Vagina Dentata

I’ve been ‘encouraged’ to post another blog by a blogger friend with too much time on his hands. But to be fair, he has alerted me to a very interesting link about ‘quotes’ in ‘newspapers’. That is, the quotation marks used in newspaper headlines which completely misrepresent the story and evidence in the piece. Typical headlines being ‘Finally, the scientific proof that ‘women lie about rape” etc.

What is important to understand is that most people only read the headline and first two paragraphs of each article in a newspaper. The facts involved which frequently contradict the headline, are therefore reserved for the final paragraphs.

This is used often about science stories, however, I just found a horrendous example in, guess where? The Daily Mail.

Here again is an issue of ‘facts’ and the Daily Mail’s inability to grasp them. According to an article on their website, a couple of paedophiles were able to abuse children ‘because of human rights legislation’.

This is in fact a story about two paedophiles being rightfully imprisoned for their awful crimes none of which had anything to do with human rights legislation. The prosecuting lawyer then said in passing that if they ever were released (and they had been jailed indefinitely) they should not be allowed to live together but this may be impossible as he believes “that may offend human rights legislation”.

There is then a string of comments to this article from, well, thick Daily Mail readers, talking about repealing the Human Rights Act.

Firstly, this pair has been imprisoned indefinitely. They will only be released when they are no longer a threat to society and if they have severe personality disorders that makes them abuse children, they may never get out.

Secondly, they may not both get out or get out at the same time.

Thirdly, the problem is that they are paedophiles not that they live together.

Fourthly, they are not a risk to each other so it is unclear under what law they could be separated.

Fifthly, the headline is based on the passing comment of one man and has no evidence to back it up.

Sixthly, they are not using the Human Rights Act to overturn a bail condition that they not live together, given that they are both in prison and not getting out.

Some comedian I saw recently called this kind of Daily Mail reaction the ‘What Next’ syndrome, i.e. “Speed cameras? What next, we’re all going to be micro-chipped and an electric current sent through our bodies whenever we near the speed limit?” Answer: No.

“What next, human rights legislation actually encourages paedophiles to abuse children?” Answer: No.

What next, the Daily Mail actually accurately reports a story on science, women, asylum seekers, gays, human rights, or Europe? Answer: No.

NB. Dick fingers: the gesture indicating quotation marks.

It seems to be a fairly established fact that more women than men use alternative medicine. It is also probably fair to say that they are more likely to read horoscopes, spend money on bullshit cosmetics that “make you look younger” and, I don’t think unrelatedly, be prone to depression (although this may be linked to reading Heat magazine). All of which points to a distinct lack of engagement with science and is interpreted by some (i.e. wankers) to be down to women’s lack of intelligence.

Women aren’t the only gender that wastes its money on fantasy and snake-oil. The pornography and prostitution industry is one of the biggest in the world, 99.9% of which caters for men and most of which tries to make men believe that they are not in fact sad wankers. So men, don’t get superior here.

What is interesting is women’s engagement with science and medicine. Yes generally, fewer women are attracted to traditionally male dominated trades such as science and engineering. However, this is changing with for example, the majority of medical graduates in the UK are now women, girls are getting better science and maths results etc.

However, the female suspicion of the medical establishment is deep-seated. Some of the biggest criticisms I have heard of the NHS have come from (middle class) women who have given birth in NHS hospitals. Is it a lack of understanding or simply about communication?

Alternative medicine does, at least on the surface, seem to give greater empowerment to the patient than ‘orthodox’ medicine.

We have also been conditioned by our consumerist society to expect to buy the solution to our problems. Not happy? Buy happiness. Not well? Buy health. A huge amount of advertising plays on female empowerment, which was perfected first by the tobacco industry.

But of course its a false empowerment, just as pornography is false desire. Let’s only hope that the credit crunch affects the advertising and marketing industry more than any other.

Who can blame pregnant women for being confused and infuriated by the ‘health advice’ they get bombarded with from the moment they announce through tears and gritted teeth that they are up the duff? Women have for a long time had to deal with their bodies being considered public property and no one feels more sanctimonious than pooh-poohing the behaviour of a pregnant woman. “This is not just about you CONSIDER the baby!”

Of course a lot of the advice that women get ranges from the eminently sensible to the morally bigoted and the tales of old wives. Taking drinking for example, the British Medical Association last year recommended that pregnant women should not drink AT ALL. Their evidence for the ill effects of a sly glass of wine on the unborn child? Poor to non-existent. You see they couldn’t trust women to drink in moderation so better tell them not to do it at all. Thing is, you have to drink A LOT for it to affect the foetus and insulting women’s intelligence is hardly the best way to go about public health advice.

All of this misses the fact that most of the time women are too queasy to even think about alcohol during pregnancy. But you know what makes them more sick? Self-righteous, unscientific scaremongering by smug, self-satisfied bigots.

