According to The Register:

[University of Washington researcher Sapna] Cheryan and her colleagues arranged multiple experiments and surveys among hundreds of non-computing-subjects students at Washington uni. Questionnaires were filled in in different rooms - one previously prepared with a science fiction poster, games kit and Coke cans; one instead with "nature" and "art" wall graphics, books and coffee cups. This stage dressing was ostensibly not part of the tests, but nonetheless it had a powerful effect on decisions by the ladies taking part.

Specifically, women filling in questionnaires in the stereotypically geeky room were significantly less likely to express interest in computer-science related studies or careers. having seen both environments, and then hypothetically offered a chance to work in an all female team in either kind of room, they still went for the non-geeky atmos.

Cheryan goes on to say that we want to attract more people to computer science, and the presence of Chewbacca action figures scared off both men and women from the discipline.

What the article doesn't mention until towards the end, though, is that the people taking part in this study weren't computer-science students — they were studying other subjects. (Do you really want to attract English majors to computer science?) Add to that the loads of biases that seem to have been jammed into this study (like the idea that liking science fiction is "masculine" and science-fiction toys are automatically a boys-only thing) that it's hard to take it seriously.

It sucks, though, that companies are receiving these kinds of messages, like the idea that women only want to look at images of nature. (Maybe a nice waterfall, or a kitten with a sign saying "HANG IN THERE BABY"?) It just seems intrinsically silly — women who are interested in computer science will be, ipso facto, geeks, and that means they'll be interested in geeky stuff. So let's not rush to tear down the giant robot wall art just yet.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Angryfilms has optioned the Cycler series, which McLaughlin has already adapted as a screenplay, and is currently looking for a director. Cycler tells the story of Jill, an otherwise normal teenager who physically and mentally transforms into a boy named Jack for four days each month. For years, Jill and her parents have kept the secret of her mysterious transformations from the outside world, but one day Jack longs for a life beyond Jill's bedroom and escapes one day.

After the eroticized chastity of the Twilight films, Cylcer could bring us a young adult-targeted film that frankly explores sex and sexuality, not to mention a host of gender issues.

Angryfilms options 'Cycler' books [The Hollywood Reporter via /Film]

Apparently when this woman had seizures, she felt that her voice had become deeper and her arms were hairy. Once, when a female friend of hers with her as a seizure came on, she thought her friend was turning into a man too. The woman had no history of mental illness, nor did she have symptoms of gender identity disorder.

After imaging her brain, the researchers discovered that she had some damage to her amygdala, and weird electrical activity in her right temporal lobe during seizures. Had they discovered some gender identity center of the brain, which when damaged results in the feeling of changing sex? Absolutely not. In fact, there is no such center in the brain.

Instead, the researchers believe that this unusual case is simply one flavor of a more general experience of self-alienation that comes during epileptic attacks.

Reports ScienceNow:

More likely, [New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky] says, the amygdala is one node in a network of brain regions essential for self-identity. When neural activity in this network goes haywire, a range of bizarre experiences can result, Devinsky says. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote of feeling the presence of God in the moments preceding a seizure. More common, Devinsky says, are feelings of déjà vu or its opposite, jamais vu, the sense that a familiar environment has become unfamiliar. "In epilepsy, you can experience these intense and extreme emotions and in some cases misidentification of yourself and where you are in relation in the world," he says.

via Science Now

Slate's Juliet Lapidos says Battlestar never lived up to the feminist agenda that its detractors accused it of having. If you'll recall, the new series' transformation of the macho pilot Starbuck from cigar-chomping dude to cigar-chomping chick caused a huge ruckus. And certainly many of the women on the show have mastered traditional male roles within the military and politics. But, argues Lapidos:

There's plenty to make a feminist squirm. Perhaps because science fiction has historically appealed to men who don't leave home much, the genre has often used alien mores and alien technology to rationalize pornographic depictions of near-naked women. (Think Jabba the Hutt forcing Princess Leia to wear that ridiculous gold bikini in Return of the Jedi.) Battlestar is no exception. When Cylons die, their memories download into an identical-looking body on a resurrection ship. This process, almost without exception, happens off-screen for the male Cylons, but when a fembot dies she flies through a vaguely fallopian-looking tube then wakes up nude in a vat of goo. Overtly, these are birth scenes. But they are hypersexualized-with lingering thigh-shots and orgasmic-sounding gasping . . . [Also] rape is a trope on the show: Starbuck finds herself in a bizarre insemination farm on the Cylon-occupied planet Caprica, and Adm. Cain orders some cronies to rape and torture a Cylon in "Razor." Naturally the show doesn't condone rape, but it's discomfiting that the writers drop sexual violence into the script so often without comment. If nothing else, this pervasive threat-directed only at women-negates the idea that Battlestar conjures a gender-blind universe.

