no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Keep talking, it's distracting me from the fact that half my back is in spasm.

We should probably go back to a picture of a Christmas Kitten on a Sea Arch.

x-post oh no! Back problems are horrible! I do those "lie on the floor, pull your knees slowly up to your chest" exercises, or failing that, codeine.

I have this handy dandy foam roller from my PT earlier this year and actually it's great but it means I have to sit on the floor in weird positions and can't post to ilx.

xp to BB -- eh, i just know i don't agree with you and don't have the mental space to devote to the argument, that's all. Please don't feel bad on my account!

What thread?

Phil D posted this on the Genderqueer thread, but really, it could probably be the ur-Comic of this thread and every space like it!

http://www.robot-hugs.com/but-men/

Haha! that reminds me of the guy who coded a chatbot to challenge climate change deniers on twitter!

I love that.

si o no:

women are good party planners
women are better party planners than men are
women enjoy party planning

the answer is no obviously
i just started to realize how much the world of party planning falls into the "women's work" category, at least ime.
i know this because people expect me to do it, and i have absolutely no track record of success in this department. they must be asking me because i am a woman?

NOPE x3

Falls under "Emotional labour" which is coded "female" because it is hard work and also low paid and low valued and we do it because of GUILT but that ain't the same as being ~naturally good at it~ or enjoying it.

well people do it for a lot of reasons -- i think some people enjoy getting a party together. other people just are naturally chill enough to let parties and social gatherings coalesce around them at any given point. i'm sure there are lots of other kinds of people who party plan for reasons other than guilt, but yeah -- guilt is a big one.

well anyway, i have been thinking a lot about this bc of work.

Oh god don't even talk to me about the expectation that women should do this at work.

About 15 years ago, one of the first jobs I had in the UK, it was a job which had been "office manager" which got diverted into "database/IT manager" when I joined, but still had a lot of "office manager" type tasks assigned to it. One of which was to organise food/drinks for meetings, social events (it was an advertising agency, there were a lot of these nebulous not-a-formal-meeting-but social events), etc.

The first one, I think I produced, like 3 packs of stale biscuits (still in the pack) and a pot of tea you could stand your spoon up in (because that's how I like it!) The company owner was basically "we are never letting Branwell do this task again, person should stick to IT from now on, huh?" after that. And transferred the role to the receptionist. Who was, of course, female. Sigh.

Love all the party planning committee bits of The Office (US) so much
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0n9bozzii1r4e1cuo1_500.png

Funnily enough, I just applied for a job I really want that is basically party planning and bridge building and contacting ppl to get them to like you/do what you want. It sounds perfect!! For me.

For a good cause that affects me personally and that I believe in, which makes it even more appealing.

you have very polished soft skills -- it does sound perfect for you!

good luck in orbit! I am p. sure you would be awesome at it.

(I am also p. sure that all those things are basically the things I'm worst at in my job x1000. if only I could isolate the things I enjoy and am OK at with such clarity)

contacting ppl to get them to like you/do what you want
this is a huge part of my job too, only minus the contacting (which is the part i would be the worst at)

Good luck, In Orbit, hope that they see how perfect you are at this job, and give it to you, and also lots of money for doing it so wonderfully!

But also! The recognition that this is a set of skills. For which you should be paid. Not something people just assume you have and will love doing, for free, because of lady-hood.

(Pls keep bridge-building and parties away from me, and just let me have a nice cruddy chunk of data to wrassle into shape, or a big chunk of code to debug. In my basement, with a door on it to keep out parties)

I never thought I could possibly contact people and get them to like me and do what I want, but it's one of the things I miss most about my last job. As long as it can be done on my own terms and doesn't have to be driven by someone else's ideas about what works, and as long as it's not Mission Impossible from the start, turns out I enjoy it. Also, it has to be for a decent cause - which in orbit's job would be for sure.

Fingers crossed, io.

I like parties. I like planning things. One of the best parts about party planning for me, is that I won't have to suffer mediocre cheese.

or the same cheap wine that everyone else has ... but mostly the cheese. I have strong feelings re cheese.

Thanks! I mean I grew up hating people, ie the people around me, and I've worked on my curmudgeon impression for so long that it's weird to air the micro-managey hostess and social lubricant and stereotypically "womanly" side of me. But I realized if I wanted to be happy at my job, it had to have those things in it to some degree because connecting w people is what energizes me, gender roles be damned. So here we are, I dearly want to plan an annual gala and draft emails to strangers to convince them to care about my issue.

xxp OH YES

I mean I grew up hating people, ie the people around me, and I've worked on my curmudgeon impression for so long that it's weird to air the micro-managey hostess and social lubricant and stereotypically "womanly" side of me. But I realized if I wanted to be happy at my job, it had to have those things in it to some degree because connecting w people is what energizes me, gender roles be damned.

Whoa! I am kinda the same way.

