Why aren't there More Women Around Here?

Every so often, the topic of diversity comes up in electronic music. Women definitely make up less than 50% of participants - including in the forums where this topic is discussed. Since I've moved to the UK, I've seen a few email flurries where men argue about whether or not its a problem that there are so few women participating and if so, what they can do about it. These arguments themselves are probably somewhat off-putting, as there are always at least a few vocal men who like being in a boys club and will argue that things are fine. Even if everybody started from a pro-diversity standpoint, I doubt it would be a particularly fun conversation for the few women who were on the list, lurking. This is why I think efforts like MzTech, Flossie, G-Hack and ETC are a good idea, despite all the places where they're problematic (which is beyond the scope of this post).

Women-only events do seem to be how the UK is best able to cope with the massively huge tech gap. This gap, by the way, gets more pronounced as level of techiness rises. As far as I've been able to determine, there are fewer than five women who are regular SuperCollider users in the UK. This is absolutely a social problem. It seems to be the case that in Japan, women users are roughly equal in numbers or possibly greater than men. Thus there is nothing inherently woman-unfriendly in the programme.

Meanwhile, in America, there is still a gap, but it seems less bad. I don't have solid numbers, but I've seen women at American conferences and they make up a fair percentage of presenters. However, sexism is also very clearly apparent. How is it that women are participating in greater numbers in what seems like it's a more sexist environment?

Well, it might not be more sexist in the States. It might just be a more open form of sexism. Scientific American just ran an article about benevolent sexism. When sexism seems 'friendly', women are more likely to accept it. They gave a hypothetical example:

How might this play out in a day-to-day context? Imagine that there’s an anti-female policy being brought to a vote, like a regulation that would make it easier for local businesses to fire pregnant women once they find out that they are expecting. If you are collecting signatures for a petition or trying to gather women to protest this policy and those women were recently exposed to a group of men making comments about the policy in question, it would be significantly easier to gain their support and vote down the policy if the men were commenting that pregnant women should be fired because they were dumb for getting pregnant in the first place. However, if they instead happened to mention that women are much more compassionate than men and make better stay-at-home parents as a result, these remarks might actually lead these women to be less likely to fight an objectively sexist policy.

So it might not be that British culture (and British people) are less sexist than Americans. They're just more polite. And the result of this politeness is not that women feel more empowered. Quite the contrary, in fact. Because the sexism is less in-your-face, it's more effective and participation by women is thus lowered.

Indeed, if men who mean well are making a big deal about how rare it is for women to get involved in something, this can accidentally slide into benevolent sexism. Which leaves us in something of a bind. For those of us who are men and do want to increase participation by women, what can we do about it? I would argue that one step is vigilant moderation, where all sexism, benevolent or openly hostile, is banished from online discussion. And we can refuse to participate in all-male events or panels. Some effort should probably also be extended in this direction for collaborations, projects and musical groups . . . there is probably some size at which it becomes problematic if everyone involved is a man. The growing pool of G-Hack alumnae will hopefully become part of the larger scene. And hopefully more women on stage will empower the women in the audience to start producing. And hopefully those of us men who want to make a big deal about it ('and they're pretty too!'), will get the message that this is not the way forward.

Dr Ew (contains spoilers)

These evil people are clearly suspicious. They have hacked a young woman's head so she can actually understand the internet. #drwho #ew
- @PennyRed

The current Doctor Who series has exactly zero women writers. Perhaps this is why it's kicked off with a show that fails the Bechdel Test - at least between adults. The child and the nanny do have a brief conversation.

The show has two strong female characters and two strong male characters as well as two additional supporting male roles. The major male players are of course, The Doctor and a character that one might not expect to have a gender: The Great Intelligence. The other male roles are two subordinates at an evil company that hacks people. The strong female roles are Clara, the Doctor's new sidekick; and the woman in charge of the evil company.

As Laurie Penny notes, the evil company adds computer knowledge to Clara's head. Previously, she was entirely inept at getting online, ringing a helpline for aid logging in to wifi. She seems to be a middle class woman in her 20's in modern-day London, who has access to a netbook and a reason to want to get online. The idea that she would be unable to manage something as simple as loggin in to wifi actually seems profoundly unlikely.

Her job is working as a nanny, a reprise of the job of her previous incarnation. The Doctor keeps trying to ask how somebody as obviously clever as herself got stuck as a nanny - an often female-specific job. Things are not getting off to a great start.

The other strong woman character never speaks to Clara. She mostly speaks to her two male assistants, to the Great Intelligence and to the Doctor. At the end, after the Doctor saves the day, she is reset to her state before the Great Intelligence started shaping her personality and actions, or 'whispering in her ear' as she puts it. UNIT finds her sitting on the floor, speaking in the voice of a little girl, asking where her mummy and daddy have gone. Her talents and even her entire self is thus not her own, but belonged to the male Great Intelligence.

Clara did get to save the day in her debut, but only by offing herself in the process. She manages to live through this episode - sort of. She dies twice, but the Doctor brings her back both times. As she's dead, she's especially helpless as a captive and thus is not able to play an active part in her own rescue. However, she's not useless. She discovers the location of the bad guys through a clever insight into social engineering - that the weak point in computer security is usually the people. However, this insight is not entirely her own. All of her computer knowledge and therefore all of her hacking skills, remember, have come from the bad guys. Again, this mirrors her first episode where she also has superior hacking skills than the Doctor, but only because the Daleks have tampered with her mind and body.

The power of women in the episode is, therefore, largely not really their own, but given to them by the machinations of a male intelligence. Meanwhile, the Doctor's abilities come from his own great intelligence and from his magical powers - he uses the sonic screwdriver to 'hack.' This device functions more or less as a magic wand in recent years. In this episode, he also has a magical flying motorcycle. (The linked article at the top mentions JK Rowling as a sci-fi author. I would normally strongly contest this claim, but her influence on Doctor Who is very clear, thus pulling the show further and further away form sci-fi and towards fantasy.) The source of the Great Intelligence's power is not yet revealed in it's current arc - it's a nemesis from the old days, so a backstory does exist, but without benefit of that knowledge, one does assume it is intelligent and powerful in it's own right.

The episode does not contain any great moral questions of good and evil and does not intentionally engage gender roles in 21st century Britain. Instead, it gives us the doctor acting silly, doing magic and centres mostly on London geography. The tallest new building in the capital, which is also a a ticketed tourist attraction, is the main point of action, but there's also South Bank and a joke about the blue police box at Earl's Court.

For those of us who miss Davies, there are not LGBT characters, but there are some POC and there are women working in tech jobs at the evil company, although these are not speaking parts. These women, like their male colleagues, also have gotten all their job training via evil mind control, so this doesn't really imply anything about their abilities, but it's better than nothing, I guess.

Apples vs Oranges

In general, I try to avoid intra-feminst disputes because, although I still consider myself a feminist, it doesn't really directly effect me and generally it's not good when allies wade into stuff like that. I also doubly avoid annoying fights. (Frankly, being able to ignore stupid pseudo-feminist bullshit is an example of male privilege, but anyway.)

There is a constant, long-running fight between some bigoted radical feminists (called TERFs for some reason) and trans women. Obviously bigots are in the wrong, but arguing with them is like arguing with my kitchen table, so I mostly ignore this except when it becomes relevant. (It used to be that TERFs wanted to save me from being trans . . in the same way the Fred Phelps wants to save people from being gay.) It's really much more fun to ignore them. However, they're planning a conference in London that actively excludes trans women and this is discrimination. I don't want to see this kind of event pass without comment, lest anyone get the idea that this kind of discrimination is ok. I doubt very many trans women would want to spend a weekend hanging around TERFs, but they should still face criticism for their bigotry.

Meanwhile, one of them wrote a blog post defending their London event as being better than a trans health conference being held in the US. Astute readers will note that a health conference in the US and a political conference in the UK are really not the same thing, but let's pretend this argument is worth examining (as my other planned activity for this evening is putting everything I own into boxes).

BugBrennan specifically attacks the sponsors of the health conference for including pharmaceutical companies, government and religious organizations. I will admit that I also find the participation by pharmaceutical corporations to be problematic, but this is a consequence of the how the US chooses (not) to organise it's health care system. The participation of for-profit entities in anything health-related is morally suspect, but, alas, that is the entire basis of the US health system. And, indeed, it makes sense to have health providers involved in a health conference. If there were a trans health conference in the UK, I would expect to see NHS sponsorship and involvement. If it were a large, mainstream conference like the one up for discussion, I would be concerned if the NHS were not involved. Trans people who take hormones do rely on pharmaceutical products and it's better that our health needs are taken into account by the manufacturers of these products.

If this were a political conference, the participation by companies such as Johnson and Johnson would be much more suspect. But it is not.

And, in the same way, government involvement seems appropriate as trans health is a public health issue. Because of systemic transphobia, many trans people in the US are reliant upon government services to provide health care as they are unable to afford private care. A social worker in the city of San Francisco once told me that it is a cost-saving measure for them to provide free transition-related health care to poor trans people. I would expect this to be true in other places as well.

So what about religious groups? I speculate that they wanted to participate because they wanted to show that they are open communities and because they perceive trans people to be a vulnerable community. If there were a gay men's health conference, I would also expect to see health, government and religious groups involved. Lest that be construed as supporting the patriarchy, if there were a lesbian health conference, I would also expect to see those same groups involved. Also, being trans is not a spiritual identity, any more than being cis is a spiritual identity. Some cis women are religious. Some are atheists. Some trans women are religious. Some are atheists.

Of course, a political conference probably wouldn't have church support or government support or big pharma support, but if you look at the very long list of supporting organisations, some of them are the kind of thing you might expect at both a health conference and a political conference. Let's look at some of them:

• Trans Masculine Advocacy Network (TMAN) which continues to provide leadership towards making PTHC better able to serve communities of color.
• The William Way Community Center which will be hosting this year’s opening reception
• The Attic Youth Center which will be helping to host this year’s Teen Space GenderReel which will be hosting a mini-film fest on Thursday evening at the conference
• Philadelphia Family Pride
• GenderQueer Revolution (GQR)
• Female to Male International (FTMi)
• Transgender People of Color Coalition (TPOCC)

There we have families, teens, community centres and non-white people! Now, I don't know who or if anybody is sponsoring the radfem debacle coming soon to London and maybe they don't have affinity groups for, say, people of colour. Maybe they think they don't need them for some reason. Maybe they have a very good reason to sneer at gatherings that try to be visibly and openly inclusive to a racially and age diverse group of participants. I don't know. I certainly wouldn't want to jump to conclusions.

Really, the TERF conference is going to be much much smaller, so it probably needs a lot less support and it's not really fair to compare things that are so unlike. But given that their intended venue threw them out for being bigots and they are keeping the new location secret, I think it was strategically wise of them not to try to get community support.

Now does this one health conference mean, as BugBrennan suggests, that trans people are now fully integrated into power structures in America? Well, one can only hope that this is a step towards the end of systematic discrimination, but I'm afraid post-conference statistics on trans unemployment, hate crimes, etc are not yet available, so we'll have to wait and see. Unfortunately, I suspect we still have a while to go.

Some of you may be wondering how it is feminist to discriminate against some women based on sex/gender? I will admit I don't get it, but if any of you understand it, feel free to explain in the comments.

Discuss

This post is intended to be accessible to non-technical readers, so don't flee when you see mention of programming languages.

Recently, on [an email list related to a FLOSS programming language], somebody posted about having used [a rival language] a lot for a month. He was happy to be back to his preferred language, writing, "It feels like having been fucking around with ugly cocain addict ex-go go dancer only to find out how much you love your wife. (who looks like Sharon Tate and still a C++/Java expert. )"

He then went on to ask a technical question.

I don't want to bring this up on the [original] list, but I have questions about this and would like to get a discussion going. Is this an example of casual sexism / heteronormativity or just a slangy way of speaking? If it is sexism, could it it alienating to women who might otherwise want to be on the email list? Should such phrasing be discouraged? Should there be a policy? Would such a policy be overly formal/constricting for a language often used by hobbyists?

I found that sentence to be somewhat annoying, obviously, or I wouldn't be posting about it, but not annoying enough to reply back and start a discussion on the list, especially as it's pretty atypical. I'm wondering what others think about it, though.

Politics and FOSS: Open to who and when?

I was recently doing some reading towards writing a paper that touched on the politics and philosophy of FOSS. That stands for "Free and Open Source Software." That doesn't mean free as in "no charge," although that is often also true. It's "Free as in Freedom," according to those that follow Stallman [1]. FOSS software belongs to the community of people that use and write it.

It's about sharing. You give away what you write and you give away your knowledge of how to use. Communities of users form, giving each other support and helping each other with the software. It's very easy to see this in idealist terms, and I wanted to write a paper about how progressive we all were. I was reading a paper by Olga Goriunova that analysed FOSS from a Marxist perspective. And then again from a feminist perspective. And then again from a Deluzian point of view. [2] FOSS began to look like a Rorschach blot of politics.

Indeed when some of the major players in the movement, such as Raymond, are right-libertarians [3, 4] and others are anti-captialist, then obviously it resists this kind of simple political reading.This was at the back of my mind this afternoon when, looking for distraction, I logged into the Greater London Linux Users Group channel on Freenode.

Freende is an IRC server, so this was a real-time chat, established so that people in the London area can talk about Linux; maybe network or get some help with a problem. Instead, I wandered in to a conversation where the participants were bemoaning the "wrong" kind of people having babies, by which, they meant poor people. One of the participants was talking about how a particular 14 year old girl, known to him personally, was a "slapper." (*) The conversation turned to how forced sterilisation of poor people would be a good idea. "[W]e keep coming to this conclusion, birth controll [sic] in the water in all council estates" suggested a user called hali. [5]

Meanwhile, bastubis, a woman from a working class background logged in and became upset about the content of the conversation. Bastubis noted she "lived on a council estate as a child." A few lines later hali said, "the fact the chavs(**) get pregnant in the first place is usually a misstake [sic]." Bastubis explained that she was "a chav with an education - you're talking about me." Another user, dick_turpin, chimed in shortly thereafter with, "Enforced sterilisation I say." Bastubis quickly became frustrated and left. [5]

Dick_turpin cheered her departure with a "Huzzah!", while hali celebrated with a "muahaha." [5]

Their exercise of privilege to create a hostile environment for some users is clearly not accidental. If they were unconsciously expressing privilege, that would not have been followed with a "huzzah." Given that the conversation started with both gender and class based slurs, it seem likely that their desire to exclude bastubis from the group had roots both in class and gender. As such, their intention was specifically to replicate privilege found offline and institute online to create an homogenous environment.

That privilege is expressed online as much as offline should not be surprising. FOSS communities are diverse and organised around geographical regions and or interests and sometimes identity, such as women or LGBT users. Therefore, some groups will tend to allow unchecked privilege, while others will tend to frown upon it or specifically disallow it. Simon Yuill writes that OpenLab, another London-based community centred on FOSS, specifically grew out out of a progressive squatter-based movement. Hacklabs such as OpenLab, "have provided a clear political and ethical orientation in contrast to the somewhat confused and contradictory political and social perspectives articulated in the other communities and contexts of the wider FOSS world." [6] When OpenLab's mailing list recently had a discussion about how to get more women involved, there were certainly moments of frustration, but the apparent intention was inclusion.

How is it that FOSS can create some communities that would seem to be progressive and others that would seem to want to preserve privilege over any other goal? I think my error is looking at it as a political movement. A lot of its spokespeople speak of it in a political manner, but given the widely divergent viewpoints, there is no inherent or unifying left or right ideology of FOSS. It's infrastructure. It has value to many groups of people because it avoids duplication of effort and grants them access to resources. For some groups, the fact that it also grants resources to other users is a necessary sacrifice - one that can be mitigated through hostility to undesirable participants. For other groups, the sharing is a main focal point. FOSS, itself, is political like music is political, with as many readings and intentions.

*A derogatory slang term used for sexual promiscuous females.

** A derogatory slang term used for poor people

[1] Free as in Freedom

[2] Goriunova, Olga, "Autocreativity: The Operation of Codes of Freedom in Art and Culture". FLOSS+Art (eBook) Ed. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. 2008.

[3] Raymond, Eric S, "I am an active Libertarian" 2003. Assessed 18 August 2010.

[4] Raymond, Eric S, Whatever happened to civil rights? 2003. Assessed 18 August 2010.

[5] #GLLUG ON FREENODE ON THE 18TH OF AUG 2010 IRC log

[6] Yuill, Simon, "All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses: Free Open Form Performance, Free/Libre Open Source Software, and Distributive Practice". FLOSS+Art (eBook) Ed. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. 2008.

Transfeminist Disucssion

I went to panel discussion on Trans Feminism at the London Transgender Film Festival yesterday, which I think was a very good discussion, although emotions did run high. The panel had four people, two of whom were mtf and two of whom were F2-genderqueer.

Near the start, one of the panelists made an excellent point about how gender is a force acting on everyone in society, but trans people end up being perceived as responsible for all gender because of transition. (I'm not stating this quite right.)

The panelists were talking about second wave and third wave feminism. Bridget, a panelist, talked about conflicts between second wave feminism and trans people and noted that the people in conflict were feeling wounded and attacked by society in general. And the people who were the most vocal were the most hurt. And that, I think, shed a lot of light on the conflict between radfems and trans people. Both of those groups have common cause, but both of them have suffered terribly under groups that (falsely) appear to have commonality with the other.

It also came up that a lot of women's groups avoid having a trans policy to avoid controversy and then trans people don't know if they're welcome or not. Given the history of acrimony, these groups should be willing to make a statement for trans inclusion. For example, one of the Take Back the Night Marches last year was not listed as "official" because it had trans participation . . . which is so terrible because trans women have an even higher incidence of rape perpetuated against them than do cis women.

One of the audience members was involved in some women's march in London (the one that shut down their mics rather than let a sex worker speak!) and she was talking about how she was in favor of trans inclusion and everybody come along, etc. But she wasn't speaking on behalf of the group, so it was an invitation to push for inclusion.

This didn't come up, but I want to note that "not having a policy" is a position of privilege. Cis people get to avoid having discussions they'd rather avoid. And then trans people get mixed messages about whether or not they should show up. And then, if they do come, all of the controversy is directed at them. So their quiet allies can avoid having to get involved. I'm a bit bitter about this because I got involved last spring with a feminist thing without an official policy and, as I was on T barely four months by then and feeling incredibly vulnerable anyway, a controversy focused on my own gender presentation was hugely stressful and not ok.

Anyway, somebody in the audience wanted to note that the experiences of trans women resonate with dysphoric (read: eating disorder) cis girls, and trans feminism is thus a valuable contribution to feminism because it benefits cis women. This did not go over well. I know she was well-intentioned, but it simultaneous came off as "they think THEY have it bad, but look at you (exotic) lot!" and "well, your stuff also matters to REAL females."

The person sitting in front of me tried to defend Julie Bindel, by raising the point that Bindel apologized for the tone, but not the content, of her transphobic column in 2004. But she gave up quickly. During the break, she said she had been hoping for a panel of ftms talking about how we still care about feminism. And she wanted to talk about socialization. Given that this is a cornerstone of why some feminists are transphobic, it's easy to see why the panel wasn't keen to bring it up. Also, I'm concerned about why a feminist discussion that mostly included ftms would be more desirable than one that included mtfs. The implications trouble me.

What was largely lost in the whole discussion, was that third wave feminism, as an extension of second wave feminism is thus a validation of the second wave. If the second wave hadn't been useful and made great gains, there wouldn't be a third wave. We want to build upon the success of the second wave while, at the same time, making critiques of some of the shortcomings of the previous wave. Second wavers were feeling attacked and third wavers get annoyed and don't spend much time on the positives of the second wave. Which is logical, really, I mean when you're complaining about radfem transphobia, you shouldn't have to start every complaint with an acknowledgement that they were the originators of the concept "patriarchy." But it should come up more often than it does. We owe these women a great debt, but it doesn't mean theyre right all the time on everything.

Anyway, the discussion was lively and I think productive and it can't help but continue.

The Transsexual Industry

In the UK, the largest LGB* rights organization is called Stonewall. You'll note I didn't say "LGBT."** They don't say it either. They're a lot like the HRC in the States.

They're about to have an awards banquet where they're going to recognize various people who they feel are good for the LGB community. One of the people nominated is a journalist named Julie Bindel, who is a Radical Feminist*** lesbian who writes for the Guardian. Like most radfems, her writings on trans issues are often transphobic. She has written transphobic things in her column in a major newspaper. Trans activists are displeased that Stonewall wants to honor this writing.

Alas, I am not talking about subtle differences in opinion. She has used slurs and thinks that trans people shouldn't have access to hormones or surgery, saying, “Sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation." While she's apologized for past slurs, the other stuff she hasn't. She recently issued a statement about the controversy, which does not back away from those positions. (Indeed, the quote above is from it.) Instead, she says, "I am the victim of an organised group of bullies who seek to discredit me and silence any radical feminist debate around the issue of GID**** and of the transsexual industry."

The transsexual industry? Does she imagine that trans people are some kind of profit center for the NHS? That's as mad as making claims about the "abortion industry" in the US! In fact, it's almost exactly identical.

Earlier in her statement, she talks a lot about Claudia, somebody who had SRS and then regretted it. She writes,

In 1985, after a consultation with Reid that lasted only 45 minutes, Claudia was diagnosed as transsexual and referred for surgery. . .. In May 2007 after a case lasting three years, the General Medical Council's disciplinary committee ruled that Reid had prescribed hormones to five of his patients too soon, and referred them for genital surgery without properly assessing their mental and physical suitability. . . .. [G]etting to know Claudia was the catalyst for me in deciding to research the hidden side of sex change surgery, namely the validity of the original diagnosis of GID, and the stories of those who regret taking the hormones and having the surgery.

In the States, anti-choice activists claim that there is an abortion industry, where woman-hating male doctors cajole their patients into having abortions which leave them mentally and physically scarred for life. They mention the cases of some unhappy women who wish they hadn't done it. They bring up some doctors who have faced discipline for unethical acts. Based on this, they argue that abortion is harming women and ought to be made illegal.

Bindel is using the same argument. And this betrays a fundamental truth about her perspective. Anti-choicers want to remove agency from women, so they imagine that somebody else has already done so. They see themselves as guardians of a helpless and contemptible class of people. Similarly, Bindel imagines that trans people have no agency and should not be allowed control over their own bodies. Like anti-choicers, she imagines a sinister "industry," eager to prey upon weak victims who fall into their clutches.

And yet, in both cases, most of the people who utilize these "industries" don't see themselves as victims at all, but as agents empowered to take advantage of what was a hard-won right. I would like to imagine that the parallels in argument would give any feminist pause, but as right wingers have happily co-opted language from the left to paint themselves as victims, I can't imagine anyone of any political stripe would be above borrowing language and arguments form their ideological enemies. If painting others as victims works for your cause, then you would use it. I'd hope that the agency-denying aspect of the argument would give leftists pause, but, alas, this gets into a larger critique of radical feminism.

If seeing trans people as full adults won't work, maybe she'll note that medical malpractice is a real issue, but when somebody has their spleen unnecessarily removed, we don't condemn all spleen surgery as a result. But if logic doesn't work for anti-choice activists, it won't work on their ideological twin. After all, there's a sinister industry afoot.

* Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual.

** T is for transgender or transsexual or other gender minorities.

*** Not the fun kind

**** Gender Identity Disorder is the diagnosis used to give hormones and whatnot to trans people want them.

The WSJ on Social Structures in the Loo

The Wall Street Journal waxes poetic about the ladies' loo. It starts with, "It's a good thing office lavatories aren't coed." This is more or less the crux of the article. Why is it a good thing? Well, the author never actually says, she just hints. The reason, of course, is that it's a holy temple of feminity. A safe space, for gender normative women. For others?

Not every woman, of course, wants to join an office ladies' room club. Some undoubtedly think there's more to be gained snagging lunch dates with staff several rungs above them than exchanging advice with women colleagues. Others simply don't feel comfortable sharing confidences in front of toilet stalls. They wash their hands in silence and, while they're present, conversations around them halt.

And this has nothing whatsoever to do with gender presentation. The reason that women have always fallen into icy silence when I tried to pee near them wasn't because I was too butch. It was because I was a stuck-up bitch who scorned their advice. Who knew?

Oh, but what about the mens? Well, this is the WSJ, so we can't focus on women's issues, even when they're as normative as possible. "Still some of my male colleagues, who describe their exchanges in men's rooms as monosyllabic at best, tell me they want to join the ladies' room club. To which I say, come on in -- but listen." To which I say, give me a fucking break.

Ok, it's nice that women can get a break from men and have some of their own space. It's valuable for minority communities to have such spaces. But these informal clubs cement power in conforming members and exclude non-conforming. Also, access to toilets is a biological necessity, not a luxury. Bearded ladies need access as much as those who might want to deal with "ripped panty hose."

Fuck the ladies room club. Move it someplace else.

Gendered Spaces

Why Limit by Gender

We live in a patriarchy. People who are perceived as male have privilege over people who are not. This starts from very early childhood and continues through adulthood. Statistically, people raised as girls tend to be steered away from science, technology and math. Children internalize these messages, so as adults, people tend to think of men as being good at technology and women as not. This is easily observable by phrases like "the mom test" or "the girlfriend test" for software usability. Women are dumb, so if they can manage the user interface, it must be really good, because even a neophyte can handle it. Because your mom could never be a software engineer. Your girlfriend could never be a hacker.

There's a million arguments already made about how mtfs share this sort of experience. Many are aware of their gender identity from early childhood and internalize all of this crap too. Finally, when they do transition, they get all the discrimination against women, and also all the discrimination against trans people. And ftms tend to also be around these kinds of places. We were perceived as girls through our childhood. I had a lot of access to technology as a child, but definitely felt unwelcome in my highschool's computer room. The boys used tools like degrading pornography to enforce the male gaze and male dominance (and heterosexual dominance) to keep others out.

Women and gender minorities, therefore, tend have a shared experience around technology. It is an experience of being discouraged, of being not taken seriously, of being excluded.

New Feminism

The ETC had a kind of interesting talk about New Feminism. (There were some issues with it, but whatever). One of the speakers, Rosy, was making a lot of generalizations, which irked many, but I think there were some kernels of truth in what she was getting out. She heavily disparaged identity politics, saying they were an aspect of capitalism and market segmentation. MTV was trying to sell us our identity. I bristled a bit about this, since MTV is most definitely not selling me my transgender identity. It's something I have to constantly fight for. I asked her about agency. If an identity is being asserted in opposition to corporate culture, what does that mean?

She said identity politics were narcissistic and had several problems. If we say women should be equal, well, equal to what? Should rich white women become just like rich white men? Furthermore, it creates a context of victimhood. In order to organize for rights around a particular identity, you need to say that identity is lacking. I think she meant to imply that there's a danger there of failing to see intersections. She noted that there are situations where lesbians were the dominant political power. If you see lesbians constantly as an oppressed class, you won't see where you're oppressing others.

Of course, you sometimes have identities forced upon you by others and organizing around that is vital. In the feminist forum that I help moderate (livejournal feminist), we have rules about "oppression olympics" where we require that intersectionality be taken into account. I think that Rosy's thinking and our thinking is very similar. Yes, there is an institutional, hierarchical power structure in society which privileges some identities and bodies over others (the Patriarchy!), but we all function within it and might be upholding it in ways that privilege ourselves. A white lesbian is still white. A upper class gay man is still upper class.

There aren't that many places where lesbians are at the top of the heap. But when you're talking about women-only spaces, such a situation can arise.

Focussing on Women

Comparing oppressions is rarely a useful exercise, but if you wanted to do so, there are metric you could use. I would pick unemployment figures and salary gaps to look at economic discrimination. I would use hate crime statistics and domestic violence statistic to look at safety issues. There are a few other metrics that one could employ. People who are out as transgendered do worse on these metrics than do heterosexual women. They even do worse than lesbians.

So if you were the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and you had a policy of only admitting people who had been born and raised as female and who were still female-identified, you would have a policy of excluding people who were lower on the ladder than you. I think most progressives can agree that there's value in oppressed classes creating their own spaces. I think most progressives can similarly agree that there is not value in privileged classes creating their own spaces. A men-only event is different than a women-only event.

