Nerds: How Far We've Come

This is the second of (hopefully) three blog posts stemming from a comment my friend made on a post I wrote about Danica McKellar's books attempting to reconcile girls with math. McKellar mentioned that girls are less likely to find math appealing both because it is associated with being nerdy and being a boy, and my friend says:

I take issue with the fact that nerdy is such a horrible insult now. The "I heart nerds" t-shirt is pretty big, not to mention the success of Comic-Con, all the superhero movies and television shows that feature nerdy characters. Maybe in middle school it still is, but nerds populate so much entertainment now that it's uncool not to be a nerd.

I don't know if I agree with that. Nerds are certainly better off now than they were before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates blew the doors off of the tech revolution; the kids who were members of my school's AV club certainly weren't being harassed in the halls. No one got their butt taped together, Breakfast Club-style. But I wouldn't necessarily call nerds the new cool. The old cool still remains pretty prevalent; and whatever in-roads nerds have made in popular culture, those 'nerds' tend to resemble the beautiful people more than any nerd I've ever seen does. Take, for instance, Chuck Bartowski:He is a veritable nerd (and geek; though there is a lot of overlap in populations, the terms tend to refer to two different types of knowledge, interest, etc.). He works for the Nerd Herd (which is the equivalent to Best Buy's "Geek Squad"), and in his eponymous show, he has a computer downloaded into his brain. And yet, Zachary Levi is in not really representative of the Every Nerd. His best friend Morgan comes closer:
but he isn't the star. He is allowed to look less Hollywoodesque and more like a real person due to that fact. However, his girlfriend, Anna -who is also a member of the nerd herd- is still incredibly, almost unreachably, beautiful. And a bit of a fashionista herself to boot. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with a girl-nerd (I kind of loathe the term "nerdette") being both nerdy and fashion-conscious. There is nothing wrong with making girls who are nerds sexual and sensual and exciting and beautiful. We've come a long way from Velma -poor, sexless, Velma- being the premiere nerd among girls.

In 1997, Willow Rosenberg of Buffy the Vampire Slayer declared, "Nerds are in!" And she was kind of right. After all, Willow was a nerd; and although she was played by Alyson Hannigan, who is herself incredibly -almost unreachably- beautiful, Willow was nerded up in her softer side of Sears outfits and otherwise weird clothing choices. And Willow got a boyfriend in season 2, when she was still very much into the science and math and computer thing -and when she still had kind of awkward clothing choices. But Willow is the exception rather than the rule in terms of geeky girls. And even Willow lost some of that nerd sensibility as she got more conventionally attractive -though her odd clothing choices remained a staple, the type of "odd" shifted away from "nerd" and toward "new age". And as her clothing shifted, so too did Willow. She became more overtly sexual and sensual (and gay!) as she moved closer to the magical arts and further away from ze book-learning. And this is something that happens again and again; men are allowed to be nerdy without being Hercules, like Morgan or Rusty from ABC Family's Greek. But girls, even and especially nerds, still occupy a very narrow range of acceptable looks. Rory Gilmore could be considered a nerd. But she was also played by someone who had previously been a model -and was never formally "outed". Most of the characters on Bones are nerds, but they mostly look like they've walked out of a fashion magazine too. Zack Addy is the one character who looked like a (still attractive) normal individual -and his luck with women was not so much of the good. But much of the rest of television and popular culture is still divided into boys being nerds and girls loving them. I must admit that I've never seen an "I Heart Nerds" t-shirt on a guy. Shows like The Big Bang Theory, Greek, and even Chuck still tend to follow the plot of "nerdy guy pursues beautiful, non-nerdy girl".

Are these things problems? I can see a criticism of this assessment being that television shows depict the beautiful, and we have to generally take their nerdom on faith rather than looks. I can also see a criticism being that nerds come in all shapes and sizes, and to proclaim that nerds should actually look nerdy is to just play to old stereotypes. And both of those are correct. Nerds should be portrayed as looking like Chuck and Morgan and Sheldon and Leonard. But I don't think girls get that option very much. The default for "girl" is still almost always "beautiful", even if she's got Velma's brain. And I believe fictional girl nerds are not only in short supply, but they are also quite uniform in appearance. And that's really no good either. Because it pushes the idea that a girl can be interested in math and science only if she also takes care to remain hyper-feminine.

Which becomes an issue I have with Danica McKellar's book. She dresses it up in hyper-feminine fare in order to beat back the boogyman of becoming the "Velma". But she -and our society as a whole- doesn't take the time to foster the idea that being a "Velma" is a pretty cool thing indeed. And that guys will still come a-knockin'. And also, that Velmas can knock as well. But mostly, it denies that sex appeal doesn't stem from make-up and hair dos and clothing; after all, Chuck is attractive in his Nerd Herd attire. Willow is cute and crush-worthy in her Inuit costume. We need to have more girl nerds in the media, and a bigger range of them. But we also need to take a good look at why the fairer sex needs all this get-up, from make-up to fancy underwear, in order to actually be feminine and attractive. And that is the part Danica McKellar is missing, and that is the part these girls (and their parents) who flock to these books need to know the most -more than even algebra.

An Example Of A Bad Poster Child

Dahlia Lithwick's article in last week's Newsweek pointed out the ridiculous nature of picking someone like Clark Rockefeller as the poster child for the beleaguered Father's Rights groups. As a general rule of thumb, it is important to not pick someone who is a possible murder suspect. But what is most of note for me is this: I find it amusing that the saner father's rights advocates and men's rights advocates actually have more in common with the feminists they disparage than they acknowledge -or even very probably know.

