Some posts from the last year on inclusion

A sort of topic-specific collection of links from about the last year, broadly talking about inclusion in communities, online and off, especially in geek(y) spaces.

What kind of discourses and conversations do we want to encourage and have?

• Nalo Hopkinson’s WisCon 2016 Guest of Honor speech: “There are many people who do good in this field, who perform small and large actions of kindness and welcome every day. I’d like to encourage more of that.” In this speech Hopkinson announced the Lemonade Award.
• “Looking back on a decade in online fandom social justice: unexpurgated version”, by sqbr: “And just because I’m avoiding someone socially doesn’t mean I should ignore what they have to say, and won’t end up facing complex ethical choices involving them. My approach right now is to discuss it with people I trust. Figuring out who those people are, and learning to make myself vulnerable in front of them, has been part of the journey.”
• “On conversations”, by Katherine Daniels: “I would love for these people who have had so many opportunities already given to them to think about what they are taking away from our collective conversations by continuing to dominate them, and to maybe take a step back and suggest someone else for that opportunity to speak instead.”
• “Towards a More Welcoming War” by Mary Anne Mohanraj (originally published in WisCon Chronicles 9: Intersections and Alliances, Aqueduct Press, 2015): “This is where I start thinking about what makes an effective community intervention. This is where I wish I knew some people well enough to pick up a phone.”
• “The chemistry of discourse”, by Abi Sutherland: “What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them?”
• “Hot Allostatic Load”, by porpentine, in The New Inquiry: “This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash….Call-out Culture as Ritual Disposability”
• “The Ethics of Mob Justice”, by Sady Doyle, in In These Times: “But, again, there’s no eliminating the existence of Internet shaming, even if you wanted to—and if you did, you’d eliminate a lot of healthy dialogue and teachable moments right along with it. At best, progressive people who recognize the necessity of some healthy shame can only alter the forms shaming takes.”

How do we reduce online harassment?

• “Paths: a YA comic about online harassment”, by Mikki Kendall: “‘It’s not that big of a deal. She’ll get over it.’ ‘Even if she does, that doesn’t make this okay. What’s wrong with you?'”
• “On a technicality”, by Eevee: “There’s a human tendency to measure peace as though it were the inverse of volume: the louder people get, the less peaceful it is. We then try to optimize for the least arguing.”
• “Moderating Harassment in Twitter with Blockbots”, by ethnographer R. Stuart Geiger, on the Berkeley Institute for Data Science site: “In the paper, I analyze blockbot projects as counterpublics…I found a substantial amount of collective sensemaking in these groups, which can be seen in the intense debates that sometimes take place over defining standards of blockworthyness…..I also think it is important distinguish between the right to speak and the right to be heard, particularly in privately owned social networking sites.”
• “The Real Name Fallacy”, by J. Nathan Matias, on The Coral Project site: “People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names….Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior – forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment….designers need to commit to testing the outcomes of efforts at preventing and responding to social problems.”

What does it take to make your community more inclusive?

