Hee Hee Hee

Just got a nibble from one of the NY agents.

The secret is to keep rewriting your query letter again, and again, and again. The more the query looks like the inside flap of a China Mieville novel, the better.

Seriously.

Sending 50 pages. Let's see what happens with *this* set...

Today's Alaska Pic

When I was 12 years old, I told my friends and family that I was going to go live in a little cabin in the woods in Alaska and write books. I ended up in Alaska a lot sooner than I thought I would. I bought a one-way ticket to Fairbanks (from Portland, OR) when I was 19. I'd never been there before.

What changed my the-next-80-years-in-Alaska mentality was going to Clarion. I was 20 years old, and I thought, "How can I settle on Alaska when I haven't really seen the rest of the world yet?"

Turns out, you can write books *anywhere.*

So this is my odyssey. See the rest of the world. And go. Back to Alaska.

Get myself a couple of dogs.

And a cabin overlooking the Kenai River. Yea.

Dept. of Public Good

I get nervous when I hear my boss on a conference call, talking about the 22 agencies in the Department of Homeland Security.

I really don't want to work on a project for those people (hello, DHS browsers!).

More Fighting. More Classes. Yeah!

Had a great class last night. I've managed to figure out how to get to my MA school in time for the 6:15pm class (leave work at 4:55 and catch the bus from the train to the school, instead of walking that mile-and-a-bit). So I lose some walking time, but gain the kick-ass 6:15 class that I was always walking in on after it already started, where I'd stand around warming up for my 7pm class and marvel at how everybody managed to keep up.

The 6:15 just rocks. It's a cardio and technique class, which basically means you're doing 2 min jump roping, then 2 min of rotating bag work (working a specific combo or kicking technique during each round), then 2 min jump roping, then a minute of abbs, then back to the bag.... You do this for 45 min. Most people then stay for the boxing class after that, which is the one I usually take on Weds.

I was really wowed at myself this time around. Is my technique perfect? No. Was I tired on the third round of jump rope? Oh yea. Did I feel, at some point, like I might die? Well, actually, no. Our last round was partnered situps where we'd pass medicine balls to our partners as we came up into a situp. I powered through it up until those last three reps, when I started losing steam. I was partnered with a purple belt, who nodded curtly when we were done. "You did good," she said.

It helps, of course, that I clock about 150 situps in my 20 minutes of free weights and stretching every damn morning.

It was the first time I'd done a class where I actually *felt* fit (again, comparing myself to myself and not to the people in the class who've been doing this four days a week for the last two or three or five years). I am not, in the words of my roomie, a Supah Ninjah - but after three months, I feel confident saying that I feel really powerful.

The funny thing is, this new upburst in strength and stamina (I felt I did really well during Monday's class as well), comes after a really slacker week. Last week, my boxing class got bumped for a "special" pilates class (to advertise the new Saturday instructor), and I not only didn't go jogging last week, I didn't even go bike riding. I halved my exercise time, but felt a big upsurge in stamina this week - exactly the opposite of what you'd think. There's something to the whole, "Down Time," thing.

I also went ahead and signed up for unlimited classes (I was on the 2-day-a-week schedule before). Starting next week, I'll be going in Mon, Tues, Weds, and Thurs.

Yes, I realize I told myself I wasn't going to do more than three times a week, but I figured saving my Saturday was worth tacking on another day during the week. Also, by taking the 6:15 class, it means I'm home before 8:30pm every night, so I do have some down time to eat dinner, prep for the next day, and read before bed.

Once I get comfortable with the four-days-a-week routine, I'm going to work at staying for the second class on Mondays and Wednesdays. But that's a ways down the road. We'll see how I hold up with back-to-back classes first.

Cause I Don't Have to Rant When I Post A Picture

via allhatnocattle.net

One For the Road

And, one for the road, because I should really be working on chapter 27 (yes, I'm STILL working on chapter 27):

Guys Pissed About Gender Roles

And, after being pissed at Brin, I have to point out some guys engaged in serious critiques of society and gender roles. Because, you know, we get too bogged down looking at extremes:

Here's an excellent guy-compiled list of male privilege. As a (white) man,

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won't think I got my job because of my sex — even though that might be true.

3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won't be seen as a black mark against my entire sex's capabilities.

5. The odds of my encountering sexual harassment on the job are so low as to be negligible.

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.

7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are so low as to be negligible.

8. I am not taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.
.....
41. I am not expected to spend my entire life 20-40 pounds underweight.

42. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.

43. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

And though I disagree with Hugo about some stuff, every once and a while he'll nail something for me:

The problem with the men's rights movement is that they confuse men's unhappiness with oppression. They assume that if men were in control, they would be happy, because patriarchal oppressors ought to be happy. Therefore, if a man isn't happy, he isn't oppressing. Newsflash, folks: Just because you don't know you're privileged doesn't mean you're not. Just because there are aspects of your power and privilege that you find alienating and burdensome doesn't mean that you are any less a beneficiary of an oppressive system! Both men and women do need liberation from rigid, traditional, gender roles. The difference is that collectively, men are the architects of the system while women are merely forced to live within it.

Does He Mean What I Think He Means?

First, a warning: This is slapdash.

Imagine me in the background, emitting a long scream as I frantically spit and type.

That's about how I felt reading this fucking thing.

Now, trying to be....

I'm trying to be, you know, really objective here. But does Brin mean what I think he means? Now, I'll be truthful, here. DB is on my shitlist, for wild talk of feminist cabals and a seemingly blinding confusion about why some feminists might find Glory Season offensive.

Do I disagree with everything he says here? Um. Not… quite… all. Am I addressing this article steeped in my own personal biases? You betch’a.

So, dip your toes in, but, in the words of the Secrete Feministe Cabal: Don’t Tell DB!

I've decided that I’m not going to be off-put by his article Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution: A Paleo-Anthropological Speculation on the Origins of Secondary-Sexual Traits, Male Nurturing and the Child as a Sexual Image. But hey, for the hell of it, let’s look at some of these winning arguments:

May we stipulate that women do often vie over men?

Sure. Of course. I’m not going to argue over this. And men often vie over women, as he mentions later. But for some reason, he seems more interested in the peculiar adornment of women. Understandable. It is indeed odd that in most of Today’s Societies women spend more than men on adornment (watch your numbers, fellas, as the media reach becomes ever more visual, you’re getting on board real quick. Plastic surgery, couture, and skin product sales among men are on the rise. Oh, wait, Brin’s arguing biology so these numbers must be wrong. After all – HUMAN WOMEN ARE HARDWIRED to read women’s magazines). If you continue reading this article, you’ll find that Brin seems to want to posit that this is a biological, unavoidable thing, and that all human societies work this way. Biologically speaking. Women naturally claw each other apart in search of “suitable mates.”

Huh?

If you ignore history, sociology, and anthropology, you can make really great arguments like this. This is why these are considered the “softer,” more “feminine” studies: not sciences, of course. Because they tell you that half of what you get often has to do with the set-up of the culture you’re raised in.

This really pisses people off. Particularly people who’ve got that Assumption of Privilege mantle.

In one contemporary society, the United States, nearly all of the most popular magazines for women trumpet articles advising their readers how to stay competitive in what is portrayed as a desperate struggle to find and keep a mate. American women spend many times more each year on cosmetics than the nation appropriates for space research. (If we add fashion, diet food, plastic surgery, and related activities, costs compare to the defense budget.)

I’m sorry: “women’s magazines”? Anyone who uses unnamed women’s magazines as research material shouldn’t have a Ph.D. They should have been kicked out of graduate school.

I'm consistently disappointed at how narrow-minded most spec. fic. writers are when it comes to theorizing about alternative family structures/gender roles (I include myself here, believe it or not – one of my Clarion compatriots once pointed out the “subtle misogyny” I’d unintentionally zipped into one of my stories – I was raised in this society, too). Maybe because many of the hard-core SF guys are 1) guys in a guy-affirming society 2) more interested in chemistry and biology than sociology, because it’s easier to use “hard” sciences to “prove” social Darwinism.

Le Guin's biggest strength is her background in anthropology and her interest in sociology (though I’m sure she’ll be the first to admit that she writes with her own biases, too). The reason you get some interesting stuff is cause she looks around not only at monkeys and elephant seals, but, you know, PEOPLE. Yes, Brin, she looks at PEOPLE, and the "different" (Read: non-American) societies they create. So you get the freer sexual practices in the Trobiand Islands, the property rights of women in the matrilocal Minangkaba culture, conceptions of androgyny and the ritual of taking on gender roles by aborigines in the Pacific, and societies where *men* make use of adornment and/or feats of skill and dancing (like, you know, all that makeup and plastic surgery in those "women's magazines") in isolated African and South American societies.

And, for the record, I prefer Russ to Le Guin. She’s more radical, and less read.

