Easily Distracted by Shiny Things

Context note: I originally wrote this particular not-quite-essay up for my brother after some discussion. He is the "You" referenced along the way.  

So. I started doing a point by point examination of Damore's manifesto, fisking style, and while it helped me pick apart his arguments, it wandered wildly off the actual questions at hand. So instead I am trying again, with a reframing. It will include significant excerpts of the fisking, but with an attempt to stay on topic.

Question number one: Is Zunger's interpretation "we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it." remotely an accurate depiction of the memo and its final gist? If not, is the interpretation you gave (in extreme short form: "That gender ratios in tech are not well-explained by sexist behaviour in tech companies ... It's a major recurring theme, arguably THE theme, of Gary's memo that people should be judged as individuals and not as members of groups") itself a fair and complete interpretation?

The really really short answer is "Zunger is overstating at best, and you are right to take him to task for it -- but there's a lot more unpleasance going on than you seem to think." Most of the rest of this will be focused on coming back to this answer.

Question number two, added later: Is Damore plausibly a well-meaning but socially clueless and possibly-on-the-spectrum person or an actual bigot as he is portrayed by detractors?

Not really a short answer, but an immediate one: I'm not exactly sure what led you to read him as possibly autistic. My read is a bit socially clueless, but more in the vein of "spends too much time coding and reading articles about people and not enough time interacting with them" AND actually a bit of a bigot.

While the dividing line is fuzzy between being socially clueless because he hasn't gone out and practiced, and being socially clueless because his brain literally works differently, I do not subscribe to treating him as a case of prejudice against autism. If nothing else, my impression is that the prejudice he displays is very real. And his actions, no matter his neurology, warranted firing.

I'm also wary that this falls close to a common trope in geek circles; the tendency to attribute bad elements (sexual harassers in particular, and other social assholes in general) to possible Asperger's, when such people most often display GREATER social acumen (in the case of sexual harassers in particular, in how they isolate their victims and code-switch when their audience is more mixed or all male. But, well, as examples, neither Thrym nor Mike read as remotely Asperger's, and nobody in Winnipeg that I know of has suggested it, but in other circles, men who have behaved exactly like them have had someone ask "in all innocence" if it explains them...)

In this case, there is a veneer of intellectualism to Damore's bigotry, which could be read that way, but I really think is better attributed to general life inexperience. A lot of NT men, especially post-grads/intellectually inclined, have talked about things they have said in their twenties that were in this range of "I read too many articles and didn't talk to enough people".

None of this above is aught but opinion, but it's also as complete an answer as I can give to question two at all.

Back to question one.

Here's my interpretation of the memo in the TL:DR version:

Damore's memo's central point is a combination of the key things in his own TL:DR (short version: Google has a strong leftward bias which makes it likely they are both stifling conservatives and committing to unproven programs out of ideology), and the desire to be rid of those same programs, which he sees as discriminatory; those that are aimed mostly or exclusively towards training of or hiring of minorities and/or women.

He accuses that leftward bias of encouraging extremism and authoritarianism by the left without producing evidence that anything in Google is in fact authoritarian. (It IS true that a leftward bias might move the Overton Window too far and open it to the biased excesses of feminist extremes, but it is not a given that this has happened to Google. Even his own firing, which is justifiable on many grounds besides ideology, is evidence of it only to people like Vox Day or the white nationalists talking about protest marches on Google headquarters this coming week. ( http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/08/11/google-diversity-memo-alt-right-protest/?source=dam ).

To support this, he calls on science, discussing the average tendencies of women to try and demonstrate that there should be little need to fight the gender gap at all (including paragraphs acknowledging that these averages are overlapping and full of exceptions but then making suggestions which treat the nature of women as vastly more uniform and immutable).

He suggests changes to narrow the gender gap which have no data to back them, and the abolishment of programs he sees as discriminatory, including not only those related to gender but those related to race.

He endeavours to paint Google's leftward bias as equivalent to climate change denial, the desire to support a better gender and racial parity in the workplace as coming from a paternalistic protective streak towards women and "those seen as weak", and emphasizes a need to support the psychological safety of conservatives over that of minorities more traditionally discriminated against.

His decision regarding delivery mechanism -- essentially sending it to every fellow employee -- is itself a major problem. Not just for use of company resources, though that alone is a firing offense, but because it literally forces every woman and every racial minority on the spot to worry whether their coworkers believe that they are there on their own merits, despite Google already being known to hire the best of the best as regards software skills. Because by describing the programs that support their entry as discriminatory, and stating aloud that they possibly lead to lowering the bar (yes, there is a line to that effect present), the memo leaves it possible to point to any of them and say "You're only here because the bar was lowered for you, so you are not *really* my equal." The same memo that suggests that affirmative action practices increase racial and gendered tensions and that this is bad increases them severalfold by laying out that implication and essentially making sure every minority and woman in the place has to see it.

This does not read to me as the work of a centrist looking to ask for better understanding across the board. This is the work of someone who genuinely believes that attempts to support people who are traditionally held back from entering some fields is discrimination against him as the prior norm.

He does not at any point say anything like Zunger wrote, and you are partly right that he makes a few paragraphs of bending over backwards to acknowledge overlaps and averages. But I do not disagree with those who inferred that he wishes to exclude more women from the job, and who feel that what he has said, if allowed to propagate within Google without active disapproval, is actively detrimental to the life of women and racial minorities in the company.

Rereading Zunger in the wake of picking apart the manifesto in more detail, I am much less satisfied in general with Zunger's approach -- his intro paragraph is a mess of that exaggeration you noted and a few others -- but I see a whole lot of merit still in his entire section 2 (about engineering), and I have just laid out a defense for his section three -- not far enough for the whole "Want to punch you in the face" but still for "large swathes of people at the company now feel they could not work with you."

Here are pieces of my initial fisk-style examination (Memo in blue. My commentary not.)

My basic impression of Damore's memo: He says a lot of things which are either factually correct or reasonable. His memo is 90% these things. But the other things overwhelm that, and they are sometimes hidden in the middle of the reasonableness.

• Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.

Freedom from offense.

This is a common and deceptive framing for people not wanting to hear explicitly prejudicial statements against them -- statements which have had a demonstrated negative effect on work. There was a study which showed that simply mentioning a statistic indicating that black people perform worse on a given test to a group of black students right before they take that test (However neutrally and "just the facts" the statement is made) has a visible and demonstrable negative effect on the students' test scores. (First google failure; I kept getting results linking to the Harvard Implicit Bias test…).

