Yellow Peril: Are you gonna liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression?
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__I'm a bit sad about where this thread has ended up, but it's not too late to yank it back is it?__
Here's a little (not unrelated, but deeply funny and bizarre) light relief
Heh. And the funny thing is, I was just thinking about Cactus Kate and Lucyna, two local female bloggers who unsurprisingly aren't on Tze Ming's recommended list.
Any of the women reading here read either of them? Thoughts?
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No. Can't stand the social and moral conservatism of one, and the sheer viciousness of the other.
Although <cough>, I have only just started reading Span, which has been my loss.
I read DPF, but less and less, and I don't comment anymore, not only because of the cesspit in the comments, but also because these days he seems to be a National Party commentator rather than a right wing commentator. I would like to find a good right wing blog, because it's all too easy to read only people you agree with, and never challenge yourself with people whose views are opposed to your own.
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Re Cactus v Lucyna
Laughed like a hyena .. does that rhyme with lucyna?
While contemplating the Jelly wrestling post - I flicked to Wanda Harland where a deeply interesting poll is being conducted.
Marmite v Vegemite. Nature v nuture.
Sorry Russell and Tze Ming - maybe some of us girls are shy about posting .. cos.. that's more fun. {gasp -l} we lurk tho. -
Sorry Russell, I felt bad after posting that and I appreciate your comments. I suppose I'd had a stressout day and I was surprised you read your comments because you aren't normally like that from what I've read. But if you meant them as a friend to Tze and by way of moderation then who am I to say. She's a big girl and she probably knows where you were coming from. It's surprising how much more involved with the conversation you get when you comment instead of just observe!
"Throwing shit" is maybe over-reacting but I am still surprised at the strength of some of the objections. I think they are disproportionate but maybe I'm over sensitive considering the topic.
So to move on to lighter things "Cactus Kate and Lucyna". Very light, pretty stupid, very unimaginative and dull. I guess that is why I like reading Tze as one of the few women on the scene who call a spade a spade (but not in that way) but who does it with some style and wit. -
Sorry Russell, I felt bad after posting that and I appreciate your comments. I suppose I'd had a stressout day and I was surprised you read your comments because you aren't normally like that from what I've read. But if you meant them as a friend to Tze and by way of moderation then who am I to say. She's a big girl and she probably knows where you were coming from. It's surprising how much more involved with the conversation you get when you comment instead of just observe!
No worries. We talked about it. Funny old day. Glad you came back.
Anyway, what I popped back in to say is that outiside the political sphere there are quite a few good local girlblogs. I like Hannah at Let's Walk Slowly:
It's a rock 'n' roll blog, with about a million photos to load on it at the moment. But she's clever, and her review of Peaches at the BDO was awesome.
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Yet another day engaged in thinking about this issue - thank you! And thank you to the people who have contacted me off-line, and pushed my thinking along. You will see your influence in what I have written.... over several glasses of wine, and a brandy to top it all off. Thank goodness my significant other was cooking dinner this evening.
You know what this discussion reminds me of? Working on my thesis, and trying to deal with issues that really, really matter. I know there's a fair amount of disagreement here, but we are dealing with it, and we are talking very hard about something that matters. So far, no one has descended into the sort of personal abuse which can be seen from time to time on other blogs.
It's unsurprising that this has been difficult. Recall the old slogan - "The personal is political."? Most people here, myself included, with some notable self-outed exceptions, are ensconced, or would like to be ensconced, in relationships with the other gender. When we start talking about gender relations, we start talking about the fabric of our everyday, most personal lives. It touches us to the quick. I know that if I say something about men in general, I necessarily include my own beloved partner. That is, the man who has provided for me through two degrees, is the father of my children, has time and time again supported me to the hilt and beyond, who cooks and cleans and maintains and works to support me and our children, as indeed I cook and clean and maintain and work to support him and our children. In my earlier post on this thread, I referred to ODMs, or ordinary decent men. He's one of those, although in my book, an extraordinary ODM.
