Category: Culture

Categories
Diversity

Girl-ick-ism

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Halley has two new posts on girlism, related to the release of Charlie’s Angels 2 and Legally Blonde 2, and both are wide of the mark.

In the first she writes:

In both movies, the younger women call on a network of their girlfriends to save the day. In both movies the older feminist woman falters by turning her back on her friends and colleagues. If Girlism is about anything, it’s about women getting their power from loving their women friends and loving men.

I have no idea from where Halley gets her understanding of feminism. She’s not that much younger than me to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that women had to fight to enter any profession, and in doing so, opened the doors for those that followed. Women helping other women isn’t as much a matter of ‘hanging with the girls’, as it is attempting to make a difference – alone or with a group.

A little history in the suffragette movement might be in order right now. In merry old England, the women that marched shoulder to shoulder united in a sisterhood that transcended social class; they used to be arrested, put into jail, and force fed when they went on hunger strikes – all because they did not want to be treated as property.

Perhaps that’s why it took three girly girls to take out one old tough feminist broad, Demi Moore, in Charlie’s Angels 2 – the younger generation doesn’t really know what hardship is.

Then there’s the issue of loving men. In Halley’s second post, she writes about the Alpha Male:

He doesn’t mind her being a big wig lawyer downtown in a big law firm.

Well, isn’t that just precious – today’s Alpha Male doesn’t mind when the little woman becomes a Real Time Lawyer. Maybe the truth is he doesn’t seem to mind, but he’s really frustrated; so he spends 10,000 to shoot a naked woman, as she runs like an animal from paintball guns that shoot the pellots at 200MPH.

(I also have to wonder what lesbians think of Halley’s posts – after all, they don’t love men, not in the way that Halley uses the term. Perhaps they don’t count in this new ‘girlism’ thing. Lucky them.)

Halley’s girlism is just that, for girls only. Cute babes with nice little bods who love to baby talk their Alpha Male, kicking a bad guy and presenting a legal brief by day, sex kittens by night. The rest of us need not apply.

Categories
Connecting

The authoritarians

Though I edited the post that led to the comment, I did want to promote what Joel said here to the forefront, because I think it’s worth being highlighted:

A few people are so intense that they fail to think through processes. It may take years before a simple reform takes place because these power brokers don’t want to be bothered or they want to build in obstacles to prevent the redelineation of a structure that they built and that they hold precious.

It’s authoritarianism at its most subtle that you’re facing, Shelley. Putting a system in place and then never, ever really considering how it might be rethought to allow for more input from others. It’s the creation of a priestly class (think electoral college) which exists primarily to prevent radical change. Often, however, it turns into a tool for those wishing to promote a radical change that most people don’t want.

“Hysterics” is a buzzword used by some authoritarian types for anything that stops them cold in their tracks and asks that they think again. Stiff people accustomed to using stiff language use the accusation of emotion to attempt to make others think that they are dispassionate. The truth is they rattle easily and they don’t want you to know this. So, unless you are up all night and unable to put this stuff out of your mind, their labels are likely nothing more than a projection of the turmoil they feel inside of themselves when you suggest leveling the playing field, changing the way that decisions are made and, maybe, the players.

In particular the statement, stiff people accustomed to using stiff language use the accusation of emotion to attempt to make others think that they are dispassionate. I would expand on this that the same people use accusations of emotion in order to undercut what another is saying – to lessen the value.

This is the battle I face and have faced in the technology world. When I get angry, I’m accused of being ‘overly emotional’ or ‘hysterical’ where men are just accused of being hot headed, and though it’s subtle, there is a difference between the two. And this difference becomes very, very frustrating.

I was also told this week, though kindly and well meant, that I have a ‘my way or the highway’ approach to many of these discussions – that when I get pushback, I leave. Guilty. Guilty as charged, especially lately. But it’s not because I’m being disagreed with, or I’m not getting ‘my way’ and I’m pouting – it’s because I see this subtle or not so subtle shift happen again, and I just don’t want to continue the fight.

