women’s issues | Schizmu

The Downfall of Society

I always laugh at the supreme right wing politicians and evangelicals in the United States when they predict their favourite doom and gloom fantasy, ”gay marriage will destroy our society” or something similar.

Of course, they never explain why this will happen. Pluto will align with Saturn and the gravitational pull will suck the US into stratosphere… or something.

Sitting in Canada, with all our gay marrying, looking around and… Yeah society pretty much still intact.

Which is why it’s extra funny when Canadians try to pull the same line, but again, we already have the whole gay marriage thing. So where do you go from there? Well normally I would say pot (oh noes!) but right now it’s prostitution on everyone’s mind.

The provincial government and the federal government want to appeal a decision by the Ontario Superior Court that struck down several laws related to prostitution.

Prostitution itself wasn’t technically illegal, because, truth be told, that law never would have withstood a charter challenge. So they tried to make it illegal by proxy; you can’t broker a deal regarding prostitution, you can’t keep a house used for prostitution, you can’t live off the money made from prostitution etc.

So you can be a prostitute, we’ll just make it really dangerous by forcing you out on the street and making sure it’s impossible for you to not break a law. Charming.

But somehow allowing prostitutes to get off the street will destroy our moral fibre. (Psst! Amsterdam! With your red light district and your pot cafes, you are in the middle of an apocalypse and you didn’t even know it!)

So what will be the horrible consequences of allowing bordellos? Well there may be licensing… and condoms…

“I hope that all the naive fools who support this ruling will be gifted with the task of picking up the used condoms in their own nice neighbourhoods.”

So aside from confusing prostitutes with teenage boys I don’t see a whole lot of problems. Which is to be expected, because the truth is removing these laws will get sex workers off the street and make them safer. Those who would argue otherwise care more about appearances than reality.

Internalizing the Failure

Salon interviewed Danica McKellar on her gender based mathematics textbooks.

The books are trying to encourage girls to get active in mathematics; by telling them that being smart and learning math is the sexy thing to do. The interviewer shows concern that sexing up math may be damaging to girls, although equating intelligence and sexiness is probably pretty far from the worst thing we can do.

It’s basically a new way of saying math isn’t cool, so let’s make it seem like it is. So the theory goes, if the kids think it’s cool they won’t be afraid to learn it, and to excel. McKellar just happens to be using sex.

But that really does not explain why the gap happens in math. Math isn’t cool, but I don’t remember the English nerds being all that popular either. (If they were… boy did I miss that boat). If it just wasn’t “sexy” to be “smart” the issue would be seen across most school disciplines, but it’s exclusive to math.

McKellar touches on the really issue but doesn’t linger long.

If you ask a boy who’s getting a B-plus how he’s doing in math, he’s likely to say, “Oh, I do great.” You ask the average girl who’s getting an A-minus how she’s doing, she’s more likely to say, “Oh, I dunno, I don’t really get it.”

No confidence in one’s ability to actually perform with mathematical skill. Is there a lack of confidence because it’s not sexy? No.

There is a problem with stereotypes here but it has more to do with gender essentialism than ‘cool’. Why are girls not confident? Because we consistently undermine the ability of girls to learn math.

Math is a man thing. In days long ago it was simply too tough for us feeble minded females and up until extremely recently it wasn’t that we were feeble, no, our brains were just better equipped for other things.

Of course now females are outperforming in the classroom we apparently just aren’t getting interested in the sciences because our brains don’t adjust to that type of work. Yeah, talk about the ever changing goal posts.

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The Downfall of Society

Internalizing the Failure

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