One of the things that occurred to me is that one of the problems we are running into is that there are several different feminisms, and I think posters on this thread are perhaps working with differing conceptions of what feminism is. Hence some of the cross talk (as in "crossing over" rather than 'tetchy", 'tho "tetchy" might be appropriate too).
I take it that everyone posting here, and most people lurking, buys into at least some basic notion of feminism - that women ought to have the same rights as men (you know, voting, education, jobs - and spare me silly cracks about sperm donors and wet nurses).
There's another form, which is about ensuring that women can compete in a man's world, provided they become the same as men (remember the shoulder pads and 1980s power dressing for women?).
And another version - that there is a world in which all can participate, because it is genderless. That is, gender doesn't matter; what matters is people's ideas and achievements.
That's pretty attractive, and based on what she has written here, I think it's the type of feminism that Emma (and many other women) buys into. I also think that it's the type of feminism that many of the men here buy into, without having to force themselves to it. Of course ideas and achievements ought to be counted without reference to gender. Hence the "me too" motif, and the concern to not be part of the problem, and to focus on the equal competition of ideas, and the equal vulnerability to abuse.
The standard critique of this type of feminism is that it invites us all to be genderless, and to think that our gender neither influences nor constructs who and what we are. However, another type of feminism says that gender is important. I think I only started to tune into this type of feminism when I had children, when I suddenly started viewing everything, and constructing everything, through the lens of motherhood. I realised that actually, gender does matter. Other people start to hear (as in 'comprehend' or 'understand') what this sort of feminism is about earlier, or through different routes (sexual harassment is a classic).
Which leads to another type of feminism - difference feminism, which says that men and women are fundamentally different, and the ways we approach the world are different. There's an overlay on this, that women's ways are necessarily better. You know, in prehistoric times we all worshipped some sort of earth mother and we were all peaceful and good, and if only women ran the world, it would be a better place.
I find this sort of analysis nauseating (if that's a word). It's based on some sort of mythology about women necessarily being better than men. So not only is it based on some sort of tale telling, it's tautological, and thus logically fundamentally flawed. There is however, a grain of truth in it. I know that in our house, some of us who have XY chromosomes are much better at single minded focus and getting things done, and others of us who have XX chromosomes are much better at organising the house, the children, the day to day routine, and getting the children's homework done while cooking dinner and getting three loads of washing though and paying bills and keeping in contact with family members and organising our social calendar. But that's different, not better.
The point is that gender matters, and that it's very hard to strip away gender, and approach the world as disembodied. This is why I'm not so happy with the type of feminism that works on the premise that all that matters is whether or not our ideas and achievements stack up. I think that our embodied experience matters. The fact that I cross the street at night when I hear footsteps behind me matters. The fact that I worry about how my colleagues feel about something, rather than the 'right' outcome, matters. The fact that I am prone to teariness, and chocolate cravings, about once a month, matters. (We have three daughers; my husband says that once they all reach puberty, he plans to spend about one week in the shed every month.) The extraordinary vulnerability that comes with late pregnancy (I recall that in the late months of my first pregnancy, I got a male colleague to walk me home, when normally I would have been quite happy to go by myself), and in the early weeks following childbirth, matters. The constant focus on children. (Recall the psalm that says that as a mother never forgets her children, so god will never forget his people. And even if a mother should forget, god would not, because they are carved on the palm of his hand. Not that I am a believer anymore, but I certainly recall this sentiment from the songs we sang at my convent school.) And so on.
If you buy into the version of feminism that says that what matters is ideas and achievements, not whether the person involved was male or female, and that it is important for us to make a society where this can happen, then it also makes sense to claim that abuse happens to men too (and I agree, it does), and that the abuse that happens is not gendered. That is, we are all equal here. And indeed, in this forum, we are. Genuinely, what matters is ideas. But, I don't think that PA is a 'usual' forum.
On the other hand, if you buy into the embodied sort of feminism, then you might be more inclined to think that the fact that a great proportion of the abuse is directed at women is a problem in itself. It's not just abuse, it's abuse of women qua women. ("Qua" is shorthand for "in the role of", or "in the position of" or "by virtue of being".)
