Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

Categories
Diversity

NonCon 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Liz Lawley wrote a well-balanced and thoughtful essay on social software conferences and the unfortunate lack of women speakers at same:

I know, I know these conferences have open calls for presentations, and if women didn’t apply well, shame on us. (And yes, I’ve now shamed myself into at least submitting a proposal for Supernova, though I won’t hold my breath.) But I suspect that many of the speakers on the list didn’t come knocking’ they were invited. And I also think that it’s in the best interest of this burgeoning field if those in positions to affect the direction of future development do make the extra effort to broaden the range of participants in their programs.

Now, before you go there, salivating at the thought of fresh meat!, Liz also added the caveat:

Before the greek chorus makes its way from Shelley’s blog to mine, let me say as clearly as possible that this isn’t about bashing the power structure, or denigrating the men in it. Hey, I like men, really. Even white men. I’m married to one, I’m the mother to two, and I’m the teacher to literally hundreds of them every year.

I agree with Liz on this too. Why, some of my best friends are white men.

As serendipity would have it, Dorothea declares herself conference free in 2003:

I hereby declare 2003 a Con-Free Year for me. Conference, convention, both. I ain’t a-goin’, and there ain’t no draggin’ me.

Um, normally dragging’s only part of Wealth Bondage’s WhipCon, but that’s neither here nor there. I also am a committed NonCon 2003tm attendee. Not only is NonCon something I can afford, it’s also guaranteed 100% diversified across all ethnic groups and genders.

Yup, no sessions where you sit at the back and skip out half way through to see who’s trolling the hallway. No looking up from giving a presentation to a sea of winking white apple logos as half the room “blogs it live”.

No morning break with the glazed pillows the non-Krispy Kreme people call ‘doughnuts’. No after hours mixer with a room full of old-time geeks (buttoned to the chin), former west-coast dot-com employees (button down/khaki), or former east-coast dot-com employees (black leather).

No lunch sitting with strangers who stare at your chest, ‘reading’ your name badge, and you’re not wearing one. No getting run over by the hordes of fans trying to get closer to one of the Names. (I once watched as Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly walked side by side down a hallway at a conference, and the fans spread out behind them like feathers on a male peacock. It was kind of pretty.)

No keynote by Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, No Michael Dell, or other Important Personage of a successful, pick one (communication, multimedia, legal, university, software, hardware, or publishing) organization.

And especially, no PowerPoint presentations.

Of course, the downside is not getting to chat with people in your field, not getting to network for those 1 or 2 unfilled jobs still left in the industry, and especially, not being able to get together with people you’ve come to know and like and admire.

But there’s something to be said for staying a virtual friend – no one need ever know that you don’t really look like Wonder Woman.

Categories
Diversity Political

Ladylike behavior

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Under the banner of equal opportunity, the demand for full integration of women means special treatment for women. They want special breaks-a woman shouldn’t have to perform the same physical tests as a man. This agenda is driven not by women in uniform, but by their civilian advocates, who would never find themselves or their children serving in the military. The most powerful argument against women in combat, however, is not their relative physical strength. It is that decent men protect women in the face of a physical threat. The typical American male cannot pretend that the soldier to the right of him is a man and not a woman. If this bizarre social experiment of moving women closer and closer to the front lines is going to continue, American mothers had better be put on notice that we’ve got to start raising our sons differently. We’ve got to start telling them, “You’d better go hit that girl. Well, what did you do when she called you a name? Did you hit her?”

Kate O’Beirne, Washington Editor of the National Review in interview

soldier_loripiestewa.jpg    soldier_johnson.gif  soldier_jessicalynch.jpg  soldier_both.jpg

I was struck by the ethnic diversity of the photographs of the women who were killed, captured, and injured from the 507 Maintenance Company. Pfc. Lori Piestewa was a Hopi indian, as well as mother of two children. Shoshana Johnson, an African-American, is also a mother, described as kind and friendly, and who loves cooking. And of course, I don’t need to link to anything to describe young, blonde Jessica Lynch, do I? The news is full of her rescue. She and Pfc. Piestewa were roommates and close friends.

‘This is a national security issue,’ said Bartlett. ‘They will rape and torture women in front of the men and break the men. They say that’s a problem with men. I hope we never live in a society in which men are not deferential to women”

Human Events

The stories about Pfc. Lynch, in particular, have been pretty wild. Real GI Jane stuff, with her firing back until she ran out of bullets. Chances are all of the troops, including Johnson and Piestewa, fired back until they ran out of bullets. Unless they were dead, of course.

