Feminist technology theory as it is realized in a Guitar Hero III Pro Face-Off

Big news first. There's a vendor booth here where they're running a contest: beat one of their employees at Guitar Hero III Pro Face-Off, win free software (developer tools). I was too chikin yesterday, but today I showed up determined to play. That's when I found out their real GHIII player had to go home, so other booth staff are subbing in for him. The new rules? "You pick the song, you pick the difficulty, but no Expert. And if it's an upper-tier Hard you're pretty much gonna win." Heck. If I'd've known that yesterday....

Anyway, I picked the hardest song I can beat on Hard: Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Pride and Joy". I knew I was in trouble when I didn't complete one single Star Power phrase in the entire song. Beat him anyway, with 80%, which isn't a score I'm happy with, but not bad for a Pro Face-Off in front of strangers with no warm-up. :)

When we were finished, someone from the little group of spectators called out to the booth staffer: "You got beat by a woman!"

Hmm.

Didn't like that.

I prolly should've challenged the heckler to a duel right then & there. You know, on all the afterschool specials they say even if you fail epically, you'll win their respect. I dunno. Not my style. Whatever.

I filled out all the paperwork for my free software, and got my photo taken for the booth's "Wall of Shame" screen saver, which I gotta go back and check out later. That's awesome.

As I walked away, another conference attendee walked alongside and complimented my performance. "You really pounded him! Nice job. Do you play at home with your kids?"

Wait. What?

Super nice guy. Paying me a compliment. Loved it. But I cannot imagine that the hundred developer dudes here who've beaten the booth staff at GHIII got asked if they learned to shred by playing with their kids. The guy before me who pwned him on Iron Maiden didn't get that question from anybody.

At lunch, K & I got talking about assumptions, and how initial assumptions are generally based on past experience, and hell, even I would have to assume that a random girl I meet, even here at TechEd, probably doesn't shred on Guitar Hero and probably doesn't aspire to be a software architect. Can I blame other people for basing their assumptions on what we all observe together as the most common realities? Certainly not.

In our most recent architecture session, I looked back through the roomful of ~300 attendees and saw that I was one of only two females in the entire room. That percentage of women who are here at TechEd at all (you know, the ones in the Women in Technology Luncheon I blew off yesterday), almost none of them are in the 400-level architecture track. I noticed this, and I was proud to be one of the only girls in the room. I have started to feel like the more profoundly outnumbered I am, the more likely I am to find the content rigorous and interesting... the more likely I am to be exactly where I want to be. And that was before Guitar Hero!

I'm very seriously really hoping I'm the only girl on the Wall of Shame screensaver and will be disappointed if I'm not. I'm sure a girl who plays GHIII is perfectly capable of beating the booth staff, but I don't expect the girls, even here, to be likely to play in the first place. Even I make that assumption.

So perhaps it isn't the assumptions that cause the problem... as long as you're open to being wrong, open to individuals being individuals.

"No, I don't have any kids." Random TechEd dude was perfectly delightful after that, rolled with the punches, kept up the conversation. Well done, random TechEd dude. It's true... I only look like a girl. I don't really talk or act like one. I like it that way.

But it isn't really enough to throw "girls" under the bus and argue that I only need concern myself with people's assumptions about me: "sure, girls are lame, but I'm an exception." Not cool.

"Beat by a woman" implies that the crowd expected me to suck... even after I finished playing. In their eyes, the fact that I won didn't prove anything good about me... only something bad about the guy I beat.

And that's why you TechEd dudes are not fully off the hook for how you think about us girls. Even if 95% of the females you've ever met or heard of don't show any interest in actual software development, even if they all end up on the BA or PM or UI tracks, even if they don't game, it doesn't mean girls are bad at the tough technical stuff. It just means they tend to be no-shows. You don't know why that is. You can't actually assume anything from that, and you shouldn't.

And that's why I have to keep being a girl here at TechEd. And that's why I, who am wearing a skirt today and everything, am gonna go see if I can beat that guy again. ;)

Update: it has been brought to my attention that kids, regardless of gender, are generally way better than adults, regardless of gender, at Guitar Hero. This is the sort of thing I would have been in a better position to have known if I had kids... and it is a worthy and valid point to consider. Perhaps developer dudes don't get asked about their kids because the answer ("my kids pwn me at Guitar Hero") is obvious. :)

Gender bending and breaking

The NY Times had a great, detailed article on the subject of F2M transgendered students at women's colleges ("When Girls Will Be Boys", March 16). This is a topic with which I was already slightly acquainted on account of Smith's SGA changing some important charter document to gender-neutral language a year or so ago, baffling we alums who were under the impression that Smith is still a women's college (it is).

