Echidne is another of those bloggers you should just read every day. She recently put up a thought-provoking exploratory post on the dangers of evolutionary psychology and bad statistics and pop science generally when it comes to women and how women’s lives are discussed in the media. The impetus for it was some piece of nonsense about how non-ovulatory (pill-taking) women do or don’t prefer dominant men or some other trumped up horsedoodoo. And how women who were ovulating voted for Obama. Yah. Seriously. Anyway, Echidne:
What a long introduction that is! If I had an editor it wouldn’t be there much longer. But I am going to keep it because it tells you how intense my feelings are, how strongly I believe in the importance of following the pseudo-scientific discussions and how bitter I am when I bump into those very same arguments at parties in six months’ time.All this matters for the girls born today, you know. It is they who will grow up within a culture which lets stuff like this find its place into the small-talk departments of cocktail parties, church picnics, kitchen tables and bars.
So I go to other feminist sites to see what they say about any of the myriad pseudo-scientific gender studies that I fret over. And I find next to nothing*, on most days. This worries me. As I have mentioned before, religion, pseudo-science and the legal system are the three traditional legs of the stool on which misogyny sits, and seeing so little written about one of those legs is disconcerting.
And then this very profound and depressing observation:
The more we focus on those who suffer from oppressions of all kinds the less we see the new oppressive tools being developed.