• “Want more inclusivity at your conference? Add childcare.” by Mel Chua and then “Beyond ‘Childcare Available’: 4 Tips for Making Events Parent-Friendly”, by Camille Acey: “I’ve pulled together a few ideas to help move ‘Childcare Available’ from just a word on a page to an actual living breathing service that empowers people with children to learn/grow alongside their peers, engage in projects they care about, and frankly just have a little break from the rigors of childcare.”
• Project Hearing: “Project Hearing is a website that consolidates information about technology tools, websites, and applications that deaf and hard of hearing people can use to move around in the hearing world.”
• “Conference access, and related topics”, by Emily Short: “This is an area where different forms of accessibility are often going at right angles.”
• “SciPy 2016 Retrospective”, by Camille Scott: “SciPy, by my account, is a curious microcosm of the academic open source community as a whole.”
• “Notes from Abstractions”, by Coral Sheldon-Hess: “Pittsburgh’s Code & Supply just held a huge (1500 people) conference over the last three days, and of course I’d signed up to attend months ago, because 1) local 2) affordable 3) tech conference 4) with a code of conduct they seemed serious about. Plus, “Abstractions” is a really cool name for a tech conference.”
• “The letter I just sent to Odyssey Con”, by Sigrid Ellis: “None of us can know the future, of course. And I always hope for the best, from everyone. But I would hate for Odyssey Con to find itself in the midst of another controversy with these men at the center.” (This is Ellis’s post from April 7, 2016, a year before all three of Odyssey Con’s Guests of Honor chose not to attend Odyssey Con because of the very issue Ellis discussed.)
• “The realities of organizing a community tech conference: an ill-advised rant”, by Rebecca Miller-Webster: “…there’s a lot of unpaid labor that happens at conferences, especially community conferences, that no one seems to talk about. The unpaid labor of conference organizers. Not only do people not talk about it, but in the narrative around conferences as work, these participants are almost always the bad guys.”
• “Emotional Labor and Diversity in Community Management”, by Jeremy Preacher, originally a speech in the Community Management Summit at Game Developers Conference 2016: “The thing with emotional labor is that it’s generally invisible — both to the people benefiting from the work, and to the people doing it. People who are good at it tend to do it unconsciously — it’s one of the things we’re talking about when we say a community manager has ‘good instincts’.”….What all of these strategies do, what thinking about the emotional labor cost of participation adds up to, is make space for your lurkers to join in.”
• “White Corporate Feminism”, by Sarah Sharp: “Even though Grace Hopper was hosted in Atlanta that year, a city that is 56% African American, there weren’t that many women of color attending.”
• “You say hello”, by wundergeek on “Go Make Me a Sandwich (how not to sell games to women)”: “Of course, this is made harder by the fact that I hate losing. And there will be people who will celebrate, people who call this a victory, which only intensifies my feelings of defeat. My feelings of weakness. I feel like I’m giving up, and it kills me because I’m competitive! I’m contrary! Telling me not to do a thing is enough to make me want to do the thing. I don’t give up on things and I hate losing. But in this situation, I have to accept that there is no winning play. No win condition. I’m one person at war with an entire culture, and there just aren’t enough people who give a damn, and I’m not willing to continue sacrificing my health and well-being on the altar of moral obligation. If this fight is so important, then let someone else fight it for a while.”
• “No One Should Feel Alone”, by Natalie Luhrs: “In addition to listening and believing–which is 101 level work, honestly–there are other things we can do: we can hold space for people to speak their truth and we can hold everyone to account, regardless of their social or professional position in our community. We can look out for newcomers–writers and fans alike–and make them welcome and follow through on our promise that we will have their backs. We can try to help people form connections with each other, so they are not isolated and alone.”
• “Equality Credentials”, by Sara Ahmed: “Feminist work in addressing institutional failure can be used as evidence of institutional success. The very labour of feminist critique can end up supporting what is being critiqued. The tools you introduce to address a problem can be used as indicators that a problem has been addressed.”
• “Shock and Care: an essay about art, politics and responsibility”, by Harry Giles (Content note: includes discussion of sex, violence and self-injury in an artistic context): “So, in a political situation in which care is both exceptionally necessary and exceptionally underprovided, acts of care begin to look politically radical. To care is to act against the grain of social and economic orthodoxy: to advocate care is, in the present moment, to advocate a kind of political rupture. But by its nature, care must be a rupture which involves taking account of, centring, and, most importantly, taking responsibility for those for whom you are caring. Is providing care thus a valuable avenue of artistic exploration? Is the art of care a form of radical political art? Is care, in a society which devalues care, itself shocking?”

Quick Hit: New Taylor Swift fanvid “Pipeline” calls out tech industry on diversity hypocrisy

As Julie Pagano put it: “So many ‘diversity in tech’ efforts are about getting young women into the pipeline. Ignore the fact that there’s a meat grinder at the end.” So I’ve made a new fanvid (a type of video art piece): “Pipeline”. It’s a little over 3 minutes long and cuts together about 50 different sources over Taylor Swift’s song “Blank Space”. Specifically, this fanvid uses clips from documentaries, glossy Hollywood depictions of hackers, comics, code school ads, and the Geek Feminism wiki’s Timeline of Incidents to critique this dynamic. It just premiered at the WisCon Vid Party a few hours ago.

My launch blog post on Dreamwidth goes into more detail and includes a comprehensive list of video.

