Livre d'Or

So there's some pushback against using the term bisexual in that the bi prefix implies that there are exactly two distinct sexes / genders, and therefore excludes people who don't fit neatly into either box. ( noodling )

And while we're on the topic, a thoughtful piece by CN Lester about whether the term non-binary may itself reinforce binary assumptions.

There is a big kerfuffle / imbroglio going on regarding a woman who was harassed at Readercon. Readercon decided to make an exception to their written policy and apply a reduced penalty to the harasser. Then the internet exploded, as the internet does.

( I can't help myself, I have to opinionate )

So there's an organization called Athena Swan which promotes institutional policies that are good for women in STEM careers. I signed up for a meeting on the topic, hoping to pick up some tips, because Athena-related events are usually a bit earnest but often useful for both advice and networking. However it turned out that I'd kind of misunderstood the remit of the meeting, and it wasn't there to help female researchers, it was a crisis meeting for senior people.

Why a crisis? Well, one of the major government funding bodies has announced that the Athena Swan silver level is going to be a prerequisite for funding from now on. They haven't given institutions any lead-in time to actually clean up their acts, it's a fiat which says, support women's careers or no money for you. And the way Athena Swan works, it's assessed on a department by department basis. Currently Life Sciences has achieved their silver level charter, Medicine has a concrete plan in place to apply for it, and my research institute, through whom I will actually be applying for most of my research funding, is kind of wrong-footed. And I suspect the RI is going to have a bit of a hard time because while not actively misogynist as a working environment (good enough for the bronze level charter, probably), they're a bit crap at things like flexible working policies, promoting proportional numbers of women and men and the sorts of things that you need for silver.

I have rather mixed feelings about this decision by the funders. I mean, on the one hand actually imposing tangible financial penalties on sexist institutions means more than lip service to supporting women's careers. But as a female researcher, I think in many ways I'm more disadvantaged by working for an institution that is barred from a major source of research funding, than I would be anyway for working for a male-dominated institution!

( what do women want? )

And then my head of department (a female professor, by the way) button-holed me and declared that since I'd showed up I was obviously interested in this stuff, and she wants me on the committee for the medical school to put together an application for our Athena Swan silver award. I think this is probably a good idea, but I'm not sure. Pros: I do in fact believe in making institutional changes so that women can fulfil their potential, and I'd like myself a lot better if I actually contributed to that goal rather than just vaguely thinking that feminism is a good thing. It'll be good CV fodder and genuinely good experience. Cons: the brunt of unintentional discrimination affects mothers, not women in general, and as a childfree woman I'm just not the best spokesperson for "women's" perspective. It's likely to be one of those life-eating things and I possibly shouldn't take on more of those. And of course part of the problem is that women take on more thankless scutwork, which takes time away from research and churning out publications, and gets emotional recognition but rarely actually leads to career advancement. Any opinions, anyone?

j4 linked to a really fascinating essay about twee marketing a few weeks ago, and I've been meaning to talk about it. ( and now I shall )

I'm not arguing that giraffe bread causes sexism, obviously. I'm just having a bit of a click moment where several things fall into place, and I think there's an underlying theme that's worth highlighting!

There's a thing where women go to technical or fannish conferences and experience creepy, sexist behaviour. There's a thing where they write about it online and suddenly the entire internet hates them. (Rebecca Watson and the atheist blogosphere is just the latest example, it's a pretty common pattern.)

So the first thing happened to me last week, and I'm sitting here hesitating whether to post about it unlocked, because I don't particularly want the second thing to happen. I think the risk is low because Dreamwidth isn't really noticeable to the blogosphere, and because the community here doesn't overlap with the community attending the conference, (unlike the situation of conferences about the future of the web or fannish topics). Anyway, I think there's some merit in telling the world when something like this happens, and also I'm pretty angry about it, though it was fairly minor in the scheme of things.

