Thought-provoked on masculinity, health, women MPs, wild animals, sex ed and fossils

[oursin]

Some very stimulating articles in today's Guardian:

Critique of assumptions about masculinity and fatherhood:
Dave Hill on the myths about testosterone: includes the following
Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck College, sees the buoyant profile that testosterone today holds as being of a piece with a "quasi-religious"

Comments

[lalouve]

often forcing women to maintain difficult and destructive relationships with their children's fathers.

Indeed and indeed. I am appalled every time I hear the statement 'a man who beats his wife can still be a good father' bleated by representatives of the Swedish welfare offices. If you hurt and terrorise the mother of your children, you are by definition not a good father. And don't think the children don't know what's going on.

[lamentables]

All the pheasants ever bred/ Won't repay for one man dead.

I think I may have that painted down the side of my car!

[angeyja]

And a note on not entirely forgotten, but less celebrated than she should be, fossil-hunter Mary Anning..

Thank you.. new for me.

[oursin]

I think she got half-a-sentence in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but otherwise, yet another forgotten foremother.

[nja]

She was on "Blue Peter" all the time during the seventies - maybe an exaggeration, but I definitely saw their telling of her story several times when I was a boy. They used to occasionally have a little segment telling the life of someone famous, with illustrations (this being before computer animation). It's an inspiring story for children, an amateur with no special training goes out and finds things which turn out to be scientifically important. Children love dinosaurs too. They used to "do" Florence Nightingale very frequently too, and Grace Darling.

[oursin]

Lying on a sofa for 40 years and tyrannising people: boy, Florence really is a great role model, isn't she? I was terrified to see this: Florence Nightingale remastered, as I thought they might be cloning her from DNA samples (given the recent hoohah about bring back the traditional matron to NHS hospitals); fortunately it is only a recording of her voice. (I am not a Nightingale fan: she did good work, but like Marie Stopes the following century, had a distinct tendency to write other people and their contributions out of the story.)

[oursin]

Well, the article mentions the kinds of material they use in various Scottish schools, and only in the mind of a cardinal could these be interpreted as 'pornographic' (I think he's confusing information with intention to arouse).

[noveldevice]

I just don't see how you can educate children about sex without telling them, er, about sex.

Well, according to the Bush administration, you can just tell them not to have it.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

[noveldevice]

Despite having been raised on a farm with livestock, I am a proponent of the re-introduction of large predators. Not because I am careless of human life, but because you cannot remove the predators and expect the prey populations to remain small and healthy. Deer in my part of the country have two effective predators right now: human hunters, who remove individuals from the population in exactly the wrong way, and disease and starvation, which remove individuals from the population indiscrimately and cause more problems (in terms of carcasses lying around etc) than they solve. Unless we want to effect large-scale slaughter and burning the corpses of native prey populations, we really need those top predators. Also, an interesting note: in all the years that we had livestock, in an area populated by foxes and coyotes, we lost large stock to snakebite and small stock to blacksnakes, opossums, skunks, and escaped housedogs (not feral dogs, but pets which people let run at night), but we never lost any animals to foxes or coyotes

[oursin]

An issue in the UK is space, as in, not a lot of rolling wide-open. This is one reason why there are no longer any large native predator animals.