Can we talk about Lady Gaga's new video? Because I could. All day. Not only is it a response to a certain era of Madonna, but it also goes to a lot of strange, strange uncomfortable places, the fascist references in its physical language being close to the top of the list. It's incredibly cool, smart stuff. There needs to be a Gaga Studies Journal, that's all I'm saying.
From all of my friendslist to all of yours: liljacks_corner is a community that has been set up for fan creators to make G-rated stuff for an eight-year-old boy named Jack who has just lost his legs; one of the only things that cheers him up right now is Doctor Who. He's only seen the first two seasons of the New series. What's being requested is a story about a little boy, much like the one it's for, going on an adventure with the Doctor and Rose. Details at the community.
Hmmm... I think we're in 99% agreement here. Taking things by parts:
Yes, my point was not the same as the point of the article. I still think the article is well written and well sourced, but I think its premise -- that the reason men dominate the high end of the professoriate due to especially high intelligence -- is flawed.
the reason women do not single-mindedly devote themselves to a pursuit (scientific or otherwise) in their 20s, 30s and 40s is because it is a cultural taboo
This is true. I'm not sure how much this cultural taboo affects women in physics and astronomy, simply because they've already overcome so many other cultural taboos. But it may be significant. Most of the women I know in physics and astronomy and aerospace engineering are culturally conservative (though veering toward the more liberal end of that spectrum), with their churches and communities forming important parts of their lives. I don't know if this is a way of demonstrating to the world that their scientific careers have not turned them into non-women, though I won't claim that couldn't be going on.
There is nothing that indicates that women are innately less ambitious, intelligent or science oriented than men
I completely agree. Given that my summer interns run around 3 to 1 women to men, I'd say that the population of high end undergraduates getting NASA summer internships suggests that young women in the sciences are ahead of their male peers at this point in their careers.
Getting back to the NYT article, I think what needs to be addressed is its flawed premise (Which would be Larry Summers' flawed premise) that men dominate the high end of the professoriate due to the way that more men appear in the very high end tail of intelligence distribution. While it's true that men dominate the high end of the science professoriate, and it's true that in the extreme high end of the intelligence distribution there are more men than women, the two facts have less than nothing to do with each other. So while the writing is good, and the sourcing is good, the premise itself has to be exposed as unjustified. If that premise were true, the IQs of senior science professors should represent the very highest end of the IQ curve. I'm quite sure that's not the case.
The thing that got me is that I'm in grad school (molecular biology) right now, and science is about writing at least as much as it's about math. Even the math-intensive students I know have got to have excellent verbal skills to give talks, write papers, and get any kind of funding. So even if it's true that women are better at words than math, which is inadequately proven to say the least, since when are words not a prerequisite for scientific success?
just about any woman with the mathematical ability to get into a doctoral program will get the doctorate if her life/family circumstances permit
In addition to the excellent comments that rm makes, I wanted to point out that it's my feeling that the life/family circumstances thing is BIG for women. Certainly, in my own case, one reason I didn't finish the doctorate, despite getting through all the hoops to be considered ABD, was because of my life/family circumstances: I was in an abusive relationship, and the abuser wanted me out of school. The other big reason was that my department did their best to keep POC and women from finishing, either through active persecution or malicious neglect. The double-whammy was enough to force me out with my Master's.
I don't think that much has changed since the 90s, given what I hear from life sciences grad students since then. What I've seen repeatedly is that women's diss projects are more frequently savaged by their advisors/committees. One woman I know had to restart her diss research 3 separate times, while watching men who came into the program with her graduate in 4 or 5 years. Another woman I know had her diss research knocked out from under her by her advisor, and two years later saw worse research on the exact same protein make the cover of Nature -- with a man's picture. One woman in my department had been in the program for more than a decade -- but she was also the laboratory supervisor for one of the full profs in the program, and he wanted to keep her in that position, so she never got her PhD.
I have only rarely seen this sort of persecution happen to a man, and often the man can get out from under it by breaking under the interminable pressure and being extra-assertive at his advisor (one man I know was allowed to have his PhD because he walked into his advisor's office and shouted at him, and kept shouting him down whenever the advisor argued).