This year's ASME conference was on the theme of diversity in medical education. There were lots and lots of good things about it, and I had a very enjoyable time overall. The one sour note was a slightly pompous, middle-aged American attendee who approached me. I was wearing my hair in its usual long plait which had fallen over my shoulder. He reached out as if to grab my hair, which meant reaching towards my breast underneath, and said "That's a great ponytail you have there, you're beautiful!" He was moving past me at the time and was the other side of the room before I had time to recover from my initial goldfish state.

I don't think he was being lechy, otherwise he would have stayed around for a reaction. I didn't feel threatened: it was right in the middle of a crowded room. No, the only reason I'm angry is the breathtaking arrogance of his assumption that I wanted to know what he thought of my hair and appearance. I was taking part in a professional conference, I was enjoying a coffee break and networking opportunity. I wasn't there for his aesthetic enjoyment, just because I happen to be younger than him and new to the medical education community and female. He probably read me as even younger and less influential than I am; the big selling point of the ASME conference is that it's a chance for everybody to mingle, from first year medical students to international Med Ed superstars. I know I look young for my age (the long hair contributes to this), and even if he guessed that I'm a junior lecturer rather than a student, I'm a complete newbie in the field of medicine and medical education.

It's a little thing, certainly, and it's hardly going to drive me out of my chosen career! But there's something incongruous about a three-day event in opulent surroundings set up for middle-aged, influential, mostly white men to air their opinions about how to make the medical profession more diverse, and then they turn round and treat their younger female colleagues like that.

The keynote speaker, another middle-aged, highly successful, white-appearing, middle-aged doctor and academic, annoyed me not by overt sexism but because he kept contrasting "diverse students" with "less diverse students". Apparently when presenting his research about the experiences of black and minority ethnic medical students, he was too embarrassed to use the term "white". Less. diverse. I've always rolled my eyes a bit when I see studies discussed that suggest many white people have negative associations with concepts like diversity, access, multiculturalism etc. But if someone who's enough of an expert to be invited as a keynote speaker at a conference on diversity talks as if "diversity" is a characteristic that individuals have to a greater or lesser extent depending on how many oppressed groups they belong to, the problem starts to look explicable.

And circling back to my opening paragraph, I wonder if there isn't something similar going on when a comment as carefully neutral and mildly stated as Watson's ...don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner can provoke such huge outrage. Somehow women are saying "I'd prefer not to be sexually harassed, thanks", and some men are hearing "men are all evil and disgusting and probably rapists". There are lots of reasons for this phenomenon, and one of them is probably genuine defensiveness by actual misogynists. Still, a contributing factor may be that objecting to harassment is considered a feminist position (as opposed to, you know, a decent human being position!) and feminism is tainted by all kinds of negative associations.

Anyway, I will soon get round to writing more about all the cool things that have been going on this month! Just wanted to get this story off my chest.

Imagine someone holds the opinion that people should not face prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of height. That's almost so obvious it's not worth stating, but what if instead of agreeing that it's completely obvious, people started arguing against our heightism activist by loudly declaring that of course height exists, there's no point being politically correct and ignoring the fact that some people are shorter than others!

( this example is obviously ludicrous )

In spite of the obviousness of this point, a lot of people seem to be confused on it when the issue is not height, but gender. I have seen a lot of fruitless arguments like this, even among generaly intelligent and sensible people:

Feminist: Don't discriminate based on gender.
Peanut gallery: But gender totally exists!
F: Our culture is often prejudiced against women.
PG: But gender is totally real and biological, not just cultural!
F: Sexism forces women into low-status roles.
PG: But gender totally exists, so men and women are suited to different jobs!
F: Everyone should be able to choose the path that best suits their talents and personality, regardless of gender.
PG: But gender totally exists!
Random Observer: I guess I must not be a feminist, then, because I definitely believe there are differences between men and women.
F *headdesk*

I think a big part of the problem is that people are unclear about what the word gender means. In some ways it was an unfortunate choice of term, because it already had a meaning referring to languages which have two arbitrary declensions, even for inanimate objects. But that's the word most commonly used to refer to the complex interaction between a person's identity and how they are perceived in society. Usually, but not always, the person's biological sex, ie their configuration of genitals, reproductive organs and possibly chromosomes, is going to be a major component of their gender identity. Now we have a big problem, because some people believe that sex and gender are absolutely congruent in all cases, and some people are embarrassed to use the word "sex" in formal situations (or confuse it with the other thing we call "sex", namely the act of having erotic intercourse). And some people have picked up the idea that "gender" is a more polite or more academic or more PC way of saying "sex", so they always say "gender" even if sex is what they mean, which is a bit like people thinking it's posher to say "whom" instead of "who" and overcorrecting.

