•  Last night John McCain told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren that he thinks people are being too hard on Sarah Palin, even if he does find it kinda funny. "I'm entertained and sometimes a little angry when I see this constant, vicious attacks by people on the left. I've never seen anything like it," he said. • According to a recent poll, 86% of men in Canada would rather be a driver than a passenger in bad weather. Unfortunately, 50% of men also claimed that they don't slow down in the snow, which makes things a little more dangerous for the rest of you up north. •  Researchers have found that a particular type of fertility treatment, ICSI, may produce more baby girls than boys. Even though few babies are born through this method, the authors conclude: "because our findings suggest that ICSI may reduce the sex ratio, we recommend that ICSI only be done if medically necessary, in an effort to prevent this potential side effect." •  19-year-old pimp DeShawn "Cash Money" Clark has become the first person to be convicted of human trafficking in Washington state. Clark faces up to 18 years in prison for his crimes. •  Years after doctors told her she was infertile, Sarah Wilkinson took an emergency trip to the hospital because she felt some pain in her stomach. Turns out, she was having a baby. She says she feels "fantastic" now, even though the pregnancy was a huge shock. • Did you know that there have been women in the Scotland Yard for 90 years now? Women first started working as officers in 1919, when they were introduced in order to help deal with prostitutes and suicidal women. Plus: here are some of their spiffy outfits. •  Vicki Kennedy told Oprah today that she has absolutely no interest in running for the senate seat left empty by her late husband, Edward Kennedy. She also told Oprah about the last days of her husband's life, including his determination to survive to see Obama elected president. •  Two teenage girls from New Zealand have been convicted of the murder of a retired school teacher. The girls, aged 18 and 15, broke into his house and beat him to death with his own walking stick before trashing the place and leaving with his wallet. •  Three lacrosse players from Sacred Heart University have been accused of conspiring to sexually assault a female student in a dorm room. The victim was engaging in consensual sex with one of the boys when his two friends crept in "as a prank," but their lawyers claim they had no contact with the woman. •  Lobna Abdelrehim used to work at a Wall Street publishing firm, until she got fed up with the rampant racism and sexism. She says she was constantly mocked for her faith and her looks, and has brought a lawsuit against the company. •  Michele Bachmann admitted to the St. Cloud Times that she sometimes says stupid shit: "I wish I could be more artful in the way I say things. But she went on add some qualifying statement about "bias in the mainstream media" and so on. • In other Bachmann news, she's headed to Nashville to join Sarah Palin for a Tea Party. Sadly, not the fun kind. •  A new study from the UK confirms that police often don't believe rape victims due to prejudices about their background, class, and "behavior." Officers were also found to be inadequately trained for dealing with rape, which can result in police that would rather "do nothing at all" than risk doing something wrong. • 

Butch Voices founder Joe LeBlanc says he saw the conference, held in Oakland, as a way to help butches "have the hard conversations that we never seem to have otherwise [...] because were so divided across race, divided across gender identities, pronoun choices." Described as "4 days of workshops , entertainment & bonding for Butches, Aggressives, Studs, & Allies," the conference included segments on such topics as "Taking it On: Dealing with Our Internalized Misogyny," "Butch Survival: Mentoring Gender Nonconforming Youth," and "Butches Having Babies." Logistics coordinator Krys Freeman also described the conference as a place for butches to meet people they share aspects of their identity with, outside the context of a bar.

NPR guest host Jennifer Ludden spoke with both LeBlanc and Freeman, and the whole interview is worth listening to. One of the highlights comes near the beginning, when LeBlanc says butches are "supposed to be these silent, cool types that don't talk or only are about how we look." He implies that butches are not only expected to conform to stereotypes about masculinity — being "strong and silent" — but are vulnerable to a stereotype more traditionally associated with femininity as well. That butches "only are about how we look" echoes assumptions about looks-obsessed women, but also the idea that LGBTQ identities are an act, something people put on, like drag. LeBlanc points out that some people both identify as butch and wear makeup, and part of the point of Butch Voices was to address the fact that gender identity is more than skin-deep.

