Women Of Science Explain How Stuff Is

In the wake of a series of unfortunate events that have rocked and shocked the small, chummy world of science writing this week, there are currently a lot of really smart women on Twitter talking about sexual harassment in science, academia and journalism.* If you are in need of a primer on the sort of guff one tends to get when one is a lady person doing sciencey things, have a glance at the hashtag #ripplesofdoubt, started by scientist Karen James to collect stories of harassment. It's quite instructive.

My wife here has just been reading over the many tales of lady-woe in the hashtag, and alternately nodding in sisterly agreement and rolling her eyes. "Bluh," she says. "It's kind of Take Back The Night-ey."

Bear in mind, this is a woman who once, as an exceedingly broke and exceedingly hungry freelance travel writer alone on assignment in the rural South, very nearly escaped having to have sex with a strange guy in a motel parking lot in Louisiana because she ate some of the barbecue he was cooking out of the back of his truck.** She is not easily impressed. Nor is she a big fan of Take Back The Night.

I am not a big fan of Take Back The Night, either, despite having spilled my guts at several of them in college. That was back before I realized, right in the middle of a doleful weepy monologue about My Very Sad Story, that spilling your guts at Take Back The Night does not actually get anybody to stop raping people, because rapists don't go to Take Back The Night.*** 

Here's where she's wrong, though. The great thing about this hashtag, which is indeed full of Very Sad Stories and not a small amount of weepage, is that it's happening among a group of professionals who already know each other, not primarily through gender politics, but through their shared work and culture. Every tenth tweet or so is from some guy whose mind has just been blown by the revelation that women all throughout his professional network are getting systematically hazed just for showing up, and institutions are looking the other way.

I am all for the creation of women-only safe space, even if that New Agey phrase makes me crabby. (What doesn't, really?) But I am so very glad this particular conversation is happening in mixed company. It's delivering a swift and brutally effective 101 course in the ugly daily realities of ladyhood to a lot of smart dudes that, for all their precociousness, have probably never had the occasion to really see this stuff before. And they ought to, really, if the goal is to get things to, y'know, change.

Keep it coming, Science Women.

*Pro tip: There's a bunch of it. Here is an absolutely withering example of the sort of thing that goes on, well, everywhere. And here is another. And another.

**Pro tip: Don't eat the barbecue.

***Not science. I could be wrong.

Update: You've really got to read this one. Kathleen Raven brings the wreckage.

Toward A New Semantics Of Rapeology; Or, We Have Met Todd Akin, And He Is Us

This past week, along with most of the rest of America, I've been thinking about rape.*



It seems likely that we're headed for a future in which laws in this country and its constituent states are increasingly drafted by people like Todd Akin, who have little knowledge of how sex works, and a vested interest in defining the word “rape” so narrowly that it rarely applies to coercive sex acts.



Being myself a rapee,** and also an empirically-minded sort of person, I find myself wondering what would have been different about my life so far if I'd grown up under Todd Akin Law. And, being fully committed to empiricism even when it conflicts with dearly held personal beliefs, I have to confess: Not much.



Here are the four pillars of what I call Akin's Theory of Rapeology:



1. A sex act is not rape unless it is physically forced.



2. A sex act that is physically forced will not result in a pregnancy. 



Number 2 is demonstrably false, but, if accepted as a premise, leads inescapably via the power of contrapositive reasoning to:



3. If a sex act results in a pregnancy, it must not have been physically forced.

Thus, the kicker:  



4. If it is acceptable to deny abortion to women in any circumstance, there is no need to carve out an exemption for rape victims, since no rape victim will ever become pregnant from the act.

Upon this rock of dubious logical soundness, Akin et al presumably seek to erect a new legal edifice, which would have two main features:



1. Abortion would become unobtainable, for rape victims as well as for the general population.



2. Increasingly, the concept of "forcible" rape – a term that does crop up in the state-by-state mosaic of law on sexual assault -- would be enshrined in law, and used to distinguish sex acts that are physically inescapable from those that involve coercion, temporary physical or mental incapacity, or inability to consent to sex acts due to age or mental status. For all intents and purposes, “forcible” rape would be considered "real" rape, opening the door for the legal penalties accorded to "lesser" varieties of rape to be diminished.



