Wherefore art thou, girl geek?
I'm home from Blogher, the
women's blogging meet-up, that happened this past weekend. 750 women
bloggers... kind of shocking. We all came out of our cubbyholes.
I've never been to an IT gathering of any kind before. I live on the
coast next to Silicon Valley, but I've never been to San Jose except to
drive to the airport. I've used Apples since 1983-- when I published the
first magazine
in the world on their desktop publishing software-- yet I have never
had any relationship with them other than a credit card transaction.
I recorded stories on geek-sex albums like "Cyborgasm,"
without hobnobbing with anything cyber. I entered virtual erotica
without communing to any virtualists. I'm an early-adopter who's rarely
rubbed shoulders with my brethren.
I'm emphasizing my naivité here.
I had no idea that a group of female computer nuts, blogging women, were so revolutionary.
Gender Bias, you see, was the elephant in the BlogHer living room. It was the fundamental reason why we all
were there, whether it was spoken or not. This wasn't a koffee klatch
for girls who like to talk about burping babies and losing weight,
which might have surprised Weight Watchers or some of the other
promoters at the conference. (I threw the baby bib, sugar substitute,
and smelly lotion in the trash).
Few attendees planned to talk about gender bias directly, because the focus of the conference was one of YOU-GO-GIRL entrepreneurship.
But no one would have to say, "You go girl," if others hadn't said, "Shut up and go away, little girl," in the first place.
Hi there, Mr. Elephant.
I didn't realize how bad it is. I should've. I know that women in the sciences have a lot of horror tales.
Masculine Sci-nerd chauvinism is so far removed from my life I haven't
stared in its hairy eyeball since I was last waved away from the Bunsen
burner in junior high school.
I'm expert, like all women, in defensive maneuvers. The computer
boho world has been a haven for oddballs, art freaks, and social
radicals, outside of corporate kingmaking. I tucked myself in those
corners, happily sheltered.
Still, my outsider status in IT is typical of women, including women far more mainstream than I.
The few females who are involved in the corridors of IT
power have barreled over gates like daredevils over Niagara Falls. They
are self-taught. I met some of them this past weekend and it was a
revelation-- my god, they're tough. I felt like I did the first time I
met female steelworkers in the 70s.
So I've been living in a cocoon. The men who have helped me along the way, from Matisse and Richard Kadrey at The Well who first got me online, to Ewald Christians who made my first BBS, to Ron Hogan
who showed me Movable Type-- were all radical individuals with defacto
feminist hardwiring. We never talked about it, it was just assumed.
And then there've been the women, completely unsung: Debi Sundhal,
the first sex worker to ever make use of a Mac. Camilla DeCarnin, who
wrote about faghags and Slash fiction before anyone. Patrizia DiLuccio
from the Well--really, all the women on the Well. Laura Miller was my
editor at Salon, at its inception, and we knew each other from Good Vibrations. Or Jane Duvall's Demystification School of Adult Entrepreneurship. I could go on and on.
Sometimes my cocoon was rudely disturbed. When I started my blog,
and GoogleAdSense turned my application down for lack of "family
values," I could've spit. Their correspondence infuriated me. But it
was just another formulaic insult.
Since 1996 I've been told repeatedly from major IT businesses and
apologists that my site is NSFW, porn, blacklisted, firewalled, etc.--
because of its sexuality.
Regular readers of my journal would be hard-pressed to say exactly
where all the freaky shit is. I've never used language in this blog you
couldn't find in a copy of The New Yorker. The pictures might get a "R" rating. If I had to rate this site as a porno hot spot, I'd give it an "F."
On the other hand, I have written about being a woman, a mother, a
bleeder and a breeder, a dyke, someone who's given birth, had an
abortion, entered hormone havoc, used every kind of birth control, and
was once was a virgin like everyone else.
And it's this: women's physiology-- the fact and story of it-- that
gets me, and every other woman who writes about it, into the most
trouble.
Florynce Kennedy, 1973: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."
