Gender and Sex

“Can The Princess Treatment Go Too Far?” Answer: No, If Your Ethics Alarms Function…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I heard the term “The Princess Treatment” for the first time last week, then right on cue the New York Times produced a feature called, “Can the ‘Princess Treatment’ Go Too Far? A popular video has prompted discussions about how to treat your significant other, what qualifies as “the bare minimum” and how this all relates to traditional gender roles.” It begins in part,

A husband opening the car door for his wife. A boyfriend surprising his girlfriend with flowers. Remembering her birthday. Tying her shoes. Paying for her nail appointment. Are these normal expectations or examples of the “princess treatment”? A recent slew of popular videos on social media have debated the concept, and what it means for women in relationships…Last week, Courtney Palmer, 37, reignited that discussion with a video that has garnered more than three million views. In it, she describes how princess treatment informs her relationship, including how she will sometimes defer to her husband. “If I am at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food,” she says in the opening of the nearly six-minute video, which has prompted a wide-ranging discussion about gender roles, restaurant etiquette and relationship expectations…

You can read it all: it’s a stupid debate. Not only with “significant others” but with all women (and, for that matter all men), how I treat them in private and social situations is based on 1) how I would like to be treated, Golden Rule 101, 2) how I have been told or discerned that they would like to be treated, and 3) what I have concluded is basic manners, and ethical societal norms that I believe should be cultivated. Why is this hard? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day 2, “All That Jazz” Edition: “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I never know when a relatively obscure topic will strike a chord and produced a bumper crop of terrific comments. “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”turned out to be such a post. Here is the second standout response, a Comment of the Day by johnburger 2013 on the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

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Here I thought Berklee College of Music was a serious institution. Silly me. Any institution with the following mission statement should be dismissed:

“The mission of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice is to support and sustain a cultural transformation in jazz, with the commitment to recruit, teach, mentor, and advocate for musicians seeking to study or perform jazz, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles.” (emphases added).

Just out of curiosity, what the hell does “gender justice” mean and what does it have to do with vamping in E flatMinor? Do we only study songs written by women? Do women prefer major modalities over augmented fifths? Do women avoid playing the F#maj13add4addflat7 chord?

Music is the one medium where gender and race are monumentally irrelevant. Is Within Temptation fantastic because the lead singer is a woman? No. The combo is great because their music is complex and full of surprises. The Warning (my most recent favorite band) isn’t great because it consists of three Mexican sisters. No. They are great because their music is intricate and heavy. The fact that they started out very young and have gained world-wide recognition as a family band is interesting but they are phenomenal musicians and songwriters. Kiki Wongo isn’t great because she is a woman, but because she has talent and tone, and can melt your heart or tear your face off with her guitar playing (Smashing Pumpkins realized her greatness when they selected her out of 10s of thousands of applicants for their lead guitarist on their latest tours). Linda Ronstadt wasn’t great because she is a woman; she was great because her voice compelled attention and takes you on all kinds of sonic adventures. [Editor’s note: Linda cannot sing any more because of Parkinson’s, but she was indeed great, and is still a great interview.)

As for “racial justice,” does that mean that only minorities are allowed to play jazz? Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are not considered jazz geniuses because they were African American. No, they were great because they wrote and played the vocabulary for modern jazz. What about Buddy Rich? Was rich great because he was white? Hardly: he is great because he could play drums like nobody’s business and had a sublime sense of rhythm.

UPenn Capitulates in the Trans Swimming Scandal, If In a Weaselly Way…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Well, it’s still progress. Conservative, Trump cheer-leading outlets are pushing the “So much winning!” line, but anyone progressive, conservative or otherwise who couldn’t see that UPenn’s “transitioning” swimmer Lia Thomas (above: guess right or left) was a cheat had his or her brain eaten by the Woke Virus.

UPenn announced yesterday that it would no longer allow transgender women to compete on its women’s sports teams and erased Thomas’ records from UPenn’s list of all-time school records in women’s swimming. “Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season,” the UPenn weasels injected as a footnote. That’s part of UPenn’s spin. A cheating swimming coach (who should be fired) let Thomas, a mediocre male swimmer who saw a loophole to exploit, be the star of the women’s team to enhance his coaching record. But UPEnn could get away with it then, so it was all right.

