Aaaaack!
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Do… do they still make Kathy? (eyelid twitches)
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Cathy ended in 2010 with the reveal of her pregnancy, featuring a little embryo thinking aack:
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Thinking “aack” in pink, no less.
That boilerplate pseudo-feminist tripe from her mother (such a feminist icon, that one /s) immediately segues to “I do know anything’s possible” for women, because BABY!
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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Aw, come on, that’s a bit harsh.
“My entire goal with my submission package was to get my mother off my back. My goal was not to do a comic strip. It was to make Mom quit telling me I could do a comic strip.”
One of Guisewite’s classmates at University of Michigan was Lawrence Kasdan. When Kasdan’s movie The Big Chill (1983) opened, Guisewite devoted an entire week of Cathy strips to it, with Cathy and her co-workers enthusing over the film and seeing it repeatedly.
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I’m pretty sure one of my favorite all time comics is a Cathy strip, but I can’t locate it on the interwebs.
In the strip, a woman with a child is going through a grocery store. As she shops, another shopper (Cathy?) is saying how she would never let a child ride in the basket without be strapped in, and on and on with the child rearing shaming. The last panel has the other woman turning to the speaker and saying, “Yes, I did all my best parenting before I became a parent, too.”
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Just read an interesting piece: Why Are America’s Most innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950’s Suburbia?
It’s not really on-topic for this thread, except that it shows yet another example of how sexism (and of course racism, if you read the article) underpins our culture. Here’s an excerpt:
The focus on amenities for office staff was also a way to prevent them from organizing, particularly the legions of low-paid female employees needed to maximize profits. “They were terrified that female clerical workers were going to unionize,” Mozingo says, “In the era before computing, companies ran on vast amounts of paper, and that paperwork was almost all done by women. That was one of the reasons they wanted to get out of downtown—if the secretaries unionized, they’d all be sunk.”
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You know, I know a guy just like you, or at least, who I’ve seen have similar experiences. He’s a nice, friendly, attractive, successful person who’s very good at what he does. I serve on a charity committee with him and he just CANNOT get a word in edgewise with either the men or the women. I always find myself saying “I think Jim’s trying to make a point…” No idea how this fits into the gender discussion, just wanted to add my 2 cents.
I routinely dominate conversations, to the point that I really try to be VERY mindful and even then sometimes get constructive criticism around the issue. And I’m a small-statured female. I see more gendered criticism in written reviews and comments, but maybe those people can’t get a word in around me either.
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I think Birmingham proper is starting to flourish again, mainly due to UAB’s campus, but all when I was growing up it was the biggest ghost town.
Montgomery, AL, too.
One of the stories not really told about the bus strike is that once it was done, the whole thing was rendered irrelevant because all the white people fled the downtown and stopped using public transportation. My mom talks about taking the bus all the time as a kid, but I never took a bus until I lived in New Orleans.
And yes, Mountain Brook was the whitest, most elite place in Birmingham for many years.
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Well, I think dominating conversations is a skill. It’s a skill we wish fewer people had. It’s a gendered issue for sure, but like most genedered issues, that’s a cultural fact not a biological one. PhDs in philosophy are pretty extremely gendered too (I meant this to be a random example of another thing with a heavy gender bias that obviously isn’t inherent, but the more I think of it, the more I think the skill to dominate a conversation and the skill to get a philosophy PhD might be the same).
For me, the gendering of it isn’t a big deal. I can still talk about it as a “male” speech domination even though my personal experience of it in my life-at-present is more often of women doing it. Being talked over seems like an experience that every woman I talk to has and that some men really don’t seem to have at all. For everything other than producing gametes I assume the variance within sexes is greater than the variance between them (you can’t even reliable predict the gamete thing on gender).
Sometimes I see people have a very strong allegiance to their gender and it kind of baffles me, particularly in men. Say something bad about men and all men feel attacked. I guess I just don’t feel that allegiance. There’s no reason a man can’t use the strategies to disrupt conversational dominance (if we actually came up with any) and there’s not reason a woman can’t read about how conversational dominance affects people as part of understanding why it’s worth the effort she’s putting in to stop.
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Phew! I got to the bottom of the thread. That’s a lot of reading! But also an important topic - and one that requires nuance and sensitivity to really delve into.
