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Seriously, stop with the booth babes | Standalone Sysadmin via Read it Later

Hey global feminists! Below are a list of links to blog posts and news stories about what other global feminists have been up to this past week. But we also want to know: what have you been reading/writing this week? Share your own link love in the comments! You can see more feminist news on our facebook, twitter, or tumblr!

Menstrual Synchrony: Do Girls Who Go Together Flow Together?: Harriet Hall reviews the evidence that women who live together synchronise menstrual cycles, and finds it unconvincing.
This Can’t Be Real: “Slavery The Game”: A website has sprung up for a supposed new gaming developer called Javelin Reds Gaming. Their first title is the light-hearted (sarcasm) and family-friendly (dripping sarcasm) game entitled Slavery the Game.
In Job Market, Social Contacts Help Men – Not Women: men who had lots of specialized work experience were often recruited into a new job through their social contacts without having to look for a job. In fact, men with this kind of experience were 12 percent more likely to find a new job through informal recruitment than they were through a formal job search… Women, however, did not see this benefit.
Meredith interviews writer Marlene Dotterer.. Time travel writing, and being a woman writing science fiction.
Less Depression for Working Moms Who Expect That They ‘Can’t Do It All’: Working moms have lower rates of depression than their stay-at-home counterparts, but buying into the supermom myth could put working mothers at greater risk for depression.
Trusting the girls in the back room: Imagining a writer’s mind as officeworkers.
I, Singularity…: Elizabeth Bear discusses and critiques (partly from a feminist perspective) the pressure for science fiction authors to address the technological singularity/transhumanism/post-body, and the problems with having an idea of required subject matter for real science fiction at all.
World of Warcraft Player v Player gaming: unsurprisingly some people think it’s only for teh menz.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Women’s Information Security Scholarship: The aim of the program is to encourage women from around the world, including the UK, to undertake study in information security and eventually pursue a career in the industry. Deadline is October 3.
Anonymous CVs will not be compulsory: a study in France finds that anonymous CVs harm disadvantaged applicants. The article speculates that anonymised CVs strip the employer of the ability to make allowances for lack of experience or non-standard French.
Pictures of Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor. (Unsurprisingly, we’ve talked about this before.)
Sexism, Misogyny and Misandry in Geek Cultures: Discusses how sexism (against women and men) manifests in geek culture, and how easy it is for those who think of sexism as only bullying or harassment to not see it.
Subnormality has a comic about a woman’s dilemma deciding what to wear given the spectrum of roles clothing has (that is avoiding being read as weird, frumpy, slutty, etc).
(Warning for apparent assailant re-telling rape as humour.) Man describes an apparent rape for comedy purposes during the audience seciont of a comedy event:

(Warning: verbal description of rape from apparent assailant’s point of view. We’ve included the video for your reference but you may prefer to stick to the analysis links.) Original video of Asssscat 3000 (Eric—identity apparently known—begins speaking at approximately 38 minutes.)
Horrified Tumblr discussion from attendees and friends of theirs: On the Subject of Rape… and follow-up discussion.
Another audience member Halle Kiefer, One Night at Asssscat, or What to Do With a Date Rape Monologue. …when the audience started booing the monologist, the storyteller turned around with a look of pure bafflement, as if he didn’t understand why an auditorium of hundreds of strangers didn’t like his hilarious story.
Eric’s former employer The Second City tweets that they have referred the matter to police.
Coverage at NPR, Jezebel.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Schrodinger’s Rapist is not about “all men are rapists.”

It is not even about “all men are potential rapists.” All men are, in fact, potential rapists, in much the same sense as all women are potential rapists, and all brunettes are potential rapists. All people are potential rapists, because rape is not a function of anything about a person except the fact that they rape people.

It is about “a very significant proportion of women will, when you approach them, be assessing whether you are going to be That Asshole, and it is in your best interest to ensure their conclusion is not that you are.”

Nearly every woman has an experience with That Asshole. That Asshole is, very simply, a person who disrespects the boundaries and “leave me alone” signals of others.

That Asshole calls you a bitch when you say politely but firmly “please leave me alone.” That Asshole follows you down two city blocks, you walking as quickly as you can and hoping he gets bored before you go to a place that’s too deserted. That Asshole calls “nice ass” at you from out of a moving car. That Asshole backs you into a corner at the bar, looming over you, and asks you for your phone number. That Asshole kisses you even though you didn’t want it, takes your clothes off even if you didn’t want it, fucks you even if you didn’t want it.

That Asshole makes up only a tiny percentage of men. However, he has poisoned the well for everyone else.

I think a lot of men underestimate the fear most women have around rape. For instance, I am the happiest little slut you could ever hope to meet. However, I would never have sex with a man whom a friend, or a friend of a friend, didn’t vouch for, because he might kidnap, rape and murder me. On a rational level, I know the chance of me getting murdered because of Craigslist Casual Encounters W4M is about as likely as me getting hit by lightning. However, on the emotional level, my brain associates “sex with men I don’t know” with “getting murdered.”

This may be related to why so few women have casual sex with men: it’s the natural side effect of a culture that says that having casual sex will get you raped, not watching your drink will get you raped, getting drunk will get you raped, going outside at midnight will get you raped, wearing a short skirt will get you raped, fucking wearing a ponytail will get you raped. That kind of thing can make a girl paranoid.

