Yes, the Daily Mail is at it again. A woman off the telly, went outside, in public, with possibly some hair on her lip (also possibly a shadow). Luckily, the Mail informs us that her young son "didn't seem to mind his mother's moustachioed look". That's nice.
Female hair really seems to be one of the last taboos and causes all kinds of kerfuffle when celebrity women go outside, in public, without being suitably plucked, shaved, waxed, sugared and electrolysed. I know women who shave their forearms. Forearms!
What I find disturbing about this is that bodily hair is a sign of pubescence and womanhood in women and there seems to be some very unhealthy drivers for making women look pre-pubescent. I find having hair sexy and womanly, and a micro act of resistance.
Plus, and I'm willing to concede that this is just me, I would love to know what it felt like to have a beard. I can imagine stroking it and twiddling it. Although I couldn't be arsed with shaving every day so on balance I'm pleased I can't grow one (and am unlikely to gain that talent even in later life as I'm not from a hirsute family).
It's time for hairy women to reclaim the mantel of Frida Kahlo and refuse to be bullied into expensive, painful and unnecessary treatments (particularly by the Daily Mail). If it feels more comfortable fine, but if not you should still be allowed out in public.
This may well be a foolhardy adventure, a titanic battle, an Icarian endeavour, I cannot help myself but carefully and scientifically dissect another Daily Mail article. After I’m long dead I hope that the fossilised remains of my blog will be found so that others will know that there was resistance to this cancerous newspaper.
I’ll address most paragraphs in turn.
Fathers DO matter: Scientists claim they play crucial role in child's development
In a world where advances in cloning and genetics are threatening to make men redundant, scientists finally have some reassuring news.
No dipshit, it’s only in your paper that claims like this are made.
A study has shown that fathers play a crucial in family life - and that without a dad present in the crucial first stage of life, offspring grow up to be less sociable.
Let’s pick out the crucial words in this sentence: “father”, “family life”, “dad”. We all know what those words refer to don’t we. Yes, humans.
Although the findings come from a study of animals, it adds to the growing evidence that fathers influence the way children develop.
Right, so in fact a study HASN’T shown anything about “fathers” or “family life”. And given the variety of parenting models in the animal kingdom you are going to have to show applicability (who thinks they will?...)
Previous studies have shown that girls reach puberty younger, become sexually active earlier and are more likely to get pregnant in their teens if their father are absent when they were young, New Scientist magazine says.
I will address these ‘previous studies’ at the end and the problems with them. I will also take the New Scientist out the back for a damn good thrashing.
Other work has suggested that sons of missing dads have lower self-esteem later in life.
Other work? What like that paper I wrote with my own shit through the motion of wiping my arse? Obviously no need to reference, it is accepted wisdom.
The latest study looked for biological changes in laboratory mice when they were raised without fathers.
Here we go. Paragraph 6 and we find out you’re talking about mice. Five paragraphs on vague conjecture with a clue that this is a completely rehashed article from the New Scientist and we culminate in fucking lab mice.
A team at McGill University, Canada, used a strain of mice which, like people, are usually monogamous and tend to rear their young pups together.
A strain of mice, which like people, live in cages in laboratories, have tails and run around on wheels all day.
They removed the fathers from some of the mouse pups three days after birth until they were weaned at 30 to 40 days old.
The scientists, led by Dr Gabriella Gobbi, then analysed the behaviour and brain cells of the pups - and compared them to mice brought up with both parents.
Brain cells in the 'single parent' mice had a muted response to the 'cuddle hormone' oxytocin, a feel-good chemical released in the brain during sex or moments of intimacy.
‘Cuddle hormone’ is a technical term I’ll have you know. And given that the Daily Mail are anthropomorphising these mice to an alarming degree, does them talking about them having sex make this article paedophilic?
That meant they were less likely to feel positive when in the company of others. The fatherless mice were also more anti-social.
They found that they were feeling less positive through a survey where the mice were asked to rate their positivity on a scale of cheese to incontinence on a first date. Indeed fatherless mice are more likely to be Goths.