There is a major cultural dysfunction in academia that conspires to hide this sort of institutionalized gender (and race) persecution. No one is allowed to talk about it -- you can't talk about it as a student, or you'll never get your degree! And if you talk about it after you get the degree, you won't get a job/tenure/advancement. And if you talk about it after failing to get your degree, it's sour grapes.
All of this, and it's not just the sciences. There's a reason I'm not getting back on line to do academia the way I'm supposed to, and it's not just because I'm an impatient sod. It's because the rules of the game are cruel and stacked and center on a sort of gender-policing I can neither pass nor endure.
I have heard male tenured professors say in one breath that their female students are always better than their male students and say in the next "if doesn't want to fuck me, why is she in my class?"
It's a big bucket of no thank you, and I admire the women in my life who are getting their PhDs from reasonably sane departments where they aren't being subjected to this sort of shit. But it's out there, and we all know it.
I admire the women in my life who are getting their PhDs from reasonably sane departments where they aren't being subjected to this sort of shit.
Yes, this, exactly. My wife just got her PhD from a reasonably sane department and it was still maddening in many, many ways.
When I got my new job, with its generous tuition reimbursement for two major institutions in the area, the first words out of my parents' mouths: "Are you going back to get the PhD?" My response: "Oh, hell no."
Truer words were never writ. This is a major part of why I teach as an adjunct, and my primary job is outside academia.
I'm truly sorry for what happened to you. You're far from being the only woman who's experienced this kind of hellish treatment in a graduate program, and I've also seen what you say about POC and women. I hope you've been able to find meaningful employment in your field as an ABD.
Wow, that guy who wrote the NYTimes article is an asshat.
I was part of that talent search that had the kids take the SAT in 7th grade. Got a 640 on the math, significantly below their 700 cutoff--though I was above that on the verbal. I'm in grad school, in physics, at one of the top programs in the country. And you know what? I'm actually better at math than a lot of the kids in this program, even without being in that top 1 in 10,000 according to the researchers.
I think the scientists are probably right that, even with completely equal social factors, we wouldn't see equal numbers of men and women--but the difference would be in the single-percent levels, not the current physics distribution of four guys for every woman. Also, even if some studies have shown that women fare better at "academic promotions and research grants", the problem with women in science is partially a leaky pipeline: you lose women at every step, from high school to college, college to grad school...so saying that the women who've survived that long do slightly better once they've gotten near the peak of the pyramid is probably just telling you that the selection pressures to get there are higher on women.
Careers in science aren't about raw math ability or slightly better promotion rates. They're about assembling and integrating background knowledge and learning how to ask questions in a way that can get you answers; they're also, for some people, about learning to build machines or use complex equipment. Women start out behind on many of those tasks because, on average, we play with dolls more often than we play with stuff like Legos, so we're not learning the visual-spatial skills for math at an instinctive level in the same way that the average boy is.
And the bias isn't totally the part where we do or don't get job offers or grants or promotions. It's also in the way that I know the first thing I say to a new group of people will not be remembered; it's not a contribution to the science being discussed, it's a way of proving that I deserve to be there at all. It's about the DARE officer who asked us to give a little speech on what we wanted to do with our lives, and who then laughed at me when I said I was going to go to Princeton, become an astrophysicist and work for NASA. It's the way some of my friends have told me that, in high school, they deliberately sabotaged their tests because being the smartest one in the class wasn't something they should be (although I should also say, that was probably a nasty combination of general gender bias and the Midwestern variant of Tall Poppy Syndrome). Or about the way that superminorities, less than around 15% of the population in something, tend to have more trouble regardless of the bias of the people around them. Or the way that girls more than boys pick up math fear from their teachers. From stereotype threat, from the image that science is not a social profession, from lack of role models, from images of scientists in the media... Fix all of that, NY Times writer, and then we can have your discussion about biological differences.
The Lady Gaga video! Totally a mash-up of Tom of Finland, Cabaret, The Night Porter, and Madonna (and some other stuff too). A smart mash-up, not a sloppy one at all. Fascinating. I think you're right, we need a journal.
I didn't even know there was a video for Alejandro out yet till I saw this, thanks! As much as I love Gaga I hadn't been behind the idea of her being "the second coming of Madonna" until this video.
I love each video more than the last one, she doesn't make music videos, she makes art films.
