Tag Archives: junk science

Tuesday Linksday

Debbie says:

The “it’s all about me and my feelings” club has a new self-elected president, Jen Caron:

A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair. Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.

Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.

Of course, we don’t know how the black woman felt. Jen Caron doesn’t know how the black woman felt. She made an awful lot of assumptions based on an amazingly small amount of information.

I thought about how that must feel: to be a heavyset black woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her body. What could I do to help her? If I were her, I thought, I would want as little attention to be drawn to my despair as possible—I would not want anyone to look at me or notice me. And so I tried to very deliberately avoid looking in her direction each time I was in downward dog, but I could feel her hostility just the same. Trying to ignore it only made it worse.

The xojane column is called “It happened to me,” so I guess it happened to Jen Caron. Personally, I’d rather know what happened to the nameless black woman. As Hamilton Nolan says, writing about Caron’s essay on Gawker,

JEN CARON: Hey there. Can you articulate your experience to me?

NEW YOGA STUDENT: Who are you?

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Neither Laurie nor I knew about this particular 19th century photography fad, in which the person’s head and body are photographed separately, but in the same photograph. A contemporary brochure at the link calls it “ladies and gentlemen with their heads floating in the air or in their laps.”

This is a side trail in a long and complex art tradition of headless portraits and photographs, and I also appreciate seeing how seriously photo-manipulation proceeded Photoshop by well over a century.

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Jenna Wortham has an interesting take on one corner of available contemporary technology which she finds useful.

Period-tracking apps are exactly what they sound like — simple menstrual calendars that help you keep track of monthly cycles as well as symptoms like mood fluctuations or headaches. The market is flooded with them — iPeriod, PTracker, Clue, Period Diary — and nearly every woman I know uses one.

They are the rare corner of the trendy quantitative self and health movement that has resonated with me, largely because they provide  useful insights into my life, how I’m feeling and what’s going on with my body. As much as I’ve enjoyed apps and wearables that give me information on the number of steps I’ve taken in a week, the number of calories I’ve magically managed to burn or how much sleep I’ve gotten, I often question the accuracy of the data and struggle with figuring out how to use that information to reshape my daily behavior and habits. But nothing has been as exciting or revealing as tracking my menstrual cycle.

I’m too old (and too app-ignorant) to be aware of this particular technology, and I think it’s fascinating. According to Wortham, these are not about (or not only about) fertility tracking, but are helping a new generation of women recognize and respond to menstrual cycle changes.

Obviously, this is not going to appeal to–or work for–every woman. Not every woman has periods. Not every woman has a smart phone. Not every woman who has periods and a smart phone cares. However, Wortham convinced me that it’s good for some women, and that’s good enough for me.

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Technology in women’s lives can be useful, or it can be appalling. Rob Bricken at io9 is suitably appalled:

Japanese lingerie maker Ravijour has developed a bra whose clasp will only open when its wearer is experiencing true love.

How does it do this, you ask? Through a built-in heart rate monitor and a special phone app (also possibly magic and/or bullshit). In case you’re worried about your phone wirelessly unhooking your bra every time you go for a jog, don’t you worry…

I mean, sure, even if the bra was smart enough to distinguish between your heart rate rising due to romantic versus physical causes, I guess you’d run the risk of the bra flying open during dinner if you happened to be eating with your true love, and I have no idea how a woman could take the bra off without the help of their soulmate, but isn’t that a small price to pay to keep your breasts locked away from those who might not appreciate them fully?

I have nothing else to say.

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Finally, technology can take us so far away from useful information that it would be ludicrous, if people didn’t seem to take it seriously:

What could possibly be wrong with this study design?

The hypothesis here was that making people feel shorter than their normal height would increase feelings of paranoia.

To test this, the researchers—bless them—built a virtual reality version of the London underground station, and a train that travels between stations. Sixty women who had paranoid thoughts within the previous month experienced this virtual world (differences have been shown in how gender affects height perception, so the researchers thought they’d better stick to one gender this time). They each went through the virtual landscape twice, and the researchers altered some people’s heights the second time to make them about 10 inches shorter. After each run through, participants completed measures of social comparison and paranoia.

So we have: a virtual reality locale, a quite small pool of research subjects who are known to have paranoid ideation, a limitation to one gender because “differences have been shown in how gender affects height perception,” and (apparently) no control group. And The Atlantic, a reasonably reliable magazine, is reporting this study as if it demonstrated anything?

I suspect that feeling smaller does make (many? most?) people feel more nervous. But I could not be less interested in how an untested virtual reality system affects a deeply skewed small group under unexamined conditions. When, when, are we going to get journalism that challenges this kind of pseudo-science?

Aside from my most usual sources: Feministe, Feministing, io9, and Shakesville, Lynn Kendall brought us much amusement with the small/paranoid link, and I would never have found the headless portraits link if Charles Pierce hadn’t pointed out Ann Althouse’s tribute to Pete Seeger (Althouse blogged the headless portraits link on the same day).

Linksday Friday

Links got delayed twice this week, but here they are!

Kathleen Turner is 60, and has something to say about aging.

“I don’t look like I did 30 years ago. Get over it!”

“You have to get to that place as a woman where you know your worth isn’t dependent on [looks].”

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I don’t know about you, but if this trend gets too prevalent, I’m going to have to stop eating in restaurants.