I must be frank here; I find this prospect terrifying. But I am also honor-bound to point out that while it seems likely Akin Law would have narrowed my options for legal recourse, I have not had much in the way of justice from the status quo either, despite having sustained injuries that would probably strike the average person -- perhaps even Akin himself -- as an unforgivable affront to human dignity.



 First, let us consider abortion. Here, I will own that I dodged a bullet: I was far too young at the time I was raped for pregnancy to be remotely a possibility. While I am of the firm belief that no one should be legally permitted to dictate for you what kinds of things should be lodged in your own body -- whether that be someone else's appendages, a medical instrument, or another living being -- my own personal experiences do not offer much to advance this aspect of the discussion.



I did, however, worry privately and intensely throughout my childhood and young adolescence about AIDS -- a disease I lost a family member*** to in 1982, not long after the incidents in question. If anonymous HIV testing had been available to me as a second-grader, it's likely I would have taken advantage of it, and spared myself many years of anxiety on that front. 



I doubt any of the prominent Democrats who are currently outraged by the proliferation of Akinesque commentary on rape would get behind the idea of federal funding for anonymous HIV testing in elementary schools, and can only imagine how the man himself would react to such a suggestion. I can therefore say with some certainty that there is no remotely feasible legal structure that could have spared me some ten years of private angst over whether I might suddenly develop a fat, ulcerating Kaposi's sarcoma in the middle of gym class. Some things man is fated to endure.



But onward! Next, let us consider the issue of what constitutes "legitimate" rape.



Here, I suppose it would be appropriate to confess a spot of equivocation on this front. As a child, I myself was often vexed by the fact that I had not, as it were, "fought back." I sustained no outwardly visible injuries during the course of my repeated indoctrination in the preferred sexual practices of teenage males. Indeed, I cannot recall ever having uttered the word "no" -- though if memory serves, the word "but," followed by a series of insufficiently reasoned excuses, escaped my lips on numerous occasions. 



In retrospect, it may have been a mercy that my rapist was wont, on evenings when we were the house's sole occupants, to turn off all the lights, deploy a strobe light and a bullhorn, and chase me around the furniture, shrieking "YOU'RE GONNA DIE YOUNG," in a terrifyingly distorted and amplified voice. This behavior, while intensely unpleasant at the time, has also been a source of great comfort to me during times when I reflected unhappily on the fact that I did not do more to deter him from penetrating my small person. The sheer cartoonish villainy of it did much to advance the hypothesis that what transpired between us was, in fact, entirely his fault.



But getting back to the issue at hand. It seems that Akin Law would have it that my rape, while possibly "rape," was not "rape-rape," to lift a snappy little phrase from Whoopi Goldberg.**** What are we to make of this?



It is said that the wheels of justice turn slowly, even on well-paved roads; when the road gets muddy, they cease to turn altogether. There may well be a law prohibiting the kind of treatment my five-year-old ladyparts received at the -- well, I shall not say hand -- of the perpetrator, but in my admittedly limited experience, the stricture against raping one's fellow humans remains far more de jure than de facto. He got off, as they say, scot-free.



Despite the existence of medical evidence corroborating my assertions, no charges were ever brought against my rapist in a court of law, mainly for the reason that -- I am told – it would have meant subjecting me to painful and pointless cross-examination on the stand. Without an eyewitness, a lawyer advised at the time, there was no hope of conviction.

My assailant was also a minor, which may well have factored into the adults' calculations; the worst he faced in any situation was probably a couple of years in juvenile detention. And by the time I was of an age to pursue legal battles on my own behalf, the statute of limitations had, most regrettably, expired. Even now, I hesitate to provide identifying details about the person in question, for the simple reason that it is far more likely that I should be sued for libel than that this man will ever be called upon in court to explain how his penis ended up in a very small child.



I know a lot of rapees personally, and I can't think of a single one whose rapist ever did time. As Kurt Vonnegut might have said, So it goes.



In summation: Under Akin Law, many rapes would be trivialized, many more would go unpunished, and many people who are raped would fail to obtain any semblance of justice. But the difference between Akin Law and the current state of affairs is not one of quality, but of degree.