Father's rights groups want for good fathers to not be downgraded "from full-time dads to alternating-weekend carpool dads" who pay about 1/3 of their income for that privilege. And feminists -the sane ones (which is to say a great deal of us)- generally want the same thing; the old stereotype that Mom is the best and primary caregiver just reinforces the notions that women are 'naturally' caregivers and men are 'naturally' the wage-earners instead of acknowledging that families are different and follow different paths and we can't as a society fall back on old tropes if we truly want what is best for the children. And as anyone who has watched That 70s Show knows (1:46 seconds into the clip):

dividing up parenting time equally and well is beyond difficult. Under the traditional system, the parent who "gets" the child the most -during the week- doesn't actually normally interact with the child in any great amount due to the constraints of school and work and homework. The parent who "gets" the child the least -during the weekend- generally isn't the one who has to reinforce rules and regulations, who has to make a bedtime and deal with projects and missed deadlines. Both of those factors breed resentment -and rightfully so. Which is why it is so important for groups like those who advocate father's rights to work more closely with other groups -like feminists- who seek to reverse the generalized stereotype that so disable single men who are also fathers from getting as much 'dad time' as they and their children deserve.

But instead of recognizing that fact, these groups tend to go after feminists for the ills of what the less sane members purport to be the nature of "all" or "most" women -"most" women are gold diggers; most women will vindictively keep her ex from his child; most women, most women, most women. What they seemingly don't understand is that it is the patriarchal system -as it is set up right now- that enable some women (not all or even most or even a sizable minority, but some) to do things like trade on old ideas about masculinity and violence. If men were allowed and even encouraged to be equal caregivers as their children's mothers and if this became the norm, then the very nature of the family court system would change because that old nonsense about what women are and what men are would be irrelevant. As they should be now. But when people like Clark Rockefeller become the face of a group and symbolic of a man driven to the edge, all that ends up encouraging is the same old ideas about men and fatherhood and parental rights that has plagued the family-law system and our society for so long.

Sugar Makes Me Sleepy

In an ironic twist, all of the sugar I've been consuming to help me stay awake has instead been the cause of my problems. Apparently, I have hypoglycemia. This explains so much!

It also, unfortunately, limits the amount of sugar I can eat. Like, none. No sugar in the iced tea, no ice cream, no cookies... Life has taken a slightly less sweet and savory turn and I just don't know what to say about that. Anyway, hopefully with my new diet many of my problems (dizziness, fatigue, blurred vision, passing the hell out, etc.) will pass into the night, never to be spoken of or experienced again. Go medical treatment!

From here I think I should probably segue into another argument, something about the state of health care in this country and how the amount of people who can afford health insurance is a paltry amount and that we should be doing our utmost to fix this problem even if it means taking a slightly more socialized bent than Americans are comfortable with/used to. As if we aren't the country of innovation that would and could manipulate those socialized systems to best benefit us. But I haven't really done enough research yet and am still just basking in the glow of knowing what the hell has been wrong with me since almost before I can remember but also being slightly mopey about the fact that I should give up most of those treats that I love ever so. So this is more of just a naval-gazing post than anything of true substance. Oh well.

Oh, Those Kooky PETA People!

A few days ago, I wrote about PETA's double whammy of insensitive "advertising". I've found a picture of the ad they want to put on the border fence between Mexico and America:

To that, I say, "Wow".

What Bush Got Right

Fareed Zakaria wrote an article entitled, "What Bush Got Right"; and when Fareed Zakaria writes, I read. And so should you. The basic premise is that after his first term, Bush and his team seemed to realize that their policies weren't really working out too well, and so dialed back from an extreme conservative response to a more moderate take on issues like intergovernmental conversations and war. I still contend that the man was potentially the worst president we've ever had in American history bar none, because at least Nixon got us panda bears. But it is good to see some signs that the man is not completely devoid of working brain cells. I also like Zakaria's point that whoever wins the presidential election in November will have to avoid the mistake Bush made coming in by throwing out all of his predecessor's policies through enormous hubris. Even if we all despise Bush, we do need to take a serious look at what he's done that worked -and luckily for the next guy, that is an incredibly short list.

I do wonder at those %32 of the population that still approve of the job Bush has done though. Who are they? What world are they living in? I suppose they could have looked at the same facts Zakaria did and decided that it washed in the end, but seriously. I am still incredibly surprised that anyone would ever publicly support this man any more. I bet it is all those people who were in Jesus Camp.

In a complete non sequitur, I'm also incredibly excited for Nick And Nora's Infinite Playlist. I think I may be developing a slight crush on Michael Cera, but it is hard to tell for sure. I'm also pretty psyched about Eagle Eye, because I definitely have a crush on Shia LaBeouf.

Book's Getting a (Comic) Book

Fan of Firefly? Seen Serenity? Want to know more about Shepherd Book? Well, the opportunity is fast approaching. The heck, you say! But it is true. Except for the "fast approaching" part, because it is slated to appear some time next year. It will be in on-line comic form, called The Shepherd's Tale and it will have three parts; its outline is all Whedon, but it is being written by Jim Krueger. Krueger is currently doing the Serenity: The Other Half on-line Dark Horse comic, if you want to get a taste for how well he absorbs Firefly's world.

More to follow, hopefully.

PETA Sinks To All New Lows

I'm sure most people know about how bad PETA is in terms of public relations and how they have continually dehumanized women, their reason being, "We're justified in using women's bodies to make our point because that's the only way we can think to get people to listen to us". And while there are many counterpoints to be made to such a statement, like the fact that they're dehumanizing women and women are continually a portion of society looked upon as objects anyway, those points have been made countless times by many people.