‘We join the Marine Corps to be good Marines and fight for our country,’ Malugani said. ‘I recognize that there are physical differences between men and women, but it all comes down to the same thing: whether you can do the job.

‘Everyone is faced with challenges, everybody has weaknesses and everybody has strengths,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t come down to a male-female thing. It’s a human being thing.’

Marine lst Lt. Amy Mulugani, for Stars and Stripes

I think we now have an answer to the age-old question about what will a woman soldier do in war? Just what the men do – their jobs. And trying to stay alive to come home again.

Of course, women are excluded from combat roles in the United States. Unfortunately, this doesn’t block them from combat – just the promotional possibilities associated with combat roles.

They know that there already is a khaki ceiling. The ladder to the top jobs has to include combat positions, yet women are still formally prohibited from most combat units. (This although the lines between deployments is so thin as to be semipermeable; Shoshana Johnson, now a prisoner of war, was sent to Iraq as a cook.) The group that lobbied for a change in the combat ban, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, has been weakened by the Bush administration, swayed by conservative critics who howled about its “feminist agenda.” Among the new female voices in the Pentagon is one former master sergeant who opposes women in combat because “women enjoy being protected by men.” She says that the skills needed for fighting are “to survive, to escape and to evade,” adding, “clearly, women don’t have those as a rule.”

Quindlen: Battlefield Rape Is Less a Concern Than It Is in Service at Home

Women enjoy being protected by men.

Unfortunately, coming home means coming home to the very real possibility of sexual assault at the hands of their own commanders and fellow soldiers. I guess it’s just an example of that old male deference and protectiveness paid to women.

In times of peace the powers that be may conveniently forget how many women there now are on the battlefield, how hard they work and how well they perform. Military leaders may forget that if the number of women willing to enlist drops significantly, the ability of America to defend itself will drop significantly, too.

And they may forget how terrible it is that women who must face sexual assault from the enemy as the price of war too often expect to face it from their compatriots in peacetime. As a colonel in the Air Force whose daughter says she was attacked by a fellow cadet told The New York Times: “She knew she could have been captured by an enemy, raped and pillaged in war. She did not expect to be raped and pillaged at the United States Air Force Academy.”

In fact, no soldier should expect to be assaulted by another without significant consequences. Yet that is what has happened. Those who have always been hostile to female soldiers say that this is inevitable, given the atmosphere of esprit with which women interfere, given the machismo that is essential for trained fighting forces. This is insulting to male soldiers. The suggestion is that they are always one beer away from a sexual assault, no more able to control their violent impulses than an attack dog.
…
As their sisters did in Desert Storm, many will return from the Middle East, having served in combat despite the ban, with an official wink and a nod. Maybe it’s the same wink and a nod you get after you’ve been pinned down and penetrated by a fellow cadet, the one that says you have to go along to get along.

Quindlen: Battlefield Rape Is Less a Concern Than It Is in Service at Home

(Thanks to Norm and Joseph Duemer for links to stories)

Categories
Diversity Political

Uncompromising Individualism

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This essay is long, and includes terms that are racially offensive, but also representative of the time in which they were used.

Much of my earliest reading was through books I pilfered from my brother’s shelves when he was out playing with his friends. It was through my brother that I was introduced to comic characters such as Superman and Batman, that guy made out of stone, Spiderman, and so on. My first exposure to science fiction was E.E. “Doc” Smith, and my first classic novel was “Song of Hiawatha” by Longfellow.

It was also through my ‘borrowing’ that I was introduced at a very young age to Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead”.

It’s no surprise that Ayn Rand was favored reading in our school. Her philosophy of Rational Egoism and Objectivism was perfect fodder for a people who were extreme Libertarians even before there were Libertarians. Each man takes care of himself and his family and those neighbors he knows, but the rest of the world “out there” is someone else’s problem. If God didn’t intend the strong to survive he wouldn’t have given us two hands and a gun to hold.

I didn’t particularly understand politics at the time. I knew that one close family friend had a bomb shelter in his backyard, and another buried jars of real metal coins along with food and weapons throughout his property, but I just thought this was the way people lived. “Get us out of UN now” posters don’t mean much when you don’t know what UN is, and the sign outside of Kettle “welcoming us to John Birch Country” was nothing more than a visual indicator that we were getting close to home – same as the funny pile of boulders along the left side of the road, and the drive in movie picture place.

