and Sunday mornings. When an email is sent during these hours, a pop-up window appears prompting you to answer a few “basic math problems”:

If you’re unable to answer the questions correctly, the email doesn’t get sent.

Seems great to me, but as Mathew Ingram points out: not everyone’s a math geek. Perhaps the feature could be updated to include the option of “spot the differences between these two photos” or something of this sort.

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