I have always been interested in the color-dynamic thing and the whole gender-assignment thing that happens at birth and in childhood. Why do boys get blue and girls get pink? I, for instance, like green. Why don't they wrap kids in all different color blankets? I realize a lot of it is tradition - you know, yay! a boy! or yay! a girl!, but as kids grow up, it's still the same. Boys get trucks and girls get dolls and little mini-ranges. You know, to prepare them for their lifetime of cooking and cleaning. I'm just saying. And why are girls who enjoy playing sports and all rough-and-tumble "tomboys?" Because they act like boys? But all of this behavior is assigned from the moment kids emerge from the womb. Not so, claims a new study.
Girls are biologically inclined to pick pink, scientists say. It's because, you know, our Neanderthalian female counterparts used to pick red berries and leaves and, you know, when babies come out, they're reddish-pink and guys like blue because their Neanderthalian counterparts used to look up at the sky. What? How does looking up at the sky aid in survival of the fittest in any way? Is staring up at the wispy clouds going to help one hunt woolly mammoth even faster? But here's the rub. Apparently, later on in the article, it says that Chinese men actually prefer pink to other colors. And why is this? Are Chinese men especially effeminate? (Because there's a stereotype that doesn't exist.) Or is it a cultural thing? Is it because red and reddish hues (which are related to red) are related to happiness? See, the thing with doing scientific studies is that SCIENCE DEPENDS ON LOGIC. And logic is important when you make huge generalizations like this.
And see, this is why I love Bitch magazine:
Science has the capacity to surprise and amaze us, but sometimes it’s more satisfying when you can jump up and say, “Yes! I knew it all along!” Which is why articles touting the awesomeness of traditional gender roles are an evergreen subject in the science pages.
Scientists are not immune to gender bias. Women who exercise more are less prone to get cancer. Oh, housework counts as exercise. So all this leads to a headline that implies, "GET IN THE KITCHEN AND YOU WON'T GET CANCER." Way to go. My problem is that media completely distorts studies into a gender-biased way and then these quotes get quoted again and again and again until they're rubbed in my face as validation that feminism ultimately hurts women. UH, FAIL. I realize that I'm mainly summarizing a lot of the points in the Bitch article, but it's just SO FANTASTIC. To throw in a personal anecdote for no particular reason, I have experienced sexist behavior before. And to say things like women have no sense of humor as compared to men is just...I don't even have words for this. In the words of my roommate, "Men are bitches." And they are. If they can't be the best, no one can. And to talk about double standards, it doesn't just apply to gender divides in humans, but also to large cats. Like cheetahs!
Further on, it shows that apparently people can use made-up studies that don't even exist to push products and sell papers. I think that in our modern world where the news is almost always interpreted as fact and science always equated with logical truth, it's important to realize that this era of Bernstein and Woodward going against the establishment and whatnot is over. OVER. And it's sad. Tragic, really. So, just goes to show. It's like that front page article from The Wall Street Journal that claimed that Americans were not going to vote for Obama because he was "too skinny" and that American culture celebrates the complete opposite of that and because of that, he's not a good fit. Okay, no matter where I fall politically, vote for McCain or vote for Obama, but vote for good reasons. Don't vote for McCain because he's omg!normal sized!. She cited a survey with numerous sources. Later on, it was revealed that she had posted a question on an AOL Message board and used the netspeak comments of other users to prove her point. Aren't you glad that ppl who talk laik dis can ttly vote 4 prez?!! omg!Whether it’s lions fathering all the cubs in their pride, or human males getting a pass for cheating on their girlfriends, males sleeping around rarely make the news—it’s the natural order, after all—unless the article is happily touting the genetic advantages a male gets from spreading his dna around.
But when female cheetahs were found to do the same by a Zoological Society of London study, the study’s words about “promiscuous” felines were quickly outnumbered in Google’s index by the phrase, “cheetahs are sluts!”
Study author Dada Gottelli was quoted thus: “Mating with more than one male poses a serious threat to females, increasing the risk of exposure to parasites and diseases. Females also have to travel over large distances to find new mates, making them more vulnerable to predation.” Sounds like a cheetah-specific version of certain sex-ed curricula: Don’t sleep around, girls, or you’ll catch lots of diseases and the male cheetahs won’t respect you in the morning. Male cheetahs, however, aren’t “promiscuous”—they’re creating a healthier gene pool.
Not too surprising, then, that most of the coverage glossed over the evolutionary benefit of promiscuity for both male and female cheetahs: Multiple cubs by multiple cub daddies increases the likelihood of genetic diversity—a definite positive for a threatened species. Furthermore, the study noted that the rates of infanticide in cheetahs are much lower than in other big-cat populations, likely because male competitors don’t know which offspring might be theirs. But why let the facts slow down a good headline?
Yeah, no.
Seriously, can we get studies that prove that the genders are equal? Neanderthalian groups hunted together so that totally means that women precipitated the downfall of Neanderthalian societies. This has nothing to do with the Ice Age or, you know, maybe meteors falling from the sky or whatever killed the effing dinosaurs. It was women. WOMEN KILLED HUMANITY, GUYS. KEEP THEM DOWN. Or, you know, testosterone is linked to humor. THEREFORE GUYS CAN TAKE JOKES AND WOMEN CAN'T. Testosterone also linked to career ambition. So women who are ambitious are more "masculine" so, what, ambition is a masculine trait? Women can't want careers?
Seriously, to quote Hamlet 2 (which, if you haven't seen it, is so funny): SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS.