The rest of the country may have had troubles with race but my people knew who the real enemy was: the Communists. And they knew for an actual fact, that someday the Reds would be in our town, knocking down our doors and forcing the Godless ways of Communism on us.

(All the while our parents worried about the communists, we kids bought black licorice nigger babies at the candy store, and picked past the nigger toes to get to the cashews in the all nut mix. And I never did understand why my two half Native American friends from across the street couldn’t join me when I went to the community swimming pool.)

In those days, unless the weather was foul, I’d climb out my bedroom window to read on the roof. We had a big two-story home taller than most around and I could look our far enough to see Main Street and even a little bit of the grass around the school. On the rooftop, I read the story about the architect who was uncompromisingly brilliant in his art, disdaining the acceptance and success more conventional designs would bring him. Ayn Rand would say of the book that it reflected “…individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.”

I was too young to understand about individualism or collectivism, but I did understand about an uncompromising dedication to one’s art or one’s belief, something I was to see in my own father, who I greatly admire. The book left in me a deeply ingrained dislike against conformity, even such conformity as is considered ‘necessary’ for the common good.

Not long after reading Fountainhead, we moved to Seattle. It was there, while I was a “Candy Striper” (a teenage volunteer) at a local hospital that I met a young black orderly who gently explained to me that ‘nigger’ wasn’t a polite term. This same young man also introduced me to the words of Martin Luther King, and I found myself lost in the power of “I have a Dream”, and the belief that we shall overcome. At the same time, Vietnam was becoming more of a nightmare and if I couldn’t see that man’s manifest destiny was filled by oppressing blacks, it certainly wasn’t being filled by killing and being killed by Vietnamese in a place we clearly didn’t belong. I embraced both the civil rights movement and the peace movement, and happily joined arms with my brothers and sisters of all colors to call for an end to war, and an end to oppression.

I saw no discrepancy between joining these movements and my continued belief in uncompromising individuality. I felt strongly that every person had a right to achieve their own success as an individual, and that a society that sought to oppress individuals because of color or nationality was wrong, and needed to be fixed. There is no hypocrisy in recognizing that a group may achieve what an individual cannot, but still believe in individualism.

Which leads me to today. To here. To now.

There has been discussion recently about community and individualism. In particular, Trevor Bechtel wrote the following:

Isn’t the cultural narrative of communites much more powerful than any personal self-knowledge I, or any individual, might posess. Surely I must assent to aspects of one or more communities representations of the world and this in turn shapes the community but the articulation is at the community level first and always most strongly. I may struggle mightily with a community, even one I feel deeply committed to, but it is only in understanding my life in the context of a communal narrative that I can understand life at all. Culture moves us forward not in an inevitable march of progress but simply because it forces us to stand on others shoulders. There is no scratch from which an individual could start an articulation of self-knowledge. And even if there was, who would want to?

An individual’s ideas are rarely that interesting. A communities ideas, even when they are wrong or limiting or confining often are.

Bechtel continues this theme in Happy Tutor’s comments:

I think many people find it necessary to be individuals and this probably isn’t all bad, but in the end it is the dynamics of there relationship to their community that shapes who they are.

As Happy Tutor rightfully has pointed out, I am nothing but a computer geek and not a learned PhD or academic, so I can’t depend on an academic argument to bolster my view. However, in spite of this, I do know when I read something that completely misses the strengths of individuality in the rush to extol the virtues of the communal good. He forgets the power of free will.

To make of each of us into nothing more than a puppet to the community’s whims and actions would still see me back in a small town in the middle of nowhere, married with a dozen children, racist, bigoted, and afraid of anything outside of that which is comfortably familiar. However, lest you think it was exposure to another community that changed me, think again. It was my own uncompromising individuality that started my discordant communion with my ‘community’.

In the fifth grade, before I moved to Seattle, we were given a topic to write about: “what the flag means to me”. Among all the stories of patriotism and love and belief in “God, Family, and Country” that the flag represented to my classmates, I wrote an essay that said, in effect, that the flag was basically a piece of cloth, it could have just as easily been orange, green, and purple as much as red, white, and blue, and it was basically nothing more than a symbol, which could have easily been replaced by some other symbol. I also said that I thought the Pledge of Allegience was so many emptry words, and saluting the flag was an empty gesture.

