Category: Culture

Categories
Diversity Voting

Men and women should vote for the same reason

I don’t respond to most of the weblog postings that Halley Suitt writes about women in general. I do think she tends to promote stereotypes as often as not. However, I also think that sometimes she breaks stereotypes by presenting the concept that women can be many things and still be womanly or even girly if that’s what she wants.

But today, I have to write in strong disagreement with her 12 reasons women should vote for Kerry/Edwards. And indirectly, I also disagree with the USA Today story that inspired Halley (link to which will most likely disappear, since it’s to Yahoo News.)

 

The USA Today article writes:

Women have long tended to shift toward Republicans as they get married, have children, return to regular churchgoing and acquire wealth and mortgages. In 2000, 63% of single women voted for Gore, but only 48% of married women did. As the ranks of female business owners and homeowners grow, fewer may be inclined to lean to the political left.

However, the same can be said for men. Men, if they become business owners, tend to shift to Republican in their voting. That women do so also, just shows this is not a gender-based difference. Also, people of both sexes, as they get older and have kids, especially if they become regular church goers, tend to lean more Republican.

So why are we differentiating between men and women, as if somehow women aren’t of the same species? Why do we focus on the W vote, and totally neglect the M vote?

Instead of disagreeing with USA Today for this differentiation, Halley actually supports it, but thinks the article didn’t go far enough. In this, she was effective, and made good use of arguments and counter-arguments. But she still supports the dichotomy between men and women, as if how we think is so different that we might as well be from different cultures.

She writes:

No woman looking at the pictures of the prisoners of the Abu Ghraib prison can be anything but devastated by this ungodly treatment of humans under Bush’s watch. As a mom I find it disgusting that anyone ever let it happen and then, never took the blame. Those people — despite being our hated enemies — are the sons of some mother somewhere. No person should be treated that way. All mothers know that in their hearts. It makes me cry to imagine it and makes me ashamed to have been a part of it — which as an American I was forced to acknowledge — they did it in my name.

By implication,then, is Halley saying that men, Dads, could look at these photos and not be devestated? That somehow men are immune to feelings of disgust and sadness when seeing another person humiliated? That men can’t see the photos of these men and think of their own sons?

I know that Halley is refuting the Security Mom phenomena, whichs is nothing more than a cold, carefully crafted and fostered necon (yes, I have adopted this word now, I have seen the light) manipulation into making it seem that all women should vote for Bush because all our babies are going to be killed in their schools and in their beds if we don’t. I applaud Halley’s approach, even while I wince at it.

(BTW, yes, your babies are in danger now–if your babies are grown up in and soldiers in Iraq, or if you live in Iraq. Outside of this, your babies are more in danger of being sexually abused, hit by a car, killed by a serial killer, catching a fatal disease, or dying of a bee sting, than killed by terrorism in this country. Frankly the Security Mom agenda–with its images of the frail, semi-sexy, God fearin’ woman holding a German Luger–is a bit of joke.)

Still, returning back to Halley and the USA Today story — is the implication then that there are no Security Dads?

As for voting for Edwards because he’s a ‘babe’ who supports his plump wife — nothing like pointing out how heroic Edwards is because he didn’t dump his wife when she gained weight.

“By gol, that’s a darn brave boy that is. Look at his wife — takes courage, you know that?”

What I don’t understand is why Hilary didn’t dump Bill when he turned into a porker.

Bottom line, we’re more alike than not. If you cut us, do we not all bleed? In fact, can’t we even use each others blood and organs to survive? We are the same species, and though society does enforce subtle behavior differences, we still share the same culture and the same values.

Isn’t it time that we focus more on the candidates and what electing each of them can mean, then our sex, and what it means?

Categories
Connecting

From the Underworld comes the Troll

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

(Insert your favorite mental image of troll here)

Introducing the troll

We all know what a weblogging troll is; it’s the person, man or woman, who writes a comment or comments in post after post trying to pick a fight with one or more members of a comment thread. This is not to confuse the person with the random abuser who comes in through Google and writes, ‘This site sux’ or something to that effect. No the troll is nothing if not persistent.

A troll can appear, day in and day out, and almost become a friend through familiarity. Almost.

Sometimes the troll only appears when you post on a specific topic. Other times they appear after a long absence, write a flurry of nasty comments, and then disappear again.

I know of one troll who is fast gaining somewhat legendary status among many of the weblogs I frequent for the length of his comments; not to mention the vitriolic nature of most of his writing–when you can understand it.

Now, we can all get into little flame fests in comments, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, if this was all sweetness and light it would be extremely dull. In addition, we can all get cranky, passionate, determined, angry, pissy, whatever depending on topic and other people’s responses. But this is not the same as being a troll.

