This Huffington Post article has been bouncing around the blogosphere for a few months. The author, Yashar Ali, argues that telling women their emotional behaviour is “crazy” is a form of “gaslighting“: convincing someone they’re crazy by questioning their perception of reality.

I wish I could agree with him, but Ali mostly misses the mark. We live in a masculine society. Any non-masculine behaviour is defined by society as insanity. Therefore, men are correct in calling women insane when they act like women. This is basic Foucault: society (not abusive individuals) uses the label of “crazy” to assert power over dissenting behaviour.

Asking men to redefine sanity for themselves is like asking someone to see the code of the Matrix. Instead of just telling individual men not to make gaslighting speech, we need to reform society to value feminine behaviour as much as masculine behaviour.

The Toronto Star ran an article on a family that is raising a gender-neutral infant. Not surprisingly, the article is a bit muddled on the distinction between sex and gender: gender neutrality is achieved by keeping the baby’s sex secret.

Given that the family’s two older children (2 and 5) identify as boys but cross-dress, I’m struck by the sense that being secret-sexed is actually less subversive of gender norms. But one of the experts interviewed for the article is a psychologist who speculates that being secret-sexed will deny the child the opportunity to identify as transgendered, which suggests than androgyny and genderqueering are rather more subversive. I suppose in the simpler case of transgender, it would be easy to tell people “he is a boy” or “she is a girl” without specifying sexual characteristics.

Much of the criticism of the family’s decision is based on the difficulty that ambiguous people have fitting into society. Heather Mallick kind of gets the point that that’s the family’s point: this difficulty needs to be removed for everyone to actually fit into society instead of just fake it. Obviously, keeping their baby’s sex secret for 4 months as a media stunt is quite effective at furthering that debate. (Fox News ran a surprisingly balanced article.)

Their eldest child has decided to homeschool kindergarten because, the article claims, he feels that going to school would restrict his gender expression. Regardless of how their parents construct their gender identities, I think being raised in a gender-critical environment will have a larger impact on these kids.

Note the order of the title, it’s not Maude and Harold, because Maude isn’t much of a character. Normally I’d take this opportunity to do my favourite off-beat reading by proposing that she’s a figment of Harold’s imagination, but I have a more important issue to discuss:

Maude, like many women in film, is not a fully-developed character – she even ends up in the refrigerator for Harold’s benefit. More specifically, she is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a very important trope in Western texts.

This extensive blog that refers to them as “Amazing Girls” explains how Manic Pixies are misogynist:

The Romantics’ ideal of the pure and naturally innocent woman, a creature morally inferior to men but capable of spiritual perfection — in short, a childlike vessel for the projection of masculine ideals.

And Eye Weekly, in doing a similar criticism of 500 Days of Summer as my own, explains the damage caused by the Manic Pixie archetype:

There’s something very underrated about sane, functional women who act their age and do not try to be spirits of pure light and joy.

Given that I’m “an soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence”, I definitely hope to “leave [my] cold, grey existence and one day meet this magical woman [so my] life will be transformed”. Yet despite my love of misogyny in cinema, I couldn’t relate to Harold. Maybe because being obsessed with death became trendy and then cliche since this movie was made? Maybe because although there’s more to Harold than Maude, he’s still not a very well-developed character? Maybe because the movie didn’t deliver an explicit sex scene (art isn’t supposed to make you comfortable)? I don’t know why, but the movie didn’t click for me like contemporary myths of the Manic Pixie.

The Tyee recently ran a hysterical (pun intended) book excerpt on how the evil pharmaceutical companies are trying to help women have more fun in bed. The authors’ concern is that the way licensing in the US works, a drug cannot be sold and insured unless it’s treating a formal disorder. So if a pharmaceutical company discovers a drug that fixes a problem people have, they need to get scientists to explicitly define that problem as a disorder before people are allowed to have the drug.

Rather than discovering “natural” classifications of disorders, scientists invent disorders and test their definitions for internal consistency with a treatment. I guess this sounds really horrible if you’re an alarmist modernist, but I’m not sure who else in society would be better qualified to invent disorders? As the article warns, “drug companies are sometimes involved in…giving a little known condition renewed attention”!! And sometimes the companies are so insidious, that they give attention to widespread but ignored conditions like women’s sexual function.