Some of Lapidos' points are good - she points out that most of the strong female characters are sick or dying, and notes that Cally is a weird throwback to hysterical women of the Victorian era. She also explains that while men like Adama and Tigh have enduring friendships in the show, we see few women with such relationships to each other. Still, I think she's missing the point when she says that the show isn't feminist because the women are sexualized and because the story is not "gender-blind." And that's because the gender politics of this show cannot be understand without looking at how men in it are treated.

Men Are Sex Objects

While I think it's debatable whether the tubs of goo are the place where women in the show are sexualized, there can be no doubt that the male characters are treated like sex objects at every turn. Maybe the scenes with the naked hybrid in goo, or Cavil waking up in goo, are not very sexy. But certainly a shirtless Lee or Helo is. And they are shirtless a lot. For no reason other than to titillate us.

Not only that, but Lee is treated like a worthless slut by Starbuck, who constantly uses him for sex and then discards him for a hunkier, more marriageable guy (Anders). And Lee isn't the only man who is treated like a piece of sex meat for women to toy with.

Baltar, who is practically the embodiment of weakness and emotional hysteria, is repeatedly used as a sex toy by cylon women like Number Six, Tory, and Number Three (D'Anna). When Baltar is held prisoner on the cylon ship, he's virtually a sex slave. The cylon women keep him locked in his quarters, where he's never allowed to get dressed (he wears an awful robe the whole time) and his main duty (other than being horrifically tortured) is to sexually service Number Six and Three - often at the same time. And given that he looks terrified and cries practically the whole time, I don't think he's living out a sex fantasy. I think he's being sexually tortured and enslaved.

Other men who are used for their bodies include Anders, who is one of Starbuck's playthings; Tigh, who is Ellen's sex toy; and Gaeta, who is horribly used by Boomer on New Caprica.

Men Are Abuse Victims

Starbuck bashes Leoben's face with her fist, repeatedly. She waterboards him. She screams at him and throws him out an airlock. She does not rape him the way the human men rape the female cylons, because Battlestar Galactica is not a gender-blind universe: It is a universe where the genders are equal as workers, but still bear their slightly different historical burdens. And so women torture men, but not in exactly the same way men torture women. The cylons torture Tigh nearly to death on New Caprica. They even put out his eye, destroying a classic symbol of male virility and dominance.

And although men are not raped in the same way women are, I would argue that Baltar's torture by Head Six, as well as his torture on the cylon Base Ship, are very close to rape. What do you call it when Three physically brutalizes Baltar until he screams in agony, and then makes him have sex with her later? It is not erotic. It is violent and horrifying.

Women also rape each other. In last week's episode, Boomer escaped from prison, then beat the shit out of her sister Eight, Athena. She then tied Athena up and put her in a storage locker where she could watch Boomer have sex with Athena's husband Helo (who can't tell the identical cylons apart, and believes he's sleeping with his wife). It's a shocking and disturbing scene precisely because it's a form of sexual torture.

Also, one of the most harrowing rape scenes in the entire series is ordered by a woman - Admiral Cain - to be visited on her one-time lover Six. After she discovers the woman she's been dating is a cylon, Cain has her thrown in the brig and orders the prison guards to torture and rape her. The horrifying result, when we see the traumatized, raped Six lying on the floor of her cell and refusing to eat, is the first moment in the series when we truly understand why the cylons are often right to hate the humans.

The multitude of these scenes does raise the question of why BSG shows so many women being raped during torture, but not men. I think it's because as long as we don't have artificial wombs, a feminist world will never be completely gender-blind. One of the central fixations of this show is reproduction. The human president at one point outlaws abortion because she wants to increase the size of the ailing Fleet. And the cylons are constantly trying to figure out how to reproduce "naturally" without using the resurrection goo. This desire to use women as vessels for reproduction shows up in the way men and women are treated when they are prisoners of war.