'Usually if you put two animals in the same cage they investigate and touch each other, but when we put to animals deprived of a father together they ignored each other,' said Dr Gobbi.
Maybe its because the offspring of divorce parents have less expectations of long-term relationships and decide not to get involved in an intimate relationship that will inevitably end in heart-break and despondency. Oh, wait a minute, they’re FUCKING MICE.
The scientists are unsure whether the same biological changes take place in human children raised without a father - and whether the findings are applicable to people.
But we’ll keep the headline and everything we've written up until this point because no one is really going to read this far and what can science tell us about the moral decline of Britain anyway.
In the strain of mice used in the experiment, the fathers lick and groom the young pups more than the mothers do. Because grooming affects the development of pups, it could be the lack of physical contact that cause the changes in the brain, the researchers say.
It seems that mice feminism has also gone to far and these mothers aren’t even looking after their children properly. OK, this paragraph does seem to entirely undermine the preceding drivel showing that mice parenting does seem to differ from human parenting somewhat, but apart from that the similarities are uncanny.
The finding follows another study which showed that men experience a huge surge in oxytocin after a child is born.
Let’s just randomly chuck this study in. Totally unconnected, but shit who cares?
Dr Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel tested oxytocin levels of 80 couples before a child was born and six months afterwards.She found that levels of the feel-good chemical rose in mothers and fathers after the arrival of a child.
‘Feel-good chemical’ is another technical term, keep up.
The chemical affected the parents in different ways.
Banal sentence of the entire article. Congratulations.
Mothers with the highest levels spent much longer gazing at their children, stroking and kissing them and speaking in a "sing song" voice, she found.
i.e. become insufferable to be around.
Dads with the highest levels played more with their child than fathers with the lowest levels.
'Fathers and mothers contribute in a very specific and different way,' she told the magazine.
She believes fathers may be 'biologically programmed' to help raise children.
This is a very very bizarre statement.
Right so let’s look at the studies the Daily Mail randomly chose to cite and how they arbitrary chose to report them. Sadly this Daily Mail article is a pretty much direct rehash of the New Scientist article it refers to. New 'Scientist' Fail.
I’ve been warned before that the New Scientist can be sexist, but this is the first time I’ve come across such a biased and unscientific article.
I have blogged here about the studies looking at early female pubescence and absent fathers when Oliver “bad-parenting-causes-schizophrenia” James tried to peddle his social-conservatism as caring liberal. (In summary; "I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that").
There are a number of social determinants that affect girls becoming sexually active earlier and teen pregnancy. Education, access to information, aspirations, abuse, gender inequality, coercion, poverty – can all play a role and interact with each other.
The two studies referred to directly in the article are by Dr Gabriella Gobbi of McGill University Health Centre and Dr Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan Universit, were both unpublished studies from Conference Posters presented at the World Congress of Biological Psychiatry and the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, respectively. Dr Gobbi's: The fatherless brain: Impact of paternal deprivation in Peromyscus californicus on social behaviour and on Oxytocin, NMDA and monaminergic synapses in the prefrontal cortex, poster, WCBP (pdf of programme). Dr Feldman's: Maternal and Paternal Bonding in the Postpartum: Hormones, Parenting Behavior, and Mental Representations.
I therefore doubt very much that the article reflects what these researchers will have concluded in their studies. Even if they themselves did make these giant leaps, the work is unpublished and there has not been an opportunity to peer-review.
Reporting ideology rather than science is what the Daily Mail does. Which is why I am more annoyed with the New Scientist for this crappy article. Of course the Mail was going to pick it up and use it as more evidence to espouse its socially conservative and judgmental propaganda. But for a scientific publication to use a study in mice to comment on human social interaction, is willfully ignorant.
Many years ago I used to work for a press cuttings agency and would therefore read most of the papers every day. One of the most interesting things about this job was seeing how the same story was retold by different papers through different ideological lens. You didn’t think you were getting unbiased news did you? And if that was what people wanted, they would read AP or PA everyday.
No, news is given to us with the light or heavy spin of political opinion. And research is used to enable this in the mainstream press.
