The man who won't rest until the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is cleaned up has successfully tested his system for doing so.
““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.
Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.
Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.
The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.
GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.
It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…
Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21
If it’s in international waters they can’t do anything about it. And I’m pretty sure the federal government decides what can and can’t go on off our coasts too, not local or state.
Slat has been working on this since he was literally a child. I remember the first posts, articles, and I think there was even a fundraising campaign at one point.
^^^ me too!! I remember the first news yeaaars ago that some kid had thought up a brilliantly simple method of cleaning up the oceans, and even that first prototype was amazingly efficient in solving a problem that the grownup world seemed to have given up on. It was so simple I couldn’t believe no scientist or engineer had thought of it before.
And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!
i just found something incredible today while browsing retractionwatch. you know that study that liberals tout regarding 'legalising prostitution decreased rape, and criminalising it increases rape'? well-
After reading an economics paper that claimed to document an increase in the rate of rape in European countries following the passage of pro
After reading an economics paper that claimed to document an increase in the rate of rape in European countries following the passage of prostitution bans, a data scientist had questions.
The scientist, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent a detailed email to an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, which had published the paper last November, outlining concerns about the data and methods the authors used.
Among them: the historical rates of rape recorded in the paper did not match the values in the official sources the authors said they used. In other cases, data that were available from the official sources were missing in the paper, the researchers didn’t incorporate all the data they had collected into their model, and a variable was coded inconsistently, the data scientist wrote. (We’ve made the full critique available here.)
Given the consequences the conclusions of the article could have for people in the sex industry, the data scientist wrote, “I hope that someone takes this very seriously and looks into it the [sic] validity of the analysis and the data they used.”
In response, Sam Peltzman, an editor of the journal and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, instructed the data scientist to contact the authors of the article:
The email raises serious questions but without any specific request. Your questions can better be answered by the authors than editors who, as you must know, cannot give each submission the kind of careful attention reflected in your email. Accordingly, we ask that you contact the authors directly if you have not already done so.
If you mean the email as a prologue to a critique, I am happy to discuss our relevant policies or any other question about our editorial process.
The data scientist wrote back with a specific request:
I have just informed you, the editor, that it appears that the authors made an error in at least one of their models that resulted in a substantive difference in the conclusions of the article you edited … I am requesting you investigate if these models are correct and if so, at very least issue a correction. [emphasis original]
In response, Peltzman reiterated his refusal to investigate:
I can only repeat what was in my last letter. You should take this up with the authors first. The editors cannot become involved unless your conversation with the authors fails to resolve the issues and a comment is received through the usual submission process.
The University of Chicago Press, which publishes the Journal of Law and Economics, states on its publication ethics page that
When notified of possible errors or corrections, the editor(s) of the journal will review and resolve them in consultation with the Press and according to the Press’s best practices.
We asked Peltzman why he refused to investigate the concerns the data scientist had raised. He told us:
The JLE does not have the resources to investigate concerns about data procedure used by authors.
We select referees knowledgeable about the topic of any submission. Occasionally a referee might comment on some detail of data used by authors. more often the referee and editors have to take data details at face value and focus their efforts on evaluating empirical results and analysis. While I can only speak for the JLE it is my impression that these procedures are common among economics journals that publish empirical articles.
Peltzman also explained that the journal’s standard procedure for considering critiques of published articles, “designed to avoid misunderstanding and excessive burden on editors’ and referees’ time,” starts with the critic contacting the authors directly.
If the authors don’t respond, or if their response is unsatisfactory, the critic could then submit a comment to the journal along with their correspondence with the authors, which the editors would handle as any other submission.
“Editors obviously cannot be expected to look at raw data for every paper they review,” the data scientist acknowledged, “but when concerns are brought directly to them it is their responsibility to take them seriously. If readers can’t trust that editors will address serious concerns appropriately, it will undermine their faith in the scientific process.”
We contacted the authors of the paper, Huasheng Gao and Vanya Stefanova Petrova of Fudan University’s Fanhai International School of Finance in Shanghai, and shared the data scientist’s critique. They responded with an 11-page PDF, available here, standing by their work.
