Define “collaborate”

Today’s Dilbert:

Alice gives a witheringly sarcastic response to the pointy-headed boss, supplying a definition of collaborate that unpacks some of the connotations of the word for her. The boss then puts her down by maintaining that she is uncooperative (she ought to “play well with others” by collaborating with Larry), and she counters by pulling out the gender assumptions in the boss’s observation (women are supposed to be cooperative and collaborative, men are supposed to be assertive and confident).

How ’bout them Cubbies?

Today’s Zippy:

So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?

(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)

More girlish chattiness

… in today’s Zits:

This is a topic that Scott and Borgman (somewhat wearisomely) just can’t leave alone. I do like the economical communication of Jeremy’s nonplussed state of mind, though.

 

On the sex / gender watch

On the heels of my little note on “Manly Deeds, Womanly Words” (a comment from John Baker notes that this is “the motto of the Calvert family “Fatti maschii parole femine” loosely translated [from Italian] as “Manly deeds, womanly words” ”) came two more items on male/female differences: a piece in the NYT Sunday Review on the 21st (“The Tangle of the Sexes” by Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis); and an Alex cartoon in the London Telegraph on men as rational, women as emotional.

Brief mention: men and women in Maryland

On a postcard (with a pile of images of and information about the state of Maryland) from Chris Ambidge on Saturday, the news that the state motto is

Manly Deeds, Womanly Words

Sigh: men act, women talk. At least in Maryland.

Side note: the Pinhead town of Dingburg is in Maryland.

 

Sex/gender symbols

From Kim Darnell on Facebook, a story from a year ago (4/17/12) about the adoption of a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish, with this handsome accompanying graphic:

  (#1)

The graphic has three interlinked components: The “female symbol” (or “mirror of Venus”), a circle (representing a body) with a cross below it (♀ in biological literature); the “male symbol” (or “spear of Mars”), a circle with an arrow at the upper right (♂ in biological literature); and a plain circle in the center, representing a body unspecified as to sex. Turning to grammatical gender rather than biological sex, the mirror of Venus represents feminine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun hon ‘she’), the spear of Mars the masculine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun han ‘he), and the plain circle the new gender-neutral 3sg Swedish pronoun hen).

A complexity here is that this symbol is sometimes taken to be a transgender symbol, the central circle represeting someone who in some sense is *both* female and male. And for this purpose there are a number of competing symbols.

Listening

Today’s Zits, once again on male/female differences:

The teenage predecessor to cartoon and sitcom husbands who don’t listen at all to what their wives are saying.

 

Finger talk

Today’s Zits, with Jeremy communicating with his fingers but not with his voice, to his mother’s dismay:

This could be about teenagers and their parents, or about the fabled laconic nature of boys (and men), or of course about both.

 

Gossip

Today’s Zits:

The stereotype is that women (especially girls) gossip about other people and their lives, but men (and boys) talk about weightier and more objective things, like politics and sports. Studies of talk among men in groups, as in college fraternities, don’t fully support the stereotype (google {gossip gender differences}: at least in some studies, women in groups do spend more time gossiping than men in groups, but men in groups gossip quite a lot.

Men’s and women’s brains in Dingburg

Today’s Zippy takes on differences between the sexes (at least in Dingburg):

Women affiliative, men competitive. (On telling the men from the women: the women wear earrings, the men do not.)

An assortment of names: Imelda as in Imelda Marcos; Izelda possibly a play on that, or an allusion to iZelda (an iPhone version of the game Zelda); Litvak ‘Lithuanian Jew’; beefeater ‘guard at the Tower of London’ (or Beefeater gin).