This can be well demonstrated by this story about an interview with Sir Stuart Rose by the Observer (trailing the full interview in their Magazine) and in the Daily Mail. The story is that Sir Stuart Rose gave his personal opinion on women and the ‘glass ceiling’. He is the Chief Executive of Marks & Spencer, one of the biggest retailers in the country, and so we are expected to care what he thinks.
Now the Observer pad this article out by getting reactions from other organisations namely the Fawcett Society and Refuge. Fawcett gives stats on the number of women in senior positions in various sectors and Refuge gives a fairly meaningless quote about changing expectations.
The Daily Mail rehashes this article (rather than the original interview) and adds in it’s own bit of ‘new’ research about female happiness. Couple of interesting points about the Daily Mail piece:
It leaves out key pieces of information
Edits the quotes from Fawcett and Refuge in a way that I think distorts their meaning
And throws in a piece of research on female happiness as a way of directly linking the concept that ‘women have crashed through the glass ceiling’ and ‘women are less happy because of it’.
Key information left out - the Fawcett stats on women in top positions in different sectors. By leaving this information out the fundamental assertion that Sir Stuart makes goes unchallenged in the Daily Mail article. It would be a sentiment that the Daily Mail would agree with “How can there be gender inequality when we’ve had a female Prime Minister/CEO/fighter pilot” etc. You don’t need a GCSE in statistics to work out the significance of this statement. You don’t even need to have gone to primary school.
‘Interesting’ editing of quotes. I was at first surprised to see Refuge quoted in this piece, given that I think it is fair to say they are a feminist organisation. That was until I realised the Daily Mail hadn’t included the whole quote given to the Observer:
“There has been a subterranean war between men and women, which has largely been won by women who don't understand what they've lost. The hard-won freedom of choice has imprisoned women. I just see an exhausted generation trying to do it all."
Only the highlighted text made it into the Daily Mail article. For more on judicious misquoting, watch this video. WARNING: Contains Ann Coulter.
But most interesting of all, the Daily Mail leads on a “new study”, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness (pdf), that the Daily Mail says claims women are “less happy nowadays despite 40 years of feminism”. Sigh. I know you can probably guess what is coming but I think it needs to be spelt out for posterity.
Firstly, this is not a new study. In fact the Daily Mail has already covered this piece of research at least FIVE times, the first back in 2007 (see here, here, here, here (all pdfs) and here).
As an aside, notice the picture they use of a WOMAN on a COMPUTER with her back turned on a LITTLE BLOND GIRL. How could she?
Secondly, the study is an attitudinal one and the researchers themselves point to many of the problems with their study design: different data sets, shifting expectations, increased ‘emotional intelligence’. This is not a longitudinal study, this is not a cohort study, this is not a study using the same parameters or methodology for each survey.
What concerns me more is the fact that the study has yet to be peer-reviewed (only being accepted into the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, but not yet published and still no link to their data-set) and yet has obviously been widely press-released and the authors proudly boast their media coverage which includes; The New York Times, CBS News, Financial Times, Guardian, Daily Pennsylvanian and the Western Mail (Wales).
Is this science? The study itself has merit bearing in mind the limitations it points to. Knowledge is a good thing, I don’t think this is a particularly enlightening piece of research but I wouldn’t say it was worthless.
What I do have a problem with is what seems to be the authors’ prioritisation of sensationalised press coverage over academic peer-review. They have for the past 2 years seen the fruits of their labours; wide coverage in the mainstream press and links to stories hinting that perhaps, you know, feminism has gone too far.
The Daily Mail is not particularly pro-women, they are always going to write this kind of guff and find some study or other that will back up their ideological position. Researchers however, should be aghast at the manipulation of their work and should be ashamed of the reactionary articles that reference them rather than proudly linking to them on their website. Unless, this is what passes for academic success these days.
This is a blog about SCIENCE (er, and tech, and geek stuff and politics). Feminists and women as a whole often do not engage with scientific and medical research which can lead to spurious claims and bad science reporting. But we should engage because science is on our side. Plus this blog will be funny, because science hasn't yet proven that all feminists have no sense of humour.
[hairy and proud, Frida Kahlo]
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