A significant minority, and maybe even the majority, of women, before a potentially non-platonic interaction, are not thinking “I wonder if we have anything in common, I wonder if he likes me”, but “I wonder what shit This Asshole is going to pull.”

That means you have to distinguish yourself from those people. The feminists are trying to give you pickup advice here! If a woman is suspicious that you’re going to rape her, she is not going to want to sleep with you.

This means that you should never, ever disrespect a person’s boundaries (if they say “leave me alone” or communicate it through body language such as turning away and picking up a book, don’t keep talking to them). It also means you should be aware of circumstances that may make even a perfectly natural approach more threatening and understand that, as a completely random example, you should not attempt to pick up a woman whom you have never spoken to before at 4 am in an enclosed space while she is in a foreign country, after she has stated that she is tired and wants to go to bed, and that she is tired of getting hit on at conventions of the sort she’s going to. That is probably a bad idea.

Schrodinger’s Rapist is what Captain Awkward, advice columnist to the socially awkward geeks of the world, calls the gift of fear. (Okay, technically it comes from a book by Gavin de Becker, but Captain Awkward is where I first heard about it, so she gets the credit.) The gift of fear is basically this: listen to your fear. Our brains developed to handle social interactions over millennia. If someone is afraid of someone else, it might be because the other person is socially awkward and not aware of what signals they’re giving off– or it might be because the person is a predator. Therefore, it is the right of every person to refuse social interaction with any other person at any time, even if it’s only because “they seem creepy to me.”

In fact, men should also develop their own gifts of fear. True, very few men have to deal with street harassment, but abuse and rape are not female-only things, and That Assholes often come in female guise. While many predators are not identifiable, and not identifying a predator doesn’t mean you “deserved” to be raped (as if anyone can deserve that!), identifying patterns of behavior that predators practice, dangerous situations, people who disrespect your clear boundaries and anything that gives you the twinge of not-right, and taking whatever measures necessary to avoid the situation, can make the difference between being a victim and not.

Further reading:

Ami Angelwings, Sometimes You Just Don’t Know >:|

Holly Pervocracy, How Not To Be Creepy.

Ozymandias (yes, I am citing myself in my own further reading, deal with it), Being A Socially Awkward Creep.

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Like some of the rest of us I’ve been up to my neck in other stuff. But over at my blog I recently posted about three items that in retrospect are pretty related. Here’s the second.

The editors at the political news blog Big Think decided to make their daily centerpiece article about yet another study of the “mystery” of women’s sexual response.

What’s the Latest Development? The locations of the vagina, cervix and female nipples that correspond to the brain’s cortex have been mapped for the first time. The study confirms that there is a difference between stimulating the vagina and the clitoris and that there is a direct neurological link …

Source: Big Think

Yeah! Whee! Lady parts! We all just love sticking probes in women’s ladybusinesses.  ”For science” of course.

Extra credit for tossing in the nipple stimulation!

(I’m unable to confirm whether they’re now hoping to get additional funding to measure the cortical reaction to researchers shaking their faces between the subject’s breasts and going wooba-wooba-wooba-wooba.)

You know why this irritates me beyond all fucking belief?

Because, hello, when was the last time anybody reported on a study of male sexual map?

Answer: 1951!  And back then they did it during open-skull surgery.

When was the last time anybody did a cortical assay of men’s secondary erogenous zones?

Because, great bactrian camel humps!  Isn’t anybody curious about male sexual response beyond “Oh men?  They just stick it in a hole and wiggle, case closed.  Now let’s get more hawt chix to play with themselves in the fMRI machine?”

You wanna know something gang?  We know roughly 130 times more about women’s orgasms, women’s sexual response, women’s arousal patterns, women’s SES/SIS interactions in the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response model, the maps of women’s erogenous zones, women’s g-spots, p-spots, a-spots, plus vaginal depth, width, lubrication, relative humidity, and fucking barometric pressure than we do about men.

So.  Anyway.  Two really, really big objections here.

1) It’s not that women’s sexual response isn’t mysterious, it’s that men’s are no less mysterious.  For instance ask any woman if things went exactly the way she expected the first time she tried to give a handjob or blowjob.

2) It’s not that men’s sexual response is mysterious, it’s that women’s sexuality isn’t either.  For instance just ask almost any woman who’s not worried she’ll get slut-shamed for showing you that, on average, she can get herself off in roughly the same time it takes the average man to get himself off.

Men and women aren’t identical.  But we’re not so different that the unbelievable imbalance in research is warranted.

One possibility that doesn’t change my social critique at all: what do you think the probability is that were the roles reversed the corresponding study would have been given as much prominence all over the internets?  I mean, not to be a sourpuss but while it’s nice to know they did homunculus mapping on (male only) brain-surgery patients back in 1951, and nice to know that they’ve just now updated the map for women, but have they done any research on men since?  On men’s nipple stimulation?  (Which if nothing else should surely be of interest to men’s partners.) How about other areas?  And is anybody doing cross checks where they look at areas where women’s brains light up in fMRIs during stimulation and then ask “I wonder what the corresponding parts on men might be and what stimulating them might do?

Most importantly, and really the point of my post, if they did bother to update 60-year-old information with research using contemporary tools and attitudes, and they did decide to publish it, would it make the “From the Editors” post of the day at Big Think and other venues?  Considerable evidence suggests no, not at all.