About the differences between the data and their paper and the official sources, they said:
the data we have used in the paper were the most up-to-date data available at the time we started the empirical work in 2018 … Eurostat is constantly revising its data. It is possible that the data contained in its current version are different from the historical version
The data scientist was unimpressed, and noted that the authors had not responded to a key aspect of the critique:
Even if the authors believe it was a reasonable strategy to only assess two years post policy change, the relative year variable for year 2— the year in which they identified a large causal increase in rape in the criminalized prostitution countries and a reduction in the prostitution decriminalized countries — was coded incorrectly (or differently for some reason). When the coding is consistent with their original coding scheme, a reduction in rape is seen in the criminalized prostitution group. I’m not sure why they didn’t address this in their response.
The authors also did not directly respond to the data scientist’s concern that if they had incorporated every year of data they had on rape rates into their model, instead of only the two years following a change in prostitution laws, they would not have gotten the same results, the scientist said.
To check whether data values had indeed changed since the authors started their work, the scientist went to the website of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, where the survey data the authors used is available for download, and found that no substantive changes had been made.
The scientist told us:
If they did something wrong or made a mistake they should just take accountability and retract the article.
let me simplify and repeat the core of this to you:
the scientists not only missed out data points, but if the scope of the study changes from the first two years post law change (whether criminalisation or decriminalisation) to all years of rape records before and after we have, THE RESULTS REVERSE AND THE CRIMINALISED SIDE HAS DECREASED RATE OF RAPE COMPARED TO SWITCHING TO DECRIMINALISED.
not to mention the fallacious belief that being forced to have sex or starve/be homeless, with an abusive pimp taking most of your money, is somehow not rape.
this whole study is near worthless. the only worth is having access to the data points they used, so we can see actual results.
what's doubly crafty, is that in their two groups, 'crim vs decrim', the 'crim' group is actually nordic/swedish model countries. because those are the countries that make up the majority of semi recent law changes in the direction of criminalisation. they were trying to claim that the nordic model increases rape.
the sickest deception in it was their hiding of the fact that in multiple countries that implemented the nordic model, soon around that time they passed laws that expanded the definition of rape....and so the authors tried to link those reports to 'be because of criminalising sex buyers' rather than more reports or prosecutions of rape due to new rape laws. you had the criminalisation of marital rape, non violent coercion, statutory rape laws, drink and drug rape laws, etc. and these evil people lied in a mass shared study that actually, more women were getting raped because men were no longer allowed to legally rape prostituted women.
the full criticsm and reasoning from the data scientist disputing them is available via link in the above post, i highly recommend reading it.
i'm actually going to post the most important parts (which ended up being most of it) of the refutation emails, because i think they're so important.
"I was able to download the supplementary data, which is kindly available on the journal website, and its seems that there are some discrepancies in the official statistics from Eurostat (where they claim the obtain the data) and from the rape rates in their dataset"
"It appears that the data for Sweden in 1998, 1999 and 2000 were missing from the United Nations Surveys of Crime Trends (UN-CTS) on the UNODC website (where they claimed to have gotten historical data). Sweden implemented the Nordic Model in 1999. Although
the UN-CTS or Eurostat did not have this data, the official Swedish open data website did have it"
"The Gao & Petrova dataset made it appear as though Sweden had a
78.6% increase in documented forcible rape the year of the ban of the purchase of sex, which was a sustained effect, while in reality there was only a small increase which immediately dropped the next year. The rape rate in Sweden in fact didn’t increase over 78.6% until 2005 — 6 years after the ban on the purchase of sex — which coincided with an expansion to the legal definition of rape"
"Legislative changes which expanded rape definitions occurred often on the same year as regulatory changes of prostitution, or within several years. In multiple reports, we see that these expansions of the definition of rape in Sweden has been strongly associated with
an increase in documented rape offenses. The expansion in 1992-1993 (to redefine many previously considered “sexual assaults” as rape) was reportedly associated with a 25% increase in documented offenses (Von Hofer, H., 2010). The expansion of the legal definition of rape to mean “sex without consent” in 2018 was associated with a 75% increase in documented rape offenses, which The National Council on Crime Prevention (Bra) claims was was directly responsible for this increase."