The article mentions that colleges are dealing with trans issues more directly nowadays specifically because "adults who wished to transition historically did so in middle age. Today a larger percentage of transitions occur in adolescence or young adulthood."

I was inclined to some eye-rolling about all this before, but the NYT article brought me up short a little bit by pointing this out:

"In a sense, transgender and genderqueer students could be said merely to be holding women’s colleges to their word: to fully support women’s exploration of gender, even if that exploration ends with students no longer being female-identified."

Oh, right. That Women's Studies major I did, it said something about all that.

(Pwned! By the NY Times! On the subject of gender conformity! Oh, the shame.)

Anyway, I've read and heard now a few different attempts to explain or understand this new trans* generation:

1. It's a natural extension of postmodern feminism, in which the very foundations of gender (and, often, biological sex itself! I've done it!) are seen as social constructs open to be questioned. (In other words, it's my fault. :) )
   


2. It's a fad. Possibly a dangerous fad, given the longer-term implications of hormones and even surgeries. Being queer, being "bi-curious", getting pierced, whatever, no longer edgy enough... so trans* is the next envelope-pushing idea. (In other words, it's my fault. LOL.)

Something kinda strange occurred to me the other day, though, when I started putting this together with the huge amounts of reading I've been doing lately on the marketing of gender roles.

I guess I can't substantiate, but I believe, that our culture is imposing gender roles on children a lot more than was commonly done in the 1970s and 1980s. Even parents and aunties who don't want to participate actively in this phenomenon are fighting an uphill battle (see "Unisex Baby Hell", December 2006). Just yesterday on outside the (toy) box was this:

"...my wonderful nanny recently told me about a friend who asked her pediatrician what to do because her son kept asking for a stroller. Not a boy with a stroller! Someone DO something!"

What if, by pressuring our very youngest children to conform to restrictive gender roles, we're sending them the message that if they are interested in anything remotely gender-nonconforming, their only solution is to become a conforming gender?

What would that mean? If gender roles are constructed, does that make it a bad thing to want to uphold the construct but just switch to a different one? Don't we go into a culture war with the culture we have? I've even heard it suggested that those who transition might even be selling out the rest of us who nonconform in the bodies we were born with! I don't think that can possibly be the case... it's not like extremely conservative/traditionalist types love trans* people for upholding all of their preconceptions about gender. :D

I wonder what the complementarians think...?!

Great Experiments in Sexual Orientation

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Unisex baby hell

This is how bad it is. As I was shopping for friends' baby shower this weekend, I mentally applauded them for refusing to know in advance the sex of their baby, especially when I discovered how unbelievably difficult it is to find unisex baby clothes. No matter how many times you tell the relatives you prefer unisex, I thought, they're going to get stereotypically gendered stuff out of desperation because there's nothing else here.

It turns out it's worse than that. These same friends had a similarly-situated expectant friend or relative. Her family decided on their own that it would be a boy, and bought it blue boys' clothes anyway. Hmm... but I'm not sure what it proves that when the baby turned out to be a girl, they decided that the boys' clothes couldn't be used and now they're packed away, waiting for someone else in the family to have a boy. If you decide that your "unisex" girl baby "can't" wear "boys' blue"...?

I ended up going empty-handed to the shower because I hated the only unisex I could find and I wanted to take the time to shop better. Today it's looking like the entire mission is a fool's errand. Witness:

Amazon.com >
Apparel & Accessories >
    Kids & Baby >
        Infant & Toddler >
            * Girls
            * Boys
            * Shoes

Girls, boys, shoes? Surely....

Search >
Infant & Toddler >
    "Unisex" >
        * "Gerber" Onesie with Matching Cap and Booties (Unisex)
            Choose a color:
                * Pink
                * Blue

I give up. I guess the only way to avoid "gendering" a baby is to let it go naked.

Oh, wait. Hmm. Dammit.


Update: I'm not alone! Rigid lines between boys' things and girls' things removes options

patterns & practices summit pays off right away

p&p seemed pretty advanced, and I was worried that it would be too far over my head. I even tried to back out at the last minute.

I must say it was well worth it, in terms of entertainment value, to step out of the conference room at our midmorning break, breeze by a long line for the men's room, and stroll right into a vast and completely empty women's room.

Guess I'm not the only devgrrrl who wasn't sure she belonged here.

Yet another reason to love the mainline

If I believed in a God, I'd wonder this week if s/he were trying to tell me something.

