Something Worth Reading

I missed this when it first came out, because I was in NYC, but there is a quite thought provoking post on Shakesville: The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck, about the difficulty of dealing with mysogyny from men we otherwise love, like, respect.

I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.

Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?

[...]

This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

In particular, I was reminded of my father. Everyone, I think, has someone in their life resposible for sending them irritating forwarded email, and Daddy Pimms is mine. He either doesn't think (or doesn't care, I go back and forth on this) "Hmm... perhaps my daughter, being a woman, will be less than amused by this email about the hopeless folly of womankind," and sends me something like this:

---

From: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com
Subject: Thought you'd like this...
To: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com

With the high rate of attacks on women in secluded parking lots, especially during evening hours, the Minneapolis City Council has established a 'Women Only' parking lot at the Mall of America Even the parking lot attendants are exclusively female so that a comfortable and safe environment is created for patrons.

Below is the first picture available of this world-first women-only parking lot in Minnesota ..

---

You know what's even more hilarious than the fact that women can't drive? The idea of women being sexually assaulted in parking lots!

I mean, you'd have to be a total humourless scold to find the framing of this joke really creepy, right? You have to totally miss the point, which is about driving and how women suck at it because they're probably putting on make-up or like, baking cookies in the glovebox. I mean, why would a man who has a daughter who often parks in parking lots at night (not to mention a wife who is also wont to do that) be at all turned off by that first paragraph?

And then there was this:

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From: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com
Subject: IT help...
To: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com

I think of you as my IT expert. [nonsensical question about his computer edited out]

---

Now, this I might actually find kind of funny, if he was saying something along the lines of "This is ironic, because I use you as my IT expert, a job many think women are unable to perform." But in fact, he was attempting to pay me a compliment by pointing me out as exceptional*. Because this image is a pretty accurate representation of a certain type of woman, but I should be able to laugh at them because I am not that type (i.e. not skinny, blonde, straight). In fact, I should want to laugh at them. He was giving me a golden opportunity to mock women who are prettier than me, and isn't that a favorite pastime of the ladies? When they aren't shopping for shoes and nagging their husbands?

And finally:

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From: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com
Subject: This is worrying
To: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com

Beer contains female hormones

Last month, Wits University and RAU scientists released the results of a
Recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer.
Men should take a concerned look at their beer consumption.
The theory is that beer contains female hormones (hops contain
Phytoestrogens) and that by drinking enough beer, men turn into women .
To test the theory, 100 men drank 8 pints of beer each within a 1 hour
Period.


It was then observed that 100% of the test subjects :
1) Argued over nothing.
2) Refused to apologize when obviously wrong.
3) Gained weight.
4) Talked excessively without making sense.
5) Became overly emotional
6) Couldn't drive.
7) Failed to think rationally.
8) Had to sit down while urinating.

No further testing was considered necessary.
Send this to the men you know to warn them about drinking too much beer!

---

And so:

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From: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com
Subject: Re: This is worrying
To: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com

why in the world would a woman find that amusing?

you know, mom always tells me to just delete your email forwards without reading them, and I won't do it because it seems so incredibly rude.

and while it baffles me how anyone who has the slightest respect for the women in his life could be amused by this email, I can accept that it's the sort of thing guys enjoy amongst themselves without really thinking about it.

however it doesn't seem to me to require more than a millisecond of contemplation to realize that whatever you and your buddies might think it probably won't be entertaining to women, so sending it to me is at best an example of how little thought goes into your emails and a worst a deliberate attempting to be insulting (especially when i've already mentioned several times that i don't find that kind of humor cute).

either way, i'm left to ask myself why i don't just listen to my mother and delete your emails without reading them.

---

And so, he refused to email me for a week. Daddy Pimms is perhaps the world's most powerful sulker. Finally, as I always do, I apologized, because I would rather have a dad who talks to me than a dad who doesn't.

To quote Shakesville again:

There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. [...] I am used as a prop in an ongoing game of patriarchal posturing, and then I am meant to believe it is true when some of the men who enjoy this sport, in which I am their pawn, tell me, "I love you."

*Ugh, how I hate exceptionalism "compliments." It's okay that I wear lots of dresses and don't know about sports, because I'm not "girly" to the point of being annoying. I've been praised many times for not "seeming" gay. I'm not one of "those" fat people (the kind that do nothing but eat donuts all day, presumably) so it's cool to engage in rampant fat-hating right in front of me.

