orichalcum (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
orichalcum) wrote2005-09-20 01:12 pm
orichalcum) wrote2005-09-20 01:12 pm
A banner news day
So, I'm about to go off and teach Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, and give my students the following anonymous survey:
Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World
Anonymous Introductory Survey
This survey is designed to make you think about your assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the ancient world, and also to collect general data about the opinions of the class. This is not a test, and you will not be graded or evaluated on your responses in any way. Please answer briefly and completely honestly. Your confidentiality will be respected.
1. Do you think that women and men are fundamentally different emotionally and mentally? In other words, are there significant biological distinctions in the way that men and women think and their suitability for different mental tasks, or are such distinctions entirely the result of culture and upbringing?
2. Do you think that sexual orientation is biologically or culturally determined? In your opinion, are people born gay, lesbian, or bisexual, or does something in their environment cause their orientation to change? Is this distinction different for men and for women?
3. List three nouns or adjectives that you associate with the ancient Greeks, e.g. “tragedy” or “intelligent”.
4. List three nouns that you associate with the ancient Romans.
And coincidentally, outlawradio and karakara have alerted me to two news articles about the changing face of gender roles and attitudes towards sexuality in the modern world - one on how 60% of Yale undergraduate women interviewed said they wanted to stop working or work only part-time once they had kids: (sorry for bad link but on public computer): http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?pagewanted=1
and another on the FBI's recent increase in agents to fight adult pornography: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901570.html, while meanwhile I found a third article interesting which detailed a recent study showing a vast increase in the number of women under 30 who have had sexual experience with other women (14% in the 18-29 range) (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/national/16sex.html?hp&ex=1126929600&en=4cb329962222f612&ei=5094&partner=homepage), unmatched by the number of guys with same-sex experience, who are at about 7%, the same as higher age ranges.
Just on the basis of these articles, it seems like American society is careening in a series of rapidly different directions in terms of attitudes towards gender roles and appropriate sexuality. It's a time of change maybe - maybe as important as the 60's. Or maybe, this is just a bubble in a general peaceful trend towards more equality.
Comments invited. You can also respond to the survey if you want, even anonymously.
Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World
Anonymous Introductory Survey
This survey is designed to make you think about your assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the ancient world, and also to collect general data about the opinions of the class. This is not a test, and you will not be graded or evaluated on your responses in any way. Please answer briefly and completely honestly. Your confidentiality will be respected.
1. Do you think that women and men are fundamentally different emotionally and mentally? In other words, are there significant biological distinctions in the way that men and women think and their suitability for different mental tasks, or are such distinctions entirely the result of culture and upbringing?
2. Do you think that sexual orientation is biologically or culturally determined? In your opinion, are people born gay, lesbian, or bisexual, or does something in their environment cause their orientation to change? Is this distinction different for men and for women?
3. List three nouns or adjectives that you associate with the ancient Greeks, e.g. “tragedy” or “intelligent”.
4. List three nouns that you associate with the ancient Romans.
And coincidentally, outlawradio and karakara have alerted me to two news articles about the changing face of gender roles and attitudes towards sexuality in the modern world - one on how 60% of Yale undergraduate women interviewed said they wanted to stop working or work only part-time once they had kids: (sorry for bad link but on public computer): http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?pagewanted=1
and another on the FBI's recent increase in agents to fight adult pornography: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901570.html, while meanwhile I found a third article interesting which detailed a recent study showing a vast increase in the number of women under 30 who have had sexual experience with other women (14% in the 18-29 range) (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/national/16sex.html?hp&ex=1126929600&en=4cb329962222f612&ei=5094&partner=homepage), unmatched by the number of guys with same-sex experience, who are at about 7%, the same as higher age ranges.
Just on the basis of these articles, it seems like American society is careening in a series of rapidly different directions in terms of attitudes towards gender roles and appropriate sexuality. It's a time of change maybe - maybe as important as the 60's. Or maybe, this is just a bubble in a general peaceful trend towards more equality.
Comments invited. You can also respond to the survey if you want, even anonymously.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2005-09-21 01:27 pm (UTC)(link)Then I saw that slate, curse them and their paid reporters, beat me to it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2126636/ (ps: Mr. Shafer, I resent the term social-science dropout.)
I think an important note missed there is that even in the Yale alumni survey, absolutely no data supports the main thesis: that the number of women who are choosing to stay at home at a given age is growing: all that doing a cross-cut survey like that of five different alumni classes yields a correlation of working gap with age, not that this is a generational attitude.
(I'm also not keen about that data too: I'd be willing to put even money on it being another self-selecting questionairre, or even better, a survey conducted in 1999 at the reunions, and published in 2000; either of those could be highly unrepresentative.).
Most likely, a meaningful percentage of women are giving up their careers (although I wouldn't use any of those percentages in the articles), and that this is probably a higher amount than at least some of us would have guessed: I don't see* any data which should make us think this trend is growing, let alone that the cause of this is generational. I barely see any data at all.
* I'm guessing that if you tracked back to the 60's, you would find that fewer women abandoned their careers, but I'm not sure this is meaningful either, since like the SAT's back in the 60's, the pool of people involved was very different and much much smaller. What you'd really want is a longitudinal study of capability vs working. If you sorted that out, I think you'd find a level or increasing amount of women working in families from 1950 onwards.