For a long time, I had difficulty calling myself “feminist.” I’ve now come to use the term (along with “masculist”) in a sort of “taking it back” sense, but it’s important to note that I had more trouble in the past. One of the principal reasons for my discomfort was (and is) that I don’t want to identify with any movement that includes hateful, discriminatory elements in its lineup of “legitimate” but perhaps “misunderstood” or perhaps “needing context” or perhaps “this was good at a certain time”-thinkers.

For me to call myself a “masculist” or a “feminist” or really an “anything else-ist,” I have to draw some pretty tight boxes, and say, “Okay, this shit over here — that doesn’t count.” For one thing, I don’t want a tent so big that bigots are sitting next to me, but for another, the words themselves lose all their meaning otherwise. In particular, if “feminism” is truly just about self-identification — if it doesn’t have any hard or fast standards so that it ends up including people as far-ranging in beliefs as Sarah Palin and Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer along with Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir — then it has no meaning anymore. And when it comes to people whose views are antithetical to gender equality, someone has to take out the trash. Someone has to say, “Yeah, you know what? No. That person’s beliefs are totally out of line. That is not a legitimate strain of feminist thought. Maybe they went down an interesting intellectual path — but it was a dead fucking end, and a bad idea, and it’s time to renounce their thoughts and take back their Feminist Card™.”

This doesn’t even get to the PR aspect. Simply put, by allowing certain people to remain “legitimate feminists” — as decided by the Great Feminist Monolith, of course1 — we allow a bad image of feminism to persist, an image with which some people become unfortunately acquainted. What’s the number one reason most perfectly reasonable people on the street give for not being feminist? (Trigger warning.) “Feminists are a bunch of crazy, man-hating bitches.” This may not be true, but if these people are otherwise egalitarian, what is it that you think made them believe that? Who are the “feminists” they read about who gave them a sour taste in their mouths? Certainly not people who argue that “women are people too” (as the overly-reductive phrase goes). No, the ones who harbor much more toxic views, but who are still allowed, for some reason, to sully everyone else’s good name.

If “feminism” is “the movement seeking gender equality with a focus on women,” why not throw out someone whose views are obviously un-egalitarian? What use do we have for toxic ideology? What’s holding people back from putting their foot down and saying “No, this person doesn’t represent my beliefs even in name?” As feminists with a conscience, as progressive feminists who’ve moved to the point where we can — hopefully — look in the closet and acknowledge our own skeletons that we find there, doesn’t it behoove us to make sure that we’re not dragging along a pile of shit with us, simply because someone had a vagina2 and spewed it out and used the word “feminist” alongside that verbal excrement? It’s no longer speech that can be excused “provided you have the right context, and think the way they did at a certain time, and understand that they’re fringe now, and know that most people don’t agree with them, even though, you know, they had some good ideas at the time, and besides, finding your self-righteously angry female voice of power!” No, it’s just hate. Plain and simple.

It’s time for us to step forward and disown these people. And by “disown,” I mean, it’s time to say, “this person isn’t a feminist.” Without further ado, the inaugural post of the “Not a Feminist” series.

I kid; but, seriously: By the majority consensus of feminists.
Most likely, at least, but they could have a penis too, I suppose.

You might say, “But Doc! Mary Daly is a cheap shot!” Yes, yes she is. But she’s also perhaps the prototype of a “not feminist” who still used the term for herself. Among other ills, Mary Daly was transphobic, racist, and misandrist. Let’s get to work now!

Transphobia
Mary Daly, in her book Gyn/Ecology (which should give you a preview of her ideology), referred to trans* persons as “Frankensteinen,” living in a “contrived and artifactual condition.” As Kittywampus quotes from Daly,

The Dionysian solution for women, which is violation of our own Hag-ocratic boundaries, is The Final Solution. To succumb to this seductive invitation is to become incorporated into the Mystical Body of Maledom, that is, to become ‘living’ dead women, forever pumping our own blood into the Heavenly Head, giving head to the Holy Host, losing our heads.

Not only is Mary Daly’s allusion to the Holocaust disgusting, and not only does Daly obviously harbor some not-too-subtly-veiled ill-will towards men (more on that later), but she continues as such:

Dionysus sometimes assumed a girl-like form. The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Like whites playing “black face,” he incorporates the oppressed role without being incorporated in it. In the phenomenon of transsexualism, the incorporation/confusion is deeper. As ethicist Janice Raymond has pointed out, the majority of transsexuals are “male to female,” while transsexed females basically function as tokens, and are used by the rulers of the transsexual empire to hide the real nature of the game. In transsexualism, males put on “female” bodies (which are in fact pseudofemale).

Mary Daly continues on to wax poetic in other lovely ways (“phallocratic technology” and “Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes” are particular favorites of mine), but I think this is plenty of evidence enough of her hatred of trans* persons. You can read the linked blog post if you want more thorough analysis.

Racism
Audre Lorde’s famous An Open Letter to Mary Daly is perhaps one of the best critiques of Daly’s racism. As a black lesbian, Lorde was uniquely situated to see the intersectionality of feminism, as well as Mary Daly’s racism. Quoting here,

Your words on the nature and function of the Goddess, as well as the ways in which her face has been obscured, agreed with what I myself have discovered in my searches through African myth/legend/religion for the true nature of old female power.

