There are many things about the Olympics that are deeply dodgy, among them the composition and actions of its governing committee, but interesting to note that just 16 of the 115 IOC members are female.
It is to be applauded that the ratio of female athletes in Beijing is likely to reach 45%, but there’s still a lot of bias in the sports open to them, and it feels like the IOC has been dragged kicking and screaming to this point.
Definitely going on the summer reading list is Social democracy and the making of Europe’s twentieth century, which looks to be that rare thing, a piece about (relatively) contemporary history offering original thought and original thesis, as reviewed in the TLS:
….the social democratic era is over. It corresponded, just as liberalism had done, to a particular phase of European history. Like its mortal enemy, Fascism, it rested on the primacy of the nation state. It finds it difficult to survive the advent of globalization and the EU. That, perhaps, is why Norway has not joined the EU, why Sweden remains a distinctly sceptical member, and why Gordon Brown is sceptical about the euro. For social democrats fear, and rightly fear, that the European Union deprives member states of the policy instruments which they need to construct a social-democratic society.
“In 1914 it was estimated that 100,000 working class women took abortifacients every year, and by just before the Second World War a government investigation estimated the number of illegal abortions performed each year between 44,000 and 60,000. If self- induced miscarriages are added to that figure, the total could have been between 110,000 and 150,000 a year – comparable with figures today but in a much smaller population…. the government’s own survey …estimated that at least 40 percent of all miscarriages in the 1930s were in fact a result of induced abortions…. [a survey just before the Second World War found] that between 16 and 20 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion.” (p. 31)
“…in 1938-39 nearly a third of all women conceived their first child before marriage, a figure that rose to to 42 percent of under 20s” getting married. (p. 32)
So how did this happen?
“The most common form of sexual intercourse pre-war was … the ‘knee-trembler’ – sexual intercourse standing up, often outdoors, which was ‘fast, furtive, and rarely fulfilling for young women’.” (p.28)
From Material girls: Women, men and work Lindsey German, bookmarks, 2007.
One more sexual stereotype shot down by a study in Science:
…both men and women use around 16,000 words a day, according to the study by Dr Matthias Mehl from The University of Arizona and reported today…
However, there are still huge differences between individuals.
Among the three most talkative males in the study, one used 47,000 words a day while the least talkative spoke only 500.
The idea that women use more words a day arose in the book The Female Brain, which was published last year.
“These findings have been reported widely by national media and have entered the cultural mainstream,†said Prof James Pennebaker from the University of Texas, Austin, another of those who worked on the study.
“Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended period of time.†“
An update on the case of Janipher Maseko, the 18-year-old nursing mother of two who was grossly mistreated by immigration officials – a case that I blogged about on Comment is Free.
Her long-term situation is still desperate, but she is now for the short term at least out of detention and being reasonably treated.
This story is very powerful evidence for the need for self-defence classes in schools for all girls (in fact why not for all pupils?)
The writer was attacked by a would-be rapist, armed with a box-cutter, but managed to fight him off and escape, which she put down to the self-defence classes she had done years earlier – not so much any particular trick or technique, but because they had her rehearse what she would do if attacked, think about fighting back, which gave her the mental toolkit to cope with the situation.
So many women (and some men) have never been involved in a physical struggle, that when the first time it happens it is in an unexpected situation of social terror they don’t cope, and frequently they “freeze” and are unable to fight back.
Surely this is an essential coping skill that schools should teach.
About