( liveblog, beginning at thirty-nine minutes in )

( 42:12 )

( 44:26 )

Over at The Hathor Legacy, Purtek made a spoilery post on all three acts of Dr. Horrible, analyzing it from a feminist POV.

It was thoughtful and well written and I liked it. I especially liked it because she'd articulated some things that I'd only been able to feel wordlessly disgusted by. I felt better after reading it, honestly, because the problems had been so neatly and evenhandedly (I felt) laid out.

Then Whedonesque linked to it, unleashing a torrent of defensive cliches from the commenters there. All the major, overused silencing buttons were pushed. It made me feel kind of sick.

Let's count them up, shall we?

( wherein I recount the most memorable comments in my own somewhat exaggerated words while making no attempt to be nice )

Eight! That's a nice number. An a nice example of how quickly the worm turns when feminists fail to hand out cookies to those who they're expected to be grateful to. I remember how part of a community of likeminded people I felt reading the post Joss made on "honor" killings and the supportive, aware replies made to it. But now I've realized... most of the people over there can only feel comfortable being pro-woman when the anti-woman activities are being carried out by brown dudes in the "third world."

Don't tell me about the plank in my own eye, I'd rather hear about the mote in that Muslim guy's eye! And how thankful you are that white guys aren't like that!

Cultural and institutional sexism team up yet again to erase the existence of women.

"Fanboy" has been added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. It's defined as a "boy who is an enthusiastic devotee, such as of comics or movies." The title of the article about it I saw linked to at fanthropology reads "'Fanboy' gains respect..."

A proud fangirl geek noticed that, hey, she and her peers have been completely left out of this whole gaining respect, boon upon the nerdy thing. She sent off a letter to Merriam-Webster, asking why. They replied that, DUH STUPID GIRL, 'fangirl' just isn't mentioned as often in their very important citational database. If Important (wanna bet largely male?) Publications don't talk about you, you don't exist.

Of course, they're not talking about you because you're a girl and they're seeping in sexism, but let's ignore that. This in no way relates to the perpetual elevation of and catering to of the fanboy demo over fangirl interests. Everybody knows that girls can't be fans, real girls are too busy being girly! If a girl wants to be a fan, she'll just have to suck it up and admit that she's really an unnatural freak boy.

THIS PROCESS IS 100% FAIR AND BALANCED.

They're having a poetry competition over on Miss Conduct's Blog in honor of Clerihew Day. I cast my vote for this gem:

Bill Gates
Has left the giant software company everyone hates.
"Hey, Mistah?
Are *you* gonna use Vista?"

Edgar Allen Poe
Was very fond of roe.
He always liked to chew some,
When writing anything gruesome.

I just saw the Fifth Doctor story "Enlightenment," which was enormous fun, with Tegan/Five moments, and Turlough's surprisingly enjoyable character arc, the matinée idol Eternal, and plot! With a galactic ship race!

Yayz. More later! Must return to school work now (midterm, omg!).

Profuse thanks to donna_c_punk for reccing this one.

Over on PBS.org, there's a half hour video clip of Margaret Atwood and Bill Moyers having a lovely talk about tyranny, language, symbols and human nature. It was originally aired as part of the Faith & Reason series, and Ms. Atwood talks about strict agnosticism quite eloquently. I love her perspective on things. There's one part where she talks about myths as an expression of the fundamental fears and desires we've had for thousands of years and how different from our ancestors we're totally not with our advanced tech and what not, and it is SO COOL.

Fannishly, I've had BabelColour's YouTube tribute vids to the Eighth and Seventh Doctors playing off an on for a while. I love the song choices; I think the vidder did a great job choosing the perfect lyrics for these two ("An Englishman in New York" fits Eight to a T!), the tone is a very Who-esque combination of the comedic with the epic, and the technique is good.

ETA: Dear friendslist, do you happen to recall which episode is it that Ace wears a tuxedo in? I saw clips of it in a vid, and she looks fantastic.

I liked it because the actors kicked butt and I care about the Doctor and his companions to an embarrassing degree, but the story/plot itself was pretty flat.

( srs spoilers )

Quality stuff, this ep.

( a few thoughts (SPOILERS!) )

The saga continues.

