Defending Yourself from Mean Girls

The Star has published an interview with the author of a book called "Girl Politics: Friends, Cliques and Really Mean Chicks":

With Girls, It's an Emotional Mugging

The author's advice on defending yourself from these types is apparently based on the Bible, which would look like a strike against it, but from the interview, it sounds as if it's not only sensible but might actually work.

Biblical or not, I really like this woman's approach to helping girls defend themselves from mean girls. Never respond to the criticism, never respond to what's being said, just turn the focus relentlessly back onto the bullying behaviour.
"Wow, I don't get into that sort of thing, sorry."

"I'm not going there, we're both better than that."

"Sorry, I don't do this."

Now, it would take a lot, I mean a LOT, of self-possession and focus to manage that, when some little bitch is tackling you at the age of 12, with all her smirking little minions standing around you, saying "doesn't the way you dress embarrass you?" or "Colin is Diane's boyfriend and if you don't stop talking to him we'll tell everyone you're a slut". Or whatever. It's VERY hard not to rise to the bait.

But if you can manage to take the high road - "sorry, I don't do this", "sorry, I'm not going there, we're both better than that" - and just keep repeating it in response to the further attacks that are certain to come, and WALK AWAY as soon as you can - it would take the wind right out of their sails, and they'd find a more entertaining target. And if everyone responded that way, they might even grow up.

What a fantastic idea! I can certainly think of encounters that approach would have transformed, when I was a lass.

Hell, I can think of encounters it would transform right now.

this just in: women do hard science, duh

Development of the HPV vaccine

It turns out that all three of the scientists who collaborated on developing the HPV vaccine were women. I hadn't read this anywhere until yesterday. And sure, it's always good to think that the gender of the scientist doesn't matter and that it's a good thing when it isn't even considered worthy of comment anymore.

On the other hand, when you have the (ex) president of Harvard opining in front of an audience of scientists, male and female, that women don't go on in science because they just aren't as good at it really, and other morons claiming that women can't do Really Serious Stuff - in science, or the arts, or anything else - because they 'can't innovate' (read: 'aren't smart enough") - although they're really very good at routine tasks like handling child care, or routine (never gourmet) cooking, or housekeeping, or clerical work for the real men who are doing the REally Serious Innovative Breakthrough type things - well, in fact I don't think we have moved on as far as all that, after all.

I think that maybe we DO need to mention all the things women do as artists and scientists and writers and in every other category of inspired and innovative work. To make sure that men and women both know that anyone who spews condescending nonsense like "oh women aren't innovative (smart) enough to do X" are talking through their - well, their hats. To be polite. And can immediately be contradicted by a thousand or a million counter-examples.

Let's put it the other way. When women are routinely burdened with all the routine work, the cooking and housekeeping and childcare and clerical crap, it's amazing that they nevertheless find the time and energy to do all the brilliant innovative stuff too. And yet they do.

So, congratulations, Drs. Laura Koutsky, Kathryn Jansen, and Nancy Kiviat (who collaborated in the early studies). Great work, and may you inspire a million like you.

My friend

The friend for whom I was reading Ursula Le Guin, so we could discuss it when I visited, died on Monday night. She had been ill for a long time, in and out of hospice, and had 24 hour care at home in the months before she died. She was not expected to live nearly so long, by her doctors. I expected her to last months longer; her spirit was so strong, she was so interested in life, so determined to live. So constantly curious and intellectually eager, even under the influence of the painkillers that fog most people out. She was very thin, and growing steadily thinner, thanks I suppose to the progress of the disease. In the end I suppose her physical resources simply wore out.

I never finished the Earthsea Series. I haven't got a copy of The Other Wind yet. I was going to give her back her copy of Tales of Earthsea this Sunday, when I saw her again, and then get The Other Wind to talk about next time.

I wish she were still here. We never finished our conversation. I suppose we never would have done. There always seemed to be new things to talk about.

God rest her gentle soul.

Dragons in the Earthsea series

I've been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin lately. I had never read the Earthsea trilogy, but a friend of mine loaned me the first trilogy, which was fascinating because it was so well-written, and so unthinkingly misogynistic. Amazing that le Guin, of all people, could so unconsciously internalize the values of her oppressors - I know, she was very young when she wrote those ones. But this is the writer of The Left Hand of Darkness, for crying out loud, the first novel I ever read that made me think seriously about social construction of gender. (I think I was around 12), and that things don't have to be the way they are; that they're built that way. So it's a warning to us all that we all do the same, internalize those values, try as we may to avoid it; and that we must keep on trying to extricate ourselves. Constant vigilance our watchword, etc.

So then my friend loaned me "Tehanu", also fascinating and well-written but fascinating particularly because you get to watch le Guin begin to write her way out of the misogynistic hole she had originally dug for herself in that series. So the culture she describes is misogynistic but the narrator is conscious of that; the narrator describes, and Ged and Tenar question, as far as they're able, the sexist and woman-hating assumptions on which their whole culture is based. But it's a tribute to le Guin that Ged and Tenar are not and do not become potted 21st century apologists for feminism, because raised in the culture they have been, they can't become so. It takes more than one generation to make a revolutionary, and there are ideas Ged and Tenar simply aren't equipped to have.