Freedom from offense also implies people want to be protected from things that they don't like, no matter what they are. This is a classic misframing: being "offended" is literally not, in itself, a bad thing. A person can be offended because a mom is on her phone at the playground, because a person is on a bicycle on the street, because a person is on a bicycle on the sidewalk… any number of things which one has zero right to be "offended" by. In fact, the usage of the word offense for reactions to everything from outright hurtful shit to breastfeeding, and to describe responses ranging from incandescent rage to eyerolling laughter is part of the reason I am beginning to hate the word.

Describing not wanting to hear discriminatory statements as "freedom from offense" is a statement intended to make such a desire seem more trivial and less of a resistance to actual damaging statements. It's part of the normalizing of prejudice.

"shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety."

Sounds good. If some people can't say what they think, then there isn't safety to be themselves. Pretty tautological… almost.

But then I have to look at what I call the moderator's dilemma.

Which is this: Any place with no moderation whatsoever (beyond deletion of actual spam like "I earned X money working from home!"…) turns into a toxic stew mostly inhabited by trolls spewing profanity. AT BEST, it contains some useful discussion threads that need to be carefully sifted from the whole. And most people either don't bother or refuse to even participate in the first place. You literally lose swathes of people who have much better ideas than what is being aired BECAUSE you refuse to silence anyone.

To maximize the genuine free expression of ideas, you need to remove enough toxic elements to allow those who are silenced by the toxicity to actually appear and speak up. This is why conversation at places with active moderators (eg, Making Light) tends to be much more productive and interesting and varied in subject matter than discussion on say, youtube threads. And it's not just the obvious -- simply having people who like "Arguing passionately" (to the point of haranguing or not letting a subject drop) also drive others away, who are less likely to speak but more likely to have something to say that wasn't already heard. (Abi at Making Light talks a lot about this).

Of course, an excess of deletions CAN stifle conversation in the "Echo chamber" sense. (it also means you lose evidence trails, but that's another discussion). This is why there are some areas, even in the social justice spheres, where deleting comments (including your own) that brought on a negative reaction is something you'd get castigated for doing, even when the moderator blocks you. This is also why TNH came up with disemvowelling to indicate comments (or in some cases, sections of comments) of which she or another moderator disapprove. People can reassemble the evidence and see for themselves, if they are concerned the moderation is stifling ideas, but people can also see explicit disapproval. (It's worth noting some comments end up entirely deleted even though the people are allowed to comment again, some people get their right to post revoked short term, and people are still banned outright. And some people are forced not to post for 24 or 48 hours -- this last happened to Will Shetterly virtually any time he talked about race. One can consider this the debate on tactics, though.)

So, yes, actually, SOME types of ideas do need to be silenced to maximise psychological safety. The debate from there tends to be what is too far.

Of course, this fellow asserts Google culture goes too far. For evidence, he provides…. Well, let's keep going.

(Skip a bunch that is not really arguable or terribly problematic, though some of it is in loaded language)

At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.

Left Biases	Right Biases
Compassion for the weak	Respect for the strong/authority
Disparities are due to injustices	Disparities are natural and just
Humans are inherently cooperative	Humans are inherently competitive
Change is good (unstable)	Change is dangerous (stable)
Open	Closed
Idealist	Pragmatic

 

5/6 of these are merely subjective preferences, with argument reasonable for both sides. But right there in the middle. "Disparities are natural and just" is a really nice way to say "You're poor because you deserve it" and "Black people are half-savages" and "women just can't handle things men can".

SOME disparities can be concluded as just. A fast food counter-minder or floor-sweeper should not make the same as a chef or electrician. (Though they should all make a living). A junkie will lose their job to a sober person and that is just (though the junkie deserves some compassion and access to support in getting off drugs). An amateur singer should enjoy their singing but not be expecting to make millions. If leftists seriously believed otherwise it *would* be a problem.

But somehow, outside satire like Harrison Bergeron, these are not the "disparities" that are meant when conservatives argue disparities are just. When poked, when examined, they are nigh universally trying to justify disparities between gender or race or the offering of services to poor people.

Pretending that shrugging off disparities as just is no different from debating whether it's better to be idealist or pragmatic is a horrid false equivalence.

…. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors.

Can he demonstrate how Google is ashamed of its core business or overly trusting?

Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.

Query, though this is random and beside the point: is there any corporation, left right or middlin', that doesn't strive for a monoculture on some level?

Second, does he have actual evidence Google has deliberately taken steps to shame people into silence? Every article he links meant to support that is about the field of psychology or university campuses.

Lastly, define politically correct?

Because if one goes with Neil Gaiman's framing of "treating people with respect", then shaming people who don't "treat people with respect" into silence seems… healthy?

Does it mean "Don't say 'retard' or 'lame' or tell rape jokes or dead-name someone"? Again…

Here's his own footnote: 'Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against,” which makes it clear why it’s a phenomenon of the Left and a tool of authoritarians.'

That doesn't look far from "treating people with respect". It really doesn't look far from "Don't say 'retard' or 'lame' or tell rape jokes"

It may seem obvious to HIM why this makes it a bad thing, but the freedom to use the word retard or use the wrong pronoun doesn't seem like a way to foster the very psychological safety he wants.There is nobody made more psychologically safe by permission to say "lame".

He may dislike the phrase "perceived to", because there are often a few assholes who overuse rules against anything with the appearance of insult or exclusion. These are called rules-lawyers and they are jerks no matter their political stripe.

The actual reason for the "perception" phrasing is the reverse; it's to fend off rules-lawyers on the opposite side, who want to BE insulting and discriminatory and who would find a way to twist up any firm rule.

The article he links to discussing PC-Authoritarians discusses them as one of two groups of advocates for political correctness. Whereas he paints all usage of PC as falling into the one camp.

For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment

So by his own admission, he is attacking an extremist position, which he has offered no evidence is in fact that of anyone inside Google.

and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation.

Affirmative action programs are authoritarian. Looking at definitions and examples of authoritarianism, this only makes sense to me if one believes any social support program meant to correct a prior systematic injustice is authoritarian.

Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech [3]

At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

So here's what YOU see as the thesis. Damore, by contrast, declares it the first piece of evidence against the extremism and authoritarianism above.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways.

On average, I would not disagree.

 These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

• They’re universal across human cultures
• They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
• Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
• The underlying traits are highly heritable
• They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Evolutionary psychology as a field has a bad reputation among social justice groups overall. Some argue it has some merit, just not as initially applied. Others pretty much distrust anything that comes from anyone who claims the name without some kind of caveat recognizing its problematic origins.

