Monday, September 21, 2015

Gender Integration of Marines Brings Out Unusually Public Discord

The Marine Corps and its civilian leadership at the Pentagon are squaring off in an unusually public dispute over whether integrating women into the corps’s all-male combat units will undermine the units’ effectiveness, or whether the male-dominated Marine leadership is cherry-picking justifications to keep women out.

The military is facing a deadline set by the Obama administration to integrate women into all combat jobs by 2016 or ask for specific exemptions. The Marines, with a 93 percent male force dominated by infantry, are widely seen as the branch with the hardest integration task. The Marine Corps has the most units closed to women and still trains male and female recruits separately.

The tension began last week when the Marine Corps released a summary of a nine-month, $36 million study that found that integrated combat units were slower, had more injuries and were less accurate when firing weapons.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., submitted the corps’s recommendation on gender integration to the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, on Thursday. Pentagon officials said the corps was expected to request an exemption for at least some front-line combat units.

Ray Mabus, the Marine Corps’s civilian chief, has criticized the idea that women would hurt combat units’ cohesion or morale. CreditKris Connor/Getty Images

Mr. Mabus, the civilian head of the Marine Corps, has steadfastly said in public statements that the Marine Corps study is flawed and that its summary findings were picked from a much larger study in a manner that was biased toward keeping women out of combat roles.

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Mabus said he planned to push ahead with integration despite the study. “My belief is you set gender-neutral standards related to the job Marines have to do, and you adhere to them,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether the Marines who meet those standards are male or female.”

Further complicating the dispute is the fact that General Dunford, who will take over next week as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be responsible for submitting recommendations to the secretary of defense for all the armed services, including the United States Special Operations Command. Officials in the Army, Navy and Air Force have suggested they are not likely to seek exemptions on integration.

On the surface, the debate within the Marine Corps has centered on the physical abilities of men and women. But critics say the dispute is also driven by a male-dominated culture that encourages Marines to believe that their esprit de corps will be undermined by the presence of women.

“The Marines have a climate of non-inclusivity and justify it by talking about combat effectiveness, but a lot of it is based on emotion and not fact,” said Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who was removed as the commander of female Marine recruits this summer after she pushed for integration and clashed with male superiors. “A lot of them, especially the older generation, believe integrating women will be disastrous in war.”

A recent op-ed by retired Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold of the Marines laid out the concerns about integration, saying women posed a threat to the “alchemy that produces an effective infantry unit.”

“The characteristics that produce uncommon valor as a common virtue are not physical at all,” Mr. Newbold wrote in the piece, published in the online magazine War on the Rocks, “but are derived from the mysterious chemistry that forms in an infantry unit that revels in the most crude and profane existence so that they may be more effective killers than their foe.”

He asked rhetorically how mixing men and women of “the most libido-laden age cohort in humans, in the basest of environs, will not degrade the nearly spiritual glue that enables the infantry to achieve the illogical and endure the unendurable.”

Mr. Newbold could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Mabus dismissed the idea that women would erode unit cohesion and lower morale.

“That is almost exactly the same argument made against ending racial segregation in the military, and the ban on gays — that it will ruin morale,” he said in the interview. “And it just isn’t true. We’ve seen that.”

A senior Pentagon official briefed on the Marine Corps study, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said a separate, unreleased study on the same group of Marines, by the Naval Health Research Center, showed that while women scored lower in many physical tasks and had higher injury rates, they scored higher in mental resilience and had fewer mental health problems. The study also found that integrated units rated their unit cohesion at the same levels as all-male units and outperformed male units at making complex decisions, the official said.

The disagreement between the Marine Corps and the Pentagon is a rare public display of tension in a culture that generally values silent professionals.

“I’m struck by how much they aired their dirty laundry in public,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution specializing in defense issues. “The Marine leadership is definitely dubious and reluctant about this. I think they know they will have to integrate, but they have real concerns about what it will mean to the force.”

Mr. Mabus will make his recommendation to Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter by January. Mr. Carter recently echoed Mr. Mabus’s belief that women should be able to enter all military careers if they can meet standards set for their tasks.

Some Marines familiar with the corps’s integration study are concerned that changes to current operations could threaten lives. Sgt. Maj. Justin D. LeHew, a decorated Iraq war veteran who oversaw the integration tests, said in a post on his personal Facebook page this week that lowering standards to allow women into combat teams would endanger other Marines. The post was soon taken down, but was published by Marine Corps Times.

