sundries

[rm]

So, as you all mostly know, I have a paper in an academic conference this summer. I just got a bunch of paperwork related to this, including the schedule. Due to one fellow that had to pull out, it appears that there are either no men with papers in the conference, or one (there's a gender neutral name).

This should be unremarkable to me. After all, I would not be surprised in the least if I were the sole (somewhat off) representative of the female at such a thing; much of my life often looks like this in truth, and while I wear men's suits because of my own gender expression, it is also a handy defense from "I really liked your speech; you have a good walk." (which, yes, got said to me in a professional setting recently).

But here's where my own misogyny comes into play. Except maybe it's not misogyny; maybe it's the reality I know is out there in the eyes both of men and women: since we're going to be a bunch of women sitting around talking about text and desire, will anyone choose to view this work as work that matters without the legitimizing force of men? It's a horrible thought. It's horrible that it's a reasonable thought. It's horrible that I have to force myself to examine the thought, it seems so reasonable. It's not a question as many people would ask about a roomful of men, and we do know those that did ask would not be well heard, don't we?

Women have the numbers in academia, especially in social sciences, yet not the power or the legitimacy. The peeks I get at privilege just by wearing a suit, even when I don't pass, are extraordinarily alarming. The fact that I can provide a live-action demonstration that my ideas are worth more when I don't wear a dress, scares the crap out of me. So does the fact that I'm presenting at a conference focusing on a theme that is a central fact of my life, and I'm terrified it'll all be dismissed as women's work.

Sometimes, gender is hard and miserable, you all.

Bias a persistent hurdle for women in the sciences.

Help some cute lesbians win a dream wedding.

Fuck you, NYU. You don't own my city, and you are not taking Governor's Island or any of the rest of our history from us.

Another reason you can't find anything in NYC: Lots of buildings don't have addresses posted and those that do often make no actual sense based on where the entrance to the building is. And that doesn't even get into our wonky numbering scheme.

The married Catholic priests of the Ukraine.

More from the department of "small talk is bad for you."

jnanacandra links us to several posts about women and Thelema, that I haven't dived into yet, because they need my time and my own gender expression makes my own thoughts on the subject potentially a digression from the topic at hand, but as noted, it's a worthy discussion to be having, so if this is a category of thing you care about, go look. Also, for the moment I am resisting telling my own stories of active OTO participating in my twenties, because they're probably exactly what you'd expect, and that's just depressing.

Buffy 4.6: Everyone kept saying to me "oh, so Oz is still around" so I thought he was going to die, not have some lonely boy adventure that's tragic and miserable and wow he was incompetent about the wolf-girl (and man, what crap makeup!) thing. It was a really sad, well-done episode though. Also, Giles is appallingly at loose ends and really needs some sort of random structure right now. Wow. Am also moderately cranky with the whole "Wicca" thing, both in terms of Willow being "a Wicca" (no) and in terms of the most recent episodes random spell crap (Satanus? really?). Ah well.

sushis is forcing me to relive my high school years by posting the videos for a few different versions of "Der Kommissar." Deep dark secret from my past: when I was in high school my musical interests were pretty much Falco, Nick Cave, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Love and Rockets, and Marc Almond. Now you know.

Casting notice of the day: "MUST BE ABSOLUTELY COMFORTABLE LAYING ON THE GROUND WITH LIVE DOMESTICATED RATS PORTRAYING A DEAD VICTIM."

Comments

[sinonmybody.livejournal.com]

There are also married priests within the Catholic Church as it exists here. Basically, if you were a married pastor, etc., of another Christian denomination, and you convert, you can become a married priest.

[eac.livejournal.com]

You would think more people would use this as a reasonable workaround...

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

My friend's father is (by now, I'm sure) a priest.

He had been in the seminary when he met the woman who would become his wife. They had several children, and after she passed away (about 10 years ago), he went back to the cloth.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, gender is hard and miserable, you all.

So much agreed. O_o re: "you have a good walk" but I can believe it.

ARGH FAIL regarding NYU and Governor's. That island should be a national park or something (it's certainly up there with Early American Settlements), not Just Another Campus.

Voted! That's an awesome-looking wedding-plan.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

I have a gut feeling that putting student housing in a location accessible only by boat is a bad, bad idea. One big storm, and hello, Lord of the Flies redux.