So excluding trans people is asserting privilege. Yes, it changes the vibe. But if a group of all-white women suddenly racially integrates, that changes the vibe too. If you bemoan that, you're a fucking racist. Certainly, it's more comfortable to be around people of your own race, gender, and economic class. But if you're trying to do something political to benefit people who face gender-based discrimination and you're all cisgender, bourgeoise, legally immigrated, white women, that's kind of problematic. If you worry that changing that will change the vibe of your event, well . . . the response that springs most immediately to mind is "fuck you."

Who gets Access

We've all heard the stories or perhaps even experienced a hostile male response to spaces that exclude them. I think the contexts of power and privilege make these replies different than trans people asking for access. Indeed, the entire justification and model of progressive, gender-exclusive spaces says these are different replies. But in the patriarcal challenge, the cisgender man says, "can I come if I wear a dress?" The annoyed feminist says, "no, fuck off." How can we tell who is a man in a dress trying to start a problem and who is gender minority?

The Gender Police

We can judge them by how well they pass! Yes, in this fantastic model, we employ something I'm going to call the cisgender gaze. Gender normative people can feel empowered to determine how well transgender people are passing. It's a fun diversion for cis people. And devastating to the identity of trans people! Yay!

When I try to explain the male gaze to people, I sometimes talk about a phenomenon that occurs on University Campuses in the US. Sometimes men will set up chairs along a bust walk way and make score cards like those used in the Olympics. A woman walks by and they all hold up scores on her attractiveness. 6.3, 7.5, 8.1. However, unlike the Olympics, these are just women trying to get to class who did not ask to be rated by their male peers. Indeed, they are no longer peers, there are judges and judged. A power structure is created where one class of people sits dominant over another class of people. Men judge women. In the context of a rape culture, this is especially alarming.

The cisgender gaze has a lot in common with the male gaze in that a rating and ranking system is employed. The people doing the rating have economic and social power (in a broader social context) over the rated. And we live in a society where the rated have to be concerned about experiencing violence at the hands of the class of people that is rating them.

Plus, this has the added bonus of kicking people where they're already wounded. Trans people often have a lot of anxiety about passing, especially when they're just starting on their transition. We can all wish this were not so. But nobody would transition if they did not with to be perceived as a particular gender. Furthermore, there is a safety issue when we try to get access to other gendered spaces, like toilets.

Would you tell a cisgender woman that she looks like a man and you would think she was one if you encountered her out in public? Then why the fuck would you tell a trans person that you were certain you could read them? Fuck you. A woman wh heard that would probably feel like shit about it. But some trans people are also fighting for their identity. I have to jump through a million hoops with the NHS. I have to come out to people. I have to struggle to assert my gender identity. You just told me I'm failing at a core aspect of my identity. I don't even want to fucking hear that I'm passing very well today. Are we best friends? Do I get to tell you that those trousers might make your ass look big? No? Then shut the fuck up.

At last year's ETC, we all went swimming naked in the Danube because it was hot as hell. I felt really weird being naked in front of other people, largely because of trans issues. At the time, it really felt ok. Now, though, I wish I hadn't. People were talking to me last week about my breasts. Yes, they're larger than you would think. No, they're not especially masculine. I don't want to fucking hear about my boobs from anybody, unless we're snogging or something. They are not up for casual conversation! Again, shut the fuck up.

Up For Further Discussion

The change from Women Only to Women and Gender Minorities was made without much discussion. Nobody wanted to have an argument. Some people wanted me (and a couple of other transguys) to come, so the change was made.

That's great for you that you don't have to argue about who should access gendered spaces. But alas, I know you meant well, but then those conversations fell on my shoulders.

There might be a bajillion trans organizations and trans activist, but I've just come out in a foreign country where I don't know that many people. I don't know any such groups. I'm one person trying to get through multiple border crossings at the same time. I don't have the resources to deal with extra shit..

My roots are in feminist spaces, in queer spaces, in women's spaces, in doing tech. I'm not entirely pleased to be moving away away from certain aspects of my roots. When I first realized I was queer, I had several unhappy breaks from the institutions of my childhood. I lost my religion, for example. Former spaces of support suddenly excluded me. Now, it seems like the spaces that I found, that seemed so much better than the spaces that excluded me, are now breaking away also. This fucking hurts.

Naked Image

When I was last at the Tate Modern, I saw some video by Francesca Woodman from the 1970's. She had a piece where she had stretched butcher paper in front of the large window of her loft. Light was shining through the window and through the paper. She stood naked behind the paper, so that her silhouette was visible and drew on the paper from behind. Then she tore the paper in a kind of provocative way, revealing increasing sexualized parts of her own body, until finally she stepped through it, tearing it all away and walking off frame.

I've been thinking about this piece a lot. I was first drawn to it because of the attractiveness of the artist, but the viewer is being asked to consider several things. By drawing on the paper, I think she was trying to create an idea of it as a canvas. We have a cultural idea that artists express themselves in a pure, cerebral form through their art. The canvas becomes almost an extension of self - but specifically, a very dualist kind of self. The canvas is not about the body, but about the mind.

Hélène Cixous argues that all binary oppositions eventually come back to gender. So when we put mind and body into opposition, immediately, we assign one of them to male. And, indeed, historically (and currently, alas) men are mind and women are body. These oppositions are also an implicit comparison, so the mind is more noble and pure than the body. The (male) artist is thus a triumph of masculinity. He expresses the true, the valuable and the pure of himself through his canvas. But if this is implicitly masculine, then women have greatly reduced access. They're not artists, they're women artists and that's something different. Their body is thus always made visible, not just because it's a site of difference, but because women are presumed to entirely be of and about the body.

By allowing light to filter around her naked body and through the canvas, Woodman makes this explicit in her work. The strip-tease aspect of her tearing makes a connection to sex and femininity even more explicit and invites a feminist analysis. Her drawings are torn to bits to reveal her body / herself, which / who then leaves. She breaks down the mind/body dichotomy, and, in so doing, her work is placed in the male gaze, which is not a site of empowerment. But she remains in control. There is no operator behind the camera. She controls what we see and when we see it, as much as she can, since the paper tears in unpredictable ways. By working within the male gaze, she makes it visible to the viewer.

I was also drawn to the aesthetics of the piece. It's shot in her home. The attachment of the paper is ad hoc. The video is actually a series of takes. She tried this multiple times and put several of them on the finished tape. I like the experimental nature of it. I like that it's about process. I think the aspect of it being in her home, which is an intimate setting (I mean that the way that small chamber music venues are described as intimate). She lets us into her life in a small way to make a statement about herself, her art and art in general.

I also admire her courage. There's no metaphor for being naked on camera because it is the metaphor. She is actually uncovered, but never uncomfortable. It's amazing.

So as I begin to think about making little films, I keep thinking of hers. I also think of her relationship to her body and the camera. I've spent most of my life striving to remain covered, living in my head. I don't think I have the "wrong body," but I think my identity was at odds with aspects of my body - not even in a way that I've been fully aware of. Which is to say, being naked on camera is not something I would ever have considered in a million years. No. No. No. What are you kidding? It's another door that was closed - right next to all the doors that disallow crossdressing. These doors are starting to open for me. (Note that they should never have been closed in the first place.)

I'm working on a video of me giving myself a shot. It is uncovering. I thought of her video for courage to continue. My nakedness, though, is metaphorical. Do I want to put out there a picture of me in my bed room? Hesitating? Pausing? Failing?

Why do I want to do it? I have no idea. I try to get things out of my head sometimes and if you that with art, then how you do it is by putting it in other people's heads. What does it feel like to have your identity hinge on an injection when you have a fear of needles? Well, here's one answer.

I'm considering doing a piece with a bunch of still photos, slowly fading from one to another. In them I would be in the same location, in the same pose. I would start wearing a suit, hat and jacket and in each picture, remove one item until I was wearing nothing. (Why do I want to do it? I have no idea.)

I pass when I'm clothed. People see me as a man, which is what I want. But I've only done hormones and only for a few months. My body is ambiguous. Not even as ambiguous as I would like. It would be a stripping away of identity and of self. (Why do I want to do it? I have no idea.)

What is sex? What is gender? They're both culturally constructed. My very body is queer now. I call all of these oppositions into question just by existing. My queer self is inscribed on my person, on my physical being.

I don't want to be a shock value, though. I don't want to be daytime TV. I don't want to be a women's glossy mag. I don't want to be a bad joke. I want to be a person, clothed or unclothed. Woodman was dealing with the same sort of issues in her work, about how her image is transmitted and received. She can't control what the perceiver thinks. Somebody like me could come up to it and think , "ooh, hot woman." But if that person engages the work, they walk away with more than that. She does with pacing, timing, repetition of the same scenario. She's got some advantage over me in that we, as a culture, acknowledge that cisgender women's bodies exist.

So, I don't know if it's a good idea. I'm looking for thoughts.

Socialization and Narratives

Socialization is the name for a training process in which the subject is taught their place in the world and how to get along within it. I had to socialize my dog. Now she knows not to run over to children and sniff them enthusiastically and not to panic when a loud motorcycle goes by and to stay quiet and inconspicuous at cafés. She's a good dog.

We also do this to kids. The effects on kids is a bit more subtle than the effects on dogs. My dog has internalized her training to the point where I don't need to pay too much attention to her, I can trust that she's doing the right thing. I've given her a bunch of commands and corrections and now she just knows the drill. But I don't think she puts these in a lager context of categorization. She doesn't think about how there might be different sets of rules for people and dogs, she just knows what she's supposed to do. This is a fundamental difference between dogs and people, I think.

Because when people are getting socialized, a big part of it is teaching the categories. This is how girls sit properly. This is how boys sit properly. You are a girl. He is a boy. You sit like this. He sits like that. And that's how we learn manners, by which I mean limitations. And since girls are generally given more limitations than boys, we call that "female socialization," something which can be considered extremely important in gender theory.

