Entries tagged "feminism"

  • November 29, 2018
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videochat tsuris and how to think about software that helps people listen

Read it here.

  • May 9, 2018
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DM to a Mansplainer: Final Notice Any Woman Deserving a Real Apology Can Use to Save Emotional Labour

I’m sharing this text of a Final Notice to help any woman out there who needs it to save time and labour.

Taking responsibility means making it about you. Understanding something of what life is like for women means reading and paying attention and listening to us and not presuming you always have something to teach us without paying any attention to the context or listening to me. I am taking my own valuable time to have interacted with you about this several times and explain a piece of misogyny to a white guy for free. I will not do it again. You have all the tools as a nerd to figure out more about this if you wish to. I will be making use of the time I put into writing this to share it on my feeds in general. Imagine this was all day long. All day long. And it’s a fraction of the crap we deal with. For WOC and queer women there’s more. All unpaid.

  • February 21, 2017
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Understanding Trump and the US via trauma. Hope for a better way.

Lesbians lead.

I started signing off of twitter and facebook in 2007 with “Night good people.” I believe I was the first to do a regular nightly sign off. I wanted to treat it as a time *with* others and to be as human and connecting as possible. I didn’t want to treat my presence in these places with other people like I was broadcasting to nameless “audience” who matter less than I do.

https://twitter.com/heathr/status/834138840436662272

  • February 19, 2017
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Uber, Susan Fowler and Patriarchy in Silicon Valley and Beyond

  • January 16, 2017
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Russia stands up for punching women. What follows America?

Russia has just decriminalized domestic violence.

Women are harmed at an alarming rate from domestic violence here in the US too. And the Senate just voted to make sure contraception is not covered. Misogyny has long been apart of our culture. This is a moment in which patriarchy has put all its chips on red.

It is time for us to refuse. This means men too have to really get in your guts, what it means to have self-agency and control over your body handed over whether its forced pregnancy, the very common experience of rape and sexual assault and the de facto cultural and legal reality that there’s not a whole lot you can do about it without more pain and even with the pain there are almost never collective social and legal consequences for rape for the rapist other than affirmation of so-called “masculinity,” the dismissal and marginalization of womens experience (or these would be stories and experiences you’d be hearing about all the damn time in media), any random guy walking toward down the airplane aisle feeling like its no big deal to put his hands on your waist to move you aside.

This means marching and calling and insisting. This means making consent a reality and the norm. This means talking to your sons and students about what consent is. This means social norms and pressures that support girls and womens’ agency.

Sadly it is things getting much worse and emboldened that make people more aware of what has always been there. A good chunk of the country had to knowingly vote (though I am not persuaded it was just votes that put Il Dupe in position we need an open investigation) for someone who brags about sexually assaulting women. Sexual assault was voted for. We will see more like this as in Russia if we do not say and embody “no.”

As with all things, if you don’t get the lesson, it gets harder.

And for those doubling down on misogyny in the new regime and the emboldened culture of dominanace sold, like crack or a bottle, like it’s gonna make everything ok, they will continue to find there will never be enough to make them feel ok. Their desperation will only increase.

There’s no way out of this without learning to feel, without growing up.

  • November 12, 2016
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My Systemic Podcast Interview

I was interviewed, just before the election, by Brett Terpstra on Systematic Podcast. I was really happy to get to talk with Brett who has built, among other things, the brilliant nvalt a note taking text editor for the Mac. It’s a double episode and we talked–among other things– about comedy, the Net’s influence on me, and Iggy Pop. You can hear it in your podcast apps or here on this page where you can also see the notes and my recommendations of great stuff.

  • November 10, 2016
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Hillary Clinton Lost Because She Is a Woman

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton from the National Archive

I have issues with Ms Henein for her approach to defending Ghomeshi and the way she attacked the women who brought charges. So I recognize some irony in this extremely well-written op- ed of hers because I believe she professionally took plenty of advantage of the dismissal of women voices in public, adding to it. (Yes I get that it is a common tactic in her job. Yes I went to law school, I get how it works). BUT she is willing to say about Hillary Clinton what few mainstream media spaces are saying in the US today (yet another reflection of sexism), “She lost because she is a woman.”

Yes.

Hillary Rodham Clinton wasn’t just opposed by the GOP and the industry of conservative and far right media. She was attacked by the FBI. Wikileaks went after her, Russia. This reminded me of my mentor law prof’s tenure review. Her feminism and femaleness and scholarship so flipped out so many men that Law and Econ profs across the country decided to wage a national campaign to Northwestern University to stop her tenure even when the law school recommended her and her work was unquestionable.

There is room enough for us all to speak and completely be ourselves in public. But we won’t live that reality until we women take, not request, our full rightful place in public and the men that are terrified by that deal with their feelings on their own. It is possible. It will happen. But it won’t until we stop the emotional labour and the stooping and smoothing over and just take our place over and over again. We will have to deal with the discomfort of male discomfort over and over and our fear of their fear. We have to let them be afraid and angry and stay focused for support on our own guiding star and our own groundedness, each other, and those who are able to hear and see us.