2 Granted, contemporary America is an extreme case,

No shit.

and even women in secure marriages work on their appearance for a complex of other cultural reasons. Still, no one can reasonably dispute that female humans often do engage in zero-sum contention over an apparently limited supply of suitable males....

“Limited supply of suitable males.” Dear god, what if we run out! What will women do? Heaven forbid they stop hating one another and work together and get really great-paying jobs and then maybe men might have to start adorning themselves to get any interest at all from women who find the idea of being talked down to really tiring. Gosh, what sort of strange society teaches women to hate themselves and each other and vie for male attention because men have (until recently here, and still, in some countries) property rights, access to higher-paying jobs, and more freedom of movement?

Oh, a heterosexist patriarchy. That’s right. Silly me. I forgot. I kept forgetting those examples of, you know, other HUMAN SOCIETIES that have DIFFERENT SEXUAL PRACTICES AND GENDER POLITICS than mine.

Right. Of course.

The presumption goes that human mothers need long-term, dependable partnership to help them carry big-brained, dependent children across the hazardous, exhausting stretch from embryo to maturity. And while some human societies have used brother-sister alliances to fill this need, or communal role-sharing, the majority have left mothers primarily dependent on continued loyalty and aid from the fathers of their children.

I totally agree. Women should have long-term, dependable partnerships in order to help them nurture and raise children.

Absolutely.

But instead of comparing societies where communal childraising works and ones that haven't, Brin’s talking about the necessity of male-female pair bonding in the raising of children. He's talking biology and making the arrangements of childrearing hardwired. He ignores societal difference and potential difference. Is there a biological disadvantage for groups of women to raise children? Or families and friends. Or groups of friends. He’s not even talking about two or three men getting together and agreeing to raise a female friend’s child.

Brin argues that the absence of male father-figures is wrecking the upbringing of children, that women with children who don't pair up with a man are more likely to live in poverty than those that do (I'm ahead of myself here - read the article, or scroll down the next big excerpt to see what I'm referring to here). Yes, this is true. But he's thinking inside the happy-hetero-pair bonding box that even Le Guin has been known to teeter about in (particularly in her earlier work). Women *do* need help raising children. Babies are born essentially helpless. It's difficult for women, in a society not created to support mothers, to raise children and support themselves at the same time.

But Brin puts this essential problem of single mothers and poverty on the shoulders of biology. He blames the inherent, biologically instinctual philandering of men, and the stupid women who irrationally “choose” to bear their children (better hope these same women have access to abortion/contraception and the ability to fight off the attention of men they’re not attracted to). Men just can't help it (don't men find this offensive?). They're naturally looking for lots of partners, and women are naturally just looking for one.

Naturally.

Right?

Um. Excuse me. Doesn't the average marriage last only 7 years in the US? I'd argue that most people are serially monogamous, which is much more biologically advantageous to both sexes. Do we have a lot of long-term friendships? You betcha. Do they all include sex? No. Do some? Sure.

And what's allowed for serial monogamy in women in the US this century is the advancement of women's rights. When women's sexuality is controlled, it's a lot easier to keep up the illusion that women only ever interested in having sex with one man (let alone a couple of women). Alpha Male Number One. Go Team Go. Using "women's magazines" to prove that all women in contemporary America are crazy about finding death-till-you-part male mates is just bad reasoning, lazy "research," and fucking offensive.

Oops, sorry. My claws are showing. Let me compose myself. Ahem.

To put this in perspective with nature at large, consider the extreme case of the elephant seal....

I still have problems with Brin using "women's magazines" as supporting research while comparing the mating habits of men and women to elephant seals. He uses the mating habits of other primates to compare those of contemporary American society. Don't get confused and think he's talking about any other society, because he's not. The only researcher he quotes at length is Hrdy, who has done some great work on primates, but she doesn’t study people. Just primates. But wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's Brin's solution for alleviating the poverty of single mothers in our contemporary society and aiding them in the raising of glorious offspring:

A better remedy might be to help women and girls learn to judge better -- to tell apart the various types of men -- and to distinguish a sincere promise from mere words aimed at an immediate end. In other words, use the tools of science to help young female Homo sapiens do what most females of other species do -- choose as well as they can, despite the complexities of modern context. For many, this could make the difference between a successful, happy life and eventual abandonment in poverty. Indeed, the pages of most women’s' magazines seem obsessed with exactly this effort -- floundering chaotically toward alchemical prescriptions for choice-directed happiness. This effort currently receives virtually no support from feminist intellectuals, who consider the approach ideologically anathema, holding that woman should not base her happiness on marriage or successful mate-choice, even though such success, when achieved, demonstrably leverages improved lives for women and children in all contexts and at all social levels, and furthermore that same success can be perfectly compatible with actualization in career and other areas of life. In other words, a woman who chooses a mate well is also more likely to succeed in areas beyond home and marriage.

The problem is: women are just fucking stupid.

Again, he doesn't give any stats to back any of this up except those still-unnamed "women's magazines."

Brin could have suggested that perhaps women - if socialized in a society that encouraged female cooperation instead of competition, and paid women and men equally for their labor - could form partnerships with one another and pool their resources and raise their children together with friends and family in a supportive network, with or without the aid of the man she had sex with. Instead, Brin says women should be more careful about who they're fucking.

Now, while I certainly believe in cautionary fucking, and while I refuse to carry to term a child who's got half the DNA of a total loser (and, ideally, I wouldn’t be fucking a total loser – but we’re forgetting that telling good people from psychos is a Charles Manson problem, and we’re completely ignoring forced and coercive sex), I'm reading in Brin's solution more of the "blame the woman because we've taught men that it's OK to split when they've spurted some semen" thing. And I see this so much that I get tired.

Is a woman who chooses a good mate more likely to succeed?

Sure.

Does it matter if that mate(s) is(are) male or female?

No.

People who have extensive social networks do better emotionally and financially than those who don’t.

Certainly we should put even greater effort into social conditioning, to try altering the ratio of "storks" to "reindeer" among human males. No doubt education can change the proportionate distribution of types. Unfortunately, those who expect a complete panacea out of socialization are likely to be disappointed. What good will it do to exhort boys not to act like elk, if they see elk-style men having success?

Read: boys are too smart to be socially conditioned!

Even if a program teaching girls to make wise choices were implemented and highly effective, there would still be a rub; for so long as the goal is "one man for each woman" the rules of a zero-sum game continue to apply. There will be winners and losers, and the spectacle of females fiercely competing for quality mates will continue.

To reiterate: women should be socially conditioned!

What bugs me here is “females fiercely competing for quality males.”

Basically, if you read the whole article, you’ll find that Brin argues that, like primates, men are all naturally philanderers. So really, if women just want some quality male sperm, that’s pretty easy to get. What women are apparently supposed to be competing over is a monogamous mate to help them raise said child.

Here’s my question: Why does it have to be the sperm donor who helps her raise her child? After all this talk of men and monkeys, Brin insists that it’s in women’s best interests to secure a mate.

But, why?

If women were equal, why would they HAVE to compete for a “quality male”? Can’t women have good friends of both sexes that help support her financially and emotionally? Why does it have to be a hetero guy?

If women are equal, if they make the same amount of money for the same work as men do, are allowed the same property rights, and etc. why would women have to rely on a live-in sexual partner?

In our society, men have to at least be financially responsible for the children they father because they’ll tend to take off and leave a woman without a social network to fall back on. It’s a problem with male socialization as much as it’s a problem with the US’s complete disinterest in supporting women.

The question Brin never asks is: what do men get out of monogamy? What do men get out of settling down with a “quality woman”? Anything? Any answers?

Sure, he says that maybe some guys will figure out that it’s more “biologically advantageous” to hang around and make sure your offspring survive into adolescents, but really, Brin’s look at human sexuality… ignores the humans.

Sex isn’t all about procreation. It’s not all about splitting DNA. Sex and touching among human beings is social. It helps create social networks. If a guy doesn’t secure himself a social network, he’s as dead in the water as a woman without a social network.

Depression and suicide rates go down for married men. Married men live longer. They have more sex. The reason men get pissed of when women “use” them as fuckbuddies is because it messes with their conception of the sexual paradigm: she’s supposed to need you, not the other way around. It’s not “just” sex men get out of sexual encounters. Any guy who tells you that is selling something. It’s about being looked at with affection, feeling needed and appreciated, and touching another human being. If it was really all about the orgasm, we’d all sit around alone in bed and stop calling each other.

Articles like Brin’s bug me because they ask stupid questions. I read an interview with Hrdy when she was asked about what the biggest difference was between male and female scientists. She said there really wasn’t one: except in the sorts of questions they asked. She and a friend were sitting with a couple of male colleagues, and one of the men said, “We should do a study to find out if women are more interested in sex in the days before menstruation.”

Hrdy and her female colleague looked at each other and laughed. They didn’t need to know “if.” They wanted to know “Why?”

Guys like Brin ask: what can women do so that children in this society are raised better?

They don’t ask: what can society do to enable the best possible environment for children to be raised in?

Guys like Brin ask: What’s the biological reason that a human female generally has to compete with other women to get a mate?

They don’t ask: How is society enabling hetero men in pursing their choice of mate, and teaching men that their desires supercede those of their intended, justifying actions such as rape and coercive sex?

Guys like Brin ask: Why are women using women’s magazines as aids in beautifying themselves for competing against each other for quality mates?

They don’t ask: Why aren’t more men striving to be quality mates?

There’s an assumption of audience going on in these old-white-guy hard science papers that’s off-putting.

When was the last time Brin listened to a woman instead of standing around in a crowded room talking about himself? (in this instance, I speak from personal experience, standing in a room with Brin)

Tripe like this bugs me.

Good Things

Bridget Jones is back.

And... a total Kameron movie: theatre, genderbending, and illicit sex.

Living Vicariously

I know a lot of travelers like this.

War. Booze. And Unrequited Love. ::snicker::

"You must remember this, a kiss is still a
kiss". Your romance is Casablanca. A
classic story of love in trying times, chock
full of both cynicism and hope. You obviously
believe in true love, but you're also
constantly aware of practicality and societal
expectations. That's not always fun, but at
least it's realistic. Try not to let the Nazis
get you down too much.


What Romance Movie Best Represents Your Love Life?
brought to you by Quizilla


War, Booze, and Impossible/Unrequited Love. Doesn't get much better than that!

Calm Before

Fall is my favorite time of year. All those pumpkins, falling leaves, coat weather, dry and sunny days. I pick up my pumpkin on Saturday.

A Softer World

I love this guy. He oozes cynicism.

Check out:

Political Assasin
Robot Boyfriends
Abortion Party
Zombies
Robot Wife
Terrorist Cell

Stuff That Pisses Me Off

If America were Iraq, what would it look like? This is great.

And, from the Guardian: "Poll Giving Kerry Lead Stirs Controversy." Funny, how it's only the polls that give *Kerry* a lead that stir up controversy, huh?

And, you gotta give props to Southern Africa:

MANZINI, Swaziland - Bus conductors in Swaziland vowed on Friday to assault and rape female passengers who wore miniskirts, sparking outrage among women’s groups in the conservative African kingdom.

“We will teach these women respect. We will fix them with our brush handles,” Simon Ndwandwe, a bus conductor from Manzini, said at the bus rank on Friday.

A bus conductor calling himself only Licandza said: “Women who wear miniskirts want to be raped, and we will give them what they want.”

What I love about stories like the above is the bullshit factor. All those skimpy skirts - those men just couldn't contain themselves. Men are such uncivilized animals that they can't contain their lustful urges when staring a woman's legs. Oh, don't feed me this bullshit. It's not only insulting to women, it's insulting to *men*. Call it what it is: asserting male power over women so that men can feel better about themselves. And if you think rape is "no big deal" (something tells me that the sort of guys who say that wouldn't be so quick if asked whether or not they thought being gang-sodomized was their idea of a great time) consider this: the HIV/AIDS infection rate in Swaziland is 38.6% - the highest in the world next to Botswana, who gets the prize with 38.8%.

What always interests me with these gang rape cases, as well, is that many men actually find that they can't get physically aroused, so they end up using things like the above (broom handles) or bottles or something else lying around to assault a woman. I've read of this happening in Vietnam as well, when US soldiers felt that they had to participate in gang rape in order to seem like "one of the guys." The problem was, they really didn't get off on it at all, and couldn't "perform." It's not about the sex. It's not about feeling lustful cause you can see a woman's legs.

Anyone who says it is is lying.

Snapshots From My Worklife, 4

Going out to lunch with the guys is always a fun affair.

It doesn't happen often, as I'm a woman and a glorified admin., but when it does, I have a good time. Last week I went out with Yellow, Blaine, Dee and Jose (one of the architects). We went out to this italian deli (their favorite spot), where we got these olive-oil soaked sausage rolls heaped in cheese and jalapeno peppers. They came in 6in, 9in, and 15in sizes. Blaine, being the ex-football star, got the 15in. The others not only ate 9in subs, but opened up a couple bags of chips, and we all chowed down while Blaine and Yellow and Dee gossiped about all the other guys in the office and talked about how incompetent they were.

I was sitting there with my own 6in oil-soaked sub (which I actually didn't even finish), enjoying the nice full, heavy feeling of eating a greasy spoon meal, and watching these guys eat. It was weird. I imagined sitting at a table here with a bunch of women, and watching them eat this stuff with such reckless abandon. It's something you just wouldn't see unless they were, maybe, a group of truck drivers, or very young. When you see women out together, they're like as not either eating salads or splitting dishes with one another.

