Interesting Sidenote

The LA Times has an article today about Susan Kare, designer of the icons for Mac Classic and more, and it not only mentions that she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, which is normal enough, it also points out that MHC is an all-women's college - without that fact being referenced anywhere else in the article.

Which, I just find kinda funny for some reason.

It's like, "so and so went here. Oh, and by the way only girls go there isn't that weird?"

And omg, I want, like all of these.

Not only are they cool, they are from an MHC alum. Double cool!

Ooooh. and they are on sale. Which means they may be gone soon. I should buy myself an early birthday present. Or two.

But, But....You Don't Understand

No, see. The problem is that I do. Far too well.

And so you have to look at the development of female geeks, who not only have the same not-conventionally attractive, socially confused, and isolated early conditioning as male geeks....

So, a story.

I was visiting colleges. Which was a painful experience to begin with, because the school I really wanted to attend was not only the most expensive - both to visit and to attend - but the slowest in getting me my financial aid package. So I spent about a month going around to the other schools. All the while trying really hard to not compare them with what would one day be my alma mater.

(Yes, there is a happy ending to this story.)

So, I was visiting colleges. One in particular up in WA, to be exact. Doing the whole tour/sleepover/sitting in on classes thing. And there were a bunch of us, because it was that time of year, who were being hosted by the same woman. The visit itself was pretty uneventful - aside from the fact that I watched ER for the first time - except for two things....

....but the added stigma of not having their intelligence recognized, encouraged, or appreciated.

The Second Incident:

I sat in on an electronics class.

Which was completely my fault, as I'd asked for a science class. Physics, preferably.

I understood very little of it, but it sounded really interesting, and I thought it was cool that I understood even some of it. But all the students - who, looking back, must have been science majors themselves, considering the level of the class - kept making comments about how I must be bored out of my mind and how they were so sorry I'd gotten this class.

I wasn't. And why did they think I would be?

And did I really want to take classes with people like that? I thought the point of college was to leave those people behind in high school?

I mean, the idiot partner from my high school physics class may ignore me every time I say the right answer, but at least he cares enough to pretend that he's smarter than I am.

And being told that their only worth is their sexuality, and clearly they FAIL at that.

Because I'm all about non-linear narrative tonight, a confession.

I was one of those girls once upon a time. You know, those heartless bitches that turn guys into jerks.

Only once, though.

He asked me to go out when we were in 6th grade - and still in elementary school. I told him that I didn't really think we were old enough for that, but that I still wanted to be his friend. (I am so not making this up.) I got all pissed when he didn't want to be friends anymore and found it really awkward when did stuff like ask me to dance at this stupid thing they held for us at science camp.

I wanted to say no but I couldn't because we weren't allowed to. Dance rules. Grrr. I have no idea if he knew that I didn't want to touch him, but it would have been really hard not to know.

(no, really, this is all true)

You end up with a lot of touch-starved women.

All through elementary school - well, fourth grade onwards, my crush was on...damn, I completely forgot his name....anyway, he was cool. Cooler than I would ever be. The boy wore Grateful Dead and Led Zepplin T-shirts in 6th grade. I still don't own any music by either of those bands. He was super cool.

And he was a nerd, too! We were in GATE and science fairs together. He made a robot in 4th grade for his science project and demonstrated it to the class and I spent the whole time secretly wishing he would pick me to try the remote. For several obvious reasons. (It was a cool robot.)

But he worked really hard at ignoring me.

And right after the Nice Guy asked me to dance at science camp, it was my turn to ask my crush to dance - and get the same treatment I'd just gotten.

You end up with women who think, "I'm sick of being only appreciated in virtual spheres for my intelligence, but still not treated as being as intelligent as men, and I'm sick of being told I'm worthless because I'm not drop-dead gorgeous. If I can't be loved, I want to at least be desired."

The First Incident:

It was about the time when normal people would turn in for bed, and our host announced that there would be one more activity. Lucky us, we'd come on the night when they guys traditionally came to serenade the girls dorm.

Being the silly girl I was, my first thought was "how romantic!" And hiding in the darkest secretest shadows of my heart was the wish that I would picked as worthy of a serenade.*

She wanted to give us fair warning though, because last year the guys thought it would be funny to be all insulting and shit and call the women names while "serenading" them. One poor girl apparently got so upset she had to leave.