“In regards to the infantry... there is no trophy for second place. You perform or die,” Sergeant LeHew wrote. “Make no mistake. In this realm, you want your fastest, most fit, most physical and most lethal person you can possibly put on the battlefield to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to counter what you are throwing at them, and in every test case, that person has turned out to be a man. There is nothing gender biased about this; it is what it is.”

The Pentagon will announce final decisions on integrating the remaining closed positions and occupations and on any approved exceptions around Jan. 1, Capt. Jeff Davis, a spokesman, said.

Captain Davis said that since 2013, some 111,000 jobs that women were previously excluded from had opened up to them, with 220,000 still closed. Presumably, the bulk of those will open come January.

(source)

Monday, September 14, 2015

"Social Darwinism" on women

In a Sociology class, some of the reading talked about "Social Darwinism" - a movement that applied Biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics.

I thought a certain extract was fascinating and food for thought for this class, so I copied it below!

To put it into context, the piece had been talking about classifying the human race into 'inferior' and 'superior' groups based on biological concepts. Women (entirely, as a sex) were inferior.. Below is some of the explanation/ theory. (Essentially, it claims that men are more evolved versions of women - I put the super-relevant quotes in bold)

Taken from: "Stephen J. Gould, "Measuring Bodies," The Mismeasure of Man, 113-145 (1981) New York: WW Norton & Company"

"In 1890 American anthropologist D. G. Brinton claimed:

"The adult who retains the more numerous fetal, infantile or simian traits, is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has progressed beyond them. ...Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negro at its foot. ...All parts of the body have been minutely scanned, measured and weighed, in order to erect a science of the comparative anatomy of the races."

....Didn't everyone know that savages and women are emotionally like children? Despised groups had been compared with children before, but the theory of recapitulation (the repetition of an evolutionary or other process during development or growth) gave this old chestnut the respectability of main-line scientific theory ."They're like children" was no longer just a metaphor of bigotry; it now embodied a theoretical claim that inferior people were literally mired in an ancestral stage of superior groups.

G. Stanley Hall, then America's leading psychologist, stated the general argument in 1904: "Most savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size'. (1904. voI. 2, p. 649). A. F. Chamberlain, his chief disciple, opted for the paternalistic mode: "Without primitive peoples, the world at large would be much what in small it is without the blessing of children."

Herbert Spencer, the apostle of social Darwinism, offered a pithy summary ( 1895. pp. 88-90):

"The intellectual traits of the uncivilized ...are traits recurring in the children of the civilized."

Since recapitulation became a focus for the general theory of biological determinism, many male scientists extended the argument to women.

E. D. Cope claimed that the "metaphysical characteristics.. of women were very similar in essential nature to those which men exhibit at an early stage of development. ...The gentler sex is characterized by a greater impressibility; ...warmth of emotion, submission to its influence rather than that of logic; timidity and irregularity of action in the outer world. All these qualities belong to the male sex, as a general rule, at some period of life, though different individuals lose them at very various periods. ... Probably most men can recollect some early period of their lives when the emotional nature predominated a time when emotion at the sight of suffering was more easily stirred than in maturer years. ...Perhaps all men can recall a period of youth when they were hero-worshipers when they felt the need of a stronger arm, and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the "woman stage.. of character" (1887, p. 159).

In what must be the most absurd statement in the annals of biological determinism, G. Stanley Hall-again, I remind you, not a crackpot, but America's premier psychologist-invoked the higher suicide rates of women as a sign of their primitive evolutionary status (1904, voI. 2, p. 194):

"This is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman.s body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becoming more womanly. "

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Friday, September 11, 2015

A Pregnancy Souvenir: Cells That Are Not Your Own

NYTimes SEPT. 10, 2015

A colored scanning electron micrograph of human chromosomes. Researchers recently found male Y-chromosomes in every organ they tested from 26 women who had been pregnant with sons. CreditScience Source

They collected tissue from 26 women who had died during or just after pregnancy. All of them had been carrying sons. The pathologists then stained the samples to check for Y chromosomes.Recently a team of pathologists at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands carried out an experiment that might seem doomed to failure.

Essentially, the scientists were looking for male cells in female bodies. And their search was stunningly successful.

As reported last month in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, the researchers found cells with Y-chromosomes in every tissue sample they examined. These male cells were certainly uncommon — at their most abundant, they only made up about 1 in every 1,000 cells. But male cells were present in every organ that the scientists studied: brains, hearts, kidneys and others.

