(no subject)

[rm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/fashion/21webgirls.html

This is news?
Girls exist?
They express their identities and desires?
They can type?
OMG!

I feel irked.

Also?

“Girls are trained to make stories about themselves,” said Pat Gill, the interim director for the Institute for Communications Research and an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From a young age they learn that they are objects, Professor Gill said, so they learn how to describe themselves. Historically, girls and women have been expected to be social, communal and skilled in decorative arts.

“This would be called the feminization of the Internet,” she said.

Last time I checked, I, and every girl and woman I know, tell stories about themselves not because of the need to be decorative objects but because we're not, because the story is longer than that, and because making sure other people know it can feel and be key to our very survival. Telling stories is about existing, not disappearing.

Also, the headline is "Sorry, Boys, this is our domain." Whenever girls surpass boys in anything there's a "sorry" in teh headline. It never works the other way. Why should we apologize, even through the words of some reporter, for what we like or what we do?

This is a petty little thing but it EXASPERATES and ENRAGES me.

Finally? The piece is in the fashion section. Because nothing girls do is real.

Comments

[marcmagus]

That piece is infuriating from so many different directions I don't even know where to start. The awful broad-brush strokes with which they paint females? The horrid ways in which they do the same to males? Maybe we should start with their inability to draw any distinction between children and adults. Or the sense they give that they're looking at this whole Internet thing as though it's a homogeneous foreign culture that they've been sent to do a 1900s-style ethnography about. Or the impression I get that they have no concept whatsoever of the difference between creating different sorts of computer content, even though they go ahead and get an expert to talk about it.

You've nailed it on the head, though. Fashion & Style?!

I need to go take a shower now.