So I wondered, why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are her goddess images only white, western european, judeo-christian? Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? Well, I thought, Mary has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope and to deal only with the ecology of western european women.

Then I came to the first three chapters of your Second Passage, and it was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women, but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. I began to feel my history and my mythic background distorted by the absence of any images of my foremothers in power. Your inclusion of African genital mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any consideration of female ecology, and too little has been written about it. To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other.

Misandry
Last but certainly not least, Mary Daly, in as many words, was a man-hater. People have called out Mary Daly for her hatred towards trans* people and her racism before, but I’ve seen a disturbing lack of discussion of just how much damage Mary Daly did to the four billion of us with penises. When people talk about “man-hating feminists,” it’s people like Mary Daly that have made that term a reality and given it a face and an ideology in front of which to stand. I mean, she wouldn’t even allow men in her (Boston College) advanced women’s studies classes, in direct violation of university policy.

First, some quotes. Just to get your appetite going:

As a creative crystallizing of the movement beyond the state of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession; and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.

And:

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.

Mary? Charmed. I’ll let Kittywampus take this one again:

[Mary Daly] fell into precisely this trap [of idolatry] by setting up “women” as a kind of idol in her later work, beginning with Gyn/Ecology, with the result being an “ethics” that demonized both transsexuals and men.

In Beyond God The Father, Daly declares that men forever embody “the eternal masculine stereotype” (of “hyper-rationality (in reality, frequently reducible to pseudo-rationality), [...], aggressivity, the possession of dominating and manipulative attitudes toward persons and the environment, and the tendency to construct boundaries between the self [...] and ‘the Other.’”) and women “the eternal feminine.” As if this false historical reduction wasn’t bad enough, a few years later in Gyn/Ecology, she writes,

Thus women continue to be intimidated by the label anti-male. Some feel a false need to draw distinctions, for example: “I am anti-patriarchal but not anti-male.” The courage to b[…]

There’s this dreadful ad presently running:

Women take note: these are shot from YOUR presumed perspective.

Now, from a pure-comedy standpoint, the computer-enhanced doofy expressions on the men’s faces really are pretty funny. They ain’t Mort Drucker, but as caricature goes they’re decent.

Pretty much everything else in this is awful.

Before I even get into the sexism, can I just say that this is a really ineffective ad campaign for milk? The classic “Got Milk?” ads were based on market research that showed that milk is just something most people expect to have in the house, and they only really think about it when they run out. Please, show me one single consumer who thinks “Well, I wasn’t going to get any milk, but… reduces PMS symptoms, you say? Shit, let’s stock up!”

So really, when you come down to it, this isn’t an ad for milk. This is an ad for the concept of “Bitches be crazy.” A popular and long-running concept, it’s the notion that women are fundamentally irrational creatures who cannot be reasoned with or engaged with on any level. All you can do is try to appease this mad creature with gifts, in this case an average of 1.75 gallons of generic milk. (Ladies, I apparently cannot fathom the depths of your lunacies, but… seriously, have you ever sat around going “Gosh, but I could go for 1.75 gallons of generic milk right now, that would surely win my favor”?)

The craziness of women, of course, emanates directly from their uterus. We used to call it hysteria (okay, some still do), nowadays we pass it off as PMS, but either way it’s understood to be a direct correlation. If you have womanly parts, you are bugfuck nuts and there’s nothing to be done about it. Women reading this, how often have your concerns or emotions been dismissed or laughed off on the grounds that it must just be your wacky hormones talking?

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in this ad. These six guys are completely dismissing whatever their wives or girlfriends are saying. They’re not listening, they’re not engaging, they’re just blindly capitulating to whatever strange mouth-noises she’s making, and desperately hurling dairy products at the problem.

Talk about your problems? Try to understand your wife’s perspective? Actually apologize for something, instead of just making apologetic sounds that don’t relate to anything real? Pfah! Those are tools for dealing with a rational being, not the fearsome and wild-eyed creature known as Woman.

What we’re seeing here is an odd fetishization, in a lot of pop culture, of really awful relationships. Clearly these guys aren’t happy, and clearly the women they’re frantically waving milk at aren’t happy either. And yet this is presented as a normal, standard relationship. This ad is, by its very structure, what Holly has called a “that always happens” joke. Ha-ha, marriage: the union of a miserable raving harpy with a miserable cringing moron, amirite? There is nothing higher to aspire to than that, we are constantly subtly informed: the best-case scenario is a crazy bitch and a stupid asshole making each other unhappy until one of them does the other one the favor of dying. That is the implicit conceptual structure underlying this ad. If we fail to take that idea of marriage for granted, there’s nothing funny about this ad but the amusing faces they’re making.

Oh wait, that’s right.

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat party and deputy Prime Minister for Great Britain, was in the news today because he is apparently “killing himself” trying to balance the stress of working such a demanding job with being a good father to his three sons by heading back from Whitehall to drive them to school, according to an interview his wife Miriam González  Durántez (who herself has a very demanding career) gave the interview in Gratzia magazine; the Daily Telegraph ran a summary of the interview which can be seen here.

Also in the Telegraph, some woman whom I’ve never heard of (and am now highly depressed that I have) called Judith Woods felt it was in her best interest to admonish Clegg for this and have a go at his wife at the same time.