(Upset - like throwing things at them upset? - I wanted to ask.)

So she just wanted us to know that we didn't have to go if we didn't want to or if we didn't think we'd enjoy it.

Well, gee, guess who opted to opt out.

And guess who the other two girls spend at least a full half hour talking about when they came back. (Be warned, my spirit animal is a opossum.)



Yeah, there's no pressure at play at all in Operation Douche.



Quotes from sabotabby via the_red_shoes via hahathor via lauredhel.

*FYI to any interested parties, being serenaded in public is no longer a secret wish of mine. Unlike you are the late, great, Heath Ledger. Or you are a famous rock star who has written a hit single about me. Otherwise it's just creepy and/or immature.

Half Truths

I've been quite the insomniac over the past few days because my new job starts on Monday, and my last day at my old jobs is on Friday. So I've been reading through (among other things) all the carnivals that I missed over the last few months.

This post from the 47th Carnival of Feminists caught my eye. It's about the classic listserv exchange "that starts out with someone being called out on saying something sexist and immediately turns into an attack on overly-sensitive women and the girly-men who respect them."

At one point, Ross, the guy that Eric ends up exchanging e-mails with, writes:

Maybe I am over-interpreting her response, but I have seen far too many people that always see prejudice in everything because that is what they expect and what they look for.

Excluding the hyperbolic "everything" - there is a kernel of truth to that statement. I very much disagree, however, that we see the sexism because it's what we expect. I'd argue quite the opposite, that we see it precisely because we are the ones who have learned not to expect it, not to normalize it.

As I've said several times before, one of the most enlightening experiences about having gone to a women's college was spending several years in an environment where the default was female. Not male. Not gender neutral. But female.

Remember too, that this wasn't just a place where we volunteered or worked. It was everything: home, work, play. Everything. 24/7

Not surprisingly, language changes in these circumstances. It isn't just our feminist sensibilities, but simple logic, that makes it clear how absurd it is to keep using words like "freshman." So we were "first-years" instead. Or, rather, "firsties." And, needless to say, there were no arguments about which pronouns/nouns were appropriate. When referencing the student body, the feminine was always used. The "he or she" (or "s/he") construction was used when discussing faculty and other staff.

We even developed a type of common shorthand for certain words. The Venus symbol was faster to write than "woman" - and "woman" came up more often than "man" - which became the sign for Mars. (both together meant "people") Besides, the venus symbol looks like a hasty stick figure it you do it a certain way. And that "certain way" was part of the logo for the student government.

And of course, we diminutized a lot of words - but never any that had anything to do with the women who were out mentors and inspiration, no matter whether they were teachers, upperclasswomen*, or our peers.

The point of this ramble being that I came home for Christmas break already unthinkingly referring to my classmates as "women" even though we still called our friends some variation of "girls" when talking directly to them. And so my mom, at one point while I was at home, looked at me bemusedly and asked why we did this.

And I had to think about it. Because it's mostly just something you pick up....and yet as wrong as it feels at first, it felt wrong as well to to call the dormmates we barely knew - especially seniors - girls. We could vote. They could buy alcohol. If we aren't adults by graduation, would we ever be?

And so, after thinking about it, I told her I thought that it wasn't so much that we thought of ourselves as completely adults yet, but that we certainly weren't children either...and that we damn well better be adults by the time we graduated. So while we referred to each other as women as a sign of respect, we did it not so much because we were sure we had earned it, but so that - by the time we left school - we'd become used to it and be able to recognize it better when people treated us with disrespect.

And it's most definitely worked, at least in may case. I don't get annoyed every time someone calls me girl, but I'm freakin' 30 people. When the 19 year old co-worker prefaces his statement to myself and the other 20+ woman sitting beside me with "girls,...." I most definitely get a little annoyed. And I see it as disrespectful, irrelevant of intentions.

Coming back to the post that inspired this ramble, I'd like to point out that at the end of the exchange, Ross adds:

Also, I have enjoyed our debate on this topic..... It can be entertaining and educational to debate these topics, especially considering that I don’t entirely agree with my own position.