Download: on Google Drive (165 MB high-resolution MP4 file, 23 MB low-resolution MP4 file, 98 MB AVI file), or at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res MP4 and WebM files)
Stream: at Critical Commons (choose View High Quality for best experience)
Lyrics subtitles file: http://www.harihareswara.net/vids/pipeline.srt (you can download this and then ask your video playing app to use it as a subtitles track)

It’s under the license Creative Commons BY-SA; please feel free to redistribute, link, remix, and so on, as long as you attribute me as the vidder, and license your derivative work under the same license. Comments are welcome, though moderated.

do ALL things! arts, tech, and not having to choose just one as a young girl

This is a guest post by creatrix tiara | edited for geek feminism from original posts on tumblr and medium. Creatrix Tiara works with creative arts & media productions, community cultural development, and education to explore ideas around community, identity, liminality, belonging, and social justice. She has been on a computer before she could talk and is currently trying to find ways to bridge her artsy side and her techy side. Also, she’s currently available for hire.

Last year I listened to “The Way We Teach Computing Hurts Women”, a podcast episode by WYNC’s Manoush Zomorodi, talking about different approaches to get girls interested in tech and computer science from childhood to university. There’s some history about Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer period, as well as discussion of Hello Ruby and Goldiblox, which are aimed at getting very young girls interested in computer science and engineering. (What would have been great would be a mention of Lauren Ipsum, an Alice-in-Wonderland style book about computer science principles and lady pirates.)

This brought up a lot of feelings for me, mostly to do with being involved in tech as a young girl but fading out of it until very recently – and still feeling stuck not so much because of gender but because of another part of my identity: my passions.

So you know how some celebrity artists or athletes talk about “I could sing before I could talk!” or “I was dancing before I could walk!”? That was me, but with two things: before I could talk, I taught myself to read and how to use the computer. There is even a pretty adorable picture of me around age 2–4 mucking around with Harvard Graphics or the tutorials for Microsoft Works.

(Yes I had an odd idea of fun.

But you could make databases for skiers and spreadsheets for snail races!!)

When I was about 8 years old, the day my sister left Malaysia for the UK (for good), my parents answered a telemarketer call advertising computer classes. My mum asked me if I was interested — I remember being very sleepy, having been caught in traffic jams to and from the airport, and muttering a Yes without much thought.

The school had divided up their classes by year level — Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, a level or so in between. After my pre-test they said I could skip the Beginner level and go straight to Intermediate. I was the youngest person there by a year.

This was before Windows 3.1 was much of a thing, and when we were still working with 5.25″ floppies. We learnt newspaper layouts, basic animation, and coding in Pascal. Mostly we cheated on the exams and looked forward to playing the various Super Solvers games.

those blasted elves

The Internet came to Malaysia circa 1995, and once I got online I never left. About the only time I took a significant break from the Internet was in 1997 when we had our first big national exam, the UPSR (which tells you which secondary school you go to), and my parents suggested that I go offline and quit computer classes for the year. I was allowed online just once – to write in the memorial book for Princess Diana.

Other then that ,  I was actively online all the time. I joined an online kids’ media site and reviewed books mailed to me from the US to Malaysia. I started webzines and wrote fiction & poetry. I hosted picnics on Geocities chat and virtual cities on AOL. When I really got into Aqua and Savage Garden, and then fandoms in general, my use of the Internet really took off. I was an amazingly prolific fanfic writer, made a ton of friends via online fandom, and even changed my life in very significant ways — such as making one of my closest friendships with someone who met me through a fansite I made for her TV channel, or choosing the Australian college I lived in based on having seen some Livejournal comics about exchange student life by one of its residents — where I met my matey: first boyfriend/significant relationship and now one of my closest friends.

In recent years my Internet presence has become more activist: first with Malaysia’s leading blog about alternative education, which could have gotten me elected into Parliament like my contemporary Malaysian edu-blogging peer, and now through talking about arts and intersectionality — gaining notoriety and (in)fame(y) by speaking up about racism in burlesque. (People still aren’t over it.)

The main reason I became so involved with the Internet is because it was safety and sanctuary in a hostile world. I was heavily bullied in school due to racial tension — most of the teachers were hostile instigators or at least uncaring. I didn’t really have a lot of space to express myself, because I was constantly told that my existence was wrong. I didn’t really learn a lot from the Malaysian education system: most of the State-sanctioned curriculum was already decades old. I was a desperately lonely child, seeking connection and community.