And when we claim that Akin is trying to redefine rape for American society, we have cause and effect backwards. Rather, we should say that the current state of political discourse is the product of a culture that wholeheartedly supports the division of coercive sex acts into "rape" and "rape-rape," and is content to quibble over where to draw the line. Whenever some apologist struggling to draw the line between rape and real rape throws up his or her hands and says "Oh, you know what I mean," we do know. Almost everyone who's been raped has wondered uncomfortably, at some point, what side of that line they're on. God knows I have.



I can only speak with authority about my own experiences, and I concede that n=1 is a weak data set. But I posit that when you have a culture in which a child who is made to learn the mechanics of blowjobs before getting through kindergarten wonders whether or not it counts as rape, Houston, we have a semantics problem.



Akin's Theory of Rapeology is monstrous. But it's not his, not really. It's ours. He got it from a culture of rape apologetics that is rarely challenged in polite conversation, and is certainly not confined to one end of the political spectrum.



I have little faith that any amount of bloviation, by anyone, will be sufficient to shift the current appalling state of American discourse on sexual violence to more evidence-based territory. But it seems to me that a little more first-hand testimony in an arena currently dominated by non-rapees probably couldn't hurt. Thus, I'm throwing this woefully inadequate little essay onto what is already a vast pyre of stupidity, in the hopes that someone who might once have been tempted to utter the phrase "legitimate rape" will think for a minute before grossly abusing the English language.



And, I suppose, I'm going to try to do a better job of calling out rape apologetics in casual conversation.



Although, frankly, I don't know how much willpower I'll have for that one. Being the avowed rapee at the party is such a downer.







*If you haven't, I submit that you have been living under a rock, and I would earnestly love to know the location of this rock, so that I might crawl under it, and thereby get a fucking break from this constant barrage of rapetastic rapeitude that currently has most of American national media under a code-red toxic smog alert.



**What. I don't like the phrase "rape victim." 



***Not the guy.



****In 2009, Whoopi Goldberg used the phrase “rape-rape” to distinguish acts of grave sexual violence from Roman Polanski having sex with an unconscious 13-year-old. “It was something else, but I don't believe it was rape-rape.”


Note, 8.28: I've made a few tweaks to this essay, for a couple of reasons:

1. It's being published in The Nation online, and thus has been submitted to the editing process. Which, when it is working properly, makes everything better. Shoutout to web editor Emily Douglas and the Nation staff for their professionalism, with my deep gratitude for taking this on and bringing it to a wider audience. Thanks, too, to several fellow writers and editors who urged me to publish this properly.

2. After my mother read it, she revealed a detail that I had been hitherto unaware of, and that actually made it worse:

"the only thing i would change is the reason why charges weren't pressed. i was told that under NY law, there would not be a conviction without an eyewitness. ridiculous, but there you have it. that's what i was told, by the lawyer... he said you would be forced to testify, and then there would be no conviction."

The fact that we received this legal advice -- that without an eyewitness, we would never get a conviction -- has been duly noted in the essay.

Banned Words Digest

Having been off the women-doing-things beat for awhile, I am still getting up to speed, here. I thought I might check in on a few of our Banned Words on Google News to see how they're doing lately.

The results were edifying. I shall have to do this more often.

Things that are feisty: Canadian football teams, Joe Biden, otters, Pixar's protagonist-shaped mass of red hair (ya think?), Yvette Nicole Brown, and oh my God you have to read this story from the Belfast Telegraph about a Tory MP yelling at the Prime Minister.

An excerpt from that last one:

Nobody could make head nor tail of it as she screamed louder and louder to make her voice heard over the din of the Commons.

The blood pressure rose, her face became redder and redder - rhubarb, tomato, beetroot - up the colour chart it went. Her arm - the one in the sling - started gesticulating widely.

Veteran MP James Gray sat back as far as he could, conscious no doubt of taking one in the eye at any moment.

As the kids on the Tubes say: GPOY.

But back to business! Things that are sassy: E!, Britney Spears, celebrity journalistrixes, Bachelorette Emily Meynard's minidress, Pink's new single.

Things that are plucky: the Oakland A's, faithful dogs, Aussie footballers, tennis player Laura Robson, wee schoolchildren, death-defying seals, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I sense an opportunity for Science here. There ought to be a more long-term study, with pretty charts breaking down the relative frequencies for each word. (Categories: Women, sports teams, animals, Irishmen, the celebrity-industrial complex.)