I’d rather just go for a walk or a drive and take photos and write stories. But that’s a cop out, isn’t it? Because if I leave these technology efforts, especially here in the weblogging work – the discussions such as those on the current weblogging metadata and RSS and others of these nature – there will be no other woman involved. No other woman.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Joel said:

It’s authoritarianism at its most subtle that you’re facing, Shelley. Putting a system in place and then never, ever really considering how it might be rethought to allow for more input from others.

That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? We create this open means of publication, where anyone can be heard. And then we constrain it with rules and regulations – mustn’t forget the links, m’dear – and elect kings and queens and become so many bobbing cats in a row, agreeing with everything they say, ready to tromp on any who disagree. The ‘echo bloggers’ I’ve heard about so much this week.

(Which is kinda funny because I just echoed the bloggers who talked about echo bloggers who… never mind. )

No answers. Back to work.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Marriage Bashing?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Halley was kind enough to link back to me and Liz yesterday after we referenced her README post. However, she added a follow-up note about her post that caused me to choke on my morning coffee:

I guess I want to add that README is not about male-bashing, since I’m crazy for men, but rather marriage-bashing, which drives me crazy. There is something new coming along to replace marriage. I don’t know what it’s called, but I know it’s coming and it’s high time.

Halley is a lovely woman with a zest for life and smart and capable, but my first reaction reading this was an unqualified: What? Well, it was really: WTF!?

My original/edited response yesterday to Halley’s post is that I don’t think that weblogging necessarily does even the playing field for women. This week, during an email exchange with another weblogger – a well known A-List weblogger – he used the term ‘hysterical’ to describe both my disagreement with a procedure another group was following, as well as my reaction to comment editing – something he said no one else disagreed with.

(Before you ask, no it wasn’t Sam. Sam would never use a term like this in a technical discussion.)

I wasn’t going to talk about this online because I’m still thinking about the exchanges from this week, trying to figure them out, and my energy is elsewhere at this time. But when I read about Halley’s README post being a pushback against marriage, I had to say something. Had to.

Marriage has nothing to do with women and respect in our fields and other aspects of our lives. That’s the battle we’ve been fighting all along – that there are other options for women other than being caregiver and wife, though these are also valid choices. Women can be police, doctors, soldiers, nuclear scientists, and yes, even computer technologists – and still be content and happy to be a woman, be ‘feminine’, and yes, be happily married or otherwise paired.

To me a great marriage is one in which both partners are free to grow and to reach beyond their internal boundaries if this is what they want and need. However, we go through our lives being who we are, making the most of what we are, regardless of our gender – a good marriage should be nothing more than a perk.

Contrary to the songs, we’re not complete and made whole through the love of a good man or women; we should be complete in and of ourselves, by ourselves. But a good marriage or partnership, and children if this is what we want, can add to the joy, the contentment, the excitement, and the adventure.

Women and equality in our chosen professions has nothing to do with being married or not. Unless you want to be a nun.

I am a passionate person, and I freely admit I have a temper. And if someone were to tell me, Shelley, you’ve got a bad temper and you need to back off and cool down, I can live with this. And if they tell me I’m not listening, or I’m rocking the boat, I can live with this, too. I can even live with being called an a**hole. But when they use gender dismissive terms such as ‘hysterical’, well then I see we have a ways to go – even in this egalitarian world of weblogging.

But fighting the good fight because we’re searching for a replacement for marriage? Well, that doesn’t rock the boat, it misses it altogether.

Categories
Diversity Writing

Art and the artist’s dilemma

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Ezra Pound has been under discussion lately, and not just in Loren’s analysis of Pound’s Cantos — his lifelong work. Jonathon also discussed Pound but from a different perspective. He wrote about the dilemma between Ezra Pound the poet, and Ezra Pound the anti-Semitic traitor. Specifically, the issue had to do with Pound being nominated and receiving the Bollington prize for his Pisan Cantos, which he wrote while being incarcerated for treason.