Although men and women are equal on Galactica, there is one crucial difference between them. When you dehumanize a female prisoner, you turn her into a battered womb. When you dehumanize a male, you simply beat him any way you can.

Male Friendship Is Predicated On Violence and Drunkenness

There are no long-term close relationships between women on BSG, and there is only one long-term relationship between two men. Admiral Adama and Commander Tigh are the two highest-ranking officers on Galactica, the ship that leads the entire Fleet, and they are buddies from way back when the humans fought the cylons the first time around.

Their friendship is touching at times, but they seem incapable of expressing affection towards each other unless they are destructively drunk. And most of the time, their comraderie is shot through with rage and mistrust. They spend more time beating each other up than any other two characters, including humans and cylons at war with each other. And of course, it also turns out that Tigh is a cylon, so our only enduring friendship is not between two human men, but between a man and a machine. Because Tigh turns out to be a cylon, this one example of male friendship is also founded on a betrayal.

It is truly hard to say which gender has it worse in this situation. Is it more awful to be a woman in a world where women never have close relationships, or to be a man in a world where the only way you can express brotherly love is through violence?

Male Leaders Are Often Weak and Make Decisions Based on Intuition
I have always disliked Roslin's character, partly because she's a female leader who gets religion and bases her leadership on feelings. But viewed in the context of male leaders like Adama, Zarek, and Baltar, Roslin's weak-minded reliance on emotion puts her smack-dab in the middle of the old boys' club.

Adama is a great military leader, but he frequently lets his feelings for his son Lee and (almost) daughter-in-law Starbuck get in the way of good decision-making. Last season, when the Fleet was being menaced by cylons, he held up their mission for a whole month while Starbuck traipsed around in a ship with Helo and a sizable crew questing to find Earth, based on a vision she had. During that mission, Gaeta loses his leg, indirectly leading to his later mutiny with Zarek. He also appoints Lee head of the Pegasus after Admiral Cain is shot, which turns out to be a terrible idea because Lee isn't ready for a leadership role.

Meanwhile, Zarek and Baltar embody the weak-willed but power-hungry types who lurk behind true power trying to influence by manipulation. In Baltar's case, that often means sexual manipulation, especially when he creates his army of devoted fangirls. Zarek first manipulates the Fleet by claiming victim status when he's in prison, and gains political power for this reason. Then, during the mutiny, he secretly slaughters the entire Quorum rather than trying to lead them.

These are not male leaders whose strength and honor cast long shadows over a series of weak and ineffectual female characters. Instead, they are weak and compromised, ruled by the same hysterical emotions that women were once accused of possessing in such quantity that it disqualified them from leadership roles.

Men and Women Are Equals on Battlestar Galactica
If we define feminism as the critique of a world where men unfairly wield power over women, then BSG is post-feminist. In other words, that critique is no longer necessary in the world of BSG: The show more or less successfully depicts a universe where women and men are equal in the realms of work and family. However, BSG was not made in a post-feminist world, so there are all kinds of hiccups where you get retrograde characters like Cally, or naked cylon chick fetishism, that are relics of our own society, which still so desperately needs a feminist slap upside the head on a regular basis.

But I strongly believe that BSG should be considered a contender for the status of feminist story in the genre of science fiction - and indeed, in any genre of television. And this isn't just because it depicts women in positions of power, honor, and competence, but also because it depicts men as possessing the same weaknesses and flaws that women do.

The project of feminism isn't just about changing women's roles in society, but to change male roles too. You cannot have one without the other. That's why feminism, to my mind, shouldn't preach for a gender-blind society, but rather one where men and women share the burdens of life equally. As long as we are reproducing the old-fashioned biological way, it will be impossible for us to be gender-blind. But at least, in BSG, we get glimpses of what it might look like to live in a world both women and men can be commanders, fighter pilots, presidents - and both men and women can be sex objects, suffer from emotional overload, fear the physical wrath of the opposite sex, and gain power via subterfuge and manipulation.

Feminism, as BSG makes clear, won't turn us all into saints. It will just make us all capable of achieving the same levels of social power, as well as the same nadirs of social humiliation and defeat.

For those of you who don't know her, Kate Bornstein is the author of two books on gender issues, Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook. Plus two other books, Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure and Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws. She's also a playwright and performance artist.

