Cos I’m trying to put some weight on. Seemed like a good app, I started adding the food I’d eaten today and it counted my calories for me. Then went to put what activities I’d done. It asked me to put in my weight and target weight first so it could calculate stuff.

It then gave me this absolute bullshit:

What an absolute bitch of an app. Fancy telling underweight people they ought to lose weight! I don’t normally swear but this has really got me angry. How small minded and down-right dangerous! This app had the potential to be really useful for people trying to put weight on and they’ve just decided to only serve fatties.

I’m deleting this app right away and suggest out of support for the skinnies you do the same. I’m also going to write on the app wall about how rubbish this is.

After dinner, Julie Lerman gave a talk which began with her explaining how in the 80s she had felt the need to dress down in a professional context, because her previous feminine look had attracted the wrong kind of attention from male peers. She explained how more recently, she has been pleased to see young women at male-dominated geek events are able to dress ‘cute’ without (as much) damage to their reputation. Then she showed a picture of a conference speaker’s avatar/conference picture (which she had removed the head of to protect the woman’s identity) which was taken at a typical ‘MySpace angle’ and showed some cleavage. The woman clearly had no bra on and you could see some nipple points through her unbuttoned grey t-shirt. To me, it was an inspiring image. I thought, “Yeah, go on girl! You are proving that women can be hot and intelligent at the same time! You are breaking down that stereotype of an ugly butch geek girl by shoving your cleavage in everyone’s face.” However, Julie said that she found the image saddening and was upset that the reaction to her conference talks was often revolving around a discussion of her boobs rather than what she was talking about. Julie went on to show pictures of herself being herself and to say how important it was to present your ‘true self’. Julie said she wanted the session to be interactive, and for us to shout out when we liked… so I did.

I briefly said that to me, showing her true self might be exactly what the Cleavage Girl was doing. Julie responded saying that that might be true, and that as it is a complicated issue, that’s why she hadn’t said anything in person to this woman – Julie thought maybe it was a generational issue. Quickly, everyone had something to say. There were two very outspoken women – one who thought the same as me, and said that if women had shown their breasts in a context like that years ago we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. Basically, that Cleavage Girl is liberating us all instead of continuing to pretend that Geek Girls don’t have breasts.

The other woman appeared very upset, shouting out “No, no! You’ve got it all wrong! She is objectifying herself by using this highly sexualised image! You can be feminine without being sexual!”. This woman went on to explain that research by Stonewall had shown that when someone is allowed to express themselves how they choose, they are more effective in the workplace. To me, this was far to close to the anti-sex, anti-porn feminists of the 1970s. Why do we think that a woman’s sexuality is separate from her ‘true’ self – like a dirty secret she should keep in the closet? Insisting that a woman portray her professional, intelligent self in a desexualised manner means that we are positioning sexy women as unprofessional and unintelligent.

The general feel in the room was that there was a line between making yourself attractive in a professional context (e.g. putting on makeup) and being provocative – and apparently this woman had crossed it. But who are we to set this line for others? Maybe this woman thought that she had not crossed the line, for her, crossing the line might be going completely topless online. In other cultures, showing your hair is crossing the line, and many feel that those cultures are behind ours in terms of women’s liberation. How is this different?

Additionally, an Online Community Moderator said that it was in women’s best personal safety interests to not put pictures like this online. She had experienced people being stalked online as a result of posting personal pictures of this kind. I do get her point, but to me, this is too close to saying that women should not wear sexy clothes out at night because they are more likely to get raped. The fault is with the rapist, not with the woman for what she wore. Similarly, we should be protesting about the reaction Cleavage Girl got – we should be shunning those bloggers who sniggered and discredited her speaking online. It is the reaction that is the problem and should be stopped. Cleavage Girl in my opinion, is certainly not at fault.

I am tempted to create a Girl Geeks for Cleavage fanclub.

Radio buttons? With only two options and I have to choose one? And the default is Male? So I’m forced to declare myself as one or the other. How rubbish. Here’s a couple of suggestions for improvement:

Or even better:

Or even don’t bother asking in the first place! At least not in the initial sign up. You could let people enter this information about themselves by choice later on. So far Pownce is winning the gender game. I know I keep reporting on all the sign-up dialogues being crap for promoting gender diversity, but when I’ve seen enough of these I think I’ll make a table of winners and losers in gender awareness in sign ups / personal profile sites’ UI.