I was particularly interested in Ged's objection to the idea that men and women are the same. He lives in a culture where only men can be "real wizards". Women are excluded from the training that would make them wizards, and are then told that they're inferior and that's why they can't become wizards; they are prohibited from ever learning the True Language in which magic can be done. Women with magical talents are "witches", village-witches, hedge-witches, and generally looked down upon; women's magic is evil magic, though useful if weak (they do a range of fertility spells, love charms, healing of minor illnesses, the sort of thing that wizards don't stoop to).

But Ged, in Tehanu, can't accept the idea that "men are nothing more than women who can't have children", and women are nothing more than men who can. There has to be more than that, he thinks. He's an essentialist.

But in his world, it pays to be an essentialist, because the roots of magic are rooted in who and what you are. And men's magic, he has been taught, is different, because men are different. If he gives up that certainty, he has to give up magic.

Tenar thinks differently; she thinks the root of all things, all magic, is single, so magic in men and magic in women must ultimately be the same. But both of them respect the idea that the magic must not be lost. (And the whole book is written in the context of a world in which the magic nearly was lost, by people trying to have everlasting life, so they know what a world without magic looks like.)

But this debate showed me why it is we are so loathe to give up the idea of essential male-female distinctions ourselves. Because we are afraid that we will lose something essential. We very much want magic - power; souls; individual people as more than social and biological constructs - to exist, and we do not want to lose the vessel that contains that possibility. Essentialism seems to make it possible. If we are all the same, if there are no distinctions but acculturated ones, if it's all words and clothes and makeup and no real difference whatever, then is there anything real at all? Perhaps nothing, including magic, ever really existed. And essentialism is the very breath of patriarchy; without essentialism, patriarchy could not exist.

So we're afraid to let go of the patriarchy, because it has always promised us that this magic exists, and more, that it owns the magic. However damaging patriarchy is, we are afraid to let go of it, for fear of losing everything that seems to be implicated in the structure.

Which brings me to the dragons.

In "Tehanu", an 8 or 9 year old girl, Therru, who lives with a group of gipsies who include her parents and a couple of other men including an uncle, is routinely maltreated, starved, beaten, forced to work past her strength to serve the others, and is finally sexually abused (one doesn't know for how long that went on), beaten unconscious and pushed into a fire by men (including her father) trying to hide their crimes. She breathes the flame, which damages her throat and voice forever; one side of her face is badly scarred and she loses one eye. But Tenar, a middle aged farm wife with an interesting past, saves her life and adopts her. We later discover that Therru is in fact both human and dragon, and her parent is the oldest dragon of all, Kalessan. When she matures she will take her dragon form and join her kind in the West.

In "Tales from Earthsea" there is a young woman, Irian. She hates her name, though it appears to be her true name (albeit not all of her true name); because her father's estate is called "Iria", and "Irian" obviously means "of Iria". But she hates her father, with whom she lives alone; her mother died in childbirth for her. Her father is a soggily drunken abusive bad tempered lout, and three instances in the story make it clear that he not only beats her when he's drunk but also subjects her to slobbering repulsive "prying" caresses. In other words she is also sexually abused. She grows up to be sexually numb, uninterested in sexual behaviour of any kind. There's only once, when meditating, that she accesses her true nature and feels herself full of fire. But this is ambiguous. Because it turns out that she also is a dragon; that anger, sexual desire and fire are in her as in Therru inextricably linked (well, we don't know about desire, in Therru).

Now dragons are the most powerful, beautiful, dangerous and inscrutable creatures in Earthsea. So what is the connection between being incestuously raped and otherwise abused in childhood, and discovering your true dragon nature? I think it's important here to note that le Guin does not claim that childhood sexual abuse makes you a dragon; both these young women always were dragons. Only neither they nor anyone else knew it.

I think, though I'm still working on it, that for le Guin, these are women who have had cause to realise that the patriarchy offers them nothing at all. The protections and promises that patriarchy claims to offer women, for which women give up autonomy, power and respect and in exchange for which women agree to live subordinate lives as inferiors, sacrificing even their anger at all they have had to lose, turn out not to be a guaranteed deal. There is in fact no contract. Women give up everything, in return for which perhaps the patriarchy will protect them, if it feels like it. But if the patriarchy does not protect them, they have no recourse.

Except it turns out that's not true. It's only the women who are forced by the circumstances of their childhoods to realise that there is no point giving up power, because protection is not guaranteed in return - even their own fathers turn out to be predators - who realise their own essential dragon natures. It turns out that far from being powerless, magicless, cast out unprotected into a world with no meaning whatever, women who reject patriarchy become the most powerful, beautiful, dangerous and magical creatures of all. Le Guin is arguing that for those who reject patriarchy, the world is infinitely more magical than before. We lose nothing, and have everything to gain.

I have one more book to read in the series though. I'll be interested to see where she takes this.

Adjectives of Order: What Point Is There in Poetry?

