Some news items leave me at a loss for words. Here is an article about people who are criticizing Wikipedia for having masculine design:
“It’s aesthetically very masculine in its design,” Stierch told us. “Its community, like so much of the early Internet, has been male dominated, and I think when a lot of people—men or women—look at Wikipedia these days, they see it as a source for information but have little interest or excitement in contributing to it.”
As a counterpoint, Stierch offered up the fact that women tend to dominate other online communities, making up the majority of social media users. She said it’s a matter of choice about how to spend one’s time online, at that fewer women are drawn to the cold, technical, and argumentative environment of Wikipedia.
So if you are a woman who is drawn to cold, technical, and argumentative environments, I have news for you: you are a man.
As I keep saying, no male chauvinist has been able to be as offensive to me as some feminists manage to do on a regular basis. I mean, where the hell do you get off, policing people’s femininity on the basis of how “cold” or argumentative they are or like their environments to be? Is there a worse stereotype of women than that we are all warm and compliant?
And another question: where should I take my cold, argumentative self to stop being censored for not being the right kind of woman?
Clarissa's Blog 
“…where should I take my cold, argumentative self to stop being *censored* for not being the right kind of woman?”
Do you mean censured?
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I meant censored, like in prevent from speaking, but censured works too.
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Feel free to go argue on my blog. 😉
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I don’t know, I saw some warm shades and even some pink on your blog template. Might it be too girly for me? 🙂
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More traditional femininity (ooh icky boy stuff!) masquerading as feminism.
The recent (ongoing) twitter feminist wars are similar, they remind me of 6 year old girls having imaginary tea parties (not my observation but one I totally agree with).
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“The recent (ongoing) twitter feminist wars are similar, they remind me of 6 year old girls having imaginary tea parties (not my observation but one I totally agree with).”
– I read about them but I avoided the whole thing because I knew it would make me too angry.
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The author, personally, has no interest in “cold, technical argumentation” and is so narcissistic that she honestly believes that this must universally apply to all women.
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“So if you are a woman who is drawn to cold, technical, and argumentative environments, I have news for you: you are a man.”
I’ve noticed this since I was a young child. I liked playing with dolls and wearing skirts. I also liked catching frogs in my backyard and playing war and quest-based computer games. There were people who insisted that I was tomboy and that I wanted to be a boy, even though I had no desire to be. Others ignored the ‘boyish’ stuff, looked at my dolls and stuffed animals, and assumed I was always a soft, gentle girl. The things I liked were apparently mutually exclusive, but no one could ever give me a good reason why.
I still get these kinds of comments in really stupid ways. I like chocolate (aw, typical woman), but I don’t enjoy shopping for shoes (wait, are you sure you’re a woman?)
These people are desperate to make the world simple for themselves. Everyone must have a tidy identity and not be surprising.
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“These people are desperate to make the world simple for themselves. Everyone must have a tidy identity and not be surprising”
– This is exactly what this is about.
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It’s ironic. At the same time that some parts of society are becoming a bit more open-minded and progressive about gender, many are also becoming obsessive and judgmental about gender roles and perceived gender characteristics. I have a theory that it’s a reaction to the stress of change.
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???? Aesthetically, Wikipedia is rather plain, so as not to detract from any photos or diagrams illustrating the entry.
Supposedly the earliest prototype for WIkipedia was a database on the lowly roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, the collective work of labs working with the worm. Don’t ask me what is elegant about this tiny creature.
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I’m not by any means cold and argumentative, although I be a mean intellectual poker player if I am very angry indeed. But mostly, I am in the mode of crude banter. This separates the boys from the apes and the women from the boys. If people don’t like it or understand it, they probably want to give me lots of space around myself.
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Something I’ve been reflecting on lately is that it is all just a game, this feminine-feminism, much like most things in US life are a marketing ploy. People say the sorts of things that others are already primed to respond to, so that they can get marketing leverage. It is much like using the basic appetites — sex, hunger, desire for recognition — to sell sugary beverages. If people are primed to feel guilty about not including women, this can be played upon to get the writer of the article about Wikipedia notoriety and funding support. She certainly does not have to mean every word she says. Those words are for leverage, on a deep emotional level, not meaning.
In terms of something slightly different from that, the expansion of traditional feminine modes of perception, reaction and behavior, into the mainstream is, I think, recognisable in the demand that other entities ought not to stand apart from the one who judges them, but be one with the judger and melded into a particular shape by him or her. This extends to much of literary theory as it is currently practiced. For instance you will find people asserting that the author has “gone too far” or made a structural mistake in his or her mode of writing. I noticed this most strongly when studying the criticism that had accrued on Marechera’s writing. For the most part the critics seemed to become out of breath and confused very easily, at which point they would return to that which was already familiar to them, like the concept of fixed identities, or proper social structure or a good upbringing. They couldn’t really extend themselves very far beyond their anchors in convention.
But what if the author writes a paranoid book not as a mistake, or because he can’t contain himself to write a more sane and sensible book, but because he WANTS us to feel paranoid? That level of artistry is hard for the majority of critics to countenance, but there is no a priori reason why this could not be so.
That we cannot know for sure what a book like BLACK SUNLIGHT is about, but still we think we recognise certain familiar shapes and forms in it, gives it a paranoid aura in relation to us, the readers. If a reader starts the book with a feeling of political certainty that war and/or revolution are desirable and for the best, by the end of the book one is left alone with oneself and with a feeling of extreme paranoia about both war and revolution and their viability. It is a paranoid book, written by someone who involuntarily lived through a revolutionary war and suffered as a consequence of that.
If you can’t take in that message as a critic, perhaps a differerent job would be more suitable for you. It’s just too conventionally feminine to want to make the author part of one’s own already existing system of values and beliefs and to berate him in a motherly fashion for going outside the bounds of what would be considered normal in one’s own society. “I chide him because I love him and I want him to do better!”
To demand that others be a part of you so that you can manage them better, shape them, and turn them into what you want them to be, is archetypal feminine relating. It is the typical manner with which managers, identity politicians, teachers and critics approach the subject today. They do not allow anything to stand apart from them, to be a thing separate from the mother/teacher/critic. They don’t seem to even have the courage to say, “I hate this thing! I’m going to let it go.” Their instincts are to draw everything under the control, by not permitting separation.
This means you can’t learn a complex lesson from a writer who is trying to teach you about your political over-certainties. You can’t even see that lesson, because you are too busy trying to impart your own about how there are certain things than can and cannot be said, in terms of your own existing perspective.
The feminine mode is like this though. It always tries to “shape” the other right away, rather than reach an understanding of what that person or thing is in its own right. It doesn’t even see anything separate from itself, just some amorphous mess to be reshaped.
And abusers are the same. They come along and try to shape things, on the basis of the feelings about what ought to be in place. But this betrays their lack of a desire to even try to understand what has actually come to be in place of its own accord, and in its own right, independently of the manager/critic/abuser. They don’t even have a faculty for handling real otherness — yet, many of them will talk endlessly about “the other”. Nothing they love better than talking about themselves!
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I love watching the look on the face of contractors that have to deal with my wife. On the exterior she presents in a very(cuturally typical) feminine way. The surprised look when she doesnt talk in the way they are expecting(from her look) is quite entertaining. 😉
The term feminist, in the west, really doesnt have a very clear meaning for all who identify with the name.
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“On the exterior she presents in a very(cuturally typical) feminine way. The surprised look when she doesnt talk in the way they are expecting(from her look) is quite entertaining.”
– This is something that happens to me all the time. The confusion of people who can’t seem to link the visual with the content when they interact with me is priceless. 🙂
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