Just a little note on the Catholic thing; I remember reading someone saying that there was a similarity between nuns and prostitutes. They both live on the fringes of society. The only difference is that a nun withdraws her sexuality while a prostitute flaunts her sexuality.
There is also a whole slew of sex issues in Catholicism. I was brought up as part of a new generation, so for me it's not the severity it would have been, oh say maybe 100 years ago? We were taught that sex was a sacred thing and supposed to be only for having children and married couples.
But I've heard stories of Catholic couples who were chaste within marriage (okay so maybe some of these stories are from 500 years ago) because sex was equated with Original Sin.
Hmmm... I haven't revisited the 'sexual issues' stuff in Catholicism in years. I might have to do that then re-watch this video.
I do definitely remember one of my nuns mentioning that she had been brought up with sex as the Original Sin. In other words, the forbidden fruit of the tree was sex, and for having sex Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden of Eden.
Someone soo needs to invent an artificial uterus. I totally understand that wanting kids before the biological clock dies. But why are we expect to sacrifice our careers for the kids' sakes?
There was a lot of discussion about this with xtricks and I think it depends on what your sensitivities are and what things are big hallmarks of "fiction" for you.
"Bad Romance" doesn't particularly bug me, because, I think it feels like a very alien world to me. And where it doesn't -- sexual commerce, Leigh Bowery, etc -- *shrug*
On the other hand "Alejandro" is very challenging for me, because I'm very sensitive about the iconography I'm not supposed to find interesting as a nominally Jewish female-type -- the Catholic and fascist imagery in the piece are what make it intellectually interesting to me, but they are also what cause me to retreat into my recurring fear that my intelligence is a moral failing.
I think dismissing Gaga as trash culture is failing to take culture seriously. Because she's not just a throw away pop star. She really is saying new and interesting things. They're things that call back to other pop stars that have changed our landscape, but they're also transformative and big. She definitely takes her work seriously. It's not something she's packaging to get rich off of. Everything she makes is put back into the shows, which she's pretty open about.
Listen, I grew up the daughter of Hippie parents. I still don't wear shoes mostly or shave anything. I didn't have a television or microwave until extremely recently (think maybe two years?). I don't know who anyone in the pop scene is. But I also get that it's not OK to dismiss things as being trash culture. What's important to people is important. Being 'above' it in some way doesn't make me more sophisticated and media savvy. It makes me ignorant. It means I'm missing something important that's resonating with other people. You don't have to find it interesting, but acting like you're so much better than people who *do* find it interesting is boring and gauche.
I never said anybody shouldn't take Trash culture seriously. And just as you're entitled to say Lady Gaga is interesting, transformative and new I'm entitled to say that it's cliched, done-before and the most interesting thing about her work is that it is spectacularly vapid.
yeah, I know a fair amount of the history and culture of the Catholic church but the Catholic imagry in the vid, for example, doesn't hit me emotionally the way it might for those who were raised catholic/were raised with some religious practice.
For me, the most emotional reaction to most Catholic imagry is either horror movies or sexual kink (like I said above, I've seen a fair amoutn of kink/porn that uses Catholic imagry).
The intersex thing bewilders me (I've also heard that described as a transsexual rumor). She's got a pretty standard female dancer's body (what I noticed most about her is her very crisp body language), a voice that I don't think most transwomen could have and she wears far to little to be a pre-op transwoman or some version of intersex that involves having a penis/large clitoris -- unless she's doing some serious tieback.
I wonder if it's because she's often very sexually aggressive in her vids?
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liljacks_corner is a community that has been set up for fan creators to make G-rated stuff for an eight-year-old boy named Jack who has just lost his legs; one of the only things that cheers him up right now is Doctor Who. He's only seen the first two seasons of the New series. What's being requested is a story about a little boy, much like the one it's for, going on an adventure with the Doctor and Rose. Details at the community.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rm makes, I wanted to point out that it's my feeling that the life/family circumstances thing is BIG for women. Certainly, in my own case, one reason I didn't finish the doctorate, despite getting through all the hoops to be considered ABD, was because of my life/family circumstances: I was in an abusive relationship, and the abuser wanted me out of school. The other big reason was that my department did their best to keep POC and women from finishing, either through active persecution or malicious neglect. The double-whammy was enough to force me out with my Master's.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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