Pink or blue? by Dr. Confused on Feministe.
I’ve been known to hang out on certain bulletin boards where people use abbreviations like “DH” (dear husband) and slightly-nauseating terms like “baby dust” (a magical substance that can get you pregnant, but which is presumably less damp than semen.) In the first trimester, there was a thread on the topic of whether or not to find out the sex of the fetus during pregnancy. (Actually, most posters write "gender of the baby," but let’s go with the correct "sex of the fetus.") Some excerpts of the thread:
"The minute I can. I hate calling the baby “it”, and I don’t like green/white/yellow clothes… I want to know! :D
One point as to why we want to wait… when pregnant with DS we had friends that were also PG. They had 2 u/s and both times were told they were having a girl. So they bought a wardrobe, designed the nursery, etc… all in pink and purple. And they had a boy. Talk about being shocked! DH and I also have a plan to avoid the neutral stuff for a long time. First, we will buy one girl outfit and one boy outfit for hopital pictures and taking the baby home. Grandma will go crazy once she knows the gender and the baby will have several outfits… probably in a matter of a couple hours! Shortly after DS was born, they went to dinner and came back with 3 or 4 boy outfits! Of course we will have some neutral gender stuff, but I am a shopper and it won’t be long before baby has a full gender specific wardrobe!
I have to know. I like to be prepared. I’ve only had boys so far and everything I have is for boys. I don’t have any unisex stuff, even the newborn onesies are blue with trains, planes and cars."
That last one is interesting to me. I design airplanes for a living, and I have a vagina. Nevertheless, if I were to put any daughter I should have into a onesie with an airplane on it, some of these writers would consider it borderline child abuse. But how will people know she’s a girl?
8th Century Scholars by Jill on Feministe.
This professor is fantastic. He was fired from his job for telling students that the story of Adam and Eve should not be taken literally — students apparently felt the professor was "denigrating their religion." But his responses to the situation are hilarious and spot-on:
"I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said.
Well, if the Bible says to teach it…
"I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here,” he said. “From my point of view, what they’re doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century."
Regarding the latter post about religion, i.e. Christianity, I like this clip of The West Wing better than the one featured on Feministe:
