Flooded Lizard Kingdom

So what's with the use of "Jane" as a universal signifier for femaleness?

First instance, the "Be Janes" who appeared at BlogHer last year. They were representatives of an online home improvement community on Windows LiveSpaces. Their marketing pitch was a bad match for the conference, and most of the attendees disliked them - but what struck me was the name Jane. The two women are not named Jane in real life. They are named Heidi and Eden. Why do they go around pretending their names are Jane?

Second instance, found through their ad in Gmail: Being Jane. From their About Us page:

Being Jane is an explosive online community dedicated to shattering the preconceived notions of women in society and the evolving roles that women are forced to play. Founded by Kelly Smith in 2004, Being Jane provides access to advice, mentoring, support and a compendium of women-related information that leverages the experiences of women who have achieved non-traditionally female goals by actualizing their authentic beliefs and desires. Being Jane is committed to redefining the idea of feminism to symbolize women coming together to raise the bar, embrace the vitality of being a woman and champion the connection to future generations.

The website menu options include Are You a Jane? and Talk With Other Janes. How do you shatter preconceptions by evoking the epitome of 50's girlhood? And why does a redefined feminism mean we all have the same name?

Third instance, the See Jane program founded by Geena Davis. It's a project to improve gender portrayals in children's media. For this, the Jane name makes more sense due to its origin in children's books.

However, isn't the Jane reference a little... kitschy? And, y'know, white?

Just thinking.

The Princess: I am not commenting on this post.

C-Man: Thank you, I feel so much stupider after having seen that page. I need to go listen to Mozart or some shit to undo the damage done to my brain.

The Princess: I'm just sad that there are no other words in the English language to convey weakness except for words referring to women's genitals. It's such a restriction on talented writers like this fine gentleman.

Diane at Dees Diversion explains:

I am tired of being referred to as a man

I recently went to lunch with a female friend, and after we sat down, the young waiter said "What can I get you guys?"

I told him we weren't guys, and he did that kind of "oh yeah I always say that, huh?" look, smiled, and said "What can I get you ladies?" We smiled back and ordered. He brought us our food, and a while later, came back and asked "How is it, guys...oops...ladies?" We smiled and said it was very good and thanked him.

Later he came back and asked "Can I get you g-...ladies some more tea? And there was a bite in the "ladies" because, you know, who the hell did I think I was, asking to be referred to as a woman and not a man?

This is not something that bothers me, but it bothers a lot of women and I take that seriously.

Luckily, in Texas we have developed a solution to this problem. It is the word "y'all." It is plural and gender neutral. You don't have to pick between such terms as gals, ladies, women, chicks, girls, guys, gentlemen, men, boys, etc., which is good if you are addressing strangers and don't know their preferences among such terms. All the kids are saying it, and I can only hope that in a generation or so we will have solved the problem completely.

My good friend C. had a vision, I had Movable Type skills, IROCK threw together a photo montage for a banner, and shazam! The Texas chapter of the National Organization for Women has launched the new Texas NOW website, and it includes a cool blog chock full of feminism. Do check it out and let us know what you think.

Dear Men of the World, Especially But Not Exclusively Those At Bus Stops,

STOP STARING AT MY BREASTS. It's rude.

Thanks,
The Princess

I posted about Holla Back New York City a while ago. I have been remiss in not posting about the Blank Noise Project, a similarly inspired project that produces a blog and stages street action in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi to stop street harassment.

Selected posts:

• Frequently Asked Questions
• rape harassment eve-teasing murder news flash
• the spill

Hat tip to Dina at Conversations with Dina for this post on the Blank Noise Blogathon and this post with comments from a study she did with college women about their experiences and some of her own.

Robert at Bark/Bite missed the Blogathon but then put up this piece on why he thinks men harass women. Definitely worth a read. And then if you need something lighter, try his Holla Back and Fire Extinguishers. The last line cracked me right up. It probably shouldn't, but it did.

My sister was in the habit of dressing up her first daughter in pink whenever I was coming to visit, because she knows the girly-girly look grates on me. Now she doesn't have to pick my niece's clothes to make sure they're pink. My niece does it herself, being somewhat Barbie-inspired currently. I wear a little pink myself these days, every so often, but I'm still deeply suspicious of it.

But I don't think it's just my aversion to the color pink or the girly thing that makes this report at Avast! Feminist Conspiracy! so appalling. This is happening in a preschool classroom:

Every few weeks, the class focuses on a different color, and they use that color exclusively to paint, draw, and learn what things in the world can be that color. At the end of the phase, they'll have a day to celebrate that color. The kids are supposed to wear something with that color on it and bring in a toy or something for Show and Tell, and they have a party featuring food of that color. Blue Day went by without a hitch, so did Green Day, and Brown Day.

Then came Pink Day.