Everybody learns that girls have more limitations. There's a question as to how it's internalized. If you believe yourself not to be a girl, this will be something that applies to other people. If you believe yourself to be a girl, then you lower your expectations and diminish your horizons. This sucks, by the way. We should get rid of it.

It's also very external, though. Even if you know in your heart that you're meant to go do boy things and these rules were not made for you, if other people see you as a girl, then you're going to run into limitations. When patriarchy tells you that you can’t possibly succeed in math or technology (because you’re a girl), they don’t both to first find out if you really ID as a girl, they just say you suck.

When patriarchy gives encouragement to the schemes and dreams of boys, they don’t bother trying to figure out which girls might turn out to be boys, they just tell everyone they think is a girl to dream smaller.

When patriarchy constructs gender as a binary of winner/loser, good/bad, male/female (to paraphrase Helène Cixous), they don’t excuse people who don’t fit on their assigned side. Hell, they batter them down harder. Butch girls and women actually face increased sexism, not decreased, according to study data. And oh my god, do femme boys face abuse.

This was my childhood experience of being perceived as female: being told that I'm weaker and more feminine and therefore less. So I tried harder, which, alas, did not help.

This is not why I'm transitioning. This is why I held off for so many years. If all of femininity is weakness and limitation, then obviously, I must not really be trans, I must just want to escape smaller horizons. That's what I told myself.

It occurred to me a few days ago that there's got to be more to it than that. If that's all there is to womanhood, why would anybody do it? Mtfs fight to be women. Compared to the population of cisgender women, there aren't very many ftms. There must be something positive about womanhood. Cisgender women must find something fulfilling in it or they would quit. Socialization is subtle and powerful, but it's not magic.

And I remember Sara telling me how she was confused by my wanting to be a boy because it's so great to be a girl. Huh. Really? So I posted a question on the internets. What's so great about it? There must be something good. I drew strength from solidarity with other dykes and women (well, the women who weren't normative at me). But that's not very much positive in the face of a whole lot of negative. What did I miss?

It's a tough question, but I got answers. Many of them were about solidarity and talked about relationships, but not specific to the gender of the subject, only the object. But some, like "not shaving or shaving one’s legs \ skipping the make-up or wearing it \ wearing jeans or a skirt or nothing at all" all hint at a freedom to optionally express femininity. And "breasts" which indicates a physical state of secondary sex characteristics. And, I’m going to guess that the major positives are these: socially allowable femininity and a body that conforms to your identity. Which is logical. What else could it possibly be?

This femininity is socially allowable because it's inhabited by female bodies. Feminine men face even more reprimand then masculine women. And of course, there's the body - which is what transition changes. The mind stays the same. And this is part of what makes my friends' sense of loss confusing. Because we profess to care more about what's in people's minds than their body. And we do, probably. So it's losing somebody from your team who is going to play for a different team.

But even the body isn't all that changed. Small differences in muscles and weight. Hair growing. Squarer chin. Lower voice. It's all very subtle. A UK glossy magazine was trying to do a story on ftms, including me, but it's going to die, I think. The editor wants before and after shots - something dramatic. But there's nothing to give her. I was masculine before and I'm masculine now. But there's a narrative she wants to confirm: one of a rigid binary. It can't possible be safe and easy to slip across a porous border to inhabit a more livable side. Transition must be medically dangerous and a last resort, preceded by uncontrollable sobbing. Changes must be dramatic and reinforce the idea of a high fence.

But the real story is so much more subtle. One of my friends, who is sad about this told me that I had been the most androgynous person she'd ever met. But in the present, I'm just masculine and male and not androgynous at all. I haven't changed. Only these subtle tings with square jaws,muscles and vocal pitch have changed. I was never androgynous. My body was suffused with social baggage. It whispered lies about me. The only thing androgynous was my deafness to it's imperatives. I'm tall and slender. There's some irony that women are conditioned to long for what I had and didn't want. Skinny limbs. Long eyelashes. My grandmother always said I could have been a model. All I would have needed was a whole new personality.

It's easier now, when I look in the mirror and the image reflected back at me doesn't call me a liar. I've always been masculine, but now it's easier to inhabit and embody. I don't have to fight for my identity and the superficial tokens to represent it, like hair and clothes. I don't have to fight the social message me body transmits. I don't have to compensate and hide. All of this and some facial hair too. It feels like everything has changed. But on the other hand, it feels like nothing has changed. On a real level, nothing has. I write music. I go to school. I walk my dog. My life is the same except that it's not.

When I was a youth, I asked the scout leader if I could join the Cub Scouts. I know they didn't have any girls, but the boy scout activities seemed more like what I was looking for than did the girl scouts. The scout leader laughed. When I was a couple years older, my church youth group sent two representatives to ask if girls could be altar servers. The priest laughed at them and they came back and shared the news with the rest of us. When I was 14, I asked the football coach if I could try out for the team. It seemed like fun and I knew that girls could sometimes be kickers or in other non-tackled positions. He laughed.

And now I'm a part of this group that spent so much time laughing at me. I don't know how much I internalized female socialization. I was always convinced that these limitations should not apply to me because I didn't want them. But they did limit me. I got hairdryers for gifts when my brother got tools.

I'm going the end of next month to something called ETC in Amsterdam. It's a gathering for women and gender minorities. I feel kind of awkward about going to be in a women's space, even as I insist that I'm basically unchanged from when I went last year. I think the point of these kinds of spaces is solidarity. Everybody there has been on the losing side of Cixous' binary. We've all all been perceived as the other. The non-man, non-default, alien - the losing side of the binary. That's what we're combatting and that experience itself is what qualifies people for membership. To me it seems obvious that these kinds of spaces would be open to transgender people.

If I don't feel like I fit in, well, there's the dramatic change that the glossy magazine wants and the loss for my old friends grieve and part of the awesomeness of being girl slipped away. And maybe then I'll see that the binary is as hard to cross as they say. But I think it will be ok. I don't want to dream smaller.

Racism vs Sexism: This is not a Contest!!

I've talked before about why I like Obama. It was mostly emotional. He talks about the future. He links it with the civil rights struggles of the past. He invokes destiny and progress in nifty ways. A big component of this is that he stays positive. His charisma is a whole big ball of being positive.

When he gave a speech on MLK day talking about the need for queer equality, that was a strong statement and it was specifically against the queerphobia found in some black churches. But it was positive all the way. He's a uniter. Emotionally, he tells folks they're wrong without ever telling them that they're wrong. It's like he's got a great big tent set up and keeps inviting people in. And he's not telling folks that they're wrong as much as he's asking them to scoot over a bit to make some room for the new folks coming into the tent.

I wish everybody on the Democratic side would stay positive. Not just the candidates, but everybody. When pundits or whoever try to frame this as white women against black men, that especially gets my hackles up. Sexism and racism are related. It's not meaningful to argue about which is worse. Historically, advances for People of Color have been linked with advances for women. The same folks who worked to end slavery worked on suffrage. Many of the same folks who worked in the civil rights movement worked in the women's rights movement.

Ok, not everybody who is anti-racist is anti-sexist. And not every feminist anti-racist. That second case is getting a lot of attention right now. White, second wave feminists tended to ignore black women's issues and write about white women as if all women were white. Some of these folks are writing op-eds now that have this same problem and it's incredibly annoying. Gloria Steinem wrote a piece that, yikes, I wish she hadn't written it. Unfortunately, though, when folks react to this kind of op-ed, well, their reactions can be problematic too. Instead of arguing with the specific author or even the school of thought of the author or even second wave feminism in general, they paint with a broader brush. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to blame all of second wave feminism. There were influential and important black women in the movement. And, with a broader brush, I really don't think it's fair to blame all feminism. Third wave feminists are specifically anti-racist and feature more contributions of POC writers and also tend not to see things solely in terms of white vs black. (Shockingly, there are additional races in America.) I know third wave feminism has it's own problems which will probably seem glaring in a generation, but right now, there's a conscious effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, especially in regards to racism and homophobia, etc. Going yet another step further, it's really, really unfair to blame white women in general as a group.

There are pundits on TV that start talking about white women as if they're a homegenius group of suburban, middle class soccer moms, all implicitly or explicitly racist. Many of these pundits are white men! Yo! Get off the high ground, Mr. Chauvinist Pig! Right, contrary to what many seem to think, white women vary in age from 18 to over 100. They vary in income from grinding poverty to extreme wealth. They live in rural areas, in the city, in the suburbs. Not all of them are, will be, or want to be moms, soccer or not. Not all are straight. Not all are cisgender. So white, male pundits, complaining about racism, treat white women as a big group of identical, interchangeable, (not quite) people. Ironic!

The brilliant part about this is that it lets white men off the hook. Who profits when the disadvantaged fight each other instead of the advantaged?

So, can we all stop arguing about whether racism is "worse" than sexism or vice versa? They're different beasts! But they serve the same purpose of maintaining inequality and keeping the rulers up top. Instead, let's talk about who is going to help the most.

Position-wise, Obama and Clinton are pretty much identical on feminist issues. I don't want to cal them "women's issues," because it's kind of foolish to assume that these issues only effect women. If abortion is illegal, that increases unwanted fatherhood, not just unwanted motherhood. Every man that's tied economically to a women gets hurt by income inequality. Heterosexual men don't bear many of the direct costs of sexism, but they bear costs. Feminist issues are good for everybody, not just for women. And Obama and Clinton are both great on feminist issues. A single-issue voter can go for either of them and end up doing well policy-wise. Of course, somebody who actually IS a woman, well, if I were a single-issue voter, that would push it over the edge for me.