“Just how scared must he be of his militantly ball-breaking missus? Yes, yes, we know she’s a partner in global law firm DLA Piper and earns shedloads more than her hubbie and was far too busy to take time off to support him on the campaign trail, but you’d think that’s quite enough emasculation for any marriage.”

Yeah, because when a man decides he doesn’t want his job to cause him to lose touch with his children, it can’t have been a decision he made on his own. It was obviously the work of some bullying feminazi. Ugh. As you can see in the original article, it’s not like Durántez doesn’t do her part in order that her children are well-looked-after but, oh right, I guess she’s supposed to do that, being a mum and all.

Woods goes on to bash her a bit more for her high-flying career as a jet-setting lawyer, for having the audacity to earn more money than her husband and for not wearing designer clothes. There’s some mention of the Franco regime because Durántez is Spanish and she needs to be reminded of that. Woods also mentions some garbage about Durántez  being an Alpha Female who married Clegg because he’s a Beta Male she can boss around, though again there is no mention of whose decision it was to split responsibility for raising their children in the peace.

Now, I’m not denying that Nick Clegg’s job is an important one, or that these are stressful times for the country, or that, yes, some of his decisions while he’s been in power have been questionable, to say the least. Then again, both he and his Liberal Democrat party members have been valiantly leading the charge to expose Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to dominate all of Britain’s media outlets. Specifically, it was he who first raised concerns about Murdoch’s plans to buy BSkyB and demanded that drop his bid for the company.

Yet spending whatever personal time with his children that he can is clearly important to him. If it weren’t, he’d just hire a nanny. Of course, then the papers would probably call him out on spending taxpayer money on something so frivolous, and more than likely find some way to attack his wife (they really do enjoy doing that). She’d be a dream target for any right wing hack journo because she  a) is foreign, b) earns more than her husband and c) is a feminist.

I can just imagine how this would go if the genders were reversed: if he were female and admitted to trying to split equal time between work and family commitments, it would be a different story. I bet the papers would be full of praise for the female leader who could run the country and still find time to fulfill her biological role as nurturer. Even in the article interview, she was asked a question about how she copes.

It’s depressing that we stereotype fathers in such a way as to deny them the right to spend that kind of quality time with their children, or see them as weak for doing so. I can only hope that it gets better for Mr. Clegg, and that in the long run the time he spends with his children will pay off.

I hate picking out cards. Not only is it three bucks for a sheet of paper that’ll get thrown out as soon as it’s read, but the cards themselves? Five percent are great, fifty percent are clichéd saccharine shite, and the rest? The rest are the topic of discussion today

For men, it’s either “Hey, I know you’re a fat dirty oaf, so be lazy today,” or, “Look! This card has a butterfaced chick with big tits!” But for women? If it’s not, “You’re old! That’s funny!,” then it’s some form of, “Men are stupid.”

Case in point: While shopping for cards today impromptu — because I always stock up ahead of time since I never remember when I do need them — I stumbled across this hilarious but sadly run-of-the-mill gem: “I like the simple things in life” (inside: “Like men.”).

Hilarious, isn’t it? I’ll wait for you to finish laughing before I continue.

Some aspects of sexism in media I can explain by looking at capitalism: The beauty industry, for instance, tells women that they have to have that new acne cream, or tells men that they have to have that new penis pill, because otherwise no one will love (read: fuck) you and you’ll die a poor pathetic pauper in the gutter.

Other aspects of sexism I can explain by looking at the “media of false distinction:” If men and women can be convinced that they’re different, not only can you create two convenient falsely separate markets based on our arbitrary gender roles, but also you can play one sex off another (“you need this burger, because bitches“).

But then there’s things like Hallmark and co. This isn’t making you feel bad to sell more things you don’t need. This isn’t just telling you, “You’re different than them, so you need this.” This is just exploiting people’s prejudices. It’s like blackface. That’s, in a word, fucking evil.

Can you imagine, for a minute, if we changed the language just a little bit? “Top 10 Reasons Why Dogs are Better Than Asians.” Feeling a little uncomfortable? How about we take your typical “how to train your husband,” and change that into “how to train your wife” — or better yet, “How to train your negro.” I bet that doesn’t sit so well with you, does it? How about the literal example I started with? “I like the simple things in life. Like Mexicans.”

I simply don’t understand this phenomenon. Greeting cards: You use them for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, congratulations, thank you’s, apologies, holidays. Happy affairs. Why taint them with sexist shit? Yes, sexism is always wrong — but to inject it into what should otherwise be celebratory circumstances seems particularly perverse.

What does this kind of reinforcement of bigotry accomplish? How does targeting people’s latent sexism even help sell more cards?

Hallmark, I’m talking to you. Cut this shit. There is no reason to vilify and dehumanize the opposite sex. Because when you print the above, I’m reminded of this:

Triple J are running a poll to vote on the hottest 100 Australian albums of all time, and I highly recommend that you go and vote if you’ve ever listened to Australian music ever and enjoyed it.  I’d really appreciate it if when people voted that thought long and hard about their choices.

I voted for:

Clouds  -  Octopus
Crowded House  -  Woodface
Divinyls  -  Desperate
Kate Miller-Heidke  -  Little Eve
Love Outside Andromeda  -  Love Outside Andromeda
Machine Gun Fellatio  -  Paging Mr. Strike
Midnight Oil  -  Blue Sky Mining
Regurgitator  -  Unit
Tripod  -  Box Set
Yothu Yindi  -  Tribal Voice

I’d really be happy if this poll did not become yet another sausage fest as the Hottest 100 Albums of All time did two years ago.

