Caveat Lector

So I wandered onto my favorite IRC channel one day. It was a Thursday. How’s it going, I asked.

About usual for Thursday, said another regular on the channel. Snorting cocaine off a dead hooker’s leg.

It wasn’t what Kathy Sierra is going through. It wasn’t personal, heaven knows. It wasn’t pointed at me. It wasn’t even intended to be offensive.

But I never went back to that channel after that.

There’s a continuum. All of this stuff is on it. It’s damned hard to tell where stuff falls sometimes.

Please try to stay off it. Please. And I will too.

After yesterday’s grouchy post I got emails from several quarters indicating that yes, men get asked about their wives. I believe these folks. So I was wrong, and I’m sorry.

They pointed out to me that the supposition isn’t necessarily that either partner is evil, just that job situations can force evil choices on good people (especially in academia, noted one correspondent). This is certainly a truth; I’m lucky not to have faced it directly, though my husband’s original intransigence over moving away from Madison got us uncomfortably close to it.

No excuses; I’m stressed lately for all the obvious reasons, but I didn’t have to take it out on my officemates and the world in general. I’ll try not to do it again.

So this friend of yours just announced he got a new job and will be moving out of town. What are the first three questions that pop into your head to ask him?

Right, right, where and what, naturally. (You might want to know how much, but you’re not going to up and ask, so that doesn’t count.) What’s the third question?

Yeah. I’m guessing that’s a stumper. Either that, or you can think of ten questions you might ask, but not one that you’re sure you would ask.

Okay, so explain to me, please, why every last colleague I have at work (minus, I will say, the World’s Coolest Boss, who is far too much the gentleman) has asked me some variant on “What’s your husband going to do?” or “Is your husband okay with it?”

Double-yoo. Tee. Effity-eff?

I’m genuinely confused. Do I come across as so horribly self-absorbed that they think I didn’t consult with him? (I didn’t even apply until I’d talked to him, as it happens.) Does he come across as such a patriarchal control-freak that I can’t possibly accept a job without his notarized signature? (Um, no. There might be a less patriarchal man in this country than my husband, but I must say I haven’t met him.) Are gender roles in this country still so effed up that the man in a given heterosexual couple is automatically presumed to have a veto over all major decisions? Not a say, mind you, but a veto?

Ah. Aha. That’s looking a little more plausible. And I’m sorry, but the assumption pisses me right the hell off.

Next time I get this question I’m thinking about answering, “No, he loves Fairfax so much that we’re getting a divorce and he’s staying behind” with a perfectly straight face. Honestly, I half think that’s the answer some people are expecting!

It’s possible that my social deafness is such that I haven’t realized that men get asked this about their wives too. It’s certainly nothing I would ever think to ask; my presumption is that the couple arrives at a mutually-acceptable agreement behind closed doors. Ever so nunuvmybizness.

But honestly, I don’t think men get this question. I just don’t.

I’m fat, graying, scarred, unfashionable, generally homely as the proverbial mud fence. It bothers me less and less these days, and today I was reminded why.

At break, I met another DSpace admin, who will remain anonymous in this post for reasons that will shortly become obvious. Unlike me, she is young and conventionally quite attractive. She introduced herself to me, and we talked DSpace geekery for a bit before she said in a low voice, “I was glad to see another woman in the room. There was this guy from [locale deleted] behind me who was going on and on about taking me out, and you helped me escape him.”

In other words, some creepwad came on to her. At a PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCE.

For future reference, I am always available as a haven for folks in like case. I give off plenty enough ugly vibes (never mind “tall and hefty and imposing-looking” vibes) to make these wankers piss off.

I don’t know who the perp was. I don’t want to know (though if I find out, he should worry). Right now I just want to tell him, loudly and publicly, that he needs to cut that crap out NOW. No woman should have to “escape” people in a professional setting. EVER.

And yet it happens. Not to me, because I’m old and fat and ugly and married. But it happens. And it shouldn’t. And when the hell is it going to damned well stop?

