Sadly, there’s a lot of stupid around gender issues in the XKCD fanbase. That thread doesn’t get too bad, but the discussion of “How It Works” ( http://www.xkcd.com/385/ ) is even worse. For some reason, geeks as a population tend to have issues with women, and I’ve never been sure how to deal with it, other than to work to eliminate those ideas when they appear.
Say, AnonymousCoward, where is the discussion you referenced? I’ve heard it referenced in the past as especially bad, but I’ve had a hard time actually locating it. Thanks, —Myca
Anonymous Coward — I’ve been planning a blog teaching geeks about feminism for a while, on a 101 level using geek examples and culture. I have too much else on my plate right now, but I’m hoping, as a geek feminist, I can make a difference that way.
I don’t know AnonymousCoward, Julius’ comments alone are pretty atrocious. And he’s far from the only one.
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18590 Notably, it starts with a defense of Larry Summers (It was just a social experiment! He was just trying to be provocative!) and goes downhill from there. Appeals to evolutionary biology abound (No, hunter gatherer societies were like this, and therefore the 21st century is like this too!), and it eventually degrades to “Feminism hurts us men because it implies that we’re all a bunch of potential rapists!” 800 posts, and roughly 75% of them are either out-and-out misogynistic or grossly misinformed. It really hurt my impressions of the general xkcd readership. Fortunately, Munroe continues to kick ass and challenge his audience to reconsider their sexual preconceptions.
Randall Munroe does some lovely arguing in the thread about two female leads. I think my “favourite” responses are repeatedly suggesting films with a single female lead, or films that didn’t make a lot of money. When I talked about it on my LJ, I got “But anime often has two female leads!”… as though this is somehow relevant.
Did they count Night of the Comet? Wait, I should phrase that like a Family Guy question: remember the time I was trapped by zombies in the frozen yogurt place with the two chicks from Night of the Comet?
For some reason, geeks as a population tend to have issues with women, and I’ve never been sure how to deal with it, other than to work to eliminate those ideas when they appear. I’d say it’s not just women, but also things like race and class issues. I think it has a lot to do with blindness to structural factors and how they impact the world and our view of it. Especially considering the overrepresentation of say, libertarians and Ron Paul-ites among geeks.
Sadly, there’s a lot of stupid around gender issues in the XKCD fanbase. That thread doesn’t get too bad, but the discussion of “How It Works” ( http://www.xkcd.com/385/ ) is even worse. Dear. Gods. Yes. I admin the xkcd forums. That comic thread gave me shrieking, bloody nightmares.
Yeah, it’s depressing how quickly everyone lines up to bend themselves into knots explaining away what’s right in front of their faces. “It’s not the studios, it’s the audiences! But it’s not their fault either because chick flicks are boring!” You’d think as geeks they’d have some passing familiarity with Occam’s razor…
OH MY GOD. The comments there made my head explode. “it is possible that men just like movies more than women do” SERIOUSLY!!?! “the lack of female participation in historic contexts is another reason for the lack of films with multiple female leading roles” !?!?!?! “Actually, as a high school teacher I wish we had more male role models. I have news for you; sexual inequality has long since vanished. In just one decade we have completely reversed academic achievement between the sexes. Girls are beating boys badly academically. We are losing boys and losing them fast. Divorce and a culture that treats fatherhood as somehow less important than motherhood is going to wreck havoc on this country in a very short time.” THIS PERSON IS ALLOWED TO TEACH. I need to find a new planet.
Randy is a great guy. It continues to shock and dismay me that these assholes can claim to be his fans while actively refusing to listen to a word he says. The next person who tells me how progressive and egalitarian nerds are might just get punched. >(
Those comments are like a really gnarly pimple that you can’t stop picking at. I read that the other day, closed it, then opened it again, and kept getting fuming mad, over and over again. No, it’s the audiences! No, it’s because men pay for movies! No, it’s because men can’t identify with female leads! And what about this movie! And this movie! And this movie! I could take little comfort in the fact that most of the proposed alternate explanations also boil down to—guess what?!&mdashsexism. That thread prompted me to write a very upset post about why I can’t shut up about feminism. It’s like god fucking forbid that this country has sexist institutions or people in it.
