My daughter is too clever to become a feminist

My daughter is too clever to become a feminist.  That’s a good sentence.  I like that sentence; it says something, but I suspect it does not say what many will have read in to it.  Modern feminism is bankrupt; morally bankrupt and empty of purpose.  Florence is clever and will see it for what it is, so will not claim to be amongst it.  You’re still not there are you?

I have noticed in many bio’s on social networks a common meme of young women who chirpily say they like this and that, and do a silly pose in their picture, and oh also, they are a feminist.  It’s such an afterthought that I suspect that most of these people are simply women who expect to be treated equally, and not sexualised arbitrarily.  All fair, but also, all normal these days.  Sexism does exist, but that is a personal thing, a personality thing, specific to an individual due to upbringing, and peers.  It is not what it used to be; systematic, or institutional, or a legal framework.  Expect in cleaning product adverts.  Have you ever seen a man using a hoover in any of those ads?  It’s always a woman smiling in her domesticity, who cleans wearing heels.  Personally, I like hoovering, and I have a method for doing my stairs which requires six separate passes, but then I’m an engineer and I think like that.

The current generation of women have rights, and privileges, freedoms and empowerments, that no duchess could have matched a century ago.  Attitudes and expectations of both men and women have changed permanently, at least in this country.  In its formative years feminism, like trade unionism, had very valid and real reasons to exist.  The industrial revolution brought jobs, and wealth, and suffering, and exploitation of a magnitude not seen before or since in Britain.  Thanks to those early days of unionism, I and the rest of the work force, enjoy a great many rights and securities.  These days, as a post industrial economy trying to compete globally, trade unions seem to act as an anchor more often than a way of driving wide spread changes for the future.  Feminism showed us how our society was bias towards the men in it, how our language and grammar, our laws, and our everyday social etiquette, reinforced that bias.  It showed the inequalities that existed, not just because of traditional attitudes, but because the law was structured to promote inequality.  But now it’s all changed, at least here, in the democratic secular west.  The vast majority of women on this planet have nothing in comparison.  Feminism has become women in very comfortable bubbles complaining that someone else might have a slightly more comfortable bubble.  It’s been reduced to picking over amendments to paragraphs of employment law.  The big fight here is over, and it’s not women who have won, it’s everybody.  A fairer society is simply superior to an unfair one.

It’s like animal rights.  Britain has the most ethically driven regulatory framework in the world.  We are the gold standard, but those campaigning for laboratory animals keep going after work done in the UK.  If they really cared they should be saying to the world, ‘why are your standard so low compared to these?  You should match or exceed them’.  That would help a numerically larger group of animals, permanently.  Of course that would require them to think.  Since I’m sure some of them must have been ill at some stage and used some sort of medicine, they are clearly either hypocrites or idiots.

I’m not comparing the rights of women with animals, nor likening feminists to antivivisectionists; it is a simile to highlight that a cause can become so committed to the struggle that it loses all sight of the larger context, until the struggle becomes meaningless.

Yes, it is true that our democratic system, and our boardrooms are unrepresentative of a country where 51% of the population is female, and it needs to be fixed.  But it can’t be done with quotas, or positive discrimination.  That either leaves men thinking a woman is present as a ‘token’, or leaves women thinking they are not there because of their merits.

No matter whether a man or a woman, all of us in Britain can live where we wish, work where we wish, marry whom we choose, including no one.  We can be educated as we choose, express whatever sexuality we choose, and hopefully soon have any type of permanent relationship celebrated as marriage.  Gender is no longer a factor in entitlement to these choices; money is the main factor now, but only here, in the secular democratic west.  For millions of women across the world, where they live is decided by their father, who practically owns them, until it’s time to marry them off, when their new owner takes over the decisions.  They’re not educated because why would you bother educating a woman, and they’re not allowed to work because that’s not what they are for.  Feminists here do nothing about this, because it’s a long way away, and they’re foreign and you can’t expect any more from them can you?  And that is moral bankruptcy.  If you believe it is right for a British woman to have these rights, you believe it is right for all woman to have them.

I’m the father of a daughter and I don’t expect anything to be withheld from her, I think that she will far exceed me.  She will do things I am incapable of, and have opportunities I never got a glimpse of.  I’m a white, middle class, western male; I’m a member of the least oppressed group in human history.  But I don’t expect her to know her place; I expect her to forge her place.  And my society will not be what stands in her way; that will be the limitations that she places on herself, as we all do.