Overcoming Bias has a strict but ill defined rule about comment length: "Comments should be. . . short," their newbie page says. How short (less than a thousand words? less than five hundred?) is never explained. Since I've been told that my last comment violated the length rule, I'm going to reply here to a response I received from one of the other commenters.

( context for those of you playing along at home )

To which Mitchell replied:

Angel: "Historically speaking, the assumption that women are fluff-brained morons has been the majority opinion. This can't be explained by the possible lonely experiences of a few male geniuses."

Has it? The Henry Higgins quote represents one tendency but not the majority, I would have thought. Isn't there a long tradition of attributing cunning to women, as well? And both are rather emotive judgments, anyway. If you judge history by its more considered opinions, you'll find platitudes like: women are good at practical matters, but men are better at abstractions. Possibly backed up with an appeal to the preponderance of men among history's high intellectual achievers. That last factor is precisely where a difference at the far ends of the Bell curve might be mistaken for a difference in essence. And while it might not take a genius to make that mistake, it might take a genius to turn it into a culture-defining philosophy.

As to whether something like Riley's assertion is correct, perhaps we can first agree that there is a historical phenomenon to be explained. The narrow version might focus on the majority role of men in philosophy and the sciences (for example), up until the present. The broader version might also include men in more active roles, as political and military figures, for example. In theory, you could explain all that with the more-male-geniuses hypothesis, on the grounds that intelligence is crucial to success in any of those fields, and empirically it's only a few exceptional men who are doing all this achieving. Against that, we have all those other hypotheses, e.g., men are just more competitive, women are steered into domesticity, lack of female access to opportunity due to anti-female ideology backed up by male physical strength, etc. Of course, the actual explanation may be a combination of several factors.

The argument from genetics interests me because its two premises - intelligence is a sex-linked trait and male traits exhibit greater variance - do appear to be true. The evidence from IQ tests seems equivocal to me, or at least the data are complicated, and the construction of IQ tests also seems such an inexact art that I would always be a little skeptical of any claimed result that wasn't screamingly and undeniably there. Personally, I am impressed most by what I called the narrow version of the historical phenomenon: a dozen Platos for every Hypatia, so to speak. The fate of Hypatia is certainly a reminder that there were other factors at work besides relative success on standardized tests, but then Bruno and Archimedes met violent ends as well.

ithiliana

ithiliana

"The remarkable thing about this explanation is what is deemed in need of justification and what is assumed as a given. Aristotle admitted that there is some justification for a difference of opinion regarding the rightness of enslaving captive peoples in the event of an unjust war. But there is no difference of opinion regarding the inferiority of women. The subordination of women is assumed as a given, likened to a natural condition, and so the philosopher uses the martial relationship as an explanatory metaphor to justify slavery. . . . By his efforts at justifying the moral rightness of slavery, Aristotle had indeed recognized the basic truth of the humanity of the slave. By denying and ignoring the need to explain the subordination of women, as well as by the kind of biological explanation Aristotle offered elsewhere, he had fixed women in a status of being less-than-human. The female is, in his words, 'as it were, a mutilated male'" (ibid).

There's this blog called Overcoming Bias. It's sponsored by Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. I discovered it through a series of posts aiming to de-mystify Quantum Physics by Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the blog's two editors and primary contributors. The posts are the sort of good, chewy fun I like to work my brain on every now and then, with a different take on things than I'd found previously in my periodic Googling research of Quantum Physics.

So far so good.

Then I went poking around the site and found a post under their gender tag titled "Is Overcoming Bias Male?" wherein Robin, the second of the two editors, says that "A few women have mentioned to me privately that our whole project seems rather male." In response to this, he quotes gender essentialist ideas about how caring and embodied women are and how abstract and detached men are.

Finally, he uses these insights to "explain" away the issue the women who came to him about the site had raised thus:

I see two main possibilities for explaining female disinterest:

1. Our goal of overcoming bias is a kind of rankable achievement, but does not clearly enhance particular relationships, and can threaten loyalty to them.
2. Our method of identifying and encouraging relation-blind principles and institutions does not rely much on emotionally-rich relationships.

