Sexist Language Which Just Won’t Go Away

1. non-working MOTHERS

Chet’s father was employed in the postal service and became a middle-class, senior supervisor. Despite his dad’s relative affluence, with seven offspring to feed and educate and a wife who did not work, there were still many times in Chet’s childhood when he was hungry.

- Affluenza, by Oliver James

The second sentence above annoys me, even though it comes in the middle of a rant about materialism with which I agree, because a woman with seven children works, dammit. She doesn’t do PAID work, and she doesn’t ‘work outside the house’. Although Oliver James is arguing that women should be paid for motherhood because it’s as worthy job as any other, he does the cause no favours by employing this ‘mother doesn’t work’ language. There are genuinely people around who believe that being a mother is not a form of work, but simply a relationship. Until everyone realises that mother, particularly to very small children, is an occupation and not just a family relationship, the status of stay-at-home mothers is unlikely to improve.

Mothers, themselves, can often refer to themselves as ‘unemployed’, when in fact the true definition of ‘unemployed’ should not be extended to mothers who have a full-time job caring for the young, not unless they’re registered job seekers who hope to then employ an outsider to work in loco parentis for the day shift. (Which is not a value judgement, by the way, on mothers who choose to do just that.)

My suggestion: … with seven offspring a a wife who did not do paid work…

2. ‘OUR WIVES AND MOMS’

Stop calling us ‘wives and moms’ is from Salon, regarding President Obama’s tendency to talk to men, rather than to women directly, about their wives, mothers and daughters.

3. ‘OLD LADY’ AND OTHER GENDERED WORDS USED AS INSULTS

It’s been around forever. Or at least since 1964.

“Tea used to be considered a beverage for sissies and old ladies. However, nothing could be further from the truth.” excerpted from To The Bride, 1964.

I’m sure every man here has, at least, once been called a girl as an insult. And every woman here would have overheard it. Maybe you’ve even wondered, as I have, why being a girl, or being a sissy, is such an insult. Likewise ‘old woman’.

Because girls and boys hear this message pretty much every. single. day. Adult me hears it every. single. day. Here’s yesterday’s sexism, from my Facebook feed (because you can’t choose your friend’s friends).

Call the bastards on it.

The Sissy Boy Experiment. Why yes, there was such a thing.

4. ‘FEMALE DOMINATED’ WHEN DESCRIBING PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

Michio Kaku gave a talk called “The World in 2030″ which I should have found fascinating but which I instead found infuriating, not least for his assertion that ‘The Internet is now female’. Why? Because 51% of internet users are women and girls.

This reminded me of the question ‘Why Do Female Authors Dominate YA Literature?‘ posed by The Atlantic. Answer: They don’t. Ladybusiness pointed out that if women made up 40% of any other area in life then everybody would be congratulating women for almost achieving equality.

Let’s hit ‘female dominated’ on the head in relation to anything close to 50/50. This obfuscates the unfortunate fact that women are still far, far underrepresented in almost everything important, well-paid and influential.

5. JOURNALISTS POINTING OUT ‘ABSENCES OF GROOMING’ WHEN REFERRING TO FEMALE SUBJECTS

The Guardian recently reported on Lionel Shriver’s latest book. It’s not unusual for reporters to describe the way a subject dresses and acts, and that is true of both men and women working in creative industries, even when a photo is attached to the article.

What’s different about the way women are treated, however, is that first it seems mandatory to mention a woman’s appearance when a man’s appearance is more likely to be mentioned only if his image is unusual. Second, it seems okay to talk about what a woman hasn’t done (according to the journalist’s expectations) rather than what she has done to create a brand or a particular image for herself. In Lionel Shriver’s case, her lack of make up is worthy of comment:

But Big Brother, like Kevin, can only serve to fuel the cult of personality that has grown up around Shriver, a figure of fascination whose makeup-free complexion has become the female equivalent of Tom Wolfe’s statement white suit.

These are not equivalents. The difference between Shriver’s ‘makeup-free complexion’ and Tom Wolfe’s ‘statement white suit’ is that Tom Wolfe wore the white suit precisely in order to be different — he could have chosen to wear a regular office suit, and might therefore expect the white one to become his signature, to his benefit — whereas the choice for women seems to be ‘either conform to society’s very high expectations of you, spending valuable time in the bathroom, and money on overpriced cosmetics produced by companies with dubious ethics’, or we’re going to build it into your image for you.

