gender

It's the girl in 'girly type stuff' at which I take offense. If you're 13 and going through a pubescent pink and sparkles phase I may roll my eyes and say nothing but if you're 26 and still playing the girl my response will be less forgiving. I feel the same way about guys. I don't want to derail this from issues of gender but there are a lot of hang-ups we seem to have about being men and women and aging which I find foolish.

i'd be up to discuss gender and aging

when you're old men's balls get soft turn into mush
science

There's a difference between girl shit and girl shit conforming to a toxic stereotype. I like pink, I like sparkles, I loathe the hegemony of disney princess pink sparkles, bows, ruffles and anything that elevates prettiness to basically being the only valuable quality a female person can have.

xxpost gbx yeah I saw it last night. It felt kinda on the nose for me. I dunno. Kristen Schaal's stuff was always pretty on point, but somehow this Bee thing just did not sit right with me at all.

'Cause you're not entitled to an aesthetic opinion?

― le ralliement du doute et de l'erreur (Michael White), Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:34 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

no, because aesthetics are inseparable from the construction of gender, and the masculine dismissal of traditionally feminine things doesn't sit well with me at this point in the development of our thinking abt this kind of stuff. too tied to a long and ugly history of the demeaning of the feminine.

separating the feminine from the childlike does help, but i'm not sure that can be done as clearly as it might seem.

yeah but erica isn't saying "gross, girl shit!", i think she's saying "gross, girls wearing pink/glittery/"raunchy" sports gear to please their men!" or IOW it's cool to wear what you like if you like it, but to wear it bc it pleases men is NAGL. xps to contenderizer

yeah, it's cool for erica (?) to take it however. i was mostly addressing my own reticence to condemn it as a man.

like (and not to open a can of worms) i think "feminism" should mean different things to men than it does to women. a perspective that would be feminist coming from a woman is not necessarily feminist coming from a man, and vice-versa.

I'm sure it does not escape the marketing people that large gatherings of men and women are converging before the game to drink/socialize so in their minds lllllllllllladies will want to be looking as blingy and boobalicious as possible, because, youknow, BOYS!

I think if you make something in a "coded" color, even if you're largely inventing/reinventing the coding by doing so, you can sell twice as many of them once you've convinced oppositionally coded groups that they have to have one or the other.

Which is really my yuck factor on this stuff. Also that I am more man-shaped where shirts are concerned and sexified ones are useless to me.

Contenderizer - I'm the Erica referred to above. Just FYI.

And, yes, just1n3 because in the end, as we sort of worked out collectively, that's what a lot of the pink/sparkly/tight sports stuff really comes down to however much I wish that weren't actually the case.

I tailgate with a couple of other women a bit older than me, and we all have the same complaints about buying fan gear, that it's all either sorta lame boring men's designs, or OTT miami beach nightclub wear.

But even the whole...football milieu?...i'm not sure of the right word...community, I guess...doesn't really handle, or really acknowledge female fans in a good way, i don't think. There's some exceptions, but for the most part you're either there because your boyfriend is, or you're some kind of weird lesbian anomaly or something, idk. There's no communities halfways as cool as I have found ILNFL to be, with regard to dudes and chicks just hanging out talking baout sports. It just doesn't seem to naturally occur out in the regular internets. But I guess that's good, so I never have reason to leave ILNFL.

sorry, tl; dr

pfft, i show you how to tl;dr

because aesthetics are inseparable from the construction of gender

i think this statement warrants a closer look, because while i do not disagree with this out of hand i don't think this is such a simple thing to declare

fwiw, i'm not saying that aesthetics = gender constructions, just that they can't be clearly separated, especially when we're talking about our response to "girly shit"

well, when we talk about "girly shit" re: sports merch, a lot of the time we're talking about the default men's merchandise that's modified in certain ways... rendered in loud colors or patterns; and/or cut to be more form-fitting / revealing / body conscious; or embellished, bedazzled, and decorated

is it a coincidence that a lot of these modifications kinda code as having a class dimension, too?

I think men's sports merchandise codes as having a similar "class dimension" tbh.

Ding ding ding

yeah, true

it depends on the sport and the merchandise

yeah, this is v true. context matters, too. in the US, soccer/futball stuff codes as more elevated than, you know, football.

Fair point:

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01435/henley_1435753c.jpg

like that scene in The Wire where Bunk shows up in a lacrosse t-shirt.

Nothing to see here, I'm just bumping this to remind myself to post my chapter 1 based ramblings.

i think this is a good place to post a link to something emil.y posted to facebook: re women and noise
http://www.splicetoday.com/music/this-is-not-bdsm-it-s-the-destruction-of-women

interesting interview. veldon's criticism of "the destruction of women" as a trope in harsh noise is OTM. that stuff has bothered me for a v long time, and it's heartening to hear abt people in that community working against it.

i read that too, it was interesting and inspiring

Yeah, I for one always wanted Merzbow's Music for Bondage Performance type stuff unpacked; and never trusted Whitehouse (hated the little I heard of their music anyway)...thing is no one seemed to bother to question, it just had this polarising effect (and w/music like that y'know..)