This is not an easy topic. I don’t see an easy answer or a clear one, and the feelings can run high, as witness my anything but subtle “Being an American is not a limitation” pushback of yesterday. On the one hand, it’s important to separate the art from the artist, because to do otherwise encourages censorship. On the other hand, honoring a person’s art indirectly honors the artist, no matter how much we try to isolate the work.

Ezra Pound is considered a poet’s poet, the father of modern poetry, and the mentor of other poetry legends such as TS Eliot and e.e. Cummings. His Cantos are considered the definitive work of its kind — literary masterpieces. I’m not one to take on something like the Cantos, but I rather liked Pound’s sweet little poem An Immorality:

Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.

And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,

Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men’s believing.

Yet from the man who penned this sweet song of the love of simple things over the immortality of being a hero, comes:

Is there a RACE left in England? Has it ANY will left to survive? You can carry slaughter to Ireland. Will that save you? I doubt it. Nothing can save you, save a purge. Nothing can save you, save an affirmation that you are English.

Whore Belisha is NOT. Isaccs is not. No Sassoon is an Englishman, racially. No Rothschild is English, no Strakosch is English, no Roosevelt is English, no Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Khan, Baruch, Schiff, Sieff, or Solomon was ever yet born Anglo-Saxon.

And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you have murdered your empire, and it is this filth that elects your politicians.

The dilemma of the artist as separate from their art continues today with Roman Polanski’s Academy Award nomination and subsequent win for directing The Piano, a movie about the very same Holocaust that Pound supported in his broadcasts. Polanski’s nomination coincided with the release of the transcript of the rape case he was charged with many years ago — the rape of a 13 year old girl. Ironically enough, the victim of the rape, now 39, urged the Academy not to hold back on giving Polanski the award.

In Jonathon’s comments, qB (coincidentally facing her own censorship issues right now) also brought up the controversy that surrounds Wagner, who was also anti-semitic. As the Guardian article writes, though, Wagner was not alone — Chopin, who I’m rather fond, was also anti-semitic (of which I wasn’t aware).

Jonathon had originally wrote a long time ago that he found an inverse proportion between the ‘goodness’ of an artist and the quality of their work. Ultimately, I don’t know what’s right. I do believe that work should not be censored, never censored. But I have a difficult time with the concept of honoring a work by a person who advocated the killing of millions. And these words sound exactly the same as the words I’ve heard from others, people whose opinions I deplore. So much for my smug assumption of moral superiority.

Where’s the line? I don’t know.

Maybe the solution to this dilemma is the one that the authorities took with Pound long ago — declare it all insane and push it out of the way and go on to other things.

Categories
Diversity

Women in IT Stuff

Recovered from the Wayback machine.

update

This discussion in Kevin’s comments has quickly degenerated into how women and men are different, physically, and how women can’t do math and engineering. I would stay to uphold the fight against this attitude, but I have to go to work. Doing the thing I should not be able to do, being a woman and not having the brain for the work.

Earlier

Kevin Drum, aka Calpundit, reflected on an article out today in the LA Times about the lack of women in IT, saying it reminded him of the previous writing I did, Outside even among the Outsiders. He writes:

I imagine this is at least part of the reason for the relative lack of women in IT: they feel enormously pressured by the obsessive, almost semi-autistic nature of some of their prospective IT colleagues. In most of the IT groups that I’ve been involved with, you have to be willing to engage in rhetorical near-war in order to be heard, and you have to put up with challenges to your ideas that are so aggressive, so intense, and so basically anti-social that it’s almost impossible not to take them as personal affronts.

I have seen this aggressive behavior, frequently, in IT. However, as one person mentioned in the comments attached to Kevin’s post, women in IT can also demonstrate this same aggressive behavior. Perhaps it has something to do with getting instant obedience from our computers, and demanding the same from those we work with?

I do know that IT is very competitive, a culture I think that originated with the early computer people, part of the older scientific community’s need to prove my brain is bigger than yours. This competition is probably responsible for 80% of our innovation. However, it’s also probably responsible for 80% of our inability to agree on standards, as well as 80% of application development failures.

Anyway, interesting and thoughtful post and discussion at Kevin’s on this topic.