No, a mark of a troll is that their only purpose in commenting in your post is to pull attention away from what you write, and what others write, on to themselves. They want the spotlight, but rather than start their own weblog and maybe dwindle into obscurity (and a troll most likely will, because they primarily only know how to write in an antagonistic style), they’ll come and steal yours. In doing so, they’ll wreck havoc on your space and what could be a good discussion thread.

What’s frustrating about a troll is that they’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong, again and again. If you ask them, then, why they keep coming back, they’ll say something to the effect of, “It’s a freeworld and I’ll go where I want to.”

You can’t appeal to a troll’s better nature to just leave, and it’s illegal to shoot them. So what can you do with a troll?

Bake them, mash them, put them in a pie…

The surest approach is to turn off comments, or require stringent comment registration.

Unfortunately that’s allowing your space to be controlled by another person–a malevant person who wants nothing more than to demonstrate his or her power. In addition, you lose out on the casual passerby who also happens to have something pretty terrific to say; or to the anonymous person who again, has something worthwhile to bring to the topic.

You can keep your space open and delete the troll’s comments, instead.

A good approach. However, this carries with it a risk. For instance, the troll could keep coming back with the same comment, forcing you to spend a lot of time cleaning your comments. In addition, other people will invariably respond to the troll, so you’re left with the dilemma about whether you should delete their comments, too.

You could also block them, by blocking their name or IP address.

This is usually not effective. The troll will just switch providers, or even use a proxy to write their comments; blocking on an IP is not worth the time. Also, anyone can change their name from comment to comment.

In addition, there’s an unsual risk associated with this one. When I blocked that aforementioned troll, who is getting a dubious reputation of troll extraordinaire, he actually went into other people’s weblogs who I read and started writing about me. Some of what he wrote was just odd; others of it was a deliberate attempt to embarrass me. Then I was forced to have to ask the weblogger to remove the comments; not all were happy about having to do this, because they didn’t believe in deleting any comments.

I now have a policy in my comments that you don’t use my space to bash another if the other isn’t around to defend themselves, or if the other isn’t the topic of the post.

Reason with the troll

You’re kidding, right?

Okay, so what can you do.

Don’t feed the troll

Ignore them.

This was the hardest one for me to learn, and is a policy difficult to adhere to at times. However, unless their comment is pretty horrible, letting it slide and not delete it or even acknowledge it exists is a very effective weapon against the troll. It takes away that power they wanted. Nothing deflates the troll more than to just ignore them.

More than that, though, you have to educate your other commenters to just ignore the troll.

There’s a couple of primarily political weblogs I read that have a very persistent troll in them (not the same troll). These are people who write comments almost invariably counter to the general flow of conversation; enough to know that they’re not writing about what interests them, or responding to the thread, as much as they want to pick a fight.

In each of these sites, they get their fight. The other semi-regular or regular commenters almost always fall for the bait and respond and the thread degenerates into an incoherent brawl. Eventually the site owner will come in and say, “If you don’t like what I write, why do you come back?”Of course we know why he or she (mainly he I’ve noticed) keeps coming back — look at the nourishment they suck out from the post and the comment thread each time they come back?

What the site owner should be saying is, “Folks, stop feed the troll.” In other words, educate your other commenters not to respond to the troll.

This isn’t to say that you should ignore people who disagree. Disagreement, even passionate, satirical, biting, snarky disagreement is healthy in this environment. If a person is disagreeing with the topic, you can tell by their writing that they are responding to it.

The troll, on the other hand, is not responding to the topic as much as they are trying to take over both the topic and the thread. Sometimes the difference is subtle; after a while, though, you’ll see a pattern form, and you’ll know if you have a passionate commenter who disagrees, or a troll.

However, even ignoring the troll may not impact on the densest, most obtuse, of the breed. That’s when you have to bring out the big gun…

The big gun in troll defense

Laughter.

Categories
Diversity

Pop!Dicks! Oh, I mean Pop!Tech!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

In the comments to Frank’s post at the Kitchen, Barbie Baywatch (Sherry), writer of Stay of Execution, wrote about attending the Pop!Tech conference, and how there was one woman presenting out of 30 presenters. She also details the experience in her weblog .

Since yesterday afternoon I’ve been pretty troubled by a pattern emerging from the speakers. First of all, our speakers this year are overwhelminly male – only one of 30 is a woman. This wasn’t intentional, but feels worse now that the program has begun. Because the male speakers have had a bunch to say about women, and I’m getting really depressed. I’m desperately wanting to see some strong women onstage (there are some really cool ones in the audience) but that’s not to be. As the program shaped out we as a group noticed that the speakers and performers were overwhelmingly white and male, and our program director worked to shift that, but didn’t make it a central factor in inviting folks.