Look, sex obviously exists. It's a (mostly) objective aspect of biological animals, including humans. No sane person is denying that the majority of humans belong to either the male or the female sex, and you can reasonably easily tell who is in which category. (You can get some problems when people insist that what is true for the majority must be true for everyone, but that's not my major point here.) It's also mostly trivial; there are circumstances for which it matters, such as pregnancy, and susceptibility to certain diseases. There are a few physical traits which are roughly divided along sex lines, such as height, muscle mass, fat distribution and so on. It would be extremely stupid to deny that these differences are real, physical differences, but it would also be extremely stupid to claim that all men are taller, stronger and leaner than all women; we humans just don't have that degree of sexual dimorphism.

But the point is that we live in a culture that has collectively decided that differences in somatic characteristics aren't important outside these narrow, mostly medical contexts. Most people having these debates broadly agree that it's wrong to treat people differently based on differing appearances, especially if the treatment is favourable to one kind of appearance and hurtful to the other kind.

However, gender is a different thing. I don't know why gender identity often goes along with physical sex; could be something that has evolved in the way human brains work, could be a consequence of the human tendency to divide people into categories based on superficial but immediately obvious traits, like sex in fact. It doesn't really matter; gender identity is clearly real as well, and the fact that it is psychological and social rather than physical doesn't make it any less so! It's also obvious that lots of people become very unhappy if the social rules for how they can express their gender identity are too rigid. Although in general in our society, having a masculine gender and a male body are relative advantages, men are just as likely to be miserable if they have to behave in ways they find completely unnatural and uncomfortable in order to get those advantages. That's sexism, in a nutshell (and it possibly should be called "genderism" according to the argument I've just made), and I'm against it because it makes people unhappy, it's an inefficient way to run society (putting effort into making people conform to generalized expectations instead of changing the model when it doesn't match reality), and most importantly because it's unfair.

One of the ways that sexism is unfair is that it severely and unjustly punishes people for having a gender identity at odds with their physical sex. That can be men who are effeminate or women who are butch, or it can be people who have such a strong sense of non-congruent gender identity that they experience dysphoria about their bodies. Now, if you knew nothing at all about gender dysphoria, you might hypothesize that undergoing surgery to bring one's body in line with one's gender identity would be totally useless and probably harmful. However, if you look at the actual empirical evidence, it turns out for some such people, no amount of counselling or brainwashing, and no amount of rejecting sexism and gender essentialism does any good, whereas reassignment surgery is pretty much curative. For others, simply behaving in ways typically associated with the opposite sex is not enough to make them feel right, but getting other people to acknowledge them as the sex that matches their gender, for example with names and pronouns and legal certificates with the appropriate sex category on, is enough. Again, you might not think this would do any good, but for some people, it does.

I have little respect for people who cling to their first assumption when the empirical evidence overwhelmingly contradicts them, and I have even less time for this attitude when it involves expecting other people to live their lives in misery in order to better suit the disproven theory. I suspect that the number of people who can get such major (and unexpected based on pure thought experiments) benefits from reassignment surgery or non-surgical transition is probably quite small, but there is absolutely no call to punish this small group for all the social ills related to sexism (which in fact has little to do with their unusual gender status anyway!)