Ada Lovelace Day (3/24/09)

This is probably the last BlogClassic, since most of the rest is just stuff I wrote in order to fulfill my goal of writing something everyday (I know, this is the crap that I actually put thought into). I debated whether or not to post this, since its timeliness has passed, but it was the first 'blog about something day' that I participated in with my shiny new (now old) blog, so it's kind of historic.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815, London – 27 November 1852, Marylebone, London), born Augusta Ada Byron, was the only legitimate child of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. She is widely known in modern times simply as Ada Lovelace.

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

(thanks, Wikipedia!)

So, did you know that today (that it, March 24th) is (was) Ada Lovelace Day?

I sure didn’t until a few minutes ago, which makes me sad because if I’d known about it before the children left I’d have made it a “teaching moment” (yes, I do kind of hate myself for using that phrase). Also pretty sad is the fact that I wouldn’t even know who Lovelace was if I hadn’t read The Difference Engine.

Here’s a little something about me: I really like computers. Not just what they do, and what they let us do (which should be pretty obvious ‘cause hey, blog), but how they work. I like the concept of them, I like to know about them. I like the language of computer programming.

Why did nothing ever come of that interest? It might have a little something to do with the fact that, despite being an honors/AP student back in the day, I was expressly discouraged from taking any computer science classes on more than one occasion. Because they’re hard. Because I was more of a creative type. There was no explicit sexism, just the very clear suggestion that I was the wrong kind of nerd for that sort of thing. But I wonder, did boys who liked English and music and art get the same advice? If they didn’t, it’s messed up. Of course, it’s pretty messed up if they did, too.

So, anyway, here’s my contribution to the day.

A Woman in Technology I Admire:

Mary Lou Jepsen (born 1965) was the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), an organization whose mission is to deliver low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries. For her work in creating the laptop Time Magazine named her to its 2008 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

(thanks again, Wikipedia)

And Another Thing... (originally posted 3/1/09)

Allow me to clear something up.

When I listed “vampire-themed romance” as a guilty pleasure, I was emphatically not referring to the Twilight series. Though I’ve read all four books and seen the movie, I don’t so much like them as I am intrigued, confused and mildly disgusted by them. In fact, one might say I appreciate them ironically, in that I appreciate them in a way that is contrary to their literal intention (assuming that their literal intention is to tell a romantic story about a teenager and her vampire boyfriend, rather than to brainwash a generation of young women into subservient baby-making machines, that is...)

Here’s what I don’t get. How can there be so many girls (and not a few women) out there who think there’s something romantic about a patronising stalker who physically prevents his girlfriend from doing anything he disapproves of? Or a manipulative bully of a “nice guy” who believes that being in love with a woman is a license to take advantage of her friendship in order to try to force himself on her or trick her into physical intimacy (I actually disliked Jacob a lot more than Edward. Bella at least agrees to participate in Edward’s bullshit, but Jacob persists despite her repeatedly telling him to stop)? I can understand the teenagers, a bit, as when I was one myself I was actually in that relationship I didn’t see anything wrong with it until much later. But shouldn’t grown up ladies know better? And shouldn’t grown up lady authors think twice about publishing a book that indicates fucked up asshole love is true love?

In fact, there were times when I got the distinct impression that the characters had motivations that the author herself didn’t understand (unless we’re meant to see Bella as an unreliable narrator, which would make Stephanie Meyer a way more sneaky and subtle writer than seems possible). It was pretty obvious to me that Edward resisted making Bella a vampire because it would mean giving up a significant amount of control over her. It’s a move right out of the creepy boyfriend play book, but its pretty clear Meyer meant us believe his stated motivation (some claptrap about her eternal soul).

This is why I actually liked the movie a bit more than the book. With most of Bella’s internal monologue stripped away, the audience had to view the characters’ behaviour with a certain amount of detachment (the cheesy special effects, I think, inadvertently enhanced this), which made their general fuckeduppitude more obvious. I also liked how Edward, who in the book is presented as utterly flawless, came off as just as much of a freaked-out adolescent basket case as Bella. It made the relationship seem less accidentally-creepy-cause-it’s-suppose-to-be-sweet and more deliberately-creepy-to-make-a-point-about-obsessive-teen-love (this was possibly aided by the fact that I am fully grossed out by Robert Pattinson, both in the movie and in real life).

I’m also interested in (and troubled by) what the success of Twilight means for vampire fiction as a whole. It has always been about the subversion of repressive sexual norms, gender roles, religion, “traditional morality,” but now the genre’s hottest commodity is a vehicle for preaching abstinence and heteronormativity, with plenty of casual sexism and a soupçon of anti-choice rhetoric tossed in for good measure.

How sad is it that in a series about a sexy vampire and a sexy werewolf there are only a couple of instances of entirely accidental homoeroticism?

Very. Very sad indeed.