Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection (Amazon) is… a brief history of feminism intermingled with an exhausting amount of cis-het-normatism with a side of biological essentialism. In this universe, race and sexuality are an afterthought, “transgendered” is an adjective, and women who don’t want children don’t exist at all.
Most of the time I was reading it, I was wondering what I was supposed to take away from it, I found my answer towards the end:
“My generation made a mistake. We took the struggles and the victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection. We privatized feminism and focused only on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations.”
Which does lead to one thing that I did like, that I think we should talk about more often – the concept of satisficing. That feminism fought for choices, but having those choices means making them – including what not to do, and what not to do well.
But – I am frustrated by the idea that women could just choose to “be less hard on ourselves” in a society that holds us to impossible standards. I’m angry about the lack of consideration for intersectionality. The book is from 2014, but already feels extremely dated. I don’t entirely know why I finished it – perhaps the historical aspect? It’s relatively well written, interweaving the author’s experience with the changes of the time. But on reflection, it probably wasn’t worth the time, and I don’t recommend it.
I love art. But my preference is for modern, abstract art. I’m not as big a fan of classical art. Mainly because it is an artistic manifestation of the patriarchy. It might not be as crude as Playboy, but the lens of the male gaze pervades. This art wasn’t made for me, because this art doesn’t recognize me as a full human being. Only (white) men get that.
So when I find myself surrounded by classical art, I while away the time with a game that I call “Feminist Art Genres”. This is basically a game of snarky categorization.
“Man, Inexplicably Naked”
Often they come with a weapon, because why the hell not. Sometimes they don’t have a weapon but… think they do?
Sometimes they have machines that may or may not work, and they may or may not know how to use.
Sometimes they appear to be explaining things. Plus ça change.
Woman are often moping. Sometimes clothed, often not. Which makes sense I guess, because often when I feel sad the first thing I do is take all my clothes off and lie down in a provocative position.
Woman, moping.
As my friend Natasha says, “I lie naked like that sometimes, but not with one stocking.”
Woman: inexplicably naked, moping.Or doing emotional labour – often without clothes.
Woman: doing emotional labour
I’ve never held a severed head, but I imagine if I did, I would experience a wardrobe malfunction.
Often you find women doing domestic tasks.
Woman, doing domestic task.
Women often look bored. This pairs well with the genre of “mansplaining”.
It’s not just classical art, I was also inspired by a type of plant recently. And if you liked this, you might also enjoy the time I went to a museum and had a complete meltdown about POCKETS.
As an Angry Internet Feminist™, every incident I point out has multiple parts.
I notice and say something.
Tone policing, on whether I should have noticed it. After all, it’s not that big a deal.
Someone uses “he” when they should say “they”? Not that big a deal.
Mild objectification of women in something that should be professional? Not that big a deal.
No women speaking at a conference? Not that big a deal.
Because the thing is, each instance isolated is not really that big a deal. So one sentence wasn’t inclusive? So what. So one guy thought he was funny when he wasn’t? So what. So that one conference didn’t actually get the best speakers because they limited themselves to <50% of the population (usually no PoC either). So what?
Here’s the thing that people who are telling me what should and should not bother me don’t seem to realize. It’s that I do understand that if it was that one thing, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it probably isn’t even the only thing I’ve encountered that week.
Because whatever your feelings about “they” as grammatically less correct, when I sit in a room full of men, and only men, and someone says “he” when they could say “they” I often look around the room, and I’m reminded that I don’t belong.
Really, I get enough reminders. At the events featuring pizza and beer. When men think I’m lost, or something – anything – other than an engineer. Could you just change that word? Would it really be that big a deal?
And yes, it just a word, it’s just a tasteless joke. But it’s in your marketing materials and presumably more than one person looked at those. So if that wasn’t a big deal… what will not be a big deal for something less externally facing?