I couldn’t keep reading that thread. It’s like that ridiculous meme from the 80s–Girls will play with boys’ toys/watch boy shows but boys won’t play with girl toys/watch girl shows. It was bullshit then, but it’s been taken as fact for decades now. Just like the “women don’t like sci-fi” meme. Sure we do, as long as it’s not just an excuse to torture women or act out male fantasy of idiot women. “Men don’t like watching chick flicks.” Hmmm, explain Titanic‘s success to me again? How did women, who apparently never pay for movies, get into the show so often? Could it be that men and women go to movies together? And that they compromise–>I’ll go watch your baseball movie if you take me to the sci-fi movie? Or, perhaps, using the odious Julius’ repetitive notion, even though men pay for the movies, they want to impress the woman, so they take her to something she’d like to see? I know I thought my husband liked movies as much as I did, but he really just wanted to be with me. Now that we’re married and don’t go out to the show as much, he doesn’t understand why I feel cheated. ;^) I mean, really, when the head of WB’s says he’s not making anymore movies with female leads, how can anyone still think that that’s just the way it is? When Stalone and Schwarzeneggar’s films started bombing they didn’t stop making stupid action movies or stop casting men in starring roles. IBTP. It sucks.
I just have a discussion with a friend about how xkcd has feminist undertones. Here’s a couple: http://www.xkcd.com/385/ http://www.xkcd.com/387/ http://www.xkcd.com/322/ http://www.xkcd.com/341/ (storyline includes the next 4 comics) http://www.xkcd.com/400/ http://www.xkcd.com/327/ I’d suggest not reading the discussion forums at xkcd. Given that xkcd’s fan base skews younger and geekier, I think they’re probably harmless, just not very schooled in feminism (and I’m not about to do it).
It seems so difficult to understand the concept of “exception, not the rule”. Yes, you can name movies that have female leads. It’s not that they don’t exist at all, or are so rare that you can name the ones you know of on one hand, but that of the double buttload (technical term) of films that are made every year, nearly all feature men. How obtuse do you have to be to not concede that? You would think that fans of such a nerdy comic would know what a ratio is.
For some reason, geeks as a population tend to have issues with women, and I’ve never been sure how to deal with it, other than to work to eliminate those ideas when they appear. Isn’t it amazing how a historically repressed minority can throw empathy and common cause to the curb and join in with the same people who’ve been attacking them for decades instead of finding common ground with another minority who has suffered under the modern leadership paradigm? Speaking as a lifelong geek, I can say (with equal parts frustration and revulsion) that the geek community in general is at least as sexually repressed and chauvinistic as any other subculture in this country. The number of stories I’ve heard about women being harassed in comic stores and gaming/fan conventions is simply horrific. As for movies… what a SHOCKER! I’m not surprised that the supposedly most liberal institution in the United States happens to be as Chauvinistic as the culture it supports, but I am disappointed and frustrated that it continues to be regarded as liberal.
The difficulty I have in discussing feminism with my own little coterie of geeks in the UK is not that they are sexist; in fact many of us are female, queer/gay identified, gender-queer or self procaliming gender blind and there is rarely much friction. The problem I have is that they are really quite insular and think that they are representative. When I air my views I tend to meet a lot of blank faces. Another problem is that geeks tend to think logically in terms of cause and effect. The example here would be “There aren’t many female leads in action films, ergo, women do not make good leads in action films”. The appeal to ovaries “All my female friends think…” “My wife agrees that…” would seem to back up that idea. And I don’t know how they can say that women are much more interested in stuff with feelings when Monroe himself has more emotions than a Dawson’s Creek episode. Love him, though. Great stuff.
Oh goodness. In that thread that AnonymousCoward linked I spotted another of my favourite tropes. “The truth is not politically correct. Therefore, things that are not politically correct are true”. PC became a dirty word over here very fast, and I’m not just talking about Mac users.
Re: “Actually, as a high school teacher I wish we had more male role models. I have news for you; sexual inequality has long since vanished. In just one decade we have completely reversed academic achievement between the sexes. Girls are beating boys badly academically. We are losing boys and losing them fast. Divorce and a culture that treats fatherhood as somehow less important than motherhood is going to wreck havoc on this country in a very short time.” THIS PERSON IS ALLOWED TO TEACH. Sick, isn’t it? Ignoring that there’s no shortage of positive male role models, the comment about how we’re “losing boys and losing them fast” is so ridiculously and intentionally misleading as to be, well, a lie. We’re not “losing” boys- it’s that girls have made up and continue making up ground faster than boys are right now. We’re not losing boys, they’re just succeeding at a slower rate than girls- which, you know, is worth examining, but not under the false pretense that a slower increase is the same as losing. And, yeah, the bending over backwards to find justifications like “since men buy most of the movie tickets”… really? They do? Citation please? Oh, right. You can’t cite that because it’s a total ass-fact. Head meet desk. *bang* *bang* *bang*
Randy is a great guy. It continues to shock and dismay me that these assholes can claim to be his fans while actively refusing to listen to a word he says. Seriously. The discussion thread for “How it Works” linked by a commenter above, starts off with several commenters who entirely missed the point, and thought they were agreeing with the comic when they said “yea, girls do suck at math even though it’s not PC to say it, poor Larry Summers, etc” Like, why are these people even reading the comic, let alone commenting on its fansite, when they are manifestly far too stupid to understand it?