But, position-wise, Obama and Clinton are not equal on race issues. An anti-racist, single-issue voter would pick Obama.

There are a lot of reasons to back Clinton. There are a lot of reasons to back Obama. There are other policy differences,although not overly many. How about we keep it positive, eh? And can we lay off white women? (If we start in on sexist black men . . . .oy, let's not do that.)

Public Service Announcement

For all of you who switched your registration to vote on Super Tuesday, don't forget to switch back to the Green Party. We need you to stay on the ballot, not just in national races, where maybe voting Green isn't s useful, but in local races. We've got folks in state legislatures. We almost got mayor of San Francisco. Stay Green!

Book Review: Strong Imagination

Before I begin, I want to share that the reason that I have time to type a book review is that my mixing board is not broken at all. You may recall that I mentioned earlier that my synth got battered in shipping. This caused some of the jacks to get bent so they weren't making good contact, which is easily fixable. So all is well.

Last spring, when I was whining about being on a really long waiting list to see a shrink, my friend Vivian gave me a book called Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature by David Nettle, which explores a link between insanity and creativity, just as the name implies. Nettle makes a convincing case regarding the nature and cause of madness. To briefly summarize: madness of all forms has both a genetic and an environmental component. In cases where of identical twins, when one becomes schizophrenic, the other has a 50% of becoming so also. This is a much higher risk than the general population, but still only half. Factors that can push people over the edge include divorce, death of a family member, social isolation (say, from moving far away) and basically everything else in my life that's happened to me since 2002. I really like this part of the book because it makes me feel like I'm super together for not being more crazy.

Ok, since going mad is a huge problem, why do these genes persist in the population? Well, that twin who doesn't go mad is likely to do very well in life. People who have increased risk for insanity tend to excel, especially in creative persuits. He then broke down mental illness by profession. Poets are just nuts. Alas, for poets. Next in line are musicians, especially composers. And it goes through all the creative fields and then into more practical ones.

The author sees two primary classes of mental illness. One is schizophrenia, and the other is a polar disorder. What he means by polar disorder is people whose emotions tend to run out of balance. So he's grouping depressives and bipolar people together and argues how they're related on a neurotransmitter level. He claims that depressives also have periods of peaks, but they don't get as out of control as people who are bipolar. While schizoid personality types are good for creative thinking, the periods of peaks (short of mania) for people with polar disorders tend to be good for getting work done. He specifically mentions composers here. Especially in the old days of ensemble writing, before MIDI realizations, composers would have to write things and then wait months or years to hear it. A sane person doesn't go into work that's so thankless and so short of rewards. Most people need positive stimuli more often to keep working on something.

He never mentions anxiety disorder, aside from in his list of mental illness by profession, but from other reading, I know it's strongly linked to depression and the same drugs are used to treat it. I don't know if I've ever experienced the highs of creative energy that he described. I do know that I tend to be overly pleased with myself. I always thought of this as some sort of personality flaw, but I guess it's essential to my line of work. Also, the way I approach composition is more praise-seeking than the old way. What better way to get positive feedback than through commissions? I get a vote of confidence when people ask for one and then (so far) specific praise for the output that I deliver. And while I hate performing, I do it anyway because I like the attention. I've written pieces of music performed by others and then sat in the audience and listened. Fewer people come up to talk to me afterwards. And, most importantly, this does not get me chicks like performing does. But more on that last part in a bit.

So Nettle makes a convincing case that the genes associated with certain types of mental illness are also correlated with creative output, which explains why they persist in the population despite their huge liability. Appreciation of creative endeavors is a human universal. In every society that has ever existed, poetry and music have been considered important. Anthropologists have never found a group of people without music and without poetry. Even in societies where survival is difficult and everyone works at acquiring food (ie, no specialization of labor), poetry and music are valued. And people who are good at poetry or music get high prestige. Even if they have a bad time of it for a while, people will donate food. Creative output is essentially human, much more so than using tools or the other ways we've sought to set ourselves apart form other animals.

Nettle then goes on to ask a much deeper question: why do humans value creativity? Here, he turns to evolutionary theory. Male peacocks have crazy tails. You've seen them. It requires a huge number of extra resources to keep those tails looking good. A male with an especially nice looking tail has to be able to get a lot more food. One with a scraggly looking tail is not faring as well nutritionally. And that's why, the theory goes, peahens (aka, the female of the species) find the tail so sexy. this male is really good at feeding himself and staying healthy. She thinks, if I breed with him, there's a good chance my offspring will be healthy and able to feed themselves too. Therefore, the tail is sexy because it's a drag on the bird. It's inefficiency is what makes it such a great indicator of success. And it shows off values that are important to the survival needs of peacocks.

Humans don't have much in the way of plumage, but we do have really big brains compared to other animals. And big brains are very important to us as a species. So somebody who is creative not only has a really big brain, but they have excess to waste on poetry and music or other creative output. Somebody who can tell a good story is thus not only smart enough to survive, but they've got brains to spare. I'm not explaining this as well as Nettle did, and, indeed, it's a little slippery and weird, inherently. Animals find excess to be sexy, specifically excess that's tied to some essential part of their species. So for humans, this is thinking power. It's important to remember that this is statistical. You might find your pulse increase for accountants (yes, I know, it's a stereotype - Charles Ives invented the actuary table), but statistically, creative output is one of the things that people consider when looking for a mate.

I say "people." Nettle says "women." Going back to peacocks - they don't mate for life. A male can go after as many peahens as will have him. His investment in the next generation is very small, so he doesn't have to be picky. People, though, invest quite a bit more in the next generation. Most people in the world practice monogamy. (Even in societies that allow polygamy, most people in it have only one mate.) I read several years ago a theory that early humans tended to mate for about two years if they didn't have a kid. after that, they tend to move on. this was valuable behavior as they seemed to be infertile with each other. If they had a kid, they would tend to stay together until the kid was 7 years old. At that point, a kid doesn't require as many resources. Giving birth is a much higher investment on the part of a woman than men's part in conception, but 7 years of monogamy means that they're both very strongly invested in the child. So the mother invests more resources, but not that much more.

Think of that movie March of the Penguins. the males and females look pretty much alike. The males didn't have any special plumage. But both parents had a nearly equal part in taking care of the kid. Both of them had to be extremely strong to reproduce and both of them had to be completely dedicated to their one offspring. A female could only lay one egg and a male could only keep one egg warm. therefore, their contribution was more or less equal. So when they were searching for mates, they're both looking for somebody strong and healthy. Any plumage that the males developed would be equally important on the females. they both need to be able to march out, find food, march back, feed the kid, etc.

But, alas, Nettle is trapped in the male plumage theory. As dubious proof of the essenitaly male nature of creativity, he has a graph of gallery shows for male and female painters in the first half of the 20th century. I wish this was a joke, but it's actually in the book and he appears to be serious about it. He does acknowledge the role of sexism, but brushes it aside. However, he would have been hard pressed to find a graph more influenced by sexism. For an example, Frieda Kahlo, who was awesome and had an incredible amount of output, didn't get a solo show until near the end of her life. She was an international celebrity before anybody even thought to give her a solo show. Her work now is considered iconic and is extremely popular, but the sale price of her painting is still much lower than other male artists with less fame and popular appeal, and she's on display in fewer museums than one would expect. She is not at all an isolated case, but rather just one of the most blatant. If Nettle had looked up a graph for white vs African American shows, he would have found similar data. Having established creativity as a human universal, it would be stupid and incorrect to argue racial difference based on such a graph. But here he does it with sex differences.

Ok, fine, there are sex differences in other species and there are some sex differences in humans too. But humans have nearly equal fertility investments in child rearing, so sex differences should be much less. Furthermore, peahens don't have fancy tails. If it were the case that creativity was an essentially male persuit, there would be no genetic advantage in giving women the dangerous personality types associated with creativity. They would get none of the reward and bear none of the burden. Indeed, since personality types and creativity are so closely associated, the rate of male vs female insanity should indicate the rate of creative potential. And it's very near the same. (Women are more likely than men to have a polar disorder.)

Quick, name a female sex symbol! Madonna! What does she do? She sings! How many female sex symbols are creative? Singers, dancers, actors! It should be completely obvious that male heterosexuals are as captivated by creative talent as straight women. (And queer folks having kids value this also.) Only blinding levels of sexism could obscure this.

I'm really tired of folks trying to say that composing is inherently, biologically male. The arts are human. Any attempt to assign them to gender is misguided and silly - or it would be silly if it weren't so dangerous. And the lengths that women go to in order to create, fighting systems specifically put in place to keep them out, should emphasize the universality of creativity. Given the obstacles preventing women from getting gallery shows in the first half of the 20th century, the fact that there are any at all seems to imply a possibility that women have more creative capacity than men. I don't think this is the case. I think the higher rate of depression in women is environmental, caused by things like barriers to creative recognition. I think the struggles past women have gone through to get their work out in the world is testament to the human spirit.

So, all in all, Nettle makes a pretty good argument, despite being a sexist ass who needs to revise some of the last chapters. He also gives advice to folks to try to stay sane. A personality type at risk to insanity can be helpful, but actual insanity is not. People who tend to succeed are organized and hard working (alas for me). Hard work is a greater part of creative success than other factors. So don't feel bad about your mental illness. Work hard, get help if and when you need it. Poets are sexy.

Horrifying Moments

Redaction

One of the most horrifying moments in film is the crucifix scene in The Exorcist. That scene stands out of one of extreme drama, and, indeed, horror. I'm talking about it non-specifically because I haven't actually seen the movie. But I want to, because it's reputed to be an excellent film and a classic in it's genre. And there's a famous scene involving a crucifix which invokes horror in the audience.

