Caveat Lector

I recently added Feminist SF — The Blog! and Written World to my home blogroll. Also don’t miss Girl Wonder if you’re a comics geek, and perhaps even if you’re not.

Some of the discussions in these venues can sound frighteningly like the current libraryland dustup over sexism, the latest episode of which is Karen’s. (Oh, and y’all? Don’t make this about feminism. It isn’t about feminism. It’s about sexism. Let’s kindly remember that, and not get distracted by waving red capes. Er, so to speak.)

Take, for example, this thorough dissection of a brain-dead remark by Marvel’s Joe Quesada about female representation amongst comics creators. Section II in particular is highly relevant to Karen’s post’s comment section, and don’t miss the quote by Laura Q of Feminist-SF!

I honestly wonder if Dr. Miller (and it is Dr., and I apologize for not having used the title previously; I wasn’t aware he held it) understands how insulting an “I can’t find good women!” claim is in librarianship. This is a majority female profession, for those following along at home. Mostly-male panels, mostly-male conference-speaker rosters, mostly-male administrations—they proclaim “A minority of men is smarter and more able than the majority of women.”

There’s no acceptable way to make this claim in librarianship. Just no way. If you’re not finding capable women in this field, you’re not looking or you’re driving them off. Even in systems librarianship where the gender ratio is skewed masculine compared to the rest of the field, if you’re not finding, you’re not looking. Laura Q just told you why you’re not looking, and Karen explained clearly in her post’s comments why sitting back and waiting for female speakers to fall from the nearest tree is a losing strategy. So go look.

I recommend a very simple weak-ties technique, for starters: when a speaker turns you down, ask him or her to recommend other speakers. Make a point of following up with this question if the speaker who turned you down is likely to have a significantly different professional network from you. Asking best buds for recs, especially if your network’s demographics are pretty much like yours and one of your goals is to broaden your speakers’ demographic range, isn’t going to expand your horizons.

I won’t comment on Dr. Miller’s “I won’t beg,” because if I did, it’d get ugly. It does, however, lead me a long way past Dr. Miller to the beyond-the-pale phenomenon that sends my blood pressure into the stratosphere, the phenomenon I was dismayed and disheartened to find in my chosen field: forthrightly misogynistic jokes.

I understand how representation issues become invisible. I do. I don’t blame Dr. Miller for getting caught out; he’s far from the only one, and I do believe given the exchange in Karen’s comments that he’s going to put some real effort into diversifying his corner of the library world. So go him.

I also understand knee-jerk defensive reactions. I have to talk myself down from them too, generally around issues of race or class (where I’m privileged and I know it). I’ve been hard on Dr. Miller about his in this post, because knee-jerk defensiveness is not (she said sheepishly) an attitude that wins friends and influences people. In fact, in my experience (on both the offense-giving and offense-receiving end of things) it magnifies an original error a hundredfold. At least.

What I don’t understand is how anyone can think that a sexist joke is acceptable in company containing strangers (never mind professional colleagues). Sure, stuff gets said around people you know well that in any other context would be out of line. But… around people you don’t know all that well… why why why? And yet it happens. When I say “tech-boy locker room” and “Cro-1337non Man,” y’all, this is what I mean. Oh, and, um, don’t ask me to be specific in public unless you really, really mean it, because I can curl your toes with some of the stuff I’ve personally witnessed, and some of my friends have experiences that make my toes curl.

What makes a Cro-1337non? I won’t even speculate, though I’m fond of the “their folks didn’t raise ’em right” theory. It’s not that they’re single; I know married Cro-1337nons. It’s not that they’re youngsters; the ones I know are more than old enough to know better. I don’t know why they’re out there. I’ll just assert that they’re out there, and they’re a problem. Since libraryland’s Cro-1337nons are naturally concentrated in systems… I don’t need to finish this sentence, do I? Supply your own ending. Or three. Could Cro-1337nonist disrespect among library-software vendors be part of the problem libraries have getting what they want and need? I dunno. Could be.

I think part of the difficulty (and Mr. G-rm-n will have yet another reason to want my head on a pike after this) is that librarianship doesn’t have enough native-born techies. We find ourselves forced to import from the exterior, and the exterior is brim-full of the Slashdot demographic, prime examples of Cro-1337non Man.

Librarian techies don’t have to be female to fix the problem, though. If it accomplishes nothing else, sitting through an MLS will teach just about any guy the basic rules for coping with a roomful of women. A CS degree, not so much. And in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, guybrarians mostly aren’t the problem, though I’ve met one or two systems guybrarians I wouldn’t personally want to work with on this account, and other guybrarians I could name have been known to magnify existing problems with knee-jerk defensiveness.

Did I mention “Don’t do that?” with regard to defensiveness? Oh, good. “I acknowledge the problem,” “I’m sorry,” “I’ll fix it,” and “I’ll try not to do it again” are vastly more useful (and, of course, kinder and more courteous) reactions. A defensive reaction to a complaint makes the complainant, who was undoubtedly nervous and unhappy about complaining in the first place, feel many times more nervous, unhappy, and unwelcome. Been there, done that, left the T-shirt behind me.

And for heaven’s sake, if you want to avoid the Cro-1337non label, don’t whinge about how a given group was so much freer and nicer in the old days (before, you know, all those women started demanding some respect), how self-censorship is such a drag. (Yes, has happened.) That’s heinous. That’s saying that lousy sexist jokes are more important to you than the women around you. What self-respecting woman wouldn’t seek friendlier shores?

A particular pet peeve of mine is being asked to monitor a Cro-1337non Man, or a group that contains them, for faux pas. (Yep. Has also happened.) Often this is well-meant, but it still rankles. I don’t like to worry about other people’s behavior; I have enough trouble keeping tabs on my own! Never mind that I can’t relax and enjoy a social group if I’ve been cast as its den mother. Nor, I might add, can the other group members be entirely comfortable around me. How could they? I’ve been told to judge them!

The more fundamental problem, though, is that I’m being asked to solve a problem I didn’t create and bear zero responsibility for. I ain’t nobody’s mama, nor nobody’s nanny, nor nobody’s etiquette coach, and I decline to be nominated to these roles merely because someone else’s behavior shows a need for them. Cro-1337non Man needs to change his attitudes or at the least learn to self-monitor, and there’s plenty of reading material on and off the Web to help him. (I recommend the Women in Linux HOWTO, for starters.)

An awful lot of good work and good intent can be unraveled by one Cro-1337non. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s how it is—any techie woman you name has been dealing with Cro-1337nons for ages, and she’s learned to vanish when they turn up. That’s especially dangerous in librarianship, because nothing gets done in a library without a woman involved somewhere. Frustrated library techies take note; if you want change in libraries, you need women, so don’t tick ’em off over something as stupid and pointless as sexist jokes.

Whether we hunt down the Cro-1337nons or just out-compete ’em till they go extinct, the sooner they’re gone, the more gender-representative systems librarianship will be compared to the rest of the field, and the more pleasant it will be to be a female systems librarian. Believe me, I’m all for that!