I don’t actually read David and Leigh Eddings. They’re in my personal category of pulp epic fantasy so clumsy and derivative that I don’t even find it fun as a light read.

But I do want to call out the odd circumstance of Mr. Eddings at last admitting that Ms. Eddings co-wrote just about everything published under his name. (I’m making the entry in The Book a joint entry. I hope I’m not the first, and I’d just better not be the last.)

The fact of the co-writing is not odd. The fact of the co-writing’s lengthy concealment isn’t odd either. Concealment of female contributions happens all the time—not just in genre fiction, not just in fiction, not just in writing, but all the time.

But acknowledging it? Setting the record straight? That’s vanishingly rare. And welcome. Bravo, Mr. Eddings.

Working on the book today, I found this in an interview with Angela Carter:

It’s not very pleasant for women to find out about how they are represented in the world. They find out much more about what their real existential status is from pornography, and it’s very unpleasant. It really is. It’s enough to make women give up on the human race.

No, I didn’t use this quote in the book (I used a bit on specfic further up, because it was a most excellent bit). But it hit home, and I thought I’d share.

The thing is, we typically don’t find these things out through actually reading pornography (or whatever you care to call it, wherever you care to find it). We find these things out because the view of women promulgated by pornography leaks out into the rest of the world, including places it absolutely does not belong. I don’t have a personal problem with porn per se, though I’m aware of and deplore the myriad problems in its production. I have a serious problem with porn as a filter on the world I have to live in, and I run into many, many men too many who employ such a filter and either aren’t aware of it or will defend it to the death.

Bloody frustrating, that’s what. Carter captures that beautifully.

(No major spoilers for Discworld books in this post. Extremely minor ones if you don’t know about Cheery Littlebottom and Carrot Ironfoundersson.)

I used to hate the Discworld character Cheery Littlebottom. She annoyed the daylights out of me: a character who didn’t have to behave like a girl who nonetheless wanted to. Dresses, makeup, the whole silly act. Why on earth would anyone…?

Finally I got it. I got what Pratchett was driving at. And it’s so beautifully subversive and clever that I just have to share.

Cheery is a dwarf. Pratchett’s dwarves are a takeoff on the famous note in Tolkien about dwarf women being rare, bearded, and almost impossible to distinguish from male dwarves. Dwarf biological gender in Discworld is so difficult to distinguish in normal interaction that even the dwarves usually aren’t sure who’s which.

A one-gender society could conceivably be behaviorally indiscriminate; all members would say and do things that in gendered societies are associated with different genders. (LeGuin hints at this in some of her Earthsea tales, when male mages who have grown up in all-male Roke do “women’s work” quite naturally, because they’re used to it and don’t realize or don’t care that outside Roke work roles are gendered.) They wouldn’t care about how humans gender behavior; why should they? Nobody needs to know whether the dwarf swinging the axe or rocking the baby is male or female. Dress could also straddle the divide; why not?

But Pratchett doesn’t do that. From a human point of view, dwarf society is exclusively behaviorally male. Dwarves wear their beards proudly, swing axes and throw waybread (a riff on Tolkien’s cram, of course) at the least provocation, ponder gold and mine for it, swagger and brawl and wear lots of spiky metal and generally act in ways that code them male. The only time you see a Pratchett dwarf doing something coded feminine is when Pratchett can make a joke out of the contrast between the male presentation and the feminine social position—e.g. dwarf barmaids.

Check it out, though! Dwarf maleness isn’t what they biologically are, because a lot of dwarves are biologically female! Dwarf maleness is what they do, how they act, and it isn’t just humans who code dwarves male—it’s dwarves themselves; they call each other “he” and “him” and insist that gendered folk like humans do likewise.

Feminist scholars have a phrase for this: “gender as performance.” It’s a viciously hard thing to get people to agree happens, since folks are so invested in the idea that biology determines gender-specific behavior. But Pratchett slips performativity in like medicine in candy. It’s beautiful. My hat’s off to the guy.