I think the Kathy Sierra story is a classic instance of this. She wasn't abused for having opinions, or for writing, or for being out there in public. She was abused for having the temerity to be a woman. Hmmm... maybe that's an exaggeration. Maybe she was successful and popular, and being a woman gave people a way to attack her. Whichever way you view it, she was attacked qua woman.
BTW, I don't think that women are the only people to experience this. Anyone who is in the outgroup gets it. Try being an immigrant, or gay, or disabled, or mentally ill. It's an excellent avenue of attack for the hate mongers.
In a sense, "ideas are equal" feminism is an idealised form of feminism. If indeed the world really was this way, then it wouldn't be a problem. But this is the real world that we operate in, and in the real world, gender does matter, so we might need to construct institutions that take gender into account instead of acting as though it doesn't matter.
It would be interesting to understand the group dynamic of what's going on when white boys (and I say "boys" quite deliberately, because it strikes me as a particularly immature behaviour) attack outsiders (women, not-Anglo-Saxon men, cripples, mentally ill people, and anyone else who doesn't fit in). I could speculate that it's backlash behaviour - those who are now being forced to share power are fighting a rearguard action to retain it for themselves - but I simply don't know enough to make that kind of claim. My training is in philosophy, not sociology and pyschology.
To sum up - this discussion has been difficult because actually, it is difficult, gender does matter, and women do get attacked qua women. And so do immigrants, gays and lesbians, cripples, mentally ill people, any out dwellers, qua immigrants, gays and lesbians, cripples, mentally ill people, and out dwellers.
What to do about it? As I have said before, it's hard to say in a forum like this, where respect for each other (although we attack each other's ideas freely) is the prevailing ethos. But as long as ordinary decent men and ordinary decent women turn the other way and ignore the attacks, then the hate mongers will feel they have a licence to persist. We really do need to stand up and call them out. That already happens here on PA - people who have been abusive have been asked to leave. It would be good to be able to work out what to do about it on other NZ blogs.
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Thanks for fixing my link, The Unseen Hand!
I'm still trying to learn tags and stuff. (Perhaps this is one reason I only ever comment on feminist and progressive sites: fear of ridicule when "they" work out I'm no computer whizz).Another reason would be that I don't really enjoy arguing with people with whom I have no common ground; if we can't agree on (what I see as) basic facts, then the discussion can't really go anywhere.
I'm glad you read that post, Russell, yes there are certainly some strange comments. It took me over an hour to get through them all.
I liked your story, next time I'm walking home after dark, I'll hope there's a Russell Brown-type about!
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it's interesting about women's voices in the public sphere. i haven't bothered to go through and count, but i bet this thread still has more male than female contributors. and watching what was happening, most of the women were pulling out as things started going downhill.
so one of tze ming's key points of how we get more women to get involved and active on the web has remained largely ignored and unanswered, and i don't know whether this thread or tze ming's original post has helped at all. as with span, i'd like to get back on topic and actually look at how we can do this. it's a little more important than "light relief" just now.
unfortunately i don't have any particular insights to offer, but would appreciate hearing from others.
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Holy smokes, Deborah, you've said a mouthful!
There's a lot there I'll need to reread, but:" But as long as ordinary decent men and ordinary decent women turn the other way and ignore the attacks, then the hate mongers will feel they have a licence to persist. We really do need to stand up and call them out."
That's it, really.
I think, by Jove, you've got the answer.
It works online, it works when men are yelling out of cars, it works whenever someone is trying to make someone else feel scared.
By not addressing abhorent behaviour, we are all condoning it. -
yanked back up, yay!
Thanks.
I just wrote a really long post and it appears to be lost. Maybe a good thing it was rather rambling.
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anjum i agree about woman pulling out as things started to go down downhill. Interesting isnt it. Either you get angry and feel foolish for "posting while angry" or you spend so much energy in reasoned arguement that is not going to convince the person concerned. Meanwhile the subject at hand is sadly neglected.
