Bitesize For Glory

Here we go!

Secretly confirming the myth that all girls want to be princesses

Because if even rampant feminists like royal fantasies once in a while, then surely that makes it universal to all womankind. Or maybe I just like Princeless because she has the same name as me.

I've still been busy in the comic world since my last post about it, and one of the things I discovered was this amazing comic, which turns the "princess locked in a tower" trope into a systematic thing and then has one particular princess and her guard dragon escape together, so the princess can disguise herself as a knight and go off to rescue her other six sisters, who are also all locked up around the kingdom. She teams up with a half-dwarf blacksmith who is similarly cool. Oh, and the princess is called Adrienne! Did you notice that? That's really cool.

The comic is occasionally a little self-conscious about trope busting - notably, there's a scene about bikini armour which is really quite forced (haha! the female smith character never even considered that women could wear full protective armour! haha... wait, what?) and book two sets up a "big mystery" which is pretty obvious within ten pages, although it seems like it's meant to be a long-running thing. But hey, it's all-ages, and it's incredibly good at lampooning misogynistic characters as well as expanding racial diversity beyond the "white people and mythical creatures" dichotomy that fantasy usually relies on. Also there is a great scene about hair management, which is always a winner for me.

You can check out Princeless some more at its tumblr, here, which includes download links if you go far enough. Princess Adrienne! How cool is that.

Pronouns for trans people

Should be the pronouns the individual requests. If a person says they are a woman, it's common knowledge to even novice english speakers that the correct pronouns are "she", "her" and "her[s]". This does not involve difficult mind-blowing questions about the nature of gender, because pronouns for men and for women are deeply ingrained into our language and it is very simple not-even-trans-101 to learn that trans women are women.

Now you know this, you can go and despair at the absurd number of news websites who are wrong in their coverage of Chelsea Manning.

Miss Tibet

I follow the Tibetan human rights activist Woeser on Twitter, ostensibly to practice my Chinese although really it's for when she puts up interesting stuff like this. I have mixed feelings about this sort of portrayal of Tibet and very mixed feelings about beauty pageants, especially those designed by men for women. Some of the video editing is also unintentionally hilarious, which is unfortunate. But it's still worth watching with a critical eye. And at least the organiser personally asked the Dalai Lama what he thinks of beauty pageants, so that's definitely a great opinion to have. Right?

Medieval poison rings were totally a thing that existed

Hey, you know what, let's play up the poisonous devious women stereotype briefly to point out how cool this is! Evidence would suggest it was used in Bulgaria by men, to kill other men, making it disappointingly like the vast majority of other weapons in human history. Still. Poison ring!

Doctor Jude Roberts, Porn User

You might have recently seen an image doing the rounds of a BBC Newsnight program in which a woman discussing pornography got effectively stripped of her doctorate by some hapless caption people. She wrote about the experience (and more on her stance on porn) for Femusings, and it's an excellent read.

And... that's a wrap!

Yes, dear reader: 30 days, 30 blogs. 29 on here, one exclusively on Femusings. I came, I saw, I wrote a lot of things even when I really didn't want to write anything at all (the tooth thing is still a thing, although the antibiotics are finally starting to work their magic thank goodness). Hopefully many of these things were enlightening for you! Most of them make me pretty happy.

What's next? Well, there will not be one blog every day again for quite some time. There will probably be no blogs at all here for at least a week whilst I read, recharge, enjoy the bank holiday weekend and hopefully kick this infection once and for all. BUT there will be a second "around the world" piece for Femusings over the weekend, and Stuff I like Sunday will return as a regular fixture from Sunday September 1. Depending on how busy I get and how prolific I remain without being under pressure, bitesize blogging may also become a regular fixture. I quite enjoy it!

In the long term, this blog is going to remain the major home for all of my discussion of media and culture, and for image- and link-heavy things that I want to do that belong on personal blogs like this. My news and current affairs pieces will be over on Femusings, and I'm not sure yet how much longer I will keep cross posting for - but they'll still exist, they just won't be on this particular website any more!