Whoa, the old Tokyo house-numbering system was completely cray-cray.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Also, if I have to be surrounded by NYU undergrads every time I go to the island.... yeah, I won't be going to the island anymore. Also, if they put student housing there, they'll start demanding to see my ID just so I can go to the island, and it's bullshit bullshit bullshit.

[eac.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the more pedestrian undergraduate drunken drownings...

[eac.livejournal.com]

Re: casting notice - hilarious. also important to make clear ahead of time.

I hate that you find yourself worrying that your conference will be dismissed as 'women's work,' but I find I can't disagree with you. :/

Also, nothing wrong whatsoever with Falco, Nick Cave, Siouxsie, Love and Rockets or Marc Almond! (My high school interests were the Beatles, Big Country, David Bowie and Bauhaus - apparently because I couldn't get past the B bin at the record shop. Big Country is the hardest to defend, obviously.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh, but Big Country had some GREAT songs. I share your shame.

re: Casting Notice -- as they did not make clear with me and the fucking LIVE INSECTS.

[frodo-esque.livejournal.com]

As painful as your reflections are about women in the workforce/academia/research I see the truth of it every day. My own current difficulties with one of my supervisors rests solely in her insecurities surrounding coming across 'smart' to her colleagues. She is a control freak, and when something incorrect is disseminated to others, she cringes and thinks it makes her look stupid. She's constantly worried at the end of conference calls, concerned that she didn't sound "smart" enough, and it blows my mind since she's clearly a very bright woman.

I've seen similar issues with other female bosses, they're easy to offend, very controlling, and not pleasant to work with.

It makes me appreciate those who aren't like this so much more. However, I do have empathy for those who have built up pa defensiveness.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well, there's that, but there's other things too. Men are allowed to say "must" in the workplace. I am, if presenting femininely, lectured for it. However, if I do not use strong words (as I prefer to do, I do not use women's words), I'm not respected as a leader. Therefore, a reasonable conclusion is: people don't want women to lead.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I love having you on my f-list to direct my reading every day. (I may be lazy, but I was smart enough to find you!)

The article on bias against women in the sciences says: The association’s report acknowledges differences in male and female brains. But Ms. Hill said, “None of the research convincingly links those differences to specific skills, so we don’t know what they mean in terms of mathematical abilities.”

I have a sneaking feeling that time and research will find that male and female brains are not intrinsically that different. My late father-in-law was a brain research scientist. Among other things, he was one of the first, if not the first, to develop a way to map brain activity. Several years ago, he could predict with some high degree of accuracy who was male and who was female by looking at computer printouts of brain activity. The fly in the ointment was that women working in his lab showed up as men. Not a big enough sample to constitute any kind of scientific proof of anything except that it showed that a particular group of women who had spent their lives concentrating on science and math possibly had developed different brain activity patterns. This, I must admit, is my opinion only--a woman who showed up as a girlie-girl on his computer printouts.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I recently took one of those "is your brain male or female" things that took me like an hour, and what was interesting was that on some of the tests I scored EXTREMELY female and some I scored EXTREMELY male, but on none, did I score in the middle, although in aggregate that was the result, which, I personally, feel has a very different (and less accurate for me) meaning ("is gender neutral"), than "has a mix of extremes".

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I hope they mean lying on the ground.

[rm.livejournal.com]

THERE IS SO MUCH GRAMMAR FAIL IN THAT CASTING NOTICE. Thank you for being the first to notice it.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

I know this is the last thing you want to hear (i.e., I take your misogyny and drown it in copious amounts of misandry), but in my opinion, you give such negative connotation to "women's work" while seeking legitimization on themes that the vast majority of heterosexual men can't even begin to comprehend.

This conference is dominated by women, because in order to truly grasp subjects like text and desire one requires a measure of sensitivity and emotional complexity that rarely accompany masculinity.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Your point about "women's work" is really good. Am I showing my misogyny or addressing society's misogyny or some of both?

I'm uncomfortable with your second point as it stands, although I would probably nod along to it were it phrased "that are rarely allowed to publicly accompany masculinity" which I think is a very true thing.