The Ardipithecus Chronicles: Special Women Edition

The NYT had a nice package this weekend on Ardipithecus ramidus, an astounding new Ethiopian hominid discovery. (Ardipithewhatzis? If this is news to you, you live under a rock and should get out more.)

Like the last big human-ancestor fossil find, Lucy, Ardi is a woman sort of hominid. (A womanid?) And you just don't get to be a big deal newspaper editor person without acquiring a deep, deep need to sling gratuitous puns, wisecracks and perky asides at every single female-type thing that passes within reach of your grasping inky paws. They had to go there.

Forget the high heels; her feet had no arches (Lucy’s did).

Was that really necessary?

Women Exacerbate Dairy Crisis

As you all know, unless you have been living under the proverbial rock these last twelve months, we are in the End Times--or, if not the End Times, perhaps their darling Victorian antechamber, where we will have a glass of sherry and have a look at some etchings before the butler arrives to usher us into the Apocalypse Proper. Odds are you've got it pretty bad. But unless you're a dairy farmer, it could be worse.

(I'm guessing you're not a dairy farmer, because if you are, you're probably not reading blogs about newspapers writing about women doing things. You're probably at your bank begging for a loan so you can buy hay to feed your cows so they'll make milk which you can sell to a giant monopoly that is currently under investigation by the Justice Department so you can maybe make back half of the money you spent on hay. Or you're at your 40-hour-a-week day job that you have so you can get health insurance, popping Ritalin so you can make it through the day and still get up at 4am to milk 100 goddamn cows. Or maybe you're out shooting your cows in the head.)

Being a dairy farmer? Not so hot right now. And it's about to get a lot worse, thanks to women. Women cows, that is.

The New York Times tells the tale for us citified types that haven't heard it yet. Since approximately the dawn of time, cows, like most animals, have been giving birth to male and female calves in roughly equal numbers. But a male calf on a dairy farm is, as Rip Torn might say, about as useful as a poopy-flavored lollipop. So a few years ago, Science gave the beleaguered dairy farmer marvelous new sperm sorting technology, ensuring that most calves born would be female.

Now farmers have a different problem: too much milk. And the first generation of bionic bovine fembots are about to hit the milk parlor, with a vengeance.

“Just as the industry starts to recover from these difficult times, we’re going to see these heifers enter the marketplace,” said Ray Souza, president of Western United Dairymen, which represents farmers who produce about 60 percent of the milk in California. “At the very worst it could certainly stop the recovery altogether and send us into another price recession.”

It's like the Chinese one-child policy, only with cows. Thanks a lot, Science.

News Flash: Effective Women More Effective Than General Population

A recent study by Stanford and the U. of Chicago found that women lawmakers, on average, introduced more bills, attracted more cosponsors, and brought home 9% more bacon for their districts than their male counterparts.

Politico asks the obvious, though somewhat misleading, question:

Are women more effective lawmakers than men?

Er, yes. No. Sort of.

Set aside the issue of whether more pork = better lawmaking. Cheers to Politico for getting around to the real lesson, though it could have come a little higher in the story:

Researchers say the small number of female members may have something to do with their effectiveness. Women who run and win are likely the most politically ambitious and talented of their pool, having potentially overcome hurdles including voter bias and self-doubt about their ability to win. Female candidates also tend to attract more challengers.

You don't have to go all Carol Gilligan on the data to explain it. This study doesn't really say anything about women being innately better or more cooperative or what have you. It's a selection effect: only the most extraordinarily competent women can survive the election process. If my lawnmower cuts down all the dandelions over four inches tall, it stands to reason the ones left will all be short.

The Youth Of Today: They Hug One Another With Abandon

Hot off the presses of our nation's paper of record: teenagers hug each other. Even the boy kind! No! It cannot beeeeeeeeee!

Our intrepid reporter Sarah Kershaw ventures boldly into the halls of Pascack Hills High in Montvale, New Jersey, where she is informed by junior Danny Schneider that gender as we know it has ceased to exist.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

And it's not just in New Jersey. All across the nation, the flower of manhood are bravely flinging their arms around one another, risking the ire of school administrators.

[S]chools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Youth vs. authority! Shifting social norms! My God, it's a trend! We have here the elements of a newspaper story. But it's not really meaty enough for the New York Times. To make it worthy of the Grey Lady, we have to know: Will somebody make some sciencey noises for us? Is there a pop-culture buzzword? Can we make an incredibly awkward reference to hip-hop culture? And can we blame it on the Facebook?