That guy, urgh that guy, who “jokingly” called his female colleague a bitch. What do you think he’s going to write on her performance review? Maybe that she’s “abrasive”.
Because these individual items that each taken individually are “not a big deal” have piled up and now I sit precariously atop a pile of tiny rocks, wondering when it will all come crashing down.
These things do not happen in isolation. The culture that culminates in the death and rape threats (just the most recent example) is built on a culture where women do not get paid what they deserve, where they are objectified, marginalized, and, most of all, ignored.
Can we talk about humour for a moment? Because I’m tired of these things being “jokes”. This guy thought that rape threats were satire. I will now explain why they are not funny. Humour requires an element of the unexpected, and there is nothing unexpected about a woman with an opinion being threatened with rape. It is an alarmingly normal occurrence. Online harassment is an expected part of being an Angry Internet Feminist™, and it is hard to distinguish between the guy who calls me some obscene word and is “joking” and the one who has intent.
So we add two factor authentication (did you know, Twitter has it?), and install security software on our websites. I have only experienced the very mildest levels of harassment, but make no doubt, if I was truly under threat, I have a plan for where I would go, and enough air miles and money to get me there. Call it paranoia, if you want. I call it being prepared.
There is no humour there. There is just yet another woman who is paying the price, in harassment, for having an opinion. For calling stuff out, when she saw it.
The data says that 40% women drop out of tech careers in the first 10 years. I didn’t know many other women on my university course, but of those I do, I am the only one still building systems and writing code. One is an environmental economist. Another a BA. I hear one became an artist, cool.
And I’m sure each of them went towards something compelling, to them. I’m sure they each made the decision that worked for them. I hope they have interesting careers and fulfilled lives.
But they didn’t stay.
Against the evidence, my generation of women techies, we thought we were different. We thought things were better, because sexual harassment and even assault was no longer a normal part of the working day (although don’t be mistaken – it happens). We thought things would be different, and we just needed to work hard and be awesome. We were wrong.
I’m reaching this point in my career where I’m starting to see my peers drop out. Make their backup plans. I wrote this article about knowing someday I would leave tech, and so many women said “this is how I feel!” and a couple of men said “wow it’s really bad that women feel this way, maybe we should do something”.
Because I hear variations on the same story, again, and again, and again.
It is hard to fix structural equality. And like many hard things the first step is admitting there is a problem. Could you just say “they” instead of “he”? Pay an expert to review your marketing materials? Could you just do the work to get a more balanced line-up at your conference? Stop making “satirical” rape threats? Could you stop telling me what should, or should not bother me? Please?
I’ll tell you what I think is a big deal. It’s when I watch a woman who I know to be brilliant, slowly lose her joy of making. It’s when I watch her give up caring about her career, and just go through the motions, because frankly showing up every day is hard enough. It’s when I see her leave.
I loveBig Bang Theory (Amazon), but, and bear with me for a depressing though of the day, I think Sheldon is the most feminist of all the guys. Of course, that is in large part because he despises everyone as being beneath him, but the people who has has a little-more-than-grudging respect for include: Amy Farrah Fowler, Leonard’s mother, and his own mother (OK, that one is more fear than respect). All women.
Of course Leonard and Raj have a whole ton of issues to do with women, but Howard I find interesting. Howard is engaged to Bernadette, who has a PhD and a good job. He’s cool with this, proud of her even, but you see his discomfort when she buys him something pretty because she’s making so much more money than he does. He’s pro children, and someone staying home to raise them, until she points out that financially it makes sense if he’s the one who stays home.
Howard is what I think of as an “intellectual feminist”. He’s cool with successful women, working with them, working for them. But when it comes to the reality that his partner is more successful (on some measures) than he is? Well that makes him uncomfortable.
But, it happens in the real world too, I’ve seen (and dated), men who were cool with successful women, attracted to it, even, but then came to resent it.