That was an aside, really, or rather an extreme and topical example of the kind of question it's hard to have a useful, communicative discussion about, because every time someone brings up the issue, it devolves into an argument about whether gender exists. This argument is stupid and unhelpful! Gender exists, duh. Also, sexism is bad, duh. And trying to do something about the latter is in no way contradictory to the former. Just because gender exists, doesn't make it ok to force people into a really narrow set of behaviours based on their physical sex (or even to argue that biological sex doesn't matter, as long as people stick rigidly to one or the other set of gender rules). Just because gender exists, doesn't make it ok to discriminate against people based on their gender, or treat things and people regarded as "feminine" as inferior to things and people regarded as "masculine".

Disclaimer: I have a really weak gender identity myself, so a lot of my ideas about gender are quite theoretical, and I've never been strong at social science anyway. And my take on trans issues is going strongly for the basic human decency angle, based on what I've picked up from friends and reading, but I am in no way an expert. Check out auntysarah or lisaquestions for much more in depth information.

This is based on several discussions I've taken part in recently, both on LJ and offline. My options are deliberately inadequate because I'm more interested in discussion in the comments than in the actual vote counts.

( no, you don't get any nuance, pick one or the other )

PS I don't have time for nature versus nurture arguments; it's part of human biology that we are members of societies, so it's natural that we are subject to social pressure.

PPS There are various flavours of genderqueer and trans folk reading this journal, as well as people with a whole spectrum of opinions about feminism, so try not to be more offensive than you can help.

Having decided I'm going to be a feminist, I should actually do something about it. I'm somewhat in trepidation about discussing directly feminist ideas in public like this, but I'd be pretty useless if I kept silent and never dared to say anything about my convictions. But I am certainly not claiming to be any kind of authority on this stuff.

Anyway, this post, such as it is, is dedicated to ravingglory, lizzip and atreic.

( sharing a planet with men )

I find myself in an LJ discussion (mostly friends locked) where I am trying to explain why feminism is a matter of justice. atreic comes from a similar place to me and feels alienated by feminism telling her that she's a victim even when her life is in fact perfectly satisfactory. lizzip has a strong sense of the need to make the world a fairer and more welcoming place for women. And all three of us find ourselves in conversation with men who don't see why they should bother with feminism, because at least this part of the world is basically equal already, and there are feminists making sloppy, man-hating arguments all over the internet.

I am working on the basis that the men who don't see the point in this discussion and a whole lot of other similar are mostly coming from a position of good faith. (Not absolutely all of them; there are clearly some people who just like to disrupt feminist discussions because they feel threatened or just like the attention they get from literal trolling.) But it's perfectly possible to genuinely and sincerely care about women, and still not get it; I didn't for a long time, after all. At some level, I want to convince such well-meaning people, but at the same time I feel really, really uncomfortable with any kind of proselytizing.

I'm also all dewy-eyed and naive and actually taking an explicitly feminist position in a highly charged internet argument is a novelty to me. I can really see both sides of the argument so well it's almost dizzying. I can see the weary frustration of seasoned feminists who have to deal with a huge wall of denial every time they mention a sexist incident. I can see why many might not want to argue at all, or might not want to be polite and patient, with men who might possibly deign to care about injustices against women if they can be convinced that feminists have a cast-iron rational case that would stand up in the strictest court. Everybody who complains about sexism has to answer for every feminist who might ever have said something negative about men, or something more emotional or hyperbolic than rigorous. At the same time, I can completely see why feminism can look really alienating; it alienated me for a long time, and for exactly the same reasons being raised in this kind of conversation.

I am going to propose a theory about why it's extremely difficult to report sexism and systematic discrimination. This is probably obvious to experienced feminists, but it might be helpful to people who don't see the point. Anyway, it's a conclusion I've come to recently. If you talk about individual incidents, people can (and seem particularly inclined to) always propose reasons why that particular incident might not be sexist. Even if someone believes that the most likely reason why a woman was disadvantaged is sexism, she's still rather in a double bind: if the incident was minor, she's making a fuss about nothing, but if it was major, then it wasn't mere sexism, it was viciousness by someone so far beyond the pale of normal human behaviour that there's no hope for them.

