is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Am I Too Late for the Garbage?
It's easy to think that sexism doesn't have much to do with your life when you have a good job, have been fairly successful, and most people you work with treat you pretty well most of the time. But then you get a reminder. Someone at work says something degradingly lame. Or you read something like this, from New York Magazine (currently one of my favorite magazines to read at the gym):
"It's a ubiquitous female strategy for success in any line of work that is a boys' game. Keep your head down and your skirts mid-length; act nice even when your actions belie your words; avoid shows of strong feeling and cleavage; stress your good intentions; be good-natured about sexist slights and don't truck too much with women's issues. You'll still get labeled 'just a woman' or, alternatively, not enough of one�but you'll survive."
If that doesn't encapsulate my life amongst the philosophers, I don't know what would. I might make a joke or a pointed rejoinder of it much of the time, laughing at laughably ancient attitudes. But knowing how it works does very little to lift me above it.
I didn't want Hillary Clinton to be president, for many, many good reasons (don't get me started on the way she alluded multiple times to the unelectability of a black man�even if that's true, a true leader doesn't use such a statement as a strategy, and doesn't even make such a statement in the first place, because a leader LEADS rather than following the narrowness of lowest-common-denominator thinking. Yes, that means we haven't really had a leader in the U.S. for quite some time, but is that news?), but that doesn't stop me from being really, really depressed by how deeply sexism determined much of the coverage of her campaign. The only good that might come of it is that it reminded a lot of women who might have thought otherwise that sexism still is a determining factor in their life prospects.
Lots of these women (and men) who have been "reminded" about the depth of sexism in our culture already knew it. It's like a (demure/slutty) garment you can never truly stop wearing. Or, it's like how there's never an end to the need to take out the garbage, and yet it is so easy to forget to do it, because it's a mundane, and dirty, feature of daily life. And then there you are, surrounded by a stinking mess wondering how you managed to forget it was there for a while.
11:15 p.m. - June 29, 2008
meow - 2008-07-01 20:16:27
I hear you, it's the same over here in the computer geek world. I am totally lacking The Technology Stick. IYKWIM.
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