I wonder what it’s like for him, too. I mean, how much must it suck to be pointing out sexism and have people who identify as huge fans so completely miss the point? I’d think that must be very, very frustrating.
Yeah, the commenters are atrocious, and I had to stop reading the thread because it was making me sick, but it just makes me SO HAPPY to see my favorite geek comic addressing some of these issues. I’ve also noticed that recently he’s been including a lot more gender balance in his comics (well, as much as you can when the characters are stick figures, anyway). I love Randall Munroe.
I wonder what it’s like for him, too. I mean, how much must it suck to be pointing out sexism and have people who identify as huge fans so completely miss the point? I’d think that must be very, very frustrating. Well, up until roughly…..now…. he’s been pretty isolated from his fans’ thoughts on the feminist-ish things he’s said. He tries to avoid his forums, and doesn’t see a lot of the fan discussion. Which, honestly, is probably a clever move on his part. I think he’d lose his mind otherwise. Though, after that blag thread, I imagine it has to be pretty discouraging.
My favorite quote from that thread, which is now a poster in my cubicle. “Sarah Connor would like to have a word with you. So would Lara Croft. I think they want to talk about their feelings.”
Oh god, that thread. I spent two full days with raised blood pressure from that thing. (I commented a bunch in there, including a couple of links to the Feminism 101 blog, as people who read some of the thread probably saw.) Eventually I had to stop going back, because I was just getting too frustrated. I don’t know how feminist bloggers manage to keep it up all the time. New respect, seriously, not that I didn’t respect you a lot for it before. Do I even want to know how bad it got after I stopped commenting?
To clarify, by “that thread” I mean the comment thread on the blag post Jill linked. I don’t look at the forums, so I hadn’t seen the thread on “How it Works” until now. (I don’t think I can get past the first page.) Sometimes I forget things are this bad. I mean, it made me really happy to see Randall’s original post, but it seems like the commenters had to make up for it 100x in stupidity.
“Sometimes I forget things are this bad.” Yeah… I spend so much time on feminist blogs. Then I go back to the “real world” where stuff like this happens on my campus: Feminism: A Heated Controversy
Cadence, way at the end of that awful thread, I thanked you for your work disputing the noxiousness, and made a point of my own. You really did a good job. I think you scared Julius away! (Or maybe that thread was just too damn much reading for his poor little head to handle, but I think it was you!) Well done, and thanks again.
I’m not going to read it … I’ve been stressed to the point of random muscle twitches and vertigo recently and don’t need that. But I did want to toss in two cents on the actual matter of women in movies … I think it really does have a lot to do with the idea of women will identify with a male character (and that’s acceptable), but men will not identify with a female character (because that would be like, so gay). And then when you do get a female lead, she’s usually a sexpot sorta character with 1 dimension to her personality. (Don’t get me started on anime, the majority of which is SIMPLY NOT FEMINIST no matter how many chicks you throw in there. Though there are a few that are, and most are kind of old. Just sayin’.) Another thing I think is that most Hollywood writers are men, and most have NO EFFIN’ CLUE what real women think or talk like. It’s weird. It seems like women can adequately approximate male thinking, but men put forth a kind of caricature of femininity and what it means to be a woman. I guess that goes with the whole social phenomenon of women bothering to pay attention to and understand people, while men don’t …
@Cadence: Yeah, so there’s a lot of asshats in the discussion over there, especially at the beginning, but your posts did do a lot of good and a bunch of people were cheering for you! And towards the end, it’s actually kind of encouraging the number of men and women pointing out the general tone of sexist asshattery. I waded in in the last few comments (discussion is still going). I was going for a PHMT, not a “What About the Menz,” and that’s the way the discussion went (thank God!). I think I’m in love with “Andy.” Anyway, this is how I wrapped up my last post over there… I think MY problem with a lot of “women’s movies” is that, um, they are “women’s movies” and not just “movies.” I mean, I like them, but I can only ever watch them when I’m in the mood to think about Issues (which are generally depressing). I’m thinking Mona Lisa Smile here, North Country. I can’t wait ’til we, as a culture, get to the point where a woman can just…be the lead in a movie. Without it being a big deal or creating expectations, a la “chick flicks,” about what that movie’s going to be like. So yes, I want more River Tams and VI Warshawskis and Junos. I don’t think I’m crazy or a conspiracy theorist or ignorant of the basic facts of life and nature for saying there’s not a lot of well-publicized, high-budget movies about women, but I think it’d be nice if there were, and that they’re not automatically worse than movies about men! (first time poster, here.)