In short: we are still talking about women’s beauty failures, even in ostensibly feminist articles such as the one in The Guardian.

But of course English speakers have an Anglo history chock full of inequalities, so let’s not keep looking or we’ll have to start speaking Esperanto. Oooh, hang on.

What’s in a name?—The Controversy Over “Manholes” from Inequality by (Interior) Design

Women Are Bitches, from The Rumpus.

Women and Talking

It’s ‘common knowledge’ that women talk more than men.

Except we don’t. Women Don’t Talk More Than Men, So Why Do People Say We Do? (from Slate).

The problem with everyone saying women talk more than men, is that in certain situations women can get to feeling bad about saying anything at all. So let’s quit it with the ‘women are verbose’ jokes. Any joke based on an error of fact has no basis at all, and only serves to perpetuate false stereotypes.

In fact, I’d like to see an end to ‘women are X’ jokes, and also to ‘men are X’ jokes. Comedy requires more talent and originality than that.

See also:

• To Be A Woman And Speak Your Mind from Stacked
• The “Language” Gene and Women’s Wagging Tongues from Scientific American
• Men Talk More Than Women, According To Rats, from Lost At E Minor, in which rats are not people, but interesting nonetheless.
• “What Does A Woman Know Anyway?”: Sexism in debating from The F-Word, and more on sexism in top-level debating from The Guardian.
• “Out of the top 100 podcasts in their system, 71 are hosted by men (many by two or three men), 11 are hosted by women (of which three are just 60 seconds long), 9 are co-hosted by a man and woman, and 9 are either NPR or BBC news aggregation podcasts with alternating hosts and reporters, or it’s unclear who hosts.” – from Explore.

An Unintended Lesson In Gender Roles

This morning I took my four-year-old daughter shopping. At the first shop we bought a worm farm. Despite the name, a worm ‘farm’ isn’t the great hulking thing you might imagine — it’s a couple of plastic boxes with some knick-knacks and an instruction booklet inside.

My daughter watched me lift one off the pile of worm farms at the shop, and manoeuvre it into the trolley. “Be careful, mum,” she said. “That’s heavy.”

“No, it’s okay,” I told her. “It’s large and awkward, but it’s not heavy.”

Next stop was the hardware store, where I bought two 20 kg bags of chicken pellets. The young woman at the counter asked if I needed help getting the feed to my car. I’d already lifted the feed from a low pile on the ground and up into the trolley, so I’m not sure why she thought I needed help pushing the trolley to my car. I accepted that it might be store policy to ask, but wondered whether they would’ve asked me if I were a strapping lad.

Right outside, the Lions club was frying up sausages and bacon. I’d parked next to their caravan. With no imminent customers, a man in his 50s or 60s asked if I needed help with my chicken pellets. I politely declined. And at this point I’ll emphasise that I appreciated the offer. If I’d been ill, or 80 years old, or if I’d strained my back I would have been very glad of the offer, and if I’m lucky enough to make it to an advanced age, I hope there’ll be volunteers about the place to help me with my pellets, because they only come in 20kg bags. There’s no 5kg alternative.

On the other hand, if a healthy woman in her mid-thirties can’t lift 20kg, she’d better get weight-lifting, because with a 10 percent natural decline in muscle mass over each decade of life, the chances of her being able to lift herself out of the bath when she’s 80 are looking slim. Is a man in his late middle-age really that much more conditioned than a woman in her mid-thirties anyway?

I thought no more about it until I pulled into our driveway at home, and realised my four-year-old daughter had been watching everything, because she said, “Mum, you take in the light bags. I’ll run inside and tell Dad to lift the heavy ones.”

I made a point of hefting the goods myself, saying loudly, “Look at me! Aren’t I strong!” I think I even said, “Women are soooo strong!” at one point.

Still, she looked skeptical. I think a gender lesson has already been learnt somewhere, and reinforced today.

 

Related: Girls Lift 3000 Pound Tractor Off Dad.

Last Week’s Mansplaining Incident

Men explain things to me. I’m not alone in this.

Last week this happened. I was walking the dog.

There’s a man who sometimes walks his dogs at the same time of the evening as we do — my four-year-old daughter and I. (We walk unchaperoned. Maybe this is important.) When I say the man ‘walks’ his dogs, there’s no walking involved. He rides a bicycle, and the dogs propel him forward in an embarrassing sort of pantomime. I don’t know how the man manages to stay upright on the bicycle. When I say he ‘rides’ his bicycle, he actually had one foot on the pavement when I saw him, in the bicycle equivalent of a bunny-hop. I assume from this that his two big dogs are not well-trained. If they’re otherwise well-trained, they are not lead-trained.

As the man approached, I pulled over to the grass verge to let him and his dogs past. Being a large breed, the man failed completely to control his dogs, who lunged at my dog. My dog snapped back and growled. I don’t like that my dog snaps. I don’t like that he growls. It’s a little concerning.

I also don’t like that this man can’t control his dogs. As I said, I have my four-year-old with me, and she is at eye-level with them.

“Are they malamutes?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

[insert snapping/lunging incident]

“Oooo,” I say. “You know, I don’t know why my dog does that to your dogs…”

The man nods sagely, pulling his dogs back as best he can. He looks at my Border collie and says, “Don’t worry, she’ll grow out of it when she matures.”

We moved on.

So, I got schooled from the dog expert: the dog expert who can’t pick that [1] my dog is not a female dog, and [2] also can’t pick that my dog is long past puppyhood, at almost six years of age.

This small incident annoyed me only in hindsight, when I got thinking about it. Not only was I better able to control my dog, but I correctly picked the breed of his. It pays to know dangerous dogs, which by the way, which is independent from degree of fluffiness. The Alaskan Malamute makes any top ten list of dangerous breeds. Malamutes can be wonderful dogs, but only under the ownership of someone who knows what the hell he is doing. Otherwise a malamute can rip your face clean off.

I have been wondering why this man — in his mid-thirties, as I am — thought he needed to reassure me that my dog would grow out of snapping when in fact I was trying to open a short dialogue which would lead me to tell him, as gently as possible, to get his fucking dangerous dogs right away from my daughter and me.

I hypothesize that this is something to do with a gender difference between the way men and women communicate. I’m pretty sure I sounded young and unsure when I opened dialogue, and he interpreted that as asking for advice or reassurance of some kind. See: Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A study of Jeopardy.

If I see him again I’ll be blunter. No uptalk. I like my daughter’s face.

 

Mums On Bums

This morning Jezebel published an article called ‘It’s Not Just Children Who Need Preschool’, in which I learned that President Obama plans to work with American states to make “high-quality preschool available to every child in America”.

An excellent idea, for so many reasons.

In this part of Australia preschool is not free. It costs over $30 per day to send our four-year-old daughter to the local not-for-profit childcare center. This is cheap compared to many. Many approved childcare centers charge double that. Our local childcare center isn’t ‘approved’ — it is ‘registered’ — which means we only get a few dollars back, not half of it.

It’s all very confusing. It took me a very long time to work it all out. My inner conspiracy theorist thought at one point that this confusing system might be a deliberate ploy to avoid giving back money.

Since immigrating from New Zealand, I have eventually learned that this is how Australia works: you pay a bunch of money for your essential services. Then you claw some of that back by filling out a bunch of forms.

Yesterday I was busy filling out forms, and once again I’m reminded of how the job of housekeeping is undervalued at an institutional level. You see, we’re allowed to claw back a paltry amount of our daughter’s preschool fees, but only if I can prove I haven’t been watching Dr Phil all day while our kid is off my lazy-ass hands.

If you embiggen that image you’ll see the government approved ways to spend my time:

• working for pay
• volunteering
• looking for paid work
• studying/training in preparation for paid work
• caring for an adult or a child who has a disability

According to this form, the following is not considered an acceptable reason to get back your three dollars per day for registered childcare fees:

• caring for a child who doesn’t have a disability, unless you include ‘shitty pants’ and ‘inability to feed oneself due to the fact of being a baby’ a ‘disability’. I would encourage stay-at-home parents to expand the definition of ‘disabled’. Stay-at-home parents deserve some alone-time with their youngest children.
• vegetable gardening and small scale farming (eg chickens, a cow), since producing one’s own food does not contribute to the GDP and therefore does not help anyone at all
• housecleaning
• washing, folding, sorting, ironing
• cooking, cleaning up after cooking
• shopping for groceries and other essential items

And for those stay-at-home parents who have a large brood of children, you’ll no doubt be doing something similar to the following on a daily basis, which does not actually count as work, just so you know:

• taking DS 8 to the dentist/speech therapy/doctor
• dropping DD 10′s PE gear/lunch/homework to the school because she forgot it
• a meeting with DS 6′s teacher

Let’s expand our definition of ‘volunteer work’, too, and hope that sometime soon, government institutions will start recognising on forms that housework and childcare is a worthy way to spend one’s day — as worthy as any other.

Imaginary Sex Differences Perpetuated By Fictional Convention

1. THE  NATURE OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION

A while back Jay Kristoff offered tips for writing outside your gender over at YA Highway.

One sex difference that stands out for Kristoff is that women, when meeting a man for the first time, will notice his eyes. Men, on the other hand, notice a woman’s hair first, and body second.

It won’t surprise many of you, but boys do not think this way. When boy character meets girl character, he generally notices her hair, then her body. The eyeline (and thoughts) of the average boy tend to… descend. This is in our nature – if it wasn’t, every XY on the planet wouldn’t be constantly caught doing it. 

Generalisations aren’t necessarily untrue simply because they’re generalisations, but I’m not so sure there’s a single grain of truth to this one.

Spend much time around teenaged girls and listen to them talk about boys. (Not because teenage girls are all that different from adult women, but because they tend to be more vocal in public spaces). You’ll soon discover that, even if they weren’t caught in the act, they must have taken in the entire vision of man at some point, because they are now able to recount the size of his biceps, the hairiness of his arms, the tightness of his butt, his height, his skin tone… you name it.

It’s a myth that women don’t notice the physical attributes of men.

Jay Kristoff also advises writers to look at how published authors do it; women should read books by men, and men are to read books written by women.

There are several problems with that. First, a minor one: you can’t always be sure of the sex of the author, especially dead ones — not by looking at the author names alone. Women used to quite often write as men, and perhaps vice versa.

The bigger issue underlying this particular piece of advice is that literature itself perpetuates the way we expect men and women to behave, not necessarily how they really behave. Far better to look to real life than books in this instance.

Sure enough, in romance novels the man’s eyes are mentioned most often in the introductory character sketch. But don’t assume from that, that that’s all that has been noticed. That is simply what has been written. It more closely approximates literary convention – or perhaps genre convention – than it reflects real life.

I also wonder if women notice other women’s breasts as much as men notice women’s breasts. Breasts have have been fetishized in the West, and play a starring role in women’s magazines. Women’s response to them may (or may not) be slightly different, but since we’re talking about ‘noticing’ there you have it. Breasts are accentuated by modern fashion and they also happen to be in a fairly noticeable position. Not only that — very little exists for the purpose of The Female Gaze.

See: No room for the female gaze in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue.

This inaccurate generalisation — that men notice secondary sex characteristics whereas women are all about the eyes — is tangled up with the old-fashioned and erroneous idea that men are always thinking about sex whereas women are pure and innocent.

A writer is always going to betray somebody. If you’re going to be honest with your subject, you can’t be genteel.

- TED MORGAN

2. MEN DON’T CRY IN FICTION

Not as much as women, at least. And if they do cry, it’ll be in a manly I-just-got-something-in-my-eye kind of way.

Men don’t cry in public as often as women cry in public. Maybe. I’m prepared to accept that. Men are more likely to express anger by shouting or storming out or letting it simmer inside, but some women react to that exact emotion by crying. It probably goes without saying, but there certainly are men who cry in public, and there are also women who fly into a rage.

In stories, as in real life, it seems more acceptable for female characters to cry than for male protagonists to shed a few tears.

Apparently, men don’t want to read about other men crying.