"We can see for Spain however, a country which initiated prostitution legalization 1995, the data on the UNODC (United Nation office of Drugs and Crimes) website the rape rate on the years surrounding the legalization of prostitution per 100,000 are 3.08 in 1993, 3.09 in
1994, missing in years 1995 - 1997, 15.07 in 1998 and 14.57 in 1999, 13.99 in 2000 and then missing the next two years. In the Gao and Petrova dataset that was available on the journal website, the column “raperate” is missing these years and the outcome variable,
which in their files they claim is called “raperape_2” contains the value 3.8 rather than 14.5 and 4.3 rather than 13.99 that is on the UNODC website"
"Furthermore, if the rate of rape is available in the official United Nations statistics, why would they be omitting it and later imputing it with lower numbers in the legalized group and imputing it with higher numbers in the criminalized group — then claiming that they passively identified a causal relationship between prostitution criminalization and rape?"
"In addition to data being different in some locations from official sources, it was sometimes completely missing — when the data was in fact available online in the data sources where the researchers claimed to obtain it. For instance, the United Kingdom (a control country) rape rate outcome data is completely omitted from the years 2000, 2002 and 2009 - 2018, which ends up being almost 50% of rape data in the United Kingdom, which was not addressed in the journal. From 2009 to 2017 the rate of rape in the United
Kingdom changes from 27.39 to 92.29 (from Eurostat, where the claimed to obtain more recent crime data). In 2018 it increased to 99.48 per 100,000. Germany (a legalized country) in the years 2016 and 2017 are completely omitted. The rate of rape there increases dramatically beginning those years."
"With the inclusion of all the relative year variables they provided in the dataset (Year_plus_1 … Year_plus_10), the coefficients for
the criminalized model would be 19, -12, -8.3, -13 for year two+, year 3+ year 4+ and year 5+ respectively. The opposite is seen in the decriminalized model, the coefficients are -2.3, 0.62, 0.30, 0.10 for the years two+, year 3+ year 4+ and year 5+ respectively." (op note: in laymans' terms, past year two, criminalisation of sex buying may be linked to statistically significant decrease in rape reports, while decriminalisation past year two may be linked to a statistically insignificant increase in rape reports, largely staying the same pre and post decrim).
"They included Ireland and France as Nordic Model countries throughout the entire analysis despite the fact that they only implemented their ban on purchasing sex in 2016 and 2017 respectively and the fact that Ireland dramatically expanded the legal definition of rape that same year. While they briefly mention that their analysis ends in 2017, they don't explain why. This means there were no post observational periods for Ireland at all even though the claims that prostitution criminalization “causes” rape has been
generalized to these countries..."
"The observed data clearly shows all countries other than those in Eastern European some in Southern European increasing dramaticlly in the documented rape rate. The countries with large commercial sex industries (Germany, Netherlands) have been aggregated with a large number of Southern and Eastern European countries and placed into the “decriminalized" group while the Nordic Model group consists only of Northern European and Western European countries. The criminalized group included the Nordic Model countries plus Croatia. The observed data demonstrates rape had been increasing every year prior to the intervention. By aggregating the Eastern and Southern European countries with other countries, it dramatically changed the trend of the data and was quite misleading. From self-reported survey data in the EU, (a survey which the authors know about as they themselves briefly cite it) the self-reported rate of rape in Sweden, the Netherlands, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc., are exactly the same, despite the fact that Sweden has higher documented rape offenses. I assume that this is due to the disparities in rape disclosures due to gender equality and social norms and the expansive rape legislation in countries which have banned the purchase of sex, as this desire for gender equality is the
reason they banned the purchase of sex in the first place."