Thanks very much for reading (no matter how much or how little you actually read) and watch this space- I'll be back very soon.

Men and Laurie Penny and PAIN OW PAIN (30 days of blogging day 29)

Hello world! I'm still on barely-acceptable amounts of pain medication, as well as several days of antibiotics, copious amounts of corsodyl and worst of all a period of enforced sobriety right at the moment when my parents restocked the beer fridge with delicious raspberry cider. I've actually started a couple of proper articles, got a paragraph through them, and then had my face start paining so hard I actually just want to take a pair of scissors to the inside of my mouth and see if stabbing it might make it hurt less. At this point I'm going with "maybe"!

 I am so extraordinarily impressed by anyone who does pain management on a regular basis. I know usually people have more resources than just paracetamol and ibuprofen but still ‒ I consider myself a relatively hardy person and having this for just three days has already left me so behind and up in the air on all the things I have to do. Anybody who copes with something like this for longer- you're incredible. Coping with your body pulling this on you is incredible, doing anything on top of it is superhuman. Wow, you.

Anyway, this was going to be a lead-in to a bitesize article, but I actually ended up writing something reasonably long about one single topic so I'm seamlessly integrating now. Here is my seamless integration, isn't it great? Oh boy my mouth hurts. It's about half an hour until I can have another painkiller.

So Laurie Penny's article about men has been doing the rounds on my Facebook, and it's got me thinking about dudes again. I know, lame right? If you haven't read that article, go and do so, because it's a thought-provoking read both for its content (which I pretty much agree with) and for its tactics. The discourse has been concentrating so much on the minds of men who do seem to hate women recently, it seems like a good time to point out that most individual men don't hate women (although the ones that tell you they're good to women because they have sisters are probably lying). But it's also important to figure out how to reconcile the fact that, yes, most men are good people who want equality with the fact that no, we don't actually have equality and few people even realise what it would look like and derailing the few strands of discussion we have going really doesn't help anyone.

So enter Laurie Penny, to point out that there's a difference between woman hating individuals and a woman hating culture, and we accept that most men are not the former but all belong to the latter, whether they like it or not, and it's quite right to be angry about that but not right to direct this anger at women. So far so good, although more so than with any other feminist article, for the love of god do not read the comments here. Based on what I've seen around though, this article doesn't have quite the universally enlightening effect that you might have hoped.

What has been missing from the discussions I've seen so far (and hey, I have a paragraph, but OH GOD OH GOD PLEASE PLEASE STOP HURTING AHH WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE YOU STOP I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL CLOSE THIS WINDOW JUST ARGH NO OW OW OW you get the point) is an understanding of the difference between discrimination and sexism, and about how we can talk about the inequalities men see in a way that helps the general equality debate. Because, yes, a lot of the time those discussions are about how men are seen when caring for children, or worrying about being seen to be a bad person when you don't feel like you've done any of the things you're being accused of, or why nobody seems to care that there are women-only sports in the olympics but not men-only ones, isn't that sexism too? Sometimes this sort of stuff is derailing can't-win nonsense from uninteresting weirdos, but more often it's meant genuinely, and it's unfortunate that the existence of the former can make us a lot less amenable to dealing with the latter.

Discrimination and sexism are two different things, because sexism requires a power structure. This does rely on a bit more of an academic definition of sexism than is often understood, but at heart it's a simple point and it's one that bears repeating again and again and again when we talk about men in feminism. Men do deal with discrimination for being men, sometimes - and sometimes, the big example being with fathers, it's in very big, obvious areas of their lives! But these discriminatory experiences don't actually harm the overall superiority of men in society, and here's the important bit: they're usually because men are trying to do something feminine, and getting ridiculed for it. They face discrimination because being coded feminine is considered inherently negative for men, and therefore doing one of the relatively few femimine coded activities is dubious at best, taboo at worst.