But it turns out that PETA wasn't done. No, those ads comparing the Holocaust to factory farming wasn't the end of the extreme, nauseatingly bad campaigns PETA could come up with. I was appalled when Feministing reported that PETA sees the border fence between America and Mexico, the one that is destroying natural wildlife habitats and communities like Naco, Arizona, as a golden opportunity to spread the message via billboards on the wall reading "If the Border Patrol Doesn't Get You, the Chicken and Burgers Will --Go Vegan" in Spanish and English. Because that's not callous in the least, right?

But then, I found something worse: PETA is using the recent Cannibal-On-The-Bus tragedy (the one that made Greyhound reverse their "There's a Reason You've Never Heard of Bus-Rage", something I found morbidly humorous) to highlight the similarities between what happened to Tim McLean and what happens in slaughterhouses:

Yeah, I thought the border fence was a low blow; but this is beyond the pale. I really have nothing to offer, except how sickening I find this whole ad campaign and how disturbed the whole of PETA's advert board has to be to think ads like this do anything to further their cause.

"Why Wasn't I In It?"

The title comes from Alan Tudyk's question to Nathan Fillion about, yes, Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. Here's Alan interviewing Nathan (why they're talking about movies that have been out for forever, I have no idea):

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story Knocked Up Hearts in Atlantis Serenity

I love it when these two crazy kids get together! But I personally love another of their interactions more, so here's one for the road:

Politics And Infidelities

It seems like the two go hand in hand; where there is politics, there are infidelities. FDR; John Kennedy; Bill Clinton; Jimmy Carter lusted in his heart (he was too much of a fuddy duddy to act on it); hell, even Grover Cleveland purportedly fathered an illegitimate child -though he was a bachelor at the time; and John Edwards. And all democrats too. Not that republicans don't have their scandals. Theirs just happen -ironically enough- with other men. Larry Craig, anyone?

The real question invariably becomes, though, who is at fault? In this situation, Rush Limbough -that paradigm of good sense and sensibility- apparently blames Elizabeth Edwards. After all, if she wasn't so darn smart, maybe she could have shut up and "serviced" her husband every once in a while. Keith Olbermann effectively smacked down that lovely take:

But the question still remains: is Rielle Hunter a whore, slut, temptress? Is John Edwards a hapless man controlled primarily by his dick? Or is it the other way around? Is Rielle Hunter a nonissue because she was not the one violating marital promises, and John Edwards the true sleazeball? It turns out that no one goes for that whole "middle ground" thing.

Truth is, I don't think Rielle Hunter is anything other than a woman who made a bad, immoral, and hurtful choice. She is less responsible for the hurt Elizabeth Edwards has more than likely been subject to given that she did not, in point of fact, promise to be faithful to Elizabeth. As much as I hate to rely on pop culture for frame of reference, it is kind of like the Rory-Dean affair at the end of season 4 and into season 5 of Gilmore Girls. Dean was the more irresponsible party. Dean was the one who was married. Dean was the one who violated his vows to love and honor his wife. But Rory was in the wrong as well. She knew Dean was off-limits, knew he was married, and chose to sleep with him anyway.

And I think that there is a more insidious side to all of this; and it is how women interact with one another. Both Rory and Rielle Hunter seemingly convinced themselves that Lindsay and Elizabeth Edwards didn't matter; that they were at fault for whatever ills their respective lovers were subject to. Rielle Hunter said to Jonathan Darman (a writer for Newsweek) of Elizabeth Edwards, "She does not give off good energy. She didn't make eye contact with me". She also, according to Darman, had been working on an "idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them". We as a society have taught women to view other women as competition, as less deserving, and more often than not as the problem rather than as another human being -and a human being whom we can hurt and cut and diminish through our actions. Men are the primary, are the subject, and the other woman in their lives are often only seen as the object. There is a reason why, on those horrid talk shows, a man's two girlfriends who didn't know about each other until the dick dragged them both on Maury attack one another with an alarming frequency -instead of going after the guy who was two timing them both.

This latest political scandal is an example of many things: egotism, slut-shaming, a propensity to judge women by their looks and sexual history, an alarming trend of making the adulterer the victim; but I think the continued animosity women show one another is perhaps the most important aspect. Rielle Hunter didn't see Elizabeth Edwards as a person worthy of respect; Rielle Hunter diminished Elizabeth Edwards in terms of being a person of worth, of good qualities, and most importantly of emotion. Elizabeth Edwards didn't factor into Rielle Hunter's thinking at all, other than that she had apparently trapped John Edwards in a failing marriage that she, Rielle Hunter, could rescue him from. John Edwards is an adulterer, and the lack of respect he has shown his wife has been very large indeed. He should be seen as wholly responsible for the actions he chose to take, for the disregard he showed to his wife and family. 

But I think what we need to work on most is the way women see each other. We need to stop seeing each other as competitors for husbands, as being less worthy, as just being "less". We -all of us- need to stop the implicit "she's not so great" when we are jealous, when we want what they have, when we don't understand why they have it. The Rielle Hunters of the world, the Monica Lewinskys, the girl who slept with Christie Brinkley's husband, need to recognize that there is a fully viable, worthwhile human also in the picture. That she is not less of a human because they covet or are sleeping with her husband.

An Addendum

Yesterday's post of "Where The Girls Are" missed out on including this video, because I just found it today. But I think it highlights some of the issues with why girls don't find math and hard sciences appealing, especially with Dr. Bonnie Bassler saying, "Women scientists have to achieve two and a half times what their male counterparts have to achieve to have the same credibility". 

I think women feel that sense of diminishment of their work and achievements and abilities in math and hard sciences without it having to always be overtly stated.

