Took a library discard into the doc's office today--Dangerous Women, I think it's called, I can't remember, about woman outsiders during the Ming Dynasty. It has the air about it of being someone's doctoral thesis, but expanded and made more accessible. The author explicitly says, in the introduction, that she wants to avoid obscuring the interesting, very real women she's discussing and quoting, so she's chosen to avoid talking-about and jargon as much as possible.

Anyway, since "geishas" are mentioned on the cover (the author knows geisha are from Japan; she explained her use of the word in the introduction), my doc was all, "Uh huh," very skeptical, and was all, "I don't know, Rat, don't you think the way they glorify geishas is just a way of prettying up prostitution?" "They" meaning Westerners. As a Filipina, this is something she has a bit of a personal stake in, since Filipinas are often exploited by the sex trades in Thailand, and whenever she goes to Thailand or China, she knows people seeing her with her (white) husband assume she's with a john. She's just more aware of the issue because of that, I guess. So we talked about that, and actually I agree with her, agree that pretty much any society with prostitution will do the best it can to pretend that prostitution has no ramifications for the ones selling their services, and that there should be no moral imperatives for johns to not be creeps. Since society insists that people--mostly women, but at any rate, marginalized people--prostitute themselves, the least it could do is offer those people courtesy and protection. But no, it can't even do that.

So yeah, that was kinda nifty. The conversation, I mean, not society's hypocritical stance on prostitution.

In other book-related news, the Liles book on natural dyeing arrived today--yeah, the one I was swearing about a week ago, because Big Stupid Corporate Library got rid of their copies, most likely because someone in Circ thought they were "weird" or "old," the asses. That is what happens when you have circ get rid of books for you without oversight, is all I'm saying, goddamn. So it's here, even though I do almost no natural dyeing and half the mordants he calls for are fucking perilous, let me assure you, but Liles is a wizard at dyeing on plant fibers--which I don't really care about on a practical level, to be honest, I'm a wool person--and generally is to be trusted in all things. I can remember that someone was talking with me about a vegetable-dyed black a few weeks ago, but I can't remember who it was. If they want to know, they should comment here and I'll look it up. Cos if anyone knows, it's Liles.

"Purls of wisdom: A collectivist study of human information behaviour in a public library knitting group":

Purpose – The authors aim to apply a collectivist theoretical framework to the study of human information behaviour and the construction of meaning in a knitting group held in a branch of a large Canadian (Ontario) public library. Design/methodology/approach – The research design was naturalistic and consisted of active participant observation of five knitting group sessions and semi-structured interviews with 12 group members. Field notes were taken, and both observations and interviews were audio taped and transcribed. Field notes and transcripts were coded qualitatively. Findings – Information practices and contextual factors are mutually constitutive. The location of the circle in a public library, the physical characteristics of the act of knitting, and the social meanings of the activities taking place within the group, including the significance of gender and caring, are integrally linked to HIB in this setting. Findings are described verbally and illustrated through a model. Research limitations/implications – This study applies collectivist understandings to enrich concepts such as the “information ground” that have previously been studied largely from constructivist perspectives. As a small-scale naturalistic study, results are context-specific and must be applied tentatively. Practical implications – This study provides an example of how programs in public libraries can provide opportunities for information behaviour and the construction of meaning for members of the community. Originality/value – This study contributes a collectivist approach to research on everyday-life information seeking and on the library as a place.

Published in Journal of Documentation, Volume 63, issue 1 (2007), p. 90-114

It might be nice to do this once a week. Let's see if I remember that next Friday.

Or, a post related to male privilege and sexual assault in geekdom. Well really, just some links. A few days ago, I posted an imperfect but (for me) energetic attempt to discuss the way privilege and marginalization intersect to normalize Nice Guyism and other misogynist behaviors in geek dudes; in that post, I referenced a previous Geek Feminism post on the subject that related specifically to conferences.

Well, they just posted an update/response/further discussion, so there's the link.