Penny's article is a powerful argument for the difference between cultures and individuals which is important in underpinning why feminist discourse needs to discuss generalisations about systemic sexism without having every  decent man have to individually note they are an exception. Next up I hope is the powerful argument about why if men want to tackle this inequality (as most do, because as much as we are driven to despair by them sometimes, most men do believe in equality and want it to be true in the world they live in) the way to start tearing down barriers for both women and men is to confront why we devalue femininity so much.

It's the old "sexism hurts men too!" chestnut in a different form, I know. I'm not saying we hand over space to endless postulating about why men are portrayed as stupid in adverts or what would happen if the draft came back. But if talking about feminine-coded activities is the gateway drug to getting men to confront the systemic sexism which makes those activities "wrong" for men, then fine, I'll have that conversation as many times as I can stomach.

This is not the powerful argument article. Not yet. Maybe later. Time for mouthwash.

Is this the end for our intrepid heroine?

It's day twenty eight! That's four full weeks of blogging, possibly more than anybody else in the entire universe has ever done before. If there were gold medals for blogs, I would be tearing down this analogy's equivalent to a track right now, the end in sight, knowing I was about to win the big prize and everything was going to be OK. And yet! In the final lap, disaster! Sprained ankle! Broken leg (although that didn't stop that olympic relay runner)! Or in this specific case, extreme chronic pain from a wisdom tooth that's been completely fine for about three years and has suddenly decided it hates the world!

(This is totally me pandering to the people who get to this blog by Googling 'dentist Drilling in "my mouth" '. Ok the one person. Look, I'm a useful blog for all your dental needs, one person! Come back soon!)

Anyway, I am literally sitting here chewing a garlic clove.Which genuinely works by the way, although it works best in combination with constant barely-within-instructed-dose cocktails of ibuprofen, paracetamol and teething gel, but no, I can testify that on its own, the ibuprofen, paracetamol and teething gel does not stop the constant shooting pains from throat to ear, but putting raw garlic in your mouth at least makes you question what hurts most. This is the most distractingly, unpleasantly painful thing to happen to me since I got a cough for half a year and strained my intercostal muscles (not recommended). There are lots of pains that I can just power through but this is really not turning out to be one of them.

I'm pulling up. I'm staggering on. The commentators are confused and possibly holding back the tears as the culmination of my journey moves from triumph to heartbreak.

Or something like that. I don't even know, I think these barely-within-instructed-dose drugs are doing things to my head that aren't just (aren't even) "taking away pain". Go and read this thing by Dr. Jude Roberts, Porn User while I find some more effective garden herbs to chew. See you tomorrow.

You've probably never heard of her.

As we come into the final week of Blog Every Day, I've had some more time to reflect on the impact it's had on the past few weeks. There's been some really great effects, like making 26-and-counting new pieces of writing in one form or another. There's also been some things that haven't changed, like my conviction that I don't ever have any good ideas for writing ‒ objectively, I'm genuinely not a prolific question-generator but an "oh, there's one idea, looks good enough, let's go with it" type of person", but evidence would suggest I do come up with some interesting things to talk about ‒ and some things that have actually been pretty rubbish. Foremost among the rubbish things has been the imbalance between the new data collections and potential information I'm taking in, and the amount of time I have to actually sit down with some of the stuff I've collected and really get to grips with it. I miss reading things that aren't on seven columns of Twitter! 

There's a similar trade-off with living at home. On the one hand, I have already gushed about how amazing my living space currently is, especially compared to the cupboard dorm I was living in in China. On the other hand, I have to get up reasonably early each morning to make sure my dog doesn't eat the post. It's all one big, exciting trade-off. The most exciting thing about being at home, of course, is having a telly that gets english channels and the most exciting thing on that telly is the wonderful afternoon quiz show Pointless.

