Quality of life? Oh, not *your* life.

 1 Response »
May 112007
 

Chris Clarke very succinctly gets to the not-so-hidden sexism behind the nostalgia for “quality of life”.

Though it goes beyond neo-environmentalism and caretaking; scratch an argument about the good old days when life was less impersonal and hurried, and you’ll find someone bitching that women aren’t doing more of the heavy lifting. “Families don’t sit down to dinner anymore”? Mom isn’t home and expected to have a hot meal on the table for everybody, 7 days a week, 364 days a year. (Mothers’ Day is her day off. That’s why you take Mom out to brunch, or make her breakfast in bed–it’s a reverse-holiday, where everybody cooks for and waits on Mom for a single day of the year.) “Parents are overworked and don’t have time with their children”? Why the hell isn’t Mom holding down a nice part-time job for butter-and-egg money?

The only thing I hear less of is whining about ‘latchkey kids’, because it’s turned into whining about daycare. And we all know whose fault it is that the children are in daycare. Certainly not Daddy’s.

 Posted by mythago at 7:04 am

Repost: The Only Girl in the Room

 7 Responses »
May 112007
 

On the laments of women who insist they really, truly would like more female friends, but are baffled as to how to make any.

As always when I play Answer Bitch, I will be happy to give you the complete truth that you didn’t want to hear, and are now mad at me for sharing instead of making up fluffy white lies.

You are as sexist as any Modern Neanderthal Man. Yes, you are. Oh, sure, you fervently believe that women ought to get paid as much as men and have the same job opportunities, and you’d kill anyone who suggests that you find computers baffling just because you’re a girl.

But most women…oh, well, they’re petty and they backstab and they giggle and think about their nail polish. That’s just how women are. MNM says the same thing, by the way: if you point out to him that you’re smart and can do math, he’ll agree that sure, you are special, but that’s just you, not most women. Which leads us into the second problem:

You like being special. You get an ego boost out of being the only girl around all the cool guys. You’re the woman chosen as funny, smart, elite, geeky, non-frivolous, whatever. Maybe they call you an “honorary guy”. If just any woman could be admired as an equal, where would you be?

You don’t call your guy friends on their shit. Part of being sexist is buying into the idea that male > female, and that annoying guy behavior is forgiveable while annoying girl behavior is deadly. Girl talks about eyeshadow? Off the guest list. Guy talks about football? Rolling of eyes, maybe, but he’s still your buddy. And of course, we must judge all women by the actions of a few:

I’ve been manipulated, sabotaged, and backstabbed by women in the past. The closest woman in my life, my mother, is a mental basketcase and the queen of guilt and manipulation.

If a man said this as a reason why he shuns female friends, you’d tear him a new one. If a woman said that she couldn’t stand men because they were obnoxious, sexist, paternalistic and she was sick of having her ass grabbed, you’d be sympathetic, but you’d also be thinking she was overgeneralizing and being unfair to the good guys. Yet this is an acceptable rationale for cutting women out of your life–some of them are bitches!

I actually just have a hard time relating to women and I recently realized that I actually treat some of them with suspicion, as the only chick in my office who’s close to my age just came over to chat for 2 minutes and I found myself continually questioning why she was here and what she was trying to find out by talking to me.

Has this woman done anything weird or offputting? Well, yes. She actually, if you can believe it, came over to chat. That’s, like, as if she was trying to make friends or something!

And believe me: the kind of woman you claim you want to be friends with, the smart one who isn’t petty and backstabbing, who is cool and friendly and won’t forget you exist when she gets a boyfriend? That “I’m the Queen of the Guys, get away from me, suspicious female!” might as well be painted on your furrowed brow.

Simple way to make female friends: stop the sexist attitude where you see men as human beings first, and women as females first. Don’t value the applause of your guy friends as the highest measure of your having overcome your unfortunate female genetic tendency towards pink things and giggling. Assume that women, like men, are capable of being assholes; they’re also capable of being pretty damn cool people.

If you really want to, that is. Perhaps you don’t.

 Posted by mythago at 6:47 am

Man-to-man advice

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Apr 132007
 

Chris Clarke has some helpful suggestions for gentlemen who wish to discuss sexual harassment, gender on the Internet and stalking in a rational, dispassionate manner.

 Posted by mythago at 7:36 pm

On saying “no”: The Next Generation

 2 Responses »
Mar 312007
 

A recent conversation came to mind apropos of threads at Pandagon and Hugo Schwyzer’s blog.

Eldest Daughter: Mama, I think I might have been a little too blunt at school today.

Me: OK, what happened?

ED: Well, see, this boy asked me if I want to go out with him–

Me: You’re too young to ‘go out’ with boys.

