The Moon Garden Lounge

I read that piece mahailia and thanks for the link. He is being bashed quite intelligently [for the most part] in the comments but because bashing is the preferred sport online it is sometimes difficult to determine when it is deserved and when it is not. Honestly, I suspect it is mostly deserved here....in the article at least. He is really dumbing down a lot of good research that is far more complex than this would suggest. The Barrowman vids are much more comprehensive, for starters.

I used to teach Gender and Communication at the University of Alaska Fairbanks but that was almost ten years ago now so the films I used are at least that old...but there are some really good ones that cover all this territory. If anyone is interested, a couple of them are:

BRAIN SEX...is a 4 part series, Canadian I believe, [CTV] and covers a lot of territory looking at brain structure, social conditioning, hormonal aspects...and relates them to our social,work, physical ives....very good, interesting stuff.

THE GENDER PARADOX in one comprehensive film show on PBS and is a really good overview of gender development....it must be 10 - 12 years old as well....I think they were fairly new when I was showing them.

On a different note....a couple of really interesting films addressing gender and pop culture that focus on sexual imagery and violence are TOUGH GUISE and KILLING US SOFTLY [there are multiple editions of KUS for sure, and perhaps TG...and the latest are the preferred ones simply as they use more recent examples and research].

Finally, if anyone can find DREAMWORLDS 1 or 2 [even better if they have released a more current version] prepare to be disturbed and shocked....I always allowed students to leave the class if they found this too disturbing...and I specifically requested that they come to me or not attend at all if they had any experience with sexual assault or rape. Recognize that these classes were dominantly females...until it became a core requirement for a Communication degree!! yeah...that was a milestone...

just fyi's....I have no idea how easy or difficult these would be to find now....I suspect you would have to have access to a university library with a good women's studies department...especially dreamworlds....Killing us softly is pretty well known so that may even be available at a large public library...I have no idea...

ETA I am sure there is lots of good, newer stuff out there and if anyone knows of something, I would love to take a look...albeit my connections have pretty well dried up .....

ETA2 Just had a friend point me to a new book she says is really good and it happens to be right up this convo's alley:



"It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children—boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks—we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework.

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender."

"Passionately argued and unfailingly astute, Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different—a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society."