Review: Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

Two weeks ago, I picked up at the library Bill Moyers' On Democracy, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, and a book by Alan Alda to break up the two heavy hitters called Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself. I'm fairly certain my library is utterly confused by my reading habits, as my librarian stared at my book choices until she got to Alan Alda, who, she said, looked like a "nice man". Given her age and the prevalence of M*A*S*H both during its run and after (my mother had a M*A*S*H shirt made in 1981 and the only reason why she doesn't have it any more is because I stole it), I was a bit confused. And it led me to questions like, "Does she not know who Alan Alda is?", "Does she assume I don't know who Alan Alda is?", and perhaps the most important, "How do I respond to 'he looks like a nice man'?" My first two questions are probably forever going to be unanswered, but the last one was; and the answer turned out to be "very poorly". I smiled confusedly and said, "Yes... he does", which probably made me look a bit slow.

All that small town confusion and small talk aside, Alan Alda appears to actually be a nice man, and doesn't just look like one. A nice man with an overwhelmingly positive outlook on life, even as he recognizes the depressing and overarching problems we face. The book is a mix of musings written for the book itself and speeches he gave to various organizations and graduating classes -and how those speeches came to be. Each speech is of a common theme -life, and how best to live it- and yet all are unique, all are funny, and all -as Alan Alda points out as being the point of the title- demonstrate more about how Alan Alda thinks and what gems he believes should be recognized than any universal truth. His truth is that the meaning of life is living itself, and it is one I embrace wholeheartedly.

 Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself is apparently a direct follow-up to Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, a book I haven't yet read and my library probably doesn't own. I thought that may be a problem because the book starts off where the last one ended, with Alda nearly dying on a mountaintop in Chile, and I didn't really know if I wanted to only read about his life from that point on; luckily for me, Alda jumps timelines. Also luckily for me, Alda's 'voice', his style of speaking, his style of delivering lines, is in full effect. Maybe it is that I watched too much M*A*S*H; maybe it is the fact that he was a very large part of Free To Be... You and Me, a tape my grandfather got me and that my mother later replaced on CD, to the horror of my friends and other family members. But while reading his book, I could hear him; and that made the experience all the greater.

What also impressed me was this: his take on existentialism. It is my own: 

Maybe it was my natural optimism at work, but what I saw and warmed to in the existentialist's writings was that life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; it's up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something, it's as though you aren't there. Existentialism was supposed to be the philosophy of despair. But not to me. To me, it was the essence of hope -because it touched the cold, hard stone at rock bottom and saw it as a way to push off it and bounce back up again.

That right there is the theme of the book: life is what you make it, so go out there and make it the best life you can. Life is for living, and enjoying. And Alan Alda's book is fully enjoyable. So I'm going to steal something from a blog I read, a shorthand review tool:

Read:√

Skim:

Toss:

And a special thanks to whoever gave the library this book in memory of Michael J. Senew.

Where The Girls Are

Little under a week ago, I wrote about Danica McKellar's new book, Kiss My Math. A friend of mine wrote something that contained several ideas I want to address. And so, after asking permission (unlike the last time), here is the first of probably about three blogs stemming from that one comment -thus ensuring that she never comments again and making me very sad indeed.

 "I've both seen and read that women are more likely to go into the helping professions like teaching and nursing because as a whole they prefer to work with people, not stuck working on abstract concepts. I do agree that it's empowering to know math well enough to function and use it at work and in daily life without relying on technology, but there's a reason why engineering programs are mainly made up of men, and it's not because girls nowadays are discouraged from becoming engineers. It's just that that life often just isn't that appealing."

So says my friend. It is the constant debate of nature versus nurture, of whether behavior is borne in a vacuum. I disagree profoundly with the idea that girls "naturally" prefer to work with people, naturally gravitate toward careers like teachers and social workers and children's librarians. I very much think it is about how we, as a society, codify behaviors and how we, as a society, react to girls versus how we react to boys. Girls are, from the onset, more likely to be the one who is indoctrinated with the idea that they are the caregivers. Girls are advertised playsets with washers and dryers:

And they are the ones who are given dolls to care for and hug and hold. Women are the people responsible for putting supper on the table, and studies still continue to show that after all of this time, after many groups are declaring equality reached and feminism as having done its job so could it please just go away now, household chores are still incredibly inequitable; and parents, according to a 2006 study, are more likely to give girls more chores than boys -and are more likely to pay boys for the chores they are assigned.

Boys are hit with crap as well, as William Wants A Doll tells us:

Boys don't want to play with dolls, unless they're called "action figures", as we all know. And a few years ago, I read a Newsweek "My Turn" where a mother (who grew up watching Free to Be You and Me -and William's longing for a doll) got her sons dolls and saw them use them as projectiles and swords, and concluded in part that little boys are just engineered differently than little girls. But that doesn't take into account the pervasive normative culture that surrounds us; it doesn't take into account what we come into contact with every day of our lives as boys and as girls. Commercials show dads as being imbeciles in the kitchen, and show moms at home there. Teachers and preschools and television and interactions with other children's parents also help create a culture of gender normative behavior. And although the most enlightened of parents may want to create a gender neutral environment, unconscious reactions to children -talking more to girl babies, reacting more gently to girl babies, and being more active with boy babies- helps explain in part why girls start talking before boys and why boys start walking before girls.

Women and men may not be overtly pulled away from certain fields and pushed toward other fields (and I somewhat disagree with that as well, but I'll concede that it is nowhere near as bad as it once was), but there are still societal factors at work that make women a more likely candidate for a kindergarden teacher than a man. Anecdote: I didn't have a male teacher until seventh grade. And I don't think it is primarily because men naturally don't want to work with small children; I think it is because men who want to spend their days with small children are looked at with suspicion and are seen as being threatening. Not always, but often enough for the guy who was thinking about becoming an elementary school special education teacher to feel like he wouldn't succeed there, and years later joined the military instead (why, yes, I do know someone this happened to!).

