wandering the streets for a thousand thousand days

[lotesse]

Four Ways Men Stunt Women's Careers Unintentionally, via geekfeminism. This is one of the smartest acts of deconstruction and assumption-exposing I've ever seen. My head did that turning-all-the-way-around thing when I realized how completely I'd bought the victim-blamey passive-voice rhetoric Acceptable Parity takes apart here. Right. Because the onus really needs to be on the people with power, rather than the the people with none.

And, um, because this seems to be going around - yeah, blanket permission giving for podficcing anything of mine ever. The answer is yes!

Comments

[idleleaves]

... Wow. Thank you for linking to that – it's given me a lot to think about. My situation at work may not be typical (the department is fairly evenly split in terms of gender & two out of the three senior-management persons are women) but it's amazing how much of it applies, regardless.

[highlyeccentric]

I have one major problem with that post, and it's that men are not alone in encouraging modesty / failing to promote women / etc. I'm not questioning that these are functions of the patriarchy, but it my personal experience and theoretical background both agree that women also police one another's behaviour, especially when it comes to appropriate professional and social behavior.

[lotesse]

Yeah, you're right. There's no reason to not use "people" instead of "men" - degendering the person in power.

[highlyeccentric]

There is also the secondary note worth making that the persons disadvantaged may not always be women, but rather those who display a cluster of stereotypically feminine characteristics. By that time you've "butbutbutbutbut"-ed the argument out of relevance, but a self-effacing mancreature is up against a number of the same systemic problems as a naturally-or-socialised-to-be-self-effacing lady.