Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed-reader. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.

• CNN shocker: women responsible for men’s feelings

– “Whoa, what? Men dismiss women’s feelings. The article acknowledges this, even explains it, but doesn’t see an opportunity for reciprocity here, i.e., maybe men who want women to realize they have feelings even though they haven’t discovered them yet themselves should, at the very least, learn to take women’s clearly expressed feelings seriously.”

• Today in Fat Hatred

– “And there it is. Despite the continual claims of anti-obesity crusaders that they’re just concerned about our health, even when there is evidence of cases where fatness is not unhealthy, it’s still something that needs to be fixed. Because fatties are grody.”

• The wildest confession you can make about your sex life

– “How do I know this is a shocking confession? Because I just read a book on it and I was shocked. What’s more I read the book on peak-hour public transport to and from work and I squirmed the entire time wondering what my fellow-passengers were thinking.”

• Dear Political Left: Enough With the Scooter Hate, Already

– “I’m more interested in confronting and engaging with the ideas these people are promoting and I find it, well, interesting that many people on the left apparently aren’t interested in ideas, they’re interested in attacking people. It would be just as easy to challenge the assertions made on the sign without dehumanising the person holding it, but people seem to have a hard time with this concept.”

• Making a career out of telling women not to have careers

– “suffice it to say Priscilla’s life path and her choices fly directly in the face of what she evangelizes as “natural” for women. Women, according to the peddlers of Biblical Womanhood, are naturally emotional. We’re naturally submissive. We naturally want men to take care of us. We naturally fall back behind a male leader.

Men, by contrast, are naturally unemotional. They’re naturally aggressive. They’re natural leaders. All of which, the article points out, stands in stark contrast to the thousands of men crying and hugging each other as they listen to speeches at Promise Keepers rallies. “

• NICE WORK: Doing Time = Doing Gender

– “Consider this: When you are thinking about gender and trends in employment consider that in America, doing time is a social institution we’ve organized for doing gender.”

• Mother's Little Helpers

– “On the other hand, the way Americans have structured stay-at-home child-raising seems to me to be almost guaranteed to cause mental and emotional stress for the care-giver:”

• He, Once a She, Offers Own View On Science Spat – WSJ.com

– “there is little evidence that lack of testosterone or anything unique to male biology is the main factor keeping women from the top ranks of science and math, says Prof. Barres, a view that is widely held among scientists who study the issue. Although more men than women in the U.S. score in the stratosphere on math tests, there is no such difference in Japan, and in Iceland the situation is flipped, with more women than men scoring at the very top.

“That seems more like ‘socialization’ than any difference in innate abilities to me,” geneticist Gregory Petsko of Brandeis University wrote last year. In any case, except in a few specialized fields like theoretical physics, there is little correlation between math scores and who becomes a scientist.”

• Not the Social Network

– “But what I have not yet seen one film critic do, not one so far, is question — or even mention — the ethics of making a film ‘about’ a 26 year old man that makes him look as much as possible like a dishonest, unpleasant little schmuck, but that Sorkin defends by saying it’s not a documentary, it’s a ‘story’. “

• Is 'Peak Oil' Behind Us?

– “Production of conventional crude oil probably topped out for good in 2006 and will reach an “undulating plateau” between 2020 and 2035. a report from the International Energy Agency says.”

• Scientists Join Forces in a Hostile Climate

– “Hundreds of scientists volunteer to refute misinformation wielded in fights over global warming.”

• 2010 still on track to be hottest on record

– “At this rate 2010 will beat out the other years at the top of the list—1998, 2007, and the current leader, 2005. And so far November is tracking at a record level. What makes this more significant, says NASA, is that the record temperatures have come during a “minimum of solar irradiance,” when temperatures would be expected to drop.”

• Science, narrative and heresy

– “If every idea must now and forever, be considered anew whenever someone brings it up, no progress is possible at all.” – Journos really should start asking whether all these iconoclasts and skeptics are just ‘Potemkin heretics’

Categories: environment, gender & feminism, linkfest, technology, work and family

Tags: ableism, cinema, climate change, double standards, family, fat acceptance, gendered roles, Read-ems, scientific method, sexuality, sexuality and health, socialisation