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said

Yep.

The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.

Check.

But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.

Er, check.

“Maybe it’s because all these kids do is text and go on Facebook so they don’t even have human contact anymore,” said Dona Eichner, the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale.

Okay, we're done here.

Women Occasionally Mean, Unsupportive Of One Another

Breaking news: Women in the workforce, despite being generally regarded as frail and timid, are in fact too aggressive. Especially to other women. Sometimes.

Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core.

Oh, feminism, how frail thou (seemingly) art. A gentle spring breeze might blow you away. Only last week, I failed to give a pregnant lady my seat on the T, and God killed a radical lesbian-separatist kitten. So much for sisterhood being powerful.

According to a story in yesterday's New York Times, women are not as prone to bullying their subordinates as men, which fits nicely with received notions of women being altruistic. But when they do go rogue, they pick on other women, which is nasty, and hurts feminism. Also, they are stone cold bitches. (And here we thought putting women in charge was going to magically reform our corporate culture and fix the recession and stuff.)

It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.

What is this "nationally representative" study, you may well ask? Was it peer-reviewed? Did it appear in some fancy science journal thing? And where on earth did they get those lovely round numbers?

Actually, it's by a bunch of seminar-peddling consultants, who can be found here, here and here. Or if you like, you can help them make the world a nicer place by getting lawyers involved. And if you're really into this anti-bullying stuff, this June, you can spend three days with them in the glorious environs of Bellingham, Washington, learning to be an anti-bullying lobbyist just like Doctors Gary and Ruth Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute. Only not as good.

No one else in North America can train you on this topic like Gary and Ruth Namie can! You will learn to customize the components for your personal needs and upon completion of this course you will be certified to deliver a presentation introducing Workplace Bullying to a variety of audiences — public or business groups.

See? You, too can be certified to give other people a PowerPoint presentation on Workplace Bullying! And, since the Workplace Bullying Institute is a nonprofit, Gary and Ruth Namie are doing this for the poor downtrodden American worker. Out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fee: $3,600 (USD) per person

Oh. Right then.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Enjoy Your Banker PMS

There are a lot of things to love about being in the middle of a ruinous economic meltdown. Hobo chic, which is hilarious. Backwoods Home magazine getting fatter and fatter. Laughing at soulless twits who bought condos at the Natick Collection. And my favorite: the Banker PMS Story.

It used to be that 99%* of stories about people rendered insane by the cocktail of hormones coursing through their veins were about women. No more. Now, when you crack your morning paper and read about somebody losing their God-given marbles to an endocrine secretion, it's just as likely to be a banker-man.

It's a little bit of schadenfreude, to be sure. But having long been vexed by newspapers yammering about how irrational we women are when on the rag/pre-rag/pregnant/postpartum/lactating/adolescent/menopausal/postmenopausal/etc., I am enjoying watching the deposed Masters of the Universe marinate in their own humiliating stew of pop evolutionary theory and specious psychobabble.

*Not a number validated by any kind of science whatsoever.

Women Do! Hero of the Month: Deb Harkness

Kudos to Serious Eats for running this very Women Do-esque riposte to a recent marketing study on women and wine. It seems that in Obvious Town, women sometimes drink wine, kind of like men do.

What's the wine industry to do, now that they know that women aren't a specialized market?

Well, I'm hoping the study's findings makes executives think twice before they pay for an insulting advertising campaign directed at women that makes us out to be clueless, waistline-obsessed wine-swilling divas. I hope we see less cutesy wine labels with cuddly animals. And I fervently pray that the next time I order the wine in a restaurant, I'm the one offered a taste of it, instead of the waiter pouring it into the glass belonging to the man at the table. And I really hope this is the last study of this kind I see.

Bravo. My only quibble: I wish Harkness had linked to the study.

Women Destroy The Environment

Dear URI undergraduates: Please stop destroying everything we hold dear with your constant showering. As a source of potent greenhouse gases, hot showers are up there, er, somewhere behind manufacturing, agriculture, poorly insulated buildings and the driving of big smokin' American cars. So cut it out. Especially you women. You soapy, soapy women.

"Shower length is the most difficult behavior to change; it seems to be ingrained in people as a right," said Scott Finlinson, coordinator of the project for NORESCO, the energy services company hired by the University.