“We find that customers, in the aggregate, made most of the item substitutions that were encouraged by the messages, such as substituting ham for sausage in a breakfast sandwich, or substituting frozen yogurt for ice cream, though effects on overall calories and fat consumed were small,” reads the report, which does recognize two significant limits to receipt-based nutrition information — “it relies on consumer memory and can only affect consumption on future restaurant visits.”

That said, during the two years during which dozens of Burgerville restaurants were successfully convincing customers to substitute side salads for fries, or grilled chicken for fried chicken, these changes ultimately had little effect on the calories or fat consumed.

Maybe people are just eating what they want when they are eating out? For shame!

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Oxytocin has been in the news over the last two weeks. First, an idiotic study claimed that it “makes men almost monogamous.”  What made the study idiotic? Give 20 young men (all of whom probably go to the same college)  oxytocin and 20 a placebo. Great sample size. Then show them pictures of their girlfriends (they all described themselves as “passionately in love with their partners”). On oxytocin, the pleasure centers of their brains lit up more when they saw their girlfriends’ pictures. Without oxytocin, pictures of other young women (selected by independent observers to be equally attractive!) were just as exciting. Well, I guess now we know! Or at least now somebody has doctoral research.

But wait! The 8-year-old oxytocin study that everyone uses to show how important the drug is (this one somehow showed that it makes us more trusting) can’t be replicated. (That one had a sample size of 24 young women.) Basically, replication studies are running 3 failures to replicate for every success. I’m betting the monogamy study will do as badly or worse.

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Melissa McEwen at Shakesville debunks another piece of junk science (this one anti-fat), so I don’t have to.

So there might be some correlation between weight and semen production which might be statistically significant and which might affect male fertility in an as-yet unquantified way. Do you think this is prematurely being peddled as a FAT MEN ARE INFERTILE!!1! and LOSE WEIGHT TO SAVE YOUR SPERM!1!! by fat hating publications? Is water wet?

Because of course NBC headlined their article with a Scary Headless Fattie and the words “A man this heavy could be harming his sperm.” He’s harming his sperm by being fat, ya’ll! But maybe he’ll read this study and this will be the final straw to cause him to stop being fat for the sake of his sperm and then his sperm won’t be harmed anymore!

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ESSAYS WE SHOULD ALL READ ALL OF (a new Linksday feature, by me):

The meaning of disability by Wilfredo Gomez.

The experience of being disabled is perhaps one most appropriately captured by the use of a metaphor: that of the iceberg submerged in a body of water. That said, there is that which is visible and that which is invisible. However, whether our disabilities are visible or invisible, there are always specters of disability looming, the conscious and unconscious choices that situate how we understand our encounters with the disabled, the extent of those encounters, as well as the expectations that accompany them. Central to this discussion is the question of performance: what does it mean to perform disability? What is an accurate representation of said performance and is it ever consistent with the nuances of reality?

With time, access, and increased education, words like “disability” and increasingly disability studies and disability policy have come into consciousness. They have taken on new significance and have effectively changed the landscape of how I understand my intersecting identities as urban, disabled, and Latino. And while disability and disability studies is a pertinent lens that frames discourses and experience, gone is the language of being handicapped.

What does “nobody matters less than black girls” really mean? by the apparently anonymous blogger at Prison Culture:

And so it appears that for us as black people, trauma and domination have always co-existed with pleasure and celebration. It is with this historical context as backdrop that Beyonce released her “visual album” this past weekend to great fanfare and debate. The past bleeds into the present as sense memory reminds us that we were property and that our bodies were violable hypersexualized flesh. We rage and turn our anger towards our reflections sometimes. We can hardly believe that we are still here when we weren’t actually meant to survive. We have few words to convey our mountains of hurt and of pain. We can’t imagine desire or pleasure without penalty. We’ve survived and my young friend is surviving still. We don’t know how to heal our “broken, burned, and bruised places” yet but we are searching for the right path. We know that we have never been in style and that chattel slavery’s script was written on our bodies. But even then, we sought ways to resist and to seize control. We created dances, embraced fashion, depicted ourselves in photographs, created homemade birth control technologies, had illegal abortions. We did this, we’ve continued to do this understanding full well that: “Nobody matters less to our society than young black women.”

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In keeping with the Prison Culture post, December 17 was the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, as every day should be. Here’s a useful column on ways to bring awareness to the event, and to the ongoing issue. I’ll be saving it for next year.

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This story has lots of possible interpretations, but without knowing the details I generally support parents being able to be naked with their children (of any age) without it being automatically sexualized.

A Missouri mom was arrested after a Snapchat photograph of her and her 14-year-old daughter — topless in a hot tub — were circulated around multiple area high schools.

The 50-year-old mom and her daughter posed for the photo, “covering their nipples,” in an outdoor hot tub in November, according to the probable cause statement. The woman’s other daughter, a 13-year-old, took the photo on her sister’s phone.

“The issue here is the fact the daughter was 14 and the mother was clearly present and involved when the photo was taken,” said St. Charles County Prosecutor Tim Lohmar. “It certainly appeared that the picture was posed and it certainly had some sexual overtones.”

Without knowing more, I don’t necessarily believe the prosecutor’s interpretation, and I don’t think the mom should get a year in jail.

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And finally, I would never have guessed what “the Lesbian rule” is. Would you?