By Cory Doctorow at 8:41 am Wednesday, May 23
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Hank Chapot sez, "You've published two links to my research about the 1937 police corruption scandals in San Francisco, November and February, 'the long lost Atherton Report.' After all the research, I wrote a novel. 'Bordello Politique'. Its an e-book available in most formats on most sites. Dolly Fine was the first profit sharing madam, she enrolled her girls in Social Security. She was wiretapped, raided and dragged before the Atherton grand jury. First woman in California indicted for contributing to the delinquency of (8) minors."
When Dolly’s elegant brothels are raided without warning, she is outraged. Her houses are raided, her girls are jailed, her money is stolen, and she’s dragged before a grand jury to testify against the cops she’s been bribing for years. As if that isn’t bad enough, she loses her immunity when her bail bondsman/crime boss buddy is named the “fountainhead of corruption” in an expensive, incendiary civil investigation called the Atherton Report. The good citizens of San Francisco command the mayor and the police commission to crack down on gambling, good-time girls and crooked cops, and Dolly is left high and dry. She tries to save herself but can’t count on anyone—can the city really come clean? Bordello Politique is a true crime story from a city searching for its center between the Great Depression and the World’s Fair.
Bordello Politique
(Thanks, Hank!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:50 pm Tuesday, May 22
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A Zimbabwean senator named Morgan Femai from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change has given a bizarre, misogynist speech at an African HIV/AIDS conference in which he proposes that his county's AIDS health emergency can be solved by mandating that women must be ugly and unbathed, and be subject to genital mutilation. He also gave an interview in which he stated that "Women have got more moisture in their organs as compared to men so there is need to research on how to deal with that moisture because it is conducive for bacteria breeding. There should be a way to suck out that moisture."
“What I propose it that the government should come up with a law that compels women to have their heads clean-shaven like what the Apostolic sects do,” said Femai, when speaking to a parliamentary HIV awareness workshop in the central city of Kadoma on Friday, according to Nehanda Radio.
“They should also not bath because that is what has caused all these problems,” said Femai, who added that if women dressed in shabby clothes and were uglier, then men would not drawn to have sex with them.
Femai also proposed that Zimbabwean women should be circumsized.
How to reduce HIV in Zimbabwe? Make women uglier.
(via Skepchick)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:39 pm Monday, May 21
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On How to Be a Retronaut, an invigorating, 1910s-1920s gallery of winsome, partially unclothed lasses posed with typewriters. Hummina. 23 and/or skiddoo! They're ganked from marvellous Virtual Antique Typewriter Museum.
Typewriter Erotica c. 1920s
(via Making Light)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 pm Thursday, May 17
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Alexandra Lange sends us her "Living in Lego City," from Print Magazine: "An essay that asks and answers the question: If you built all the Lego City sets, what kind of city would you get? The city you get is one founded on the stereotype of boy busyness, a place that makes 3-D the transportation, safety, and sports obsessions we assign to boys. There's no zoo but a Dino Defense HQ, no supermarket unless you go down an age group to Duplo, no cafe unless you enter the pink and purple world of Lego Friends. It isn't just the minifigs that gender the Lego world."
Flying into Lego City on a Passenger Plane, you can see the city laid out below you in a grid: squares of green, wide roads of gray, and a tidy coastline of blue squares. It’s early, but already the Tipper Truck is out fixing the potholes and the Garbage Truck is collecting trash and recycling. At the Harbor, the crane is unloading goods onto a truck on the dock, while next door at the Marina the lifeguard is ready to go on duty. A high-speed Passenger Train is just pulling into the Train Station. And over at the Space Center, John Glenn will be happy to see that there’s a Space Shuttle awaiting its next trip to the International Space Station.
Safety is a watchword in Lego City. The Mobile Police Unit is ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice, should the Police Helicopter spot any illegal activities. It is hard to believe that any thieves could cross into Lego City, knowing the Forest Police Station is fully operational. And if the police, with their own helicopter and Jeep and a built-in holding cell, don’t catch the criminals, the bear (included) will.
But where do Lego City’s residents sleep? Eat? Shop? The green blocks are strangely empty. On the edge of town, kids are carving up the hills with their dirt bikes, thanks to the Dirt Bike Transporter, but what happens if they get thirsty? The only houses nearby (available as part of the Architecture series) are for the 1 percent: the Farnsworth House (that blue square looks awfully close) and Fallingwater.
Downtown, on the gray squares, the skyscrapers crowd closely together: the Burj Khalifa, the Empire State Building, the Willis Tower (renamed, even here). There should be a place to sit and watch the crowds at Rockefeller Center, but the scale is too small for benches or the skating rink. Down at the Marina, at least, you can relax at the Paradise Café and admire the brand-new Sydney Opera House. Now that Lego City has an opera house and a museum (the Solomon R. Guggenheim), it qualifies as a world-class city—right?