I was instant messaging with a german friend while reading some feminist stuff about rape on the net, he asked me to send him the link. I said maybe later. I never did. The reason is kind of complex. I'm not really clear on it myself.
I guess not everyone can be invited to every discussion.
(it was a bunch of really fiery comments threads with alot of interlopers) -
Don’t you know that its different for girls…….
I have been ruminating on what useful contribution I can make here without stating what seems to me at least to be obvious and still being helpful. I have stuck to stuff I know about.
Psychology lecture follows:
Reasonably good science suggests that the temporal patterning of anxiety symptoms for girls is different to that of blokes. Blokes and girls will be equally anxious at the time but girls are inclined to worry more before hand (if they know what’s coming) and suffer longer lasting negative affect afterwards (stretching the evidence a little bit towards the end here).
If engaging on line does cause any anxiety, then one might argue that such anxiety is more persistent and long –lasting for girls.
Interestingly this effect is moderated by gender role, that is to say the response is determined by how girly someone feels. The more girly one feels apparently the more worry. A valid point to make here is that moderation by gender role can have both genetic and socially constructed causes. In saying this I freely admit that finding a decent explanation of this is hard.
A really important point to note, is that the majority of this research involves males and females that are successful in at some areas of their lives (Uni students, sports people, professionals). It is tempting to suggest that the people who do not make it into these survey groups are somewhat worse off in this regard and they are less successful as a result.
Things spooks have learned about dealing with worry.
Identify coping resources – That is to say identify where you can turn to for help, there is some evidence to suggest that perceived resources are almost as good as instrumental resources. To put it another way, an anxious person is helped a great deal by feeling that they have somewhere to turn on a hard day. The supporter quite often doesn’t have to do anything but does have to maintain a degree of credibility. Stretching the point a little further it means to say; if you want someone to worry less you need to tell them that you will support them.
Build confidence, in particular build self efficacy – The general rules of efficacy are, allow opportunities for people to experience their own success on their own terms - Let them pick the fight when they are ready and be there to cheer loudly. Point to peers who have experienced similar success (imagining success also works). Talk worried people up not down. Let them know that those feelings are normal and don’t have to be associated with fear, but rather sometimes just challenge (oh gawd I’m starting to sound like a self-help book - ping!).
An important consideration on the back of this advice is that these actions are largely context dependent. That is to say efficacy for driving a car does not automatically transfer to blogging. More importantly this suggests that gender specific support and consideration is likely to be more effective than generic or gender neutral support.
Other stuff does spring to mind but most of it is highly individual.
So do make use of girl targeted initiatives if you want more girls involved. Do make sure that you support girls in a fight. Blokes please be clear on this, girls feel and perform differently in this regard and that empathy or gender neutrality is of itself not as helpful as we might like it to be.
The ratbags who deliver sexist abuse believe they are winning by ignoring the intellectual and going for the emotional. The least that ODM’s can do is make it clear that they will receive no social approval for doing so. Silence is social approval.
I really do apologise if I have missed the point here.
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Excellent post thanks Deborah and 81st.
As a hairless pink guinea pig of indeterminate gender, I too often feel marginalized in the blogosphere and hence my reluctance to comment much on this thread.
But I find it difficult to understand the miserliness of spirit that can’t handle something being dedicated, if not devoted, to women. Women are discriminated by still, even in the most ‘civil’ of environments, and in many other environments they are more vulnerable than men. Of course bad things happen to men, and of course that is wrong too. That isn’t denied by acknowledging women can be systematically mistreated. And by focusing on how to improve women’s participation in the public sphere we will not be forgetting all the many others disenfranchised by race or wealth or health or species whatever – I’m sure those issues will keep for future action. I myself will soon be campaigning for world guinea pig literacy, an area much overlooked by even the most liberal States.
