no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I guess that's it, though. Just that despairing sense of "oh god is this yet another thing that I'm going to be judged on? Fuck that."

Hokay, sorry for long and self-absorbed post.

I am totally a tomboy and a geek with very male-coded interests and I did not read myself in that excerpt AT ALL because I have never been the "cool girl" - too ugly and neurotic by far. In fact I can get p. angry when people say "why don't more women like this thing", because it seems to mean "why don't some women who are Cool Girls like it, because I am going to pretend women like you who like it don't exist, and if you continue to remind me that you do I'll get v. unpleasant telling everyone your Cool Girl credentials or your Liking My Stuff credentials are not up to snuff".

(Though I'm not sure the Cool Girls get off any more lightly on that part. I guess they just get less of Phase 1: Ignoring and more Phase 2: Gatekeeping. What I took from "Cool Girl": mainly hot but also socially "fun", plus maybe some nastier back-stabbing anti-feminist aspects listed in the article but not the original rant, which I won't list so we don't have to argue abt how straw-womany they are, which is probably a little but I know I was guilty of some of them when younger and insecure in a mostly-male group)

So I'd agree the conflation of MPDGs and hot ladettes and geek girls into one big category of Women Who Like Man Stuff without considering the different ways in which they like Man Stuff and the different reactions they get for it - never mind the different categories of Man whose Stuff is being liked - is not very helpful here.

But I read this post on "'fake' geek girls" yesterday and it ties into the bits of this I can relate to, so here it is: http://www.themarysue.com/on-the-fake-geek-girl/

(Interesting post, C#. I was into boy stuff before I knew it was gendered, of course, but definitely entered a feedback loop when I was at primary school that the stuff other girls liked must be Bad and whatever the boys liked must be Good, and later was drawn to interests not shared by others at my girls' secondary school; maybe pure iconoclasm plus not even knowing any boys, and obviously the origins of likes/dislikes are always tangled, but probably still an element of privileging male interests, yes.)

Yeah the 'fake geek girl' thing is a red herring – if there are geek posers it's not a gendered phenomenon.

I try not to read about any of this stuff anymore so I can just go deeper into my own fantasyland of what a fun woman's life is like without worrying I'm fitting some kind of (patriarchy-tooled?) stereotype. I spent my mid-'20s worrying about all that shit, image, and I had no fun at all.

yeah i always just ignore "articles"/opinion pieces like that because clearly they are not talking about me as a subject or as an audience so NEXT

whoa xp

i meant that thing about "cool girls" -- i didn't mean your fantasyland. I live there too!

meaning also that i have stopped trying to figure out where i "fit in". i don't feel like i fit in anywhere, so i just carry on not worrying about it. i guess to some degree everyone's interested in defining themselves but i have little interest in that, for the most part.

I suppose I just let that one get through the filter because I normally like the author.

The "fake geek girls" article and the whole minor geekworld clusterfuck that it was written in response to is something that has been doing my head in. Different people trying to carve out some kind of identity within "geek" or "hipster" or exclude/banish others, as if it's a binary. Mostly I just eyerolly about that stuff because I'm too old to care. But I'm certainly familiar with the phenomenon described, the gatekeeping deployed against women but that doesn't only happen in geek worlds.

Ugh, I shouldn't have eaten that cheesecake at lunch I've got major sugarcrash and can't think/post straight now.

ha LL no the xp was whoa because who PSYCHIC LINK

I try not to read about any of this stuff anymore so I can just go deeper into my own fantasyland of what a fun woman's life is like without worrying I'm fitting some kind of (patriarchy-tooled?) stereotype.

TBH this sounds like the right answer, and yes I have long since given up on "fitting in" so why worry? But I guess I'm worried that in some ways the stereotypes and divides seem even harder to avoid than when I was a kid, and maybe one day (soonish if ever, for purely biological reasons, not a declaration of immediate intent) I'll have kids, and how can I steer them round this shit?

I mean I don't have any concrete evidence that it's getting worse, just a lot of my friends are having kids and all the mothers with daughters have said things like "we were totally not going the pink princess route because it's so limiting and I didn't like it as a kid but she's really picked up on it and insists on it", plus thinking of the female musicians I loved as a teenager and drawing a blank thinking of modern equivalents, or seeing sexist crap in the music press and thinking, ok, it was a boys' club when I was 15 but not like this... all purely anecdotal and hopefully more reflective of me looking in the wrong places than the world changing

WCC -- I guess I feel like if it's bothering you so much, why are you immersing yourself in the discussion? I guess that's my natural tendency -- to flee conflict -- and it's not that great of a tendency, but it does protect me from getting overly upset about stuff. Sometimes I get overly upset about international relations or private corporate greed or the intersection of these two things. I know the feeling of being upset about a current topic. But I have to make myself take breaks, especially if there's nothing I can do about the situation from my current position in life. It's why I couldn't go into that field professionally! It would have taken over my brain and made me MISERABLE.

Anyway, I don't mean to diminish your feelings or your reaction to this article -- I just wanted to add my unsolicited $0.02 about the topic.

ha LL no the xp was whoa because who PSYCHIC LINK
you've seen it too! :D

Seriously the less I read about anything about how you present yourself to the world, the more at peace with myself I am. I had made *the mistake* of reading something about what kind of decor will help you get laid (har) if you bring over a man. Which, why did I read that? What was I thinking? It made my house I worked so hard to carefully decorate after my own dreams – it made my house seem the product of a deranged mind for a couple days. Which it isn't. Garbage in, garbage out, and there's so much garbage in disguise as reading material.