The “Hottest 100 Of All Time” has since aired, and audiences have been shocked to find that only two songs in the top 100 – two! – were sung by women. Only six female-fronted songs made it into the second batch of 100, so it wasn’t as though the men just edged women out in the final vote – women are just overwhelmingly absent. This sort of discrepancy doesn’t happen by accident; we can quibble about the locus of the problem till we’re blue in the face, but it’s a clear sign of entrenched, largely-invisible sexism in action. Quibbling about the locus is pointless because the locus is everywhere. This is the Matrix. (from Hoyden About Town)

 

It is possibly the modern music industry’s greatest tragedy and shame that it has, collectively, worked so hard to exclude women, keep them to the margins or, at best, channel them into narrow moulds. Given everything that worked against them being acknowledged as musicians it is a testament to the astonishing talent, dedication and sheer strength of will of women that any managed to break through and be heard. But break through they did, and they did amazing things, and now Triple J erases them all over again. (from Hoyden About Town)

 

The Hottest 100 is a major Triple J brand, and I guess I’m coming at this from a branding and marketing perspective. It’s a major plank of the station – of the network’s promotion, and to hold it up and say ‘Here’s what our listeners think are the greatest 100 songs of all time’ when there’s no women, I think is a major problem for the station, in terms of its representation of diversity and the diversity of views among youth in Australia. It suggests that Triple J is perhaps playing to, or certainly in the case of this poll, is attracting a very narrow sort of white male oriented audience. What it says about the audience, what it says about the station, what it says about the relationship between station and audience, I think is of concern for Triple J as the – let’s face it, the Government, the ABC’s youth broadcaster, and one that’s funded by all Australians. (from Hoyden About Town)

 

 
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I had a random (and anonymous) comment left on my blog quite recently, and thought I’d share it all with you.  It’s on my “Roses only… more like sexist only” blog post.

The commenter said:

Bec, it’s just an ad… get over it.
They’re not playing into anything, they’re doing a good job at selling their product.
I’m sure if you were trying to sell lots of your over-priced flowers you’d be trying to do whatever it takes to get people to buy them too.

*Ahem… REBECCA… ahem*

Anyway… It’s not just AN ad.  If it were only ONE ad in all the other ads that portray men and women as equal, with the similar interests and that there were not boy topics and girl topics, then I wouldn’t have an issue with it… because clearly they were attempting to be provocative, versus just playing into existing stereotypes about the gender divide.

I have a problem with TV commercials (which is why I so rarely watch TV these days), especially those that play into gender stereotypes and continue to reinforce the domesticity of women, or suggest that only women perform some roles and not others.  I’ve made a little collection of TV ads from the 80s onwards (in Australia) that all depict women in traditional roles.

(Australian MasterFoods Tuscan meatballs advert)

This ad is relatively recent, and with the exception of one male/female couple in a kitchen playing with spices together, this ad focuses on women cooking and performing food duties.

(Chicken Tonight Ad (1993))

“Mum.  Can we have Chicken Tonight tomorrow?”  Because as we all know, only mothers cook food for their families.

(Ajax 1980s Australian ad)

A group of women singing about how great Spray and Wipe is for cleaning their houses (mostly kitchens).  Spray and Wipe then went on a character creation and lifestyle phase, using the same “family” over the following 20 plus years, watching the kids grow up and various things happening (all with the same tuned jingle) and each ad about some rapid cleaning that needed to be done immediately, mostly by the mother, with Spray and Wipe coming to the rescue.  Dad helps out, but the mother does the majority of the work… for almost 30 years.

(SPRAY AND WIPE AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL)

(Spray And Wipe Australian Ad (1989))

(Ajax Spray n Wipe 2010 Ad)

Clearly women belong in the kitchen… or cleaning up everyone else’s mess.  The other thing that is annoying about these ads is the continuation of the perfection ideal that women must also have.  We must always look beautiful, our houses must always be beautiful, we must always… etc.

(KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) Australia Ad – 2006)

This ad is quite subtle in it’s sexism… it only hit me at the end of the video how sexist this video is… see if you can spot it yourself… Did you notice that the only man in the ad is the truck driver?  Did you notice that all the KFC employees were female?  The ones cleaning the store, the one greeting the big, brave truck driver man?  Women once again clean, and once again cook for other people.

The final ad I’m sharing in this post is about a man… and its about a man because of SCIENCE.  Men do science, women do cleaning.

(Domestos (Australian ad) 1987)

So, don’t tell me it’s just an ad.  It’s never just an ad… these things are both a reflection of modern society and a clear display of how fucked up gender roles are.  Next time think a little before attempting to tell me how the world works.  Women are only less because men have been the default for such a long time.  One day when it is as acceptable for a man to keep house as a woman, then I might stop pointing out sexism and other similar issues.
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I started playing Plants vs. Zombies several months ago. This is a tower defense game in which you must defend your house against endless hordes of zombies. To do this, you have a variety of plants which you can plant in your lawn. These plants do different things, like lob corn kernels or shoot peas, to fend off zombies. It’s a pretty addictive game, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. It’s pretty well-balanced and doesn’t get too hard in the early stages, but it’s challenging after you’re going through adventure mode a second time through. There are a variety of puzzle and mini games to keep you occupied after you have finished adventure mode. The graphics are cute, two-dimensional, and cartoon-like.