Anyway, good that some moves are being made in more positive directions.

Gotta say the distinction applied between "real" and uh, "unreal" computer based noise is hilarious. Never heard of that one before.

Colour photography isn't art and all that...

she gives an "out" re whitehouse at the end which i agree with, god bless em. xp there are a lot of idiot noisers out there iirc

Zora's reading Delusions of Gender (Cordelia Fine, 2010)

Chapter 1: "We Think, Therefore You Are"

Fine opens the chapter with a quote from Jan Morris, an M2F transexual, which I think bears transcribing, supporting as it does, this business of mutability in the face of expectations -

The more I was treated as a woman, the more a woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

Fine reminds us that we all carry sexual stereotypes around in our heads, regardless of whether we consciously subscribe to them. We can all label traits as masculine or feminine pretty consistently. These associations of course cascade all over the place, without you knowing it's happening. (Fine doesn't go the mechanics of implicit association, but of course it is no surprise as it is well established as just being how the brain works - most of what goes on happens without conscious awareness, and language processing in particular involves a lot of pre-conscious priming that is very amenable to study.)

Anyway, back to gender. So - if everything we are exposed to our whole lives goes into building up this network of associations, and the associations all very in terms of strength, and recent exposure carries more weight that less recent etc. etc. (this is really cool stuff & I would recommend reading around it if you're interested in psychology), it's even less surprising that images of people doing stuff - Fine uses women doing the hoovering in adverts as her example - feed into our mental construct of what it means to be female, at a level that is utterly beyond our control.

She cites a study demonstrating that women in two colleges in the US, one co-ed and one women's only, started and finished their studies with the same explicit (self-reported) beliefs about women in leadership positions. However, the women in the co-ed school became slower at pairing words denoting leadership with words denoting female, and the women in the single-sex school got quicker, indicating that their implicit understanding of gender roles had been altered by their experiences.

(This ties in with stats showing girls tend to do better in all-girls schools at secondary level too, where boys do better in mixed schools, something that would give me a real dilemma if I had a daughter.)

As mentioned in the intro discussion, one's sense of self - I won't barter definitions of self here - is also dynamic and malleable. We adapt according to context. As Fine puts it, we have a range of self-concepts from which choose among in our "Wardrobe of Self." She says:

With a particular social identity in place, it would not be surprising if self-perception became more stereotypic as a result.

She goes on to back this up with some studies that demonstrate that even something so apparently innocuous as asking people to tick a box indicating M or F at the beginning of a questionnaire changes their responses to be more in line with sexual stereotypes.

Skipping, skipping... the next bit that grabbed me was the study about imagination / empathy in which people were shown photos of different people and asked either to write 'a day in the life of' in the 3rd person or to imagine that they *were* that person and then write 'a day in the life of' from a 1st person POV. After this exercise, people's self-ratings of their *own* characteristics changed to be more in line with the character's. People writing from the POV of an athlete felt themselves more athletic, people writing a cheerleader felt themselves sexier, etc. Apart from scaring the shit out of me b/c I am writing a story about a hugely dislikable, emotionally and creatively stunted, misogynistic junkie right now, this is brilliant. It shows that asking people to put themselves in someone else's shoes for a bit actually works, and as Fine points out, such exercises can help us to take on challenging roles; "'Fake it til you make it' gains empirical support."

So our ideas about and associations relating to gender (& race, age, frogs and stones for that matter) are flexible, adaptive. Our self-concept is also flexible and adaptive. She's going to go on to examine the knock on effects on behaviour. To close the chapter:

No doubt the female and male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But _this_ is not the same as 'hardwired'. And... we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring... starts to look more like sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking in the social context.

I hope this is of some value and not tl;dr for everyone. Really it would be best if all y'all bought the book, or others in this area so we could have a proper debate.

And I should point out that whilst our ideas about and associations wrt stones are flexible, I am aware that there is in fact an objective reality wrt stones that does not seem to apply to gender in any meaningful way.

So, does this set any bells ringing with anyone, or so far so obvious?

Yeah, I for one always wanted Merzbow's Music for Bondage Performance type stuff unpacked; and never trusted Whitehouse (hated the little I heard of their music anyway)...thing is no one seemed to bother to question, it just had this polarising effect (and w/music like that y'know..)

see, I think EV's defense of Whitehouse is OTM. There's a sense of humor/irony behind their aesthetic that seems pretty blatant to me compared to some newer noise musicians who flirt with the same imagery & are a lot more serious about it.

I hate ILX.

sorry?

I thought it was ok to respond to an earlier discussion.

yeah just kidding <3 ILX. just a bit of a whump! after taking an hour to write that big post up there.