I can’t help thinking that if gender or gender issues were featured prominately in this conference, this would become a central factor driving out the invitations. As it is now, you have a guy standing up at the front of this room talking about alpha male chimp behavior, and another about how we’re not having enough babies. If Sherry was depressed, two guesses as to how I would be reacting – and the first doesn’t count.

Interesting, but from her comments it would seem that of the ten women who were invited, nine had to decline. But then, if several men also declined, and they still managed to get 29 men, this shows that the conference issued several times more invitations to male speakers than women. Perhaps if all these conferences wouldn’t invite the same ten women, they might get more acceptances. Or gosh, be daring and maybe even invite eleven. Or even go all the way and invite twenty!

One weblog that responded to Sherry was Anthony Citrano who says that we shouldn’t be angry – after all, true inequality exists in Saudi Arabia. He also wrote:

What I want is a world where men and women have equal opportunity and (of course) equal rights – but we all need to realize that our gender differences are as special as our interpersonal differences. Men and women have very different physiological/psychological skills, desires, and priorities. They are fundamental, they are the reason we are all here, without them the species would have died off long ago. Now, to appreciate our biological differences does not mean we should be limited or trapped by them. We must accept our limbic differences – we cannot change them – while also growing upon them and using this fancy new cortex we grew recently. Men & women operate from very different perspectives, are generally better at some things than the other gender, and prioritize very differently.

Getting respect. Paid equally. Getting respect. Having access to opportunities. Getting respect. Receiving invitations to speak. Getting respect. Control over our reproduction. Freedom from stereotypes. Choice of roles and vocations. Did I happen to mention, getting respect? Now, which part of these is specific to men, and which specific to women? In what way are our priorities different?

Or is the male/female thing role dependent, and why don’t we all face it: technology is a guy thing. So is politics. But women make great nurses – so compassionate.

The topic of “Where are the Women” is featured the last day of the Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog clinic (on November 5th), which also features the topic weblogging ethics among others. Should be a smash ending.

A must-read writing on Pop!Tech by Mary Hodder:

Oh wait, again. A speaker just announced that for Poptech 2005, Caroline Porco, Dame Julia Pollock, and some space ship guy have agreed to speak. Well, they just doubled the number of women from one to two, at least in announced speakers for next year over this year. Bravo. But I think they need to work a little harder to reframe the world as both masculine and feminine, in order to even attract women, because who wants to speak at an all male party, were the world is framed in male dominated power structures? It’s demoralizing. It’s like a liberal going to a conservative party. The liberal will never be taken seriously there because everything will be on conservative terms.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

No, that’s not true

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

From David Weinberger I found out about a “Blogging for Women and Girls” workshop in Boston. According to the event description:

Blogging is emerging a powerful opinion-making force, but though the technology is fairly cheap and widely available, most blogs are still written by men. This workshop will teach women and girls the basics of blogging, from the technical aspects of blog publishing and maintenance, to developing a personal voice, style, and area of focus, to how to drive traffic to your blog

…most blogs are still written by men No, this is emphatically, and unequivocally NOT true. This is based on rumor and hearsay and people’s ill-formed opinion, and that unfortunate and biased Technorati 100 (and other Bloated Ego lists) and I for one am getting sick and tired of this myth being perpetuated.

At LiveJournal, the ratio of women to men is 2 to 1 or some such thing. According to statistics of weblogs outside of LiveJournal, the ratio is about 1:1.

We’re not being heard, or being linked. Why? A lot of factors are involved, but one of them is NOT that there are fewer of us! What does it take to get this communicated? A bloody act of God? Do we need to part the male sea?

We don’t need hand holding and a sensitive, nurturing environment. We don’t need little group blogrings made up of Progressive Women webloggers. Progressive Women – what is that? Liberal People with Breasts?

We don’t need to be ghettoed because of our gender, and categorized as some form of tech deficient po’baby, and helped along like pathetic half-lives just because we don’t have a penis. “Ewww, computers. Hold hands, ladies. Don’t let the bad technology scare you.”

Do you know how much this demeans us women?

What we need is to be visible. To be heard, and to be visible. And this starts with both men and women opening their eyes and their ears and treating women with equal respect; adding a thousand more women, ten thousand more women, isn’t going to make a difference. We have to make a difference, by being seen, and being heard, and listening and seeing each other. Not just those liberal politicos who write critical and thoughtful essays. Not just the people who write about social matters and other Things of Great Importance. And not the city dwellers who talk about this play or that great and profound book. All of us, babe. That means you’ll have to slum it with us non-political webloggers. You know, those people who write about something other than the American election.

The fringes.