Because after all, heaven forbid we have a way to solve common problems: “to what extent are women’s problems of desire and arousal really the signs of dysfunctions, or rather common sexual difficulties being portrayed as diseases in order to sell drugs?” Instead, the article advocates a movement in psychiatry called the New View, which says that patients’ disorders are mostly caused by “the broader context of her life, her relationships, and the wider society and culture in which she lives.”

I wonder what New View psychiatrists tell their patients? “Your disorder is caused by society; I’ll try to have it fixed by our next session.” If society is broken, why is it unreasonable to take something to cope? Men clearly appreciate having sexual dysfunction treatments (because men are capable of separating psychological and physical desire for sex), who are we to tell women that they shouldn’t want them too?

Jezebel is a megablog that runs a combination of trashy celebrity stories and mid-brow feminism. I find the combination weird, but that’s probably because I’m a guy: they’re both things that contemporary women like to read about. I don’t subscribe to Jezebel because I can’t stand the gossip, but I appreciate it when one of my lady-friends tells me about a good feminist post. Especially because Jezebel’s feminism posts tend to have unintentionally hilarious comments.

My friend Caitlin recently pointed to a pair of posts on the rape charges against Wikileaks’ Talking Head, Julian Assange:

• The media says the victims are the kind of women “who make up rape claims, basically”
• “A consent-based framework for evaluating sexual assault is not yet widely accepted”

The second one is particularly interesting. I haven’t bothered to read the comments – let me know if you see anything funny.

The bottom line as I see it: Assange certainly appears to be an asshole, so I suspect there’s something behind the charges. Western governments are applying an awful lot of pressure to apprehend this particular rapist, so it is persecution in a way. Regardless, Wikileaks would probably be better off today if they didn’t have a Talking Head (maybe they can pass teh cables over to Anonymous?)

I’ve run into a situation where sexism might be taking place against some of the women in my class. And that “maybe” is a form of sexism itself.

We’ve been invited to apply for a shoot in Brazil as an extra-cirricular project. It’s a week in the jungle shooting along the Amazon followed by a week in Rio shooting Carnaval.

One of the women came to me today and said she’d been told that they wouldn’t “pick a girl” because “it’s a week in the jungle carrying 50 lbs of gear” and “the girls aren’t as skilled technically as the guys”. The teachers, “of course”, wouldn’t be picking “a girl”. (This was said to someone who is far ahead in the whisper buzz for best documentary and who “already lugs piles of equipment around”.)

Jill’s spot-on-analogy is: “imagine they had said that about — and to — a black person.”

Whether the selection is biased or not, that one of my classmates told this to her was probably intended as a chilling effect. I’m thinking of going to someone, but it’s impolitic for me to go to the profs, as there’s a suggestion they’re implicated.

There’s a woman on the selection committee — should I mention this to her? I’ve been googling sexism ombudspeople at my school and can’t find any. I was considering spoiling my application in protest (“I am qualified because of XYZ — and I think you should send one of the women in class”), or going to the corporate sponsor directly.

Complicating this is that there are about 1/5th as many women as men in the class so the discrimination could just hide behind sampling noise. Anyway — the deadline is fast approaching. Ideas? Let me know ASAP.

I am trying to defeat my classmates through fair competition and aesthetic achievement, not through white male privilege!

As a computer science undergrad, one of my (and my girlfriends’!) favourite books was Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. The book is about a group of Microsoft programmers who leave Microsoft to found a start-up company, before the dot-com bubble. Besides the characters’ career arcs, a large part of the book is about [SPOILER!] Daniel and Karla gradually getting together. Ultimately, Microserfs is a romance set in a very realistic Silicon Valley.

Coupland effectively rewrote Microserfs as JPod, changing the setting to Electronic Arts in Vancouver. Except JPod skips over the few months where [SPOILER!] Ethan and Kaitlin start dating. In his rewrite, Coupland removed the aspect of Microserfs that I liked best: JPod is a boring piece of crap (that made for an even worse TV show).

The only two films about programming that I can recall are Hackers and Antitrust. Both films have male protagonists supported by technically-competant love interests: Hackers was Angelina Jolie’s first major role her best haircut ever and I don’t remember much about Antitrust, but Wikipedia assures me that the girls kicked ass*.