Meanwhile, women are also the ones who are called most often for childcare. My father was often more available to pick me up than my mother, but whenever the nurse went to call someone I always had to remind her to call my father first. It was a constant battle, and one that is pervasive. Women are taught, through interactions with society, that their primary objective in life is to be centered around the family. Women are consistently interacted with as members of the caregiving community. For that reason, no one turns a head when I play with a child I've just become acquainted with in a park; but if a guy my same age were to do so, there would be questions asked.

There is a reason why girls have often felt they did not belong in math classes and science classes; and while I am ambivalent about Danica McKellar's technique, I admire what she is trying to do in attempting to change the message from "girls are good at caring for others" and "girls are good at languages and history" to "girls are good at math, can succeed in math, and can be fulfilled by math". I don't think every girl ever will suddenly want to become a mathematician or will want to work in a chemistry lab and be the next Marie Curie. But I also strongly believe that the reasons girls don't find abstract work as appealing has less to do with how girls naturally are and has more to do with how society views girls. I don't know enough about the subject to state definitively that there are no distinctly "girl" traits and no distinctly "boy" traits -and I suffer from a fair amount of liberal guilt that I was attracted to literature and made my home there instead of math and the hard sciences- but I absolutely do not believe that it accounts for as much as we constantly hear it does from baby books to magazines.

I will end with this: in the 1800s, it was important to teach boys to read and write, but it was only important to teach girls to read. In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a short story detailing how women were considered too delicate to be able to read or write for any length of time. My point? Women are always and forever being given what is seen as the lesser sphere of influence in western society and thought. It is embedded in the very fabric of how we think, and how we interact with others. I'm guilty of it as much as anyone else. But the argument about what is appealing and what isn't appealing for women in math and hard science seems very similar to language used at every other point in history when the intention was to prove that the woman who wanted out, who wanted to write or hold a job outside the home (if one happened to be white and middle class) was really just the odd one out. That only Betty Friedan suffered The Feminine Mystique.

I Figured Out Why I Love Jessica Valenti

I had a wonderful, inspiring, crazy, intelligent, fashionista philosopher for a professor in college; she was one of the only things that could consistently get me up for an 8 o'clock class, and I took every course I could with her. I probably freaked her out more than a little bit with my devotion. The face Jessica Valenti makes at the end of this 12 second rant? Totally a face Professor Cassidy would make. Awesome!

Making faces at NeW on 12seconds.tv

"Somebody's Sister"

There are many things I like about Feministing, but I think the thing I'm really appreciating the most is the new "community" Feministing. An interactive feature, it allows users to blog themselves -to highlight issues they see in their lives. Some of them aren't as well written as others, but there are a lot with good ideas and more than a few gems; ones that make me rethink my own complacency. This one, entitled "That's somebody's sister", is one of those gems. As sad as it is, before reading this piece I had never stopped to consider the phrase before, how that "someone" is often male and how the possessive quality of the phrasing eliminates treating a woman well for the woman's sake and instead makes it about treating the woman well for someone else's sake. The end note is one that should be repeated often:

Ultimately, misogyny, sexism, discrimination, harassment, rape, and domestic violence aren’t bad because of what the female victims’ brothers will feel. They are bad because the woman , a person in her own right, is being hurt. And until this starts being the frame around which people, even men trying to appeal to misogynists, argue for equality, equality will not be achieved.

Genevieve PlusCourageuse deserves much applause for highlighting and emphasizing a prevalent theme in society, and an accepted one. She deserves kudos for bringing attention to an issue I have previously mindlessly accepted. And we all deserve this phrase -and the behavior that elicits it- to be stricken from society.

Another One

So it turns out I missed one of Sarah Haskins' brilliant Target: Women when I compiled her videos earlier in the month. So here is another bit of Sarah Haskins to brighten up your Tuesday:

Georgia vs Russia

If anyone else is like me and has absolutely no clue as to what's going down between Georgia and Russia (or who, also like me, had the knee-jerk reaction of thinking Georgia-next-to-Alabama had been attacked), the New York Times has a helpful article that partially explains reasons for the conflict and helps put the whole thing in a more historical context. I also found this blog, and more specifically these blog posts helpful while I mull over exactly what is happening there over yonder.

More Notes on the Olympics

Actually, just one: We kicked France's ass! Thank you, France, for being obnoxious enough to make me want to really root for Michael Phelps. I have an odd loathing of the kid that I feel kind of badly about on some days and not so badly about on others. But when Alain Bernard of the French relay team says shit like, "The Americans? We're going to smash them. That is what we came here for", it stirs up a national pride like no other. And so I am supremely happy (as well as more than a little surprised) that Jason Lezak was actually able to chase Bernard down in that final leg of the relay and make him eat those words. I usually feel sorry for the losing team -unless they're the Lady Vols from Tennessee, of course- but nothing gave me greater pleasure than seeing them all dumbstruck by the American victory.

Just Call Me the Harbinger of Doom

My mom does, in fact, call me the Harbinger of Doom. When I was younger, I would listen to the radio as I read or decorated my walls or -more infrequently- cleaned my room. And through those years, I was often the first one in my family to learn of a tragedy and would then pass along that news to the rest of the family. Princess Diana, JFK Jr.'s disappearance, the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy, these were all incidents my parents heard first from me. It got to the point where my mother threatened to confiscate my radio. The nickname has returned with a vengeance this weekend, as I had the unfortunate fate of telling her that Bernie Mac had died at 50 from pneumonia, and also that Isaac Hayes died at the age 65. 

Both Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes made an indelible mark on popular culture as a whole and on their own mediums individually, and I'm sure their loss will be felt keenly. What this really makes me want to do, though, is jump in my car and drive to Memphis to visit Stax Museum, a museum built in the recording studio where Isaac Hayes first recorded and which is one of the best museums I have ever been privileged to visit. Plus, it has Isaac Hayes' car and a recording of him warning visiters not to get too close. I want to go there, and see the influence he has had already and see the mark he has made on history for myself. And maybe buy a cd on the way out.