A. They're not gonna tip you, periodt. So already the $10mil is looking better.
B. They're not gonna talk to you, so any "business advice" you thought was gonna be worth more than $10mil, that's null and void, aint happening.
C. Here's the real secret of their "success"; they're all bad people. That's literally it. They're willing to lie, steal, cheat, bully, oppress, rape, etc to get what they want, and their appetites are never sated, so they never stop lying, cheating, etc. You don't get that kind of money through hard honest work. If you're willing to be a big enough piece of shit, you could easily be one of these guys.
So yeah, if someone's offering that choice, get it in writing and stay the hell away from these creeps.
No one is systematically tracking how many young people regret transition or how many are helped by it.
By: SEGM
Published: Jun 11, 2023
A new peer-reviewed article, “Transition Regret and Detransition: Meaning and Uncertainties,” published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, reviews clinical and research issues related to transition regret and detransition. The article emphasizes that “although recent data have shed light on a complex range of experiences that lead people to detransition, research remains very much in its infancy,” and there is currently “no guidance on best practices for clinicians involved in their care.”
The author, Dr. Jorgensen, notes that the term “detransition” can hold a wide array of possible meanings for transgender-identifying people, detransitioners, and researchers, leading to inconsistencies in its usage. Although regret and detransition overlap in many people, not everyone who regrets their transition takes steps to detransition and conversely, not all of those who detransition regret their transition. Proponents of the “gender-affirming care” model typically focus on the latter group who are driven to detransition by external forces such as discrimination, lack of support from family and friends, or difficulty accessing health care. Euphemisms such as “gender-identity journey” and “dynamic desires for gender-affirming medical interventions” have been used to describe this process.
But the author highlights studies and personal testimonies of detransitioners who do deeply regret their transition, mourn the physical changes made to their bodies, and feel betrayed by the clinicians and medical institutions that offered hormones and surgery as antidotes to their gender confusion and distress. For this group of young people, internal factors such as “worsening mental health or the realization that gender dysphoria was a maladaptive response to trauma, misogyny, internalized homophobia, or pressure from social media and online communities,” were the primary drivers of their decision to detransition.
As the author highlights, a consistent theme in studies and personal testimonies of detransitioners is that there are major gaps in the quality and accessibility of medical and mental healthcare: “Many detransitioners reported not feeling properly informed about health implications of treatments before undergoing them (Gribble et al., 2023; Littman, 2021; Pullen Sansfaçon et al., 2023; Vandenbussche, 2022). Likewise, many felt that they did not receive sufficient exploration of preexisting psychological and emotional problems and continued to struggle post-transition when they realized gender transition was not a panacea (Littman, 2021; Pullen Sansfaçon et al., 2023; Respaut et al., 2022; Sanders et al., 2023; Vandenbussche, 2022). Despite ongoing medical needs, most patients did not maintain contact with their gender clinic during their detransition.” Detransitioners report wanting more information about how to safely stop hormonal therapies and surgical reversal or restorative options, but few clinicians are sufficiently knowledgeable about these issues to manage their care.
The author notes that our ability to predict who will be helped by transition-related medical interventions and who will be harmed by them is limited and we currently have no idea how many of the young people transitioning today will eventually come to regret their decision: “no one is systematically tracking how many young people regret transition or, for that matter, how many are helped by it.” However, the increasing number of detransitioners publicly sharing their experiences suggest that historical studies citing low rates of regret are no longer applicable. Moreover, these studies suffered serious methodological flaws that would tend to underestimate the true rates of regret including high rates of attrition and narrow definitions of regret.
More recent studies that have included the current case mix of predominantly adolescent-onset gender dysphoria suggest that up to 30% of those who undergo medical transition may discontinue it within only a few years (Roberts et al., 2022). It is likely that a number of them will experience significant regret over lost opportunities and permanent physical changes.
So how did we get here?