"While men tend to be willing to reduce the length of their showers, women say that they have too much to do in the shower to cut back on the time spent there."

Also. Undergrads shower eight times a week? Not in my day, bub.

Food Eaten By Women, Men

This morning, I went out in the yard with a few chicken bones tied together with a rag, muttered a few guttural incantations and left them hanging from the branch of an apple tree to ward off the evil eye. Why? Because the Globe is toying with my mind.

You may think this sounds paranoid. Well, then, you explain it. Why else would they run a great big blooming feature on the cover of Living/Arts--oops, sorry, "g"--devoted entirely to the thesis that men eat meat and women eat plants? And call it "Guys vs. Dolls"? And stuff it with irrelevant science? And, for the jaunty little sprig of parsley atop this teetering pile of madness-inducing verbiage, execute a rhetorical 180-degree-turn in the last few paragraphs that neatly disposes of the premise that THEY MADE UP IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Sorry for the yelling. Deep breath. Go to your happy place, Harris. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Now, I know they run this kind of drivel on a regular basis. There's no reason to think it's personal. Except for the deviled eggs.

Deviled eggs, you see, are men's food, along with everything else of animal origin. According to source Holly Safford, the Hingham caterer upon whose experienced shoulders this story's meager pretentions to factuality rest, no self-respecting female would be caught dead sinking her teeth into one of these savory little confections.

"I don't think I've ever seen a woman eat a deviled egg" at a social function, says Safford. "She might like them, but with all of the mayonnaise and everything it just feels too much like a whole meal. For a man, he might deny himself eggs every morning because he should watch his cholesterol. But at a party, he's not thinking about his statins," referring to cholesterol-lowering drugs.

(Ooh, they explained "statins." Thanks, nameless Globe editor!)

Deviled eggs are my Proustian madeleine. I sometimes think I might be the only person east of Worcester who owns a special deviled-egg plate and uses it on a regular basis. I never let a summer barbecue go by without making a giant mess of deviled eggs, and I usually consume an untoward number of them personally. When Joe Keohane and Jean Whitman left Boston recently to make their fortunes in New York, I was very sad, not only because they're fine folks and I will miss them, but because they were the only other people I know around here who made deviled eggs. I don't know how the Globe knows all this. Is it possible they've implanted some sort of chip in my spine?

But enough about my personal paranoias. Go read the story; go stare in slack-jawed wonder at its mind-boggling irrelevance, as with one fell swoop it divides the entire food-eating world into tremulous salad-pickers and boorish bacon-grease-swillers. And if you still haven't had enough, check out the bonus Q&A, in which a couple of female food bloggers face off against, unaccountably, a couple of Merrimack Valley radio guys to reveal their food preferences and ascribe them to the rest of us. A sample:

Q. What kind of salad dressing do guys like?

DJ: If I throw it against the wall and it sticks, that's the kind of dressing guys want.

I hope MC Slim J.B. rips this useless idea a new one in print somewhere. I hope Nina Planck reads this story and mails Globe food correspondent M.E. Malone a brick of lard for his or her birthday. I hope I will get a chance to eat a deviled egg soon. A really zesty one, with lots of horseradish and paprika.

Erin Go Bleaaaaaagggggghhhhhh

Today, a great blessing has been visited upon the land. We have been granted a day of rest in between the Southie parade and the actual St. Patrick's Day, during which, if we are lucky, we can hole up in a dark corner and slowly begin forgetting all our fine promises never to touch green 40s of malt liquor ever ever again. I'm guessing a great many of you--most of my fellow Bostonians, at least--are somewhat the worse for wear today. I recommend you drink a huge glass of tomato juice, have a few saltines, and contemplate the immortal words of Kingsley Amis:

He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

Also, women, you should know that this kind of behavior gives you cancer. At least, that's what a TV station in Rochester says. And that's where most of us like to get our science. Look:

A new study says as little as one drink a day can significantly raise the risk of one type of cancer for women.

Dr. Robert Anthenelli, an addiction researcher, said the study found just two drinks a day ups woman's risk of pancreatic cancer.

What? Cancer? From one drink a day? Or is it two? WHAM, your blithe fecklessness with facts is a little disturbing.