I don’t have many ideas on the topic but I expect good things to do would be to actively encourage women to blog and to try and create or maintain an environment in which they feel it’s worthwhile [while carefully remembering that other groups of society are also disadvantaged and may suffer like, or in other ways, than women]. Both sexes of the species seem to benefit from cross-gender participation in social discourse. At least that was Mill’s argument and I can’t think of many examples to the contrary. After all, it’s not like women are a numerical minority so why should their collective voice be? I guess that requires more willingness from women, and a more active intolerance of arseholeness from men. And perhaps those still learning to be men should also think about how misogyny really just makes them look weak and sad.
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Sue,
good blog russell\
and if anyone wants crafty girl blogs let me know, i have huuge list.
the reason crafty girls don't bother with political stuff. wee we are all far to busy engaging in swaps, sending gifts and supporting each other :)
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So, something good came out of this otherwise not particularly pleasant discussion, and that's Deborah's comment. It's common sense and inclusive. Deborah++
Your hubby isn't an ODM, surely... he's an EODM. :)
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I think the Kathy Sierra story is a classic instance of this. She wasn't abused for having opinions, or for writing, or for being out there in public. She was abused for having the temerity to be a woman. Hmmm... maybe that's an exaggeration. Maybe she was successful and popular, and being a woman gave people a way to attack her. Whichever way you view it, she was attacked qua woman.
There's an extent to which Kathy Sierra was attacked for being blonde. She's an attractive middle-aged woman. and for some people that made her fair game. She's not political or controversial - she writes about making technology more appealing.
It seems to have begun as a mocking campaign by some people who didn't buy her theories, and escalated because no one had the good sense to call a halt.
The founder of the meankids.org site - including, it should be noted, a couple of well-known women - didn't initially know that at the same time Kathy was getting very nasty emails and comments via her own site, but they should have understood that a site specifically constructed to vilify people wasn't going to end in a good place.
And when Chris Locke set up a replacement after Frank Paynter, having talked to Kathy, closed the site down (there had also been a racist, hateful comment about another blogger's pregnant wife), you had to wonder what he was thinking. They enabled this stuff through being juvenile and callous and then they complained they were the victims of the subsequent "hysteria".
You see this kind of denial in teenagers who don't know any better. The fact that it was practiced by grown men and women is pretty sad. Not everyone thought so, of course:
Another interesting point is that these twits were so wedded to a misguided idea of free speech that they couldn't do the obvious thing and clean house. They had no space between open slather and closing the whole site down. For members of the digirati, they weren't too smart.
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nice theatre Che
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Cheers, Deborah, that was a lovely post and I agree with pretty much all of it. I'd just add a couple of caveats.
I think gender does matter, I think it does make us different, and I think that's great. It's one of a number of things that makes us different, and I think any discussion benefits from having a number of different points of view contribute. (Though for me it's sort of more about brain gender because that's what's helped me understand what makes me different from a 'typical woman'.) I do think it's achievement that matters, but I'd like to broaden our definition of what achievement is, because I think it's still very focused on money and career, and that sort of 80s shoulderpad feminism did very little to change that.
And the other thing is, and I do feel I'm harping on this a bit but I also think it's important, that it's not just 'white boys' who attack outsiders. Women do it too. From what I've seen when I was at school, and again through my children, bullying of girls at school is done by other girls. My memory is awfully fuzzy, but weren't there one or two cases earlier this year of Myspace bullying by Kiwi girls? I do think it IS hegemonic, that girls construct their own little power structures and then fight to preserve them. You have to be 'in power' to do that, so it doesn't happen on male-dominated sites but does on social-networking type sites like Myspace.
And... I do think Women's superior ability to walk away from a pointless unpleasant fight is a strength, not a weakness. This is only sightly tongue in cheek.
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thanks riddley.
took a bit of writing, laptop perched on my knees in airports.
but then... better than confinement-to-office.
would be interested in comments from any female commenters here.
especially you debs. i think we, once again, wrote the same piece (i think we need to co-author a journal article).
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laptop perched on my knees
Oi, is that Robyn Draper i hear? better not be any shiraz in the next post or there could be trubba.