Nobody's ordering a 15in sub.

It's not like these guys are skinny. They're all pushing middle-age (Yellow's the youngest, at 33), and every year after 25, the average person gains half a pound of fat and loses half a pound of muscle as the metabolism decreases. Again, this isn't "all," just "average." So these are big guys I'm sitting around eating with, and being there, just... eating, and watching people eat without reserve was sort of... well, it was different. It made me realize how little I hang out with guys anymore (my friendship circle in Alaska was almost exclusively male).

Here I was sitting with guys who were about my size (Dee, Jose, and Yellow are either my height or within an inch or two, and though Yellow pretends to be in good shape, he's got a little pot belly he likes to hide by wearing baggy flannel shirts - women aren't the only ones with image problems, I suppose, but I doubt that pot belly keeps him up at night), and I suspect that only Blaine weighs significantly more than I do, like, by 20lbs or so (Dee and Yellow might weigh a little less than me, but again, not by more than 20lbs or so).

It was the first time I didn't wish I was any smaller. I felt totally average. I liked feeling like these guys were physically my equals - if not in terms of upper body strength, then in terms of mass.

And I thought - why do I still have to feel the female compulsion to be smaller, when it's so obvious that I'm not and never will be anything close to the 5'4, 140lb female average? I want to eat the occasional sausage roll, subsist mainly on eggs and meat and mixed vegetables, and not feel guilty when I go out for Chinese food on Fridays. I just couldn't imagine any of these guys ever feeling bad for eating Chinese food. Why? Because women are supposed to be more forgiving in their assessment of datable men (the guys in my office are overwhelmingly hetero)? Because men are *supposed* to be big? Supposed to take up more space? Be stronger? Be stronger than what, exactly? Why are women who're the same size as guys so scary?
Ha. My worklife.

Fighting & Stuff

Had a good class last night. It was the second "special class" of the month, that is, our usual scheduled programming was replaced by Muay Thai. It was fun, and I had a great partner. She was a frickin' Amazon (5'10 about 190lbs), and after assuring me I wasn't going to hurt her, I pumped up the amount of power I was using in our headlocks and knee strikes, and when we broke, she was hopping up and down and grinning, "We're both really strong!" she said, "This is great!"

So, we kicked the crap out of each other, and I suspect I've got some bruises. It was great.

In any case, I've also found that the monetary difference between "unlimited classes" and "two days a week" for our MA school is $24. For some reason I had a whole other set of monetary increments in my head. I'm definately switching to full-time classes next month.

What Men Want?

Hugo's got an interesting discussion going over at his blog about men's expectations of women's compulsorary smiling, cheerfulness, when men walk around the room.

Check it out.

Here's my response:


I'd agree that, as a woman, you're likely going to measure your smiling/friendliness level depending on how comfortable you feel in a given location (and likely how old you are). I'd also agree that, as a woman, you learn very quickly to gauge your behavior based on the level of threat you feel. Is that right? Does it suck? Sure. But we do it. Because that's how you survive.

When I lived in the NW and later, Alaska, I didn't pay much attention to the "smile" comments (I get these a lot - I'm not a naturally friendly person, and I'm stuck in serious thought more often than not). Most of the "hi"s and "smile"s from Fairbanksans were friendly: men (and women) said hello and passed on by, without demanding any more conversation if I didn't start one; no one followed me, or men sexual invitations. After a time, I became much more relaxed and laid back, to the point where I'd actually take rides with strangers and fine-tuned my "radar" so that I'd take the occasional chance going somewhere alone with a pseudo-stranger. I just didn't find men all that scary. And I had complete trust in my neighbors. If the shit went down, I knew I could count on the vast majority of friendly strangers for help.

Then I moved to a big city. It started while I was overseas, in Durban, South Africa, and I was suddenly being cat-called at, followed, and grabbed at by random passersby. I stopped making eye contact, stopped smiling at strangers, and managed to get these male intrusions on my personal space down to 2-3 a week.

If you think that's just a foreign country thing, wait: then I moved to Chicago. I spend 15 hours a week on the train. The great equalizer. Now I'll get the drunken, "You're very beautiful. Did you HEAR ME? DID YOU HEAR ME??" "Nice peice of ass!" and "Smile!" only once or twice a week. And I do better than most - I'm not little and blond. Not being the cultural ideal of "attractive" you'd think I'd not get harrassed at all, right?