A ridiculous number of these appear to be uploaded to Youtube, so if you like you can discover the magic for yourself, but basically the premise is this: four teams have to give answers to questions in different categories: either by naming something that fulfils a certain criteria (Matt Damon films, eponymous Beatrix Potter characters, nationalities that end in -ian) or by answering something from a set of themed questions. The catch is that these questions have all been asked to 100 hapless bystanders somewhere in the country before the show, and each answer has a score based on the number of bystanders who answered it right. The aim is to score as low as possible, which you do by giving answers that most of the 100 people didn't know. An answer that none of the 100 people knew is a Pointless answer, both because you got no points and because it is likely to be a very obscure piece of knowledge that you had no use for before coming onto a quiz show. It's great because sometimes they ask questions in categories where I can't possibly see how anybody could get anything wrong (like how could you not name every male Disney hero, who doesn't know what the Beast's real name is in this day and age, come on) and I feel very clever, and also because despite both being male, the presenters have some pretty awesome banter.

Therefore, in honour of my favourite daytime TV show, and of things I desperately want to read more about, let's play a Pointless inspired game! I am going to show you five pictures of different awesome women, and you are going to see which ones you can recognise. I haven't gone to the lengths of asking 100 people to tell me if they know them because if I had time to do that, I'd just read the damn books I want instead. But here goes:

Number 1: 

I may be deliberately choosing pictures of women who look like they will take no shit from anyone. Which is... ironic.

Number 2:

Occupation should be easy here at least...

Number 3:

Too easy again!

Number 4:

... yeah.

And finally, number 5:

This one's technically the easiest but I've made it harder by choosing another "not taking your shit" picture.

If we were playing the gameshow, this is the point where pairs of contestants would be looking at each other in horror, wondering why they are trapped with such an awful subject as "awesome women" (to be fair it is a little broad). If you don't guess right, you score the maximum 100 points which as we can all agree would be terrible for everyone involved, because TV quiz shows are very serious business. Anyway, think for a while about who you know out of those women, and how many other people you think 

Alright. Thought enough? Let's go through the board, as they say. Up there are the top in Number 1 is Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, who casually formulated the theory that the majority of the universe was made of hydrogen and helium in her doctorate thesis. Second is Mae Jemison, epic physicist who was the first African-American woman astronaut and the first real astronaut to also appear in Star Trek. Third is Stephanie Kwolek, who is holding kevlar in that picture because guess what, she invented it. Fourth, Nellie Bly, or Elizabeth Jane Cochran as she was secretly known to non-readers, who faked insanity to undertake one of the first pieces of investigative journalism from a women's mental institution in 1887 (she was trying to avoid being forced to write the "culture" section). And last is the "easy" one, Ada Lovelace, who effectively invented computer programming about a century before computers actually came about. How did you do at home?

I'm being a little unfair, because scientists of both genders are rarely recognisable visually unless they're either a bit of a celebrity like Professor Brian Cox. But even without making you guess from photos, how many of those women did you actually know about before that paragraph? My guess is "not five". Cecelia Payne-Gaposckin is almost definitely a "pointless" answer, despite the fact that she figured out the composition of 75% of the universe in her PhD thesis. How many soldiers and police officers (and skiiers!) running (or skiing) around in their kevlar know that they owe this innovation in their safety (or skiing speed (or in the case of Scandinavia, both)) to a mere woman? And this is not even scratching the surface of the historical women I wanted to talk about here. Rosalind Franklin, whose work was integral to the understanding of DNA, is held up as the prime example of a woman who was screwed over and shoved aside by the men she was working with. Gertrude Bell, whose new biography is sitting on my Kindle begging to be read, spent decades in British colonial politics in the 19th century ‒ a very dodgy area to be celebrating, so don't think for a minute I am, but she spent that time fighting for independent Arab countries during the colonial period and eventually helped to install Hashemite dynasties in Iraq and Jordan, which was politically quite momentous*. Despite this, you're much more likely to have heard of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, and who discovered nuclear fission? Not just Otto Hahn.

