Gumby wrote:soldierwhy wrote:JAB wrote:BTW, I hope someone saved the youtube of RW's talk.
This one?
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(Not my YouTube account BTW)
Every other word out of her mouth is "uh". Punctuated by countless annoying giggles and expectant pauses while she waits for laughs from the audience. Her speaking cadence is atrocious. This is a public speaker? Someone please tell me again why Watson is popular?
I can't stand to listen to her for more than a minute or so. Her talks are a nails-on-chalkboard combination of embarrassingly poor delivery, annoying mannerisms, and self-referential narcissism that's devoid of content.
The FtB wagon-circling is extremely entertaining, though. Interesting that Zvan mentions Sarah Blaffer Hrdy as one of the "approved" researchers. Hrdy was a visiting professor at my undergrad uni, in the Anthropology department (one of my majors). She's well-respected for her work on mother-infant interactions and mate choice in primates, and I can see how her research and writings could be twisted to fit the FtB narrative on the patriarchy. Here's an [url=
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/s ... }interview with Hrdy[/url] by Eric Michael Johnson; as a Houstonian myself, I found her experience growing up there to be very different from mine:
"This was a very segregated and really quite patriarchal society," Hrdy tells me from her home at Citrona Farms near the University of California, Davis, where she held a chair in anthropology until her retirement. "Growing up in Houston was a lot like growing up in South Africa."
When she later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, first to attend Radcliffe College and then graduate school at Harvard University, Hrdy embarked on a distinguished 40-year career as a primatologist and evolutionary theorist who would come to challenge - and ultimately transcend - an interpretation of Darwinian biology still moored in Victorian attitudes about gender and the role of mothers in natural history. But it would be Hrdy's early years in southeast Texas and her unconventional career path as she tried to balance work and family that would ultimately inspire her ideas and motivate her to persevere.
As the third daughter born into a wealthy family - Hrdy's paternal grandfather, Robert L. Blaffer, was a founder of the Humble Oil Company, which later merged with Standard Oil of New Jersey to become Exxon - her surroundings were permeated by distinctly "Southern" genteel values, especially where women's roles were concerned. But she was also subject to the prevailing attitudes in child psychology of the time, which regarded overt expressions of love and affection as a parental weakness that could spoil a child's character.
Some of the difference in our experiences can be attributed to generational factors (I'm 15 years younger than Hrdy), but I think the socioeconomic contrasts are more important. She's from an extremely wealthy family of Texas oil barons, so of course her childhood environment was quite segregated and sheltered. Likely she attended private schools in Houston, rather than the socioeconomically diverse and integrated public (US definition) schools that I attended in the suburbs and inner city. I was also raised in a solidly middle-class environment, by hippie academician parents who were influenced by the works of Piaget, Montessori, and Harlow = lots of unstructured creative playtime, attachment parenting, and alloparenting. I'm using this mundane anecdotal comparison to once again point out that the FtBers continue to project a very narrow socioeconomic experience on everyone they encounter, and repeatedly fail to consider perspectives and experiences that are substantially different from their own. They engage in a lot of egocentric thinking.