A new (for me) answer to the classic question, Why aren’t there any great women Xs, occurred to me when I saw a website for a small company of composers specializing in music for dance troupes (all four composers were male) shortly after a male friend of mine confessed that if he wasn’t getting paid …
Category: sexism
Jun 09 2014
Brilliant Piece – “Little Women, Big Men” – check it out!
“…what many unthreateningly call “the male ego” (an inadequate term to describe the drive behind men’s collective undermining of women)…” – one of the many brilliant lines in “Little Women, Big Men: Sexism and the Language of Size” by Andrea Safran. http://www.saidit.org/archives/vol4no2/language.html
May 19 2014
Brunettes, Blondes, and Redheads
So the other day I started reading Iron Shadows by Steven Barnes. He’s apparently a bestselling author. Which is really disturbing. Because four sentences in, he describes a woman as “a small wiry brunette”. Seriously? Does anyone actually identify women by their hair colour any more? That’s so—1940s. Isn’t it? I check. The book’s copyright …
Mar 05 2014
Pointlessly Gendered Products
Check it out: http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinchack/pointlessly-gendered-products Be sure to read the comments/captions. They’re great.
Feb 23 2014
Dangerous Sports
I haven’t really kept up with the sexism in the Olympics, mostly because the nationalism bothers me so much I don’t even watch them anymore, but I suspect there are still some sports in which women aren’t allowed to compete. Perhaps because of the tired, old, and fucking patronizing ‘You could get hurt!’ This from …
Feb 02 2014
Show a Little Initiative!
If you just do as you’re told, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get advanced up the ladder, because you’re not showing initiative. Yeah right. Every time I showed some initiative, I got fired. Or at least reprimanded. Then I realized that’s because there are different rules of advancement for men and women. Initiative in …
Jan 07 2014
Arrogance, I think
Fresh from the office of my supervisor who persists in gently giving me unsolicited advice, despite being neither older nor wiser, I’m struck by Rousseau’s tone (in his “Marriage”): “Extreme in all things, they [women] devote themselves to their play with greater zeal than boys. This is the second defect. This zeal must be kept …
Dec 27 2013
What’s wrong with being a slut?
slut, n. Slovenly woman, slattern slovenly, a. Personally untidy or dirty, careless and lazy, or unmethodical slattern, n. Sluttish woman Not what my mother meant when she called me a slut. For whatever else I am, I am tidy, clean, careful, industrious, and methodical. Quite methodical. So just what did she mean? I don’t know. …
Dec 18 2013
Let’s Talk about Sex
[This one’s a little old, as you can tell by the Salt-n-Pepa reference, but still relevant, I think. Sigh.] Disc jockeys generally come in two sexes: male and female. So what, you may think, sex doesn’t matter. Oh but it does, so sad to say. I used to deejay for weddings and other parties, and …
fiction