The night before, when we were picking out her clothes and trying to find the pink stuffed dog that had gotten lost in her toybox, LC informed me that the boys don't wear pink, so they didn't have to participate in Pink Day. They didn't have to wear pink or bring in an object, but they could eat the food at the Pink Party. She said it again, to make sure I understand: Boys can't wear pink. It's a girl color. ONLY for girls. Her teachers said so.

I haven't been very enthusiastic about this homeschooling thing that C-Man leans towards, but I might reconsider.

I suppose I wasn't really minding my own business, since I was reading the newspaper. But I was reading a nice Statesman article by Jean Scheidnes on the Austin Craft Mafia and their TV show on DIY, when all of a sudden:

The dialogue assumes a fair amount of viewer knowledge about sewing, of which I have none, but the hosts' cuteness is enough to make me want to learn. I can't even do simple mending; I usually take it home to my mommy. A lot of my friends are the same way. I guess the reason for this is the same reason a lot of us can barely cook. Anything falling under the rubric of home economics was stamped out of our education by feminism.

I'm sorry, what?

I'm grateful for the feminist movement, obviously, because it made all kinds of skills, careers and achievements available to women. But it's time we stopped denying ourselves these other valuable skills.

Where do I even start?

Abstinence promoters are upset about the HPV vaccine because it will make sex safer, thus undermining their message that premarital sex isn't safe?

I just can't even make that fit together in my head.

Because of course, as Hope at Appalachian Alumni Association points out, safety isn't their real motivation.

PART THE FIRST

My friend Lucy pointed out the "What Kind of American English Do You Speak" Test.

My results:

• 60% General American English
• 30% Dixie
• 10% Yankee
• 0% Midwestern
• 0% Upper Midwestern

I'm not really sure they had enough questions, but it was an amusing diversion.

PART THE SECOND

Magpie found a color-coded map of English nouns created from the "average color of images found by a search engine." Go see it, it's quite fascinating.

PART THE THIRD

Ping launched his Regender translator on the day of BlogHer, which meant that so many people found out about it that the server gave up a few times. But try it out. Here is his description:

Welcome to a little experiment in webpage translation. Have you ever wondered... What would the world look like if the two sexes switched places? What would it look like if English had genderless pronouns? What would it look like if English identified races the way it identifies gender?

I also loved what ae had to say about it:

I mentioned my new pal Ping's right-on hack Regender a couple of posts below, and I can't say enough about it. I think everyone should read the news through this filter for a couple of days. It's mindboggling. Queen Fahd passes away and a new Princess will be crowned. You read that one story and think, okay, so Queen for King, I get it. But no. Look at page after page, day after day, of news stories all about women, all by women, and you see how gendered "news" POV, authorship, subject matter is. It's enough to make one question patriarchy or something. Hmm. [Ed Note: send Valentine to Ping.]

END NOTE

This will probably not entertain anyone who has not met C-Man, or maybe not even anyone but me:

I showed the Regender hack to C-Man, and since it's a computer thing he had to find out who made it. He spend several minutes reviewing Ping's CV, then gave some of his highest praise: "That kid's really not stupid!"

I just didn't know what to say.

Via Pam Spaulding at Pandagon and media girl: 28% of voters polled would not support a woman for president regardless of which party nominated her.

My writing about cultural products gets extremely boring if it's over a paragraph.

I discovered this while cleaning out my blog a couple of months ago. I was making sure all the posts were marked up properly, checking for spelling errors, etc. I also read over everything to make sure I really wanted to keep it.

True, I didn't delete the excruciatingly boring posts about these movies I saw or something I objected to where someone dissed comic books.

My only motivation for keeping them was this: someday, my grandchildren are going to request proof that I have ever been boring. "Surely not!" they will say, hanging on my every word as I regale them with partially fabricated tales of my youth during the emergence of the Internet and the end of dependable cheap oil. And I will point them to those posts.

All this is to explain why my following comments are short.

Comment 1: Elisa Camahort and media girl have both blogged recently about Fiona Apple's album Extraordinary Machine. They can actually describe music, so you should read what they have to say. I think the album is amazing, and I was never all that impressed with Ms. Apple.

Comment 2: What the fuck is going on with the new Dr. Who where The Girl did something spunky and action-oriented in the first episode, but since then has been completely useless? I'm depressed about it.

Via feministe, a perfect demostration of why I quit reading most mainsteam magazines several years back: The Art of Retouching.

Not only am I bombarded solely with images of women who are considered culturally the most attractive - excluding all the other women in the world - but those images are fake. No wonder my confidence in my looks would plummet after paging through one of those magazines.

Dads & Daughters first came to my attention on some PBS show during the day when I was contracting from home. Since I've noticed that I keep going back to their site when I need comfort from a scary world, I thought I should share.