_____________EDIT______________

Aha! on logging in, turns out you can un-define your gender in your profile settings.  So that is a good thing, but you still shouldn’t have to choose one in the first place.  It’s a bit weird that you can choose ‘nothing’ later on, but not initially.  Also it’s still not perfect because you might want to define yourself as Transgendered or something else and because you can’t this is giving preferential treatment to males and females.

]]> http://bethgranter.com/blog/2008/06/spock-is-rubbish-at-identity-politics-as-well/feed/ 3 http://bethgranter.com/blog/2008/05/plaxo-loses-for-gender-diversity/ http://bethgranter.com/blog/2008/05/plaxo-loses-for-gender-diversity/#comments Fri, 02 May 2008 08:46:28 +0000 Beth Granter http://bethgranter.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/plaxo-loses-for-gender-diversity/

Plaxo just put me off by forcing me to choose my gender:

The only options were male or female. C’mon Plaxo, get with the program! This is the modern day and you should know better than to only give us these limiting binary options with which to define ourselves (and must you force us to define ourselves in those terms at all?). What about everyone between or outside these options?

When you’re building a social networking site you should have advisors on identity politics, since you are getting your users to create identities on your site.

An example of gender being handled in a lighthearted and positive way is Pownce.

Tags: plaxo, gender, social networking, queer, feminism

The name is a bit dodgy in my opinion – too close to ‘ponce’, but maybe they were playing on gaming lingo’s ‘pwn’ (meaning ‘own’, as in, ‘you totally got pwned’), and mixing that in with pounce (like a cat?).

Anyway, in the sign-up process, they’d clearly been taking notice of gender debates and, taking a light-hearted approach to the complicated subject, came up with this:

Brilliant. This beats facebook’s tolerance of selecting neither gender by about a million. FYI, I chose ‘Lady’.

Beth’s pownce

Also, they only have 4 templates at the moment, but they’re very nice.

This is pretty normal for registration purposes. I’ve collected quite a few snapshots of similar ‘error’ messages (will add these to the post later), from places you really would think wouldn’t care what your gender is (weather sites?!). I guess it’s good for targeted advertising to know your market, but shouldn’t it be up to the user whether they want to give out that information (without being blocked from registering)? Still, Facebook wins as the only place I remember to allow me to leave my gender blank.

“Shag Types: Because women are easier to understand if you stereotype them”
(Maxim, 2006: 142).

The commodification of women under prostitution or marriage has been widespread in many societies and cultures for centuries. Second wave feminist calls for the sexual liberation of women in the 1970s might appear to be forgetting mainstream media’s representation of women as ‘things’. Such is the case in the February 2006 issue of Maxim magazine, where “things and girls” are deemed to deserve to share the same category listing on the contents page. Repeated explicit objectification of women enforces chauvinistic attitudes to the extent that concepts of women as ‘things’ purely existing in order to receive the male gaze and for the consumption and ownership by men are not challenged.

The whole essay is available here: How do mainstream ‘lads’ magazines’ represent women and construct concepts of femininity? [PDF]

‘Beauty’ is rarely used in relation to anything male, therefore issues relating to the power of beauty almost exclusively describe issues relating to women. In our western culture, an ideal woman is beautiful. A beautiful woman’s attributes include definitions of body size and shape, skin tone and condition, hairstyle, facial features, symmetry and the observable care she takes of her body. Breasts should be on the large size and pert; there should be a tiny waist; average sized hips; long legs; no hair anywhere apart from on her head (10), where hair should be worn long, straight and blonde; full lips; large eyes and a small nose – these are the desirable traits for a woman.
“The stereotypes… program into young people an image of the dominant male and the subservient female that becomes second nature”. (8i)

Girls are taught that they must act subordinate and that beauty is the key to getting what they want, which is men with power, because men only see them as objects. In this way, girls are taught from an early age that they begin as a second class citizen, and beauty is the tool to be used to gain recognition, to be seen. Boys are taught in the same way to objectify women and that their only useful feature is their beauty.

The whole essay is available here:  The Power Of Beauty – Discuss [PDF]