In my second play through the main adventure, I unlocked all of the zombies. There are 26 different zombies in all. All of the zombies are coded male in appearance. I double checked the Suburban Almanac, which described each zombie, just in case the descriptions revealed any female zombies, but any gender pronouns I found referred to the subject depicted as male.

Here is a list of zombies in Plants vs. Zombies, with descriptions of each zombie seen in the game (all the zombies have large, bulging eyes):

Regular Zombie – Bald zombie wearing a brown suit jacket, red tie, white shirt, ripped blue trousers, and brown shoes.
Flag Zombie – Same appearance and wearing the same clothing as Regular Zombie, except holding a red flag with a brain on it.
Conehead Zombie – Same appearance and wearing the same thing as Regular Zombie, except he has a traffic cone on his head as a hat.
Pole Vaulting Zombie – Balding blonde-haired zombie with a blue sweat band around his head, red tank top, red shorts, blue sweat bands around his wrists, and white sneakers.
Buckethead Zombie – Same appearance and wearing the same thing as Regular Zombie, except he has a slightly blood-stained metal bucket on his head, turned upside down to make a hat.
Newspaper zombie – Balding black-haired zombie with glasses, wearing a dark grey/black suit jacket, black tie, white shirt, and white boxer shorts with pink hearts on them. He holds a newspaper in front of him as if he is reading it.
Screen Door Zombie – Same appearance and wearing the same thing as Regular Zombie, except he is holding a metal screen door in front of him with both his hands.
Football Zombie – Green-skinned, tall, broad-shouldered zombie wearing a red American football uniform, including helmet (with the image of a brain stamped on the side of the helmet). He has red gloves and white American football trousers. His shirt is not put on correctly, exposing one of the large white shoulder pads.
Dancing zombie – Green-skinned, zombie in 1970s attire: blue long-sleeved shirt with a white collar, poofy sleeves, opened at the chest, exposing a bright gold chain around his neck. He is wearing white bell-bottomed trousers and big clunky shoes with chunky heels. He wears gold-rimmed glasses with round, purple tinted lenses, and has gold rings on his fingers. He has a giant, reddish brown Afro hairstyle and sideburns.
Backup Dancer – Green-skinned zombie in 1970s style attire: pink shirt with light green dots, large collar, shirt buttoned to expose the top of his chest, gold belt buckle, blue trousers. He has a black handle-bar mustache and gold rings on his fingers.
Ducky Tube Zombie – Same appearance and wearing the same thing as Regular Zombie, but he has a bright yellow duck inner tube around his waist.
Snorkel Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie wearing a snorkel mask, white tank top shirt, bright yellow inflatable devices on his arms, and red shorts, and flippers on his feet.
Zomboni – Green-skinned zombie with scraggly red hair hanging out of a red knitted hat with a bobble on top of the hat. This zombie is wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off to show a black short-sleeved shirt. He is wearing blue trousers. He is also driving a white Zamboni machine with the letter ‘z’ painted in red on the hood of the machine.
Zombie Bobsled Team – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie wearing a red, tight-fitting spandex bodysuit. He is wearing orange-tinted racing goggles.
Dolphin Rider Zombie – Green-skinned zombie wearing a red, head-to-toe, full-body wetsuit. He is carrying a grey dolphin under his left arm. (When he jumps into the pool, he rides this dolphin.)
Jack-in-the-Box Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie (with slightly more bits of hair standing up on his head than the bald-headed zombies), wearing what appears to be a white, unbuckled strait jacket. He is carrying a red jack-in-the-box with a blue lid. White stars are painted on the red sides.
Balloon Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie wearing a blue and red beanie cap. He is wearing a grey shirt and blue jeans. A red balloon with an cartoony angry face drawn on it is floating above him, and he is tied to the balloon, so that the balloon suspends him in mid-air.
Digger Zombie – Large, burly, green-skinned zombie, with bulging red eyes. He is wearing a red, lumberjack style long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and blue dungarees. A white hard hat with a yellow light in front is on his head. He is holding a pick axe in his right hand. He appears to have hair on his head–there seem to be some scraggly strands sticking out from under his hat at the back.
Pogo Zombie – Green-skinned zombie with scraggly brown hair. This zombie is wearing black-rimmed, rectangular glasses, has a brown goatee, and a golden earring in his left ear. He is wearing a black t-shirt, blue jeans ripped at the knee, and black shoes. He is bouncing around on a bright red pogo stick.
Zombie Yeti – This towering zombie of massive girth and build, has white fur all over, and has a green-skinned face. This zombie’s appearance is male-coded.
Bungee Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie, hanging from a bungee cord. This zombie has a red jacket, unzipped, brown trousers, and brown casual shoes. His trousers are ripped on the left side, with the middle completely gone, exposing  a green thigh, knee, and calf.
Ladder Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie with a grey mustache. He has a pencil tucked behind one ear. He is wearing a red, lumberjack style flannel shirt, and blue work trousers. There is a hammer hanging from a utility loop in his trousers. He is carrying a metal ladder.
Catapult Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie in a dark blue work uniform. He is big and burly, sitting atop a riding lawnmower. A basket ball net has been fashioned into a catapult. There is a large container of basketballs next to the zombie. The basketballs serve as ammunition for the catapult.
Gargantuar – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie, extremely tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular. He is wearing a ripped brown shirt, blue trousers, and brown shoes. He has a red collar around his neck, to which ropes are attached. On his back is a trash can, in which the Imp Zombie rides. He his holding a wooden telephone pole in his left hand, which he uses to smash anything in his path.
Imp Zombie – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie in a red shirt, blue trousers, and grey shoes. This zombie is very short, and has a rotund build. His red shirt is unbuttoned, exposing his chest.
Dr. Zomboss – Green-skinned, bald-headed zombie wearing a lab coat, and sitting in the open head (cockpit) of a gigantic mecha-zombie. His bald head is much larger than the other zombies, and has the skin tone of a white person. Veins are apparent on this zombie’s head. The cockpit of the mecha zombie surrounds this zombie roughly at waist-height, and there are all manner of coloured levers and buttons.