More anti-woman propaganda from our friends at the Daily Mail, same story here (“Women are too shy to break through the glass ceiling, says female scientist”). The important word in the Daily Mail’s headline is “says female scientist”. It can’t be sexist or biased because a woman said it! And she’s a scientist! This is a regular trick by the Daily Mail, similar to a comment piece from a few years ago about India being rubbish since the British left – written by an Indian. So not racist at all then?

Despite this basic anti-intellectual point (women can indeed be misogynistic, people of colour can be racist, etc), what about the ‘scientist’ word. Hmmm, not a lot of evidence for that. Shannon Goodson proudly announces that she not only has a bachelors degree, but a Masters too! While still reeling from this academic achievement, I noticed that her Masters was in Organizational Psychology. Now, I’m not one to poo-poo psychology (well, OK I am) but I think it is a stretch to call her a ‘scientist’.

Psychology is an interesting and controversial discipline, which has historically had an anti-woman streak running through it. It has given us Freud and evolutionary psychology (not to mention the Bell Curve). So we should, at the very least, be demanding of the application of the scientific method when it comes to sweeping statements about half the World’s population.

Again, the book does refer to differences in female achievement between countries and is probably more rigourous than the papers present it. But researchers must be conscious of the way their research will be presented and communicated. This research has been presented in some of the UK press as ‘proof’ that women aren’t cut out for business. Obviously, journalists with their arts degrees are largely to blame, but so are the researchers for the misuse of their research.

Oh the Daily Mail like nothing more than when the mighty fall. They particularly like it when the individual’s involved fit the characteristics on their hate list of moral crimes. Which is why they are so delighted that Euroderm Research is in liquidation. Because the founders are not only a gay couple, they really flaunt their gayness, in a massively gay way.

Their crimes (and why its wrong)

• Being homosexuals (well, goes without saying right?)
• Being in a long term stable relationship (goes against promiscuous stereotype, dammit)
• Getting married (makes homosexuality normal, they also had an ‘extravagant civil ceremony’ the swines, unlike all the modest, tasteful, unvile weddings that heterosexuals have all the time)
• Having children (makes it seem like children need loving parents regardless of gender)
• Being rich (being all of the above AND rich is just, well unfair)
• Being vulgar (they are new money and they spend it on stuff – ooo the Mail hate that – and have called their children silly names)

The article also makes reference to them “provoking anger” by “posting pictures of their children on a gay dating website”. Sigh. Right, so what’s the story here? They have a profile on Gaydar and were looking for friends and in order to pictorially demonstrate their lives together they include family pictures of them with their kids. What the nasty right-wing want to get across is that gay men are paedophiles, that same-sex couples shouldn’t have children and that children can in some way be hurt by appropriate pictures of them being posted to a site where on other profiles there *may * be an explicit picture of a man. The leap of logic there is too wide for me even to comprehend.

But the vicious myth that gay men are paedophiles lives on, without evidence, without analysis but based purely on homophobia. So let’s look at some of the facts about paedophilia:

• 1% of children experienced sexual abuse by a parent or carer and another 3% by another relative during childhood. (NSPCC)
• 11% of children experienced sexual abuse by people known but unrelated to them. 5% of children experienced sexual abuse by an adult stranger or someone they had just met’. (NSPCC)
• The vast majority of children who are sexually abused are girls (UN)
• The vast majority of people who sexually abuse children are men. (Royal College of Psychiatrists)

So, does being ‘heterosexual’ make you more prone to paedophilia? Should gay men be encouraged to be parents given that they are less likely to be sexually abusive? I await the Daily Mail’s campaign on that one.

Why is this a feminist issue? Because at root homophobia is sexist, gay men are ‘like women’ therefore wrong and gay women are ‘not proper women’ and therefore wrong. I presume this will be a common theme, I shall expand upon it in future.

This may seem a bit out of date to cover the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but is it still going through Westminster and the dark forces are still trying to use it as a way of restricting women’s access to abortion.

One of the main areas of ‘debate’ is whether advances in science require a change in the abortion laws. I say ‘debate’ because there is scientific consensus on the issue and it is those with a ‘moral’ perspective who are trying to create allusion of a debate.

So is there a case? Well not according to the medical establishment. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, neither known for their radical feminism, have both submitted evidence to Westminster’s Science and Technology Committee in support of the 24 week time limit and a liberalisation of access to abortion in the first trimester.

So where are the medics and scientists marching in the streets asking for the law to be changed? Well, there have been submissions to the Science and Technology Committee advocating time limit restrictions from medical professionals who have not declared their religious affiliations. Luckily the press can do this for us:
Guardian Blog

The majority of them are activists from the Christian Medical Fellowship, an organisation which is opposed to abortion (unlike most Christians) and has already made a submission.