• Everything
• A post asking if any "gamer girls" are out there, because the (male) poster has a female friend (who I suspect is imaginary) who is desperate to game with other "girls"
• A post like the above, not including the girl's woman's contact info, but rather the dude's.
• The probable refusal on the part of Gamer Dude to wonder why his (possibly imaginary) woman friend feels so uncomfortable gaming with dudely dudes that she wants to game with more girls women

Mind you, this is possibly a sleazebag way for Gamer Dude to get the contact info of lots of "girls," rather than an actual thing with actual basis in reality, so.  But again, people wonder why women are hesitant to take part in geek culture, you know?  Or why we build areas just for us.  It's because of all the bullshit, plain and simple.

In related news, the posts about "Why geeks are human failures" are going around again, and the thing is, these posts seem really useful at first.  They describe behaviors that really do happen.  What they don't do is hold a society obsessed with relentless conformity to task for rejecting people based on mostly harmless behaviors.  Instead, they blame the victims--the awkward, the smart, the curious, the interested, the passionate--for the way they're treated.  Such lists also tend not to explore the creepy, passive-aggressive-macho thing that often happens in the male-dominated portion of geekdom.  I'm talking about Nice Guys, the dudes who think that women owe them attention, adulation, and favors because they're dudes of low social status, and therefore haven't been quite as able as dudes of high social status to take advantage of and harm others.  Well, and just because they're dudes, of course.

A lot of the overtalking, the dissing of others' intelligence, etc. that's described in these lists happens in a male-female dynamic, you know.  Because it's an unacknowledged, but treasured element of our culture that no matter how low-status a dude is, there's almost always a woman somewhere he can push around, if not through direct means, then through manipulation and guile.  Cos you know, they've grown up in the same culture we have.  They've seen how being an alpha male means that fabulous privileges accrue to you, and they want a piece of that, too, so they're experimenting with the methods.  How can they establish dominance over others?  Who is most susceptible, who least likely to fight back?  Who has something they want?  How can they get that?  So the mansplaining, the guilt-tripping, the connivance, the close-talking, the groping and other unwanted sexual behavior (apparently prevalent at cons), all of that comes into play in that way, too.  That's so all-pervasive in geekdom that it's actually considered normal--"Oh, he's just awkward, he just doesn't know how to act"--when of course, it should be an outrage.

The outrage comes when female geeks raise questions about how women are treated in the various geek subcultures.  Geek Feminism, for instance, discusses the way women in tech receive a lot of backlash, and has enumerated the reasons geek gatherings are often not safe for women.  Discussing this is apparently so infuriating that the blog is often attacked by misogynist trolls, and recently, the trolling escalated to threats of violence.  The Nice Guy quickly loses his veneer of civility when questioned.

That's probably where the divide occurs, come to think of it.  Because really, there's little awesomer than a genuinely civilized geek man, that is, if you're of the sort who likes men.  Well, and even if you don't like men for sleeping with, isn't it nice to have civilized friends?  It surely is.  So that's where the divide between the Nice Guy geek and the genuinely civilized geek gent occurs, maybe: one wants to defend his unearned privilege, and the other wants to interact with his fellow human beings, some of whom are women.  The latter person is a lot more pleasant to be around.

So those lists are interesting, and maybe even a little useful, because they describe behaviors which many of us are unconsciously performing.  There is some truth to what they say.  Unfortunately, they also are just another way of beating the socially-awkward or different over the head and telling them to be more normal.  They also ignore the fact that some of the behaviors they mention are, in many contexts, less about awkwardness and more about power, which then leads to jaundiced eye-turning and heavy sighing and verbose posting by yours truly.

"Most of the public still takes the position, 'How does this concern me?' The idea that each individual is responsible for what happens to the poorest, most anonymous child on the street hasn't even dawned on the public at large!"

It's been a long time since I saw the old edition of "M," which was subtitled in the 50s or 60s, but I am 100% that the "socialist" line at the very end was deliberately left untranslated (leaving the onus for the children's deaths squarely on their suffering parents, rather than an uncaring society), and I'm 99% sure that this line was left untranslated, too.