Living in Lego City
(Thanks, Alexandra!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:02 am Wednesday, May 16
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From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, Maia Weinstock's chart of gender in Lego minifig heads. There's an accompanying blog post, where Weinstock explains:
So many of LEGO’s sets today are made in conjunction with a movie or other Hollywood media brand. It’s a win-win for Hollywood producers and LEGO alike. But how many of those brands star girls or women in the lead role? Star Wars? Toy Story? Pirates of the Caribbean? The Lord of the Rings (available in LEGO this summer)? Hermione Grainger is a major character from the Harry Potter series, and there were a fair number of female minifigs incorporated with those sets, so I’ll give them that one. But still, in almost every franchise that LEGO has partnered with, females are secondary or sidekick characters at best. To be sure, this heavy male slant in children’s programming is a problem with Hollywood as a whole, not just with the famed brick-makers. (For an in-depth look at how girls and women are marginalized, sexualized, and stereotyped in family films, check out these studies by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.) And yet, LEGO could go a long way toward increasing its girl-friendly cred by creating sets and minifigs that mirror movies and shows featuring prominent leading ladies—like Avatar, Dora the Explorer, Spy Kids, and The Hunger Games.
See also: History of gendering in Lego.
LEGO minifig head breakdown by pixbymaia
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Wednesday, May 16
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John Scalzi attempts to explain privilege using a video-game metaphor in "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is." It's a good metaphor in that is illuminates more than it obscures (the litmus test for metaphors).
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
Now, once you’ve selected the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, you still have to create a character, and how many points you get to start — and how they are apportioned — will make a difference. Initially the computer will tell you how many points you get and how they are divided up. If you start with 25 points, and your dump stat is wealth, well, then you may be kind of screwed. If you start with 250 points and your dump stat is charisma, well, then you’re probably fine. Be aware the computer makes it difficult to start with more than 30 points; people on higher difficulty settings generally start with even fewer than that.
As the game progresses, your goal is to gain points, apportion them wisely, and level up. If you start with fewer points and fewer of them in critical stat categories, or choose poorly regarding the skills you decide to level up on, then the game will still be difficult for you. But because you’re playing on the “Straight White Male” setting, gaining points and leveling up will still by default be easier, all other things being equal, than for another player using a higher difficulty setting.
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
(Thanks, benchatt!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:50 pm Tuesday, May 15
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On Sociological Images, David Pickett is tracing the history of gendering in Lego toys, from the early efforts to produce girl-sets and boy-sets before 1988, to the full-blown gendering watershed attending the release of the Pirates minifigs, which had definite "girl" and "boy" characters. It all went downhill from there, too. He's got two parts posted, with more to come. It's engrossing stuff.
This pioneering pirate was the first in a long line of token females in otherwise male-dominated action-centric themes. The imbalanced ratio of masculine to feminine minifigs persists today, though it has lessened over time. I have seen several different numbers for this ratio, so I decided to do my own count. I gave TLG the benefit of the doubt and counted as gender neutral any minifigs lacking definitely masculine (facial hair) or feminine (lipstick, eyelashes, cleveage) traits, even when LEGO marketing materials clearly delineate them as male or female.
The following graphs represent masculine minifigs in blue, feminine minifigs in red, and gender neutral minifigs in gray. I have also calculated the masculine to feminine ratio (m/f ratio). Ideally this should be 1, indicating that there are equal number of masculine and feminine figures. This chart shows the aggreagate across all themes for the five key years between 1989 and 1999. The m/f ratio for this data is 3.74 (which is a lot better than the initial 13.5 it starts at in 1989, but not exactly something to celebrate).
The trend to unrepresent feminine figures in the main LEGO product line is mirrored by a tendency to overrepresent them in the “girls only” lines. LEGO released four major “girls only” themes through this time period: Paradisa, Belville, Scala Dolls, and Clikits. Here’s a quick run down of the “girls only” themes:
Part I: Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap
Part II: Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Sunday, May 13
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Another Vintage Ads gem for Mother's Day: this bit of corporate futurism from the energy sector.
Mother's Day
By Cory Doctorow at 10:49 am Sunday, May 13
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Oh that scamp. Poor Mom. Check out that beatific expression.
Mother's Day
By Cory Doctorow at 5:10 pm Wednesday, May 9
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Thing-a-day guy Noah Scalin sez, "Artist Betsy VanDeusen created this wonderful Star Wars-ified version of a classic Elvgren pinup as part of her yearlong daily project!
You can see the rest of her work on her blog, and read a recent interview about her project on my own blog."
She explains, "Starting on 2/27/2012, and working through 2/27/2013, I intend to work on my art daily. It will all be tied in to the "Retro Pinup" theme somehow. The important thing to me is the daily practice of working. I'm not necessarily interested in creating "finished pieces" on a daily basis (Taking a work to completion may take the accumulated efforts of a week, a month, or more- if the piece demands it). I just have so many ideas that I never follow up on, and this project gives me the incentive and excuse to focus on those ideas on a daily basis."
The Princess Leia Pinup.
