Collisions with Reality

I tweeted about this earlier, but I’m still mad about the t-shirt I saw FOR TODDLERS that said, “Lock up your daughters!”

I am aware that it is supposed to be funny. The supposed humor behind the shirt rests on at least one of the following two premises:

1. There is a double standard wherein it is okay for men to be sexually active, but not for women.
2. The implied sexual contact is not consensual.

I am not about to support either of those premises, nor am I ready or able to explain any of this to MY TWO-YEAR-OLD. I kind of can’t believe this shirt exists — who really thinks that a kid needs a shirt with this kind of message? (The same people who buy the princess shirts for their daughters? But I think this is a step worse than the preponderance of princess stuff for girls.)

I’m working on another post about how hyper-gendered toys hurts boys, too, but clearly there are some pretty vile messages aimed at boys from a very young age.

(Huh, still mad. Looks like it’s time to shoot off a letter to Hybrid Tees.)

Had I only encountered one blatantly sexist incident online today, I probably would have bypassed it. But as I saw two, I am now annoyed enough to present them as Exhibits AA and AB in what could be a never-ending series.

1. I’m a big fan of The Online Photographer (TOP) blog, whose resident curmudgeons (I mean that in a good way) have an incredible amount of enthusiasm and experience. In the most recent Random Excellence post, Mike said:

   I’ve been accused of featuring too many female photographers in my “Random Excellence” posts (which, as longtime readers know, means randomly encountered, not that their excellence is accidental).

   Okay. Hold up. Too many female photographers? I went back until June 2009 in the archives, and tallied up 53 male photographers and 9 female photographers. Only 15% of the photographers featured in “Random Excellence” have been women, and somehow that is too many? Maybe the complainers meant to say, “You haven’t featured enough female photographers,” or, “I hate boobies!” (I have commented on the post, asking/hoping for clarification, but my comment is still in moderation.)

2. The Ada Initiative is trying to increase the number of women in technology (particularly the various open source communities). Their biggest achievement in 2011 was probably getting large conferences to adopt an anti-harassment policy. They’re fund-raising for 2012, and their funding push has been picked up by a lot of tech and geek blogs*: Boing Boing, Linux.com, and reddit, to name a few. So hey, let’s see how it’s been ranked by reddit!

   … only 58% like it. Okay, then. I know I go around clicking “dislike” on every fundraising cause I see! Especially if it’s trying to encourage members of an underrepresented minority in X to pursue X, while also trying to improve the climate of X for everyone! THAT’S CRAZY TALK.

Let me emphasize that these are both general-interest websites. These comments were not complaints about women invading a forum on prostate cancer. These were comments complaining about women existing in the population at a proportion higher than ten percent.

I’m not going to highlight every instance of sexism on the internet. That would make this a very long and boring blog, and send my blood pressure through the roof. But here is your occasional reminder that as soon as women come out of the woodwork, there will be people complaining about their mere existence.

———–
* NO ONE TELL ME IF SLASHDOT PICKED IT UP. I swore off Slashdot comments several years ago**, and haven’t looked back since!

** Okay, the first time I swore off Slashdot comments was in, like, 1999. But I have stayed firm since 2007!

I have mostly ignored the discussion surrounding the blog post on sexy female scientists. I don’t think it’s unimportant, but I didn’t have the energy to really dig into the many issues raised by the post. My opinion, if you’re curious, is probably most closely aligned to Sheril Kirshenbaum’s.

However, yesterday I also saw a blog post on a nurse-in at a Johnny Rocket’s in Kentucky. (Nurse-ins, for those of you who are not in any mommyblogger loops, are generally organized as a response to a business or organization asking a nursing mother to leave or nurse elsewhere. This is often in violation of state law, as forty-four states specifically allow women to nurse in any public or private location. Yes, including businesses. One day I will have a post about how nursing in public is a feminist cause, but today is not that day.) And, well, you can read the comments yourself. Some of them are supportive, some of them are willfully mis-interpreting the law, and then some are complaining about how they don’t want to see “dirty tits” or “gross-looking” women.

These two issues are really two sides of the same coin. They happen to be extremely relevant to my life — as I am a woman scientist, and a mother who has nursed her child in public — but they are merely two examples of the sexism that is still in society. Forget about whether I’ve contributed anything to our understanding of galaxy clusters, or whether I’m trying to provide the best nutrition for my son. Am I sexy? No? Well, then, clearly I have no value.

I don’t care what Lukeprog’s intentions were in posting that list. The sheer act of compiling and posting it is hardly different from the Consumerist commenters complaining about ugly women nursing in public. It’s treating women as objects of attraction first, and scientists, mothers, and members of society last.