My friends were online. My creative expression was online. My education was online. The computer was a source of life for me, in many ways: even now I feel more spiritually connected to bits and bytes rather than trees and sea. While I sometimes had to deal with trolls and online bullies, I also had much stronger positive support online – many more people who had no problem with my existence and actually welcomed it.

However, despite my affinity to computers and the Internet and the fact that I am still online all the time, I didn’t actually follow through with any sort of tech degree or career path. Even now my family wonders why I didn’t pursue computer science; my dad calls me all the time demanding I make the next Facebook, because with my supposed computer smarts and his business acumen we could take on the world! I fit the childhood profile of many professional computer geeks: what was I doing being anything else?

There were a few factors in effect: they weren’t really connected to gender, in that nobody told me I shouldn’t be coding because that’s a boy’s thing, but they still played into societal expectations in some ways.

Some of it was logistical: I was often working on old semi-obsolete gear – I couldn’t even practice CSS or Javascript when they were still new because my browser wouldn’t support it. Asides from the classes I went to as a youngster, there wasn’t really any avenue for computer science education in my area in Malaysia – it wasn’t in the national curriculum, and I was often the de-facto school tech expert even in primary/elementary school. There’s only so much I could teach myself with my limited resources and age.

Mostly, though, nobody told me that I, or any other Malaysian student, could be both artsy and geeky; we were told to choose between Science or Arts. Science, in this case, meant taking Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and maybe Additional Mathematics in Forms 4 and 5 in Malaysian secondary schools. It was what every good student does because the whole point of Malaysian education is to study Medicine and be a doctor and make good money for your family. There wasn’t any “women can’t do Science” sentiment (and I went to all-girls schools that weren’t particularly feminist). The expectation was that everyone does Science, because that’s just what you do. Arts and Humanities, so my teachers and a lot of Malaysian society claimed, were for stupid people: people who failed their exams and so had to take Visual Art or Literature instead because those are for simpletons.

I caused quite a ruckus in Form 4 when I moved myself from being placed in one of the Science class to sitting in the row for the “last” class because I wanted to take Literature.

As you probably noticed, a lot of my online activity from childhood on involved writing. The same people who thought I would be a computer scientist or programmer also thought I would be a world-class writer, and at the time writing was my more pressing interest. I saw the Internet as a medium to post my writing and talk to other creative people, but didn’t really think about being in the bones of hardware or software or web development — it had been so many years since I knew any coding that I thought I’d missed the boat.

I didn’t want to be a doctor, or any kind of scientist, despite loving science museums as much as I loved libraries and bookstores and computers. This was mostly because the school’s take on Science was super boring (had I had a better set of teachers I may have been more inclined) but also because I felt like I had to choose: Science or Arts. The opportunities for Science were everywhere; the Arts, less so. I had my one chance, and I was a bit of a rebel — I had to take it.

Nobody ever said that I could have done all of the above. It never occurred to me to pull a Hermione Granger and take all the subjects — it was two distinct streams and I had to make a decision.

Ever since then, my personal and professional journeys have largely been in the arts and creative industries: media, performance art, writing, community cultural development. I wrote scripts for TV and interviewed Prime Ministers and stripped onstage while reciting adaptations of Suheir Hammad. I sang and danced and chomped the tops off roses and went viral for something I said at Slutwalk.

All of these were made possible via the Internet — whether by finding out about opportunities, getting a shot from the muse, posting my work, being known.

And yet I didn’t really see myself as the programming type.

Digital? Yes. Geeky? Sure.

Computer scientist? ehhh…

Yet there is so much I want to do with technology that goes beyond blog posts and social media and Facebook invites. I’ve started venturing into game design, after harbouring an interest for a long time, as a means of producing creative interactive experiences. I have ideas for performances that require a fair bit of geekery (such as this LED light costume). And there’s all these apps that would make my creative life so much easier but which don’t get made because there aren’t a lot of coders who are interested enough in making them.

I have noticed how deep the chasm is between the arts world and the tech world, even now, and how I’m somehow caught in the middle.