Some Notes on the Olympics

1) I miss Ian Thorpe. While Michael Phelps has captured America's attention and may in fact beat Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics, I care less than if the Australian Thorpedo was swimming again.

2) Why is all the music American? It may be just the events I've caught so far; I mean, I'm not sure about the relevance of beach culture in China or Japan or France, so I'm not sure if there is any music even remotely akin to the Beach Boys, but it just seemed strange that during the beach volleyball match all I heard was American tunes. Same thing with the gymnastics and swimming. It is just odd. I am hoping that it is just the music I know that my brain is picking up on, kind of like the phenomenon of noticing your car's color or type on the road more often than others, but I'm kind of thinking that American culture really is just that prevalent. I blame a friend of mine's blog entry for getting me to even think semi-deeply about the subject.

3) I can blame that same friend for getting me to notice the fact that two of the American saber fencing medalists were wearing flip flops when they were chatting with Bob Costas. I understand the gold medalist's choice in footwear. She was wearing a casual outfit and chose a casual shoe. Same thing with the silver medalist seated next to her wearing sneakers. But the incoming Duke freshman, Becca Ward, wore a very nice skirt and top and flip flops for shoes. That was an odd mish mash of serious and casual and was kind of odd.

4) Congratulations to 18 year old Taehwan Park from South Korea, whose Olympic dreams were dashed 4 years ago when he fell into the pool before the start of his race and thus disqualifying him. He managed to take gold in the Men's 400 metre free-style this time around.

5) Congratulations to 41 year old Dana Torres, who was one of the reasons America got silver in the relay race.

Spelling Correctly is for Losers

British academic Ken Smith has a solution for that pesky problem of students' spelling woes: "accept as variant spelling those words our students commonly misspell". I am more than slightly aghast. In an age with internet dictionaries and spell check, there really should be no need for students to spell many words incorrectly. And on handwritten papers, I can't help but feel spelling "their" as "thier" is more a question of speed in a timed setting and laziness in an untimed setting than it is a question of a student not knowing the correct spelling of the word.

As many know, I am an absolutely horrible speller. I -at certain points in my life- have had to forego using the word I wanted, the absolute perfect word for the sentence I was constructing, because spell check had no idea what I was trying to get across. My spelling is so bad I break the spell check. I blame Catholic kindergarden; I blame Catholic kindergarden for a lot, but in this case I'm certain it really is responsible. One of the best things about college was the fact that my roomie and best friend is actually a very good speller, and so I could just annoy the crap out of her whenever I needed a specific word spelled. And I did that a lot. But in no way do I think that my problems would have been helped had my professors and teachers accepted things like "otrocheous" for "atrocious". In fact, I'm willing to bet that my spelling would have devolved further.

Words are tricky things. Phonetic spelling doesn't always work in the English language, partially because English is one of those languages that appropriates words from other languages, and partially because the English are a strange folk and apparently decided that adding in extra -and silent- letters was good for a laugh. You really can't hold much about a language against a people who have a town spelled "Leicester" and pronounce it "Lester". And maybe poor spelling isn't the mark of a nation falling into a pit of ruination, but I can't help but think that we should continue to complain about the state of the education system if teachers and professors are correcting the same mistakes every year. And I can't help but think that a coherent system of spelling is a great help. 

Anyone who has read the letters of people like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, people who wrote before American-English was standardized (and also when f's and s's were interchangeable), could tell you that deciphering what the author was saying -even if he spelled the word phonetically- is sometimes (oftentimes) a challenge. The meaning of the document loses some of its panache when you cannot cheerfully go along with a rhythm to your reading, but instead have to stop every few words. One of the beauties of having a native tongue is the ability to not have to constantly translate said tongue in order to achieve maximum understanding. Misspelled words trip us up, for good reason. And so I can't help but feel as if Ken Smith's suggestion is to accept mediocrity in the face of the more difficult and time consuming effort involved in figuring out where the break down comes in education and why students cannot -or will not- spell correctly. 

"Girlie" Math

Danica McKellar, she of Wonder Years fame, has grown all up and become a mathematician. Everyone who has ever watched VH1's "Where Are They Now" probably knows that (and what happened to that show?). And after growing up, writing a physics theorem that has been named after her, becoming a yoga instructor (seriously, she and her mom have a line of videos), and continuing on as an actress, Danica McKellar decided to do something to help minimize the gap between girls and boys in math classes and possibly mathematical fields. On a visit to Good Morning America -and if you watch the clip, look for the little girl by the back window- she said, "Boys and girls are afraid of math in junior high, make no mistake about it." But boys are encouraged to go into math and sciences whereas "girls don't end up going into math and science as much as young women because they're not encouraged to. They're told in every message conceivable, every form conceivable -billboards, magazines, tv shows, movies- that people who do math and science are nerdy, and they're guys, and they're told that math is not for them."

So she wrote a book, Math Doesn't Suck, which I'm sure many people have heard about. Math Doesn't Suck is an interesting book with an interesting premise -that if you teach "girlie" math, math with feminized examples in a "fun" way, then girls will learn math and like math and be more likely to go into math. Making it look like the cover of a teen magazine (and Kiss My Math goes further with this theme), Danica McKellar tries to take the fear out of math by making it safe for girls. By integrating lessons on fractions, decimals, and percents with quizzes on being a "math-o-phobe" and questions about teenage (or preteen) crushes and horoscopes. Kiss My Math has the same premise and the same cover, with tips on how to beat stress and ways of finding out if the girl in question has supportive friends. 