To avoid this problem, you have to go to systematic analysis to look for overall trends. The problem with that is that it becomes very abstract, people don't relate emotionally. And it's a lot of work, so it ends up being its own academic discipline, with its own jargon and community that is not very accessible to outsiders and a sort of self-perpetuating orthodoxy. Like most complex subjects, feminist studies and positions get misquoted and over-simplified by ignorant internet people. At the same time, if someone posts to a blog complaining about an annoying sexist remark, they don't want to and quite likely can't justify their complaint by giving an overview of all the feminist studies and theory ever to have been performed on the topic.

So it's easy to get to a point where someone who has done a fair amount of reading and thinking about feminist issues is going to dismiss a well-meaning but relatively ignorant man out of hand, if he starts demanding detailed arguments why he should believe her complaint. This can end up looking a lot like telling him that his opinion is worthless just because he's male, which is not at all likely to encourage men to be sympathetic to feminism.

Obviously, the fact that something is hard to demonstrate doesn't make it true! But what I would like to see is a little less readiness to look for reasons why sexism might not be sexism. I want people to at least consider the possibility that something might be true, and realize that some of the apparent causes for scepticism would still apply even if it were true. Also, the fact that some people who consider themselves feminists say ridiculous things fairly obviously doesn't make every claim that might be interpreted as feminist prima facie ridiculous!

Author: Hanne Blank (misia)

Details: (c) 2007 Hanne Blank; Pub 2007 Bloomsbury USA; ISBN 1-59691-010-0

Verdict: Virgin is lively and interesting.

Reasons for reading it: I was reading misia's journal while she was writing Virgin and it seemed such a fascinating project I wanted to read the end result.

How it came into my hands: I bought it from Amazon, nice shiny new hardback, because reading her blog meant I had enough trust in Blank's writing to pay real money for the book. And it is a very nice edition, lovely paper, attractive typeface, and a sparsely elegant cover (I am so glad that misia won her argument and stopped the publishes from using the clichéd image of a naked woman's torso).

( detailed review )

I posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek essay to my OKCupid journal recently, on the topic of men who whine that women on OKCupid are rude to them. I give several possible reasons why women might be rude in an online dating context like OKCupid: ( summary of the essay )

The version I posted on OKCupid was a lot less harsh than this. I filled it with disclaimers about how I'm sure all the men doing the complaining are basically decent people, and how I understand that it's really upsetting if a woman is rude to you because of other men being jerks to her in the past. Even so, within minutes I got a comment from a guy whining that I was expecting men to be omniscient, and how unfair it is that women are so mean to him. (I suspect this is partly a ploy, he wants me to come back to him and try to prove that I'm not like those mean horrible women that he's complaining about.)

I'm also reminded of this long and tangled discussion on Making Light. There was a thread that was vaguely about feminism, and a commenter showed up with an anecdote about an incident of fairly standard harrassment of a woman by men. The reaction to it was kind of amazing. Many women started talking about how she might have been in physical danger, and ways to assess the probability of and hopefully avoid really extreme things like gang rape in that sort of situation. Many men started talking about how the guy sounded like he was a bit clueless but he didn't mean any harm, and there was no need for her to overreact so much, she should have been more polite. (Her supposed rudeness, by the way, consisted of: So I take off the headphones, look him dead in the eye, and say, "I would like to be left alone. I thought by now that would be obvious. Good night." And I put the headphones back on.)

Now, the discussion wasn't divided purely along gender lines, but the gulf was definitely significant. The thread unfortunately devolves into people yelling at eachother, with some trying to frame the whole discussion with standard feminist theory and others not understanding the asusmptions of said feminist theory, and I don't think any of that is helpful. But I think it's part of the same phenomenon I'm talking about in this post. Men just don't know what it's like to go through the world being female, and don't understand why a lot of women make an assumption of malice when an unknown man approaches them. Also, they don't see malice when it actually exists; the guy in Nicole's story wasn't just socially inept, he was getting off on having power over her, but he was keeping his threats deniable.

I've never been offended by a man chatting me up or expressing interest in me, if it's genuine. I am offended by men being sleazy and lechy because they can get away with it. I really don't like having to be wary of men; by nature I'm very friendly and will chat to pretty much anybody who approaches.