The organization doesn't just encourage dads to be good to their daughters. It also encourages them to speak up in advocating for girls' issues, such as Title IX and damaging media imagery:

DADs inspires fathers to actively and deeply engage in the lives of their daughters and galvanizes fathers and others to transform the pervasive cultural messages that devalue girls and women.

Too often, cultural and media messages bombard our daughters with the notion that how they look is more important than who they are.

DADs will lend its voice to calls for greater public policy attention to girls' health issues (like tobacco use, eating disorders, etc.).

In the interview I saw, one of the founders explained some of their activist strategies. As men in our culture, they knew they might be able to get more access to decision-makers in corporations. They also knew they could talk with folks like that on a father to father basis, a persuasive tool that other organizations or activists might not have.

It was one of the best answers I've ever heard to the question "So what do I do with the privilege I get from society?"

I saw Blue Car (2002) on DVD. The DVD box (left) pissed me off more and more as I watched it, since the main character, 18 year old Meg, NEVER wears an outfit like this - and the only sexual encounter shown in the film is extremely difficult to watch because it's such a betrayal.

Check out the original movie poster (right), from the Miramax website for the film. Apparently it wasn't thought sexy enough to coerce people to rent DVDs.

It's an interesting film, though, and despite some of the more harrowing moments I did enjoy it. I'm enjoying small films more lately - films that follow a small number of characters and no buildings blow up.

Casa de los Babys (2003) fits that bill. It's a drama about American women waiting to adopt babies in a Latin American country. In contrast to the comment at IMDB, the actor interviews in the extra features on the DVD contend that director John Sayles isn't trying to preach any particular viewpoint on international adoption, childbearing, etc. He just follows the lives of a group of women in this situation and several people who actually live in the country, for contrast. You're allowed to draw your own conclusions.

Sayles's comments about casting in the DVD extras really struck me. He said that since the majority of female actors in Hollywood over 30 are unemployed, he knew he could find a great cast. Bonus for him, I'm sure, and for me since I enjoyed their performances, but a sad statement. Lili Taylor, Mary Steenburgen, and Marcia Gay Harden should be difficult to book.

Steamboy (2004) had only one major female character, who was irredeemably annoying. It was also a bad movie. The End.

So Mattel is making a Barbie line of clothes for adult women. As G. observed when I traumatized her with this news, they couldn't possibly make them in Barbie-scale measurements, or no one could wear them.

Catherine Orenstein pointed out a couple of weeks ago that women are often involved in:

...imposing a conformist definition of beauty and femininity. Girls' and women's magazines incessantly promote perfect thighs, abs and hair, and achieving the perfect look has moved beyond diet and exercise. More and more, we place ourselves willingly under the knife, happily embracing the plastic... Along with collagen implants and Botox, summer beauty treatments now include toe-shortening and even pinky-toe removal - the better to fit into pointy shoes... On Fox's series "The Swan," surgically altered women competed against one another for a chance to be part of the beauty pageant in the final episode.

I would wonder who owns the women's magazines and Fox, but I take her point. Hell, even Keira Knightley tortured herself with a corset in Pirates of the Caribbean:

"It was really that bad," she said. "You just can't breathe in them at all, but it was my own fault as I have this thing about Gone With The Wind and Vivien Leigh, when she got her waist down to about 18 inches to play Scarlett O'Hara. I thought, 'Ooh, let's see if I can do that'. "I got mine down to about 20 inches and couldn't breathe. It's fine in the fitting as they're only five minutes long, but as soon as I was in it for 12 hours my eyes started rolling and I began to faint."

I also remember reading that some of the dancers in Moulin Rouge ended up bruised from the corsets, but as I cannot find any evidence of this it may just be a recycle of the Nicole Kidman injury story where her rib broke when they put her in a corset "too soon" after she cracked the rib in a dance number.

Interestingly, in a brief history of the corset:

...a "straight-front" corset, a new style that pushed the shoulders and breasts forward and the abdomen back, contorting the spine into an S. It caused lower-back pain, pelvic strain, hyperextension of the knees, and gait abnormalities. If it seems incredible that women put up with the straight-front corset, it should be noted that another item of female attire produces precisely the same ill effects: S-bend, back pain, and all. It's called the high-heeled shoe.

I think I'll kiss my Doc Martens tonight when I get home.

I did not expect much from The Chronicles of Riddick. Pretty spaceships, evil alien cult armies, Vin Diesel's glowing eyes.

But now that I've seen Tomb Raider and Underworld, I'm much less forgiving of weak female characters. Especially when the female characters actually kick tremendous amounts of ass and should be treated with more respect by the story's architects.

