Linkage Is Good For You: Sayonara Edition

Well, this is my last post until after the new year.  It has been fun these last few months writing at Your Big Girl Pants.  I look forward to seeing what the new year brings.  Now on to linkage:

As a woman whose voice is on the huskier range of things *mild understatement*, this is good news.....

People prefer women with deeper voices:

Kathleen Turner

Male and female leaders with lower-pitched (i.e., masculine) voices are generally preferred by both men and women. We asked whether this preference shifts to favor higher-pitch (i.e., feminine) voices within the specific context of leadership positions that are typically held by women (i.e., feminine leadership roles). In hypothetical elections for two such positions, men and women listened to pairs of male and female voices that differed only in pitch, and were asked which of each pair they would vote for. As in previous studies, men and women preferred female candidates with masculine voices. Likewise, men preferred men with masculine voices. Women, however, did not discriminate between male voices. Overall, contrary to research showing that perceptions of voice pitch can be influenced by social context, these results suggest that the influence of voice pitch on perceptions of leadership capacity is largely consistent across different domains of leadership.

 2.To the utter shock of no one,

Time Magazine's Man of the Year is Barack Obama

Managing editor Richard Stengel unveiled the magazine's choice on Wednesday's "Today." He said it was remarkable that the president won two terms with over 50 percent of the popular vote as a Democrat. He also noted that Obama took office in an economic crisis, and credited him with creating a new political "alignment like Ronald Reagan did forty years ago."

This is the second time that Time has chosen Obama. The magazine said it named him Person of the Year in 2008 for winning against the odds and becoming the first black president of the United States.

"For finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union, Barack Obama is TIME's 2012 Person of the Year," Stengel explained in his note this year.

3.   Everyone remembers the race riots following screenings of Do the Right Thing and Malcom X, right?

Conservatives fear that if black people see Django Unchained, white people will be in danger:

Moreover, it is allowing the cultural establishment to excuse blatant racism, especially directed toward whites. Anti-white bigotry has become embedded in our postmodern culture. Take “Django Unchained.” The movie boils down to one central theme: the white man as devil — a moral scourge who must be eradicated like a lethal virus. For decades, Hollywood, U.S. textbooks and higher education have stressed that America was founded upon slavery, sexism and genocide. In other words, white European civilization is the root of evil and imperial subjugation around the world. Hence, it should come as no surprise that many black leftists — Cornel West, Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Mr. Foxx — share this view. It is simply anti-Western, anti-American propaganda masquerading as history.
....



Going back to Malcolm X and the emergence of the black power movement in the 1960s, there has been a virulent strain of anti-white hatred seeping through parts of black culture. It is seen in rap and hip-hop songs that glorify the murder of white police officers and champion a coming race war. It is seen in the disturbing rates of black-on-white violence, especially homicides and flash-mob attacks. It is seen in many black studies departments on college campuses, vilifying capitalism, America and Western civilization as fronts for white imperialism.

4.  Stupid, Stupid, and more Stupid.

We don't need gun control, we just need to bum rush an active shooter:

Like most people, I’ve been thinking and thinking about the Sandy Hook massacre. I’ve even pored over a map of the school and its killing sites — and studied a timeline of the incident, which appears to have unfolded over about 20 minutes. I have three observations:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

There were at least two males on the premises, one of them the janitor.  As Sandy Hook only goes up until the fourth grade, there were no 12 year olds to throw their bodies in front of a high powered rifle in a futile effort to stop him.  It didn't work when the principal did it, why would a 12 year old be any better at it?



5.  A very difficult situation...what to do when a transgender person, still with male genitalia, wants to walk around naked in the locker room around little children?

Transgender person sparks a debate

Evergreen State College's non-discrimination policy is being put to the test now that the mother of a 17-year-old girl using the Evergreen swimming facilities filed an incident report about 45-year-old transgender woman named Colleen Francis, who walked nude around the locker room. Francis was confronted by a female swim coach who later apologized when Francis told her she was transgender, but maintained that her (biologically male) presence might make the girls-as young as six-uncomfortable.


Francis, who, after 20 years serving in the army, wears a low-dose estrogen patch, plans not to undergo sex reassignment surgery and says she prefers women, is outraged: "This is not 1959 Alabama. We don't call police for drinking from the wrong water fountain."



But for the time being, Evergreen's temporary solution does sort of resemble that: after parents refused to allow their minor daughters to change in front of Francis, the girls' sports teams were placed in a smaller ancillary locker room space to change and Francis was given the run of the main locker room-which is where Title IX comes in, say some: the old discussion of "male privilege" shuttling female athletics by the wayside.