Eric rightly calls him on this, saying that:

I wish I could get a guy like Ross to understand that this is not a “debate.” I hope this exchange was at least a little bit educational for him. I don’t feel that combating sexism is entertaining…

What he means of course, is that he wished Ross would see the conversation as something other than a game.

The thing is, I'm fairly certain he does. He may see it as a game as well, but it's obviously more to him than that - the use of ALL CAPS betrays a certain amount of (gasp!) emotion on the subject, as does the rest of the tone, the less formal writing in his earlier emails, and the fact that he bothered to email Eric at all.

No, Ross' claim that he "do[es]n’t entirely agree with [his] own position" isn't there to reassure Eric that he was only messing around, it's there because Ross lost. It's an attempt to lessen the loss by trivializing the debate after the fact. And it neatly, subtly reasserts his comrade Chris' main argument that "this is a silly discussion." An argument belied by the amount of time and effort Ross - and even Chris - put into the discussion.


PS - The comments are nearly as maddening as the emails that prompted the post. Is there any particular reason why people have such a hard time making the leap from "ok, ok, so maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to say" to "I'll try not to do it again"????????


*Spellcheck does not like "upperclasswomen" but it thinks "upperclassmen" is just fine. >P

I'm a Bad Person

Generally, reading through the alumnae magazine just makes me feel depressed and like a complete failure.

Today, though, I found it very funny.


And I'm not going to share why.





But, because I'm not all bad, I will say, with complete sincerity, "congrats goilfriend!"

Thoughts on Childhood and Othering

Feministe guest blogger Roy has a post up ranting about people who say they hate children. His very good point is that making blanket statement about children themselves is othering and discriminating.

I wasn't terribly surprised to see this argument pop up in response:

My point is that childhood is a phase, not a permanent state. You cannot identify a permanent set of children and work to change their status, because they will not remain children. Children can’t be said to be discriminated against, because they aren’t permanent members of a group. Instead, they will inevitably leave that group and join the “other side.”

Pardon me while I digress for a bit.

Sophomore year of college the trustees hired a new President specifically to make financial changes. Needless to say we were not happy about a lot of them. One particular one was protested from the moment it was suggested. Candlelight vigils were held, letters were drafted and sent, etc. We were promised that this would not, in fact be one of the cuts.

Spring break comes around, and during that week - when everyone is off campus - that exact change was announced.

It's pretty typical of colleges to do this. I saw the same thing happen again at the University of Oregon when the President went back on his word and overturned a joint decision made by him and a committee of students and faculty. And he announced it during summer break. And they can get away with it because a significant percentage of the people they are screwing over changes about every four years.

Childhood, like being a college student, is a temporary stage, but the fact that children will one day be less powerless does not mean that they are not constantly screwed over the way college students are by their administrators. The temporariness of childhood is part of what makes abuse - both large and small - so heart-breakingly constant. It's certainly not a reason to fail to see a pattern in the abuse.

And the way our culture often treats children - especially once they've grown past the cute stage - is very much abuse.

My supervisor asked me just the other day if (in the near future when we have money for another person) I would consider dropping the children part of Youth specialist and concentrate just on teens.

I have to admit I was a little floored. I tend to feel like I'm drowning when I deal with the teens. I never liked being one, I never liked my peers when I was one, and I rarely feel like I understand them the way that I understand the younger children. And quite frankly the teens that come into the library drive me batshit insane on a regular basis.

But I've also noticed that most adults tend to treat teenagers as either oversized children or defective adults. Despite having been a teen at some point, there's often no respect or understanding for what they are going through, much praise less for their skills or compassion for their developmental limitations. We scorn teens for not yet being adults in a way that we rarely do with younger children.

The fact that todays teens will not be teens forever does not mean that teenagers are not among one of the most derided groups of people in modern society. Neither does it mean that their lack of power is not often used to abuse and neglect them.

It scares me and makes me very sad that I can considered to be a really good YA librarian just because I try to treat teens as people - and not defective adults or monstrous children.

It's Not All About You

(A recent discussion made me think of the story that this post begins with. I've shared it in comments before, but I decided it deserved it's own post, so here goes.)