Except men do cry. Some cry more than others. Men cry when they are very sad, or bereaved, or depressed, or angry. Men cry, all right. They cry in private, in front of their wives and girlfriends. But so long as we all avoid men crying  in fiction, we’ll all go on pretending that men don’t cry — not ever — and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Is this honest? Is it helpful?

Why Is It So Hard For Men To Cry? World Of Psychology

A Cultural History Of Weeping, a podcast from BBC Radio 3, in which we learn that men-not-crying is a fairly modern expectation. I bet caveMEN cried as often as cave women. (And no, I can’t prove that at all.) But here’s something interesting along those lines.

“Funerals For Males 101″ from The Good Men Project

3. MEN GO FOR WOMEN WHO ARE BETTER LOOKING THAN THEMSELVES BUT NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND

See: Handsome Men With Unattractive Women (Couples the media will never show you) from Good Men Project

(And… whenever I say anything about Beauty, I always add the explanation that I am talking about The Western Beauty Ideal. Y’all know what I’m talking about. And yes yes, we are all beautiful in our own way.)

An episode of Girls, Season Two, was particularly brilliant and since it was pretty light on story-driven plot, probably existed mainly to get people talking about this very thing. The response to this episode was summed up nicely at Jezebel: What Kind of Guy Does a Girl Who Looks Like Lena Dunham ‘Deserve’? And here’s another response, similar to that at Slate, this time from Film School Rejects.

Kate asks:Would you have had less of a problem with Joshua being attracted to her if he was played by some other, less traditionally handsome, actor?

And Rob says: Probably. And I know this veers dangerously close to me being labeled an asshole, but this pairing just doesn’t happen without a lot more character work. The social and intellectual differences are a part of it, of course, but the physical details can’t be ignored.

We are still surprised, it would seem, when we see a conventionally attractive man with a lesser attractive woman, to the point where we don’t even believe it would happen in fiction as a believable storyline. Instead, these critics are more willing to believe this episode of Girls was a dream-episode, despite no precedent for dream sequences on same show.

See Also: Evolution and Heterosexual Dating Rituals from TSP

The ‘Maiden’ Name: It’s Still A Thing.

Perhaps we should just junk the whole idea of getting married in the first place. I’m generally against anything where you’re supposed to change your name. When else do you get named something else? On joining a nunnery, or becoming a porn star. As an ostensibly joyful celebration of love, that’s bad company to be in.

- Catilin Moran, How To Be A Woman

1. Bride Unable To Deposit Cheques Because She Kept Her Maiden Name, Is Probably A Nihilist.

2. Dear Wendy: I’m ostracised for keeping my maiden name from The Frisky

3. A town in France abolishes the title “mademoiselle” for young, unmarried women, from The LA Times

4. The lifelong curse of an unpopular name from BPS Research Digest

5. It’s now legal for Indian women to keep their own names after marriage, The Times Of India

6. How Come I’m The Only One Who Kept My Maiden Name? from BlogHer

7. Does Sharing A Name Really Mean Anything? from Good Men Project

8. The Name Game: Yours Or Ours, But Not Mine, from Bust Magazine

9. Man Who Adopted His Wife’s Last Name Is Accused Of Fraud, from Salon

10. I seriously Regret Taking My Husband’s Last Name, from The Frisky

11. What women’s lib? 70 percent of Americans think women should take spouse’s name after marriage, reported here byThe Daily News. What can the possible reasons for such a sloppy study be? Why are there people out there who want the world to think that 70 percent of Americans think women should take their husband’s name? Maybe I’m getting too conspiracy theorist here. Maybe sloppy stats are just sloppy stats.

11. Do Feminists Care If You Take Your Husband’s Last Name? from Salon, in which feminists are treated — in the title, at least — as a single group of people with a single and unanimous political agenda.

12. See the Let’s Talk About Names Tumblr Blog

***

I would encourage any woman contemplating a name change upon marriage to reconsider. I’m constantly glad that I didn’t change my name. I was glad again this morning when filling out a government document. I will ALWAYS GET TO SKIP TO THE NEXT QUESTION. Always. And I’m several hundred dollars better off because I didn’t have to pay to lodge the change of name forms here in Australia.

Do you need any more reasons than that? Really?

Do Slogans Have Power?

