The Bluestocking, vol XXII: Surplus men, diseased brains and angry liberals

Good afternoon,

Did you enjoy being back at work? Certainly, my dreams of a soft landing were ruined by the Labour reshuffle. Still, it meant there was lots to talk about on Week in Westminster (link here), which I presented this week. Who knew that Wales's elections would be so interesting?

Also this week, Harvard's journalism magazine Nieman Reports published my long read on graphic images in news coverage. In the course of researching it, I saw some astonishing things (for example, there are photos of what was left of the people who jumped out of the Twin Towers when they hit the ground) and was surprised by how conservative most news organisations are about what they will publish. There's a photograph included in the piece from the MH17 crash which isn't graphic or gruesome in the conventional sense, but I haven't seen published in any UK print outlet. And yet the papers yesterday have generally used pictures, sometimes pixellated, of the man shot dead outside a French police station. So the "rules" are quite hard to establish.

Anyway, I'm off to sneeze quietly to myself for a bit. Until next week,

Helen



Europe's Man Problem

If that trend continues into 2016 or even beyond, each successive late adolescent cohort of 16- and 17-year-olds will be similarly abnormal, and over time the abnormality will become an established fact of the broader young adult population in Sweden. In China, long the most gender-imbalanced country in the world, the male-to-female ratio of approximately 117 boys for every 100 girls in this age group now comes up short of Sweden’s gender gap. China’s sex ratios are still more abnormal across other age groups; the imbalances there extend all the way down to birth sex ratios due to the country’s severe birth restrictions, while Sweden’s abnormalities do not. But young adult sex ratios are arguably the most crucial of all for social stability.

In light of the Cologne attacks, this was very much worth reading. As we deal with the refugee crisis, and with the vast migrations that climate change will surely bring, it's not enough to cross our fingers and hope it will all be OK, somehow.


Knausgaard writes like a woman

A woman physicist, for example, is masculinized by her choice of work, while a male novelist is necessarily feminized by his. As a purveyor of feeling and sentiment, his masculinity is already compromised, and if he takes up that most feminine of feminine subjects, the drudgery of staying home with the kids, he has traveled far from the Lone Ranger mythos of his sex. And yet, the stubborn fact that Knausgaard is a man, and a heterosexual one, toughens and enhances not only his author persona, but his text, which we are meant to accept as an autobiographical mirror. This is an illusion, of course. No text mirrors phenomenological reality. Nevertheless, an attractive tension is established between the rugged, handsome, masculine figure of the novelist pictured on the book’s cover and his feeling, feminine subject matter.

Just putting it out there: Liz Jones and Karl Ove Knausgaard are basically doing the same thing, over the same seemingly endless number of words. (Bonus: Knausgaard watches neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, one of the most interesting people I've ever interviewed, at work).

When liberals attack social science

This should stand as a wake-up call, as a rebuke to the smugness that sometimes infects progressive beliefs about who “respects” science more. After all, what both the Bailey and Chagnon cases have in common — alongside some of the others in Galileo’s Middle Finger — is the extent to which groups of progressive self-appointed defenders of social justice banded together to launch full-throated assaults on legitimate science, and the extent to which these attacks were abetted by left-leaning academic institutions and activists too scared to stand up to the attackers, often out of a fear of being lumped in with those being attacked, or of being accused of wobbly allyship.

Alice Dreger's book Galileo's Middle Finger was one of the most interesting things I read last year, partly because of how uncomfortable it was. There are many areas of science where the evidence we have conflicts with deeply held beliefs: for conservatives, it's global warming, sex education and evolution; for liberals, it's motivations for rape, the possibility that transgenderism might be about sexual identities as well as gender, and research into native peoples.

Quick links: Schlong equality, or how male nudity went mainstream. How stories over-ride the logical bits of our brain. Facebook is killing the media, pt 94. An unsettling Hilary Mantel short story from the LRB. Fascinating pictures of Albania's last few "sworn virgins" who lived as men. Don't trust eyewitnesses. What it's like when your wife becomes your husband. This, on how unfair it is to force non-white people to gloss over casual racism so other people don't feel uncomfortable, is worth reading.

Guest gif: Mary Berry is also surprised at how long the reshuffle lasted.

That's all, folks. Email me on helenlewisbook@gmail.com. If you enjoy this, why not forward it to a friend? They can sign up here.