I was about to go flying out the door and see a guy about having my potentially cancerous pancreas out, the better to enjoy a nice IPA of an evening, but fortunately I read all the way to the bottom first.

Those addiction trials are on-going and results are expected in a couple of years.

Sheeeeeeeeeit. That's science-speak for "a whole lot of nothin'." And as the story notes, the point of Anthenelli's boozy women-research is to find new drugs. In thirty seconds of bullshit-detecting research on the Google, I discovered that Anthenelli's on the take from various pharmaceutical companies. The following is courtesy of Google cache:

"Robert M. Anthenelli, MD, discloses that he receives grant/research support from sanofi-aventis, Addex, and Ortho-McNeil Neurologics. He is a consultant for sanofi-aventis, Pfizer, and Alkermes-Cephalon and a clinical investigator for sanofi-aventis and Addex. He also is on the speaker's bureau for sanofi-aventis and Pfizer."

So he's working on some kind of alcoholism drug that they can target especially to women! Oh, my God, it's brilliant. Can you see the commercial now? We open on a shadowy living room, where a vaguely out-of-focus woman gazes alone with sepia-toned melancholy out a window, clutching a wineglass. Cut to a dazzling meadow, where our heroine, now clad in perky florals and surrounded by frolicking children, contemplates a brave new world of nuclear-family happiness, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine. Ask your doctor if Sozzilax is right for you.

Hey WHAM. There's this new thing. It's called fact-checking.

**UPDATE!** I made a mistake in an earlier version of this post, and conflated two separate studies mentioned in the WHAM story. It looks like the study on women and addiction is ongoing, but the one about cancer is already done. (Sorry! Physician, heal thyself!) I can't find the cancer study in PubMed though. Am assuming it exists in peer-reviewed medical literature somewhere, but this may be overly optimistic.

**UPDATE UPDATE!** Well, this will teach me to blog on an empty stomach. It's not Anthenelli's research at all. (Thanks a lot, WHAM!) It's out of Georgetown University, was funded by the National Cancer Institute and is in the current issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. So, women, you're screwed. Better get that pancreas out after all.

Women Have No Energy; Energy Has No Women

Missouri 15-year-old girl struck with debilitating fatigue; with the help of their exceptional medical knowledge and scientific training, parents and local newspaper conclude it must have been the Gardasil. (You know what's great for your energy level? Cancer!)

In other Gardasil news, the FDA has once again deemed women ages 27-45 too slutty for the HPV vaccine. (Their reasoning appears to go something like this: Under 9: not slutty enough. 9-26: just right. 27-plus: Go get cancer, you bunch of hos.)

In other non-Gardasil news, local energy consultant Judy Chang would like to see more women get involved with energy and the environment. Accordingly, she's kicking off a new group, New England Women in Energy and the Environment, this week at the World Trade Center in Boston.

I suppose this is as good an opportunity as any to pimp my new other blog, which is much more boring and wonky than this one, but contains just as many terrible puns, if not more. It's called Captain Trade, and it concerns carbon finance: offsets, cap-and-trade, carbon tax proposals, etc. Any dumbness therein should be attributed solely to me, and not to the several billion people with whom I share certain general characteristics of anatomy.

Only A Pawn In Their Game

We interrupt this regularly scheduled program of newspaper-bashing to bring you this vital news: Women are going to play some chess this week in Turkey.

Why, for the love of all that's holy, are there women-only chess events at all? I can think of a few reasons, none of them all that good:

1. Women are generally worse than men at chess. Therefore, we have to give them their own event so they can win sometimes.

Even if you accept the premise, the conclusion doesn't follow. What do general statistical trends have to do with individual abilities? Not much. Saying individual women can't possibly compete with men because women rank worse overall is kind of like looking at national weight averages and concluding that Rosie O'Donnell must be skinnier than Pete Wentz. Anyway, if I was a top-ranked chess player and somebody said this to me in all seriousness, I'd put a knight through their frontal lobe.

2. Women are generally as good at chess as men are, or better. Therefore, we have to give them their own event so that grown men won't have to lose to 11-year-old girls.

One word: Pussies.

3. We have no idea if women are as good at chess as men, but the only way to get women playing chess is to give them their own special tournament.

Please condescend to me more in an attempt to make your favorite activity seem less dull to the Hannah Montana set.