I already wrote about my thoughts on last night's episode here. Among a whole host of UFO freaks, the episode introduced us to Eileen (aka "Abraham"), a blogger about UFO conspiracy stuff who has worked with a mysteriously advanced metal. At my urging, Kate watched the episode, and she was pretty thrilled with it.

"It was a huge step forward," she told me. Eileen wasn't crazier than anyone else on that show, and "she turned out to be a brilliant scientist," which is a plus. "We did have Dead Tranny Syndrome," she added, "but they do that to a lot of people. They kill a lot of people in an episode, so it's not like she was singled out."

"If the [actor] was not transsexual, it was one of the best jobs I've ever seen," Bornstein says. Sure, the character was over-the-top and melodramatic — just watch the clip above — but so is every other character on the show.

Bornstein especially liked the speech that Eileen gave about "that moment, that opportunity to face what you never really wanted to face, but always wanted to face. I thought that was poetically written, and it did apply to Sarah Connor and to the tranny. I thought that was really fucking cool." She also really liked the bit towards the end, where Eileen is being hypnotized and remembering the warehouse, and describing being inside the panel truck with no way to see out. "And the therapist is like, 'Does that bother you?' She was like "No, I like not being seen.'"

One minor quibble: Kate thought Eileen looked more like a girl without her wig than she did with it. It seemed like the big reveal, where Eileen takes her wig off, is supposed to show her looking like a boy, but she just looked more natural and real. It was as if the director or producers insisted on the wig and extra makeup, because they were afraid Eileen wouldn't "pass" as a woman in her early scenes, but it backfired.

"What i thought was even cooler than the tranny treatment: When do you have a grown black man who's talking to an even older black man who's giving him wise advice?" Bornstein says, referring to the scene between James Ellison and his preacher.

She was also happy that the show didn't "go for the cheap shot" by making Jesse and Riley turn out to be lesbian lovers. "I think Riley's biseuxal," Kate says, which is "a cool nod" to real sexual diversity. Riley isn't just a lesbian who's pretending to be into John Connor, but someone who's attracted to both Jesse and John.

All, in all, Bornstein was surprised by how much she liked last night's epidsode: "It's getting complex." It turned out Bornstein stopped watching the show after the first season, but she liked last night's episode enough to want to get caught up. Before, "It wasn't deep enough for me. [But] I didn't think they were exporing the avenues that I saw explored in this episode. How do you learn? Who is the puppet, who is the master?"

Tarr and his team examined how test subjects identified the gender of Caucasian faces by taking 200 pictures of men and women in the same position, under the same lighting conditions. They blurred the faces together and pixelated them (like in the image above). Then they asked their subjects to figure out whether an essentially genderless face was male or female. Overwhelmingly, subjects would guess male if the face had more red in it, and female if it had more green.

So what's the point?

A statement from Brown University, where Tarr did his research, explains:

Across this and related studies, Tarr has determined that observers use the color of a face when trying to identify its gender . . . The finding has important implications in cognitive science research, such as the study of face perception. But the information also has a number of potential industry or consumer applications in areas such as facial recognition technology, advertising, and studies of how and why women apply makeup.

So basically his research is going to help companies that sell makeup to white women? That doesn't sound like a big breakthrough until you consider that it may help resolve the mystery of why anybody would wear green eyeshadow.

Structure and Color in Face Recognition [via Tarr Lab]

Evolutionary anthropologist Gottfried Hohmann, a co-author of the study, says this discovery might change how we understand male dominance in society:

In chimpanzees, male-dominance is associated with physical violence, hunting, and meat consumption. By inference, the lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. Our observations suggest that, in contrast to previous assumptions, these behaviors may persist in societies with different social relations.

Now all that awesome feminist science fiction from the 1970s about women who fight like crazed weasels has been validated!

Photo by Emmanuelle Grundmann.

Primate hunting by bonobos at LuiKotale, Salonga National Park [Coming Oct. 14 in Current Biology]

World Without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pruyn (1960)

How it happened: A mysterious illness kills off all the women in the world save a few.

How they reproduce: Unfortunately, all the women have been rendered barren, except one who was living in isolation during the plague.

How it works: The now largely male society becomes obsessed with the surviving women, with most states declaring martial law. Men who harass or assault women are shot, prostitution is legalized, and some countries require their remaining women to enter polyandrous marriages.

