Gender roles effect Valentine's Day

So I came across this article today and was confused. The article itself is a mix of feminism while at the same time claiming that feminism is wrong. Don't believe me read this:

But for good or for bad, it presents a new challenge to the enduring American way of romance -- the one that no matter how evolved we think we've become, keeps turning up in song and story.

(Really, can it get any harder for those breadwinning women -- working long hours to help support their stay-at-home or less-moneymaking men -- to find the energy for a candlelit dinner, a quick change to a lacy negligee and an evening of unbridled romance?)

Yes that's right she claims in two paragraphs that the feminist movement has done great things for women while insisting that women must retain the classic role in relationships. She continues on later saying this:

If you caught any of this year's Super Bowl commercials, you saw a surprising representation of how conflicted men are (at least TV-commercial men) between feeling like traditional car-loving, pants-wearing tough guys and emasculated, moisturizing purse holders for their ladies.

Um, I don't know where she has been but for as long as I can remember Super Bowl commercials, and men all over the US, have been making similar jokes. When I first started dating my now fiance my friends gave me crap for not spending as much time with them as I used to. Would they do the same thing if they were in my position, sure, but that isn't going to keep them from giving me a hard time about it.

I love my fiance but she is very much her own woman and I would have no problem with her being the money maker in the family. I think that Miss Spencer is trying to force us into gender roles that are no longer a necessity. What is wrong with a woman treating her man to a fancy dinner? How about while the woman is at work all day the man is at home preparing dinner for the family so it is on the table when she gets home. Romance goes both ways and most of today's relationships were built on the idea that both parties are equal and bring different things to the table in the relationship.

No Miss Spencer romance is not dead or dying, as you seem to be implying, in fact it is still going strong. All that has happened is that the roles in the relationship are not the same that they were in the '60s and '70s and may in fact be stronger!

One more time

Ok so I promise I will eventually get off of this book banning topic but I came across this today and after my last two posts (here and here) I figured I would pass this along. This comes to us from Amazon.com and it is a list of the most commonly banned books. The most common reasons for books being banned, at least by my count, are:

Profanity(12)
Sexual Situations/Nudity(10)
Teenage Situations(6)
Racism(5)

I don't know if the parents/teachers who made these complaints have ever walked through the halls of the middle and high school but all of these go down every day. You think you are protecting the kids from all of these no all you are doing is covering your eyes and not seeing what they are actually doing. By the time I was in high school I knew fellow students who had been sexually active, I also knew the better part of the swear words you can imagine. Sure I may not have used them at home or even much at school, yes I was that kid, but that doesn't mean that I hadn't already been exposed to them. As for the teenage situations, which is a very broad category and often includes the sexual situations, we all went through them. At the same time it wasn't something you always felt comfortable talking about with family, friends, or teachers. Reading that people had gone through similar things and had come out alright helped me get through all of them. Racism exists (yes even though Stephen Colbert said that it had ended with President Obama's election) today but most of these books are not even modern books. They date back in time and they show you the views that were held at the time of the writing of the book. This is important not just in the historical aspect of it but in order to help us learn from our mistakes. The reading of a book should not just be handing a kid a book and telling them to read it. It should include a background of what was going on at the time of writing and why the book was written, see banning books and Fahrenheit 451.

There are a couple more common themes that get books banned and a very common one is support of communism/socialism, this is something I have already written about (here) so I really don't feel that there is much more to say on that. Also a big theme is violence and death.

All of these themes are events that we deal with in a real life. All things we need to learn about. Books provide an opportunity to do that learning in our minds. When we see it on TV or in Movies we get the visual aspect. It doesn't give us an opportunity to learn from it or to think through what we would do in real life. With reading we can put ourselves in the situation but at the same time our brains recognize it as not real, where as sometimes it is more difficult with TV and movies, so we can see how it turns out in the book and realize that those decisions were good or bad.

Ok I will step off of my soap box now, although what is a blog if not a giant soap box, and will try to get back onto more sciency issues for my next blog post but I make no promises we won't be back to this issue at some time in the future.

What to do?

So we all know that this time of year, aka the holidays, bring families together. It has been nice being home and getting to see my family. Over the last few days I have my parent's have had one of my aunts and her son over to visit. And it is nice to see them since I haven't seen them in at least 2 years. My aunt is for the most part conservative but then again so is most of my family but at the same time we are far from religious, although apparently my grandfather is very liberal which made for an interesting situation yesterday when we went to go visit him but that is another story all together. I love my aunt I think she is funny but tonight she said something that disappointed me.

We were watching the TV show The Big Bang Theory, Monday's at 9:30 on CBS, and the intro song mentions human evolution. My aunt said, "I don't believe in human evolution." There was the silence where no one knew what to say or do. One thing is for certain as much as my parent's might not completely understand science they have at least tried and they tend to accept most of the theories, sometimes a little too much against my advising but it has never hurt them. That maybe why both my sister and I have always been interested in science. Anyway this silence lasted for what seems like a couple of minutes but was probably only a few seconds until the next cheesy commercial came on. I will admit I didn't say anything and I probably should have but I tried to make my annoyance known.