This screen shot of the zombie Suburban Almanac shows a small picture of each zombie.

Plants vs. Zombies Screen Shot of Suburban Almanac - Small photos of 26 different zombies are shown laid out in a grid format. Each zombie has greenish skin and is wearing a costume. Regular zombie is highlighted, and there is a larger picture of him in the sidebar. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, red tie, and blue trousers. You can click on this picture to reach the full size image.

I have the basic zombie highlighted in this screen shot and the description reads:

Regular Garden-variety Zombie

Toughness: low

This zombie loves brains. Can’t get enough. brains, brains, brains, day in and night out. Old and stinky brains? Rotten brains? Brains clearly past their prime? Doesn’t matter. Regular zombie wants ‘em.

If the zombies happen to overrun your lawn and make it to your house, you are eaten alive (off camera) by the zombies. The screams you emit are with a male voice. Yes, indeed, the game assumes that everyone who plays it is male. Given the fact that you never see your character at all, and there is no story apart from the fact that there are these zombies which you must protect yourself from, I am making the assumption that you are not playing the role of a character in the game. As such, I believe the male voice that screams out when the house becomes infested with zombies is meant to be the player of the game.

You have a neighbour in this game. He is an older white man with brown hair and a goatee. He wears a metal pot on his head. His name is Crazy Dave. He speaks in gibberish that is meant to elicit amusement from the player, because he is, you know, CRAZY–one assumes that his mental state has been disrupted because of the zombies, but whether this is actually the case is unclear. Regardless, his mental state is portrayed as something which should elicit laughter, which is abelist.

Given that none of the zombiefied humans attacking your lawn and trying to get to you are women, here are some of the conclusions I can draw:

Women in the universe of Plants vs. Zombies managed to avoid the apocalypse altogether. However, given the huge numbers of male zombies, there is no explanation as to[…]

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question. (See the status of this project, also.)

I am a girl geek in a relationship with a guy geek, and this guy geek was raised by his mom and his aunt to hate men and hate himself for being a man. In puberty he rejected that and swung a bit in the opposite direction, and now he’s in a place where he believes in the equality of the sexes but he has internalized stereotypes and vitriolic messages about both sexes. He recognizes that and he wants me to help him learn about feminism. Well, that’s great! But I haven’t got the foggiest where to start. We tried reading the Feminism 101 sites together, but it’s too unstructured. Do you know of anyplace else I could find an approach to teaching feminism to men, specifically, or have any advice for helping him confront the internalized hated?

I’ll be interested in the Hive’s thoughts too, but to be honest I’m not sure you can provide structure in this quest, ultimately. It’s a big messy pile of issues, and one person’s structured look at it will be another person’s incoherent mystery.

I wanted to post this after the linkspam put up the lists to the latest round of self-education posts, because he needs to accept responsibility for his own education. If he’s not willing to do a lot of listening and doubting and struggling to understand and looking back at his six-months-ago self and being embarrassed at his lack of clue, you can’t make him and we can’t make him.

Let me talk about myself for a bit. I’m very privileged, and I’ve spent a few years now reading about intersectionality issues and oppressions other than patriarchal ones. I don’t get an ally cookie and reading the social justice blogosphere is far and away not the only thing an ally can or should do. But here’s what’s worked for me:

reading a lot of things, mostly in my case blogs, with stories in them about oppression playing out in people’s lives;
thinking privileged things like “surely that’s an exaggeration” “but I’m not like that” “but my friends aren’t like that” “but I’ve never heard of anything like that” “I think your point would be better made if you…” and so on;
(at least sometimes) noticing myself thinking those things and keeping them inside my own head; and
(sometimes) noticing oppression that isn’t happening to me personally and thinking “that’s fucked up” and (sometimes) analysing, criticising, or trying to end it.

Not a direct answer to your question, but perhaps your partner does need to ask himself what it is he needs structured for him and why.

For others, were there any resources that provided you with some structure to your early feminist or anti-oppression thinking, even if they later turned out to be incomplete or problematic in and of themselves? If you’re a male feminist/feminist ally, how did you start out learning and what are you learning at the moment?

Note: discussions of what one can do to learn about or further social justice can themselves end up ableist and classist among other things. There are many types of activism and the types that can be done or are preferred by conventionally educated abled folk with leisure time aren’t the only kind. Be careful with your ‘must’s.