In the 1990s, scientists found the first clues that cells from both sons and daughters can escape from the uterus and spread through a mother’s body. They dubbed the phenomenon fetal microchimerism, after the chimera, a monster from Greek mythology that was part lion, goat and dragon.

But fetal cells don’t just drift passively. Studies of female mice show that fetal cells that end up in their hearts develop into cardiac tissue. “They’re becoming beating heart cells,” said Dr. J. Lee Nelson, an expert on microchimerism at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The new study suggests that women almost always acquire fetal cells each time they get pregnant. They have been detected as early as seven weeks into a pregnancy. In later years, the cells may disappear from their bodies, but sometimes the cells settle in for a lifetime. In a 2012 study, Dr. Nelson and her colleagues examined the brains of 59 deceased older women andfound Y-chromosomes in 63 percent of them. (Many studies on fetal microchimerism focus on the cells left behind by sons, because they are easier to distinguish from the cells of their mother.)

Experts now believe that microchimerism is far from rare. “Most of us think that it’s very common, if not universal,” said Dr. Nelson. But it remains quite mysterious.

In recent years, researchers have found many clues suggesting that microchimerism can affect a woman’s health. Tumors may be loaded with fetal cells, for example, suggesting that they might help drive cancer. Yet other studies have suggested that fetal microchimerism protects women against the disease.

“In each instance of a disease, it seems like there is this paradox,” said Amy M. Boddy, a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University.

Fetal microchimerism has been found in a number of mammal species, including dogs, mice and cows. It’s likely that fetal cells have been a part of maternal life for tens of millions of years.

“Microchimerism is something that humans have been evolving with since before we were humans,” said Melissa Wilson Sayres, a biologist at Arizona State.

During that time, fetal cells could have evolved into more than just bystanders. Writing in the journal Bioessays last month, Dr. Boddy, Dr. Sayres and their colleagues suggested that fetal cells may produce chemicals that influence the mother’s biology, allowing fetuses to manipulate her from within.

Some cells may help maintain the health of the mother — for example, by healing wounds. But there is also an evolutionary conflict of interest between mothers and their young.

A mother’s reproductive success depends on the total number of children she raises to adulthood over the course of her life. Devoting too many resources to a single child may leave her too frail to care for later children.

If a child can somehow coax its mother to provide more resources, on the other hand, he or she may be more likely to survive to adulthood and reproduce. Fetal cells may let children manipulate their mothers to this end, Dr. Sayres and her colleagues propose.

Fetal cells are frequently found in breast tissue, even in milk, for instance. The researchers argue that children might thrive more if their fetal cells drove up milk production.

Mothers also nurture their babies with body heat. The thyroid gland, located in the neck, acts like a thermostat, and fetal cells in the thyroid gland in theory could cause mothers to generate more heat than they would otherwise.

This biological tension might help explain how fetal microchimerism sometimes causes harm to a mother. It may simply be an occasional side effect of the cells’ manipulations.

There are some clues that mothers, too, pull hard in this evolutionary tug-of-war. The immune system kicks into high gear after giving birth, possibly to clear away leftover fetal cells. This defense may pose its own risks: Women with autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis can suffer relapses after pregnancy.

Some straightforward experiments could put all of these ideas to the test. Scientists could look at which genes become active in fetal cells in different parts of the body, for example. They could then see how the activity of the genes influenced a mother’s physiology, such as the production of milk.

If the preliminary results hold up, Dr. Boddy and her colleagues suggest that scientists also should consider how fetal cells in the brain might influence women’s behavior.

“It’s the most exciting part, but it’s the part where there’s the least research at the moment,” said Athena Aktipis, a psychologist at Arizona State and a co-author of the Bioessays article. “There may be a role of microchimerism in postpartum mental health.”

Dr. Nelson, who was not involved in the new paper, said that it raised a lot of ideas worth pursuing.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how the data coming in over the next several years stacks up,” she said.

Article

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Semen has controlling power over female genes and behaviour

New Scientist

Semen says turn those genes on (Image: CNRI/SPL)

THERE’S more to semen than sperm. In many animals, seminal fluid alters both the bodies and sometimes even the behaviour of females. Human semen, too, triggers changes in the uterus, and might have wider effects on women, aimed at just one goal.

“It’s all about maximising the chances of the male reproducing,” says Sarah Robertson of the University of Adelaide in Australia. The effects are most striking in fruit flies: seminal fluid can make the females eat more, lay more eggs and be less receptive to other males.