The author suggests that less restrictive eligibility criteria for accessing transition-related medical interventions under the gender-affirmation and informed consent models, coupled with the rapid rise of adolescents and young adults presenting to gender clinics, many of whom suffer from complex mental health problems and neurodiversity, has important implications for the incidence of transition regret and detransition. Under these models of care, standard processes of differential diagnosis and clinical assessment are seen as “burdensome, intrusive, and impinging on patient autonomy.” Moreover, the author points out that hormonal therapies and surgery are now conceptualized as a “means of realizing fundamental aspects of personal identity or ‘embodiment goals,’ in contrast to conventional medical care, which is pursued with the objective of treating an underlying illness or injury to restore health and functioning.”
Furthermore, adolescents and young adults might not be mature enough to appreciate the long-term consequences of their decisions about the irreversible medical interventions used to achieve “embodiment goals,” and/or their capacity to give informed consent may be limited by comorbid mental health problems or neurodevelopmental challenges. Additionally, “feelings of profound grief about lost opportunities and negative repercussions of transition might not be fully captured by framing the emotional experience in terms of regret” because “regret is an emotion that is unique in its relation to personal agency (Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2007), but the exercise of personal agency in the transition process might have been limited for people who began transition as minors, whose decision-making capacity was compromised by mental illness, or who were not fully informed of known and potential adverse health implications.”
The author offers some suggestions for how detransition may be prevented and inappropriate transitions avoided:
Improving the process of informed consent.
Prioritizing treatment of co-occurring social, developmental and psychological problems.
Using precise language about medical interventions.
Helping young people expand their understanding of what it means to be a man or woman.
Being transparent about the quality of evidence supporting medical interventions and the uncertainty about long-term harms.
The author ends by emphasizing that when clinical cases are complicated by a lack of knowledge about the natural trajectory of the condition and a paucity of evidence supporting treatment options, “minimizing iatrogenic harm requires application of cautious, thoughtful clinical judgement, meticulous examination of the data that are available, as well as a willingness to change practice in the face of new evidence.”
Jorgensen calls on the gender medicine community to “commit to conducting robust research, challenging fundamental assumptions, scrutinizing their practice patterns, and embracing debate.”
--
Read more about the phenomenon of detransition:
Boyd I, Hackett T, Bewley S. Care of Transgender Patients: A General Practice Quality Improvement Approach. Healthcare. 2022; 10(1):121. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10010121
D’Angelo, R. (2020). The man I am trying to be is not me. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 101(5), 951–970. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2020.1810049
Entwistle, K. (2020). Debate: Reality check – Detransitioner’s testimonies require us to rethink gender dysphoria. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, camh.12380. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12380
Expósito-Campos, P. (2021). A Typology of Gender Detransition and Its Implications for Healthcare Providers. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0092623X.2020.1869126
Hall, R., Mitchell, L., & Sachdeva, J. (2021). Access to care and frequency of detransition among a cohort discharged by a UK national adult gender identity clinic: Retrospective case-note review. BJPsych Open, 7(6), e184. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjo.2021.1022
Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02163-w
Marchiano, L. (2021). Gender detransition: A case study. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 66(4), 813–832. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12711
Roberts, C. M., Klein, D. A., Adirim, T. A., Schvey, N. A., & Hisle-Gorman, E. (2022). Continuation of Gender-affirming Hormones Among Transgender Adolescents and Adults. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 107(9), e3937–e3943. https://doi.org/10.1210/clinem/dgac251
Vandenbussche, E. (2021). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality, 20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2021.1919479
==
Genderists often say things like "detransition/regret is rare" and "detransition is only due to discrimination." These run in the opposite direction to genderist assertions, as this means "detransition/regret due to discrimination is rare."
Most of the numbers they cite are either poorly sourced as mentioned above, or worse, from the days of "watchful waiting," where transition only came at the end of a comprehensive care process; a completely different model.
Not only is it dishonest, given they regard watchful waiting, or anything else as "harmful" and "gatekeeping," but the low regret rate actually supports that more cautious, thoughtful process.