So now my question is this: If you were put in the same situation what would you have done? Would you have sat their quietly like my whole family did or would you have said something challenged her or heck maybe you have some sort of middle ground. I just didn't know what to do at the time and just let it slide, since for most things we have very similar thought processes and I don't get to see her very often. I don't know how many people follow this blog but I figured I would ask that question to see if anyone who does read has any suggestions for next time.

The difference between going to Grad school and going to work right out of school

So this may seem really random but where I am currently in both life and in location I really got to thinking about this today. At 23 years old I am in a unique position in life most of my really good friends from both high school and college have a job now but there is a good number, myself included, who decided to continue going to school and are now in grad school. I also am not quite in the position where I know a lot of people who are working and in grad school at the same time so I won't really be discussing that here. But tonight I was hanging out with a bunch of friends from high school we are all really close and it was good to finally see them all again. As I was leaving my one friend's house (yes he owns a house) he jokingly said to me something along the lines of it must me nice to have 3 weeks off but I guess you do kind of work for it. He has next week off and I told him well I can only imagine what it is like in your position.

So what is the point? Well once you get through your undergrad education your life very quickly evolves out of the large amounts of fun it was as an undergrad. I'm not saying life isn't fun but no matter what path you take you will be in working to be where you are. So for example there is no question my friends who have jobs work harder than me when you average it out. They will work 48-50 (5 day) weeks a year I however will get a month off from winter break and 3 months off for the summer. But what do you get for that? One of my friends is working but owns a house and has a kid, my fiance and I couldn't afford to do that if we pooled all of what we make a year, we would still make less than all of my friends except the ones who are teachers (which says something about our society). They tend to get up and are at work by 7-9 in the morning where as I tend not to get up that early but I will be up working on homework or something till 2.

So what should you do? Sometimes you don't have a choice. There are certain fields, and all of academia is included in that, in which you need at least some post-graduate education so you are stuck. But is it worth going to grad school right away or to enter the work force. That I cannot answer for you, and to be honest it took me time to answer it for myself. And that is just it if you can make enough to afford to own a house and have a kid at 23 then I say go for it but if you don't want to leave school right away and are willing to work hard in the academic world go for that too. In the end it comes down to the individual and nothing else!

Human's the social species.

So anyone who tells you that the final stretch of a semester in graduate school is easy, well that person is lying to you I should be working now but I am taking a break between projects so you get a blog post.

Tonight's post I actually got the idea from the 7/6c episode of Bones on TNT, and yes I am not making any money off of this. Anyway toward the end of the Episode Bones and Booth are talking about the human condition and about how we are in fact always alone as a species. I disagree with this as we will see in a few minutes but I also want to credit another source of the idea for this it is this post by a friend of mine's blog, the main blog can be found here. Toward the end of the post he says this:

Maybe I'm crazy for thinking everyone just wants you to step in line and shut up.

[...]

Meanwhile, I'm going to make this world better than the way it was when I was born. You can either stand up and follow me, or you can stay in line. Your call.

Now most of the rest of his post has nothing really to do with what I want to say here. They question I want to ask is why do humans seem to care so much about what other people think? Why do we care about fashion and other aspects that cause us to "fit in"?

This is where I want to refer back to the Bones episode. Yes each of us is our own person but we are shaped by those around us in fact we care more about their opinion than we do what we think of ourselves most of the time. When my friend argues that he wants people to follow him he is, probably unknowingly, saying that he does not want to be alone. None of us do! We are a social species we evolved that necessity. When we were evolving and living in the wild we did not have the physical ability to defend for ourselves we are very vulnerable. Look at yourself in the mirror sometime you don't have any killer claws, no extremely sharp teeth and for our size we are extremely weak.

So what does all this have to do with fashion? Well if in the wild everyone was moving out to a new location to look for food you would probably follow because everyone else was going not knowing that you are really going to use them as a form of protection. So the extension to fashion is that since everyone else is doing it we don't want to be left out from what the masses are doing in order to allow for "protection" of ourselves, after all we wouldn't want to be "eaten".

So next time someone tells you that each person is an individual think long and hard. Do you think the way you think because it just popped in there or did what people say/teach you cause you to think the way you did. All of our experiences change the way we think and our actions. And every person is effected by everyone they meet whether it is for good or for bad.

Please feel free to rip me a new one for my blindless conjecture, yes I have no supporting evidence and normally I am big on this but I will admit that I am just making conjecture here, or you can agree with me. I welcome all.

Michael Shermer's What I Believe

Michael Shermer the editor of Skeptic magazine, and eSkeptic online magazine, something I recomend that everyone subscribe to (its free), put this out yesterday. It is a good read and while I do not agree with everything he says I agree with enough to send it on. Enjoy

http://skepticblog.org/2009/09/08/science-and-the-power-of-humanity/