Easy to see in the world of romance, but also outside of it. A woman having a professional disagreement she feels passionately about, has her argument discounted because she’s being emotional. A guy hits send on an inappropriately critical/complaining email, to a woman, that he probably wouldn’t have hit send on had it been a guy who he was unhappy with. Or, at least, maybe he wouldn’t have cc’d a guy‘s boss.
Years ago, the Sexist Pig would look you up and down, and tell you to fetch him a coffee before performing a sexual favor. The Sexist Pig of today is more subtle. They think – and this has been demonstrated lately – that they are completely egalitarian and people are just being over-sensitive/taking things the wrong way. They are an intellectual feminist.
Howard is a pure Intellectual Feminist. He gets that sick look on his face, but doesn’t say anything – I like to think it’s not out of fear of losing Bernadette but because he realizes he’s made a flawed assumption. In my theory of Intellectual Feminism and Sexist Pigs, where the intellectual feminist starts to cross into Sexist Pig territory, it’s because they are acting on their flawed assumptions and trying to justify them. They can’t take that a woman pointed out that they are wrong, and so they go on the attack and try and destroy the woman’s credibility. They generalize, “I worked with a woman and didn’t really like it, and I’d prefer not to do that again”. Personally, or professionally, they try to hurt the woman who has (unintentionally) challenged their self-esteem.
Sometimes people say things, or do things, that are manifestly wrong, and stupid. But mostly, it’s a thousand little cuts. Questions, where we ask ourselves – would he be behaving that way, if I were a dude? Maybe the answer is No, and that is a problem. But the fact that question even crosses her mind at all? That is what eats away at her – at me – and makes Sheldon seem like not that terrible a person to interact with, after all.
I mean, yes he would be like that with a dude. He’s kind of a jerk.
Continuing my education in Feminism, I’ve been reading this, mind-blowing, book – Female Chauvinist Pigs, by Ariel Levy (Amazon). Essentially it’s about how the sexualization of women and the increasing sexual promiscuity of women is not female liberation. To be clear, the book is not anti-sex. It’s pro-sex. But, sex for pleasure and not for celebrity. If sex is a performance, we have for show or because it’s how one becomes popular, but our own sexual pleasure is not even considered… that is not freedom.
“…I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling. Being able to have an orgaism with a man you don’t love or haveing Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we’re all Carrie on Sex and the City, well the problem is: You are not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let’s see the Senate fifty percent female; let’s see women in decision-making positions —that’s power. Sexual freedom can be a smoke-screen for how far we haven’t come.”
Erica Jong (author of Fear of Flying – a book I found on a shelf and started to read as a teenager, but could not finish, I think I found it dull), quoted in the Female Chauvinist Pigs.
This book was an eye-opener for me. I’ve not bought any books by porn-stars and I don’t measure my worth in the number of men I have “conquered”, but I definitely enjoyed Sex and the City. I think one of the most fascinating points was about sex education in the US – abstinence is the big one (insert usual metrics about ineffectiveness, ignored by conservatives here), but the liberals message is merely “sex is ok”, at no point are teenager girls encouraged to take ownership of their own pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t even come up in the list of reasons they give to have sex.
So – at times explicit. Somewhat depressing. But, really, fascinating. Highly recommend.
“Someone once said to you that you didn’t have a romantic bone in your body, and I’ve come to think they were right…”
Credit: flickr / Apostolos Letov
My friend and mentor says. I forget where the conversation went from there, but I feel that she would have been shocked to find me curled up with Pride and Prejudice (free on Kindle!) for the umpteenth time shortly after.
I love Pride and Prejudice, though. The BBC TV series, the movie, and the modern tale of Bridget Jones (all Amazon). It’s that moment in the middle when Elizabeth tells Darcy, no, you don’t get to speak to me like that and expect me to be grateful – you don’t get to treat me with so little respect and have me thank you for it.
