Oh, and for good measure:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/our-gun-culture/

I remember seeing that last Mattel ad in my comic books as a kid.

For some good news on this front, the head coach of the Syracuse University basketball team used the press conference on his 900th game win as their leader to speak out against the American gun culture:

http://msn.foxsports.com/collegebasketball/story/syracuse-jim-boeheim-turned-his-night-over-to-a-cause-900th-win-121812

Oh my, Fox Sports News calls him courageous! I can just imagine the flack he has gotten in some quarters, though. Hope they let him keep his man card. :^S

Waldman seems to have a low intrinsic opinion about men’s ability to exert self-control. Men don’t do this because they must; they do it because they can and feel entitled to it. Which explains why in fact most of these massacres are committed by skinny, pasty kids who stare at computer screens.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/20/opinion/waldman-guns-manhood/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Of course there will always be holdouts, but perhaps the rest of us can move on now into the 21st Century. Just too bad that it always seems to be an extreme (read violent, deadly) event to wake humans up.

I can’t recall exactly when I started consciously noticing the way girls tended to be relegated to the pastel ghetto, but it was definitely sometime in early grade school. The thing that puzzled/annoyed me the most was the way expressing any sort of preference for the non-”pinkified” version of something (toy, clothing, etc.) was interpreted as “troublemaking”. I don’t think a lot of adults-in-charge-of-children even realize the degree to which they tend to police kids’ gender performances.

In my case there was definitely no *intentional* performance of anything going on…I liked what I liked, and disliked what I disliked, and it just so happened that for whatever reason I was drawn to dark/solid/primary colors (not pink frills!) and spaceship toys/remote-control cars/Lego (not baby dolls!). And yet from an early age, people took my preferences as being some sort of “statement” or deliberate attempt to be “contrary”. I was far from socially aware enough to know what “making a statement” even meant at those age(s) but the whole experience was definitely one of those that managed to open my eyes to the fact that grownups weren’t always mad at you for reasons that actually made sense.

The idea that the girl is simply imitating her mother and that they are effectively training her to be like that never seems to settle into their skulls. I wish I knew an effective way to erode this lifelong belief that this is just the way life and people are.

That is very true. I don’t know whether it’s because it is expected that women will parent and therefore spend less time perfecting their career, or whether hatred of women has forced them into parenthood and away from their career, thereby creating the expectation. But it certainly happens.

I work in a STEM field and am happy there. Surprised there aren’t more female developers about.

The article makes a good point that most sexism is unconscious. But that does not make it any less hurtful if discovered, I imagine.