(Thanks, Noah!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:00 pm Wednesday, May 9
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In Slate, Lindy West has an engaging and intriguing review of Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, a new book by Florence Williams on the science, history, and future of breasts. The review concludes with "Five Things I Learned About Breasts From Florence Williams' Breasts" (not excerpted here), which I found fascinating:
Williams' journey begins when, alarmed by a news article about toxins in breast milk, she decides to get her own milk tested. And, surprise! It's packed with toxins—specifically, chemical flame retardants—that Williams is funneling directly into her baby. ("Well, at least your breasts won't spontaneously ignite!" her husband jokes, because that's exactly what you want to hear when adjusting to the news that you're a human baby-poison factory.) This sends her down a rabbit hole in search of deeper understanding of her own anatomy— into the evolutionary history of mammals, to Peru to investigate nursing and weaning, back to the first breast augmentation surgery, and all over the world to interview more boob experts than you can shake a pasty at.
And she discovers that breasts are complicated. Impossibly so. She learns that it’s the breast’s permeability that make it such an evolutionary powerhouse (lots and lots of estrogen receptors help human puberty occur at the optimal time; nutrient-rich breast milk makes for giant brains)—but that same permeability is also, partially, what causes one in eight women to develop breast cancer. Our breasts make us great but they also make us vulnerable, and you can’t help but come away from Williams’ book feeling a bit helpless. (Self-examinations! Self-examinations are key!) While she makes the story as dynamic as possible, there’s no escaping that this is science journalism—there are lots of PBDE levels and octa-203 and penta-47 and dioxin and “lobule type 4” and other such enemies of lively prose. But that’s OK—there are enough surprises and genuinely horrifying learning moments to keep a reader (especially a lady-reader), uh, latched on.
Your Breasts Are Trying To Kill You
(via Skepchick)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Sunday, May 6
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The Kansas House of Reps passed one of the most draconian and awful abortion bills imaginable last week. Among other things, it allows doctors to lie to their patients to keep them from getting abortions, even if the mother's health demands it, and mandates that doctors lie about health risks from abortion. It also allows doctors and pharmacists to withhold cancer treatment from pregnant women if they believe it might harm the foetus's health. From Amanda Peterson Beadle's writeup in ThinkProgress:
– EXPANDED ‘CONSCIENCE MEASURE: Earlier this week, the state Senate aproved a bill that offers additional legal protection to Kansas health care providers who refuse to participate in abortions. The House had already approved the measure, and it is likely that Gov. Sam Brownback (R) will sign it. But critics of the bill worry the “conscience” measure goes too far, and that it would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control “allow a doctor to refuse to provide chemotherapy to a pregnant cancer patient because it might end her pregnancy,” according to the Associated Press.
– PREVENTING LICENSES FOR PROVIDERS: Last year, the legislature approved licensing regulations that specifically targeted the state’s three abortion providers, potentially making Kansas the first state where a woman could not access abortion services. But when a judge temporarily blocked the regulations from going into effect, Brownback’s administration planned to enact the exact same regulations to skirt around the court’s ruling.
– DEFUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD: Lawmakers signed off on a law last year to ban Planned Parenthood clinics in Kansas from receiving federal funds, endangering health care for at least 5,700 patients. A judge blocked the law from going into effect, but the state has spent hundreds of thousands continuing to defend the law.
Kansas Anti-Abortion Bill Would Force Doctors To Warn Women Of False Cancer Risk
By Cory Doctorow at 3:42 pm Friday, May 4
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Todd Stave from Voice of Choice (previously covered here) says, "This flyer was put on the doors of the homes in my wife’s parents neighborhood.
They are targeting me because I am the landlord to an abortion doctor. The people who made this piece of art felt that best way to convey their desire for me to terminate my lease with the doctor was to litter my in-laws' neighborhood and attempt to embarrass them."
Voice of Choice
By Cory Doctorow at 11:46 am Thursday, Apr 26
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Dr Petra Boynton has a very good critical essay examining the media coverage of a study that "proves" the anatomical existence of a G-spot.
The take home message is
- there are numerous conflicting messages about the g-spot, many of them from papers with limitations, all recently published in the same journal
- this is not cutting edge sex research nor the prime focus of what sex research is
- this distracts us from the exciting and wonderful stories and studies within sexology – and people’s daily lives
- this makes people anxious about their bodies, sexual experiences and sexual performance
- it gives legitimacy for untested cosmetic gynaecological procedures to be promoted uncritically by the media
- it implies orgasm is solely a physiological experience that is located in specific areas of the genitals (in cis women)
- it suggests particular kinds of orgasm are superior to others or that you should train your body to orgasm in particular ways/locations
- this discourages us to celebrate sexual diversity and pleasure in our genitals and elsewhere, and find what excites and arouses us
G-spot discovery, medicalization and media hype
Penny Arcade TV's "
Harassment" episode looks at the phenomenon of in-game trolling, with its disproportionate emphasis on racism, homophobia and sexism, and suggests a solution: identify players who are muted more often than the norm, and set them to "auto-muted" when they join games, and have guild efficacy decline based on the number of automuted players in them. The idea is to create social pressure that make bullying into something that makes gaming suck for bullies.
— Cory
