A Movie Without Enough Male Presence?

The NYT has a fairly unfavorable review of the Sex and the City movie; while I haven't seen the movie, have no desire to do so, and am sure several of the criticisms are valid, part of the review rubbed me the wrong way:

Unlike the show, which allowed the men to emerge occasionally from the sidelines with lines of actual dialogue, the male characters in the movie stand idly by, either smiling or stripping, reduced to playing sock puppets in a Punch-free Judy and Judy (times two) show. I’m all for the female gaze, but, gee, it’s also nice to talk — and listen — to men, too.

Uh, right. Men don't have enough screen time?

Not according to another NYT article by the same author (!), xkcd, Jezebel, or indeed, anyone with half a brain who watches blockbuster movies (or even their advertisements). It's nice to talk and listen to men in movies, sure, but you have every other movie coming out this summer for plenty of that.

Gender and Politics: Followup

Seeing the following in Slate (in, of all things, an article explaining why it's righteous for liberals to vote for Obama just because he's black) helped me clarify some of why I think it was important to bring up the issues my previous post:

(The conservative brand identity also doesn't have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton's problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Um, what?

Nobody is calling other presidential candidates bitchy, catty, shrill, or emasculating. Nobody is opening an article in a leading national newspaper with a comment on how much skin the other candidates are showing. Nobody is producing novelty nutcrackers modeled after other candidates (and displaying them prominently in places I run errands). Let me guess -- could cultural perceptions of gender be at work here?

Yes, there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Hillary that aren't sexist. If I didn't think so, I would have voted for her myself. But to say that her gender isn't a liability in her political career is an attitude both obtuse and harmful.

A lot of older feminists who voted for Clinton seem to think that young people who voted for Obama are naive about the issues of sexism Clinton and other women in politics face -- but that's not true of all of us. And a lot of young men who voted for Obama seem to think that their legitimate, non-gender-related reasons for disliking Clinton mean their perceptions are totally untainted by sexist cultural mores -- but that can't be true, either. People who support these two candidates are fighting when they should be uniting -- uniting against racism AND sexism.

Gender and Politics

Like many peolpe my age, I voted for Obama this year. But while I didn't vote for the female candidate, it's not because I think we've reached some sort of post-feminist utopia. I'm not choosing any candidate based solely on demographic factors, but I don't think these factors are irrelevant to the effects a candidate's election will have or the way a candidate is presented and perceived.

I've heard some of my male peers say that Clinton "wasn't a good feminist candidate" because she gained political power partly through her association with her husband; I've also heard them say that it doesn't matter whether we elect a woman president, because there are already female governors, senators, and world leaders in other countries. But I think it does matter -- I think there's a lot to be gained in terms of public perception from having a woman elected president of the United States. We still live in a country where men shout "Iron my shirt!" at an accomplished professional woman -- if they think that's funny, they don't get it, and the day we do elect a woman president is one day closer to people like that "getting it".

The New York Times describes some ways in which Clinton's gender may have affected the race:

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

The reasons I have for voting for Obama don't make me blind to these factors -- I very much do think that Clinton's campaign has been presented differently because of her gender and that she's had to contend with obstacles and perceptions that are never an issue for a male politician. This primary has been framed as a divisive, either-or situation, but it's a false choice. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters are painted as people with no common ground, when in fact most of us agree about a great deal. Just because I ended up preferring Obama doesn't mean that I don't recognize the challenges Clinton has endured solely because of her gender or that I don't see the value in having a woman president for the sake of having a woman president.

Market Work vs. Other Work

Jesse recently read a few chapters of Joan Williams's Unbending Gender for school, and recommended that I take a look at them. Although a lot of the more theoretical aspects went over my head, I found it an extremely intelligent and interesting analysis of work/family/gender issues with a lot of practical recommendations that support my own positions about work/life balance.