"Adjectives of Order"
By Alexandra Teague
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET (link in title is to Slate article)
Click here to listen to Alexandra Teague read this poem.

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.

We, and of course I take some pride that my country was not part of the Coalition of Suck-ups but let us be honest: we, all of us in the West who are dependent on the faltering American economy and the oil economy, are murdering people in Iraq every day. We have destroyed a country. We have murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, torn apart by bombs, by bullets, by destruction of a medical system, by limiting supplies, by sectarian violence that we did not care enough or want to spend enough money to try to stop, we thought we could destroy a country and rebuild it on the cheap, we did. We are murdering a country, children are dying every day because of us, and terrorists are being born. Because of us.

And what point is there is saying any of this prettily? It's happening, whatever we say. We are doing it, whatever we say. And this is a brilliant poem, but what does it matter?

Joss Whedon's Equality Now speech

Over a year old now, but it cheers me to watch it again every once in awhile:

Does fanfiction keep us poor?

I was directed by circuitous routes to this article by "Cupid's Bow" on LJ, "Why Fanfiction Keeps Us Poor". Since she summarizes and engages with one of my favourite books, "How to Suppress Women's Writing" by one of my favourite writers, Joanna Russ, I found it particularly interesting. (I see on scanning the wikipedia article that Russ has got two recent books out that I didn't know about. I've already ordered, last night and this morning, two books of essays of hers that I didn't know existed, via abebooks.com; I think I'll hold off on ordering the latest two. At least until I get paid again ... - nice to know it's out there though, I have an interesting summer's reading ahead!)

But to return to fanfic. I gather there's been a lot of discussion of the article - in fact she's written a couple more posts in response to the discussion -but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

To summarize very very briefly, Why Fanfiction Keeps Us Poor".argues that fanfiction, whatever its merits, is a women writer's ghetto in which nobody is getting paid. Moreover, fanfiction tends to be written off as derivative and written by talentless crackpots (by people who don't read it, obviously). So fanfiction turns into yet another way to suppress women's writing.

I think of fanfiction as a study, myself. A supportive place to learn the techniques, to have fun without having to think of it as 'work', unlike pretty much all the other writing I do (or avoid doing). I think for many people - well, let us admit it, for many women, since the overwhelming majority of fanfic writers are women - it's a jumping-off point, rather than a self-limiting self-protective practice. But still, her point niggles at me. Is writing fanfic a a self-imposed suppression of women's writing?

The one thing that makes me uneasy about fanfiction is how many very good (and almost invariably female) writers seem to concentrate on fanfiction; and I cannot help but wonder if it's at least partly because because they, or we, are, or seem to be, afraid to send their stuff out there for (commercial) judgement. So writing fanfic and publishing it to thousands of people on the web becomes paradoxically a method of self-silencing; of self-corralling into an admittedly supportive but unprofitable ghetto.

And then there's the fact that, whatever its advantages, we have to admit that we are playing in someone else's sandbox, with someone else's characters and world. Is this just because it's easier, and guarantees us an audience of other people who also enjoy those characters and that world? Or is it because we don't believe - because we have been taught not to believe - that we're capable of coming up with something on our own?

I write fan fiction too; I'm just finishing a fanfic novelette in fact. And freedom, a guaranteed readership, and immediate feedback, as well as not having to invent the characters and world I write about, are all among the reasons I write fanfiction. As well as fear, not so much of rejection, as of spending all this time writing and then nobody every getting to read any of it because it doesn't get published, so at that point the effort would feel wasted. I have to admit that one problem with writing academic articles - aside from the fact that, to be honest, it's hard work - is that it takes four years for the article to get out there, and then I will never get any feedback at all for another five years or so, unless I happen to run into someone at a conference 3 years later who mentions that they've read the article (and aren't quite sure what I was getting at). And I can't help but suspect that my academic writing has a total readership of five. Where fanfic will get voluminous and usually enthusiastic feedback in 24 hours.

So it is not that I don't see the numerous and manifest advantages to writing fanfic.

But the thing that still bothers me is, why is it that fanfic writers are overwhelmingly women?

You could argue that it was because the men have this weird urge to get out there and wave their phallic pens about shouting 'look at me! look at me!' Mine's bigger than yours! And I got paid more for it too!' and women have generally no such urge (say). So it's the urge to publish and get paid for it that becomes the pathological problem, rather than the tendency to avoid it.

But you could also argue that the reason women find it far, far more comfortable to publish to a mostly supportive community of several (thousand) of their mostly female friends, in a protective atmosphere sheltered by shared interests and an assumption of supportive feedback (that is, we are socialised to produce supportive feedback for fanfic), is because we, women, have been socialized to a) do volunteer work and b) not to step 'out of doors'; to stay inside, in the women's world. And publishing to the wider world and getting paid for it feel uncomfortable for reasons that have everything to do with still, deep down, believing that we're not good enough, or believing that really, it's not nice for girls to show their faces in public.

Internalizing the values of our oppressors, in short.

I think I do truly believe that fanfic is a product of both, or all, of these factors.