The more I watch this--in a new, retitled version put out by Criterion, thank goodness--the more I think that Lang and Von Harbou were trying to talk about class issues, too. In the first few minutes of the movie, we're shown a victim's mother as she scrubs her neighbors' laundry and prepares lunch for her daughter. This is not a neglectful, uncaring parent, as the former US translation would have led us to believe--a parent who just didn't care enough to keep an eye on her kid. She was not ignoring her child. She was too poor to stop work and meet Elsie at school. We do see other parents meeting their children at school, yes: and today, for the first time, after watching this movie at least 8 or 9 times before, I noticed that they were all wealthy. They had heavy coats, nice clothes, many of them in furs. They were rich. Every minute not-working didn't mean the difference between putting a meal on the table or going hungry, like it clearly did for Elsie's ma. Laundresses are not exactly notorious for living high on the hog.

There's always something more to tease out from a Lang/Von Harbou movie. OK, not if we're talking about "Woman in the Moon." That's a rotten picture. But at least it's gorgeous.

This year's Blog for Choice prompt, "Trust Women," is taken from a button that Dr. George Tiller wore. Dr. Tiller was murdered by an anti-choice terrorist last year. He came to abortion rights the long way around, first thinking that only "scumbags" performed abortions, but gradually coming to realize that total bodily sovereignty is a human right, and that the right to choose is literally a life or death matter for women.

So, for that, he was murdered.

The prompt doesn't mean much to me, because it's never occurred to me not to trust women, or even to think that women aren't trustworthy to decide when they do or don't want to carry a child to term. Our trustworthiness is not even an issue, because as human beings, we are the only ones who have the right of ownership over our persons. What does occur to me, quite regularly, is that men are not trustworthy to tell us when we should or shouldn't terminate a pregnancy. Men have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not trustworthy to decide what's good for us. If men want to work with us, alongside us, as fellow human beings, then they must do what Dr. Tiller did: they must trust women, and keep their laws off our bodies. Trust is reciprocal. I'll trust you if you'll trust me.

Dr. Tiller had been threatened and even injured before, and he did not back down. He was not the first person to work for women's rights, and not even the first man to do so, but the work he did was vital and important to thousands of women. He worked, daily, for our freedom. The work he did, helping women to achieve or maintain bodily sovereignty, goes against some of the deepest-held beliefs of our culture, and for that he had to die. Whether or not I trust women is a non-issue, but I would have trusted George Tiller.

Accidentally-sort-of picked up The Fifth Elephant and read the first few pages, and now am committed to reading it again. I might actually own it, but I can't remember, and I'd hate to count on its being at home if it's not. So I'll check it out.

I ran across Feet of Clay the other day and remembered with a start that it had a considerable amount of subtext--hardly sub-, really--about oppression, and how oppression can screw with your head, and how the words in our heads can do a lot for or to us. I think this is what Pratchett was trying to talk about in Unseen Academicals, but in that book he did so more explicitly and, in so doing, closed off the openness of interpretation that made Feet of Clay so effective. It's the difference between being given a picture of a fascinating and ambiguous scene and allowed to learn and examine and project and infer from it all by yourself, and being given a fascinating and ambiguous scene, but having someone try to tell you exactly what it means and getting it wrong in some significant ways. I still think Unseen Academicals is really good, and I like that Mr. Pratchett is engaging with difficult issues, but I think he does that better when he doesn't try to tell us exactly what those issues entail for the people who experience them.

Also, I'd like to try fatsup, but it frankly sounds as if it'd give me heartburn. Given that a lot of Discworld stuff has real-world antecedents, there's probably some Eastern European recipe out there that's similar.

A whole passel o' ladies carrying human bones just settled down at a table a few yards away. Pat Robertson would flip his shit over this one.

Account security issues and important notes from mark. Most of the folks in my Circle know more about this shit than I do, being on the dev team or related stuff like that, but those that aren't should know about this.