I can see myself spending a lot of time in the next year or so debating issues of sex and porn, so I’ve been looking around (with the help of the Women’s Studies email list) for a guide to the latest debate.
Which led to my being pointed to this excellent – and recently updated – article by Laurie Shrage, Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
More generally that looks to be an excellent resource, and free online – well done!
At last, a sensible piece on the race/IQ debate in the New York Times – yes there is a difference, but it is overwhelming down to environment – and that’s been shown by very solid studies.
Or to put it another way, a view that I’ve held for a long time: all IQ tests really test is how well you do IQ tests – and if you’ve grown up in an environment that thinks broadly the same way as the people who drew up the test, you’ll do rather better than people who didn’t. If the tests were set by Kalahari bushmen, we’d all do rather badly, and be put in the bottom class.
I was reading a piece about Uganda, one of the “success stories” of Africa, which is curently battling (although not all in the same place) outbreaks of ebola, yellow fewer, cholera, meningitis and bubonic plague. Bad enough, and then I read the explanation of why it was chiefly women who were suffering from the last disease:
Dr Otaala attributed the incessant occurrence of plague in Nebbi along the frontier line with the DR Congo, to the primitive culture of the indigenous people “where men sleep on beds while women sleep on the floor.”
“The people mainly affected are women because in that district (Nebbi), women only come up on the bed (for sex),” Dr Otaala said, at the Media Centre in Kampala.
“The flea (that causes plague) can only jump up to six inches (high) and (that means) if everybody was sleeping on a bed, there would be no plague in this country,” Dr Zaramba.
Turning party political for a moment, news from my inbox has raised my blood pressure: The Liberal Democrat councillors in Lancaster have fully supported a new bypass (the Heysham M6 Link Road) – as did the Tories and Labour. The official word is that it will create an additional 24,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum.
How the Libdems manage to claim to be “green” without the word sticking in their throat is often beyond me – this is entirely typical of the behaviour of their councillors up and down the country.
The prevalence of female genital mutilation in Kenya has fallen from 50 per cent in 1999 to 34 per cent now. (What this figure actually refers to isn’t entirely clear – presumably girls emerging from the danger period.)
And showing that it is possible to almost stop the mutilation entirely, in Cameroon, the rate has fallen from 20 per cent to 1 per cent.
And in Nigeria, Kano state which adopted shariah and threatened to stone women for adultery (there were a couple of highly publicised cases) has toned down the approach, the New York Times reports, with the once Iranian-style religious police being reduced to directing traffic and guiding at football stadiums. Amina Lawal, one of the women threatened with stoning, is now a local political activist.
Pictures from a complete set to be found on Flickr. (Just click on one of these pics to find more.)
This protest was held on Saturday, with more than 100 people attending despite bitterly cold weather. The group is campaigning for the 3 acres of land behind the British Library to be kept by the government and used for council housing and community facilities, rather than be sold off. I’ve written before, and will again soon on another forum….
Media or any other use of these pictures is welcome with appropriate credit.
(A young participant showing what he’d like the land used for.)
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