At a meeting hosted by a major Bay Area arts organization, one of the organizers proclaimed that we were “analogue mediums in a digital world!”. A few days later, while volunteering at a games conference, a lot of attendees were puzzled at the presence of a performance artist in their midst. I’ve had people respond to my presentation of a social media campaign project at an international hackathon specifically designed to bring media-makers, journalists, and developers together with sarcastic tweets about how “if you’re going to be at a hackathon you should be creating something” (because a stack of blog posts, and animated video, and a hashtag doesn’t count as “creating”, clearly). I’ve also had to stop myself from getting riled up at writers’ events when people respond to my novel-in-progress, about a girl who gets superpowers from a Google-Glass-like device, with a long rant about how Google Glass is always evil and the downfall of society.

Around the time I wrote the first version of this article, I was being interviewed for a possible space at a tech bootcamp known for its supportive community and diversity work: when the interviewer asked why I wanted to learn coding, I told her about wanting to be entrepreneurial by producing creative work and artist tools, and I could hear her interest switch off, simply because I didn’t say “I want to be hired as a software engineer”. (I was rejected twice.)

The combination of arts and tech does exist, though in smaller scale: this Ask Metafilter question brings up a lot of options, and for a little while I was going to an Arts+Tech Meetup in San Francisco, which is leading me to a lot of other opportunities. I also was nearly involved with Gray Area’s Creative Code bootcamp, which would have been perfect, but the timing didn’t work out.

The more I find, the more I wish this existed for me as a young girl — and the more I want to help young girls currently in this situation.

There are a lot of efforts towards encouraging young girls to get involved with tech, as demonstrated in the podcast. Girls Make Games did a presentation at Casual Connect and a big horde of us women immediately volunteered to help out! Search “tech for girls” and you find heaps of classes, workshops, camps — for Australian school girls or budding makers or young girls of color.

And yet so much of it is about getting girls involved in science or engineering. STEM. Even the first project talked about in the podcast had renamed their subject “Creative Problem-solving in Science and Engineering” — artsy little me would not have thought coding was ever an option for me.

There seems to be a little nudge in that direction: Google’s Made with Code has resources for code in the arts, and there is an Arty archetype in the Tech Girls Movement. But I would like to see more. I would like to encourage more. I want to bring more to the girls who may be where I was 15 years ago and thought that being a geek and being an artist or writer or musician was somehow a contradiction.

Now that I’ve graduated with an MFA and I’m looking for jobs on my OPT visa, I’m started to revisit the tech industry as the next stage in my career. It’s been tricky; some of the places I’ve interviewed at have asked me why someone with an arts and non-profit background like myself would want to be involved in tech. Sone get it though, when I tell them that putting a show together is much like working in a scrappy startup, trying to herd cats and do everything at once.

Maybe there is a space for an artsy creative person like me — especially a queer migrant minority gender-weird woman. (It’s been really bizarre to have my South Asian race not make me a minority, though I am not sure how many Bangladeshi-Malaysians are out there.)

Maybe there are ways to reach out to young girls, young boys, intimidated artists, baffled techies, about how these worlds do not need to be separate, how left brain/right brain is a myth, how you don’t have to sacrifice one interest for another.

One of my sister’s self-portraits. (credit: Mithila Shafiq)

Maybe I can look to my sister, who has always been inspiration for me even from a thousand miles away, who went from a lifetime of science to a rebirth as an illustrator, and yet so much of her work is already very scientific anyway. She has a kid, Zen, who – before her second birthday – declared to her mother that she wants to “do ALL things!”, and is already proving so: her Instagram photos always have her trying out something new, from cooking to beekeeping to painting to building.

I want to help her do all things too.

So now, after not having coded anything since I mucked around with QBASIC as a 13-year-old, I’m learning how to code. I took the Web Developer blueprint with Skillcrush, which is geared towards women — I mostly joined because one of the staff members totally understood what it’s like to be the Resident Geek amongst her artist friends. Asides from the classes, there’s also a pretty vibrant community — including other artsy types. I’m also catching up on Codecademy; Javascript is a lot easier than I thought it would be! (Sort of: for loops confuse me a little.) I have also been looking at tech bootcamps, since I find that I learn better in person, though cost has been a major limiting factor.

When I listened to this podcast, I became so inspired: I was reminded of my dream to support young artsy & geeky girls, and this was more motivation to do so. I am almost tempted to get a computer science degree, but formal education and I barely get along. And I do want more options for exploring tech than having to do yet another degree.

