'Lemme tell you about my trouble with girls ...' Er, please don't, bro-ffin This week, the science world was shocked to its dorky core after one of its own attempted to tell a joke. In public. Step forward Sir Tim Hunt and hang your head in shame. The Nobel Laureate, who has been a Fellow of the Royal Society for nearly 25 years, royally cocked up a speech to a group of senior female boffins at a …
I don't see the link between the things at all.
The Reg produces headlines with amusing sexual references (I don't consider them "smutty", that word is of itself a bit of a giveaway about someone's attitudes). Prof. Hunt may have intended a joke, but it would be surprising if someone who had been to many conferences in the past hadn't had the lesson "Do not try to make jokes when there are people from other cultures around" drummed into him. The point was that he was characterising women as inferior beings who couldn't control their emotions in a lab, and therefore perhaps needed to be segregated. Think about the way that slave owners and Afrikaners used to go on about how black people were "childlike". Would his remarks have been acceptable if he said "The trouble with black people in the lab is that they are childlike and emotional and cry when they're criticised"?
Jokes about sex in the abstract, on the other hand, get made by both men and women. You would still probably be advised not to tell them at the annual get together of Wahabi imams and Hassidic rabbis, but they don't of themselves denominate any group of people as inferior.
Ah yes, two old feminazi lines:
- "Joking about sex is funny and great, joking about wimmin isn't and isn't".
It is and it is. We will decide what is funny, not the Womens' Studies men-haters.
- "Remarks based on sex are the same as remarks based on race".
They're not. Racism is based on real hatred, you demean it by these comparisons.
What you usually call out as sexism is not even sexism, but is based on fighting for _real_ equality - that of Opportunity, not of Outcome.
And I like "smutty", the fact that you don't like that word "is of itself a bit of a giveaway about your attitudes".
"not the Womens' Studies men-haters."
I've only ever met one of these, and she was a black student visiting Oxford from a mid-Western university. With what I've learned since about "Greek culture" in US universities, I find myself more sympathetic than dismissive.
Outnumbered ten to one in my experience by the kind of men who wonder why so many women don't seem to like them, but then they open their mouths and you find out. Here's a thought: "feminazi". Because wanting to have equality with men is just so much like a political movement that believed that women had to stay at home and do what men told them, and that most of the rest of the human race was "racially inferior" and needed to be exterminated.
60%+ of medical students are women - I haven't seen the protests demanding women be refused admission to medical school because of their gender, as men are being overlooked for STEM jobs.
That is because, while men and sensible women are fighting for equality of Opportunity, the men-hating feminazis don't want that equality - they want women doing any fashionable jobs we do, whether those women want to do those jobs or not.
The trouble is to make Prof Hunt look bad you have just had to selectively quote AND add extra words which he didn't say. There is a perfectly good reading of his words that is purely self-deprecating - that he is bad at talking to women so that he makes them cry - remember it is "my "problem with girls Apparently this was spoken at a dinner, not the main conference - so I would guess it was an attempt at humour, and the love bit certainly supports that - it was not intended for broadcast and as far as I know Prof Hunt is not leading a campaign to segregate labs or stop women going into science. I think a lot of people have just been quite cruel to a 71 year old Noble prize winner, who is a pretty soft target, and who wasn't aware that he was going to be put on the world stage.
If I did, it would not change my view that making silly jokes about gender stereotypes was completely acceptable in a normal society not taken over by whinging wannabe-victims, and I hope my daughters would agree.
If they worked with the joker, I am sure they would rib him endlessly on his return to work and everyone would have a good old laugh about it.
So it's a shame that the way things are going, he'd probably be executed by the Wimmin Studies death squad as soon as his hyperliner touched down at Wimminchester Spaceport.
Loon,
Are you a virgin ?
Just wondered...
There may be a grain of truth in the middle of all that, but he said "when you criticise them, they cry". While it may be true that women are more prone to crying under criticism, to play it as a sweeping generalisation disrespects the countless female scientists who accept valid criticism. It could also be that he's such a jerk about how he gives criticism to his female coworkers, the natural reaction is simply cry.
As for the comments about falling in love, that's possible in many workplaces, although I guess the nature of lab work (working closely in smaller groups on a project) may make it more likely for scientists. In any case, it's all down to how you react to it and remaining professional.