Well, if American men today wrote about their reproductive life and
sexual mind, their journalism would be treated like the finest prose
and argument. "Andrew Sullivan, please accept our Pulitzer for your
work on man-o-pause."
Dream on. In the real world, when a woman writes with grace or
clarity about her female passage, it's considered obscene or trivial--
definitively not safe for work or men's imaginations.
When I produced the first g-spot ejaculation movies with my friends
in the 80s, we were told that our videos were "fetish" that could not
be legally distributed anywhere in the country.
It's biological female sexual response. Why is a woman's orgasm considered an obscenity?
Why are women nursing their children considered a prelude to a sex panic?
Why is a woman writing anything about abortion politics considered NSFW on the Web?
Remember when AOL shut down the chat room for breast cancer survivors, because they used the word "breast"?
And yes, we watch the news about children being bombed to bits, skin
flambeing off their bones, because it's all Absolutely Safe for Work,
as long as you don't show any woman's tits.
In our sex blog workshop
at Blogher, several women raised their concern of writing about sex
publicly, in any context. They were fearful of ridicule,
discrimination, and dismissive stereotypes.
That threat is legitimate-- and why? Not because of "frightening the horses," but because of gender bias.
Christie Keith,
one of the women in our discussion, said, "When gay men post about sex
in their otherwise non-sexual blogs, they couldn't care less what
anyone thinks."
She's right.
No gay male blogger would dream of putting a peer down for a bawdy
or erotic remark. You could be the most successful gay businessman on
the internet, and your colleagues wouldn't think any less of you for
admitting your sexual knowledge or maturity.
Open gay men, largely white and middle class, have found the
time-honored milieu-- a successful world of their own. Nevertheless,
their nonchalance about "sex... and so what?" is telling.
Why don't straight men include sexuality in their blog writing--
aside from the resolutely anonymous few that sex-blog professionally?
Because outside of the "adult" world, a straight man writing about
his sexual life-- his erotic self-reflection-- is considered feminizing.
It would make him a pussy to his peers.
Paul Krugman... wouldn't you love to hear what a great writer like
that had to say, every once in a while, about sex and economics?
Wouldn't it be great to hear some IT hotshot talk about what they've
learned about sex from web life? "Steve Jobs Confidential!"
NEVER NEVER NEVER does this happen, except in the most anonymous
forums. It's like risking castration. I wonder how, or if, it even
crosses their minds.
Some folks at our panel talked about the risk of hurting loved ones
if we blog about our sexual lives. They were concerned with boundaries,
respect, and discretion-- timeless issues for authors in any era.
Those concerns are about ETHICS.
The far more brutal issue, in women's blogging, isn't whether you
have the sense to refrain from advertising your teenager's puberty, or
your husband's nose hairs-- it's the fact that gender bias will paint
you whore-red. It's gender bias that will condemn you for your
impudence in speaking on female passage.
I realize I'm talking about "gender bias" as if it was an inanimate
object. Of course it's people. It's a prejudice, that unfolds in a
myriad of ways.
There were a couple dozen men at Blogher, and few hundred women. Some of the men I met were thrilled to be there. Guy Kawasaki wrote in his journal:
There is a contingent of readers
of my blog who do not like it... when I write about non-business,
non-tech, non-male subjects. To these readers, I say in advance: "You
can never support a mom, much less a mommy blogger, too much, so deal
with it."
A few other men I spoke to, confided to me that they were
apprehensive to be in attendance, afraid they might get thrown out on
their ear.
"Really? What do you mean?" I asked. I was taken aback.
I know what it's like to be the bizarre minority in a room, the
white chick at the Black Islam conference, the lone female member in a
labor hall of cigar-chompers, the bisexual plaintiff in a dyke court. I
know that sensation of trying to maintain your integrity without
setting someone off into a rage.
But Blogher was like a tea party. The women attendees were dying
to talk to the IT professional men who showed up-- after all, they were
largely there because they has some product or service of interest.