Just to reinforce the point, Pratchett highlights the performativity of dwarvishness in the person of Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson. Biologically, Carrot is human; he’s six feet tall and beardless, and was born of (biologically and culturally) human parents. Culturally, he’s a dwarf; he was raised by dwarves, self-identifies as a dwarf, and is accepted by dwarves as a dwarf (though some humans do roll their eyes a bit). Dwarvishness: it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.

And along comes Cheery Littlebottom, who is a dwarf. And biologically female. And decides that she wants to perform femaleness as well as inhabiting it. Do the dwarves accept this, seeing as how they have a one-gender society that is theoretically not limited in its behavior by gender?

Do they hell. They decide that their male-normativity is so important to them that anyone who doesn’t perform maleness threatens the entire dwarvish way of being. Cheery’s behavior causes a huge furor among the dwarves. Some of them (notably, the “deep dwarves” depicted as the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes dwarvishness) consider her non-dwarf. To her credit, she keeps doing what she does, and (minor spoiler) eventually the more cosmopolitan parts of dwarf society learn to cope with their feminine outliers.

If you’re not seeing parallels with the whole Honorary Guy thing, well, what’s wrong with you? Programming cultures, geek cultures, gaming cultures, many other online cultures—they’re theoretically ungendered, but they behave male, and any behavior that codes feminine is automatically suspect—even coming from a bio-guy.

As I suggested in my honorary-guy post, any attempt to question male-normativity in one of these groups automatically codes feminine, and is considered a threat to the group identity itself. The perp gets smacked down hard, if not kicked out altogether. How else to explain why a guy got jumped on for questioning a sexist headline? A little while ago in one of my comics blogs I saw an exactly parallel scenario commented on (and I wish I could find the darn link again!). I daresay most of my readers can dredge up more examples.

Pratchett doesn’t sugarcoat Cheery, and I applaud him for it. There is no mass dwarf regendering in Discworld, though a few brave dwarves do follow Cheery’s example. There is no vanishing of dwarf prejudice. What I love most about Cheery, actually, is that she is herself far from free of prejudice, and there’s more to her than her gender-performative rebellion. She feels whole and real, insofar as a secondary fantasy character can, and she doesn’t offer any easy answers.

There aren’t any easy answers, after all. But at least Pratchett helps frame the right questions.

I thought the Forbes “response” to last week’s heinously sexist article was actually pretty lame, but I didn’t say so, because that was a fight I just didn’t want to start.

This, however, is much more like it. I do enjoy a good verbal evisceration when it’s merited…

I got Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment out of the library again, because it’s a book I like with a message I needed just about now. I don’t know how many women in male fields (and no, that’s not a spoiler; it’s clacksed from the very first page, and the title is a dead giveaway too) Pratchett talked to before writing this one. Perhaps no one out of his ordinary acquaintance; the man has a gift for hitting bullseyes about human interaction.

A (minorly spoilery) passage that hit me this read-through:

He looked innocent, so possibly he didn’t understand the raging argument that had just broken out in Polly’s head. A credit to the women of your country. We’re proud of you. Somehow those words locked you away, put you in your place, patted you on the head and dismissed you with a sweetie. On the other hand, you had to start somewhere…

Part of the annoyance of being feminist is having these arguments with myself all the damn time. It’s such an energy drain. Do I call this one out? Did that person mean what was just said, or was it just a brain-fart? If I dig in my heels and howl, am I going to create more heat than light? Will anybody back me up? Why, for heaven’s sake, did that make me so angry? I’m a grownup, and it’s not like I haven’t heard worse before. Why can’t I just let stuff go? How much trouble am I willing to get into over this? Honestly, how much?

Meredith used the word “subtle” to characterize sexism in systems librarianship. I’m going to use the word “insidious” instead, and try to explain why. “Subtle” carries the connotation “intentional” to me, and I don’t believe that’s warranted. I don’t know a single librarian of either gender capable of even thinking anything like that absurd Forbes article (which from me gets no linklove, nuh-uh, no way).

And when I cut loose on CavLec finally, I didn’t get a pile-on in return the way Bess did. Well, I sort of did, actually; I spent a solid month and more answering email with my teeth lacerating my tongue to shreds. But the pile-on wasn’t an outpouring of blatant insult. It was an outpouring of “hey, um, WTF just happened?”