But I have a vision, a vision for the creative Renaissance girls amongst us — if nothing else, then for my niece, and 4 year old me.

marching to the beat of her own drum

Time Ladies: Adorable Gender-swapped Doctor Who

So. Darned. Cute.

Time Ladies: Doctors from Dr. Who, represented as women. Picture by Gladys @ http://rocketssurgery.tumblr.com

Picture via Gladys, whose artwork just took up some of my afternoon and I don’t mind a bit!

I should probably compile a post with some of the excellent gender swaps I’ve seen lately, but I know if I wait I might forget, and this is too cute risk forgetting.

So in preparation for a potential future post full of pictures… what’s the cutest gender swap you’ve seen lately?

Why WotC’s Sexism in Gaming Art Article Made Me Happy

Eva Schiffer is a Computer Scientist and a second generation tabletop gamer. This guest post is cross-posted from her blog.

WotC recently published a post titled Sexism in Fantasy that’s caused a lot of mixed reactions. I want to talk about why the article, if not it’s content, made me happy.

I see myself as a feminist. I know by putting that out there at the beginning I’m raising a lot of expectations about what I care about, how I react to things, and what I’m likely to defend. I’m also a relatively laid back person, despite some of my blog rants, and I’ve been through a long journey trying to understand sexism and feminism. For me this journey was many small cycles of “not getting it” punctuated by bursts of insight as I incorporated new ideas into my worldview. I grew up in the gaming world and for a long time I was so used to how things are that the roots and implications of the many traditions were invisible to me.

I’ve also watched many of my friends go through various cycles of getting and not getting aspects of sexism, racism, and other -isms. I’m not going to claim to be super enlightened… I mess up on ableism issues all the time… but I’ve reached a point where that cycle is familiar to me.

When I read WotC’s article what I saw was Jon Schindehette going through one of the early cycles of trying to understand sexism. He was “not quite getting it” and honestly if he’s just starting to struggle with these issues, I can’t blame him for not understanding them all at once. I’ve been there and I’ve fallen in the same pitfalls. I wish he had gotten further along before he wrote a public article… but he has my empathy as to why getting there takes time.

Jon tried to approach the problem logically and understand what sexism is and what it’s doing to gaming. He fell short on three fronts. One is that he didn’t do enough research on discussion that’s already taking place in the online community. Blogs like Go Make Me a Sandwich contain lots of resources that include frank discussion of the sort he’s trying to elicit. Tumblrs like Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor include loads of beautiful examples of art that’s attractive and pretty while presenting characters who look like people rather than toys. The fact that Jon didn’t bring up any of these resources makes me suspicious that he didn’t do this kind of research. He tried to start from square one by himself and he suffered for it. It’s a lot easier if you build on the work others have already done. ;)

The second problem Jon ran into was that he got into his logical investigation and backed off when he was starting to get somewhere. The definition of sexism he found, which seems quite reasonable to me, was, “Sexism is defined as having an attitude, condition, or behavior that promotes stereotyping of social roles based upon one’s gender.” That’s a good start. After talking about it for a bit he failed to take the next step and investigate gender roles.

To start understanding how sexism could promote stereotyping, you need to ask: “what gender roles might we be perpetuating?” Wikipedia has a good overview of historical gender roles. However, in the last 30 years, gender roles have changed. The “perfect submissive wife” ideal is not what our societal norms think women should be anymore. Unfortunately, there are still some very damaging gender roles out there for men and women.

One of the ones that hurts women the most is the idea that they must always be physically attractive and sexually available for men. This is sometimes called the Beauty Myth, and it’s the big problem one Jon missed. The Beauty Myth says a woman can be a brilliant rocket scientist, but if she isn’t also pretty, she’s not really worthwhile as a woman and no one will love her.

One of the roles that hurts men the most is the idea that they can only succeed financially and aren’t particularly physically attractive to women. This is also called the Success Myth. This is rather insidious because the Success Myth says that an average man needs to find a high paying job if he wants any hope of attracting a woman. If he suffers setbacks in his career or prefers to do something that is low paying, then he’s worthless and no one will love him.

Here’s a good summary of these two roles and how they hurt us from a male perspective.