Amazingly enough, a scientific paper recently addressed this very issue. Statisticians took a look at the performance gap between the top 100 ranked male and female players in Germany, and concluded that most of it could be explained by sample bias: i.e., not enough women in the sample to yield very high-ranking outliers. Read more about it on this blog, which also features some grown men crying about losing to 11-year-old girls.

Scienceology at the Wall Street Journal

Recently in the WSJ: Women in the US are having babies younger because they don't care about work anymore. Or something. Maybe. Although it might just be that there are more of those baby-makin' Hispanic women now, or fewer teen abortions, or more pregnant b-ball superstars. Who knows? Let's throw a lot of women-spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks!

Like most bullshit trend stories, this one has a tell, and it's this paragraph:

A one-year reversal doesn't make a trend, of course. But the study lends weight to anecdotal evidence that young women are tuning in more closely to their biological clocks. "It's the first time it's ever gone down, and certainly that's noteworthy," says Brady Hamilton, co-author of the study.

Anecdotal evidence which consists of: a speciously unsupported opinion from a Marxist historian (WSJ, we hardly knew ye!)*, a "college graduate" who decided to have some kids instead of becoming a librarian, pregnant basketball phenom Candace Parker, and a twentysomething mom whose husband is still in college. You see what they just did there? Three anecdotes plus an expert: it's a trend!

OK, geniuses, this is not a "study." (PDF alert!) It's a CDC report on a bunch of data they just released for 2006. A "study" would generally have a question--like, say, "Are women putting their uteri into production at an astonishing rate or what? Maybe they hate work?" Its authors would then go about trying, in whatever flawed way available to them, to answer this question in good faith. And in contrast to the way things work at the Wall Street Journal, some people would actually have to read such a study, and spend a few minutes thinking critically about whether it was bullshit, before inflicting it on the rest of us in print. It's called peer review.

*This is sophomoric, but I cannot resist. The Marxist is named Stephanie Coontz. What are the odds?

This Has Nothing To Do With Women Do, But It's Sciencey And Porny, So Here Goes

Knight-in-government-waste-hating-armor Chuck Grassley wants to hold up $3 billion for university science in the stimulus bill. Apparently, some guys [Just guessing--Ed.] at the NSF were watching porn on government time. Maybe Chuck should come blow up my house now; there used to be some mice in it.

Next up: Ranking GOP Senate Finance Committee Member Eliminates FEMA; quoth Grassley; "Those guys are always screwing around on the Facebook."

A Few Tidbits

-"A laptop for poor widdle women arms."

-Hooray, Science, Part I: Life officially not over until age 33.

-Hooray, Science, Part II: 23 hungry psych students prove women have feebler brains. It must be the hormones.

-Self-serving observation: In their roundup of vegetable-porn outrage, the SF Chronicle missed this.

What Happened While I Was On The Beach

I understand some of you have been extremely disappointed in the recent dearth of postings. I have received several formal complaints. As this blog's senior management, official spokesperson, CIO, ombudswoman and Bwana-in-Chief, I take full responsibility for any lapses in content, and would like to issue a sincere apology--

Whoa. What's that? I'm not getting paid for this? In that case, Dear Reader, you can stuff it. I am currently on vacation, which differs from my usual pro bono activities in that my mom has been buying me lunch every day. Thanks Ma!

In the week or so since I last checked in with the world outside of Humboldt County, a lot has happened. We have a new President, and he's on the cover of Ms., which upset several people. Upon taking office, Mr. Obama immediately did away with his predecessor's loathsome abortion gag rule, prompting some 2,007 news articles; by comparison, Mrs. Obama's smashingly newsworthy yellow dress inspired 4,248.

I missed some alliterative nonsense from Natalie Angier, about how Obama's "geek chic" is going to be good for science-women in some unspecified way. (Memes? Really? How scientific, Natalie!) In addition to befuddling the brains of Ms. Angier, Science has also been hard at work on that age-old question, "How do we unify the three different quantum mechanical fundamental interactions of quantum field theory?" Oops, not that age-old question. "What Do Women Want?" Yep, that's the one. They're close to figuring it out, thanks to voodoo and mechanical fruit detectors.

Meanwhile, it seems not much has changed in Globe-land. The End Times are still upon us. Reporters still can't do math. And that prize-winning noodle kugel from September is still the most emailed story of the day. That one almost made me homesick.