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especially you debs. i think we, once again, wrote the same piece (i think we need to co-author a journal article).
Yes.... it's a bit worrying. Great minds or fools?
"Debs"?!!! "Deb" if you please, or the full moniker, or even "Hey, you!"
BTW, when Che says we wrote the same piece, he means our doctoral theses. I first contacted him when he started writing interesting stuff on PA, and by comparing notes, we figured out that we had reached much the same conclusions in our theses, 'tho his was in Pol Sci tending towards Sociology, and mine was in Philosophy tending towards Pol Theory and Pol Sci. Naturally, I think that his ideas are BRILLIANT.
The interweb really is a marvellous thing.
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I've been a bit left behind by this thread as I've been - shock horror - working at work instead of writing at work (I know, curse my name) but I'd just like to chip in belatedly and thank Deborah for the post that made this entire blog entry/thread worth its weight in... uh... magnetic storage. If that was a blog posting I would have been motivated to sign up an account to agree with it. And hey, since I've already signed up, why not try to knock it out in terms of word count?
Some points that have been knocking around my head at work today after reading this in the morning:
The Kathy Sierra fiasco was something that was born out of part of what is easily referred to as the geek community. As somebody who, by nature if not background, fits the profile of a geek very well I'd maybe like to attempt to try to connect some threads of discussion together. Keep in mind as I write this that my qualifications consist:
1) GCSE Maths taken when I was 14.
2) A qualification in hitting inanimate objects with pieces of wood.... therefore anything I say is derived from personal experience rather than academic study.
Deborah, you observe that men are - speaking in generalisations - often better at single-minded focus in their activities than women. That's my experience too, and I'd argue that it cuts both ways - as well as being a gift if you want to get something involved done, it's also a curse in that it is (in extreme forms) rather socially retarded and, emotionally speaking, detrimental to staying particularly healthy.
Geeks are really the ultimate example of this. They (And I'm partially speaking of myself here, but also not) can pull of some of the most impressive feats of intellectual focus and specialisation out there, yet this trait is frequently inversely proportional to their ability to actually deal with people. But that's not to say that they're emotionally stunted and don't feel emotions. They just get them from different sources. More on this in a sec.
Deborah talks in her post about considering male and female differences as being of, in effect, different contributions of equal value. That's something I tend to believe in quite fervently. I'm going to speak generally for a second, and of course there are many exceptions in both directions. Women, in my experience, often offer more in respect to building emotionally sound, healthy environments for themselves and those around them as part and parcel of whatever they decide to do with their lives. Men perhaps offer more in the ability to go way, way off the deep end in focusing on something to get it done - frequently way beyond any actual benefit to themselves that achievement might conceivably provide.
And that's the rub. Geeks (for lack of a better word) do very clever things like write books like "The C Programming Language" - which is a fantastic bit of writing, if you're skewed sufficiently geekward to read it. If you're not, it'll probably seem dry as a fossilised dog turd. They don't do this because it gives them geekMana Points++; they do it because it makes them feel a genuine emotional sense of reward. As such, what seems totally uncontroversial and benign to what I'll describe for convenience as a normal human being might seem incredibly emotionally important to a geek.
Somebody earlier made a point that Kathy Sierra wasn't writing about anything controversial - y'know, just technology. If you hang around the "right" (or wrong, depending on perspective) parts of the internet you'd be well aware that there are few topics more controversial to geeks than technology. After all, I doubt there's few non-geeks who'd consider the difference between a tab and a space a good reason for even tongue-in-cheek references to capital punishment. The amount of sheer vitriol that is exchanged over what seems like (rather, is) absolutely trivial minutiae in the geek world is incredible. But it's part and parcel of the same emotional responses that make the whole state of being possible.
None of that is, of course, any excuse for what happened to Kathy Sierra - any more than suggesting that metal fans are passionate about their music is an excuse for what happened to Dimebag Darryl. But I'd suggest both are certainly explainable as events born from a largely male tendency to go way, way off the deep end emotionally when a particular topic grips their attention for a bit too long - and particularly when they're left in isolation, largely in communities of other males who consider similarly trivial matters equally emotionally intense.