Like, one of my favorite movies that I saw as a teenager was this 70s film called "Smile" about a teen beauty pageant, and one of the funny, eye-rolly bits is how in the interview segments all the girls either said (or were prompted to say) that their goal in life was to "help others" -- and now, in my current profession, I explain to friends, that one of the things I enjoy about it is that I work with people and "help them"

"Connecting with other people is what energizes me, gender roles be damned!" = you are an extrovert. Gender roles have nothing to do with it!

But this is the whole point of the thing! Personality, it is something that male people and female people and all other people have in all kinds of different flavours! Getting energy from people or not = A Thing. A Thing called Extroversion or Introversion. It is NOT "Women be chatty and social" vs "Men be strong and silent types" which is just gender-flavoured bullshit.

Exactly, but for me, at least, the extroversion and "helpfulness" associated with the "this is what women are like" gender role was something I rebelled against because of its association with the gender role and the other things about it that I found off-putting: breeding, meekness, always "thinking of the children" ... etc.

the other things about "this is what women are like" - traditional gender roles (if the above was unclear)

Yeah, I think I understand what you're saying. Like, you felt put off something you felt very drawn to, because you didn't want to conform to a shitty stereotype? When really, it was better for you to forget the rest of the stereotype and go "this bit is me! this bit is me, regardless of the rest."

I found it helpful to reframe "I like sitting in a corner by myself, fixing a thing" because I am introvert, rather than because I am a Failed Girl. But gender roles are used to punish people both for conforming to them (if you are a cis woman) and not conforming to them.

the extroversion and "helpfulness" associated with the "this is what women are like" gender role was something I rebelled against because of its association with the gender role and the other things about it that I found off-putting: breeding, meekness, always "thinking of the children" ... etc.

Yeppers. Also because when you fulfill certain parts of the role, men/people in power tend to write you off as not one of them and stop hearing you and start condescending to you, and THAT was sure an unappealing prospect. I'm past that now in a few different ways, not least that I've spent enough time sharpening my claws that I don't fear misogynistic dismissal or whatever.

know what else is kinda weird? i have felt, in the past, over the years, a kind of skepticism or maybe even a whiff of judgment from people who can't seem to reconcile that there can be very "trad gender role" impulses that have nothing to do with conforming to gender roles. in some ways i am extremely "feminine"; in other ways, i am the least feminine person of anyone i know. and yet i continue to exist? how can this be?

for example, the fact that i do all of the shopping, food prep, and cooking in my household. i don't do this because anyone has ever expected me to, or because i feel pressure to or because i feel guilty about not doing it. i do it because i enjoy it (most of the time) and mostly i do it because i am good at it! it is one of my skills, i should probably use it, right? but i've felt some latent hostility from various fronts over the years (not in my home but def in my friend circle) about whether or not this is equitable/feminist of me in spite of the fact that i have continued to be happy with the situation.

so any general effort to see that it's not all black/white and we don't all have to be the same way and that a person can accidentally conform to gender role expectations not because she is being oppressed but because it makes sense for her is a good thing. that was a terribly formed sentence but hopefully not confusing.

tl;dr - people are complex yay

We are all learning, and trying to live out our lives more freely of centuries of constraint; and resisting internalised misogyny (in whatever form it takes) is hard work.

On one level, "fuck judgement" because who has time for that shit, but on another level, if person find perself judging people guilty of "judgement" based on whiffs and latency, person is peself partaking in the same negative form of "judgement."

Person has a choice: person can start the judging game all over again, "judging you, judging me" in an endless cycle. Or person can work on judging others less perself, and trying more to forgive/accept/not sweat the people who may be overcorrecting for years of being judged perselves, and found wanting.

People are complex. Everybody is on their own journey. Those journeys will of course all be different.

And using "person" instead of pronouns makes me feel like fucking Yoda, but it's really helping *me* escape the tyranny both of "he/she" and also the ambiguity of you/I/we.

The pronouns thing is a cool move BB; I'm enjoying watching you grapple with it. I'm finding it awkward to read at the moment but I'll be interested to see if it gets to feel more natural, if you keep doing it.

I get the 'rejection of gender stereotyped activities thing' so, so much - it took me til my thirties to embrace things like baking and knitting, because of the overwhelming association of these things in my mind with my grandmothers and the WI, and I was *not* going to be some little woman who stayed home and made cupcakes. I was missing out on some damn enjoyable things :( so I look to the day when all of it can be stripped of genderisation so people can just do what they like doing.

Zora, have you read Woman On The Edge Of Time? (Where the "person" pronoun comes from) Because it's fantastic, it's the kind of Sci-Fi I think you might really like (and it grapples a lot with the boundaries between "insane person" and "sane person in an insane world" and also a ton of stuff we have talked about in person) and I wish it weren't a library book so I could lend it to you.