All in all, I thought his comments said more about him and his attitudes than it did about women in labs.
I think he had something else too. So now look, boys are boys and it doesn't get any better with age. There we have a guy a long way from home among all those good locking women thinking about how to make his point for the more important part of his trip. Rather bald, close to eighty years old but alone for the night and with a point he makes his call. I fall i love and they all fall in love with me. Not such a bad start, I have heard worse. Give him a break, boys are boys and that damned point won't leave us alone.
Have mercy.
"Give him a break, boys are boys and that damned point won't leave us alone."
Right so it's OK to be an twat and bother the opposite sex because you're old, desperate and a bloke? This sort of bollocks is why fundamentalist feminists love bloke hating, they accuse us of doing these things and the only defense some of us can come up with is to confirm that we can't help ourselves! FFS! "Sorry darling, it's millions of years of genetically repressed animal instinct. I can't help but leer at your cleavage and make remarks about your arse!".
He has to know better than to say that he's in favor of single-sex labs. The rest of it is foolish but saying that he's in favor of single-sex labs is a real problem. Once those words leave his mouth, irrespective of the exact circumstances in which they were uttered and irrespective of the remark being an attempt however feeble and stupid at humor then anyone who is so inclined would be fully justified in questioning how much his hiring and promotion decisions are effected by the same attitude.
//Modern communications networks can be used by the unscrupulous for purposes ranging from cyber-attack, terrorism and espionage to fraud, kidnap and child sexual exploitation.
A successful response to these threats depends on entrusting public bodies with the powers they need to identify and follow suspects in a borderless online world.//
You know what?
I think this is the perfect reply to "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.":
If they're looking at everybody's privates, it's because they're perverts.
"A successful response to these threats depends on entrusting public bodies with the powers they need to identify and follow suspects in a borderless online world."
"entrusting public bodies".
There's your problem right there. You had our trust. You fucked it up. And now you do not have that anymore.
Come on folks. No organization is going to fire a Nobel laureate because of one stupid joke.
If nothing else, the PR boffins would have told the bosses to sit tight til the smoke cleared in a couple of days and it was all forgotten.
More likely the "joke" was the last straw in a long history of offensive behaviour.
Somewhere Dr Broffin likely has a big fat personnel file that has "Your last warning." on the second to last page.
Will kicking out Prof. Hunt over these comments improve physiology?
Will moving a probable sexist give more opportunities to others, especially women?
Or
Giving an inspired physiologist, who's discoveries have tangibly improved lives, the boot over an out of context quote limit further development in his discoveries.
.
Personally I believe public figures should be judged in the context of their field. If a footballer is a drunken idiot off the pitch but inspired on it then we need to judge them for what they are paid for.
If Prof. Hunt purposely limited women's careers in his labs then he should be damned for that. But if his approach is gender blind in his work then these comments should be ignored.
Fair enough, but in reality he is retired and had an honorary title. The university has to consider next year's admissions, not the last century's research performance. Even if he didn't mean it, even if it was a joke, unless they took action the message to next year's would be biology students would be "come to us for an Islamic educational experience." It's not like there aren't a lot of other Russell Group universities for women to choose from.
OT but I'm led to note that the Neanderthals coexisted with h sapiens sapiens1 for much of their existence. I'm not aware of any convincing evidence that they were less intelligent. (Brain size is not very relevant in human beings above a certain mass, as is well known from research.) Perhaps the Neanderthals lost out because they were less aggressive and more egalitarian.
However...
If the professor had said that some women students get crushes on more senior male scientists, and it was necessary to be very professional in this situation - that would be quite legitimate (though probably not in the circumstances of the speech.) It was the unreconstructed form of his remarks that was the problem. There is an important sub-text there about how we deal with our biological past in the context of modern society, but he didn't address it. And I'm inclined to agree that the hashtag was a bit uncalled for in the immediate context, but it did have a role in bringing out that women do do hard science research which, at a time when people are about to finalise university decisions, is surely a good thing.
1Given our remarkable destructive capacity perhaps we should rename ourselves h sapiens deinanthropos, by analogy to dinosaurs.
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