CNN: Woman elected to lead American Episcopalians

NY Times: Woman Is Named Episcopal Leader (very cool photo)

(Take that, Diocese of Fort Worth.)

Another reason to give women's colleges a look?

NYT: To All the Girls I've Rejected

(Women find higher hurdles at college is identical; NYT doesn't always expire their op-eds, but just in case.)

To sum up: at many competitive co-ed colleges, female applicants outnumber male ones, but the colleges want to maintain gender parity in the classes they admit. The result is pretty simple math: well-qualified girls will be rejected to make room for less-qualified boys.

This is a challenge. I'm an alumna of a women's college and I have been working to encourage high school students in my area to consider not only my alma mater, but highly competitive colleges in general and women's colleges in particular. On the one hand, if female applicants are at a demographic disadvantage at co-ed colleges, that's a rock-solid argument for them to look at women's colleges instead. On the other hand, it's hard to brag about a college being easier to get into, at least among the caliber of students I'm trying to attract.

"Be surrounded by all the girls who were almost good enough to get into Kenyon"?

But, wait. That's only half the story. What about going to Kenyon and being surrounded by all those even less qualified boys?

Now which campus is looking more competitive?

It's interesting, because Smith takes a big hit in the U.S. News rankings for having too high an acceptance rate. (I don't think that's the only reason Smith has been slipping for the last many years, but that's the most glaring difference between itself and its peers.) Smith loses that one on two fronts, because its applicant pool is half the size of its co-ed counterparts', but its incoming class is twice the size of its single-sex competitors! I'd love to see us back in the top five again, but I think I'd rather brag about the wealth of opportunities we offer to a truly diverse pool of amazingly talented women and girls.

In any case, I shall be curious to see what effect the demographic shift has on Smith and women's and co-ed colleges alike, in the coming years. Maybe female-dominated campuses will be the wave of the future for all of us. ;)

An exercise in cultural relativism, feminist style

I was a women's studies major at a women's college, so this is by no means news to me. Really. But lately I've been really interested in examining the issue of "women as property" (say, historically, or in cultures where a Western-style "feminist" movement hasn't happened) from sort of a different angle.

In college, it was all about cataloguing the myriad ways in which women were oppressed by being considered property, and about being appropriately outraged thereby. And I'm not backing off from that. When one thinks of a woman as property, one is inherently not recognizing her as an intelligent human being endowed by her Creator with certain rights. Obviously I think women are the latter and thus I have a problem with the former. And this is not news.

What I've been thinking about, and this may or may not make any sense as I try to explain it, is the ways in which women-as-property and women-as-instruments really serve to illuminate certain cultural practices, laws, historical events, or what have you. Instead of getting distracted by being outraged, I'm just thinking about what it means.

If a culture considers a woman to be the non-sentient property of her husband, then it makes a certain kind of sense that such a culture would demand virginity (unopened in mint condition, if you will) and/or have no use for widows. It makes perfect sense that such a society might punish a man for his crimes by raping his sister or daughter; it devalues his property and thus is equivalent to assessing a fine. Women who are property would be saleable and barterable and could certainly be seen as consumer goods or appliances. One can imagine how someone in a women-as-property culture would consider [e.g.] electing women to parliament to be as absurd as electing his livestock or his dishwasher.

I'm not saying I agree. I'm recognizing that at a certain level, a culture's position on this matter is likely to be internally consistent. I would hope that by trying to understand the entire system and how its elements fit in, we can identify root causes of injustice instead of flailing around and vilifying the symptoms.

I'm also by no means targeting non-Western cultures. This sort of thing really sheds light on every practice from genital mutilation to pole dancing. In the West, we call it "low self-esteem" but it amounts to the same thing: women who believe, for whatever reason, that rather than actors they are mere instruments to be acted upon by others. I feel like that idea is at the heart of any practice we Western feminists might want to see changed anywhere in the world (including our own backyards), and that by approaching it in such a way, we might make progress with the world instead of stridently (and imperialistically) alienating it.

But it's also just interesting to think about how all these things work together and how bizarre and unsettling that can be.

Addendum, 1/19/2006:

Another point of all this is to consider that women-as-property was the unquestioned norm in virtually all agricultural societies going back 10,000-12,000 years. That's a pretty serious tide to turn, and we haven't been at it very long: women-as-individuals (collectively; tokens don't count) is an idea that has dawned in some modern societies over the last 250 years or so, with meaningful progress only within the last 50.

Just another reason to favor patience and understanding over outrage and colonialism in situations like these, I think.