One of the interesting things about going to college is the experience of having friends who are in Psych 101 do experiments on you. It's really fun to try and guess what they are really about, because of course they almost never tell you until they are done, because that would mess up the experiment.

First-year at college a few friends of mine read a story to me and some other friends of ours and told us that there would be a memory test at the end. The story was about a high school kid arguing with his English teacher about his grade. When the story was done we were asked all sorts of questions about what had happened. We only got one question wrong each, and it was the same question.

"Was the teacher a man or a woman?"

We all said "woman"....

....but the story never said.

Because, this being a liberal all-women's college, the experiment was not a memory test at all, but a lesson in internalized sexism.

We all do it. All of it. The sexism, the racism, the homophobia, you name it. If it exists, we pretty much all do it. It doesn't matter if we are male or female, gay or straight, rich or poor, black or white or any other color, we all do it. The only way to stop doing it is to recognize it and name it every time you see it. And even then, really, you never actually stop doing it, you just do it less.

We usually don't mean it. We usually don't see it. And we definitely usually don't mean to be unfair or cruel. But we all do it. And it usually is. Even if we don't see it. Especially when we don't see it.

So when you hear someone toss around terms like "male gaze", "the patriarchy," or "colonizing" or when someone says that something is sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, etc. remember that they may not talking about you any more or less than they are talking about themselves.

"Look, Nora, in lots of things, you're still a child. I'm older than you in many ways and I've had a little more experience."

I adore my alma mater to pieces.

Quirks and all; and trust me, it has plenty of quirks.

Such as...a PE requirement.

Yup, that's right, we had a PE requirement to fulfill before we could graduate. I took Badmitton, Rennaissance Dancing, and Self Defense. Which....yeah, that says a lot about both me and my school right there.

If memory serves me, the self-defense course was the most popular PE class available; owing in no small part to the college being both liberal leaning and all-women. Our instructor was tiny, not much taller than me. I'd imagine most people saw her as pretty non-threatening. as just your normal, slightly overweight, middle aged woman. She was also in charge of campus security and had a black belt in karate. One of our final classes included a demonstration of her breaking boards with her karate chops and kicks (with one of us nervously holding the boards up for her).

At the time, the class was - to use an over-used and often abused phrase - empowering. Of course, pretty much anytime we got together and had the opportunity to yell simultaneously was an empowering experience - Convocation, Disorientation, Graduation, Friday Night parties, etc.. Adding in the practice punches and learning how to get out of a choke hold certainly gave the class extra kick to it, though.

However, one of the most memorable parts of the class was not so empowering in retrospect.

Part way through the course we got the lecture from our instructor about acting smart so that it would be less likely that we would ever have to use any of this stuff. Now, I do give her props for not pretending as though following her advice would for certain save us. I will also adore her forever for being the first person to ever tell me about the FBI's research about rape, and how they concluded that women who act confidently - as if, you know, they have every damn right to be wherever the hel they happen to be at that moment - are statistically less likely to be targeted by rapists.

Her list of advice - which sounded a lot more like dire warnings - was endless. Don't have an apartment by yourself if you can help it. Don't say your name on your answering machine. Don't walk alone at night. Don't take trips by yourself. Don't trust strangers. Watch your drink at all times. Never carry your keys with your fingers through the key rings (they can be easily broken that way if you are attacked). Carry your keys in a fist with one key poking out between your fingers. Make sure someone knows where you are going if you do go out alone. Glance under your car as you walk towards it whenever the area is deserted or it's nighttime. Have your keys ready to go so that you can get in your car quickly. Don't make your routine too normal. Get a second floor apartment if you can. Don't listen to music while jogging outside. Don't jog at night. Make sure your dorm blinds are closed before dressing and undressing. And on and on and on.

Now, a lot of this advice is perfectly reasonable - as long as it's taken with a grain of salt and one balances trying to be safe with not missing out on opportunities. Unfortunately, when people give out such advice, they usually leave out the bit about the salt and weighing various costs.

Which is part of why my reaction at the time was mixed. I wanted to be smart and safe, and her advice seemed mostly reasonable, but....some of it rubbed me the wrong way, and it was one of the most logical and reasonable bits of advice she gave us that bugged me the most.