And besides, claiming to know the success rate under the "affirming"/"informed consent" models is itself dishonest too. Detransitioners are not going to rush back to the same doctors who facilitated their mistake. Especially in a climate where they'll be blamed or vilified.
anti-pronoun pins I designed with help from the ladies in the Totally Rad Lesbians discord server ... one day when I can afford one of those badge press machines I’m going to have a bangin’ badge shop
(those last two I’ll name The Emma and The Genevieve)
Even the most misogynist men don’t want a world without women. Red pill guys don’t have fantasies about a literally woman-free world - in their fantasy worlds, we’re sex slaves and servants, we have no rights and no power - but we do still exist.
“Misandrist” women fantasize about a peaceful, safe world with no men. Completely normal and apolitical women do, too - I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t, at least once, made an offhand joke about how there would be no war without men or something.
Men want us and need us, even when they hate us, but women know that we don’t need men at all.
I made a 3d editorial inspired by SCUM manifesto :) it was for an open call of an indie magazine and the topic was a mistake. So naturally I first thought of that quote about "biological mistakes". I was thinking a lot about these days how there's NO misandrist art or fashion so I decided to make some :)
I used materials that look like placenta and skin to reference this biological aspect.
I was also interested in exploring violence and womb envy. Color choices are very important in this work :pink and blue for gender id, deep blue for motherhood. The three dresses I made here are a nuclear explosion dress I designed like... three years ago in college, my vulva dress in a new version and this dress inspired by prehistoric venus statues to symbolize womb envy. I also used 3d models of skulls and guns.
The explosion dress has a slightly phallic shape to symbolize male violence.
The blue picture is about the male tradition of womb envy. The adult embryo one is a direct illustration of a "biological" mistake.
Just a dude afraid of a vulva lol #wombenvy. The ruffles are pussy lips, fur is for pubic hair, the hood is clitoral hood ofc. This is my favorite garment I ever designed and I'm planning to make it irl one day!
This one I call it "All the same" - garbage, a regular testicle and an extra pink sparkly feminine one :)
This is a man in a gynecology-patient position but the draped clothes cover a skull instead of a pregnant belly and a gun positioned like an erect penis to symbolize phallos as a tool of violence. I didn't show his face bc beheaded ppl are all about empowerment nowadays, right?
This is a picture of a dude with a latex garment covering his whole face and body. (>fetish). On the background I used guns and a barbed wire halo to symbolize the holiness of violence for the males. The lighting is pink and blue and he has smeared makeup on his face - I'll let you guess which movement does this reference.
I used CLO3D as my 3d software, it's a program for virtual fashion.
i'm so tired of women being expected to take the high road all the time. i'm tired of having to be the bigger person. women should be meaner. we should be blunt and unapologetic and stubborn. i'd love that for us.
“Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn’t some feminist myth; it’s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That’s right: without women’s inventions, we wouldn’t be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing or hunt with nets or haft a blade or wear clothes or grow our food or live in permanent settlements. Suck on that. Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anything—a technology, a science, an art form, a school of thought—and start digging into the background. You’ll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place. Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school. Hurdles like not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Example: look up Lise Meitner some time. When she was born in 1878 it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Once the laws finally eased up and she could go to university, she wasn’t allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasn’t allowed to use the lab on account of girl cooties. Her whole life was like this, but she still managed to discover nuclear fucking fission. Then the Nobel committee gave the prize to her junior male colleague and ignored her existence completely. Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny women’s creative contributions. That’s because patriarchy is founded on the belief that women are breeding stock and men are the only people who can think. The easiest way for men to erase women’s contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation don’t hear about it, and so they grow up thinking that no women have ever done anything. And then when women in their generation do stuff, they think ‘it’s a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.’ And so they ignore it, and it gets forgotten. And on and on and on. The New York Times article is a perfect illustration of this principle in action. Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren’t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical “women’s work”—they also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and it’s usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.”
—
Violet Socks, Patriarchy in Action: The New York Times Rewrites History (via o1sv)
Reblogging again for that paragraph because that is the part we forget the most.
Men are bad at creating and inventing, the only way they can compete with women is though keeping us oppressed so they don’t have to compete with us in the first place, or by stealing the things we create and taking credit.