Despite having lurked on the boingboing bbs for years, I’m usually pretty outspoken. I’ve had to be. Working in tech, especially in the years when I was young, meant that if I wasn’t assertive then I’d get ignored and/or talked down to. I can’t even count the number of sexist comments, situations, and meeting dynamics I’ve witnessed. I was often the only woman in the office, and either I’d be treated as ‘one of the guys’ (and witness to really gross comments about other women) or the pet office coffee-fetcher. I’ve ‘parted ways’ with employers after pointing out how sexist and demeaning the office environment was for women, instead of having the issue addressed in any way. So I learned not to say anything about toxic work environments. I’ve seen a woman more qualified and capable passed over for a promotion that went to a man who had years less experience because he was a mate in the men’s office football team. So I learned that it doesn’t matter if you’re quiet and try to fit in, you will never be ‘one of the boys’ that gets the promotions. I’m sick of it. So now I freelance because I am just tired of fighting to be heard, tired of being in a space that is uncomfortable and where I just don’t fit in because of my gender.
Even in my non-working life, in volunteer and charity groups, because I’m a woman who is assertive, I’m almost always the focus of abuse and difficulties even if I’m not the cause of conflict.
In gaming… heh. don’t even get me started! Rape threats, doxxing, offline harassment and just general background every day sexism. I try not to be identifiably female in that world, but then I am erased as everyone assumes I’m a male (can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been called dude or bro). When people are surprised how many women game, I think there must be a lot of female gamers out there who are similarly ‘erased’ and that’s why people are so surprised.
It’s exhausting trying to communicate when you are a woman. Working out a way to get a man, whom you respect, to try to stop dominating a conversation is the least of it. Trying to get men you like and respect to see it, and to see it in their own behaviour, and then to do something about it -it should be easy, but sometimes that’s the hardest part.
I have no solutions, but I thought I’d share my own experiences.
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Thanks for delurking!!!
Your comment is so great I’m tempted to ask for the thread to close as this is a great summary.
Sadly we have come to little actual useful conclusions.
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Have no fear – the programmer-mens will be around eventually to tell us when our communications have strayed into chat (which should be segregated into their chat application. which doesn’t exist yet.).
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You better get posting then as you are about 9,625 replies away from that happening!
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9624 now
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Agree. I’ve seen people learn it, and I learned it myself, on purpose. Lots of women have it, but you’re right, our culture gives men far more opportunities to learn and use the skill, and in general more approval for doing so.
Well, the category of men includes all men, so if you attack men you attack all men. Should someone not feel attacked when they are attacked? I feel attacked when people say that all religious people are [insert fake nonsense here] even though I know the things they are saying are true about many religions and religious individuals, just not me or mine. Where should one draw the line?
I believe the originator of a thread can close it? Not sure.
There’s also this study result, which was a little scary, and corroborates what you’re saying:
The first rule of dude club is that you don’t talk about dude club.
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Which reminds me of this study: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-job-rather-jennifer
Whenever someone claims there’s no such thing as a “wage gap”, I pull that one up.
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I really feel the first step to addressing this kind of bias is for people to accept and acknowledge that it exists – the data proves that it does. Then at least when these situations come up we can remember our biases, many of which are nearly unconscious and unintentional, and adapt for them a bit.
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I find that way too absolute. If someone says, “Ugh, I’m so sick of men talking over me,” then I think we can see that there is room in that statement for there to be men who don’t do so and for there to be women who do so. Just like in the title of the thread, “How can women disrupt male speech domination?” Male speech domination is a real thing that a lot of women experience. That doesn’t mean that every man participates.
But another observation I’ve made being on both sides of the privileged and marginalized spectrum - and sometimes masquerading as privileged in discussions about marginalized groups - is that when white people talk about black people, or mentally “normal” people talk about neuro-atypical or mentally ill people, or men talk about women, their observations are usually BS, but when it goes the other way the observations are a lot more objectively accurate. If you ask a hundred white people what they think of indigenous people you’ll hear a lot of stupid shit. If you ask a hundred indigenous people what they think of white people you’ll hear a much greater amount of fair criticism.
Sometimes people do make blanket statements and overgeneralizations, but I think it’s up to us whether we take that as an excuse to back out of the conversation or whether we continue to engage and listen to their point of view. I don’t think it’s worth trying to turn the conversation into a conversation about whether their approach is the correct one. I haven’t seen that work yet, and I’ve seen it tried a lot of times.
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