The twin roles define a lot of our popular culture and they bleed into our fantasy as well. The Beauty Myth is why people fixate on making female characters beautiful even when “beautiful” crosses the line into impractical and unrealistic. The Success Myth is why we’re still unbelievably stuck on the “guy succeeds and then guy gets the girl” story plot.

Back to Jon… the third thing that I think went wrong for him is that he stumbled into some very basic fallacies talking about an -ism. This is a pretty common mistake and while embarrassing, isn’t all that surprising. Fallacy one is to assume that whatever went before is ok by virtue of being tradition. This was mostly justified by “market forces” in the article. If all tradition was free of -isms life would be sunshine and kittens and I wouldn’t have to write any blog posts in the ‘feminism’ category. :)

More seriously, a lot of people think “feminism happened, sexism is done now, right?” and sadly the answer is no. It takes a long time to change culture and there’s a lot of momentum. That’s not to say we need to flip out and throw all of our traditions out the window tomorrow. We can start by calmly taking a step back and making a few rational changes at a time towards a better, less -ism filled world.

The second fallacy Jon made was while talking about his three images. He got a bit muddy because he couldn’t see the modern roles affecting them and drifted into the “it’s really all opinion, anyway” argument. There is some opinion in everything, I agree. Sadly the existence of a systemic problem in media and in gaming media specifically isn’t really up for debate. It’s been discussed at length by a lot of people, especially authors. You can’t use the fact that some people can’t identify prejudice to justify prejudice not existing at all… that’s downright Paranoia levels of circular logic.

I want to be clear: being a bit blind to sexism doesn’t mean you’re some sort of horrible misogynistic asshole who’s running around saying terrible things all the time, it just means you haven’t quite figured out how to see sexism hidden in the world around you. All of us have been there, you don’t need to be ashamed of it, just do your best to keep an open mind and learn. :)

The final fallacy that Jon fell into was the “a few people complained, but lots of people like it, so everything must be great!” The argument “lots of people agree with me, therefore I’m right!” is not meaningful, especially when you’re talking about -isms. It’s an appeal to base social pressure and has no bearing on the correctness of your argument.

I suppose at this point you’re probably wondering how I’m going to justify the title of this post. Well, to be totally honest, as much as parts of the article irritated me, Jon redeemed himself in my eyes by taking the initiative to write about something as scary as sexism in the first place, making an honest (if flawed) attempt to learn, and asking for our input.

I can remember the first time that I tried to write up a post on a feminist topic. I think my hand was actually shaking when I pressed the “Publish” button. It’s scary putting yourself out there to talk about any issue of prejudice, because we all know our culture is so ready to throw a firestorm back in your face if you get anything “wrong.” I appreciate and respect that Jon was willing to try and that WotC was willing to let him.

When I reached the end of his article I was overjoyed that he openly solicited our feedback and I was presented with a comment box to put my thoughts into. Wow, was I happy. I didn’t even realize how happy I was until I’d spent an hour skimming and “liking” other people’s comments. I wanted a chance to speak to WotC directly and he gave that to me, which I’m deeply grateful for. The number of people who posted ernest, well thought out comments, some with great links to resources, made me feel better about the community. It made me feel like other people believe I belong here. :)

A lot of the commenters were talking to Jon too and most were very civil. Some offered him links to resources (like some of the ones I posted above) and encouragement. I’m hoping he’s taken some of those links and moved forward on his own path to understanding.

So, thank you, Jon, and thank you, WotC. It had some issues, but I appreciated the outreach and the effort that went into it. Please keep learning and write more about sexism and other -isms in gaming in the future. :)

The links are strong with this one (4th December, 2010)