If the women like Ms. Davis didn’t ignore the other women–those not on the Progressive Women’s Weblog Ring– and what we’ve been saying for months, years, perhaps we wouldn’t be having these conversations again and again and again.

Am I angry? You damn right I’m angry. Let’s solve the one problem we don’t have – get more women involved in weblogging. Yeah, more women to be ignored. More women to be be invisble.

update

What is frustrating is that I tried to get more women involved in the Kitchen effort; tried to bring both sexes in equally–make this as open and equal environment as I could. But what response did I get? As grateful as I am to all those who are helping, and I am tremendously grateful, the ratio of men to women is still about 4:1 or higher.

Does it take involvement from people like David Weinberger or Dave Winer or Joi Ito or some socially acceptable and sophisticated and ladylike venue to get women interested? We bitch about wanting to be seen and to be heard, but from what I’m experiencing, only if it’s being seen and heard by the right people.

So maybe what I’m feeling now is great disappointment rather than anger.

Categories
Diversity

Please notice me in the corner

Gina, who I like and respect, wrote a post at Misbehaving about how she doesn’t …wanna fight anymore — she doesn’t want to have to be louder online in order to be visible. She references helenjane.com who wrote:

See there’s been this ongoing discussion on the Internets over where are the ladies? They’re not involved in conferences, their blogs aren’t pushing the technical envelope blah blah blah.

And where are the ladies?

They don’t feel like making everything a fucking argument.
That’s where they are.

I can understand and sympathize with both ladies. It’s not pleasant having to yell, get into people’s faces and scream out, “Why can’t you see us!” Doing so usually irritates people in power, and loses us jobs and opportunities. What’s the old saying? You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar?

Of course, in the past, the women that fought for equal rights for women (and blacks, the early sufffragettes also promoted equality in race) didn’t stay quietly at home. No they usually dressed in their black business suits or white summer dresses with their sashes and marched through the streets yelling out for equality. And they would get spat on, and hit, and jailed, and force fed, so I can see why there were many women of the time that didn’t want to get involved.

Several decades ago more women marched for equal rights for women, and for the right of women to control their bodies. They were labeled bitch, and their femininity questioned. Some of them have gone on to be killed when abortion clinics have been exploded or shot down. Others still keep up the fight, but they’re considered anachronisms now — you know those shrill feminists who hate men?

In fact, many women would rather quietly sit and chat in a corner and wait to be noticed. After all, we have primary care giving responsibilities for our families and kids — we can’t afford to spend the time to get into tech user groups or conferences and make our presence known. It’s up to the men to notice us.

Still, for every three women who sit in the corner quietly writing or talking or doing good work, there’s one tough broad who still believes we have to get into people’s faces and demand to be heard. You’ll know her easily because she’ll enter political or technical threads and be one of the few women slinging mud with the rest; or she’ll submit her proposals to conferences, or write about the lack of visibility of women. She’ll call even the most popular guy out when he makes a sexist joke, or generalizes based on sex. She can be unpleasant to be around; most will say she can’t take a joke.

Of the three women in the corner, one, who is primping in a mirror and putting on lipstick, will look at the tough old broad and shake her head, saying something about those ‘crazy feminists’, and how if you want to get ahead, you have to make the guys feel good about themselves; after all, these big, tough men don’t want some shrill women yelling at them. Let’s face it: women have used sex and sexiness to get ahead for years — what’s wrong with using what works?

The next woman is the proper woman and she looks in disdain at both the primper and the tough broad because both are, frankly, rather distatesful: the primper because she uses sex, and the tough broad because she gets angry and makes a lot of noise, and that’s just not very professional. Not to mention ladylike. No she looks down her nose at such messy behavior because all it takes is connections to get ahead. You have to make connections. So what if you don’t call this guy or that on his behavior? Once women are in power, then we can call the guys on how they act. In the mean time, you have to play the game to get ahead.

The third women is a lot like you and me and every woman. She wants to be respected for her work and her ability. She gets frustrated that being a woman means that she’s less likely to get notice, or to get recognized for her achievements. She speaks up from time to time, but each time she does, she gets slapped down, and no one likes to get slapped down. She wishes that a lof the guys she respects would speak out more, and would stop making sexist generalizations –but she likes these people and they do a lot of good, so she holds back. She doesn’t really want to argue. She just wants to be respected. To be noticed for her work.

And who could blame her?

But that fourth woman, the tough broad; the one who keeps up the fight, who barges in, who calls the guys out, no matter how nice? Well she’ll just continue doing what it is she does, until the day she no longer needs to, or, more likely, the day she just gets tired. When she does get tired, she’ll probably join the ladies in the corner–if they’ll have her. But she won’t sit and quietly talk. No, chances are, she won’t say a damn thing.