Now a team led by Tracey Chapman at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, has found that male fruit flies selectively alter the chemical make-up of their seminal fluid. In the presence of rivals, the males produce more seminal proteins. “It came as a real surprise,” says Chapman. “It’s a sophisticated response to the social and sexual situation.”

Some of their findings were presented at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference in Vienna, Austria, last week, including their discovery that one of these proteins is a “master regulator” of genes. Females exposed to it show a wide range of changes in gene expression.

Chapman thinks this kind of seminal signalling is widespread in the animal world. The semen of people, pigs and mice affects the female reproductive tract, and the question is whether it can also produce behavioural responses in female mammals similar to those seen in fruit flies.

There have been claims that semen can do everything from making women sleepy after sex to strengthening the emotional bond with their partner. One 2002 study, based on a survey of 300 students, even found that women whose partners did not use condoms scored lower on a measure of depression.

If that effect is real, depression in some people might be treatable with artificial-semen suppositories. Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, who carried out the study, says a PhD student of his has replicated the finding in a survey of 1000 women, but the results were never published.

In flies, seminal proteins can directly affect behaviour because they enter the circulatory system, travelling throughout the body to the brain. “They rapidly get to many places in the female,” Chapman says.

From the female’s perspective, seminal signalling is usually nothing sinister. According to Chapman, it’s an efficient way of getting a female’s body ready to produce offspring as soon as possible.

It’s not clear whether any components of human semen get into the bloodstream, but it could be possible, particularly for small molecules like hormones, says Robertson. She has shown that seminal fluid induces expression of a range of genes in the cervix, including ones that affect the immune system, ovulation, the receptivity of the uterus lining to an embryo, and even the growth of the embryo itself.

As for seminal signalling, she thinks it’s more likely to be indirect, with semen causing the cervix to produce molecules that influence the rest of the body. Her team is studying the effect of three microRNAs – RNA fragments that affect gene expression – released by the cervix in response to semen.

Whatever the mechanism, both Chapman and Robertson say it’s plausible that semen could have effects on women well beyond their reproductive tract.

Article

Sexual Attraction and Fluidity

NYTimes Charles M. Blow

Recently, Miley Cyrus told Elle UK, “I’m very open about it — I’m pansexual.”

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Attraction is simply more nuanced for more people than some of us want to admit, sometimes even to ourselves. That attraction may never manifest as physical intimacy, nor does it have to, but denying that it exists creates a false, naïve and ultimately destructive sense or what is normal and possible.

Furthermore, different people can experience attraction differently. For some, the order of attraction starts with body first. That’s fine. For others though, it starts with the being first, the human being, regardless of the body and its gender. That’s also fine. And yet, the idea that one can have a physiological response to something other than gendered physicality seems to some antithetical to their rigid, superannuated notions of attraction, or even heretical to it.

But it seems more younger people are liberating themselves from this thinking and coming to better understand and appreciate that people must have the freedom to be fluid if indeed they are, and that no one has the right to define or restrict the parameters of another person’s attractions, love or intimacy.

People must be allowed to be themselves, however they define themselves, and they owe the world no explanation of it or excuse for it. They have to be reminded that the only choices they need to make are to choose honesty and safety.

Attraction is attraction, and it doesn’t always wear a label.

Complete Article

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Women Still Feel Like They're Not Treated Fairly At Work

Women are four times more likely than men to say they've been denied a raise because of their gender.

Janie VelenciaAssociate Polling Editor, The Huffington Post

JACOB AMMENTORP LUND VIA GETTY IMAGES

It's 2015, but women are still being held back when it comes to pay and promotions at work because of their gender, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

The survey finds that women are twice as likely as men to say they have been passed over for a promotion because of their gender -- 12 percent versus 5 percent. The gap is even larger when it comes to pay: Four times as many women as men report being denied a pay raise because of their gender -- 17 percent to 4 percent.

While trends on promotions and pay have remained largely unchanged from a 2013 Gallup survey, there has been an increase in the percentage of women who say career advancement is "very important" or "somewhat important" to them, nearly closing the gap between women and men.

Women also expressed less satisfaction than men did with various aspects of their workplaces, with the most striking disparity in pay satisfaction. Twenty percent of women report being satisfied with their pay, while 44 percent of men say the same.

A report by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, notes that while women have made a great deal of progress in recent years, there is still work to be done. Even though women make up more than 50 percent of the workforce and earn 60 percent of undergraduate and graduate degrees, they still hold a substantially lower number of executive-level positions across job sectors.