I finally got around to seeing The Social Network, which got a lot of attention when it came out for its “angry nerd misogyny”. Writer Aaron Sorkin flip-flopped on whether it was a pure Hollywood fantasy, sexed-up to sell tickets, or if he was accurately reflecting the mysogyny of the tech industry. I think The Social Network was an amazing script, making a fast-paced film out of typing and depositions, but maybe I would have liked the film more with some romance?

* Although Rachael Leigh Cook’s career-best hair was in Josie and the Pussycats.

For the lulz, Brynn asked me to respond to this Jezebel post, criticising this AskMen dating advice article. I don’t drink The Game‘s koolaid, but I can debate from that perspective:

1. Every guy who hits on a woman in a public place has either picked up a woman in a public place themselves or talked to a guy who has. Guys will not accept rules women set if they are different for hot guys. If women don’t want to be hit on somewhere, they need to collectively agree to refuse all such attempts, like they have at clubs.
2. I agree the example is lame but how about a constructive suggestion? What is the correct way to approach a stranger you’d like to meet?
3. Oh yes, because women never have ulterior motives.
4. “Buying signals” is sales jargon – it implies the woman is the buyer and the guy is the object being sold.
5. Where’d this one go?
6. Oh, does that mean Jezebel agrees with #5 (the 15-minute rule) and #6 (probing for relationships)?
7. Agreed
8. Ouch!
9. I hope Jezebel doesn’t agree with the classic wing formation?
10. Women never close me, which is proof that I’m right about #13
11. This one is a chicken-egg problem to implement – is that why Jezebel didn’t bother?
12. I agree – I am perfect!
13. All of this pickup stuff is trying to figure out how to operate within The Patriarchy, under the assumption that a few guys can’t destroy it on their own – once women are liberated, we won’t have to treat them like slaves.

Some old, white male trained in two of the most modernist disciplines – Western medicine and psychotherapy – is concerned that teenage girls are postmodern. As quoted in this Macleans interview:

You’ve got 14-year-old girls essentially presenting themselves as a brand, trying to create a public persona, polishing an image of themselves that’s all surface: how you look and what you did yesterday, not who you are and what you want to be. And that leads to a sense of disconnection from themselves, because in most cases, these girls don’t even realize that their persona is not who they are. They’re just focused on striving to please their market and presenting the brand they think will sell.

This is coming from a guy who has been doing a speaking tour to promote his new book and who cites his own credentials to support his point! Why would what you want to do tomorrow be a more important part of your identity than what you did yesterday? Especially when the desires of teenagers are mostly externally imposed.

Girls who see themselves as brands will likely go on to be more successful than girls who want to be loved for their authentic selves. And having “anorexia of the soul” is at least as healthy as the chronic existential crisis that strikes the “authentic” people in our society.

Dr. Sax shows his hand by applying premodern morality and seeming hopelessly out of touch with the historical reality of being a woman:

I find it troubling that so many girls are using their sexuality in an instrumental way, in order to accomplish some other end such as raising their social status, but not as an expression of their own [feelings and desires].

If a burqa-clad young Muslim woman tells you that only being seen by her husband makes her feel sexy, you don’t believe her. You say she’s been brainwashed by her cultural upbringing. She has Stockholm Syndrome.

Why would you think any differently if a young Canadian woman says that dressing as a slut is “celebrating her sexuality”?

Poststructural literary analysis is based on the “death of the author”. It doesn’t matter what the author claims or thinks they’re writing about: what matters is how people interpret it. Authors do not have a priviledged position with respect to their own work. If someone writes a novel that’s obviously about young Hitler but claims that’s not what it’s about, who cares what the author says?

So when I “read the text” that is a woman’s slutty Halloween costume, I don’t care what she claims she’s doing. In fact, I’m less likely to believe her analysis: she’s too close to the material to read it critically. She has too many incentives to convince me that she’s not being oppressed. I also don’t care what people who benefit from a slutty world say.

Sex-positive feminism may be possible, but it needs to be backed in theory. It’s not enough to just say “I’m sex-positive and I’m a feminist!”