I gave myself a headache of sorts looking into evolutionary psychology, both defenses of and criticisms. My final conclusion is that it has some merit as a tool, but is still easy to twist in support of sexism -- partly because that was its origin.

The gist of it is this: we can look into some of the ways people (across populations and in general) behave now, and attempt to make a conjecture why that trait evolved. Then they take that theory and attempt to test it. Well, not the idea why the trait evolved, that's physically impossible to test. They usually test whether the behaviour they claim exists actually exists.

The problem with this is… testing the existence of the behaviour NOW actually teaches nothing about whether it was an evolved trait or a societally driven one. The base assumption that a trait that exists now has existed for 100,000 years or more literally cannot be tested. The closest they can come are traits common to most/all societies, which are implicitly more likely to be older. (Another issue that has been raised is the assumption we are not still evolving.)

Even more, the people who started evolutionary psychology as the thing pretty much outright did it in an attempt to prove that gender roles as they were in the 1970s (with a focus upon sexual relations and sexual appeals) were something humankind has always had, and that we should therefore preserve gender roles, not strive to alter them. In short, they were trying to give a scientific veneer to sexism.

The roles they promoted are much more egregiously sexist than the roles that modern supporters tend to link and cite, and apologists for evolutionary psychology see this as proof it's a science and uses the scientific method. "See, we rejected the bad data and now we're getting closer to the truth."

But there are those who consider this itself a variation of iterated Naziism (to refer to something I linked before): "We couldn't prove the gender differences included all the things we wanted to prove, but what if we claim we have data for this much of the gender difference? We do if we massage it right and elide these bits." And I have to say, the evidence both for and against seems to massage data or shrug off nuance before presenting it. A LOT. some of what some of its proponents seem to think is proven is… really more debatable than they want to make it sound. (and some of what its detractors take as utterly destroying it… doesn't do any better.)

Part of the reason some responders appear to be saying there is no real gender difference whatsoever is a rejection of this iterated Nazi effect.

Yet … most people when asked about the subject without evolutionary psychology, would grant SOME difference between genders. Physical science has also seen some differences between male brains, female brains, and transgender brains. (Another whole discussion though.) So observing some differences in behaviour and general trends between genders, is also to be expected. Some of these WILL logically have developed longer ago than others, even prehistorically.

Sounds great, until you start reading someone saying that women don't go into jobs like upper management because the long hours, frequent travel schedule, unpredictable crises, and amount of work required outside of work hours are detrimental to the work-life balance women prefer.

Then look at how many low-status jobs women are known for also contain the above.

Until you see these trends being applied to all people of that gender regardless of how many caveats are written saying this is on average. Unless you see it being used to excuse wildly different treatments despite the visible overlaps.

In any case, all that history, all that explanation why some people flinch or throw things at the mention of evopsych is beside the point. So far nothing stated has been terribly wrong.

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

This is the paragraph (And attached diagram, which I am cutting out but am aware exists) you seem to see as his central point, despite the fact that if judging people as individuals were the point, he wouldn’t have had to raise evopsych or the actual differences between men and women at all. Remember, he's defending himself here against an extreme stance he has not actually proven is more prevalent than a more moderate stance.

Reading over my comments in the Female traits section, other than the note that he does not acknowledge the studies showing women being assertive in business environments are punished socially for it, I mostly didn't have big objections or pick apart much of interest. My biggest objection came at the end:

The problems women mostly talk about when talking about discrimination in tech are not problems of having the inclination, or having the ability. By the time we're talking about the people trying to work for Google, we're looking at people who already skip past all these averages and have a declared interest in a non-feminine field.

I have more to say in the next area, though again, this is all more of a side trip than the general point.

Men’s higher drive for status

We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs.

I literally cannot see a way you can ask the one without asking the other. When we are looking at what traits women lack, we are implicitly suggesting the men have those traits. When we are looking at aspects of a job women prefer, we are implying what men prefer. When we are looking at systematic exclusion, we are implicitly noting systematic INCLUSION. Assuming a binary, and for these purposes, we can briefly elide those populations that do not fit the binary -- in most positions they suffer if anything MORE discrimination -- you literally cannot examine why women are not in top leadership positions without some data suggested about men. EVERY STUDY about women in power is pretty much obliged to use men as a control sample.

 These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

Again, so do many jobs typically held by women, they're just low status. The argument about women and ability to cope with stress seems much more suited to arguing why women are so much less often firefighters than why women are rarely CEOs. Besides, what has this to do with tech? Tech jobs aren't top leadership.

Status is the primary metric that men are judged on [4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths

Are they the literal same drives? I am skeptical. Some of these areas also have an explicable difference in the physical divergence between the genders, not in their psychological differences. And coal mining is geographically focused -- in locations which tend towards much more conservative culture and gender roles.

I wonder how many studies have been done on how much more often women insist on, and/or follow, safety regulations?

But this is nitpicking, really. I am at least willing to assume there's some basis to the general point.

Still, this entire thing seems like a non-sequitur for tech jobs, few of which are as high status as is required for the gender difference in status-seeking to be a big part of the problem. Equating software engineering with top leadership is definitely as weird as comparing it with coal mining.

Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

This section is part of where I started really feeling skeeved out. And confused. If the gender gap is determined by our psychology, then why is it necessary to help reduce it? His caveats so far have included ONE line which implies sure, the psychology is not the complete story, and lots of "on average" caveats.

Let's assume this was a blip in writing, he meant to say, "despite these differences, some of the gap is based on discrimination against women. So how do we help reduce the remaining gap?"

Which he does… with the same thing he is using to explain why at least some of the gender gap is explicable and pardonable.

Never mind those women who want the job as written, who are exceptions to averages.

I feel like I'm seeing several contradictions in those last four paragraphs. We don't need to make this job more appealing to women, but we can do these things to make them so. Women should be judged as individuals not subsumed in average differences, but we need to accommodate their blanket different thinking by these methods.

This whole section also suddenly becomes weirdly citation free. He provides no evidence these things -- without any other initiatives -- reduce the gender gap. And several of them are either vague or counter-productive, with one another if not with the stated goal.

He later goes on to suggest getting rid of all affirmative action type projects -- he's technically already done it, just not at length -- but this is all he has to replace them. It's like replacing the ACA with Trumpcare. There's no evidence any of this has a real impact, and where it does, some of it seems intended to do the opposite of the declared objective.

This is one of the places that, whatever else you feel about Zunger's commentary, he makes  a lot of points directly addressing these things.

• Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
  • We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). (evidence? This sentence is clearly speculation, but it's also alarmist in tone. There's nothing cited to suggest any program is deceiving its students about how people oriented the tech jobs are, but neither is there proof  that telling people at this late a stage that tech jobs are not people-oriented would put women off the job.)
• Women on average are more cooperative
  • Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. (Which means what?)Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do.
  • This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education (This article goes to considerable length to say that what men need is a more traditionally masculine upbringing and more father figures and masculine roles.)
• Women on average are more prone to anxiety.
  • Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits. (Another generic solution for a specific problem. Also of note later.)
• Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
  • Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

On the reverse, it seems like the way to get men to actually embrace more work life balance is simple, and it has nothing to do with women. If more men take time off for family, and come back to their jobs with no ill consequences, more men want to take time off for family. This is what has happened in companies and countries where parental time off is an option for both genders -- nothing happened with the fathers until some man actually took the leave and became a seed crystal to catalyze the others. So why is this not a part of his offered solutions?

Part time is rarely a solution in high tech jobs because it's darn near impossible to either rise in a company by part time means, or to do the upper level work on lower hours. Offering part time jobs almost always means offering them as low-status positions only. By contrast, flex-time options that still add up to full hours and a lot of time shared with fellow employees tend to be preferred higher end solutions for work-life. And once women demand and get it, some men start taking it too.

 

• The male gender role is currently inflexible
  • Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles. (So shortly after endorsing traditionally masculine upbringng and attitudes, he endorses feminizing men. Maybe he thinks he means being the seed crystal guy in the point above? Or maybe he's just unaware he's offering opposites as solutions. He's certainly implying that men who are allowed to be more feminine will want to leave tech -- which is itself another implication "women don't really want to be here anyhow" -- not just seek options that allow more work-life balance.)

;">Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principled reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google—with Google’s diversity being a component of that.

Which sounds like admitting he doesn't have any proof for any of these, and doesn't even really want to bother with any of them and these solutions are all coming out of his ass. But oh, yes, by the way, he really does want diversity.

 
The Harm of Google’s biases

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

How you could let him have a pass for something like this while complaining about the logical gaps of his detractors, I don't know.

When did race come into this? Why are we suddenly talking about racism when he has talked this far exclusively about gender gap and gender bias? Does he have evidence of racial disparity being based on genuine difference? I doubt it. I highly doubt it. I also suspect he skipped that because if he tried to include such a section, his opinion would lose the veneer of respectability.

• Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race.
•  A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
• Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate (link is private. Not very helpful. )

I've already noted that even accusing a business of lowering the bar to let in certain minority candidates is a way to increase hostility towards those candidates by raising doubts about their qualifications. And "Oh, but we didn't mean you, Julie. You're a good one." comments aren't reassuring, as they represent a kind of "divide and conquer" or "exceptional female" attitude which is the reverse of really embracing diversity.

However, I also have to say, almost every time someone has argued that one is lowering the bar for diversity, there's some evidence that mediocre, just-barely-hired people in the NON-diverse group are the main ones to suffer, and that the candidates perceived as "less qualified" are at least as qualified as the mediocre candidates they replaced. So you're not generally losing good people to less qualified candidates. Often, too, at the top level of resumes, the differences aren't nearly as meaningful.

• Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)

I'm not even sure how this works. In what way should a diverse group be "reconsidered" if they are already diverse? In what way are non-diverse groups reconsidered? Does he mean non-diverse groups have their actual production questioned and diverse groups do not? That WOULD be heinous and I think it's what he wants us to think, but it's also unclear that this is what is happening.

I suspect all it means is that if a group forms that is 8 white dudes, the upper levels mention it should be more diverse, but if a group of 8 gets formed that includes three women and three PoC {in overlapping circles}, the upper management doesn't blink.

• Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]

Illegal discrimination sounds horrible. But what does it mean? His footnote doesn't especially clarify.

I also have no idea what the techy words in this translate to, or the footnote except that he wants smaller groups within the company to hire diversely, not the company as a whole. I think.

• These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology [7] that can irreparably harm Google.

That last link is worth reading and thinking about.

It is not, in itself, proof that Google as a whole is failing to observe the effects of its policies, especially since working for Google itself, in a specific diverse department, with a specific (diverse) team, creates a basis for "Common interests" which is one of the main things the very same article cites as helping to decrease tensions.

Does he have evidence they lack evidence? Does he have evidence they have made changes this large, and don't know what they are doing or who it benefits?

Overall, the whole gist here is "Eliminate ALL of the known programs to promote diversity because I feel they discriminate against ME." After presenting what he feels is considerable evidence to  indicate that the gender bias against women is natural and to be expected, he proposes "solutions" with no supported evidence they will fix the gender gap, suggests removing nearly every instance of actual programs to help increase the number of women in the industry, and claims they are harmful to Google without presenting evidence how.

He offers NO evidence suggesting the racial gap is natural or normal, yet nonetheless suggests deleting all programs designed to decrease the racial gap, citing only one article discussing increased tensions in universities (Which article itself proposes solutions he never mentions.)

The footnote is another evidence-free opinion.

(And whatever the demerits of its awful title - I hate the title so much - the essay "I'm a woman in Tech. Let me Ladysplain the Google Memo to you" has some pretty firm points on this section:

"Many defenders of the manifesto have eagerly, and, as far as I can tell, earnestly, pointed me to the manifesto writer’s frequent claims to support diversity in the abstract, as if these are supposed to be reassuring. (“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists. ...”) They are not reassuring. The object of his memo is to end programs at Google that were designed, with input from a great many people who are educated and focused on this issue, to improve diversity. If those programs are killed, absent a commensurate effort to create replacement programs that have plausible ability to be at least as effective, the result is to harm diversity at Google.

He does make some recommendations, but they range from impotent (“Make tech and leadership less stressful”) to hopelessly vague (“Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive”) to outright hostile (“De-emphasize empathy”).

In the end, focusing the conversation on the minutiae of the scientific claims in the manifesto is a red herring. Regardless of whether biological differences exist, there is no shortage of glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities. Until these problems are resolved, our focus should be on remedying that injustice. After that work is complete, we can reassess whether small effect size biological components have anything to do with lingering imbalances.

At this point, I only really want to cite one line of his next section:

In addition to the Left’s affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females.

This is his claimed explanation why there are diversity-supporting programs at all. To protect the weak and female. The number of reasons for diversity support that have nothing to do with weakness or protectiveness are legion, but you know that.