The reason you should worry if a woman tells you that "The whole project seems characteristically male", is that they may be indicating their annoyance with a characteristically male mistake. Of course it is also possible that they are misunderstanding the Way in some fashion that is characteristic of their gender, or more likely, characteristic of 21st-century culture as it pertains to First World females, including those types of postmodern idiocy that are marketed especially to women. But it is worth paying attention to such comments, precisely because, as a male, you may tend to overlook characteristically male irrationality as being "not really important".

An anonymous reader asked me to post this comment:

You missed the best explanation: Women are biased and proud of it!!!
But Henry Higgins says it better than I ever could:
"Women are irrational, that's all there is to that, their heads are filled with cotton, hay, and rags."

Finals Week is a cruel thing to do to people. Making a bunch of poor students sick and tired is just not cool, academic establishment!

It's the only thing I don't love at all about school, really. But it's over, now. yay.

Happily, I get to have birthday-fun tomorrow. I get to see Iron Man for the second time! And eat vegetarian sushi with pickled ginger and wasabi! WIN! My twenty-third fell during Finals so I put off celebrating until I could really enjoy myself.

I will now reacquaint myself with the sensual delights of my one true love, the mattress. We need some quality time.

eta: I was distracted on my way to dream land by hilarity. I'm sure the YouTube video has been linked all over, but Gladys Knight and her new Pips: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr.

AWESOME!

Heeee.

+School+

I got to represent! for our girl Imogen at my school's Multimedia competition yesterday. The fellow who teaches the history of photography class I'm taking is one of the judges and he let us know that he likes to include a short (3-4 min) show about a Great Photographer every year. When I discovered Imogen, I knew I had to offer to do it this year. I enjoyed putting it together, and it seemed to keep the audience's attention well enough.

The art students showed some seriously awesome work: short pieces done using stop-frame claymation, anime techniques, photography tricks. The student who'd done the (delightful!) anime piece happened to be sitting next to me. She took out her computer during the fifteen minute break and introduced the girl on her left and I to a strangely addictive game called Crayon Physics. The object of the game is to use the laws of physics to move a ball around by drawing boxes: a teeter-tooter can be weighed just right so the ball gets where it's got to go, a bridge has to be built so it can cross a chasm, etc. It's really mellow and fun, like an interactive kid's drawing.

+Fandom+

We've been slowly working through the first few seasons of Numb3rs on DVD at my house. So much love! Sometimes they hit it out of the park with exciting, gee-whiz stuff like astronautics, computer science, special guest star Bill Nye (The Science Guy!) and Tit for Tat strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Sometimes they handwave like a dance troop learning Spirit Fingers, but that's okay! It's still enjoyable because I've pretty much decided not to dig too deep with this one; I like the geekboys and the well intended, if sometimes faultering attempts at being progressive. We just finished season 3, and I loved... ( spoiler )

The newest episode of Doctor Who was good. It didn't completely blow me away, but it was quite a fun way to pass an hour. ( spoilers ) I'm excited about next week.

Even if the new X-Files movie sucks epic-ly, it'll be worth it because it produced this gorgeous Mulder/Scully picture posted by the lovely longtimegone for Phile viewing pleasure.

+The Internet is for feminism!+

Last time I checked in with the ongoing OSBP response, I found a couple posts I'd like to share.

The first two are theory-related. They're important to me because they shine a light some things that had caught me wrong-footed during the discussion without my quite knowing why.

First, blacksquirrel on gender-reversal:

What I wanted to ponder further is the inability to come up with an appropriate gender-reversal paradigm - I think that inability is instructive - that we can't easily *imagine* a situation involving men and women which would actually reverse *all* of the vectors of power, and issues involving history, socialization, and public space. I quite like the work of people who have tried, and I have a special place in my heart for the Open Source Swift Kick in the Balls Project, but overall I think these discussions have really highlighted how intractable and layered m/f exchanges are in this society (particularly American, but with implications for global patriarchy as well). You can't fix the whole enterprise by changing *just this one thing,* or acting a certain way among your friends, or wanting it really badly.

bretth

coffeeandink

I've been watching the attempted deployment of the concept of chivalry among the defenders of the Public Domain Boobs Project with this weird fascination, kind of like I'd watch cancer cells mutating beneath a microscope.

[...]