There has been linked mention elsewhere of, in effect, a deep well of misogynistic behavior in the online geek world. To an extent this is true, but in all honesty I wouldn't describe it as worse or arguably even as bad as many other predominantly male environments. It's just that in the absence of women - and one problem that more extreme geeks do tend to have in life is an absence of women - myths and/or obsessions about them tend to spring up to replace the reality. Combine that with a distinct lack of social graces and... yes... see results on display in many places online.
In tandem, a tendency towards very obsessive emotional reactions to techie minutiae and a really rather poor understanding of what women are like in real life is undoubtedly a nasty combo to find yourself on the wrong end of. But I'd argue that socially there are better avenues to persue to "taming" of the geek community than trying to view it as an education or solidarity/community response issue alone. The problem is that the internet tends to allow people to group in situations that they feel comfortable with. So while most of us feel comfortable at Public Address, I doubt few of the commenters at Little Green Footballs would find it too accommodating.
The "We need to start calling them out!" argument is, in real life, a damn good one. After all, in reality it's a lot harder to build entirely homogeneous communities - it's the differences between people that keep people accepting of difference, because being intolerant of it results in you being shunned to a degree that you start getting the message. Unless you're rather thick, of course, in which case you go and join a political group for people who fear difference.
But I'm not convinced that merely calling people out, online, is going to do a whole lot of good. They'll just find themselves a new home with people they feel comfortable around, who don't say scary distracting things like "You're not behaving correctly". They're not, of course, but that's largely irrelevant if they're in a group that accepts the same standard of behavior. Look at certain other blog comments sections for an illustration: you can try calling people out if you like, but you'll probably find yourself attacked en-masse by a bunch of people who find safety in numbers.
So what's the solution? I don't have a single one to offer. I do have a couple of thoughts, however:
1) When you go places reliably occupied by obsessives, it's usually not a good idea to use your real name and traceable contact details unless you can see concrete benefit in doing so from the outset. It's easier to start a blog under a pseudonym and then unmask yourself later if you feel comfortable than to do the reverse. This isn't about right and wrong, it's just the same kind of pragmatism that suggests it's a good idea not to walk too close to strangers in dark secluded places when you're out at night.
2) Recognising that communities of male obsessives aren't necessarily malicious is helpful. Generally they're not - few (if any) geeks are sitting out there plotting the enslavement of womenkind, they're typically more interested in valid XHTML+CSS or whether their data structures cause unnecessary memory overhead inside the inner loop. Engagement is probably a better tactic than confrontation. I'm saying that as somebody with rather severe geek tendencies that are held in check by a variety of more human activities by a lot of non-geek people around me. Left to my own devices I can find one topic an endless source of deeply emotionally involving interest - as you can tell by the stupendous length of this post.
But I'm not left to my own devices, because of situations arrived at both accidentally and deliberately. For example, soon my delightful better half will be home, and she'll say something like "Jesus christ, did you write all that?" and look at me in slightly worried dismay. And I'll react to that and knock it off. Because let's face it, there's really very little actual real return beyond obsessive interest in these discussion threads and endless online political conversations either. Maybe that's why they're usually full of boys?
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That was really good, Finn. I could (hah!) probably debate bits and pieces of it, but I'm most grateful to you and Deborah for putting in the spadework.
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Wow. Thank you, Finn. That has given me a lot to think about. Particularly because I have already bought into your point about the extraordinary things that men (and some women) can achieve through their single minded focus. As you say, it's a blessing. And of course, a curse. Likewise my capacity to manage many things at once, but never quite manage the focus that would lead me to personal success in one field, instead of pretty good, but no more than that, achievement in a number of fields.
Interesting points you make about how to manage the obsessives. I will have to think about those for a bit. Perhaps the two strategies, yoru pragmatism, and my call-them-on-it, need to be deployed together.
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