These women are all anything but pointless. They all did incredible things that change the ways we live in ways both big and small. But we completely overlook most of them when we look back at history, in favour of thinking that history is a men's game. Women have been adding to the stock of human knowledge, often against huge personal odds, for as long as human beings have been around, and we've been casually taking that knowledge and forgetting where it came from for just as long. And then people look back at the historical record and have the gall to suggest that because they don't "see" women, there must be something particular about men which just makes them naturally better at all these things. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking it's a particular problem of the current age that the best self-publicists win out over the most talented people in a lot of fields, but really this has been going on for quite some time. And it's much easier to self-publicise, or to get other people to like you, when they're not instead spending all their time suggesting you are worthless and out of place.

From Friday onwards, I get a bit of a break from extreme writing, and whilst I certainly won't be shutting up after that, I'm very much looking forward to having some time to actually read and reflect on some of the things I've collected about these women, and a million other topics, in the last month. Not just because I'm a rabid feminist who only thinks women are interesting (although that becomes more true every day, to be honest), or because I'm about to write a novel involving historic women scientists (FACT, so pass on any and all others that cross your mind if you are an expert on this topic because chances are I only know a fraction of what I should still!). Mostly, because these are not pointless people, and shouldn't be in any sense of the word.

*I should also point out that she was a member of the anti-suffrage league because too many women thought they belonged in the kitchen and bedroom! and shouldn't be in politics! So with that and the whole colonial figure thing I'm not actually suggesting she is any kind of feminist hero, just that she's a woman who did stuff in history that you don't know about. Which is the kind of person I am talking about here.

Stuff I like Sunday: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Oh yeah, the big one. The holy grail. The show that went on in the late 1990s where a small blonde high school girl kicked evil in the arse repeatedly while dealing with serious high school things, and then grew up and dropped out of college and had to deal with even more serious life things, but still all the arses needed kicking all the time and that was no problem because hey, she's the Slayer! Nothing wrong or weird about that.

I could actually make this entire blog post just videos interspersed with overlong gushy sentences.

But no, let's do some writing! I first discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1998, back when I was still a young thing who should probably not have been watching violent shows aimed at teenagers (although to put it in perspective, my brother's favourite films growing up were Starship Troopers and Predator...) I was completely hooked, downloaded all the episodes onto VHS when Fox Australia did their whole season marathons (Slayerfest!) and spent a lot of the next few years writing endless juvenile stories about myself as the slayer, except of demonic frogs rather than vampires.

There were a few things I thought were weird about the show when I was nine. I thought it was strange that even though Buffy and Angel were clearly meant to be together forever, he turned evil in Season 2, wouldn't really talk to her in Season 3 and then left altogether to do his own crazy Angel thing. What's with that? Similarly, I didn't really like Spike coming back without Drusilla in Season 4, especially as it ruined the symmetry- Spike and Drusilla are supposed to be one entity! One Big Bad! You can just imagine how I felt about the Troika in Season 6. On many levels. I also had friends at school who thought it was very unrealistic that Willow would give up places at top universities in order to go to UC Sunnydale, because obviously you go to the academic best university that you are given a place at with no consideration for other factors, right?

It did not seem at all weird to me at the time that this would be a female-fronted show where women characters in general are seen as far more powerful and in touch than the men around them. Likewise, it didn't seem weird ‒ once I'd accepted the idea that characters can have more than one romance in their lifetimes ‒ that Willow would fall in love with Tara and be a lesbian from that point onwards. To be fair it also didn't seem weird that Buffy's entire life was defined by antagonisms with male authority figures (yes, and her Mum, that's true) but hey. It wasn't perfect, but there's nothing else that's ever been like it.

Proof that Buffy was better than everything that came after, if you ever needed it:

I actually thought I had much more to say about Buffy - after all, it's one of the only shows I know of with its own dedicated journal, Slayage - but actually I'm going to leave this here, if only to avoid looking up more amazing videos. This was one of the very best shows for representation of women, and it ended ten years ago, and there's been nothing quite like it since. Why is that? Hmm.