Williams describes a norm of domesticity based on an "ideal worker" doing market work, who works full-time, is available for overtime, is available for relocation, and takes little to no time off for child-rearing. Especially in cases where children are involved, this ideal worker can only fill this role if supported by someone, usually a partner, who abstains from ideal-worker market work in order to raise children and care for the household (hence the slogan "most women need a wife"). While the feminism of a few decades ago focused (successfully) on giving women access to these types of jobs, it insufficiently accounted for the fact that these workers are intended to be backed up by a partner taking care of family work; most women remain primarily responsible for childcare and household work regardless of their employment status, which leads to a situation in which they can only gain the social power of men through essentially working double shifts, one shift as a market worker and another as a mother and family worker. She describes this as a situation that can and should be legally framed as discrimination. She also points out that divorce laws, which award most of the household assets to the market worker (who "earned" the money) without compensating the family worker who made the market work possible (and who will probably also have to support the children after the divorce).

Williams also argues that this system is not just harmful to women (who disproportionately fill the role of marginalized caregiver, or if they do not, have a hard time living up to the ideal-worker norm because they rarely have partners available for family work), but also to men, children, and society -- she quotes both women who "choose" to stay home with children but would prefer to keep working at a schedule that allows them to have time for their children as well as their careers, and men who "would prefer the 'daddy track' to the fast track". While everyone seems to agree that children should have more time with their parents, employers reward the opposite behavior by promoting workers who spend long hours at work and passing over or not hiring workers they think will try to take time to be with their families.

She points out that work hours have increased in the U.S. over the past few decades; not only is there more overtime, but people work farther form their jobs, so getting home at 5 is unreasonable for most workers -- but an 8-to-7 schedule for both parents is unreasonable for children, thus perpetuating the situation where it's only practical for one parent to work (and since societal norms still punish men who don't work, it's still usually the man).

Williams has a solution to this: more flexible work hours for everyone. She points out an example of a family that decides that someone should be home with the children two days a week; if one parent asks for a three-day week, an employer will usually consider that unreasonable, but if employers were more open to giving both parents a four-day week they could both keep working and still give their children the time they need. She approaches this from an explicitly pragmatic perspective, pointing out that flexible schedules need not disadvantage employers. My position is that this would even be advantageous to employers, who would have a broader pool of qualified workers to choose from and happier (thus more productive) workers at work if they were more willing to give out schedules that accommodate employees' values and non-market priorities.

The book focuses on families with children, but she briefly touches on how a more flexible work schedule would be advantageous for single or childless people. This is something I feel particularly invested in -- as the text points out, the work-hours it takes now to produce a 1948 standard of living are less than half those it would have taken then, yet people are working longer hours and consuming more, in large part because employment structures discriminate against part-time workers, denying them benefits, fair pay, advancement opportunities, and respect. With more flexible opportunities, all kinds of people who are satisfied with a lower standard of living could work fewer hours and devote the extra time to community service, personal projects, travel, family, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits. I've seen a few news articles in the past few years incredulously describing the expectations of "Gen Y" workers new to the workforce -- we want "work/life balance", they scoff. How selfish! Imagine! Market work is not necessarily the most important thing in our lives, and we'd prefer less money to longer hours!

In fact, almost everyone hopes to balance their time between market work, family work, community work, and personal time -- but employers almost never offer schedules amenable to such balance. If they did, everyone would be better off.

Bags

Men of my acquaintance are often saying things like "Why do women carry bags? What do you need to put in there?"
Of course, those men then ask women with bags to carry their stuff in those bags. In addition to my own stuff, my bag now contains a book, a bag of coffee beans, a box of pens, and some "housecooling party" goodies that I'm carrying for the boy.
I don't really understand how bags became gendered -- it seems a lot more reasonable for each person to have his or her own bag. I'm definitely pro-"man-purse" in this sense.

"Girlfriend Linux"

So with the release of Hardy Heron, an Ubuntu-using blogger puts the new system to the "girlfriend test" -- he gives his Windows-familiar but Ubuntu-n00b girlfriend a list of tasks to accomplish, and watches her try to accomplish them (she's able to do most, but not all, of the tasks without any instruction).