(I am having a lot of trouble with the ambiguities of the word "we" at the moment. Because as a word, it can mean both "me and you" and also "me and other people (who may not be you)" and when one switch back and forth between the former and the latter in the same paragraph, one can end up with jerk-faced persons who wish to discredit one's entire person saying stupid things like "what is this, 'the royal we'?" maybe because they are incapable of understanding the ambiguous subtleties of the word "we" but also maybe because they are just jerk-faces.)

((Is this subposting? I don't know, it might be. But I have been talking about pronouns here, so I'm going to put it here, as opposed to just randomly digging up a grammar thread to stick it on. I might go and put the "why I am using person as a pronoun" explanation on the genderqueer thread, but even less people read that then read this thread.))

It's funny, WRT knitting and baking, I know almost as many male persons who enjoy those activities, so it's almost like they've become un-gendered. (Thinking of Ed and per knitting-as-engineering-projects, which were great to watch.) I neither knit nor bake, but I've finally got to a place where I can say "well, it's just because I'm not very good at them, I don't have the patience to master them, and I'd rather spend time my on activities I am good at, like sketching or making curries" rather than feeling terrible about being a failed girl.

I haven't, it's going on the to-read list. I'm not sure how I missed that as it does sound right up my alley.

Oh it's so good.

E would you be at all interested in doing a book club type thread about it? Coz I have so! many! questions! and "how did Piercy *do* that?" I am dying to talk about, but not on this thread coz spoilers.

We are all learning, and trying to live out our lives more freely of centuries of constraint; and resisting internalised misogyny (in whatever form it takes) is hard work.

On one level, "fuck judgement" because who has time for that shit, but on another level, if person find perself judging people guilty of "judgement" based on whiffs and latency, person is peself partaking in the same negative form of "judgement."

Person has a choice: person can start the judging game all over again, "judging you, judging me" in an endless cycle. Or person can work on judging others less perself, and trying more to forgive/accept/not sweat the people who may be overcorrecting for years of being judged perselves, and found wanting.

cmon, i'm not a prescriptivist. i hope after...8? years here people understand that :(
i know you were working on pronoun usage, but it made me feel kinda misunderstood and generally bummed. it's not like i've changed my name 1000x.

which was not a personal dig btw!! i just haven't changed my name at all and was wondering why i hadn't.

i guess the flip side of this is that i have been totes undercover for 8 straight years! that's pretty awesome by itself.

anyway, wish i had never brought it up, the end.

I struggled a little to love your choice w/r/t all the food stuff, LL! I hope I always respected that it was your decision, but it took me a while to completely internally, like, understand it because I had never seen that role modeled in a way that didn't ALSO have a bad power dynamic. So I really learned something from you. Thanks for that!

glad to be of service :)

Lol the other day a female friend was telling me about how she used to joke that someone should invent a vibrator that's built into, like, a weighted pillow so it's like being in bed w an actual person, and I cracked, "Will it also ask me what's for dinner?" because just ugh.

OK, sorry, that was completely clumsy impersonal pronoun use. Because "person" in that sense was an abstract person, could be "you" could be "I" but just trying to say, like, judging goes round in endless circles and that's a bad and unhelpful thing.

Like, I feel like, as one of the loudest "gender is a social construct!" voices, like I'm included in the whiffs and the latency. And just trying to say that when it seems like I'm being really judgey (that was such a great memeword? whatever happened to judgey?) about people conforming to gender roles, it's coming from a deep place of gender confusion of "gender! what the fuck is that about, and why do people keep using it to try to beat me with?" rather than the "wow, girly girls are so fucking terrible" that it might be read as.

Girly girls confuse the fuck out of me, because I am so *not* one of them. I resist being made to be one, because that simply isn't who/what I am made of. But I also recognise that Gender Roles are used to universally beat women with, and "girly girls are terrible: don't be like them because gender roles are constructs" is just the other end of the bat which has always been used to beat me.

Like, we (specifically LL and me, but also every woman in the world) are arguing with a bunch of phantoms built from patriarchy and our own fears. And it's too easy to project those phantoms onto ourselves or each other. I was trying to say "I feel a bit hurt by that statement, but instead of having another round of projection and hurt feelings, let's put it into the general abstract instead." Guess I failed really, really badly at that, huh?

OK, I am going to get off ILX for a bit because I have had a really heavy session and I am feeling fucking frail like I am going to burst into tears for family-related reasons nothing to do with ILX, but I apologise unreservedly, if you thought I was having a go. I was trying to do the opposite of having a go, and ended up hurting you anyway. I'm sorry.

it's ok -- hope you feel better soon.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/selling-shame-40-outrageous-vintage-ads-any-woman-would-find-offensive/

I told my mom tonight that I'm going to a casual event next week for an organization I applied to work for, so it may be that the event is like a pre-interview for me. She told me not to wear "that short black skirt that makes you look naked."