• Valerie’s Conference anti-harassment policy is under discussion at LWN and Hacker News (‘ware: both sites well known for faily comments, although as of writing LWN is doing mostly OK). LWN’s article will be de-paywalled in a few days, before that, go via Valerie’s free link.
• The Mistress of the Lash Wears Chains: I began to wonder just what drove the [game design] obsession with these matriarchies. I then realised that this was the flip side of “male fantasy’- which is “male nightmare.’
• The Importance of Allies: Ever since I started working towards the goal of increasing the number of women participating in the free software community, I’ve had men say some variation of the following to me, I didn’t know it was this bad. Is there anything I can do? The answer is yes!
• A series of questions in photographic form. This ongoing body of work explores the power dynamics inherent in the questions asked of transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and gender-variant people.
• Reinventing the Outreach Program Wheel: Why, oh why do I have to be hatin’ on the good works that SciCheer wants to do for the young girls of our nation?
• Becoming Einstein’s cousin: profile on Cathy Foley, an international expert in superconductivity, the first woman to become president of the Australian Institute of Physics, and president of Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies.
• Wake up, LOPSA members., or, Sexism in LOPSA, part 3
• Women in Web Development: Do The Numbers Really Matter?: The failure isn’t the industry or its hiring practices. It’s in education, summer camps, parenting, and all the other places young girls could be coming into contact with coding, development and engineering but aren’t.
• Gertrude Rothschild, Dies at 83: Important geek engineer who improved LED displays; defended her inventions against patent infringement. (In contradistinction to copyright infringement, which poorly serves IP interests in 3D objects and processes).
• Finally, a quick thought from @heathermg: … the head of NASA Astrobiology AND the lead researcher who discovered this lifeform are both women.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious or the #geekfeminism tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Betty Willis

This is a guest post by Alicia Aho. Alicia Aho is an erotic romance author and language geek (five and counting!).

Betty Willis was a commercial artist and neon sign designer in Las Vegas at the height of its love affair with neon. She designed the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, which is now the most copied design in the world–thanks in no small part to Willis’ refusal to allow the design to be copyrighted.

She also designed the lovely lettered sign for the Moulin Rouge, which was the first fully integrated hotel on the strip. Both the “fabulous” on the Las Vegas sign and the lettering on the Moulin Rouge were based on Willis’ own handwriting. Willis worked for many years at Ad Art, and collaborated with other (male) designers on such historic neon pieces as the Frontier sign and the Stardust sign (both now awaiting restoration in the Neon Museum’s boneyard). She retired at the age of 77.

Wikipedia: Betty Willis
New York Times, 2005: AT HOME WITH: Betty Willis, A Neon Come-Hither, Still Able to Flirt. Ignore the headline, which is awful.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Open Thread: the Hive Vagina revealed

Geek Feminism HQ has received a very serious complaint and we intend to rectify our mistake as soon as possible.

Complaint: there is no picture of the Hive Vagina.

Proposed solution: commenters, get out your pencils, chalk, video camera or menstrual blood, and provide us with a hive vagina icon.

This wild bee hive has the right idea, I think:

Wild bee hive by Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, CC BY-SA

In case it’s not obvious, this is an open thread, accepting both your hive vagina artwork and allowing you to talk about anything else you’re up to or want to share with other geek feminists.

The Happiness Hat

Behold Lauren McCarthy’s amazing Happiness Hat. It’s knitted hat that digs a spike into the back of your head when it senses that you’re not smiling.

happiness hat from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.

It’s amazingly creepy and perturbing. I was reminded of how women in particular are often expected to smile or look actively happy. But further than that, a sort of relentless pressure for self-improvement. McCarthy’s video of the Happiness Hat didn’t make me think, “Oh, if I smile more I might be happier”. Instead it reminded me of the concept of hegemony as “the gun inside your head”. Police your thoughts… or else your conscience will prick you – along with the scary hat spike!

Lauren McCarthy has made a lot of other cool stuff. Take a look. From her bio: “Her work explores the structures and systems of social interactions, identity, and self-representation. She is interested in the slightly uncomfortable moments when patterns are shifted, expectations are broken, and participants become aware of the system. Her work takes any form necessary: video, performance, software, internet art, interactive objects and environments, and media installations.”

Jie Qi loves to make things

Jie Qi is majoring in mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and as her website says, she loves to make things.

Now, sometimes adding electronics to classic kids toys just makes them obnoxious, but this popup book, done with Dr. Leah Buechley as part of the High-Low Tech group in the MIT Media Lab, is an amazing example of how electronics can enhance in a beautiful way:

Today and Tomorrow also featured some beautiful paper/electronic flowers she made, that move and open much like real flowers would.

Paper flowers blooming from Jie Qi on Vimeo.

I love how hardware hacking can be so beautiful. I’ll bet that’s not the first thing some people think of when they think of neat hardware projects, but I’ve seen a lot of really lovely things out there. Feel free to show off your own stuff in the comments: complete, incomplete, or even not quite started.