Insidious. The word implies invisible destruction of trust, which to me is just right. I started out, as I think many women of my age started out, honestly trusting that the worst of the struggle for gender equality was over, and that I could and should expect to be treated with courtesy and respect wherever I went. Not because I was a woman, not in spite of being a woman—but just because. Because it had finally been acknowledged that women are, you know, people and stuff.

When you think about it, against the tapestry of history? That’s an amazing trust. The wonder isn’t that it gets broken in some women. The wonder is it’s left intact as often as it is—and not just out of blindness, wilful or otherwise.

The reduction of women’s contributions to sniffed-at footnotes that annoys Pratchett’s Polly is only one insidious way to damage women’s trust in basic fairness. The one I most recently ran into boils down to honorary guyness (and I use the word “guy” rather than “man” intentionally). A woman can be an honorary guy, sure, with all the perquisites and privileges pertaining to that status—as long as she never lets anything disturb the guy façade.

It’s good to be an honorary guy, don’t get me wrong. Guys are fun to be around. Guys know stuff. Guys help out other guys. Guys trust other guys. And in my experience, they don’t treat honorary guys any differently from how they treat regular guys. It’s really great to be an honorary guy.

The only problem is that part of the way that guys distinguish themselves from not-guys is by contrasting themselves with women. Women are the not-guys. It’s an incredibly insidious set-up. When a guy cracks a pr0n joke, he honestly doesn’t have anything against women; he’s just affirming his guyness. Other guys take it so, and don’t think twice about it. It never occurs to the guys that these boundaries are artificial, that there’s nothing intrinsic to women that makes them not-guys, that there are better ways (e.g. group purpose, mutual support) to define a group and the desired characteristics of group members. And since that never occurs to them, pr0n jokes and the like get baked deep into group culture.

Honorary guys, now—some can see the guyness-affirmation for what it is to the guys and let it go. I know some honorary guys who do precisely that. Maybe their trust in fairness remains intact (after all, as honorary guys they’re being treated well); maybe it doesn’t. Maybe some of them come around to the guy point of view, despising women who haven’t become honorary guys. I’ve never quite dared ask.

I’m not that kind of honorary guy, I’m afraid. I’ve paid for it, and I expect I shall again. But at least y’all get to watch me talk through it all.

Mark, then, what happens to temporarily honorary guys who have trouble accepting the typical guy style of group-membership claim. Every guyness-affirmation from every guy erodes their trust, in that specific guy, in the group, in men, in fairness. My $DEITY, do they think about me like that? Heavens, that was disgusting and uncalled-for—do they know how they sound? If they know, do they care? How do these people treat their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, female bosses, female co-workers? Do they laugh at them behind their backs? Do they laugh at me behind mine? If so, what am I doing here? Do I really belong, or am I just the mascot, just the dartboard, just the token?

Insidious. Let me tell you, insidious. Not least because the guys have no intention of causing these reactions, and no idea they’re doing it. I haven’t even touched the question of fear for one’s bodily and professional integrity, but in the worst cases, it’s real. If I’m in a hotel bar with these guys at a conference, am I even safe? If these guys have power, am I toast if I tick them off? Even though most guys would be outright horrified that any woman, especially an honorary guy they honestly like, would distrust them so.

Now mark what happens when a guy, honorary or not, assails the definition of not-guys as women by asking for the pr0n jokes to stop, please, and now would be nice. Every guy in the place has suddenly had his guyness, his group membership, even the very existence of and justification for the group, called into question. Of course the result is unconsidered defensiveness. How could it be anything else?

And that defensiveness is a serious, sometimes fatal, blow to the honorary guy’s trust in the victory over sexism. Not only will guys crack pr0n jokes, they’ll defend the practice, bemoan losing it as a diminution of group culture; I’ve seen ’em do it. Even though (here’s the insidious bit) it’s not really pr0n jokes they’re defending; it’s group cohesion. And when honorary guys have no more trust left? Well, I’m Exhibit A. Come to your own conclusions.