The scientific case hinges on the principle of the “viability” of the foetus outside the womb. It is claimed that foetuses that have been born prematurely at 24 or 22 weeks have be kept alive by science. As stated by the BMA, it is only a fraction of births at this gestation that survive, and most of those are severely disabled. However, then we have a conflation between the theoretical viability of a foetus at 22 weeks and the viability of a foetus that a woman chooses to abort at this time.

Women get a scan at 20 weeks which can show up problems with the pregnancy. Obviously we can’t be certain, but it is very very likely that those being terminated at this late stage have serious problems. Lets remember that 20 weeks is half way through a pregnancy, women would have a very good reason for going through what is a particularly invasive surgical procedure. Either the foetus is in fact not viable or these are particularly vulnerable women. Restricting their rights further is hardly the answer.

Which brings us back to the question, why are we talking about time limits? Suspicions rise further when we start looking at how many abortions we are actually talking about – in Scotland out of over 13,000 abortions carried out in 2006, 62 were between 20-24 weeks. That represents 0.5% of all abortions. So why exactly are we seeking to change the law for a fraction of a percentage (or around 1% UK-wide) of all abortions?

Because this is a tactic, part of a wider strategy to chip away at the right to abortion. Banning by increment. This isn’t my wild paranoia; this is exactly the course of action taken by the Anti-Choice movement in the USA. Restrict women’s access to abortion a bit at a time until it is effectively banned in some States and restricted to 13 weeks in others.

Advances in science do not change the principle that women must have control over their own body and must never be forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy.

As if by magic, another men and women have different brains nonsense story in the Scotsman. What is even more nonsense is that its being reported as ‘news’ with ‘new research’ when it is ancient and consistently badly reported.

“For a long time it was thought that the basic architecture of the brain was the same in both sexes, with behavioural differences between men and women put down to hormones and social pressures.”

No. We have know for a long time that the ‘architecture’ of male and female brains is different because of their different biological functions. Female brains have to deal with menstruation, pregnancy and child-birth, not unreasonable to think that this may lead to variation.

I don’t have a problem with the research itself which is about male and female reactions to pain and pain treatment. What I do object to is the infantile reporting and surprise at age-old lame assumptions:

“Meanwhile, other studies have found that the hippocampus, which is involved in short-term memory and spatial navigation, is proportionally larger in women than in men, which may come as a surprise given women’s reputation as poor map-readers.”

Could it be because its bollocks?

If you want to read about SCIENCE, read the original article in the New Scientist NOT in the press.

I get annoyed by this subject because I am regularly accused of having a ‘male’ brain. Given that I am a woman, look like a woman, do not have gender dysmorphia and have all the working bits and pieces I think its fair to say I have a woman’s brain m’lord. And those things that you think are ‘male’ such as remembering things in lists, reading maps and having a fixation with ordering my CD collection might be possible within a ‘woman’s brain’ in a woman’s body despite a society that tries to assign gender roles right down to my CD collection.

Lame. Lame. Lame. And bad science.

I’ve been inspired to start this blog for a number of reasons.

1. A wee while ago I wrote a letter to a paper about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which was making its way through the Westminster Parliament. While Cardinal Keith O’Brien had been given 20mins on Radio 4’s World at One and plenty of column inches, there was no one to represent my rational, science-based views. This was the basis of my letter. The first comment I got on the newspaper’s website read:

“Sadly, being a woman, you will be as rational as the catholic faith itself and as for science based views? Yeah, you mean what you read in Heat or Star magazine.”

Now of course, this gave me epic lols. But seriously, can you imagine a man getting a comment about his gender when he was reacting to a non-gender issue?

2. As a feminist, you are often being confronted with biological determinist arguments: ‘women simply can’t read maps – its been proven’, ‘women are genetically predisposed to liking pink’ etc etc. Given the piss-poor level of scientific reporting in the press, these arguments are used to further demean women and feminist analyses of oppression. These stories are every bit as bad science as homeopathy, but they also impact on women’s inequality.

3. Being involved in the pro-choice movement and again, lobbying on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, it became clear that the scientific evidence supported our cause but was being drowned out by emotional, religious and socially conservative interests. Science won out this time, but it will always be under attack from those who can count on the scientific ignorance of the majority of the population (and our political representatives).

4. I emailed Ben Goldacre to rant about some bad science I came across but weeks after it happened and so he couldn’t follow up on it. Instead he suggested I set up a blog and do it myself.

Er, OK then.

So misogynistic comments on the internet, the need for feminism to engage with science, the need for defenders of the Enlightenment to analyse the science used against women and the fact that I should start taking some initiative on this, all culminated in me starting this blog. I hope you enjoy.