The change in policy was part of an agreement reached with the Education Department yesterday about two months after the department found that Penn had violated Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, when it allowed transgender athletes to compete on women’s sports teams. The Trump administration had frozen millions of dollars in federal funding for the school over its transgender athlete policies. AUTOCRACY! No, this is called “using legitimate government power for justice and the public good.” As part of the deal, UPenn says it will “apologize” to the women placed at a competitive disadvantage by its allowing a penised swimmer with male-puberty musculature to slaughter competing female swimmers in one pool after another last year.

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Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I would say that DEI has more rapidly than most reached the final evolutionary stage noted by philosopher Eric Hoffer, who famously observed that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The problem with that is that DEI was never a great cause to begin with. However, it has definitely entered its racket stage, and maybe its certifiably insane stage. Behold…

Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice—no, I’m not making that up— at Boston’s Berklee College of Music has issued the results of a study that claims to show that because “male-identified jazz educators” outnumber “female-identified counterparts” six to one, it is proof that jazz “remains predominantly male due to a biased system.” The Institute’s website asks,“What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?” One wag’s answer: “Probably like nothing at all.”

Indeed most jazz musicians and composer are male. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if any variation from demographic equality proves bias, oppression and discrimination in your DEI worldview, then this phenomenon is sinister. Researcher Lara Pellegrinelli PhD is an “ethnomusicologist” who contributed to the study. She blathers, “To identify each jazz faculty member by gender, we examined the pronouns we encountered in these sources—and found only “he” and “she” in reference to the educators in our study. This is why we use the terminology “female-identified” and “male-identified” for our data, as opposed to sex assigned at birth or the descriptors “female-identifying” and “male-identifying,” which suggests a more active process of participant self-identification.”

Oh.

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Mahmoud v. Taylor: No, LBGTQ Indoctrination Is Not The Theory of Evolution

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

…and shame on the three Progressive, woke Justices who are implying that it is.

24-297 Mahmoud v. Taylor (06/27/2025), just handed down by the Supreme Court, should have been an easy 9-0 decision. Sadly, the three female radicals on the Court (I once had high hopes for Justice Kagan, who’s not, you know, an idiot like the other two, but she clearly has been brain-washed with Clorox or something, so the tally was 6-3) opposed the holding that families choosing not to have their children exposed to pro-gay, bi-, trans, etc propaganda in their public school classes have a right to do so. (At least the majority didn’t say parents have an obligation to do so, which would have been my position.)

The decision declared illegal a Maryland school board’s decision to deny opt-outs for religious students during such scintillating in-class readings as “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” a story about a child’s gay uncle marrying a man, and “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a dog who gets lost at a gay pride parade. Incredibly, the lower court and Court of Appeals had sided with the school against a group of Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox parents who argued that the school board’s lack of an opt-out policy breached their right to exercise their religion under the First Amendment.

“The Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion,” Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote for the conservative majority. “[F]or many people of faith across the country, there are few religious acts more important than the religious education of their children…In the absence of an injunction, the parents will continue to be put to a choice: either risk their child’s exposure to burdensome instruction, or pay substantial sums for alternative educational services.”

To read the hysterical dissent from the three knee-jerk progressives, SCOTUS just returned to the bad old days of Tennessee v. Scopes (1925), when a state made it illegal to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution because it contradicted the Bible (as Clarence Darrow showed by making a monkey out of William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand, Darwin didn’t and doesn’t).

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Message to Simone Biles: “Shut Up and Vault!”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It shouldn’t matter than cute little Simone Biles isn’t very bright. She’s a talented gymnast, and has parlayed that skill into a fortune, a brand, and enough fame to last her a while. There was that choking episode at the 2020 Olympics, but never mind: she’s won enough championships and medals to qualify as one of the all-time greats.

