Interesting Links for 16-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Google now allows you to search for uses of a particular image
  (tags: google search image)
• The many uses of a dirt-cheap Android tablet
  (tags: android tablet funny)
• The Story of Marli-hrair and the Black Rabbit of Inle (You wanted some Watership Down fanfic about death, right?)
  (tags: fanfic WatershipDown rabbits stories death)
• 600 points, no deaths‬‏ - playing Super Mario with the object of getting the lowest score possible.
  (tags: mario computer_games)
• Dogs and Smurfs; Why women writers and stories about women are taken less seriously
  (tags: feminism gender writing norms)
• Humans are predisposed to believe in gods and the afterlife.
  (tags: humans psychology belief religion)
• Online map suppressing crime reporting. People won't report anything which affects property prices.
  (tags: crime property uk EpicFail)
• The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View
  (tags: brain genetics biology neuroscience future singularity)

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

srsly? - £1.9 million to discover that people are predisposed to believe in god? I could have told them that. All they need to do is read a little. I used to gobble up every anthropology and archaeology book I could find. In all the 100's of civilizations and societies I read about they all had one thing in common - they all had some sort of religion.

That's when I gave up any use for atheism - whether god exists or not, the belief in something is a fundamental part of being human. Might as well enjoy it.

[andrewducker]

There are many things that _anyone_ could tell people that turn out to not be true. Heck, reading every anthropology book out there will tell you lots of things about men and women which actually turn out to be largely cultural biases.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Like how everyone knows that women talk more than men...

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> Dogs and Smurfs; Why women writers and stories about women are taken less seriously

Interesting, but it doesn't go into what's the original cause of the actual dogs and smurfs. Or is it just self-perpetuating?

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

An unfortunate choice of example, there. Of course dogs are male. By definition. Female canines are bitches. Mind you, I can see some... problems with a children's book that features a female canine pet and uses the proper terminology.

[andrewducker]

I _suspect_ that it starts off with the way that boys think. And continues because when most writers/editors were male, and that's the way they'd started thinking, and nobody had ever pointed out the problem with it.

I went to an all-boys school, and had no idea what girls were like. And I grew up reading fiction which was largely male-lead. And it wasn't until I bumped into The Bechdel Test that I realised how bad most movies are (and also a huge amount of books, TV, etc.)

It's very easy for writers,directors,etc. to default to the first image that comes into their head - and if they're anything like me then that image isn't likely to be a woman, unless they're specifically wanting female attributes - they'll default to a man.

If I asked you to picture a totally imaginary engineer, or a doctor, or a politician, or a driver, or a writer, what genders would pop up for you?

Things are slowly getting better, and I wouldn't want to accuse most creators of being deliberately sexist. They aren't setting out to exclude women. They just have the images in their head that they grew up with, which (as you said) is self-perpetuated, until we make people think about it.

(And actually a bit worse than that - because I've seen studies that show that if you don't talk to your kids about racism and sexism then they tend to assume that people are different based on physical differences, so you need to keep educating them out of it.)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I've been pondering this and I suspect it starts even sooner, and happens to everybody. In an infant's relationship with its mother, the only quality she has is her motherness. My other theory is that a bit later on in life, the women a child has contact with are still all carers (other mums at playgroup, nursery staff, then primary school teachers), whereas men are firemen / builders / policemen / doctors and labelled as such.