Day after a party at my dad’s house in the late 80s my 2nd cousin’s husband walked around under the pool picking up beer cans, etc. He walked over the septic tank that had a concrete exposed top, and it collapsed. I woke up to screams of “Help me!” We pulled him out and he lost a shoe - he said, “I’m not going back for it!”
God the stink was awful and we had to hose him off.
You mean understanding satire?
Oh here is an excellent article from Fortune Magazine that talks about the women programmers of the ENIAC and how Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer for Babbage’s machine.
My point is that women have played a very important part in the development and use of computers:
you cannot have your sexism cake and eat it too.
Today?
Popular culture isn’t designed at all. It is the entirety of all things within the mainstream. There are no grand architects, there is no grand scheme, it is the result of a generalized consensual acceptance and nothing more.
No, it only reveals your fetish by piquing it a bit.
It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, good luck and remember, lubrication or inflammation, it’s your choice.
Well - it’s not that simple. My Hello Kitty loving household was quite atitter about that news, but it turns out it’s one of those Japanese to English translation things.
Sorry - as a woman who has worked in Engineering for many years as well as software development I have to disagree that we don’t have a natural proclivity for it. The old boys network just seems to be especially hard to crack in this field; I think because people’s careers are a lot more stable in Engineering so change is much slower and it does trend older than CS, it’s harder for women to get a break. Also, the programming work culture is much friendlier to women’s schedules. Most engineering companies do not have the same flexibility about work from home, flexible hours.
Honestly, though, lately, I wonder what it would be like to walk in the door at work and have it be more women than men. I’ve never worked in such an environment, and it’s getting a little tired to always be invisible no matter how hard I shout.
This magazine cover, like a lot of “popular media” is designed to move units for cold hard Ke$ha. To the extent that it sometimes overlaps with ongoing social issues (more likely to occur in pseudo-journalistic commercial enterprises such as newsweek…) is a matter of what sells. A news source may end up being influential in pushing a narrative (gasp!) about reality. That’s kinda the news game.
Certainly this cover is meant to make you cynical about Silicon Valley, and the idea that it is full of sexism and denigrating, one-dimensional attitudes about women. Like other popular culture presentations, it is a ham-fisted and over-simplified presentation of a complex problem.
You’ll as often as not find pop culture that cheerleads for “our own culture” (“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!”) whatever the hell that even means. To the extent that “the kidz rock and rap music” is rebellious and advocates change, or “rule-breaking”, well, that moves units to teenagers. Beyond those tired tropes, I think your tagline could use some workshopping…
This is clearly a commentary – and a good one – on how Silicone Valley looks at women… Just as the title of the piece says. The arrow (or cursor – a common computer screen image, and not a projectile towards the woman’s behind) is lifting the skirt of the faceless woman… Get it! Faceless!!! You know – no value. Oy, is it so hard to figure out the symbolism?
These knee jerk reactions are getting all too routine. Somebody provides a commentary on a hot button issue, and the masses attack the person/publication, without thinking for a couple seconds. In the case of Boing Boing the supposed shock seems more to bait clickers.
I agree that it oversimplifies with the illustration, but isn’t that the point of illustrations in these publications? The reason I think it works is that it gets your attention, but doesn’t utilize the mistreatment of women within its message.
I am not saying that there are not good women engineers or not good men programmers. What I am saying, like the misogynist said in the article, “women are not (generally good at being) linear thinkers”, and I think is true, as well as, “men are not generally good at multitasking”. I think that this brings in aspects of the old time men being single tasking hunters, and women being multitasking gatherers.
I think of engineering computer pathways to be more linear thinking, and programming to be more multitasking, but they are certainly not exclusively each that way.
As a man, if you would like to look at what I think of quantum computing, check my profile on BB. It includes some of what I would call exceptionally hard programming. It is a working model, but I have yet to find anyone who can understand why it works, despite my best efforts. Hell, I created it and I have a difficult time understanding it, and cannot say I fully understand what the implications are.
At any rate, hopefully later today or tomorrow I can get my mom to write here about her years of programming for a major insurance company, and others. She has some realistic insights (not saying you’re unrealistic) into this subject that I think should be heard.
Hey everyone? Could you do me a favor please and go and look up “confirmation bias.” Read the definition two three times, and then, here is the thing, stop and realize that it is about you, yes, you can be wrong about things you hold dearly. Next time you think, “Oh, that group has a common trait that makes them less qualified than me.” STOP, that is it. You should have a giant red flag go up in your head telling you that you have overlooked your own bias, systematically, for the whole length of your life. Aspire to not do that. The first step is to stop your self before saying it out loud.
You can do it!
I take it that is directed at me. If women and men’s brains are not at least different in a minor way, then why are men much more likely to suffer from brain diseases like schizophrenia and autism?
I assume that’s snark, but in case not, no, I mean understanding why it is that using sexism to point out sexism isn’t doing it right.
I, like others in this thread, looked at cover as an illustration summarizing the point made in the article. No face, sexual object, etc. But I won’t try to mainsplain away anybody else’s outrage, I’m perfectly happy with accepting that women may find this offensive. Though I’d certainly appreciate an explanation of why, as opposed to simply being a graphical interpretation of the points in the article, it’s actually sexism. Simply because I like to think of myself as a fairly enlightened feminist-type man, so when I miss stuff like this I like to inspect my privilege.
I was going to respond and disagree with you, but I gave it some thought and liked your comment instead.
My instinct to disagree came out of my “reading” of the visual. If they wrote in the story, “Silicon valley treats women like faceless sex objects” then that wouldn’t be using sexism to point out sexism, that would just be pointing out sexism. The graphic designer did a good job of translating that sentence into a visual for me.
But obviously the image doesn’t sit well with you (or Xeni, or others in this thread). You didn’t see the image and read the sentence I wrote above as its message, so I guess the designer didn’t do as good a job as I thought. In this case, I guess the best I can do is say that I can see how Newsweek thought the image was doing what it was supposed to (in answer to Xeni’s “What were they thinking?”), but they obviously should have shown it to more people to make sure that what they were thinking was what other people were thinking too.
The fact that I think the image does what it’s trying to do is a useful lesson for me in the importance of checking with other people.
Well, it sure seems to have worked on you. I’ve never read something so cynical. “Most people are conformists and will subscribe to … what they perceive to be the most popular.” Do you realize that “what is most popular” is the same thing as “what the most people subscribe to.” The fact that most people like what is popular is a tautology, and we don’t need to go digging into the “people are sheep” well to explain it.
Read what I wrote above to milliefink - is that cynicism? Is listening to other people and thinking about how they may feel differently than you cynicism? Yikes.
Women’s and men’s brains are different. Men’s and men’s brains are more different, though, and women’s and women’s brains are more different as well. At this point, I don’t think there is a single trait where there isn’t more variation within the sexes than between them. We have to separate the idea of “if you have to put your dollar on a man or a women being X, put it on men” (men are more likely to have schizophrenia) from ideas that “men are like X, women are like Y”.
I’ve posted this on these forums before (though the ordering is wrong for this post, but that’s fine):
Most things where we perceive a real difference between men and women are the second graph. Extremely few things (like the ability to bear children, for instance) are the first graph, but even then you can’t just say men are X and women are Y*. Also, beware of the third graph. It could be that an appearance than men are like X and women are like Y (or vice versa) could actually reflect the same mean value but greater variance in one than the other. If one sex had great variance in a trait but they both had the same mean we might be tricked into thinking that sex was more likely to have that trait because our greatest exemplars of the trait are of the greater variance sex.
* If you can say this, then I recommend “Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano because it’s a great read anyway and I’m not going to do an adequate job of it