The reason that I bring this up is because I fell victim to knee jerking even as I tried to resist it. Horrifying is not the same as horrible. Saying that Beethoven's 9th is a horrifying depiction of violence does not mean that it's horrible. Nor does it mean that the horror lies in people's enjoyment of the piece. Instead it means that McCleary would like to put an additional genre description on the 9th. In addition to it's musical form and it's time period, she would like to add the label "horror." A label worn by excellent works in other genres.

This sort of generic description is not often applied to musical works and so McCleary is often misconstrued. Including by me. Which is why I should not blog about books that I haven't actually read.

But what about porn?

(Musicology is so much more exciting than one might think!)

The director of The Exorcist created a film about demonic possession. However, I wouldn't say that he was advocating for the same or trying to encourage it in any way. I'm guessing most Beethoven scholars would assert that Beethoven wasn't advocating for rape. However, pron occupies a somewhat different realm in society. For starters, unlike demons, we all agree that it exists. Secondly, unlike rape, it's legal.

So I think most of my questions from my previous post still stand: Does a pron sample carry the male gaze with it ("the male audition")? Does intent matter? Does usage matter? What are the implications of whether or not they matter? Does the amount to which they matter vary over time?

Questions in Feminist Musicology

Instrumental Music

To call Susan McClary's book Feminine Endings "controversial," is an understatement. It inspires not just controversy, but also outrage. One guy I knew said of it and her, "she should stop writing."

Those of you who are not in the music world may be unfamiliar with this book. What it could it say that would cause folks to want to mute the author? "The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the [Beethoven's] Ninth [Symphony] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release." (found here) (Let's leave aside that this sentence doesn't actually appear in the book, she did write it and the book has a rephrased version of the same sentiment.) Note that she is speaking metaphorically about the piece of music, not literally about Beethoven. She speaks of his creation, not of he, himself. Still, that's provocative as hell. Is there anything to it?

I kind of like the 9th and the drama of it, so rather than knee jerking about how I don't consume that kind of pron, I want to instead address the idea underlying this oft quoted sentence: Are ideas of sexuality and violence expressed through instrumental music? One place to search for the answer to this query is to look at how instrumental music is paired with words and actions in cultural product that seeks to express those same ideas. That is, does Hollywood assign certain sexualities or actions to certain musical idioms? If, for example, woodwinds and especially saxophones were often used as musical cues attached to the sexual other, such that they came to stand as a character note, that would suggest that instrumental music could carry those sort of cues. And indeed, the saxophone's association with jazz and thus black people (an alien other) lead it to be associated with other alien others like queers (as Norman Mailer wrote, "the white negro") and fallen women. It is the case that certain instruments and tonalities tend to have cultural baggage rooted in their history. A sax playing a 'blue' note invokes all the baggage of jazz music. A drum and bugle corps playing in major invokes the baggage of military pride. Indeed, it would be more surprising if these associations did not exist as it would mean that people had no connection to their cultural history.

Lest anyone argue that the newness of 'talkies' means that poor Beethoven was writing before associations came to be attached to musical cues, I have two answers to that. 1. The term "feminine ending" is an archaic musical term, referring to cadential weakness. (wikipedia) This shows that ideas of assigning sexuality to musical structures pre-date hollywood. And 2. She's using present tense not past tense. "The point of recapitualtion" means not the intention, but the moment: the place where the theme returns and is restated. She asserts that it "is one of the most horrifying moments in music" now. I have to disagree, purely on aesthetic grounds. However, she's talking about what it means to a listener now, not what it meant to the composer or people in his time period.

Tape Music

I meant to just have an intro paragraph on McClary, but I got carried away, as one so often does. (I have to confess that I haven't actually finished reading the book. I can't even swear that I finished the first chapter, but I can't say for certain as it's in California and I am not.) Anyway, my point of bringing it up was to make the assertion that if the use of certain instrumental sounds can reference particular ideas, this must also be the case for musique concrete. That is, if a certain schmaltzy sax line implies a sexual encounter, a musician playing a sample of a moan from a porn movie must also have certain baggage. It unarguably conveys sexuality. To say otherwise would be silly. And with it, I think, it brings all the baggage associated with pron.

The first piece that I know of which uses the sounds of a woman experiencing orgasm is Tiger Balm by Annea Lockwood. This piece is feminist in intent. And the sample reflects that. It sounds like a home recording and while the fact of it's inclusion is a bit shocking, the sonic effect does not carry the titilation that one would expect. I communicated as much to Lockwood over email, after she sent me the record (I met her by volunteering for the Other Minds festival, but that's a longer story). Her reply acknowledged this.

Since then, I've heard orgasm samples used in (at least) three pieces by two male composers. Both used what sounded like recordings of commercial pornography. The first one was by Jascha Narveson, who was a colleague at Wesleyan. He played it in class and I remember it using mostly porn-y sounds. I was dismayed, but then he explained that the piece was feminist in intent. The other two pieces were both by Alvin Curran. One he performed this last spring at the Royal Conservatory. He has a large keyboard loaded up with samples and he improvises playing them, building up dense and often unexpected textures. The first inclusion of the woman moaning was a surprising juxtaposition and a funny moment, but when it returned, the humor was lessened until it was gone. The other piece was on a podcast which I just listened to and which inspired this post. It sounded like he was using the sample sample in the same keyboard. I suspect that it's a sound that he uses often, as are, probably, all the sounds in his keyboard. Therefore, it's affect cannot be merely novelty or it wouldn't bear repeating in multiple pieces and would instead wear thin as a joke that gets old.

So does a pron sample carry the male gaze with it? The production values and sound quality are as instantly recognizable as pictures of Barbie-smooth skin and shaved pubic hair. Can one speak of a male audition to compliment his gaze? And does intent matter?

If intent does matter, then McCleary seems to have slandered Beethoven. (*) I can imagine that his primary conscious desire was to create a compelling piece of music. Certainly, he had unconscious goals, firmly tied to his time and place. But even then, when women's roles in public life were less than they are now, rape was still far out of bounds. (I presume. Scholars are free to correct me.) If intent doesn't matter, then Narveson's piece would be perpetuating our hypothetical male audition. Or does it matter how the music is used? I recall that the music was composed for a feminist benefit of some kind. Does the importance of intent change over time? Beethoven's intent doesn't matter because he's long dead and we're modern listeners, so therefore, over time, the importance of the intent and original use of Narveson's piece will gradually fade and it will slowly fall into the male audition. If the intent and usage is a deciding factor in how one regards a piece, do the program notes then become an integral part of the composition? What you hear is always colored by what you know (or think you know), so, to avoid the male audition, would it be necessary to insist that everyone acquaint themselves with the program notes?

How much importance to composers should this be anyway? There is (or was) a group in the San Francisco area called the Porn Orchestra. They played live music to accompany muted porn films. Sometimes with the fast forward button firmly pressed. Amusing, certainly. When I first learned of them, it was via the internet and their information spoke of the "universal" experience of hitting the mute button while viewing porn, because the sound so often sucked. I polled my female friends and almost none had participated in this "universal" experience. So it's universal for who? (We all know the answer to this question.)

So what about using pron samples? I hope for discussion in the comments, as I don't have answers to these questions.

Edit

Something just occurred to me. There will be a followup post shortly.

Edit 2

Ok, I knee jerked a bit. Sorry. followup is here

It's alllllliiiiive!!!!!!

Caravia asks, rhetorically, I hope, "Is feminism dead?" There's nothing as fun as answering a rhetorical questions, so therefore, my answer is "if it was, you wouldn't be asking that question."

She goes on to point out that the key players in the Iraq war boondoggle have been almost all men. That's true, but I would caution against the drawing of certain conclusions based on that. Lest anyone think that women are automatically better, more peaceful leaders, may I draw your attention to Marget Thatcher. I think it's an error to assert the automatic superiority of women in any matter. Women suck just as much as men. We already have equality in stupidity.

The reason fewer women were in war planning has to do with the spectacular level of sexism in the US. However, it may also be the case that the war itself is a result of the same sexism. The US seems to be going through a certain crisis of masculinity. There's a desire afoot to assert a masculine presence. Columnists fret about a metaphorical castration of the armed services. Voter's positive evaluations of Bush before his re-election also seem to be mostly based on the perception of him as the more manly candidate. Therefore, I would say that the lack of women in high levels of the Pentagon did not cause this disastrous foreign adventure, but instead, is also an effect of the same social forces that caused the war. What better way to assert a hyper-masculine presence than kicking some ass.

Note that the war was marketed as "ass kicking." Toby Kieth sang, in the widely played song Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, "An' you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A. / 'Cos we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." Of course, it was not Iraq that "messed with" the United States, it was Al Quaeda, but an extensive misinformation campaign caused the majority of Americans to believe that Iraq was at fault. Kieth sang, "A mighty sucker-punch came flying in from somewhere in the back." obviously alluding to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York. A sucker-punch is an unexpected hit: a tap on the shoulder from behind followed by a fist to the face. He felt this was a damage to the dignity of the US, singing metaphorically about a "big black eye," which is used, typically, not to just refer to an physical injury, but also a humiliation. In the barroom brawl in which he imagines foreign policy occurring, the US' masculinity has been compromised.

Alas, the "boot in ass" did not go as well as some might have hoped. Osama bin Laden was at large. There was no catharsis in extending the suffering of Afghanis and the already-destroyed infrastructure in Afghanistan. By contrast, there were plenty of things to blow up in Iraq.