I recently did my first gig as a STEM ambassador, explaining to a group of sixteen year olds why they might like a career in networking.  I think I did ok; they stayed awake, and asked some decent questions.  No one hacked in to my laptop; I had it running Wireshark, on the internet, with no firewall, so I had no exciting demonstration to finish on.  Oh well, you can’t have it all.

I spoke to two groups of twenty, and there was one girl in each.  There needs to be more, but this will come from a change in attitude.  You don’t need to fight for it, you need to encourage it.  And attitudes are changing.  I’ve been in engineering for nearly twenty years, and I’ve met more woman engineers and scientists in the last five than the previous fifteen.  By the time Florence hits university and needs to make choices about her direction, it will be more common still.

We should acknowledge and celebrate the changes that the battle for equality has made to our society, and build on the hard won rights we enjoy, and guard them jealously.  Feminism won because it was right, but fighting the good fight after victory is commonly acknowledged can even be counterproductive.

Instead of hounding a society that agrees with them, to be taken seriously feminism should be going after Catholicism and Islam, the two largest organised abusers of woman on the planet.  But that means banging the atheist drum, which it won’t do as it is afraid of been called racist; despite religion not been a race.  As others have pointed out, anything you can convert to, or from, is not a race.  For a movement that overturned centuries of accepted social norms and conventions, they seem unwilling to overturn the convention that religion is special, and deserves protection, rights, and privileges from society.  People have rights, whether man or woman, but ideas do not.  The societies that reduce the status of women most are the ones that elevate religion most.  The idea that this is acceptable must be challenged, and the faith that inspires the idea must be challenged too.   Religion will of course lash out at such a challenge, as reason is its biggest enemy.  It would be a hard fight, and I would support it, but there is no sign of it.

That is why Florence will not be a feminist, unless she invents a new type of feminism, which she is perfectly entitled to do, and that, in itself, is possibly the point.

You need to grow a brain

We’ve just had a half term and it was good.  The weather conspired to keep us indoors a fair bit, but we found things to do and as always with Florence, I had a good time, and so did she.  And we didn’t just sit around watching telly.  This is in part because I don’t let her; in fact I’m very restrictive on how much she gets to watch.  I have certain brain development issues, or I would have if I could make any damn sense out of the science.

Now, if you ignore Susan Greenfield, and every living being on the planet should, then it is not at all clear cut what effect, if any, exposure to all this technology has on young minds.  Unlike Greenfield, a number of proper scientists have published the results of studies about brain development in very young children and the impact of screen time.

The summary is that in early life a number of behavioural traits are established, and that expectations about stimulus are set.  If a toddler has lots of television and computer games, then this interaction sets a pattern of dependency, reinforced by the dopamine released by the colourful, fast moving, sound tracked, stimulation on the screen.  If a child can watch as much telly as they want, they will want more and more leading to damaged behaviour and poor concentration skills; the digital babysitter gives your child ADHD.

Only that doesn’t seem right, not completely.  It’s too simplistic, and even though I am not a behavioural neurologist, I know that is not how dopamine works in detail.  This relates to what I have said before about science been a framework of ideas that all interlock and interact.  Sometimes, I find that when research focuses on one aspect of one effect in one group, the results when considered in a wider context don’t ring true.  Dopamine has a range of functions in the brain, but its main one appears to be as a motivator, not as a reward in itself.  If you eat food, and it’s nice, then you release dopamine.  If you fall down the stairs and break your leg and it hurts, you release dopamine.  In the first instance it is to encourage you to eat, and not starve, in the second it is to be more careful in future.

Animals altered not to produce dopamine will starve to death in the presence of food, as they make no effort at all to obtain it.  We think of eating as the most basic and powerful of instincts, but instinct doesn’t exist; it’s just the name we give to chemical pathways that evolved so long ago everything has them.

Interestingly, if you receive a reward you expected then you get no dopamine.  Children like to watch the same thing over and over; they are famous for it.  All parents have a DVD they can cite as having seen a hundred times.  Once you have learnt all the songs in a Disney film and jump and sing to them all, you are not getting dopamine, you getting something else, they used to say serotonin, but that’s in doubt now too.

And indeed there are published studies which say screen time does not damage social skills and emotional development.  These studies still recommend restricting screen time, but only because they highlight it’s not the screen, it’s the lack of socialising that causes problems.  The screen is a symptom as much as the short attention or bad behaviour.

