Joelle Nebbe-Mornod's List: gender questions

The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, are producers of the NPR series, The Hidden World of Girls, which explores the lives of girls and the women they become, and producers of the duPont-Columbia Award-winning NPR series Hidden Kitchens, and two Peabody Award-winning NPR collaborations, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project. Hidden Kitchens explores the world of secret, unexpected, below the radar cooking across America—how communities come together through food.

The fact that there are few films featuring a woman over 40 is now more recognised. However, the real problem with films about women over 60 is not that they are rare but that they are misogynistic and ageist. The ones that are not are just not distributed or programmed.

In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men.  Two species, nearly.  (I've seen people go so far as to claim that Slavering Beasts are the result of evolution, which might make them literally a subspecies.)  There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts.  And they are very, very easy to tell apart.  They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting.

You don't have to have a PhD in Racismology to sniff out one idea often lurking beneath the surface here, but "frat boys" and "dudebros" are often suspected of being Slavering Beasts too, along with a lot of mentally ill people, counterculture members of any stripe, and sometimes even geeks.  But I don't want to make too much of this, because Slavering Beast diagnostics are almost always ex post facto--he committed violence?  Well, no wonder, he's a Slavering Beast! You should have seen it coming!

And yet I can't even say that-"stop making a big deal out of my gender"-because the war against sexism in the video game space isn't nearly won. It is still a big deal. The war against all kinds of insular hatred in the game space isn't won yet. Gaming has been, forgive me, a predominantly nerdy shut-in white guy pastime for so long that people seem scared to discuss all the ways gaming could and should be a place where everyone needs to be acknowledged and invited, as creators and players and writers.

I mean, my friend Denis bares his soul in front of all of you last week because of his wish for less homophobic language in the competitive online space, and there were still people among you who left comments to the effect of "how is this relevant to games." There are still people among you who leave comments on Kotaku about Lisa Foiles' makeup, or when Kirk Hamilton says he likes Felicia Day's work you assume he's in looooove.

Really? How old are you? When are we going to grow up, as a culture? When am I going to stop being embarrassed to have devoted my entire life to this?

How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?

I don’t.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for

Because I am Schrödinger’s Heterosexual: my friends can never truly be certain whether or not I’m homophobic or transphobic or see the world in heteronormative terms until I demonstrate it. Until I fail the test.

And that goes for my race privilege, and my class privilege, and my education privilege.

And there’s no pass condition on this. A privileged person can simply never actually prove with 100% certainty that they will never be a threat or a problem or a trigger to an unprivileged person.

And lords and ladies, we’ve got more than enough extreme-headdesk-worth examples of people who really, really should know better pulling some serious asshattery.* Until now, they might have been Schrödinger’s Mainstream Feminists. Now we’ve opened the box and had a look and it ain’t pretty.

We privileged people do not “deserve” the automatic trust or assumption of good faith or patience of unprivileged people [especially while in the act of fucking up]. And that’s okay, because it’s not about us. And that’s Basic Ally-hood 101.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://fishmonkey.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-flattering-dressing.html

For example, the researchers tracked which students responded to questions posed to the class as a whole, not one particular student. At the beginning of the semester, female students were much less likely than male students (9 percent vs. 23 percent) to respond to such questions, regardless of the gender of the instructor. But as the course progressed, female students became much more likely to respond to such questions posed by female instructors (46 percent of female students were responding) than to male instructors (only 7 percent of female students were responding). Likewise, a larger percentage of male students answered questions posed by female instructors (42 percent of men) than by male instructors (only 26 percent of men). Notably, however, the impact of having a female instructor vs. a male instructor was much greater for women.

The researchers tracked other measures as well. At the beginning of the courses, there were not notable differences in whether female students approached female instructors (12 percent did) or male instructors (13 percent did) with questions after class. But as the course progressed, the percentage of female students approaching female instructors stayed constant, while the number approaching male instructors dropped -- all the way to zero.

"Once I got started on Wikipedia I really liked editing. I found it easiest to get involved in local stuff… articles about my state, city, neighborhood. Those are topics I'm familiar with, but they're not all that fleshed out yet.

I also just liked reading up on topics I enjoyed, and filling in red links. It was easy to create new pages once I had my feet wet editing paragraphs on bigger articles.

Are my contributions perfect, with rock-solid references and links to every possible related page? No. Do I contribute every day, or every month? No. But it's not about that, I see Wikipedia as a "beating the curve" sort of thing. Write articles that are better than other articles. Make improvements, even if they're small. Do something small. It's so much easier than running a blog or web page, where you have do make consistent good updates all the time… it's low-maintenance. It's great."

Executive women are still fighting for a fair chance http://ht.ly/3YP1w

Tue 8th March - The responsibility of women in technology innovation: Why should we care?: International Women's... http://bit.ly/eEniS1

"To gain support at CSW 2009 (UN Commission on the Status of Women 2009) to open discussions at ECOSOC (United Nations Economic and Social Council) for a UN 5WCW (United Nations 5th World Conference on Women) by taking up the proposal from Finland, tabled