The recipient of a sucker punch must retaliate to the punch or risk being labeled a "pussy." "Pussy," of course, is a crude word for a vagina as well as a descriptor for an insufficiently masculine man. The symbolism of the toppelling towers was not lost on the American subconscious. We were castrated, a hole left where once a tower stood.

The presence of more women in the Pentagon, then, wouldn't mean the women there would be any smarter or less loyal Bushie than their male colleagues, but it would imply that the crisis of masculinity was lessened or passed, thus causing a decrease in sexism and an increase in female participation.

Caravia goes on to note:

The idea with . . . peace movements driven by women is to raise awarness about the consequences of the war, the millions of civilian casualties. Not only the killed, but . . . the raped women, carrying the children of their rapists, the people killed in genocides around the world.

Her implication is, then, that male-driven peace movements focus on something other than civilian casualties. Perhaps they focus more on the (not inconsiderable) harm suffered by American soldiers? This is an interesting assertion and one that bears further analysis. It's certainly the case that woman are more able to have an immediate empathy with foreign victims of rape. American women are taught rape fear from an early age. Outside areas at night, mall parking garages, even the homes of friends are all fraught with danger. This ever-present rape awareness creates a connection between American women activists and their sisters in war zones. (I can't speak for European women's experiences.)

Others seem to have a harder time empathizing with women. In his song, Keith clearly imagines his metaphorical protagonist as male. What happens when somebody "sucker punches" a woman? Firstly, I doubt many would refer to it as a sucker-punch, but rather as an assault. And the response to an assault isn't to get into a brawl, but rather a more legalistic approach of calling the police, pressing charges, etc: a due process where, ideally, everyone involved is treated fairly and justly. This kind of response is one that might not work as well in a song ("Whip out my cell, before you can run / dial the operator at 9-1-1. / The police will come and put you in jail. / It takes 72 hours to set bail"), but is one that doesn't harm innocent bystanders or set off a larger, regional bar-brawl.

That Keith and others couldn't imagine themselves as acting as anything other than a humiliated man may stem from a horror at their tower being replaced by a hole but more likely shows that the crisis of masculinity was already present, probably brought about by other social factors, probably including economic insecurity. This shows that a thriving feminist movement could result in peace and also that it's tied to other struggles, like class inequality and the healthcare crisis.

Feminism and FLOSS

Introduction

Let's start this with some definitions. (No, this isn't about feminism and gum disease (although that might also be interesting).) FLOSS stands for "Free (Libre) Open Source Software." As they say, that's "free" as in speech, not "free" as in beer. FLOSS refers to software projects in which participation is more open. Users can get copies of the source code (this is the stuff that programmers make. you can change it and thus change the program) and do whatever they like with it, as long as what they distribute is also FLOSS. This is what we mean by "free."

However, to be clear, the distribution model of FLOSS means it is often also available without monetary exchange. Users can go to a website and get tons of cool software for their computer, including an operating system. You can get computer hardware and never pay for any of the programs on it and do this without piracy or stealing. And if you have technical skills and really like a piece of software, you can even add features to it. Or, you can ask for the feature and somebody might even listen to you and do it.

Every piece of software has a certain community aspect. The users are a group of people who care about the software. Thus, all software has some community. But proprietary software owned by big companies can afford to ignore this community or even work against them. Many of the mis-features in the new version of windows were added at the bequest of media companies and are contrary to the needs and desires of the user community. This dynamic is less present in FLOSS software because the user community has direct access to the very essence of the software. If something unpopular gets stuck in, they can take it back out. Thus FLOSS software is inherently democratic, existing squarely within the free marketplace of ideas. The users own the software.

Therefore FLOSS empowers the user. This dynamic tends to have implications in the social dynamic among users. Many FLOSS programs have online resources to help users and the community will often offer help and support to each other. For example a FLOSS thing I use has an IRC group (a chat room). Many users log in and keep it open in the background. If they have a problem, they can ask about it. If they notice somebody else is having a problem that they can solve, they might jump in and help.

Many of the implications and goals of FLOSS have an obvious commonality with feminist goals. In a more concise summary, my internet friend Paula (aka Bastubis) wrote:

I think FLOSS offers better possibilities [than proprietary software] for feminist use because:

• it’s community owned
• mutual and self-help model
• collaborative
• empowers the user

Women Developers

Despite all the commonality between FLOSS and feminism, it’s still the case that only around 1.5% of FLOSS developers are women. Therefore, we can conclude that while FLOSS has a commonality with feminism, it is not, in and of itself, inherently feminist or women's participation would be higher.

Ironically, some of the very openness of FLOSS may be part of the issue. All groups have hierarchies and power imbalances. In some groups, hierarchies are formalized and in others they are not. Informal groupings are fine for consciousness raising or within groups of friends, but they can become problematic in groups that are taking more direct action. For example, let's say a CR group decides to act on a specific issue. One person might have an idea for a protest, but, since this is a new direction for the group, before presenting it to the group as a whole, she runs it by a few friends within the group who offer suggestions. Over time, in-groups and out-groups develop, where a core group of friends discusses things before brining it to the group as a whole. This dynamic can quickly become toxic and it's why direct action groups often have specific handbooks for how to organize themselves. You cannot try to right a power imbalance unless you first recognize that it exists.

Ironically, sometimes even more oppressive hierarchy can be better for reaching feminist goals. About 20% of corporate developers are women. Corporations invest energy in trying to recruit women and trying to avoid the appearance of sexism (to some extent). This is not because corporations are good, far from it, but because we have been able to use the legal system to force them to be less discriminatory. However, turning the legal system on FLOSS is probably not the best solution to the lack-of-diversity problem, alas.

So, given all of this, what causes women’s non-participation in FLOSS? Well, most FLOSS stuff occurs on the internet. I remember the good old days of “nobody knows if you’re a dog on the internet” and how the invisibility of identity would lead to a truly colorblind, genderblind utopia. There’s multiple problems with this ideal, which can explain where it went wrong. First of all, access issues meant that the majority of (english-speaking) people on the internet were white men. This lead users to assume that anybody they were talking to was a white men. Secondly, anoninimity causes people to act like assholes. A few assholes could spew racist, sexist, classist garbage until populations that were sensitive to this would leave. The answer to this is not to do it in reverse because it’s a terrible model of how to behave and because it just won’t work. White guys are priviliged and this makes them less vulnerable to this kind of attack. So they’re in a position where they can exert this power and have no negative consequences for it. Probably, these are people who don’t feel terribly empowered in their daily lives. In the offline world, most gay bashers are teen boys who are alarmed about their own sexuality.

Informal hierarchies on online forums, coupled with conditions created by institutionalized oppression, therefore can create an environment which is explicitly hostile to women (and other minority groups). Because everyone is equally empowered, nobody is empowered to stop harassers, trolls, and vocal bigots. Indeed, a completely open forum is a situation where a troll (or a spammer) can destroy a community, by creating so much garbage that any meaningful communication is effectively drowned out. The way to solve this problem is to create a more formalized hierarchy, where certain users are granted the power to ban certain users or remove certain posts. These super-empowered users are called moderators. They keep spammers and trolls at bay. There are more refined models of moderation, such as rotating moderatorship or systems where comments are voted on and given certain scores (so users can elect to see only high-scoring comments).

However, moderation is only as good as the moderator(s). If the moderators don't care about sexism, an informal hierarchy based on sex can still exist. These partially unmoderated portions of the internet are often explicitly hostile to women. The moderated sections are less hostile, but there’s still the nobody-knows-if-you're-a-dog invisibility. Everyone around you is (apparently) a white man. This does not create a welcoming environment.

So what to do about women in FLOSS? As the hierarchies are most often informal, a legal remedy is probably not the answer. Therefore, I think there are two approaches we should explore. One is to work with prominent FLOSS organizations, like GNU, to put women in high profile positions. I think the Ubuntu group is probably receptive to this. This would create a situation where women FLOSS contributors are more visible.

The other approach is affinity groups. Having groups of women working together on FLOSS creates visibility and an a community which is specifically welcoming to them, potentially attracting more women to become active in FLOSS.

I think there’s also a financial issue Do FLOSS developers get paid for their work? (Frankly, I don’t want to add to the amount of unpaid labor already extracted from women.) Programmers in open source may be living off of donations to their projects. They may be funded by corporations and foundations. Some just do it in their free time. The grass-roots kind of FLOSS that we’re talking about is more in the free-time category of development. I’m guessing that the men who do free time development have some sort of infrastructure to support them. They’re students. Or they’re married and have a woman picking up after them or they have a maid (a woman picking up after them). By contrast, women who are not students usually have to pick up after themselves.

Non-profits

The ideals of FLOSS have a great synchronicity with non-profit enterprises, but if we want women who are in non-profits, and thus already getting low pay, to take up FLOSS development, it needs to be part of their job, not something for their free time. The good news about this is that there is funding out there.

If we want women who are in non-profits to take up FLOSS tools, we need to give them training and support, face to face, through affinity groups. The money they save on software licenses will make it worth their time. Also, we as developers need to make sure that the tools we give them are self-explanatory. If they want to get a volunteer to come in for an afternoon and do something, they want hir to just be able to sit down and do it, without having to spend too much time learning the system.

Conclusions

FLOSS and feminism could and should work together. To ensure that this happens on the development side, we need to push for both visibility and anti-sexist moderation policies. We can create visibility by getting women into visible formally hierarchical organizations that already exist and by creating our own such organizations. On the user side, we should specifically offer support through affinity groups, so that women have an explicitly welcoming environment where they can learn about FLOSS tools. Furthermore, we should specifically reach out to feminist non-profits as a means to help them become more effective and thus advance the cause of feminism in the brick and mortar world, as well as online.