There's probably also, other stuff that neither of us have said that relate to the differences in how women and men process texts versus visual material, although I will say I suspect most of the objects of study at the conference, are, in fact male-generated texts (I'm partnered for the presentations with someone presenting on St. Augustine as an example).

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Vanity addressing drove my parents insane.

There is [Their Address] and [Their Address] South, and often deliveries got misdirected.

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

There is NOTHING WRONG with Der Kommissar.

[sushis.livejournal.com]

I agree! :-)

[mzlizzy.livejournal.com]

The N.Y.U. story rings so many bells for me. I live down the street from Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles and they are trying to push through a 20 year plan for rebuilding the campus as well. They don't want to expand their boundaries, but they want to have just under 500,000 sq.ft. of residential space on a campus surrounded by single family homes.

Oh and 'special' things like a 2,000 niche columbarium.

Needless to say we are fighting this. Keep an eye out for the public comment periods and comment!

[rm.livejournal.com]

I used to live in DC, where my university was actually banned from buying more property int eh District, so they opened a new campus in Virginia.

Prodigal Sons

[keith418.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you have seen this documentary about a transgendered woman who goes back to her High School reunion in Helena Montana - where she was once the Quarterback (and a good one!) of her HS football team. Instead of what she expects, her former classmates evidence no issues at all with her change in gender. I kind of got the feeling she was let down by their lack of a freak-out.

Re: Prodigal Sons

[rm.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen it, but I'm not surprised. The personal usually is better received than the abstract. Also, people knew this person and may well have been at least peripherally aware something was up there. When something is extremely stressful to reveal and/or has been a central narrative of one's life, I think it's pretty reasonable to both want and expect a reaction and be sort of baffled when it doesn't come, even if that's a better thing.

[don-negro.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have come up with Marc Almond had I been asked to guess, but it makes total sense. Good synthpop that most people over here never heard. I'd venture that there are kids 8-10 years younger than us for whom the Pet Shop Boys filled a similar role.

(I'm now having one of those moments where I realize how weird it is that it seems unremarkable to me that I'd be able to hazard an educated guess at the teenage musical tastes of someone I've never met and and only had limited one-to-one communication with of any sort. The fact that I still have these moments of weirdness after all this time online (24 years? Jesus Christ, what happened?) is itself weird.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Marc Almond was absolutely positively my most favorite. Very gay. Very literate. And I listened to Soft Cell's "Little Rough Rhinestone" on repeat a lot when I was 16 and wanting to be a club kid very very badly.

[cozzene.livejournal.com]

rat whiskers tickle.

[sushis.livejournal.com]

Why is it a dark secret that you listened to Falco, Nick Cave, et al?

Is there music that you think people would be more likely to associate with you? Other music you wish you'd known about at the time, but didn't? (I'm just curious :-)

[weirdquark]

I majored in physics at a women's college, which, according to their website, has about 3% of the graduating class majoring in physics, which is about 50 times the national average for women in physics. I wasn't planning on majoring in physics when I was looking at colleges, so I didn't know that, but I'm happy with how that turned out.

One thing that they did that I liked was that part way through the first year of physics, a bunch of us were asked to stay after class. The professor told us that we were all doing really well, and he'd like to encourage all of us to continue taking physics classes and to consider making it our major. Most of us did.

One thing I found kind of interesting and a little disturbing was that we shared resources with our (co-ed) sister school. Upper level classes were offered alternating at both places; you could take all your classes at one or the other or some at each. When you took classes at the women's college, classes were almost entirely women. Women talked. They asked questions. They answered questions. The token male of the class would talk some, but mostly was pretty quiet. At the co-ed school, there would be maybe three women in a class of twenty, and all three of us were from the women's college. There were no women physics majors at the co-ed school; I heard once that there had been one at one point in my year, but she switched majors. When most of the class was men, the men talked, asked questions, answered them. The women were much quieter.

Also, there was no women's bathroom near the physics labs at the co-ed school -- you had to go up a floor. Which really doesn't make you feel welcome.