As you can imagine, this didn’t exactly make my fellow classmates happy. I do have a very vivid memory in my mind of my friends reactions that day in class. Very vivid.

No act of the community helped me arrive at my viewpoint. No one coached me in these words. This was me taking a close look at the community around me and seeing for myself the emptiness in so many of our gestures. It was my free will, my individuality, which gave me the ability to look at what the community offered and to choose to reject it.

Was I out to change minds? No, I was only answering the question truthfully for me. Did I change the community or enrich it? Not a chance. This act was the act of an individual operating, however momentarily, outside of the community. Did that make my act unimportant? No! For me, it was probably one of my most defining acts of my life, one that I continue to this day with all my ‘contrary’ writings.

Now, your reaction might be to say, then, that I lack individuality because I deliberately choose a contrary viewpoint. Of course, this becomes somewhat tantamount to the old question of “When did you stop beating your wife”.

I don’t deliberately choose a contrary viewpoint. There are hundreds of events that occur daily that I don’t write about, either yay or nay; and hundreds that I write in support. But there are few things more irritating to me then to see herd like behavior in pursuit of the “good of the commons”, particularly when any behavior outside of the ‘herd’ is considered ‘bad form’. Or unpatriotic.

There are also few things I dislike more than acts, covert as well as overt, attempting to silence those who do not agree. Something I’m seeing with disquieting regularity within this form of communication we call ‘weblogging’.

When I see these things, these group behaviors, I am moved to act. If these actions are the act of a mindless automaton as part of reaction to ‘community’ so be it. Beep, friggen, beep.

Am I denying that we’re part of communities? Can an individual be part of a community? Of course. As John Donne wrote:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

We are on a small world, existing on finite resources. Our actions can and do have repercussions on others. To deny that is to deny our responsibility to the greater community that is Earth. But accepting our responsibility as citizens of this world does not preclude the existence of the individual, or the importance of individualism. We belong to as many communities as communities have people, and with each, we choose what to receive from, or to give back to, the community. We choose. We choose.

To say that we are hapless participants within a community, unimportant of and by ourselves is to deny all that is great in us – is to deny our individuality. Our uniqueness. The wonder of Me in each of us.

Categories
Diversity

Amazons raise your shields on high

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave quotes a posting from Tara Sue, who writes:

 

My friend Ross and I have a lot in common. We both come from military families–his cousin and uncle serve and my brothers are soldiers. We were both raised by our father. And we share many ideas in business and politics. But there is plenty of room to disagree. Today we argued about war. I spoke with his wife and said, “If we replaced every man in power with a woman, there would be less war.” I don’t care for any speculation on the matter. We’ve never experienced mass matriarchy on this planet. There is no room for discussion–only proof. We will make peace in this world only after peace has been brought to our home. There are too many females pushing the testosterone bandwagon. I read an article today by a “chick” who thinks war is the “grown-up” thing to do. She went so far as too chide the protestors as though they are just simple minded youngsters, left-overs from the sixities who are just not “grown up” enough to make a choice for peace, but those who are grown up should know to support the war. Well, sister, even morons grow up.

Jonathon picks up on the premise and writes about the changing roles of women in combat. He writes:

 

I have no idea what Tara Sue Grubb might think of women in the military—whether she sees female soldiers as part of that group of women she criticizes for wanting “to have what [men] have.” Yet, given that one of the key goals of feminism has been to dismantle the political and cultural barriers to women’s participation in every field of human activity, it’s inevitable that women—or, at least, some women—would wish to participate in John Keegan’s “entirely masculine activity”: combat.

When we consider the major psychological transformations precipitated by weapons and tactics that allowed man to kill at a distance in an emotionally detached manner, it is hardly coincidental that women are integrated into combat units in the US Navy and Air Force—where they would not be expected to engage directly with an enemy—but are excluded from combat in the US Army where the chance of face-to-face contact is significantly higher.

 

The argument about women in combat and whether women being in charge would prevent war is somewhat mute because several times in the past, societies have been matriarchal, and many times, women have been the primary ruler. And we still have war. There is no sex-related war gene. There is only cultural indoctrination.

Think of the lion. It is the female who hunts, and it is the female who protects her young, and therefore the species. All the male does is sleep, have sex with the females, and fight other males for possession of the females.