I completely hear you, Zora. This is my frustration, this sense of banging one's head against a wall, and why I can't do these conversations any more.

That people on ILX looooooove to discuss their ~opinions~ about what it all means when it comes to gender (and lots of other subjects) but when it comes to discussing what is experimentally known and confirmed about gender (i.e. very little, and how slippery and un-rock-like and guesswork it all is) it's just... not so interested.

But perhaps it's just confirmation bias, on both sides, I don't know.

I'm appreciating your summaries of this because, like I said, I found it a very interesting and possibly life-changing (definitely mind-changing) approach to the subject, and I just wanted other people to read it and see, did they draw the same conclusions about the book as I did. And you seem to be doing so.

people writing a cheerleader felt themselves sexier

So depressing.

Or maybe you just posted a dense, long post in the middle of the workday and no one has responded to it an hour later! I just finally read your post after loading it half an hour ago and then getting sidetracked by (gasp) my job. I think this pull to contextualize unfulfilling (or not yet fulfilled) ILX expectations as somehow being embedded in the same dynamics of gender + sex as the content being discussed is a dead-end.

Fwiw, the question of sending my daughter (when she's old enough) to an all-girls school has been on my mind a lot, especially because that was the default in the community I grew up and we've had studies for a long time about how girls perform better in all-girls schools. IIRC Peggy Orenstein talks about this in Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. On the other hand, the educational models for all-girls schooling (esp in my community) can bring their own baggage in terms of reinforcing gender roles. In the Yeshiva system, boys learn Talmud (difficult legal exegesis) and girls learn Halacha (practical domestic household law) and Tanach (biblical stories). These things code in other ways too. The very religious girls-only school here doesn't teach Talmud, and the curriculum is heavy on memorization. The co-ed school had a more contemporary pedagogical model, teaches Talmud, etc, but the boys and girls take classes together.

hey guys I'm not uninterested in the discussion I just saw people were talking about Whitehouse and I was like "hey, that's something I can chime in on!" Sorry to continue a tradition of brickwalling!!

S'ok Mordy, crut, it was just a momentary flash of irritation because there was a post itt (Surprised! Excited!) but then it turned out to be an unrelated post (Ow! Disappointed!) I'm over it. And I should be working, too.

Mordy your schooling conundrum does sound like it will be tough to disentangle. Does the co-ed school have good represenation of women at senior levels? Is discipline good? I went to a co-ed school myself, and I have to say I think I have come out of it OK, but it doubtless helped that the staff had a good balance and subject teaching wasn't distributed along gender stereotyped lines. My only problem with it, in retrospect, was that there was a lot of playing up designed to impress members of the opposite sex, and not all the teachers controlled it well.

If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

from a Sci American blog entry awhile ago when there was a sexism issue with Nature magazine...

It was Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson who, in 1995, first coined the term stereotype threat. It refers to how the knowledge of a prejudicial stereotype can lead to enough anxiety that a person actually ends up confirming the image. Since that landmark paper, more than 300 studies have found evidence for the pervasive negative effects of societal stereotypes.

When it comes to women, studies have shown that stereotype threat is very real. Women are stereotyped to be worse at math than men due to lower test scores. But it turns out that women only score lower when they are reminded of their gender or take the test in the presence of men. In fact, the greater the number of men in the room with a female test taker, the worse she will do. The gender profile of the environment has no effect, however, on women’s verbal test scores, where no such inferiority stereotype exists.

brings back memories of the panic attacks i'd have during calc tests. every time i was faced with a calc test, my brain just freaked out and nothing would make sense. i'd stare at it and feel stupid and get more and more upset. i was good at crying silently tho.

the (woman) instructor talked with me, and, after ascertaining that i knew my shit, gave me extra time. so for the first hour i'd freak and then i'd eventually calm down and get my snot under control, and use my extra hour to take the test. (argh, embarrassing)

i got an a in the class. i would have flunked if the prof hadn't noticed and considered what was going on w/me individually. (despite a pretty big class)

i had some big psychological math/sci issues in school. i was also a biochem major.

omg, this:

Simply reminding girls that they are girls is enough to drive down their math test scores. Even at the age of five, girls will score 15% lower on a math skills test when they perform a gender-reinforcing activity first.

Simply reminding girls that they are girls is enough to drive down their math test scores. Even at the age of five, girls will score 15% lower on a math skills test when they perform a gender-reinforcing activity first.

This is called The Stereotype Threat.

This is a real, documented thing, and I think it's one of those discoveries that should just completely change and reorder not just our perceptions about gender, but about the entire ways that our societies are structured.

That's it's one thing to talk about Privilege as a concept, and quite another to discover the actual methods of how it works and influences behaviour in the real world.

Sorry, I only skimmed Julia's post, you made the same point!

Like, these studies, this concept, it's like a fucking BOMB in terms of why this stuff matters.