Women also continue to make 78 cents to the dollar compared to men, a gap that has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. The problem is even worse for women of color.

And while the Gallup results reflect a relatively low percentage of women who feel direct gender discrimination in the workplace, studies show that most discrimination occurs implicitly. Several companies have taken steps recently to change their workplace policies to improve gender equity. Facebook has begun to provide implicit bias training to its employees and has changed other policies to be fairer to women, including providing four months of paid maternity and paternity leave. Netflix recently introduced an unlimited parental leave policy for some of its employees.

Gallup surveyed 1,001 U.S. adults with a subsample that includes 208 employed women and 277 employed men. The interviews were conducted over live telephone calls Aug. 5 through 9.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

WORLD

Pope Francis Eases Path to Absolution for Abortion

By JIM YARDLEY and LAURIE GOODSTEINSEPT. 1, 2015

Pope Francis after a Mass at the Vatican on Tuesday. He announced that during the church’s Holy Year of Mercy, which begins in December, priests would be empowered to offer absolution for abortion. CreditTony Gentile/Reuters

ROME — Pope Francis announced Tuesday that all Roman Catholic priests would be empowered to offer absolution for the “sin of abortion” during the church’s Holy Year of Mercy, which begins in December.

“I have met so many women who bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision,” Francis said in a statement issued by the Vatican. “What has happened is profoundly unjust; yet only understanding the truth of it can enable one not to lose hope.”

Francis’ offer is not without precedent — Pope John Paul II enabled priests to offer the same absolution during the last Holy Year, in 2000 — yet it shows his broader push to make Catholicism more merciful and welcoming.

Later this month, Francis is scheduled to visit Cuba and the United States and then return to the Vatican for a pivotal October meeting on whether the church will soften its approach on social issues like homosexuality and whether Catholics who have divorced and remarried without an annulment may receive the sacraments.

Vatican officials noted that Francis is not changing his opposition to abortion, nor is the church. Under Roman Catholic canon law, abortion brings automatic excommunication unless the person receiving or performing it confesses and receives absolution. Abortion is considered a “reserved sin,” meaning that permission to grant forgiveness usually must come from a bishop.

Though most bishops in the United States have already empowered their priests on the issue, many in other countries have not — meaning women seeking absolution can face delays, obstacles or rejection. Francis’ edict effectively streamlines the process for a single year.

“All priests will be ready to absolve women who have had an abortion and have repented — all over the world, for a whole year,” said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman. “It’s a widening of the church’s mercy on what is such a dramatic and widespread issue.”

Candida R. Moss, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, said that Francis’ statement was not a doctrinal shift, but that it might serve to alert women who have felt disenfranchised by the church that they are welcome to return. “Even though John Paul II used much the same language, and forgiveness has always been available — albeit through more formal channels — that message wasn’t out there because the rhetoric that accompanies abortion is so elevated that it eclipses the church’s teaching on forgiveness and mercy,” she said in a statement.

Popes have been celebrating holy years since 1300, when Boniface VIII summoned pilgrims to Rome because travel to the Holy Land was too dangerous. Traditionally, the church has offered indulgences for an array of sins during these “Jubilee” years, which are celebrated every 25 years. Christians are urged to do penance and, if possible, make a pilgrimage to Rome.

In March, Francis used his papal discretion to call the “extraordinary” jubilee that begins in December. Two months later, with less notice, the Vatican announced that during the Holy Year, priests would be able to offer absolution for abortion, a move likely to please many liberal Catholics.

Interestingly, Francis on Tuesday also made a move that may appeal to some conservative Catholics by including priests with the schismatic Society of St. Pius X among those empowered to offer indulgences during the Holy Year.

Known as the Lefebvrist movement, the Society of St. Pius X is a breakaway group of traditionalists who reject the reforms the Second Vatican Council approved in the 1960s. The previous pope, Benedict XVI, sought to repair their breach with the Vatican. But the effort foundered after it was discovered that one of their bishops was giving talks denying the extent of the Holocaust.

Reconciliation talks have continued under Francis, and he said in his statement on Tuesday, “I trust that in the near future, solutions may be found to recover full communion with the priests and superiors” of the society.

Francis has also sought to advance his environmental agenda, declaring Sept. 1 the first World Day of Prayer for Creation. When he announced it last month, he established it as an annual event and said he was following the lead of Orthodox Christian churches, which have been praying for the environment on this date for decades.

Sex Differences in the News