I remember going to a lecture about women in the sciences and job hunting. They told us that employers aren't supposed to ask you if you're married/ planning on getting married or planning on having children, but they do anyway. And that if you say yes (and you can't not answer, even though it's illegal for them to ask) they're much more likely not to hire you because clearly you'll be taking time off for children, and people who are taking time off for children aren't doing research, aren't publishing, aren't doing things that get them tenure, aren't doing things that make the employer look good. Even if your spouse will be the primary caretaker, because you're a woman, they assume you'll put your family over your career, and your career won't be as full of research and publications as a man's. So they told us, when you go for an interview, don't wear a ring, because they'll assume you're engaged or married and they won't want to hire you.

[pineapplechild.livejournal.com]

AGH, that thing about the bathrooms is the same at my (co-ed university) school. The main math/computer science building is the older of the two science buildings, and the only women's bathroom is on the first floor. In a three storey + basement building. (There are also absolutely no bathrooms I would want to take a wheelchair into, but that's another story.)

I'm the only female in most of my computer science/higher math courses, and in the ones that I'm not the only, I am the only one who talks and asks questions.

re: casting notice

[pocketmouse]

...is it bad that my first thought was 'wow, caps lock,' and my second was 'wait, are the rats portraying a dead victim, or the potential actor? grammar fail.'

And, uh, now that I think about it, I think they got lay/lie wrong too.

Re: re: casting notice

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup. Isn't it AMAZING? Also, I have to add that this is for a major broadcast network property, and not like some random student film.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I hear you on the academia thing -- I feel insecure about that all the time, especially since my field is children's literature, which is dominated by women, so we have a double marginalisation thing going on there. Many people don't take children's literature seriously as literature, and many people assume that women gravitate towards children's literature because we all want babies and because it's less rigorous anyway, like most "women's work". Of course, there are actually many of us working in the field who don't even want to have children (not that the desire to have children or not should have any bearing on the validity of one's research).

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I was thinking, a little while ago, that I was glad to be female because at least it gave me a head start seeing bias. Then I remembered that I'm white and I have said (and thought) some stupid shit over the years, so I should give myself a good slap on the head when I start getting pleased with myself!

You're thinking about balancing two forms of privilege (male vs. cis) right now, but in reality, you're balancing far more kinds of power and privilege (or lack thereof) than that. It's hard to throw off privilege, so use it to open doors for others; conversely, to whom are you trying to make your work "important"?

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I don't know why they're calling that Tokyo house-numbering system "old" - everywhere I lived in Tokyo and other Japanese cities had exactly that system. Postal workers are expected to memorise their entire district.

[kadairk.livejournal.com]

Today is German music from the 80's day, apparently, as I heard both Rock Me Amadeus and 99 Luftballons (German versions of both) today.

I also just got home from music shopping, where we looked at Siouxsie albums, as well as my standard check for the one or two Marc Almond/Soft Cell albums I had on vinyl a million years ago I've yet to find on cd. (Still no luck ... I need This Last Night in Sodom, and Vermin in Ermine.)

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

I can honestly say that that casting call and I would work well together. Well, until it turned out that all I wanted to do on set was play with the rats.

Am also moderately cranky with the whole "Wicca" thing, both in terms of Willow being "a Wicca" (no) and in terms of the most recent episodes random spell crap (Satanus? really?). Ah well.

This. Honestly, it's like you can't combine paganism or magic with television without the result being (unintentionally?) hilarious, offensive, or stupid. And then the public, on the whole, can't tell the difference...

After doing a lot of reading since this post, I'm actually forcibly dragging myself away from the women in Thelema conversation. My response to the smug, gender-essentialist, sexist asshats is to go after them, which is Not Smart. Somebody (namely me) needs some more time on the cushion, I think.

I'm having a similar problem with thinking through the process on the conference, because as you say, you can't not think about it. And that's so phenomenally unjust and ridiculous I just stand there in my head yelling, "BUT THAT'S DUMB!" Which is not productive, and I know that, but damn if I know what can be done to effectively change it. The whole thing is too big and moves slowly. ARGH.

Clearly I need to get some caffeine in me. I'm smarter, nicer, and better able to strategize on stimulants, apparently.

[rm.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with the Thelema conversation, which is why I have not engaged it (except tangentally with you, related to other things), is if you're not OTO your input is (somewhat reasonably) not going to be considered relevant, and if you're not a certain grade (hi) you're just going to get patted on the head and told you don't understand yet, but there's a reason why many women don't fucking bother to. It's a nightmare.