Ha. It's about power.

Age likely has something to do with it as well. I'm still youngish (24). What happens in big cities more often than not (and I can tell you this from experience) is that saying "hello" back to random strange men on the street who say hello will get you 1) followed 2) yelled at, as they attempt to prolong the conversation as they follow you.

Strange men who follow you are scary. Why? Do you watch the news? Do you see the spray of mangled, mutilated female bodies thrust in front of us? Lori Peterson? All the women Manson killed? What about television? What's the proportion of female murder victims to male murder victims on our tv shows and on the news?

My roommate is 5'2, 120lbs. She's from California, and spent her first couple years here in Chicago living in Evanston. When I got here, we moved closer to downtown. She was walking around the corner to pick up videos around this time last year, and passed by a guy coming out of the store. She raised her head as she passed, and smiled, merely acknowledging another person passing her. *HE TURNED AROUND* and *FOLLOWED HER BACK INTO THE VIDEO STORE*. He proceeded to try and make conversation with her. She kept blowing him off. He kept trying to talk. Increasingly agitated, she bundled up her rentals and sped to the exit. *The guy continued to follow her.* As he approached the exit, the woman at the counter called him back (bless her heart), and insisted there were several things she needed to speak with him about regarding his account.

When my buddy got home, she called the woman at the counter to thank her. "Thank goodness you called," the woman said. "I stalled him as long as I could, but when he looked up and saw you were gone, he started swearing and ran out the door. I was seriously hoping you were all right."

My buddy got lucky. It's the only time I've ever encountered anyone in Chicago who stood up for a stranger being harrassed.

That's the worst of the Chicago stories (there are many, many more), but I have a lot of Durban stories too (including an incident at a busstop when two men came up to the thin blond girl next to me and started threatening her with all of the sexual things they were going to do to her, and I turned around and started cussing and screaming at them and telling them they were violating our right to stand there in peace. They were so shocked they just stood there silently for a few moments and then wandered away. "Thanks," the girl told me afterward, "I'm always afraid of standing up for myself because I'm afraid I'm going to get knifed." I was afraid of getting knifed, too), and let me tell you - after that incident at the rental store, my buddy is a lot more careful about who she's friendly with while walking down the street alone.

These are survival tactics. Anybody who says otherwise hasn't lived as a woman in a big city, walking around alone (and in Durban, one *never* walked around at night without a male escort. You just didn't, unless you had a BIG group of women. The rape rate there is 1 in 3).

Is this every woman's experience?

No (obviously, as this little sample has illustrated), likely because of age or geography, women will have different experiences, just as men will have different experiences of interacting with women on the street. What I resent is men's assumption that they have some sort of right to be treated better than anyone else. I don't smile much at women, either.

Is it sexism, to not be friendly to a guy? Do I violate his civil rights by not smiling when he asks it of me? Do I physically abuse him by not saying "hello"? Would anyone ask a *guy* this?

When asked what they fear most about the opposite sex, women will say, "Being raped and/or beaten or killed." Men will say, "Being laughed at."

It says a lot about the rift between most male and female experience, to see those two reactions next to each other. You can sort of see them colliding here as well.

Do men (or women) violate my right to privacy by demanding that I interact with them? I'd argue that yes, they do. You can't force me to interact with you. That's assumption of privilege: believing that the world owes you something.

Women have a right to protect themselves. Scarily enough, that often means being very, very picky about who you're friendly with when you're alone. The legal system is against you.

Should it be that way? Should I be "allowed" to be friendly with whomever I want, without fear of being followed home by some psycho? Sure. That would be great. It would be great to walk down Lawrence in a skimpy skirt at 1am, all by myself, and not worry 1) that I'll be attacked 2) that if I survive said attack and am raped/beaten/mutilated, that the judge won't blame *me* because I was in a skirt at 1am on Lawrence.

There have been a lot of studies done about how many people will "help" you if you're assaulted or verbally abused in a big city. 99% of the time, NO ONE WILL HELP YOU. Or, they'll wait until you're being beaten or raped, and then maybe somebody might slow down and consider what they should do. Maybe.

Why was I so nice in Alaska? Why did I feel so safe?

I opened up the local paper one day to find that a woman who'd flown into Fairbanks for business had been grabbed and pulled into the woods along the road.

THREE CARS STOPPED IMMEDIATELY. One woman grabbed a rifle from the gunrack of her truck, and two men chased down the jogger's attacker before he even managed to wrestle the jogger to the ground. He fled into the woods, and within 20 minutes, there were helicopters searching the area for the attacker.

