By Ági Szabo

It was 2017, my postdoc fellowship was coming to an end and I was looking for opportunities to stay in academia in Aotearoa/New Zealand. A permanent job was advertised at the university I was working at: Lecturer in Health Psychology. The focus of the position was clear, applicants needed to be critical health scholars. I had spent two years doing critical health research, publishing in the top journals of my field, so I was confident I fit the job description. I mentioned to a colleague that I was planning to apply for the role. She told me not to apply. Her advice, kindly meant, was: “Don’t bother, you are wasting your time. They will never hire a quantitative researcher. You won’t even get shortlisted.” I was taken aback by her comments.

By Wendy Stainton Rogers

“Resisting the Darwinian Phallocracy” – Don’t you just love the language?! It’s from a new book out by Lucy Cooke, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution & the Female Animal and is full of sass like that. With a Masters in Zoology and tutored by Richard Dawkins, she explains:

I was taught that this apparently trivial disparity in our sex cells laid cast-iron biological foundations for sexual inequality. “It is possible to interpret all other differences between the sexes as stemming from this one basic difference,” Dawkins told us. “Female exploitation begins here.”

Male animals led swashbuckling lives of thrusting agency. They fought one another over leadership or possession of females. They shagged around indiscriminately, propelled by a biological imperative to spread their seed far and wide. And they were socially dominant; where males led, females meekly followed. A female’s role was as selfless mother, naturally; as such, maternal efforts were deemed all alike: we had zero competitive edge. Sex was a duty rather than a drive.

And as far as evolution was concerned it was males who drove the bus of change. We females could hop on for a ride thanks to shared DNA, as long as we promised to keep nice and quiet.

Lucy Cooke

By Siobhán Healy-Cullen

When I embarked on my doctoral research in 2018 I was interested in how young people made sense of gendered images in online pornography. I was also interested in what caregivers and teachers thought about young people’s pornography use. A new, in vogue,  term called “porn literacy” caught my eye. In those  early stages of the project, I thought “Sounds good… Why not talk to young people about pornography!? It’s clearly something many young people engage with, and to ignore or censor it would be like other prohibitive interventions, which haven‘t worked!” However, as I explored  the notion of “porn literacy”, it became plain to me that the ways pornography, young people and their pornography viewing are thought about invariably shapes porn literacy as an educational response.

Our blog has been running since 2015 and had many people pitching in to keep it a blog for the Society by the Society. Our latest blog co-editors have just been announced at the latest ISCHP conference. As it happens, all three are kiwis studying health psychology at Massey University. You can read more about them in this post.

By Abel Polese, June 2021

Abel’s post discusses the implications of Plan S, which requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state funding in member countries to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all (thanks, Wikipedia).

Anthony Idowu Ajayi, African Population and Health Research Center; Boniface Ushie, African Population and Health Research Center, and Caroline Kabiru, African Population and Health Research Center

There has been tremendous growth in the number of studies on sexual and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa in the past two decades. Notably, there has been an increase in research documenting what works in improving adolescents’ health and wellbeing.

However, the use of findings from these studies to inform the development of policies is low. For example, research shows that educating young people about their sexuality and giving them access to contraceptive methods has lifelong benefits. But few sub-Saharan African countries have enacted laws or policies that follow through on the evidence.

As a result of this inaction, adolescents continue to experience early unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and other poor health outcomes.

By Tracy Morison, March 2021

I no longer have any illusions of myself as a creative writer. I was disabused of this notion very early in my academic life after receiving feedback on a chapter I wrote for an interdisciplinary book. The editor was an English professor and published poet. After providing kind feedback on two drafts in which he politely encouraged me to be more expressive, he announced flatly that my writing style was ‘very soc sci’. He was not wrong. Our training as social scientists, and especially psychologists I think, rewards clarity, conciseness, and coherence (the social scientist’s holy trinity) but doesn’t foster creative expression. Yet, there are those rare (infuriating) scholars whose prose is pleasurable, provocative, and effective. It is possible, apparently!