If you’ve ever browsed for a t-shirt on, say, Zazzle you may have noticed a number of t-shirts such as these:

Part of me wants these shirts to continue to exist, and for douchebags to continue wearing them, as a clear-cut slogan to single women the world over: don’t touch this guy with a barge pole. If sexist t-shirts exist for a positive reason, that’s surely it. Causing deliberate offence is funny in its own right,but only if your sense of humour accompanies a general lack of empathy.

Speaking of offence, the shirt below is listed under ‘Funny T-shirts’. I find it politically offensive, yet I wouldn’t expect a Republican to stop wearing something like this based on my own offence. Better the devil you know.

Interestingly, this t-shirt (below) is categorised under ‘offensive t-shirts’.

Which tells me only that there’s a categorisation problem going on over at Zazzle.com.

THE POWER OF SLOGANS

The more intriguing question to me is about the power of slogans (if any), and the degree to which we are each responsible for curbing other people’s offence, which can never be wholly predicted anyway. Is asking a man, say, to stop wearing a sexist t-shirt to avoid offence in women akin to asking a woman, say, to stop wearing a mini-skirt to avoid sexually arousing men? After all, isn’t each of us in charge of our own responses?

Here’s how I feel about swearing, for instance, in which I argue that generally we need to examine the reasons behind our own offence.

Yet I have some cognitive dissonance going on, because here’s how I feel about the right of the general public not to be bombarded with images such as that on the front of Nick Cave’s latest album. In this case I argue that an image of (off-stage but probable) violence against a naked young woman might well exist as art, amid other artistic context, but that such a thing should not be used as general advertising material. To avoid causing offence.

If you’ve travelled on Australian highways you’ve probably noticed a highly-decorated and colourful van or two, probably driven by young tourists. These are called ‘Wicked Vans’ and many of them include political slogans as part of the paint job.

See: Why Women Should Boycott Wicked Campervans, by Clem Bastow, which I would change to ‘Why People Should Boycott Wicked Campervans’.

Do people have the right to travel from point A to point B without seeing slogans like this? Is it a matter of slogan-size? Because there are some pretty dodgy bumper stickers on private vehicles. Or is my discomfort due to the fact that this decoration is a form of advertising material, which is generally subject to standards? Do slogans sanctioned by a company carry more weight that the ravings of an individual lunatic who happens to like sexist bumper stickers?

INEQUALITIES AND PRIVILEGE

These slogans exist, surely, because the bearers of such things have no idea about the nature of inequalities and the nature of their own privilege. A man who wears an Offensive Tshirt from Zazzle is parading his own privilege of being able to walk around without getting beaten up, for example. The ‘make a sandwich’ joke I can’t understand, because surely a joke has to be original to be a inherently funny. The only thing that can still be funny about that is the offence it causes.

THE NATURE OF REAL HARM

I don’t recommend a visit to Total Frat Move or Uni Lad or A Voice For Men unless you were having a sterling sort of a day and are in need of a rapid comedown. On the other hand, websites such as these are important from a sociological point of view because they speak a kind of truth that ‘regular’ people such as myself rarely encounter in everyday interactions: they exist as written documentation of misogyny, which slogans such as those on the vans and t-shirts above manage to summarise in a single sentence. These slogan-sized soundbytes are the very tip of a very, very large historical iceberg and they do harm first by normalising terrible ideas, and second by enforcing relived trauma.

A salient example this week was picked up by Jezebel after a female student at American University (Washington D.C.), recovering from an eating disorder not otherwise specified, wrote an op-ed explaining the problem with the following t-shirt:

Apparently:

The AU Interfraternity Council told them to get rid of them because, “as a general standard, if mothers would not be comfortable reading it, it should not be on a rush T-shirt.”

EMPATHY ONCE REMOVED

Why should we think of our mothers when asked to consider offence and general care towards others? What about calling upon one’s own power of empathy, expecting young university students to ask, ‘If I were a woman, would I find that offensive?’ By off-setting the gatekeeper and conjuring up a ‘typical mother’, we’re not asking enough of our young men.

Slogans do have power, if only because they exist as a warning beacon: People, we have an empathy problem.