No offense to Durban or Chicago, but I just don't trust the people here to react in that kind of way. I'm on my own.

I think that if men want to live in a friendlier society, they should take more steps toward eliminating the harrassment of women (Hugo's points here are very valid) in their own peer groups, standing up when someone is verbally or physically harrassed, and refraining from such harrassment themselves.

It's not sexist to not smile at men any more than it's sexist to not smile at women. It's my right.

That said, I think you'll find that everyone is a lot more laid back when they feel safer. And I think a lot of men would be really surprised to realize just how many women walk around hyper-aware of their surroundings and assessing how dangerous the people around them are (particularly the men - we're working on statistics and personal experiences).

If guys want to help change that, go for it - teach other guys how not to be assholes. Evaluate your own behavior. Talk to your female friends about it. Don't get stuck here being pissed off because you feel like it's tougher to get laid because random female strangers won't smile at you. Get over it. Try looking over the fence. You'll find a whole other set of experiences over there. Some of them might actually freak you out.

Gateways to My Blog

On lazy Sundays, I'll often browse through my sitetracker and amuse myself by looking at all the search strings that brought confused users into my blog this week (in addition to the regulars and random "next blog" browsers):

My Darklight post has brought in a few "The Celestine Prophecy was a true book!" types with:

daggoth curses christian
biblical curses> marks of daggoth
marks of daggoth
motorcycle on Darklight on Scifi
"marks of daggoth" (twice)

Then there are the usual "questionable-and-not-so-questionable" attempts to find porn:

tall blonds
mucky women fighters

People looking for info:

africa jogging
ECCENTRIC TIPS PARENTALS
gastic bypass surgery WA STATE
cigar dinner site:blogspot.com

And, the just bizarre:

photo "mary ritter beard "
wo

And, of course, the usual couple "kameron hurley" searches.

I'm always amused at how people get here...

Social Reform (and all that Jazz)

I had a long conversation yesterday with my Republican Atheist brother (now there's a pairing I bet you don't see much) about healthcare, welfare, and Michael Moore. Needless to say, it was a really interesting discussion.

My brother's white, good-looking, and comes from an upper-middle class family. He's never had to worry about healthcare or buy his own car or pay rent (he'll be 20 in December). I totally respect him, however, because though I think his politics are nutty, he comes at them from an informed perspective. He reads both Time and Newsweek regularly, watches CNN, and has been making inroads into the blog forums/online news sources.

He argued that universal healthcare is unsustainable, that France and Germany are seriously reforming theirs (moving over state-funded programs to private programs), and Canada's is in serious financial trouble.

I got to say, well, "What about Scandinavia?"

Of course, Scandinavia does it by taking 40% of your income. But if you don't have to pay for all your public services, your streets are clean, there's only five homeless people in the country, and childcare is subsidized, isn't it worth it?

I knew less about welfare reform in the US, except that I knew about the welfare-to-work programs and the privitazation of welfare. I wasn't certain what our current set-up was.

My brother forwarded me some useful links:

Whitehouse Stance
Urban.org(unfortunatley, this link provides info about welfare in 1995, before Clinton's 1996 retooling - but it provides a history of welfare reform)
LibertyNet (overview)

We appear to still be stuck in that tricky welfare-to-work program, which gets people one or two (or three) minimum wage jobs, kicks them off welfare, and keeps them living out of their cars (my brother rightly pointed out that this program was put into place by Clinton). Check out Enrenreich's Nickel and Dimed for more about what these sorts of programs really do for families.

Another one of our debates was about raising minimum wage to a living wage of, say, $11 an hour. He argued that this would cause inflation. My buddy Jenn (we were just speaking of this) pointed out that most min. wage workers spend most of their money at the sorts of places that hire min. wage workers (Walmart, fast-food, local diners, etc), so, say, that my dad (who has a couple of pizza restaurants) would have to pay his workers more money, so he'd have to raise the price of his pizza, right? But... would people who had more money just buy more pizza? Apparently, economists are just as confused about what really happens as the rest of us. Here are some more factoids about minimum wage (updated July 2004).

"Why I'm Not Voting for GWB"

It's still a sad day when most people aren't voting *for* the democratic candidate: they're voting *against* the President (I include myself in this category).

And, of course, I'm pretty stuck on this one: one wants to limit women's health choices. One believes they should have choices. I'm pretty stuck on that issue alone. Not to mention the whole "voting back in a totalitarian regime" thing.

Ha. I'm only half-joking about the totalitarian thing.

via Simon