(Well, okay, from this example I guess we could say that we females lack the gene that makes us want to fight other females over a man.)

For every woman simpering in a kitchen saying she’s too frail to lift a gun because she’ll break a nail; and for every woman claiming woman as goddess who states that if only women were in charge, our nurturing natures would prevent war, I repeat what I said in Jonathon’s comments:

This “woman as nurturing mother figure” is absolute bullshit.

The primary reason women have been adverse to warfare in the past is because women have usually been left at home, unprotected, while the men went off with all the weapons, leaving them vulnerable.

Tara Sue needs to consider a little history lesson about women and fighting. Most of the early Celtic war leaders were women. Women were gladiators in Rome. Most of the native american tribes in this country were matriarchial and they did fight wars. Women have dressed as men to fight as soldiers, or have picked up the guns of fallen soldiers and taken their place — without training I might add.

There isn’t a ‘war gene’ that’s sex related. The only reason women aren’t allowed in fighting infantry is the stupid old men in this country who don’t want to face the political backlash of the first women killed in actual hand to hand combat. Horrors! A potential mother killed!

And because of this, women also lose out on advancements, many of which are dependent on being in a combat unit.

If women have one thing that men don’t have it’s more of a willingness to see and acknowledge our mistakes, and our aggressiveness is usually vocal rather than physical. And these are more from cultural upbringing than sex-related genetics. Perhaps because of these characteristics, there _might_ be less war.

Here we go again, another round of making women into these delicate flowers of sensitivity and feminity, fragile, manipulative little blossoms whose sensibilities are too refined to do something such as ‘fight in a war’. Horrors!

Girlism redux.

 

Categories
Diversity Writing

The perfect woman

Ladies! Ladies! Please stop your housekeeping for one moment and pay attention to some absolutely vital information. A wonderful new treat is heading to the bookshelves in February, ladies. I know that you’re all shivery in anticipation just from my introduction, but be sure to fold your towels and take the curlers out of your hair before you rush past your 5.3 children on the way to the store to buy it.

What is this new treat? Why, dear hearts, it’s none other than Phyllis Schlafly’s newest book, Feminist Fantasies! Isn’t this just the biggest thrill!

Now, now, don’t swoon. I know that we couldn’t ask for a better valentine’s present, and you’re all agog in anticipation.

Don’t pee your panties, ladies, but there’s more — none other than Ann Coulter has written the forward to it! Yes! I would not josh you, ladies! Ann Coulter, herself! I am beside myself. Just beside myself.

Now you can tell that big, strong man in your life what to get you for Valentine’s Day instead of a silly box of chocolates (not to mention that you’ve gained a few pounds anyway, darling, and nothing turns that handsome man of yours off more than bulky thighs). Just make sure you re-assure him that you won’t take time out from your wifely duties to read it. You tell Charlie that Charlene, Charlie Joe, Billy Chuck, Cherrie Charlie, and Bob are more important than a book, even one as important as “Feminist Fantasies”.

However, since I am such a tease I thought I would re-print some of the advanced review of the book. Just for you, my darlings.

Just for you.

 

So, this feminist writer in her thirties started interviewing smart young women in their twenties and she learned quite a lot. She discovered that, among women in their twenties, “feminism has become a dirty word.” She discovered that young women in their twenties have concluded that feminists are “unhappy,” “bitter,” “angry,” “tired,” and “bored,” and that the happy, enthusiastic, relaxed women are not feminists. The writer found that young women are especially turned off by feminism because of its “incredible bitterness.” She admitted that “feminism had come to be strongly identified with lesbianism.”
…
The Wall Street Journal ran a series of news stories about the disruption in corporations and law firms caused by the wave of pregnancies at the managerial and professional levels. Since more women hold high-level jobs, their time off for pregnancy has caused serious company disruptions. In the past eight years, the number of women over thirty having a child has almost doubled

A study by the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne discovered that “the professional homemaker is a happy woman who feels good about herself and her ability to stick to her decision to remain at home, even under strong societal pressure to find an outside job.” She is feminine and traditional; she is not feminist.

 

I’m so excited about this book, my dears, that I’ve decided to celebrate it’s publication with a series of weblog postings focusing on Phyllis Schlafly and her impact on culture, titled The Perfect Woman in the inaugural launch of the new Evil Woman weblog.

Coming to a browser near you, February 5th.