Thorns

I've been slowly working through this book, it's fairly light but still a bit dense for my foggy hard-science-oriented brain.

Basically it's about demolishing gender essentialist pseudoscience.

The first part is a whole bunch of examples of how amazingly easy it is to affect people's decisions and abilities by "priming" them with stereotypes, either by putting stereotypes into their heads or just by reminding them of the stereotypes they've already been exposed to. Just putting a gender tickbox at the start of a maths test lowers women's scores, since they go "That's right, I am a woman. Women are bad at maths." (And thinking "I AM NOT BAD AT MATHS DAMMIT" still takes up valuable mental energy that could be spent calculating) And of course there's all the examples of exactly the same resume being judged differently depending on the gender/race etc associated with the name attached. People THINK they're being objective but really aren't, and will come up with complicated justifications for why their choice is logical, eg if you swap the "male" and "female" names on a pair of different resumes suddenly the traits that were unsuitable for the job when they belonged to a woman make a man the perfect choice.

She also demolishes some of the specific claims of Bad Gender Science, like "girl babies look longer at faces therefore women are naturally more intuitive therefore men are better at hard sciences" and so on (and of course as gender roles change the arguments have to twist themselves into stuff like "Women are attracted to forensic pathology and microbial biology because they...like faces and people")

Overall I'm finding it really informative but I am annoyed by how it assumes the reader is a cis het woman living in Australia/the US etc who is probably going to get married and have babies. She does acknowledge trans people, intersex people, same sex relationships, people from other cultures etc but mainly for what they can teach us about heterosexual cis etc people rather than as examples of everyday people who have to deal with gender stereotypes themselves. And, ok, most of her arguments are statistical and so the "average" woman is what matters, but she could still do better on being inclusive and intersectional. She does mention assumptions about race every now and then, but not in a very meaty way.

I'm onto part two now and she seems to be implying that there is some evidence for men and women (and male and female primates in general) being biologically hardwired differently in one particular way: men care about fitting into the male gender norms of the culture they've been brought up in whatever those norms happen to be and the same goes for women(*). The nice thing about this theory is that it says that specific gender roles are socially defined rather than innate, but that gender identities and divisions themselves are hardwired enough to debunk radfem etc dismissal of the trans experience.

(Second post)

(*)Non binary gendered people seem to be entirely off her radar, though being a small and poorly defined/understood group I guess it would be hard to come to many useful conclusions right now.

You were right, that was awesome :D

I have Things To Do Today, so no actual review, and I can't tell how objectively good it is but where with the Theif I had a sinking feeling about a plot twist and was sad to be proven right with this book I was sitting there going "Could the plot really be that awesome? Noone ever writes that..." and was filled with glee when twists happened the way I'd hoped. Though overall I think her writing would benefit from not trying to so hard to have twists at all.

Now to get my hands on the next book...

Saw Fanboys last night. It's not a good film, but enjoyable enough as a geek road movie (and it's not like that's a large enough genre that one can afford to be too picky) It was VERY much the story of a bunch of white straight dudes, though, the writers clearly had no idea what to do with their one female character and the homophobia was pretty intense. That said, I think I liked it as much as the geek guys I've discussed it with, since the main problem with the film is that apart from the odd quite funny scene it just isn't very good!

Anyway, it was thus nice this morning to read ‘CAUSE I’M NERDCORE LIKE THAT: Toward a Subversive Geek Identity which then led me to Riot Nrrd, a very cute webcomic about "being LGBT nerds, female nerds, nerds of color, disabled nerds, and other kinds of nerds that don’t get as much love" which is like a cross between "Dykes to watch out for" and geeky slice of life comics like "Weregeek"(*). It even has a transcript, huzzah!

There's geeky female characters in lots of webcomics, often but not always done fairly well, but I'm having trouble thinking of any I've really liked in mainstream-ish films or books. Any suggestions?

(*)Not that "Dykes to watch out for" doesn't have geeky aspects and geeky webcomics don't have any female/LGBT etc characters. But this is more concentrated.