His comparison of Google's leftward bias to climate change warrants little attention. His description of people trying to discuss male problems getting dismissed, is supported not by psychological studies or neutral articles as he tries with everything else, but with an explicitly anti-feminist link -- I can't even.  (He, and it, are not even factually wrong about some of the men's issues, but he didn't write this to discuss changes to the dress code to allow men to wear a greater variety, or to discuss men as victims of physical violence.)

In fact, at this point, without picking apart the remainder of the memo, I think I've advanced a pretty good case that there is a whole lot of actual discrimination present against supporting women or minorities in tech, that the science is not the issue. If you really want me to comment on the section about allowing conservative voices and de-emphasizing empathy etc., ask away. I won't do it now. I have a literal headache.

As an addendum, your interpretation of the memo:

Gary's ACTUAL central point is one we've discussed before and you seemed to agree with, or at minimum be open to: That gender ratios in tech are not well-explained by sexist behaviour in tech companies. Whatever is keeping women out of those companies, most of it happens WAY too early in life to be plausibly explained by that, as gender ratios in high-school programming courses are similar or even worse. And in any case, lots of far more sexist, less feminist-friendly organizations (the Catholic Church jumps immediately to mind) have far better gender ratios! Not to deny that sexist treatment can have an effect, but you can't just read the prevalence of sexist behaviour from an organization's gender ratio in a simple one-to-one fashion. There's something else going on.

You don't have to believe anything overtly un-feminist to think it's entirely possible, even probable, that even in a situation with no sexist discrimination and perfect equality of opportunity, there would STILL be less than 50% women engineers at Google. This does not of course mean that you can assume any GIVEN women isn't a capable engineer; individuals need to be judged as individuals, that's the entire POINT here. But nevertheless, *in the aggregate* women and men are not identical, even feminists are happy to admit this when it suits their immediate rhetorical purposes. The surprise would be if they WERE interested in the same things in the same ratios.

(Writing this is making me pissed off at Zunger all over again. It's a major recurring theme, arguably THE theme, of Gary's memo that people should be judged as individuals and not as members of groups, and he repeatedly acknowledges that there are many solid female engineers at Google….)

You'll notice that very little of this actually falls into the category of "Stuff I had a problem with".

No, I would not expect genuine equality of opportunity between genders to lead to gender parity, though I would expect a smaller gap, a hugely decreased number of instances of sexist behaviour and harassment, an increased reportage of what sexist behaviour and harassment still happens, and more equal gender percentages reflected when assholery in general IS reported. I WOULD expect genuine, pie in the sky equality of opportunity between racial groups to lead to percentages of representation close to those in the population as a whole, but we are so far from that, so much farther than we are from gender equality of opportunity. Similarly, for disparities in class.

You'll also notice that almost none of your interpretation is related to his TL:DR summary of his intent, or his final list of suggested solutions either to the gender gap OR to Google's bias.

This story is rocking, practically screaming in some venues, across Canada. I suspect it's hardly a blip in the US.

CBC fired a major radio personality with a highly popular show with no public explanation.

Ghomeshi himself then proceeded to publish a lengthy post (Mostly on facebook but disseminated elsewhere as such things are) which said: I'm into BDSM. *** I did some consensual things with a woman. After we broke up, she started claiming we did non-consensual abusive things. She took her invented story to the media. I told CBC about her wild accusations, presented them proof everything was consented to. They fired me anyhow, to cover their own arses.

This is I should say an unfair rendering of his letter, which on the surface is a remarkably convincing document. It rang all the right bells; big corporation fires perfectly nice person for being part of a subculture it's okay to vilify.

At first I was inclined to believe him. I thought about how rare are false accusations - but rare is not absent, and those real false accusations really hurt, too.

Also, his story version was first out of the gate, which tends to create and set the narrative in peoples' minds unless there's an overwhelming counter-response.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

Then the Toronto Star's first news story broke. With not one but THREE women - asking to remain anonymous - reporting non-consensual beating or choking. A story the paper had apparently been working on, and sitting on, for a year, and might not have released now if Ghomeshi hadn't put forth his narrative.

And I was given some pause. ONE accuser leaves a lot of room for wondering. Three false accusations, even in collusion, even anonymous, seems - unlikely?

Still, my attitude was "Let's wait and see." I got at least one highly heated comment for being that moderate, from someone who was SURE he was innocent.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

Around now, this comment from a friend of his came out, but I read it rather later in the sequence. Owen Pallett's take.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

Then another woman came forward. Then another was interviewed, on CBC's afternoon show. Both still anonymous, but now we had at least one voice speaking directly. And yes, the interview was highly disturbing. No consent - the cornerstone of BDSM. Of ALL sex. Of ALL physical interaction between adults able to consent.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

Another very familiar line: people had known; people had whispered. But without anything that could be taken to a court, or a boss.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

At least one person created a twitter account back in April about Ghomeshi that's coming to light again now.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

We are now up to NINE women who've stood up - two of them have allowed themselves to be named.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

The first one named, Lucy DeCoutere, was interviewed on CBC, again, but this time, AFTER she had come forward to other venues. Her story was over 10 years old, but contained most of the same elements. Abruptly hit and choked - not during a sexual encounter, not after any discussion of BDSM, barely inside the door - by someone who afterwards treated the rest of the evening as perfectly normal**. How she could not process it at all, at the time, certainly not enough to come up with any clear response. How sudden unexpected abuse isn't easy to react to.

How, and this is significant, how hearing the other womens' stories convinced her to speak up. But she was the first to put a name to it.

But:

Innocent until Proven guilty.

On the wrong comment threads, she, and all eight other women, have been called liars, and bitches, and attention-mongers, and whores. Or all at once.

There seem to be a number of people who want to believe one man's testimony over that of nine women, some of whom spoke up independently and don't even know the names of the others, making collusion difficult.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

At least one person has cited that there are more false rape accusations than real rapes (Do I even need to say this is a pure lie?), and this is more of the same. I don't want to know if there are more of these than I've personally witnessed. One was enough.

At least one person has said that the fact that so many women are jumping up now is evidence the whole thing is being railroaded.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

Several people have said that they're in it for easy money - what money? - or for fame, or for revenge, or for just about any motivation other than "Maybe he did something wrong and should be investigated."

Several people have suggested at least some women might not even know him before they're telling these stories, something they seem to think a reporter doing due diligence might somehow miss.


Multiple people keep asking why they can't keep this whole thing private, and only a few acknowledge that Ghomeshi's letter, not the women speaking up since, is the reason it's in the public eye to this degree.

The fact that nobody went to the police or any other authority* prior to the media story breaking -- even the ones who came out to the media BECAUSE the media broke the story and they would now be heard, a pretty obvious causation - is brought up over and over.