Related: ”Dear POTUS: Why do I have to be someone’s daughter for you to think I deserve rights?” from Daily Kos, which I found in this article: Stop calling us wives and moms, regarding President Obama’s tendency to sound like he’s talking to men — while excluding women — in his speeches. The bottom of that article seems to have been removed, so I include a screenshot of what came through my feed reader, because the homosexuality analogy is most pertinent to this discussion:

11 Signs You’re a Men’s Rights Activist.

“The world looks very different when you take away irrational anger and conspiracy theories and add empathy to the equation.” from Confessions Of A Former Misogynist.

Pockets. I want pockets.

My husband’s secret superpower is locating the whereabouts of eggs in the garden. Whenever a chicken decides to change her laying spot it always seems to be my husband who finds them. Recently he sidled in through the ranch slider carrying over a dozen eggs in the pockets of his shorts, which he had found in the very darkest recess of an outside cupboard.

I said he was carrying over a dozen eggs. IN THE POCKETS. OF HIS SHORTS. (And another few in his hands.)

How many female-pants have you seen in regular stores which would allow a woman to fit a dozen eggs in her pockets? When cargo pants are in fashion you might find something with pockets in, but cargo pants are not in fashion. (I have checked the chain stores. Nope, not in fashion.)

Last season I accidentally bought a pair of shorts with FAKE POCKETS. I didn’t think to check for authentic pocketedness because I have enough to double-check and worry about in my life without adding that to the list, but next time I buy a pair of pants, I must remember to plunge my hands into any pocket openings, because although these shorts have ZIPS on the pockets, the zips lead to nowhere. These are the cul-de-sac analog of the pocket world. A mugger would be most disappointed. This is possibly the first time I have empathised with an imaginary mugger.

Zipped pockets would be particularly useful for me because I like to carry gadgetry on my walks, and I have had to change out of one pair of track pants and into another pair simply because I haven’t got a single pocket in which to carry my iPod. Those things get sweaty if you carry them in your hand. Which is also a nuisance, and men wouldn’t put up with it.

Why are pockets not prioritised in women’s casual wear? Why? No one wears track pants for the high fashion, do they?

Here’s a headline for you: An iPhone Case For Moms Questions The Value Of Portability. Take a look at that thing. It’s ridiculous. It turns your phone into a 1980s brick.

In this way, women are conditioned our whole lives to prioritise almost every single thing over practicality and personal comfort. High heeled shoes, pocketless track pants, hairstyles which require product and/or styling-time in the mornings… the list could go on.

Enough is enough.

That ridiculous phone holder wouldn’t fit in my bag. My over-the-shoulder bag is the same one I was using 10 years ago, before I was with child. And when it wears out it will be replaced with exactly the same model. It’s a very small black ‘transit pouch’ from Kathmandu and it only holds my own shit. No one, not even my own kid and certainly not my own husband can pass off their own crap for me to ‘transit’ into my mum-bag. Nope, because I will not own such a thing.

I even bought one of these bags for my mother-in-law, and apart from the fact we sometimes nick off with each other’s, it makes a great gift for the practical woman in your life.

I highly recommend downsizing in the bag department. Here’s the rub: my husband doesn’t own an over-the-shoulder transit pouch. He’s done nicely his whole life without carrying a bag. Pockets. If I had more damn pockets in my pants — not to mention skirts — I would gladly ditch the bag.

Related: Mothers reveal the weirdest things in their handbags, from Cafemom

Women And Science

See: Einstein’s reply to a little girl who told him she wanted to be a scientist, quoted by Brain Pickings

You probably saw the headline a while back which told us that Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Scientific American summed it up nicely and explained its importance.

You may have heard various arguments to justify the paucity of women in top science jobs. They were summed up nicely by Lawrence Summers, details of which can be found at the Lawrence Summers entry at the Geek Feminism Wiki. There were lots of people talking about it.

Geek Feminism Wiki also has the following lists:

• Women in Chemistry, and see also Inspirational Women: Chemistry edition from Behind NMR Lines
  
• Women in Physics
• Women in Biology 
• Female astrophysicists and astronomers

Here’s an interesting podcast between Kim Hill and British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell in which these two educated women talk first about star dust and then about Bell Burnell’s career in science as a woman.