I've been paying attention to this because various women of color have frequently blogged about white male chivalry towards white women as an expression of white privilege against women of color: white women are frail, vulnerable, victimized flowers in need of protection from the harsh forces of the outside world, which apparently include women of color, who are strong, aggressive, assertive, and, let us never forget, mean.

vito_excalibur

kate_nepveu

Day two, and the "Open Source Boob Project" has turned into a sort of Feminist Fen Friending Meme. How awesome is that? I've seen people friending each other in the midst of crunchy, constructive discussion threads all over, and I've discovered lots of progressive voices and likeminded people I wouldn't have otherwise.

Yesterday, I admit felt like shit about the whole thing. Stayed up 'til 4am commenting with ever-increasing flail, feeling helpless. But today, despite the evidence of troll dung and comments disappearing for a while, I'm glad to know that so many excellent people have shown up, spoken up and connected with each other. People have come at the issues from hundreds of different angles, digging out insight, raising awareness, and being damn funny. I like seeing fandom regulate itself in such a democratic way.

Since I've got a project due tomorrow, I haven't been able to read as many posts/threads as I'd like, but one exchange that really hit some things spot on occurred in the original post's comments here, where loligo suggested that, instead of having women wear buttons classing themselves as grope-able or not-grope-able, "everyone who might like to grope a stranger wears a green button. Then they sit tight, shut up, and wait to see if anyone offers. If you don't wish to grope a particular body part that is offered to you, you can always refuse, of course!"

This sounded like a fantastic way to re-frame things. theferrett replied that this new system was too "passive," which lead to folks like coffeeandink pointing out that it isn't anymore passive than the previous set up, except that men are the ones waiting to be asked, instead of women.

I felt like the whole exchange was really illuminating about the undercurrents that sparked everything off to begin with.

In another corner of the Internets, misia wrote up a magnificent satire titled "A Modest Proposal," where she suggests the creation of a "Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project." It totally lives up to its title! Were Jonathan Swift alive and up to date on the bajillions bits of context--little things like feminism, technology, fandom and the blogosphere--needed to get what's going on, I think he'd approve. And laugh his ass off, powdered ringlets flying every which way!

For more clever, awesome people, the_red_shoes post has a fantastic collection of links that'll help you sort through the thousands of comments and posts to find the really good stuff, as does tablesaw at his journal. Red's rec of his comments was what made me feel it might be possible to get some constructive, civil discussion out of the whole crazy thing.

Another learning moment came when I discovered a whole new slang phrase! "OH JOHN RINGO NO" was just what I needed to spice up my geek-speak. It may never replace "the Internets" or "made of win" in my heart, but it will remain precious to me throughout the years. Whenever I face absurd misogyny, I'll reach for it like a spork of justice. I'm sure I'll go on to confuse youngsters outside my zeitgeist with it as I age into obsolescence even more un-gracefully than Baby Boomers.

Earlier today, comments at the original OSBP post disappeared for a while. They're back now, but replies have been frozen, stopping conversation dead. I'm going to copy/paste a few pieces of conversation I was in for my own record (is it paranoid to worry they might disappear again?) and so anybody who wants to chat further past the reply freeze can comment here if they like. I hope other people do the same and take their part of the conversation to their private journals; there was some seriously good discourse going on, and I hate so see that stopped mid-word.

I'm just going to hit the main points (I got rather wordy and flail-y as the night waned on), but if you guys have any part of the threads I was involved in you want to talk about, feel free.

( text )

'Kay. Back to the class project!

I'm crazy-focused on a big math test (Monday! it's coming! Run! *muttermutter*i'mtooyoungtodie**mutter*) and the English Paper What Ate My Brain.

But I took time out for Who, because the Pompeii ep made me remember that this show can be the perfect, delightful escape for a geeky, sensawunda-lovin' wee creature such as myself. These two eps have been Old Skool in the Best Ways Possible. With all the ((flail)) visiting of an actual alien planet and travels in history that both open up horizons for companion, Doctor and audience, where people in the past are fully human, not one dimensional playthings whose deaths don't matter (unlike in some nasty s2 eps I could mention), and aliens deserve rights! YAY.

( quick, spoilery thoughts before bed )

Sadly, my enjoyment of these eps is dimmed by the knowledge that they're going to have to let RTD write another episode soonish.