Innocent until Proven guilty.

I've seen some ugly racism crop up against Ghomeshi - mostly to say he could be guilty because he's "one of THEM", not one of us. A way of making him a monster, an OTHER, an equivalent to the rapist in the bushes. A creep whose scary Middle Eastern culture taught him to be evil. Not a liberal Canadian. Not a normal man like me/my husband/my boyfriend/whoever it is we're desperately not trying to vilify today. Notallmen.

(I have no trouble distinguishing my own husband and brother from Ghomeshi without reference to anyone's ethnic origin. Neither of my relatives would beat a woman, and I know more than enough of their exes to know nobody will ever be coming forward making such accusations. I cannot say the same with confidence of Ghomeshi.)

Innocent until Proven guilty. innocent until proven guilty. Innocent until proven guilty. innocent until proven guilty. Innocent until proven guilty. innocent until proven guilty. Innocent until proven guilty. innocent until proven guilty. Innocent until proven guilty. innocent until proven guilty. Innocent until proven guilty. innocent until proven guilty.

Nobody is allowed to suggest he can do wrong without a court of law. Never mind that this is one way to GET him to a court of law.

Do I think he's guilty? I think the evidence is tending strongly that way. That's not a yes. It's a we don't know but we have good reason to believe. It's an I refuse to disbelieve nine women without evidence against THEM, either.

Do I think he should be investigated and charged? Damn straight. That's how you find out the answers.

Or.

At least, it should be and I want to believe that of our courts. We've certainly had proof this isn't always the case. Sometimes, even after conviction.

Do I think it was wrong or inappropriate for these women to go public in the media first?

NO.

Not when the alleged abuser has already had his say in the media.

Also.

I feel like I've seen this before. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than that.

And one thing these cases have in common? GOING PUBLIC FORCES ACTION THAT WOULD OTHERWISE NEVER HAPPEN. And I don't mean that by way of "if you don't report your abuse, it's all your fault if it happens again". That's BS, even if the person making the accusation weren't always treated as a liar, a whore, a gold digger out for wealth or fame. Not treated worse for speaking out or dealing with it..

I mean "Now that you've spoken, others speak."

I mean, "Oh, crap, people are watching. Now that we have witnesses, we're obliged to take this seriously, to not dismiss it the way we really want to. We're going to do it, and with luck, do it right."

Of course, I can't help note, all of the things I mentioned above didn't get dealt with right by the relevant due process. And I don't mean because I didn't like the verdict. The verdict was guilt. What happened afterwards was not just.

They got revisited, sometimes, after public outcry at a blatant, screamingly obvious miscarriage of justice.

So maybe I'm a bit cynical. A bit worried that even the courts won't answer. Even if the evidence is there and the guilt determined.

But we'll be able to watch. Because when it comes to the safety of the people targeted by a probable abuser, the priority isn't perfectly determining legal guilt. The priority is protect them and prevent more abuse. Because the law court can't provide that protection to victims, and future victims are entirely out of its purview. And the whispered warnings that have been happening for years absent that publicity only protected those few who happened to know someone who knows Ghomeshi.

But we'll know at least that here's someone to watch, someone not to trust. Because someone went public. Public knowledge protects everyone.


* One of the first four anonymous ones had reported she made a sexual harassment claim while he worked for CBC, and nothing came of it.

** There's a moment in Labyrinth where a character is telling a story about how she had something similar happen - an unexpected abusive turn in a previously mostly-normal situation, which then reverted to normal and left her half doubting it had even happened. I was worried it was going to ring as extreme and unrealistic to readers. I wrote that scene last November. I could almost have lifted that moment from Lucy DeCoutere's account verbatim. I was chilled.

***I'm not going to further address this side, because while it led to some interesting side conversations, and the public examination of an interesting point of law, it's a red herring.

“Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.” (Robert Conquest)

The above quote is one of many that live on the sidebar at Making Light. And it doesn't just apply to organizations. If anything, it seems to me to apply even more strongly to ideologies.

There's a Buzzfeed post that's ostensibly a privilege test but makes me wonder if it wasn't designed by someone who disagrees with the concept of social privilege and really wants to undermine people who actually try to use the concept in their discussions.

I do have some issues with the idea of privilege, and Nimue Brown here lists an entire set of ways it's overused and misused, many of which are worth discussing. As I say in a tl:dr comment to Nimue Brown's article, I find the problems with it to be balanced by the things the concept has allowed us to talk about that we previously couldn't address, but I did see where she was coming from.

But. This quiz.

So, I get about a 62/100, "yes you are somewhat privileged", which seems fair; I'm a bisexual woman, but I live in a country and a family and among subcultures where my sexuality is a serious non-issue, and on every other axis, I'm basically well off (White, in Canada, middle-classed now and always have been, cisgender, able-bodied, married to a man, in a Christian church, neurotypical, College degree.) If anything, I think my score ought to be higher (more privileged). The only things I could do to be more privileged are to be male (assigned so at birth, that is), be completely straight, and be outright rich.

But I know several people who got scores in the 30s and 40s that don't feel the test remotely accurately describes their actual level of privilege - they are in their own opinion and awareness much more privileged than that reflects. (One of them was a straight white male in a steady job who owns a home.)

In other words, the test is confirming the opinion of those opposed to the concept of privilege, and those who agree with the concept are finding it unsatisfying and inaccurate.

Just going through the test, I could see why.

1) It assumes, but does not say, that this test is skewed to the US first, to North America in general second, and to Europe and European Colonies/ex-Colonies overall.

Living in North America, with the probable exception of living on a First Nations Reserve, already adds a pile of privilege points. More in Canada with its vastly greater access to health care. I understand that no such test can cover all the world but failing to acknowledge that focus in the preamble is already a serious point against the test genuinely trying to show the variety of privilege.
__________

2) All questions are weighted equally. Thus "I've never been raped" is counted the same amount of privilege as "I don't know what Sallie Mae is." or "I feel myself to be physically attractive." Really?

I can quite easily come up with two sets of five questions each out of this list which would reveal VASTLY different levels of privilege or lack thereof to the majority of readers. Weighting the questions as more than one point each out be tricky, as the exact severity of each is subjective, but not to the tune of a near thirty-point difference between me and someone who would look substantively similar in privilege to me from an external perspective.
__________

3) it doesn't account for temporal change. Some of the privileges, such as weight, health, and money/class, can and have changed for some people over time. These leave scars, I grant you (Abuse even more so), but to the extent that a person who *ever* suffered them is forever and always counted as exactly the same level of privilege they were at *while* they were happening? A poor kid who is now as an adult working a well paying job with a good education is still counted as a poor kid who lacks money/class privilege. Sorry. I was sexually assaulted *once* when I was twelve. As a 37 year old woman, this is NOT something I think reduces my privilege to the same degree as it would someone to whom it was fresh.
__________

4) Let's count.