Just like the “women don’t like sci-fi” meme. What about Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. That is one of the best character’s on television. She also happens to be the toughest soldier on the show. Plus, Katee Sackhoff rules!
As an incredible, and somewhat stereotypical male nerd, I encounter the extreme sexist statements that get made in some nerd communities on an all to frequent basis. I say some, because amongst other hobbies, I’m in the SCA, where I’ve encountered a hell of a lot less sexism. There are a few potential influences on this, but I think its mainly the fact that its a nerdy hobby where women aren’t a tiny minority. I’m going to generalize from personal experience here. We’re often white, usually male and for the majority of our formative years, we’re bottom rung on the pecking order. We usually get exposed to different religions, different ethnicities, differently abled people in college, and we usually welcome people who share our passions. And almost all male “nerd” passions are heavily gender balanced towards men. Essentially, and still wildly generalizing here, we get told, or tell ourselves, that our intelligence makes us different, that it sets us apart. This means that its easier to bond with people we see as fellow nerds, and overlook superficial differences, like ethnicities, religions, sexualities, and sex. But meeting female nerds? Rare. Very rare. So for many nerds, women are in the great big category of non nerds, we allow ourselves to think, they’re just not like us. We lose out socially, we’ve got less chance of having a relationship, probably start having sex later than our peers, and these are both mentally connected to the other negatives of being a young nerd. I still have occasional problems, when I read a post or a comment that reflects on the posters backgroung going out with a total sexist arsehole of one stripe or another, until they wised up and became a feminist, and I think “I hope you realise, you helped create the problem”. Which is unfair, and mostly useless. I’m not trying to excuse here, just explain. I think some of these problems are, on one level, likely to be solved, or at least reduced, indirectly. If barriers on women in maths and science and engineering are lowered, if it becomes more ok for women to be nerdy (something that does seem to be happening), way more nerds will be exposed to women as part of the group they consider worthy of not being discriminated against. Other nerds.
On the topic of the movie inequality, rather than the insane sexism of a contingent of nerds, I think its got a range of causes, but most of them have to do with the fact that movies are effectively made by committee rather than by individuals. And the big budget movies, which have the most promotion, and tend to be the highest grossing movies, are ruled by conventional wisdom. We don’t make movies with F/F leads, or F/M leads, because we don’t have proof that movies like that have succeeded before. And in movies with, say F/F/M characters as the core characters, the movie will lead with the bankable names and the billing will most likely be M/F. Partly this is a self fulfilling prophecy, since if we don’t give women top billing in something, we’ll never give them a chance to get acknowledged as a bankable star. Partly its to do with the ageist sexism in the industry, since the average female star will not be given a long enough run to be get to the point where they’re considered bankable. Additionally, if we’re working within a “historical” context, a lot of genres will ring false with female leads. (Not that iffy historical accuracy seems to concern the producers, writers, or movie-going public all that much(“Shhh. Here come the ninjas”)). A number of genres will require more skillful writing to have a female lead in a present day storyline. (Eg, if you make a movie about a male president, the movie can still go in almost any direction. If you make a movie about a female president, then the fact that the president is female is part of the narrative. Its true of less and less roles as time goes on, but its still a factor).
Ugh, Cadence, you were like, my shining beacon of sanity on that thread. I read the whole thing, and gave myself a headache because I was clenching my jaw so hard. Someone actually said, “I mean, yeah, sexism is bad, but so is obesity.” I second the comment upthread, about forgetting how bad it is. I like my feminist blog cocoon. It’s warm here.
Seconding the props for Cadence; you were awesome. 🙂 Sorry to get off on a tangent, but since someone mentioned the forums… I’m extremely frustrated with them lately because I swear, it didn’t used to be like this. I’ve been lurking off and on since it was just five people in a dorm room, and for the longest time, it was a really friendly, equitable place. It’s been in the past six months or so that a huge wave of extremely obnoxious new people have come through and drowned out all the good that used to be there. It’s like a punch in the gut, especially after spending so much time lately in the feminist blagosphere, where there may be huge disagreements, but at least the fundamental fact that women are people isn’t constantly questioned. I’ve been pondering splitting off and making a more explicitly feminist XKCD community for awhile now, but I worry that it’ll either just end up as a big troll magnet, or drain all the good out of the exisiting one and leave it as this creepy privileged white boy echo chamber. D:
It’s been in the past six months or so that a huge wave of extremely obnoxious new people have come through and drowned out all the good that used to be there. Agreed. And yet, if I just start banning them, somehow I’m the bad guy.