The story doesn’t end there. Groups blow up, feelings are hurt all ’round, everybody yells and screams, friendships are broken, people are blacklisted, nobody understands WTF just happened, the guys suddenly wonder if they trust honorary guys and if they should, and it all sucks amazingly. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, bled (metaphorically) all over it, wish like you wouldn’t believe that things had been different.

Meredith’s comments have a deeply troubling variation on the honorary-guy scenario; it isn’t only “guys” who use this group-cohesion method, and it isn’t only women who are shoved into the not-us group. I saw this same scenario brought up on a different library blog (I forget which, or I’d look it up); the female techie librarian targeted had the courage to dispute the homophobia with “And if I am [lesbian]?” Good for her. I hope her co-workers felt all due shame.

In addition to the homophobia, though, I want to call out the anti-techism in that anecdote, even though as an outrage it pales in comparison. How many librarians are defining librarianship as intrinsically analog? (Shortly after I was hired, I heard a librarian at MPOW angrily insisting that MPOW needed to hire “real librarians.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by the term, but I got the message loud and clear that she didn’t mean me. Was scary at the time, I admit.) How do we change that group definition without threatening those librarians’ self-concept?

I’m not saying anything here that a passel of sociologists haven’t said better than I ever could. That’s the funny thing about all this. It’s not hard to read about these things. There’s lots out there that would help us break these counterproductive patterns of group formation within our profession and in the larger world. We’re librarians. Why do we not read, why do we not research, when patterns like these damage us?

I have suggestions for worthwhile reading, but this post is too long already. You could do worse, though, than start with Monstrous Regiment.

I’ll happily add to the general kudos heaped upon Roy Tennant’s article about women in systems librarianship. It’s good stuff, it’s necessary stuff, and it took considerable cojones to publish.

I’d also be willing to put money on his really wanting to spike it. And that’s my fault, you see. I kicked up a big fat ruckus, bailed on a commitment, and generally treated good people badly over this whole feminism thing not long ago. I’m still comfortable with that, it being the best of a lot of lousy alternatives, but if Roy wants my head on a pike, I completely understand why.

And yet he didn’t spike the story. Go him.

I do think there are ways to attract young girls and the women they grow into to systems librarianship that have nothing to do with games. (Informing people who teach computers to children and ex-children of that basic fact will take work, however.) The indispensable Margolis and Fisher suggest that the lone-hacker-with-pizza image and the total absorption of some programmers with computers as machines is offputting to women, but adding a social dimension, especially a socially useful dimension, to the mix is highly attractive to them.

And what’s librarianship if not socially useful? This is why I keep saying that librarianship needs to connect its intake pipe to the exhaust(ed) pipe of women leaving comp sci programs. There’s talent there that we need, and we have a lot to offer.

That aside, though, I want to use Roy’s example to quiet the apprehension of a lot of guys who think it must be really hard to make those damfool women happy. It isn’t. I swear it isn’t, on an individual level. (On a societal level, it’s quite a bit harder.) The cardinal rule is, if you wouldn’t say it in front of a group of women consisting of your grandmother, your female boss (okay, imagine such a being if she doesn’t exist), your sister (ditto), and your significant other (if any)—maybe don’t say it at all, okay? Heck, if it helps, imagine irascible old me in that group.

And do like Roy. Swallow your anger and defensiveness when someone gores your ox on this; acknowledging frustration is the best way to defuse it. (I had “a woman” for “someone” in the previous sentence at first, but that traduces a number of men—not just Roy—that I’ve witnessed speak out courageously on this point.) Examine your assumptions, and don’t just handwave about how great it’d be if there were more women around—do something to make that happen.

Write an article. Cast a critical eye over the gender balance of the next tech conference you go to, and say something about it if it’s out of whack. Build a personal file of female speakers and writers, and make a point of recommending them. Link to female bloggers. There’s lots you can do, and none of it is hard.

Or, hey, you could just do like Roy does. That’s cool by me.