It is kind of like guerilla warfare, education style. The books Danica McKellar writes are about things like being cool and feminine and having boyfriends. She says, "In Kiss My Math, I teach averages and I say, 'Okay, if your boyfriend texted you this many times today and this many times tomorrow and here's the whole week, how many times on average did he text you?'; that may be something a 13, 14 year old girl would be interested in knowing." And she may be right. Maybe the way to teach girls math is to segregate the examples we give to boys (bullet speed, trains meeting, traditional stuff), and examples we give to girls (lipstick color, texts received, feminine stuff), but I'm not convinced. As much as I like Danica McKellar and as much as I think she is doing a wonderful thing by trying to get girls interested in math -and as much as I agree with her that knowing math "just empowers them"- I can't help but feel that books like this and examples like this just reinforce certain gender stereotypes. 

And it leaves no place for the girl who either doesn't have a boyfriend or doesn't care how many times her boyfriend texted her, the girl who is turned off by girlie script and the idea that girls are going to intrinsically care about hair styles and boys and being popular and cool. And -perhaps more insidiously- it makes it seem like in order to succeed in math, girls have to be pretty and fashion-savvy. The girl with bad hair and no fashion sense still has no place in math. It reinforces the notion of what traditionally makes up proper girl behavior, and it adds math to the mix. Danica McKellar and her books aren't the only guilty parties here; Newsweek had an article about the Nerdette, and every girl highlighted was a fashionista and tech-and-math friendly. Maybe this is the way it has to be done; maybe in order to make girls in math palatable to both girls and the greater society at large, girls in those fields need to be girlied up and made to be not only smart but also sexy -not only tech savvy but also pretty. Maybe girls will be more interested in math if they know boys will still be interested in them, and maybe boys will be less threatened by girls in math if those girls would be equally at home on the cover of Vogue. 

But I wouldn't count on it. And it hurts girls who look more like Sara Gilbert (who I mention because she guest-starred on The Big Bang Theory) than they do Danica McKellar. McKellar mentions that being good at math is seen by girls as nerdy, and nerdy implicitly equals bad. But nerdy is no longer a groin to the flagpole offense for guys ever since the tech revolution, so we need to work more as a society for making it less of a crime for girls as well. That would mean turning the focus away from looks as being one of the most important things about a girl, and that would be good for girls interested in math and in general.

I think the thing that breaks down the real problem of math and girls -the problem Danica McKellar highlights in the beginning of girls being not only not encouraged but even discouraged from entering math fields- is being solved more by McKellar's own exposure than even by her books. Here is a girl who has succeeded in math and science and is being celebrated for it on news programs and on book lists. She highlights that it can be done, that girls can be afraid of math in junior high and still succeed. She is the ambassador, the woman girls can point to when they're in their guidance counselor's office; one of the people who can counteract the billboards and movies and tv series. We just need more of her out there, spreading that message.

Television and Me

I’ve been thinking how to write this for a couple of days, because there are just so many aspects of what my parents did that helped me positively become who I am today and helped me be strong, to be confident in myself, my appearance, and my intelligence throughout my youth and through today. But I think what it comes down to –more than the gender neutral clothing choices, more than the instruction to hit back- was this: television; or rather, the lack of it.

My parents came to the conclusion before I was born that I wasn’t to watch a lot of television, and certainly not a lot of commercial television. In fact, the one commercial television program we watched consistently was Sunday Morning. My parents believed strongly that commercials and consumerist culture infused people with negative opinions of themselves. They believed that if a person is indoctrinated with images about how your life could improve if only you had that game, that car, that hair color, or that jewelry, then that person would be less apt to see themselves as whole and worthwhile without it. Because of that, I mostly watched PBS. I watched Sesame Street, and Reading Rainbow, and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, and This Old House. When other girls had crushes on the New Kids on the Block, I was in love with Bob Villa (and thought The New Kids on the Block were really kids who were new to my particular block). While other girls were watching commercials about barbies or playhouses or easy bake ovens, I was watching Maria and Luis fix toasters and Linda and Bob and Susan and Gordon deal with Big Bird. I was watching the Land of Make Believe. I was learning about the Underground Railroad (something I thought, for a time, was an actual railroad built underground). I was watching specials like Eyes on the Prize. And also, Pooh Bear. But only for a couple of hours a day. The rest of my time was spent with books, reading and being read to, or playing outside and with my toys.

I was so divorced from commercials and their marketing techniques that the first one I remember was from when I was five. It was a Chips Ahoy commercial, for Sprinkle Chips Ahoy. Its tagline was "A Party In Every Bite":

And I believed it. So I went home and asked my father to buy me a pack; he did, and sat there with me as I took my first bite, expecting streamers and for generic rock music to start playing. When nothing happened, I was incredibly disappointed and very, very mad. My father then took this opportunity to explain false and misleading advertising and why it was important to look at the commercials and recognize that they were attempting to sell me products I generally wouldn’t need or even want without the commercials themselves alerting me to the fact that I needed and wanted them. The whole experience was so surreal and so jarring that I remember it to this day.

The other thing that was strange about my family and television were the rules surrounding its very existence. Television sets belonged in the living room. No tvs in the kitchen, none in the dining room, and certainly none in the bedrooms. Dining rooms were for family dinners; people should be able to exist without television long enough to cook dinner; bedrooms were for sleeping and for playing. Television watching was sort of an old fashioned event; instead of everyone going off to their separate spaces and watching what they wanted to, we sat in a central location and watched, well, generally what my parents wanted to. We would watch, and discuss what we saw. We discussed how the Japanese were depicted during World War II in Loony Tunes cartoons and that morphed into a talk about Japanese internment camps. Later, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was used to discuss things like sexuality, feminism, and pop culture references. Ken Burns’ documentaries were watched together. History was weaved into the very fabric of my experience, as my parents –both tremendous history buffs- would sit and talk for hours about Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We would watch shows about them, and then visit museums and historical sites dedicated to them and others.