Oh, Rusty, why can't you be a figurehead who gets by on his laurels and lets more talented people do all the real work? Not even speaking of regular weekly eps, finales are hard; you have to pull magical shrinking JESUS!Doctors out of your ass. It's got to be painful.

Why not take a nice, long vacation! You deserve it.

I watched this because David Tennant is in it, and I had a craving for more of his work after last Saturday's delightful episode of Doctor Who.

It's a bit fluffy. There's a nice storyline, but the story moves across the surface of its characters lives mostly, and resolves the conflicts it does bring up in a way that felt a too easy. Still, enjoyable.

The set up here is that Beverley, who works as a cleaning lady, dreams of getting her driver's license so she can have her own mobile "green cleaning" business and go about washing up for people in an eco-conscious way with her non-toxic cleansers. Her husband has been teaching her to drive, and he's abysmal at it. He doesn't appear to have much faith in her abilities, and it shows, which makes her morbidly nervous.

After failing the driver's exam five times, she goes to a professional driving school. There she's assigned to Chris (David Tennant), a dorky, awkward man who only really shines when he's teaching. He's confident sitting in his instructional vehicle, unlike in other places, and he gives a lot of care to instilling confidence in even the most terrified students. He really likes it when he can build them up and help them succeed.

He's got a Rocker Smurf figurine on the dash of his small, blue instructional vehicle and a cross hanging from the rear view mirror. His being a committed Anglican is handled surprisingly well. Apart from having the cross, he doesn't mention his faith during business hours. When Bev demands he swear on the cross that she really can learn this stuff because she's afraid he's letting her waste her 40 quid a week on lessons that won't do any good, he politely declines and ends up swearing on the Rocker Smurf for her instead.

Bev's used to being a harried wife and mum. Chris' attention and genuine hopes for her to accomplish her modest dream touch her unexpectedly, and she finds herself with a crush on him. Her feelings and how they play out made sense, I think.

It's a very nice story. It ends happily and it has some modest touches of insight as it goes along, despite wrapping things up too neatly.

It satisfied my David Tennant jones, and showed me another side of his acting. He got across what a caring, encouraging teacher Chris was and his awkward!boy body language here is perfect, especially during Chris' one sad, inexperienced but passionate attempt at a fistfight. Tennant gets to use his own Scottish accent, which is always lovely. And he manages to make it seem quietly sincere instead of off putting or proselytizing when Chris folds his hands to pray for a student as he waits during her driver's test.

Rating: B+

( spoilers )

The recent ep. was just Too Pretty. I couldn't resist iconizing its beauty.

teaser:


( 11 icons, 98% John Mercer )

I think #3 is going to become a wallpaper when I've got time.

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

..some people say Romance is feminist by its very nature as a genre written for and by women, I say that sounds like a nice world, if only we were living in it

Just got caught up with my blog-reading and found a really good post over on Romancing the Blog about underwritten heroines in Romance, and how a genre targeted at and written by women can be so amazingly androcentric and misogynistic.

I feel the romance genre has grown too hero-centric to suit me. The heroine, instead of standing on her own feet, is increasingly created as a foil for the hero, to showcase his strengths and be “light” to his “darkness.” Instead of being his equal, she begins her journey in one of two forms: “feisty” and “independent” or “nurturing” and “bookish.” These characteristics evolve into two endings; the former, in which the heroine is taken down a peg or two, and the latter, in which the heroine is forced out of her shell by a) healing the hero from his tortured state or b) his rakish seduction of her. In a nutshell, the heroine’s journey is solely that of hitching a ride on the hero’s character arc.

This trend presumes to tell me that the male and female protagonist cannot simultaneously partake equally of a character arc. And what troubles me are the words tossed at the heroine who doesn’t fit within the aforementioned categories. The statement in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, that heroines are required to be “presented as intelligent without being intimidating, independent without being offensive, attractive without being smug” lest they become “cast-iron bitches who appear petulant and unsympathetic rather than strong” is downright insulting. The fact that a heroine perceived to be recalcitrant would warrant the word “bitch” astounds me.

untrue_accounts

giandujakiss

Further nattering, this time with heavy spoilers for all four aired episodes.

( spoiler cut )