Of the questions:
- 9 are about race, though you can count 2 or 3 of the ones about religion as having crossover here.
- 14 are about sexuality
- 3 are about transgender, genderqueer and fluid gender identity.
- 5 are clearly meant to be about sexism (Focused on male/female gender relations), but some also apply to more fluid gender identities.
- 2 are sexual harrassment/assault, and rape, which sorta fit with gender but should be their own thing.
- 23 are wealth/class.
- 8 are education related, but with a strong overlap with wealth. (I will note I put "I had my own car in High School" under wealth not education.)
- 3 are questions about one's parents.
- 12 are questions about mental and physical disabilities, if you count the one about *affording* a therapist as in this category and not yet another one about wealth, and if you count the "I've used prescription drugs recreationally", which, um, what? Also, NB, only TWO of these questions are about physical disability, and one is the ability to afford medication, which, again, yet more overlap with wealth-as-privilege.
- 4 are questions about weight and "attractiveness".
- 11 are questions about religion, though a couple of them cross over into the "Race" category above.
- 2 are about bullying, and
- 4 are about general comfort with one's own identity.

0 about age, and there are issues with how we treat the elderly. 0 about abuse outside the sections on rape and bullying. While I agree that "Not abused" really shouldn't be considered a "privilege" by the original definition of the word, once you're including bullying and sexual assault, that argument is long out the window.


Are we actually saying that a poor cis straight Christian white able-bodied person is seven times as oppressed as a transgendered person? Are we saying that being raped is twenty-three times less damaging than poverty? Does someone gay/lesbian get hit with four times as much prejudiice and phobia as someone transgendered?

NB: I am *NOT* doubting or dismissing poverty as a major source of prejudice, or a badly ignored injustice or something we should be doing our best to eradicate. It's BIG. Jesus was all about taking care of the poor, and so should we be. But this test literally spends more questions on poverty than it does on race and religion combined.

If this test is in fact designed by someone to mess with the idea of privilege, making sure that any white male who's counted pennies EVER (even if it was years ago) shows up as just as little privileged as a black lesbian is a sure way to stir up trouble.

______

5) Some specific questions feel painfully badly chosen or badly written:
- I have never been the only person of my race in a room.
This one is the THIRD question, and it's the most amazingly poorly phrased question. ANYONE who has ever been alone in a room is the only person of their race present. BY definition, I qualify right this instant. Even if one accounts for the need to have another person present for the question to be fair, well, I would only have to talk alone once with one person of another race to qualify. I could even be using racist language that would embarrass Vox Day while I harangued them and yet I could use it as an excuse for not having to check off this box and admit to being privileged.

I took a couple of bus routes to work for a while that, going through a neighbourhood that's predominantly First Nations and new immigrants, occasionally meant I really was the only white person in the space for the duration of a stop or two. I still checked this off, because I knew what the question *meant*, and there was nothing about taking that particular bus or those particular couple of minutes that threatened me or isolated me racially in a way that was meaningful to my life. Not the way being the *one* black person in a college class, or the one Asian in a company staff meeting does.

- I have never been discriminated against because of my skin color.
I know white people who would count any request to leave a "Blacks only" or "First nations meeting" immediately as discrimination and check this off. Question as written feeds the trolls.

- I have never been called a racial slur.
I call *myself* a honky. Does that count? Obviously not, but again, those who want to bend the definitions of the test can, quite easily... the guy who sneered at the burlesque fundraiser for a women's shelter as "Do-good white people" was an ignorant jerk, but I don't call that set of words, even with their acknowledgement of the race of the majority, a racial slur the same way the n-word is.

Moreover, under the sexuality part of the questionnaire, they ask three questions about sexuality based slurs. Which immediately treats being called a "fag" *and* a "fairy" once each as twice as bad as a black person being called the n-word on multiple occasions. Which, pardon me, but note which one I don't feel I'm able to WRITE without crossing a line.

- I have never been sexually harassed or assaulted.
These are not ONE question. This is two questions. The difference between sexual harassment and sexual assault is not small. Someone who HAS suffered both should damn well be granted two points against privilege. (I say that having been assaulted but *not* harassed.)

- I don’t know what “Sallie Mae” is.
I didn't, but not because I didn't get student loans... wrong country, dude.

- I’ve used prescription drugs recreationally.
Maybe this is a marker of privilege because it's something only more well off people can do? I mostly just don't get its relation to the actual concepts of privilege.

- I have never worked as a waiter, barista, bartender, or salesperson.
Because these are the only minimum wage or near options out there? Or maybe working an "unskilled" job in a factory doesn't count because... ? This could have so easily been fixed with "I have never worked for an income below a living wage" or some equivalent.

- There is a place of worship for my religion in my town.
I wouldn't have seen a problem with this one, but at least one person said that as an agnostic, they still felt they didn't have a place of worship. Which I think is "Spirit vs. letter" fuss - but then again, it does fit into "Only member of your race in a room" level of poor phrasing to even allow for that kind of misinterpretation.

First things first: I wasn't offended by this particular meme by any legitimate definition of offended. I had little emotional reaction even when I thought "Oh, yeah, that's not really right." When I hit the comments and the claim about its context, I had a bit of an emotional reaction but not one I could describe as "Offended". It was too mild for that.

But I do think it deserves a closer look and some thinking.

This is the meme I saw pop up a few times today, and which a couple of people on my friends list shared or linked automatically, usually with a comment on it making them cry or making them think.

Things in Perspective

I saw the first couple of shots in it, and I kinda nodded, as one does. Yes, we have it a lot better overall. At least in part because some people go out and do hard things so we don't have to.

Then, the second juxtaposition made me say, "Hmmm."

And as I went on I had less nodding, "Yes this is perspective" and a lot more "Something's not right here."


_______

Thinking #1: What qualifies as trivial?

I have a friend. Not one of my closest friends, but a friend. We've helped each other move, hung around, and sometimes even regretted not hanging around more. But only sometimes.

This friend had a hard life. Living on her own at 13 levels of hard. Things were very bad for a long time, but I won't give more details even of the details I know. She's picked herself up a lot since those days, and is doing well by most peoples' criteria.

Which is part of why very few people can ever tell her if they feel that something is going badly.