Florence is very social.  She loves to talk to anyone, and will play with any children she comes across give even a small chance.  In Tesco she likes to wait for me on the benches they have behind the checkouts.  If there are any other children around, she will head straight to the bench they are on and sit down next to them with her big grin in place.  I’ve seen a few surprised kids in there, but they all seem to get it in the end, and make a game of running between benches, then waiting so they can climb on together, before running back to the first one.

At the moment Florence totally loves Snow White and has seen it dozens of times.  I have to admit that sometimes she has watched the whole thing on her own, as the reality of single parenting makes it almost unavoidable.  But normally she is only allowed to watch half of it, and I will watch parts of it with her.  When Snow White is running through the scary wood, Flo likes to tell me ‘it’s ok daddy, the animals aren’t scary’.  We both shout ‘Boo’ at the queen every time she appears as the wicked old lady, and we cry ‘go Grumpy!’ when the dwarfs rush to her rescue.

Another favourite is dancing to the start of the Octonauts.  I love the Octonauts, and I wish I could be more like Captain Barnacles; I’m not awesome enough, but I’m trying.  During the half term I took her swimming.  I try and take her swimming every weekend, but I have to say it is more an ambition than a reality.  This time, when we got to the pool we found it closed for maintenance.  Presumable somebody, a genius of some sort, decided to close it during half term as no one could possible want to use it that week?  I was going to go home, but then I realised Captain Barnacles wouldn’t go home, so we drove forty minutes to a bigger better pool.

‘Florence, let’s do this!’

Over the last week her nap has gone all over the place.  It is meant to be at one o’clock, and my child-minder manages this with almost perfect regularity, but with me, one can sometime mean two, or three, or ten past four on the train back from the Natural History museum.  To her immense credit, she doesn’t seem to mind, and as she gets older she gets more and more adaptable to events around her.

The next big adaptation is dropping the nap, which I had been thinking about until recently.  But now I have decided to keep it going as long as is logistically possible, in to school even.  She clearly still needs it as she almost always goes off with no trouble at all in the afternoon, and if we have a day with lots of people or actions, then she’s even quicker to drop off.

Learning and sleeping are intimately linked.  There is significant evidence that sleep directly affects the performance of long term memory, which is in essence where we store our learning.  Evidence of changes to short term memory seems less conclusive, although if children are taught a new skill and then asked to repeat the action later, if they’ve had a nap meantime, their reliability consistently increases.

Florence is, in a very real sense, tying to grow a brain.  One that I hope will eventually blow the doors off my feeble efforts at cogent reasoning.  This is why I would like to understand more about what is potentially happening in that most fascinating and impenetrable of organs.

Until recently I would have said, along with most others, that our best way in would be observing the brain working directly through fMRI.  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging can detect areas of the brain that are consuming more oxygen in near real time.  By devising psychological tests for volunteers to perform while inside the MRI machine, it is possible to see which areas of the brain are associated with different cognitive activates.  As ever when it comes to the brain, it’s not that simple.  fMRI only gives you useful information if you can remove the noise from the signal you are looking for.  The brain is a noisy place with lots of totally unrelated activity going on during your experiment.  Removing the noise is essentially a statistical process, and it seems to have gone wrong.

Returning to the interconnectedness of different parts of science, as the techniques and possibilities in one area grow they run in to other areas, and whole new fields of research spring up.  Quantum biology is a good example, where biologists have found problems only quantum physics can solve, and physicists have found new ways to perform their experiments biologically, rather than cryogenically.  Well fMRI has started attracting researchers from other areas who bring their own mathematical tools with them.  Unfortunately rather than expanding what fMRI can do, it has mainly served to highlight errors the subject may have been making all along.  This culminated with a rather public demonstration where established neurological statistic tools where used to show activity in the brain of a fish.  The fish having been bought from the fish counter of a supermarket a few hours earlier.  Some estimates suggest that as much as ninety percent of existing data may be corrupted.

For me there is a clear historical parallel.  I have seen fMRI used to make some very bold claims about very specific but complex mental processes.  A few years ago this was common in genetics.  We were subject to regular headlines about the gene for crime or the gene for autism.  Now we know enough about the scale of complexity of interaction of the proteins and enzymes our genes code for, to know that such black and white statements are nonsense.  The claims made by fMRI recently are like someone claiming to have found the gene for speaking French or for parallel parking.

As ever with science, if existing hypotheses are shown not to work they will be replaced with superior hypotheses.  Until then I will have to keep reading the literature and applying common sense.  Make sure that Florence’s experiences and situations are as varied and interesting as I can reliably manage.  And treat studies saying how I’m harming my child with a healthy dose of scepticism.