How does one get from quantum mechanics to feminism?

I ask you. In all seriousness.

Today, I did a lot of things. I played on my Iphone, because fictional high schools still don't run themselves and neither do fictional tower blocks or South American  airlines. I hope that my audience understands that even though I didn't write "fictional" before that last one, I am not yet in charge of a real South American airline, but this is excellent practice because it has taken me from only knowing one north Brazilian city (Manaus, with a squiggly maybe?) to knowing at least four. My favourite is Belem, because it sounds like a Pokemon. In between this very important airline management, I did job search stuff, because I am legally obliged to do that and actually do secretly really want a job, as great as this all freeblogging all the time thing is. I also spent a really long time doing my first week of quantum mechanics for UC Berkeley.

I have brought up the quantum mechanics (and its precursor, Learning Linear Algebra for Fun) a couple of times, but it has been pretty much irrelevant most of the time. And it still is. Basically, upon arriving home, I decided that my life would probably sort itself out without me pushing it and therefore the best thing for me to do would be to just find things to do whilst the mystical universal forces work their magic. I also became briefly obsessed with Skills with the capital S, which any chronic self-undervaluer will know means "literally all the things that I can't do yet." Being a young person and a woman and also maintaining a constant conviction that the things life has taught you so far make you worthy of getting paid for your labour are three facts that are difficult to balance in this modern world. Luckily, it's summer, and challenges make me take on ridiculous projects rather than curling up into a ball and sleeping!

So, along with the birth of 30 days of blog, there was a concurrent line of thought: "how do I prove to myself/ the world /every condescending scientist and mansplainer who has ever passed unwanted judgement on my life and abilities POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS (ugh) that I am truly an updated renaissance woman, capable of doing pretty much anything I set my mind to and also science is not so hard, look!" The answer was quantum physics on EdX. I enrolled, noticing that they wanted something called linear algebra as a prerequisite skill set. "no problem," I said, "of course I can do things with numbers in a line"! Then I actually looked at the diagnostic test and re-remembered that there are things called vectors which I have not seen since I was 18 years old, and also I only ever did one Maths A-level (foreigners: there are two) so all the linear algebra I had actually come across was "this is a vector, add it to another vector, also scalar multiplication, OK bye!"

Oh what a magical world of numbers ensued. Sort of. I got partway through the preparation and then got bored and distracted by things are less formula heavy and, in most cases, more edible. Then the course completely took me by surprise by starting last week. I had a single week to get up to speed on enough algebra and figure out everything there was to know about qubits.

Which I did. With two days to spare. 100% in homework one, YEAH. There were some hairy moments whilst my brain rediscovered the concept of radeons, and I'm still dreading the point when e comes in ‒ Euclid, who are you and why was the time I learned your constant's rules so long ago? ‒ but otherwise I am down with qubits and the double slit experiment and ready for whatever else quantum physics decides to throw at my strong sexy artist brain.

I'm still pretty sure none of this has anything to do with my original thoughts in taking the course though. Is any employer going to look at my CV, go "oh I see you passed a free online university course in quantum physics", and realise I am exactly the candidate they have been looking for all this time? Sort of unlikely ‒ although if this does sound like your organisation, and you work somewhere in either public policy or the non-profit sector, and you have a job... you know where I am. Seriously! In lieu of actual prospects, however, I'll have to rely on my innate love of learning and, more importantly, the sense of extreme satisfaction that comes from setting yourself an impossible challenge and then winning. Everything is important if it helps reinforce your ridiculous internalised ideas about success and worthiness!

What of our above question? What does any of this have to do with this blog's actual topic. Well, I googled "feminist quantum physics", and it is totally a thing that people are trying to make happen. Like this lady! I have no idea what to make of this theory and I have a reading list that is much too long and interesting to put her on it, but hey! Maybe one day, this whole linear algebra and quantum mechanics business will pave the way for my great feminist insight of the century. A girl can dream.