So why would the fellows I spoke to be terrified? When I pressed
them, in genuine curiosity, they repeated their sense of being under
threat. They allowed that yes, everyone had been very, very nice, in
fact. No one had been strung up for patriarchal war crimes. Good grief!
I asked my partner Jon at home what he thought of this, if he could
help me figure it out. He said, "Well, just imagine if one of those
cigar-smoking labor guys came to one of your women's union reform
meetings... how would they have reacted?"
I laughed. "They would have been extremely uncomfortable."
"And why...?"
"'Cause they would be resentful, sort of guilty-- feeling like the
world's been turned upside-down and no one gave them the memo.
Feminists violate their idea of what their mom and their wife or their
daughter is supposed to do. They really do have this idea about women
being "different creatures."
"Well, there you have your answer."
"But do you think that's unconscious on their parts, is that why they can't confess it to me?"
Jon shook his head. "No, it's just the opposite... they're
hyper-aware of how they've excluded women in the past, and they're
terrified that their own tactics will be visited upon them."
"Well, not all of them are terrified," I said, picking up business section
of the Mercury News, which ran a story advising "single geek guys" on
how "pretty" all the little BlogHer girls were. "That's just
condescending."
"Same thing!"
The conference was astounding for the authority of its women
speakers. You can find "pretty" girls anywhere-- how often can you find
ones who can rewire your whole world?
I went to one workshop on something very technical, that I've been
wanting to master. It featured two of the best educators at the
conference, who were dazzling, at the top of their game. Pardon me if I
don't remember what they were wearing.
The Q&A began... and each time a woman in the audience asked a
question, one lone man sitting at a nearby table, rose to answer. He
cut off the presenters, he cut off everyone. He had to be the first, and he had to have the last word.
He was blind to the eyes rolling around him. Eye-rolling was all
we did-- no one said to him, "Dude, shut up already." He was indulged
and allowed to sail off without realizing that he had alienated every
last person in there. I doubt anyone from his mother on out has ever
given him a clue. I feel ashamed of myself for sitting there and
writhing in silence.
At this conference, there was a great deal of hand-holding on all
fronts, and it wasn't altogether unwelcome. Sometimes I wished the
conference had more debate, less esteem-building-- but other times, I
was glad for the encouragement, especially on a one-to-one basis.
For feminist convention organizers, on ANY TOPIC, one fears there
is little space to occupy between Pablum Rah-Rah on one side and Queen
Bee Death Match on the other. Women in leadership positions have often
complained that they don't want to be sharks, but they don't want to be
holding hands and singing lullabies either.
Some argument came up in the Mommy Bloggers colloquium. There are
women who chafe at being called "MommyBloggers"-- they feel it
trivializes their mission.
Others want to reclaim the word, like Dyke or Pussy-- this is what
we are; it's the listener's problem if they lack respect for a
righteous mother.
How does one accurately describe a mother's life, anyway? Some said
profanity had no place in a mommy-blog, while other mommys shouted, "No
MotherFucking Way."
The tension once again scratched the toenails of that Elephant I
mentioned in the beginning. Blogging IS a feminist issue--and is perhaps
its most subversive force.
In the 60s, womens libbers articulated that the personal was
political, and that the Double Standard had to go. Every madonna was a
whore, and every whore a mother. We wrote it on the walls: "Daddy, I'm Through."
And yet, despite Ms. magazine, despite The Hite Report, despite Billy Jean King, I have never seen the demonstration of personal-is-political, double-standard shredding in action as I have seen it today, practiced on women's blogs.
Every time a woman's blog proclaims her intellect, her
sexuality, and her nurture -- all on the same page-- she has diced the
dominant paradigm.
She has motherfucked her way into new consciousness, with the
radiant touch of real life, the opposite of all those ridiculous
"women's" magazines, TV shows, and celebu-crap.
The hand that
blogs the cradle informs the world --this, the blog-her generation, is
the crux of women's liberation that I thought had passed its due date.
Who's drooling now?