Of course, at the end Lizzy is putting aside some of her “pin money” to give to her feckless sister, and I can’t help contrasting it with the story Carol Leaman told at our last Girl Geeks Dinner in KW about cutting a personal cheque for a large amount of money to a company she’d just started at in order for them to make payroll.
We’ve come a long way. And yet – I still see things that make me wonder how far. The woman who says “my boyfriend is my top priority”. The woman who says “I’ll vote the way my husband does”. The woman who compromises her career because her partner won’t compromise his. I want to yell at them – it’s 2011. You get more than that. Take it.
In the same week I read Penelope Trunk’s post on how her husband is physically abusive. And discover the existence of the Atheist Feminist movement. I’m a little shocked by this, because given the effectiveness of religion to subjugate women, I took it for granted that if we got rid of the religion we’d have equality. Apparently not.
And so Lizzy’s feistiness reminds me to say – you deserve more. A reminder I should heed the next time someone overlooks me, because I’m a woman. The next time someone tells me I need to be more aggressive in order to be successful. The next time I don’t fight for something because I don’t believe I deserve to win.
There are certain things I am, but don’t necessarily talk about that much. I’m atheist, but I don’t feel the need to argue about it anymore. I’m a feminist, but I’m not screaming it from the rooftops.
In the circles in which I move, I tend to assume the programmers are atheist or at least agnostic. Most of them are, as one friend pointed out, “you can’t debug code all day and fail to notice flaws in that logic”. I assume women are feminist (by which I mean, believe in equality between the sexes) and that men are at least not misogynistic.
However I don’t really talk about what I mean by feminist because 1) it doesn’t come up and 2) it’s not really something I think about a lot. When it does, what often seems to come up is the unfairness of women being penalized for motherhood, and as someone who doesn’t want to have children, I’m not always sure I agree. If a woman chooses to take a year off work and I don’t, it seems fair that I should be a year ahead in my career. If I’m willing to travel, and relocate for my job, and have fewer other aspects of my life to prioritize, it’s clearly easier for me to advance.
Obviously, some people don’t see it as a choice. My ex certainly didn’t see the logic of my suggestion that if should he want a child he could get it from China like everything else. But to me this seems like a biological unfairness rather than a societal one. So until we can grow babies in test-tubes and raise them on farms I’m pretty cynical about this situation. I look at the unpleasantness of contraception and the degradation of childbirth itself and I think – “that’s a sign that men have too much power”. I mean, we have viagra but no male contraceptive – oh hai, priorities.
Then there’s the whole issue of the burka. The best I have is, as a feminist, I respect a woman’s right to wear whatever they choose. Equally though, as someone who is grateful for the work (and suffering) of the suffragettes, and continually grateful for the work of other people that make it possible for me to succeed (and thrive) in a male dominated profession, I find it offensive when a woman voluntarily subjugates herself. I also dislike the implication that all men are sex-crazed fiends.
So I definitely see myself as a feminist, even if I don’t always agree with what other feminists are saying. However today a friend told me that pole dancing classes (for fitness) enable the stripping profession. I was pretty shocked by this, because going to an (all women) class with a (female) instructor and having fun spinning around in exercise clothes didn’t seem like a complete betrayal of my sex at the time. It no more made me a sex object than my kickboxing skills make me Uma Thurman!
In response I said, “no more than sex enables prostitution”, and then proceeded to be bothered by the comment for the rest of the day. I’m not completely sure why I was so annoyed. Probably the passing of judgement on something I do for fun, when I spend so much time and energy trying to help women in CompSci and Science and Engineering.
And really, I don’t know what feminism is, but I’m don’t think it’s about passing judgement – on fitness classes, short skirts, burkas or otherwise. For me, it’s about what am I doing to positively impact women. And so I’ll keep making loans on Kiva, keep working on CompSci Woman, wear whatever the hell I want, and damnit if my goal is to spin around a pole upside down… I’m gonna make that happen.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
Sometimes they have machines that may or may 
Often you find women doing 
It’s not just classical art, I was also inspired by 