I know from coming out, eventually, the reality of the full you, when it does not move and go away, becomes more difficult to pretend and wish away.

 

What’s underneath achieving social equality. And product returns.

Screen Shot 2015-04-01 at 11.27.59 AM

  • January 9, 2013
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Redemption at the Polls: Obama’s 2012 re-election, 80s Identity Politics and the Tipping Point

DNCtour.152523

 

A lot of geek prayers were answered recently through geek statistical analysis by Nate Silver. He accurately predicted almost all the US election results and was dismissed for it by the Right, for his bewitching use of math because “Nobody knows anything.”

Nate Silver is a statistician taking on the job done before by pundits and experts who have been around the game a long time. He is quiet and nerdy and he bested them all. It’s exactly the story told in Moneyball (which is a great movie and an amazing book by Michael Lewis).

I was lucky to get a nerdy tour of Obama’s campaign headquarters when I was speaking at WebVisions in Chicago in October. (Many thanks to them for the tour and the above pic). Some of the people in our group who worked in UX (or user experience design) knew the Obama campaign’s head of UX. Obama’s HQ was full of old computer monitors propped on cardboard boxes for ergonomic help. There were huge numbers of young people editing video, designing sites, coding, making calls and designing all manner of posters which were all center justified and beautifully fonted (yes I made that word up and I like it). The posters and youthful environment felt like a Pride Parade organized by McSweeney’s smushed with a tech start up: Asian American Pacific Islanders for Obama, African Americans for Obama, LGBT Americans for Obama and so on.

It was a room full of true believers who were working their asses off. It reminded me of my brother who is an intense campaigner (he helped Canada’s Green Party leader Elizabeth May get elected and now runs Change.org campaigns in Canada) and it reminded me of myself in college and law school when I organized and worked fervently on feminist and progressive causes. I attended a rally for Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” back in the 80s when he ran for the Democratic nomination and it was dismissed as a political stunt and far-off, utopianism among naive students and wacko liberals. And it was easy to dismiss. The rally wasn’t very big, the speeches weren’t well-organized or confident and the most notable moment was one of my few out classmates throwing her bra onstage for the Indigo Girls. It was 1988. All of these different groups working together? They couldn’t stop arguing and all they wanted to do was compare their pain and oppression. A bunch of whiners.

Fast forward 24 years to last Tuesday and I’m at my nerd friends with a bunch of nerdy people of various races and sexualities and genders, many of whom work at tech start-ups and we’re taking photographs with our pocket computers of the High Definition television set of the results of incredibly well-organized, disciplined, grass roots campaign which had as its basic premise the reality that enough of us from all the hyphenated groups would matter and are of voting age that you could have enough votes to re-elect a Black and White President who supports the right to equal marriage.

And all 4 states with votes on gay marriage supported marriage equality.

And the first openly gay senator was elected. And the first Asian American woman senator.

And every politician who made insane comments about rape was defeated.

And the demographics show that the tipping point has happened. The electorate has moved toward amore diverse population and inclusive policies.

I’ve been waiting for this moment for the wake up call about the human cost of the “trickle down” economics and the playing to the religious right since Reagan, since I was a university student at Yale. That’s when identity politics was being mocked as official whining and it launched the career of many a disdainful, pithy writer (Katie Roiphe, Camille Paglia, Dinesh D’Souza I’m looking at you). And yeah the worst part of identity politics was and is the idea that feeling aggrieved is what you should lead with instead of what motivates you to lead. It took me many years to find that the theory you have about the world is just a feeling you have about your parents.

The best part of political correctness is the idea of consideration and respect for others who are different than you. The best part of identity politics is the notion that the reality of your lived experience informs your understanding of public needs and effective solutions.

And to have the best from these things combined with incredibly nerdy attention to detail and excitement about connecting with people is to re-elect Barak Obama.

To focus not only on what hurts, but to feel and acknowledge what hurts and then focussing on what *can* be done. This inspires me.

  • December 4, 2012
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Fix This Movie – Lincoln, Brave, Wreck It Ralph. Our podcast experiment. What do you think?

Mariko Tamaki and I write a lot, perform a lot, read a lot and see a lot of movies. We know as artists what it’s like to have someone just tell us what’s wrong with what we made. It’s a very popular hobby. It’s one of the many parents of the blended family known as the Internet.

Anyway, after having high high hopes for Young Adult (especially because of how much we like Diablo Cody. Ivan Reitman, Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt’s work) we found ourselves trying to figure out *how* we could have made it better. We play this little writing game after every movie now and decided to try it as a podcast. So we made one. We discuss Lincoln, Brave and what it can learn from Wreck It Ralph. Tell us what you think. Do you want to hear some more? Any movie in particular?

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