Anyway I have a giant framed print of this over my bed, and guess who has sex under it, it's this lady
http://www.bongonews.com/StoryImages/double_entendre_-_beating_off.jpg

Hey, I'm not upset. I just thought it was something worth discussing. And seeing if other people thought it was kinda bullshit, too.

I follow the discussion because I'm interested in it, the gendering of interests etc. etc.

I don't believe in that whole "if something upsets you, ignore it" way of thinking because these things have ways of affecting you, even when - especially when - you're not paying attention to them. So I think it's better to be aware of, and be aware of the countering mechanisms with this stuff.

Anyway, I wasn't upset at all before. (But now it's kinda bothering me a tiny bit that people can no longer tell the difference between "WCC thinkin' bout stuff out loud" and "WCC actually upset.")

I'm gonna go make more smutty jokes about "standard deviations" with OfficeBoy now instead.

Anyway my Blakean friends you can always call upon the spirit of Los in Jerusalem: "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's."
xp

6 billions xposts gatekeeping deployed against women but that doesn't only happen in geek worlds

Oh agreed but
1. that's where I personally see it most;
2. it maybe takes on a slightly different form, in some ways more blatant and in some more insidious? maybe not, but
3. geeks have this horrible conviction that they are Logical Beings and that therefore every thought that enters their head is purely logical and anything which contradicts with it must be illogical, and it gets unpleasant if you try to point out that their kneejerk emotionally-based ideas are not in fact pure binary instructions read off the ROM of the universe

(ok, conviction in your own rightness is a purely human trait rather than a geek thing too, but it's slightly more entrenched as OK to talk like you're the only logical being in the room if you're a geek, or a politician)

I've got a bit off-topic here, sorry, the bees have carried my bonnet over a cliff with me still in it

Yes yes yes, especially to No. 3 there.

<i>women can exist in any damn way they like, it's true.

i honestly do not think the article is worth the time it would take to work out what it is trying to say beyond "some women seem to have made more of an effort to fulfil certain male fantasy roles but tbh it's hard for everyone and judging is nagl"</i>

Read the article and became irritated. Fuck that! I have always liked what I liked without it being a part of some strategy. My likes and dislikes, interests and hobbies have never been part of some strategy to snag a man. They have come in and out of fashion, hipsterdom etc... over the decades but I was there before and remained after. This article reminds me of branding and all that is associated with that. Deconstructing a group until it is so finely filtered and can fit into a nifty lil label or niche demographic. I can care less who is out there trying to be someone they are not. I imagine that shit is hard.

ugh! bbcode...sorry

aaggggghhhh i just remembered how cute harold "happy" chichester is
but this is the saddest thing i have ever seen http://www.howlinmaggie.net/fans/categories.php

AND THEN i went to his facebook page and saw that he is recovering from a bout of bell's palsy!

whoa

sorry for the fluffy subject matter, but apparently my girlish crush on this person persists even after all these years even though i completely forgot about him after 1998 or so?
that's a no boys allowed topic if i've ever heard one

Aw. I had Bell's Palsy once. It was really dumb.

i had a lengthy dream last in which i was on a date with damon albarn who was not yet famous and it was awesome.

we ate some kind of pink goop on a bridge. when i woke up and went into the kitchen i noticed my only edible food was some kind of pink jello. not the part of this dream i was hoping would come true.

damnit, Albarn <3

brb eating pink goop

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc5ehgePAo1rn4zwmo1_500.jpg

lol

God I could still look at pictures of Blur all day

When I met A he had such an Alex James haircut but he kept getting called emo at work & swore longish hair off forever!

literally skipping class to look at pictures of blur all day

ok there are other factors but

haha graham coxon looks just like me in 1995 only way cuter

imo that is one of the hottest pics of graham

i think a deep part of my attraction to damon albarn is bound up witht the fact that he annoys me on some level. lol

yeah he's real "annoying" alright

lol e!
I'd let him annoy me any day!

hahaha otm

otoh alex annoys me in a different way. i do not find him attractive

More Alex for me, I'd say. Perhaps a form of narcissism to be most attracted to the dude with the most similar name? Heh.

http://youtu.be/1zHGrINnzqo

"they gave me this to do this"

i liked alex in high school but it went away. he looks like a goofus to me now

Haha the video is so weird. I love them for having been goofy dudes.

i know, me too. they really have that over all the other bands of that ilk. they were just fuckin' dorks. i love in starshaped when they're on the bus and singing "when will we be married" all drunk and...annoying? lol.

i am deeply embarrassed but this is the only safe haven i have for posting cute boy stuff. i need to grow the hell up.

You're safe here. You inspired me to jam out to this (can't embed from phone) - http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=Kk4LSrugwRY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DKk4LSrugwRY

i really want his sweater from the beetlebum video. really badly. maybe i'll knit it.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbxgxqrXiz1qc2fdt.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbxgxqrXiz1qc2fdt.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbxgxqrXiz1qc2fdt.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbxgxqrXiz1qc2fdt.jpg http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbxgxqrXiz1qc2fdt.jpg

dying

hahahahahaha

it looks like it is from HR puffnstuff (sp?). how was this a look in like 1990, baggy aside

I am so glad I was too young for dating in the days that boys looked like that.

grebo

grebo even just as a word makes me lol

i know! it's repulsive in every possible way!