In Riddick, he's violent because he's an invincible alien with special powers. Kyra's violent because she's broken. He's capable of taking care of himself. She always needs his help at a critical moment. She can only win by sacrificing herself. When he wins, he gets the extra prize of a devoted army of followers. She is strong but also looks like a sex bomb, and is not taken seriously as a threat by men because she's a woman. He is amazingly competent, no questions asked. Her violence is lamentable, a waste of her life that the other characters mourn. His violence is because he's allegedly evil, but we only know that because other characters say so - we only see him making the right choices - and it's necessary to save the world.

Give me Lara in Tomb Raider, owning her own destiny and making her own choices. Give me Selene in Underworld, in love but still dedicated, strong, determined. Don't give me Kyra in Riddick, or Anna Valerious in Van Helsing who is only good for a chick fight, or Trinity the ever-martyred.

I just can't deal with it anymore.

(Now if I could just stop giving them my money...)

Dear girl with the puppy at the Pecan Street Festival,
Yes, you're right, I was getting all up in your business. But no amount of eye-rolling from you changes the fact that your puppy was being slow because she was trying to DRINK OUT OF THE GUTTER BECAUSE SHE WAS THIRSTY! If this simple need is too difficult for you to meet, then you better not be having sex because no birth control is 100% effective and I PROMISE you that babies would be much more disruptive to your lifestyle.
Thanks,
The Princess

Dear man hanging his entire torso out the window of a red pickup truck driving north on Burnet Road,
Though I did not catch the exact wording of your suggestion, I feel fairly sure that I understood the gist. I regret to inform you that I am not available for any such activities this month, but please check back when I have no self-esteem. (Also, please know that no matter what my friend D. said, your behavior is all about power - I proffer as evidence that I have never been spoken to like that by any man who was stationary and within a five foot radius.)
Sincerely,
The Princess

Dear fireflies,
Thanks for moving back into my neighborhood. It's like tiny Christmas lights are flying around in everyone's front yards, and it's the closest f*&ing thing to magic that I've ever seen. Keep up the good work.
Love and kisses,
The Princess

Dear The Dog,
OK, new plan. I pledge to check out a lot of books from the library this year. I further pledge to return each one as I finish it so that you can walk with me to the library and I can throw it in the bookdrop. That way, I get more books, you get more walks, and everyone's happier. Sound good?
Devoted but slightly exasperated by your suddenly increased desire to smell everything in the entire neighborhood one leaf at a time,
The Princess

is not like the other one?

• "Surely we can find someone to be governor of California who doesn't have a history of sexually assaulting women?"
• "Surely we can find someone to be governor of California who hasn't ever beaten someone with a baseball bat?"
• "Surely we can find someone to be governor of California who doesn't mix plaids and stripes?"

I would have guessed wrong.

This weekend someone I interacted with was wearing a shirt that upset me. I had heard this shirt was being sold at Dragon's Lair, but I was trying to forget about it. It said:

My other girlfriend has 18 charisma.

I have some issues with this.

When I was 18-ish I walked past the auto repair department of some department-type store in St. Paul - near the Midway Target on University - and a group of men hanging out there in the open bay doors catcalled and whistled at me several times. I regretted wearing a short skirt, I regretted being alone, and I have always regretted that I didn't call the store when I got home and complain.

Today I walked past the construction site between Congress and Brazos on 4th street in downtown Austin. For a block and a half several workers on scaffolding several floors up catcalled, whistled, screamed "I love you baby" and other tempting lines. And while I walk faster than most people, a block and a half is still a very, very, very long time when you're the only person on the block and you are powerless to offer so much as a comeback line or a dirty look. The regret for the short skirt and the aloneness competed with rage and humiliation.

So when I got back to the office I called Downtown Austin Alliance, who referred me to Cousins Properties, whose exceedingly nice receptionist referred me to Constructors and Associates. That exceedingly nice receptionist got me on the line with a supervisor, to whom I complained. He made all the right noises about how this was inappropriate and unacceptable in their company. He even gave me the address of the on-site construction office (I didn't think to look for it, I just wanted to get out of there) and said that if it happened again I should go right to the office and he would terminate someone from the site for that type of behavior.

But then this happened:

Him: "You must be a very attractive young lady."
Me: "That has nothing to do with it."
Him: "That does have something to do with it, 'cause some of these guys are boxed in there for 12 hours, which doesn't make it right, but I'm going to go up there right now and straighten this out..."

Now I don't know what to do. Aside from cry, which I did a little bit once I got off the phone, and the only result was to get sunscreen in my eye (not sure how that happened, but ouch). Is it enough that he went up there to take action on my behalf, or should the company be teaching its people not to say things that imply sexual harassment is about the attractiveness of the harassee?

*sigh*

Here's what I have to say about Episode 2:

What, women are biologically defective in the force? One woman on the council, 4 or 5 more in the big fight. Irritating.

But the last 45 minutes did kick ass.