This blog post has gotten a lot of attention in just a few days, and with good reason -- it touches on a lot of hot-button issues regarding Linux and Ubuntu. The blogger says, "Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do" -- and he considers his intelligent, tech-savvy girlfriend's failure at a few of the tasks to be a sign that this isn't the case. This is a problematic assessment -- many of the tasks he chose are the kinds of things only power users even think to do (Photoshop a picture, download a torrent). A truly computer-illiterate user or even an ordinary non-power-user would be interested in much more basic tasks -- e.g. I installed Ubuntu on my mom's laptop a few months ago (hi, Mom!), and she hasn't had to ask me for tech support, presumably because she only uses her computer for a handful of things and those things are easy to do.

That said, this type of test is definitely a useful way to see what aspects of the interface are more and less user-friendly; for example, installing Flash, which is one of the first few things I do on any new installation, is completely non-obvious and requires command-line usage -- not a good idea for something many non-savvy users will want to do right away.

Of course, there's always going to be the double-standard folks who will use any non-user-friendly aspect of a Linux distro as an example of how "Linux is too hard", while ignoring any program that's buggy, interface that's confusing, or task that requires the command line on another OS. Their counterparts are the "Linux isn't Windows!!!" people ("Linux isn't Windows, so don't expect someone used to Windows to be able to use it easily") -- I agree, Linux isn't and shouldn't be a clone of Windows, but if you want Windows users to switch to Linux, you should care about making Linux easy to use for people used to Windows, just like if you want new computer users to be able to start out on Linux you should care about making it easy to use for people who haven't used a computer before. Fortunately we've seen a lot of progress in these areas in the past few years, and I'm confident that Linux developers will continue to produce distros that are easier and easier for all levels of users.

Oh, and for the "Linux users don't have girlfriends"(/"girls don't use Linux"/"there are no girls on the internet") people? Get over yourselves. It's not funny, it's not original, and it's not true... in fact, I happen to live with a Linux user who not only has a girlfriend but had her install Flash for him :).

Even leaving aside the tacky-at-best practice of referring to people with a strong thinking preference as "Vulcans", something's a little off with David Brooks's review of Al Gore's new book. Most notably, this phrasing struck my attention (emphasis mine):

As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This sentence doesn't sound like something only a graduate student could come up with; in fact, it sounds like the sort of reasonable yet straightforward analysis tht you might find in an intelligent high schooler's paper. Curious, I did a little Wikipedia-ing; as if we needed confirmation that Brooks should know better, he has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago! I'd assume that even in 1983 they don't hand out such degrees to students who can't write clear sentences about simple historical trends. So Brooks is presumably aware that the "graduate school" epithet is a little silly here. Throw in descriptions of Gore's prose as "pomposity" that the reader needs to "steel yourself for", and it's clear that Brooks is taking a deliberately exaggerated version of the position that Gore is too intellectual to represent the American people -- and in the New York Times, a publication popular primarily with educated liberals. My interpretation of "graduate school" in particular is that he's trying to play up Gore's supposed over-intellectuality for a mostly college-educated audience; they wouldn't be intimidated by a more realistic description, since it would sound close to their own backgrounds. I wonder what makes Brooks think alienating (literally, with the Vulcan reference in the article's title) Gore from NYT readers is so important, and if it's working.

Meanwhile, over in Slate, William Saletan, whose straightforwardly factual presentations I usually admire, ends up saying something a little weird when talking about the new no-period Pill:

The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won't shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They'll do it to satisfy others. On menstrual-suppression Web sites, you can find testimonies from women who hate their periods for making them too moody for their boyfriends or too tired to go to the office. Their menses are getting in the way of their men.

The boyfriend comment I can understand, but if I can't go to work or can't work effectively because of low energy from blood loss, not to mention crippling pain, that's far from my "menses getting in the way of [my] men". That's another example of how menstruation's side effects can be a more than minor obstacle to the "emancipation" that comes from being able to perform at your best in any job or activity, regardless of whether men are involved.