My parents did other things, obviously. They made sure I was told I was smart; that I was capable; that I was loved. They treated me with respect, and were wholly interested in my opinions and my views about the books we read or the shows we watched or the places we visited, and that certainly has given me the ability to be a confidently opinionated person. They made sure I knew that authority figures were not worthy of blind adherence simply because they were authority figures; but they were worthy of respect because they were people. And they sent me to preschool and to daycare where I had to deal with children and parents and supervisors who had different opinions and different ideas –though that was mostly to preserve my mother’s sanity. 

However, I strongly believe that all of this rests upon my limited interaction with a world that wants to make me feel like I am less than I am in order to prey on my feelings of weakness, and my intense exposure to people who believed that I was wonderful and whole the way I was. By substituting educational television for commercial television; by substituting an interactive response for a passive response to those programs; and by encouraging other areas of interest and interaction independent of the talking box, my parents helped me to develop the skills necessary to feel whole. I am still affected by media images; but since I grew up with the television more off than on, and since I was taught to think critically about those images from a young age, I think my parents were able to imbue me with an incredible skill set. I'm still sucked in sometimes; but more often than not, I recognize the problem is something outside of me. And that is a rather powerful thing to recognize.

Carlin in Hell?

I watch stuff like that and just hope beyond hope that there is a god, and that he is a George Carlin fan. I think it would be a marvelous turn around.

Some More News Stories of Interest

In an effort to keep down the amount of posts per day I tend to amass, I'm going to bulk post some stuff that interests me.

First on the list is Morgan Freeman's accident, mainly because I discovered this first and it nearly gave me a heart attack yesterday. Oh, Morgan Freeman! You have to be alright because you and Michael Caine make Christian Bale palatable! And you're one of the last older actors I absolutely adore who's still working! Sean Connery, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier have all retired, so you have to carry on the torch.

Secondly, Gloria Steinem gave an interview to the Financial Times (to actually read the whole article, change the "false" in the URL to "true"; it should then work). She's one of my favorite feminists, so it was very exciting. She's just so darn cool!

Third on the list is this: The Feminist Underground is asking for essay submissions. In their own words:

Since The Feminist Underground writers believe that fighting racism, classism, homophobia, ableism, and transphobia are part of modern feminism, we're looking for posts about how you deal with all sorts of dangerous -isms when interacting with the young people in your life. Write what you want, but some ideas include movie and book reviews, personal essays about what your parents did right, and essays about what you've done to help kids cope with toxic ideas and images about gender, sexual orientation, and race they're bound to encounter.

I have two thoughts: one is how I can see myself raising my own (hypothetical and at this point completely undesired) children, and one is how I was raised. The two intersect, because how I was raised directly (and positively) influences how I want to do it myself. Overall, it seems like a cool idea and a good opportunity for exposure and whatnot. The only thing is you've got to be quick because the deadline is this Thursday. Sorry about that. Anyway, if you're a quick typer or saw this and thought "Hey, I know!", you can send submissions to pobrehabladora@gmail.com or leave a link to your post on your own blog in their comments section. Happy writing!

Oh, and on a personal note, due to an unhappy confluence of events, lightbulbs in my house are dying in quick succession and we didn't have the foresight to buy replacement bulbs before. Or even now. I predict that a few days from now the situation will worsen, leading to chaos and an implicit refusal by all parties who have the means to drive and get lightbulbs to do it.

Marriage for None; Civil Unions for All

A June CBS poll about gay marriage found that 30% of Americans favor allowing it, 36% are against it, and 28% percent favor civil unions. This is the highest percentage of people who support recognition of homosexual relationships since the question first appeared in polling questions in 2004, but it still represents a rather firm split with no clear majority. However, Oliver Thomas -a minister, lawyer, and author- has an intriguing answer to this ideological problem; actually, it is the same solution my mother blurted out about 3 years ago in our kitchen, but Oliver Thomas actually has an outlet for these ideas whereas my mother just had the four of us to rant to as she put dishes away. Plus, Oliver Thomas' seems more thought out and -dare I say it- more eloquent than my mother's rant was. I attribute that to the fact that he probably wasn't trying to wrestle with the conundrum of where to put the colander.

What both Oliver Thomas and my mother came up with -separate from each other- is that government should get out of the business of marriage. Government appropriated marriage from religious institutions because it "creates more stable relationships and families, more financial security and a better environment for the rearing of children" -all of which are legitimate concerns, but not religious ones. The thing we call marriage is a civil contract between two parties and the state. Thomas' proposal (and my mother's) is that we merely acknowledge that, call what the state does civil unions, and allow marriages to be overseen by the church. Says Thomas, "Theologically, this puts marriage back were it belongs. Constitutionally, it protects churches from having the government dictate to them which relationships they should or should not sanction."

Thomas has a list of benefits, and -from what I can tell- no real downside. His basis is on the fundamental principle of separation of church and state. It is also about what benefits both the church and state separately. Churches could refuse to perform marriages, couples could find churches that would sanctify their unions, and homosexual civil unions would provide the same stability and financial security to the state that straight unions do. The right of equality under the law would be upheld, as if everyone were getting civil unions there would be no discrimination. He even tackles the "union for procreation" argument, stating that "if procreation were our primary concern, current law wouldn't allow the elderly or the infertile to marry". All in all, I think Thomas has the right idea here. Government shouldn't be in the marriage business; homosexuals should have the same rights and legal protections in their relationships as heterosexuals. Civil unions for all solves those problems; and does so fairly and equitably, if I may say so myself.