Unfortunately, Biles, like so many other jocks and celebrities,, has let her popularity and acclaim in a very narrow field go to her head. She thinks she has something to contribute to national debates that have nothing to do with floor exercises and the balance beam, and she doesn’t. I’d love to know what books, if any, Biles has read while being essentially a full time gymnast since she was knee-high to a praying mantis. The fact that she never attended high school (she was home-schooled) and eventually got a college degree from a non-profit, online college doesn’t mean Simone necessarily is lacking in critical thinking skills, but her engaging in a name-calling battle with Riley Gaines—the former competitive swimmer who has become a critic of trans men who still have to shave every morning throttling girls and women in women’s sports because they can— does.

To begin with, Gaines is smart, articulate and knows her topic. Biles’ contribution to the debate has consisted of social media posts the equivalent of “Oh yeah?” and “Well, I’m better at my sport than you were at yours, so there!” Here’s one…

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Who Says The Supreme Court Is Partisan On Every Issue?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments


The Supreme Court yesterday sided 8-0 with a straight (okay, “cis”) woman in Ohio who filed a “reverse discrimination” lawsuit against her employer after her boss declined to promote her, preferring to promote “rainbow” staffers. In a unanimous ruling written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Justices agreed that a federal appeals court in Cincinnati erred by imposing a tougher standard for the case brought by Marlean Ames to move forward than if Ames had been a member of a minority group. 

The appellant, a straight, white woman, had filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that she had been the victim of employment discrimination based on her not being gay. The department had hired a lesbian for the position that she had sought, she contended, as well as a gay man to replace her after she was demoted.  The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit threw out Ames’s sexual orientation claim, arguing that her claim could not go forward unless she could show “background circumstances” to support her allegations of reverse discrimination, such as a “pattern” of reverse discrimination. 

SCOTUS reversed, sending the case back to the lower court. Federal employment discrimination law, Jackson explained, prohibits intentional discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Period. Minorities have no more intrinsic grounds to claim discrimination than majority groups.

Thank you!

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It’s About Time: CNN Gets Called On Its “It Isn’t What It Is” Rhetorical Dishonesty and Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

and…

Good.

All ethical and aware Americans should treat their Axis-supporting friends, relatives and colleagues similarly. What both Miller and Hamill did was to label propaganda what it really was, and not allow it to falsely present itself as “journalism.”

Stop Making Me Defend the Supreme Court!

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Almost a year ago, Ethics Alarms discussed the case of Liam Morrison (above), a seventh grader who was told that his “There are only two genders” T-shirt was inappropriate as school attire. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a District Court decision from 2023 that the Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts didn’t violate Liam’s First Amendment rights by telling him to change his shirt.

Chief Justice David Barron, writing for the Court, concluded that “the question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them – educators or federal judges.” He continued, “We cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to use rather than to the educators closest to the scene.”

I wrote, in a post agreeing with the decision both ethically and legally,

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In a Competitive Commencement Season, Evelyn Harris Makes a Strong Bid For Most Unethical Speech of 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Favorites Tim Walz, Scott Pelley and Kermit the Frog may have fallen to an underdog: “musician and activist” Evelyn Harris (whoever she is) may have succeeded in embarrassing her host school the most of all with her 2025 commencement speech.

For some reason, Smith College, which has apparently become too woke to function, included Harris, a relatively obscure singer (but more importantly, an activist) among its all female honorees this year. The most prominent one of these would probably be far-left historian Danielle Allen, who has several items in her Ethics Alarms dossier. Or maybe it would be the (historic!) highest ranking trans official in US history, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Rachel Levine, one of Biden’s DEI appointments. Then there was new age-y guru Preeti Simran Sethi, the only one of the four who is a Smith grad. All of these, however, whatever their issues, at least managed to compose their own speech to give to the graduates.

Harris didn’t. Smith officials learned that her entire speech had been cribbed from other sources without attribution (you know, like Joe Biden once did), and had to inform the Smith community that it had been deceived. “It has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients — musician Evelyn M. Harris — borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity,” the letter read in part.

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