A female science professor at a large university explains how she became an invisible woman. (Anyone else experience this lately? I was ignored at our local bank when I went in with my husband to set up a joint business account, for our joint business, and again just a few weeks ago when a man came to the house to talk manly thinks with the man of the house: solar panels. I walked off after a while. He told my husband he ‘Hoped he hadn’t upset his wife.’)

Ada Lovelace Day was created to increase the visibility of women in scientific fields.

Where Girls Do Better Than Boys In Science, from Mother Jones, from which you should draw the conclusion that scientific aptitude is cultural, not innate.

Female students just as successful as males in math and science, Asian-Americans outperform all, from e! Science News

How Cultural Stereotypes Lure Women Away From Careers in Science, Time Health and Family

Why We Need More Geek Girls Like Willow from Bitch Media. Also, because this is what little girls see all over the damn place:

Harrods, you suck.

And let’s not forget, so do little boys.

Institutionalised sexism is why special effort needs to go towards equal gender representation on things like science panels. We’re constantly told by People Who Know Things that this is very hard, since women are equal but different. Yet over at Skepchick, UAJamie explains in a very logical and reasonable way how it’s not actually hard, starting first by Proving and Quantifying Sexism. Also, other organisations have done it. Here’s how Etsy grew their numbers of female engineers by almost 500% in one year.

Here’s a telling graph, from Explore. It hasn’t always been thus!

Here’ is the Periodic Table Of Elements drawn as people women. Cool stuff, shared by The Mary Sue

Editor fills a gap in science coverage for women, from News Observer.

See also: The Double X Science website.

Women Who Changed the World Through Science: Rachel Zimmerman from Science Blogs

And this, from The Problem With Highlight Beauty Along With Brains, at Life As An Extreme Sport:

So apparently Business Insider thought that they would do the world a solid and highlight the fact that scientists can be attractive, sexy people, too. … Business Insider is trying to cast this list of sexy scientists as some sort of outreach list – people who are sexy, who make science sexy. The problem is, it’s alienating as fuck. Suddenly, there’s one more area of life to be judged by looks rather than anything else, and for many people, especially many women, science has been a refuge where brains are what matter (or at least what matter first). Unlike many areas of life, in science, what you can do matters more than how you look.

Where Have All The Role Models For Girls Gone? from Shelley Emling. Fortunately io9 has published at least ten (fictional) female scientists we wanted to be when we grew up.

The Finkbeiner Test for determining any sexist bias in a newsitem about a female scientist, because “ You’ve seen these profiles, of course you have, because they’re everywhere. The hallmark of “A lady who…” profile is that it treats its subject’s sex as her most defining detail. She’s not just a great scientist, she’s a woman! And if she’s also a wife and a mother, those roles get emphasized too.” from Double X Science. Here’s more commentary on The Finkbeiner Test from National Geographic. And then The New York Times Failed Miserably in its obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill.

Women In Science: Women’s Work from Nature, who do acknowledge that, ‘there is still much to do to achieve gender equality in science’. Here it is quantified. See also these women who combine childcare with science careers — an article which definitely does not pass the Finkbeiner Test, but unfortunately articles such as these are still necessary. We’ll know gender equality has been achieved when they’re not, or when we see articles about how men manage to combine families with science careers.

Women and Science: A New Conversation from Nancy W Mendoza, who wrote an MSc dissertation in 2005 about the under-representation of women and science. “I worry though that parents and children are still not teaching daughters to believe in themselves and be confident in their interests and their intellect. Toy shops are still segregated, playground chatter still focuses on what’s okay for boys and what’s okay for girls.”

CNN asks Why are there still so few women in science and tech?

Opening A Gateway For Girls In Tech from NYT.

Portrayals of women in science(y) films from Girls, Interrupting

Women love science! What a surprise, from The Independent

How Children Learn Scientific Thinking From Their Parents: ‘parents of girls tended to be more absolutist when talking about morals than were the parents of boys. In contrast, boys’ parents were more absolutist when talking about global warming than the parents of girls.’ — Research Digest

Top Ten Gifts To Empower Girls: Science Is A Girl Thing, from Toward The Stars