LeBlanc, Freeman, and Ludden discuss class stereotypes too. Freeman says strangers don't expect her to be educated, "just based on my appearance," and LeBlanc says that "butch [...] is a very class-oriented identity, from the history of it, it's a very working class, a very white stereotype." On the Butch Voices website, conference co-chair Adrienne "Aj" Davis addresses these issues head-on. She writes,

I am black, I am butch, and I am an intellectual. I use that term in the classical sense of one who lives for the life of the mind and for ideas. I am happiest when I am either reading something that makes my brain hurt or engaging in a fast-paced discussion about politics or some arcane subject. It took me a long time, over a decade, to become truly comfortable with this fact about myself. In part this is because there were (and still are) precious few depictions of butch intellectuals in lesbian literature or film. We work with our hands, we shower after work, we have callouses and steel-toe boots. What we don't have are jobs where we sit and do mental work all day. For some odd reason that is supposed to be the province of femmes.

She also mentions that "the TV host, Rachel Maddow, is really the first acknowledged butch intellectual I've ever seen." Maddow notwithstanding, it's interesting to note that the idea of intellectual endeavor as somehow effeminate affects butch people as much as it affects male-born men. All these assumptions — that masculinity is about strength, silence, and steel-toed boots, or that being butch is all about "how you look" — stem from the idea that of gender as unitary, inflexible, rule-bound. But according to Freeman, Butch Voices showed that identity is actually much more expansive. She says,

What this conference brought out for me in particular is that people do form identities. [...] All these things are constructed, they're made by us and made by the influences the people in our lives have on us.

One lesson of Butch Voices is that gender identity isn't a set of rules imposed from outside — instead, it's something people build for themselves, consciously or unconsciously. If we are aware of this building process, we can understand that our particular gender expressions are just one possible construction — and respect other people's constructions as well. As the Butch Voices website explains,

The point is, we don't decide who is Butch, Stud or Aggressive. You get to decide for yourself.

A Conference For 'Butches' [NPR]
To Be Black, Intellectual And Butch [Butch Voices]
Butch Voices [Official Site]

On a trip to Asia this February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

In no society are women treated equally yet. I believe strongly that if women are not full participants in society, the society does not advance the way that it could. And if women are denied their rights, it affects children, families and the entire social structure.

Women have had the right to vote for a long time, but in many ways, women are still not equal. Women still make less on average than their male peers, and the pay gap for women of color is even greater than it is for white women.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has ruled against women in Ledbetter v. Goodyear and AT&T Corp. v. Hulteen. And the Equal Rights Amendment, once passed by the Senate in 1972, never made it to the constitution and any real movement to push for it has dissolved.

The women's equality today is focusing on small victories. President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act this year, which sought to reverse the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter Case by explicitly saying that discrimination is reiterated with each paycheck, but did nothing to expand prevention of pay discrimination.

Obama established a White House Council on Women and Girls, but it's unclear what the role of this council is in the administration.

This January, more women were elected to Congress than ever before, but women still only make up 20 percent of congressional representatives and senators.

We saw the third woman and the first Latino in history appointed to the Supreme Court, but not without her subjected to racist and sexist attacks. Then, during her confirmation hearings senators openly questioned whether she could be "objective" despite her race and gender.

These are just a few examples in recent months that show that although women have marked many milestones in the last 89 years, it's time for women's equality groups need to start tackling the bigger issues of gender equality. We could use another coup like the 19th amendment.

Today In Feminist History [Feministing]
Women's Equality Day [Voice of America]

Psychologists from Bradley University of Illinois say that both physical and social stresses in poorer countries are the reason that there is less of a personality difference in those societies. The personality tests of men in these countries suggest that they are more cautious, anxious, and less assertive than men in wealthy societies, and researchers say this may be because their natural biological traits are muted because their growth is stunted by disease and malnutrition. Evidence shows that poorer agricultural societies where a few men hold the power are actually unnatural, because hunter-gatherers were actually more egalitarian. They suggest that modern progressive cultures are actually moving us back to a more ancient state where men and women were considered equal overall, but had predisposed interests in different domains.

But some, like John Tierney in a NY Times blog post, say the gap is more likely just an illusion resulting from the way people in different cultures interpret the personality tests. For example, in a traditional culture like that found in Bangladesh, a man may rate his aggressiveness as average because he's comparing himself only to other men in his society, or a woman may rate her benevolence lower than a woman in a wealthy society because she's acting out or social duty, not personal kindness.

Another study out today suggests that the differences between men and women may be less culturally motivated and have more to do with how men and women are wired biologically. In trying to understand why men and women of equal intelligence tend to excel at different cognitive tasks, Spanish researchers studied brain tissue from the left temporal cortex and found that men had 52% more synapses in that region than women, and they suspect there are other brain regions where women have greater synaptic density than men.

As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen [NY Times]
Gender Differences Seen In Brain Connections [New Scientist]