ED: Mooooom! I know! Anyway, so I told him, “No.” That was too blunt, huh?

Me: You didn’t say it in a snotty way, like “ew, no way, not you,” right?

ED: No.

Me: Then there’s no problem. It was a yes or no question. I guess “no thank you” would have been a little more polite, but just no is fine.

ED: Okay….really?

Me: Really.

 Posted by mythago at 7:43 pm

“They want women out of their worlds”

 2 Responses »
Mar 292007
 

Among many other good posts in the blogosphere about the harassment of Kathy Sierra is Violet Blue’s piece in the SF Chronicle–correctly pointing out that this isn’t an issue of one tech clique hatin’ on another, but a fairly typical example of the mentality of boys who love computers because computers, unlike women, don’t turn around and refuse to fuck you.

As the old-timers know, of course, this isn’t new to the blogosphere end of the tech world. (Usenet, anyone?) It’s the same old same old: a certain damaged segment of the geek community getting its patriarchy on, and using technology to carry out their hate fantasies instead of their weak, pasty little fists.

Perhaps some of them should learn that their house addresses show up on Google Earth, too.

 Posted by mythago at 9:47 am

“Activist” courts – criminal division

 10 Responses »
Jan 202007
 

Via Pandagon, the story of Julie Amero, who was obviously railroaded for the crime of failing to erase porn spam pop-ups that mysteriously appeared on a school computer while she was a substitute teacher.

Right? Well, it’s hard to tell from the Pandagon or Alternet articles, which are less about what actually happened and more about righteous indignation that somebody would be convicted of showing porn to 12-year-olds; they’ve already seen porn anyway. And she wasn’t allowed to prove that somebody else surfed onto porn sites. Besides, the school should have stopped it with filters, and somehow, this is patriarchal oppression or something.

My lawyer sense started tingling when I noticed that Amanda had skipped over one very interesting fact: Amero’s lawyer failed to notify the prosecution of the “she was helpless before infectious malware” defense in a timely manner, and so her expert was barred from offering any testimony along those lines. Hm.

As far as her helpless reaction to the porn? Amaro turned one kid’s face away, but they could see the screen from their seats. The police testified that the graphic sites had been accessed during the time Amero was in the class, not before. It apparently didn’t occur to her to, oh, turn off the monitor, turn the screen, or unplug the computer. Or to call the principal’s or custodian’s office for help.

On the “forty years in prison”, this seems to be drawn from Amero’s conviction on four separate counts of a crime that calls for up to ten years in prison. To get forty years, she would have to be given the maximum penalty for each and have the time served consecutively, rather than concurrently. Norm Pattis would know Connecticut criminal law better than I, but I’m not seeing that Amero is likely to be given the harshest possible sentence without some kind of aggravating factors, such as a criminal history, which she doesn’t have.

Is it possible Amero was railroaded by paranoid prudes? As lawyers say, anything’s possible. But the facts that have been floating around so far don’t suggest that we should be checking the Connecticut court for railroad tracks just yet.

 Posted by mythago at 6:11 pm

NYT Prints Another Non-Story, Blathers

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Jan 162007
 

What’s odd is that, for a change, they managed to let a few facts slip into a story about an increase in the number of women living without husbands. Of course, they quickly swaddle the facts in a lot of talky anecdotes from people who are able to fully explain the trend by what they and their friends do, but the facts are still there:

  • The number of women living without a husband in the home is up a staggering 2% since 2004.
  • Since the bar graph includes “widowed” and “divorced”, “single” presumably means unmarried.
  • Lesbians, as usual, do not exist.

One of these days, they’re going to have to take a deep breath and hire fact-checkers.

 Posted by mythago at 9:54 pm

Above-Average Voters

 1 Response »
Jan 132007
 

Nole Irritare Leones links to an article citing a Newsweek poll about the chances of electing a female or black President. Respondents overwhelmingly said that they, themselves, would vote for someone other than ‘standard white male guy’, but doubted that the rest of the electorate would. It’s a bit like the poll results showing that most drivers rate themselves above average.

I doubt that the poll tracks anything like the way actual voters would actually behave. For one thing, it probably suffers from response bias; few people are likely to tell a pollster something they feel makes them look like a sexist or a bigot. Worse, though, is that it assumes an answer to an abstract question can be applied to actual candidates. Asking whether a voter would reject a candidate out-of-hand purely because of their sex, or race, doesn’t tell us much about what standards that voter applies to female or minority candidates. Theoretically willing to vote for some female candidate says nothing about how a person will judge an actual female candidate, or whether they will apply biased and/or disproportionately high standards and scrutiny to that candidate.

The shorter, cynical version is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would have been candidates by now if they were white guys.

 Posted by mythago at 5:31 pm
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