Closing one's blinds before undressing is a pretty normal and low energy task. It might seem odd to you that she would even mention it. Unless, of course, you happen to be living on a fairly isolated campus with a student body that is all female. Privacy boundaries change. The topic of periods becomes acceptable in normal conversations. Pajamas are worn to communal dining spaces. Third story blinds that look out over the lake or the athletic fields are often left open for the view and sunlight.

Side note: when people ask me why I went to a women's college, I want to point to experiences like this. Nothing opens one's eyes to the subtle way that culture and other institutions blindly favor men than going to a school that is focused only on women. Not that one needs to do so to see that "male" is the constant default "in real life", but - for me, anyway - there's just something about having spent several years in a culture where "female" was the default that solidifies this knowledge in a way nothing else could have.

Back to the main topic....

I immediately knew why the thing about the blinds bugged me. I was convinced I was behaving illogically as well, but I still rebelled at the suggestion and deliberately ignored it. Not because I thought the 15 seconds it would take to do this was really all that much of an inconvenience, however.

Here's where I explain, because I'm sure very few of my current readers know this, that I spent my entire high school career checking not only my windows - but also in my closet and under my bed - each and every time I got undressed. I didn't do this because I was irrational or paranoid. I did this because it was the precaution that I had learned to take in order to prevent my brother from spying on me. It was the safety measure that I found worked best. It became so automatic that I didn't stop doing it until I had been living in the dorms for quite a while. What had started out as a logical response to clear and present danger had morphed into something closer to a tic or a security blanket. Until one day my brain noticed what my body was doing....and I stopped and pushed the horror of what I had become back into the dark corner of my mind where everything else about that time dwelled.

Until we got the lecture.

And all I could think when she mentioned the thing about blinds was that I didn't want to go back to being afraid all the time. I refused to go back to living in a world where even my own bedroom was unsafe. I thought at the time that I was being illogical, but in reality I was being very logical, I was just to scared to examine everything throughly enough to realize it.

I wasn't living on a co-ed campus in the middle of a city, in a bedroom that looked out into the street. I was living on a relatively remote all women's campus and my bedroom window looked out over lots and lots of green space surrounded by forest. Yeah, some creep could hide out by the trees with binoculars, but I it seems to me that such men are looking for victims, and will find them no matter what I do. Yes, a couple of extra seconds spent doing a simple chore was certainly low cost enough to be worth the safety gained by doing so. The problem is that this would never be a mindless task for me ever again. I would never be able to go to the window and simply consider it normal behavior, like closing the door to the bathroom or keeping my mouth closed as I ate. This had gone far beyond normal cultural mores long before I'd ever gotten to college. And it wasn't ever going away - at least not anytime soon. It's still something that I often think of when I go to open or close my bedroom blinds.

So my choice was not between having to do normal, simple, short tasks and endangering myself. It was between doing something that would make me a tiny bit safer and not expecting to feel like shit for at least a few seconds every day. What would seem to be the logical choice to any outsider was no longer an acceptable option to me.

At the time, I didn't question any other particular bits of advice our instructor gave us (remember, I thought I was being illogical), but the experience did leave me with a vague uneasiness with such advice. As time went on and I had to decide more and more often whether or not I would follow her safety measures, I found myself looking more critically at what I would be giving up by doing so. I've decided in favor of ditching her advice to a degree that would shock and alarm many, I'm sure. I've walked down streets alone at night. I traveled alone by myself dozens of times. I've done so without making sure anyone has my itinerary (what itinerary?). I've even walked alone, by myself, in a foreign city, with no cell phone, at frickin 1 am at night, and I was perfectly fine, thank you very much. And no, no one knew where I was except me.

Do you know when I wasn't safe? In the middle of the day on a crowded subway full of normal people. That's when some guy decided my boob was his little pet.

And in my bedroom, when I was alone by myself, and no one else was home except my own family.

And do you know what else? I don't regret getting on the subway that day. If some fortune teller had told me that my choices were getting on that subway and experiencing that humiliation along with everything else I did that day - or staying home where it was safe - or even choosing to travel to Paris with a group and doing group things instead, I still would have taken that damn subway. Because that was the subway that took me to Monet's Waterlillies.

So, I'm with Sheezlebub on this one: you can take your "advice" and shove it you know where.