The White Plague by Frank Herbert (1982)

How it happened: A molecular biologist, driven mad by the loss of his wife and children by the IRA, concocts and releases a deadly biological weapon that affects only women.

How they reproduce: A very small handful of women were successfully inoculated against the plague.

How it works: The world returns to a semblance of stability, with the decimation of the female population finally uniting a once-divided world, a unity that extends to the sharing of breeding women like any other natural resource. Childbirth becomes the primary function of able women and is quickly commoditized, with women agreeing to carry the children of important military officials in exchange for protection and influence.

“A Man’s World” by Alan Moore (1985)

How it happened: The Culacaons are all naturally male.

How they reproduce: Through the act of “gamugha,” in which one party meets an unpleasant end.

How it works: The system works out fine for the Culacaon, but it can lead to some cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Hatching Stones by Anna Wilson (1991)

How it happens: When cloning becomes a technological feasibility, men find that they prefer cloning themselves to having natural-born children. Women become increasingly rare from generation to generation, until the few remaining women go into voluntary exile.

How they reproduce: Men have themselves cloned.

How it works: The men offer women exile to quell political tensions between men wish to employ cloning as the exclusive means of reproduction and women who seek a return to natural childbirth. The clones, who are portrayed as the product of their predecessors’ narcissism, live a happily hedonistic existence but suffer from a lack of personal identity.

The Disappearance by Philip Wylie (1951)

How it happened: A single dimension shifted suddenly and mysteriously in two, with one universe populated entirely with males and the other populated entirely with females.

How they reproduce: The universes remerge before it ever comes to that.

How it works: Neither dimension functions well without the other. The infrastructure and technological capabilities of the male universe remains intact, but violence breaks out around the world, forcing men to achieve their ends by force.

“The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal” by Cordwainer Smith (1964)

How it happened: On the planet Arachosia, feminity is carcinogenic, so one female scientist devises a way to make the entire population male.

How they reproduce: In making the females male, the scientist also ensures that humans on Arachosia continue by developing a system whereby males can carry male children, remaking humans as the klopt.

How it works: Without women, the klopt descend into a dysfunctional, nightmarish society filled with violence. Having not seen other humans in generations, they remember women as abominations, and consequently believed that all humans of the two-gendered variety should be destroyed.

The Guardians of the Universe (Green Lantern)

How it happened: The male Malthusians sought to combat evil and promote order in the universe, establishing orders such as the Green Lantern Corps. The female Malthusians, however, had no interest in meddling in the affairs of other species (or disapproved of the Guardians’ decision to suppress their emotions, depending on where you are in the continuity) and left the males to guard the universe alone.

How they reproduce: The Malthusians, known later as the Oans, are immortal and have no need to reproduce.

How it works: All goes well until a battle with Hal Jordan, under the influence of Parallax, destroys Oa and nearly all the Guardians. When Kyle Rayner, as the nearly omnipotent Ion, decides to resurrect the Guardians, he makes them male and female, deciding they could benefit from both perspectives.

Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)

How it happened: Believing that women have a demonic quality that inspires madness in men, a group of men settled on Athos to lead a monastic (though not asexual) existence free from women.

How they reproduce: Athos receives eggs from female donors on other planets. The eggs are then fertilized with Y chromosome-carrying sperm from the intended father, and implanted inside and birthed from a uterine replicator.

How it works: Athos represents one of fiction’s rare all-male utopias. Strongly family-oriented, men in the agrarian society form both romantic and platonic parenting relationships and tight-knit family units. But this society is preserved through strict controls on information. Men are taught from an early age that women of evil, monstrous beings, and all incoming news is heavily censored.

It turned out that men and women use exactly the same parts of their brains to engage in the imaginative exercise required to imagine, a future scenario. Even more intriguing was that both genders relied heavily on the Hippocampus, a part of the brain that's usually associated with memory. Write the authors in a study published earlier this year in the journal Hippocampus:

Behavioral, lesion and neuroimaging evidence show striking commonalities between remembering past events and imagining future events. In a recent event-related fMRI study, we instructed participants to construct a past or future event in response to a cue. Once an event was in mind, participants made a button press, then generated details (elaboration) and rated them. The elaboration of past and future events recruited a common neural network.