Because she is the sort of person who does seem to sometimes take some pleasure in having had it worse. Because she can be remarkably unsympathetic to people whose problems are less bad than hers.

One of the things that warranted one of the header posts for the Dysfunctional Families threads on Making Light was this very point: "... the doubt whether one’s own situation is “bad enough” to be a problem." A commenter going by Laura in that thread had this to say about it: "Trauma dick-sizing is overrated. If it hurts you, it counts, and you're allowed to feel something about it, and to process those feelings."

It's also pointed out that it's often people whose feelings have been dismissed or outright ignored who wonder this.

I feel that a lot. I grant you there are some genuinely trivial problems in the world: "My latte is too hot" is a favourite example. On that very meme, "Wishing Summer would come quicker so you can wear your favourite clothes again" definitely qualifies. There are some things that people gripe about that make me think, "Oh, you poor unfortunate." in the most dripping sarcasm.

But several of the pictures in that meme have another message. Several of the slogans on the pictures could be as easily applied to people suffering depression. Could easily be applied to the state of the economy, the environment, or education.

"Wodnering how your future will turn out to be" could be the easy idling of a middle or upper class girl debating which college will accept her or whether she can afford a trip to South Asia before she continues school. Or it could be the question it's almost impossible even to contemplate for the person trying to figure out how to escape severe poverty. The person in the refugee camp in one of the very other images.

"Missing your old friends" might just mean they're now at a different school and you see them less. Or it could mean they've crossed the continent and live in another city. Or it could mean, even for a teenage girl, they've passed away. I consider myself lucky: I lost nobody significant to me in my school years. But we had a teen die in the year ahead of me in my school. And the year after. And one boy beaten into an extended hospital stay. I'm pretty sure their friends and even some "Mere classmates" missed them. And maybe they looked at pictures of their dead or battered friends that were as goofy and fun-filled as the picture of the girls in Mario and Luigi costumes, and wept over them?

Some of the others, like the second one, are flags for depression, which is a genuine non-trivial medical condition for many, and potentially deadly.

Maybe it's the fact that if I were stopped on the street and asked to name 5 people I know with depression, I doubt it would take me 10 seconds (It didn't when I tried it earlier today. Or just now -- and one of the names changed.) And that I know of a few people (Not necessarily the SAME people) who have made genuine suicide attempts. (And some who made cry for attention suicide "attempts", which I can't entirely take lightly either, because even if their life is not in the same danger, you can't say everything is really okay when that's what they feel it takes to get attention.)

Thinking #2: Teenage Girls

And I wonder how many of those "trivial" Justgirlythings problems would look less trivial if a different face was applied to the picture.

I wonder if some of the slogans would look less trivial if they were applied to images of the elderly ("Not being able to fall asleep because you're constantly remembering the past, present, and future", or "Not being able to live with your best friend" or "remembering is easy, it's the forgetting that's hard") instead of teenagers, and how many to images of men instead of women. In obviously impoverished settings.

Of the "serious pictures", the images of wartime, two feature women. One is a group of refugees. One is a widow. There are no pictures of women in service. They at least covered a range of ages. (On BOTH sides there is exactly one black person and nobody obviously any other non-white racial background, but I leave it to people better versed in racial issues to unpack that.)

But all the pictures, being taken from some girly source, are teen girls. Usually in some setting that usually hints that they at least have money and comfort.

This erodes what good message there is. Because there *is* something to be said sometimes for looking at the state of the world and some of the places in it and saying, "Y'know, my problems ain't so bad." There's something to be said for remembering that soldiers have a hard life with a huge danger of death or dismemberment or trauma. It's worth honouring them. (Though I don't think this meme honours them.)

But the actual takeaway is "No teenage girls have real problems. Ever. And almost no grown women either. Take men seriously. We do all the really hard work. We have the real problems. We're the only ones who really suffer and die."

I was a middle-classed white teenage girl. I had a lot fewer problems than I thought I did. This is flat truth.

But I call bullshit on extrapolating this universally.

Thing is, though, at first I thought this was accidental, reflexive sexism creeping in as an unintended second message.

If one commentor is to be believed, I was wrong.

Thinking #3: 4chan

One of the comments fairly far down notes that this meme actually originated in 4chan on a weapons board, and was meant to be funny. The person who noted this also thinks they are hilarious, and suggests that maybe other people haven't seen enough images of war. Which I think is ridiculous: "Look, you aren't desensitized enough". However, he is right that whoever posted these images saw them in their original context in 4chan and KNEW THAT.

I have a natural revulsion for 4chan, as one of the few places that has ever given me a true full visceral case of revulsion and horror at the sheer true level of hatefulness out there. So here I'm not, perhaps, wholly unbiased. She understated.

Nonetheless, I think this is an issue in itself.

A lot of people, seeing mostly the "servicemen, veterans, refugees and people in prison camps know true suffering that we in the free world don't", felt it was touching. Them, I have no beef with, though I think it's worth thinking about the first two points above a bit before agreeing with it 100%.


But knowing this was meant to be funny puts a whole nastier spin on it. It means that a lot of those faces of serious and suffering servicemen aren't meant to make you feel for them or what they're going through.

They're meant to be looking at the teenage girls with their first world problems and saying the equivalent of "LOLWHUT?"

Which is something on the order of the opposite of honouring soldiers or veterans. "Let's use your pictures to mock and deride others" is not honouring.

It being 4chan based, and intended as humourous, also almost certainly means the negativity towards women is not accidental, it's the actual true point of it. Because there is no (intended) message about the worth of veterans. There is only the intent to point and laugh at the women.

(It also implies something to me about why it's so pasty pale aside from the last image, and that's a whole other ugly thought.)

Of course, the other "perspective" message is there. That it was unintended can't erase it. But it can taint it.

Someone (two someones possibly but one was a vague enough comment to be unsure) also made a claim that one of the pictures of soldiers is of the Nazi army. I'm not that good with uniforms or context, if this is 4chan based and intended as humour, I can see that being inserted as an extra joke for the people who do know their military. And that adds the message, "Even the Nazis had more real problems and deserve more sympathy than first-world white teenage girls."

_________________

White Middle-class-and-up North American teenage girls are some of the more privileged people in the world, probably behind only white middle-class-and-up North American teens and men and some parts of Europe. A lot of them badly need a bit of perspective about their problems versus the level of drama they make. I sure did.

But it doesn't mean it isn't possible for genuine trauma to happen to such a person.

I did study the World Wars, and something of Korea and Viet Nam. I've been alive for two Gulf Wars and know servicemen and women current and recent. I think we do badly by our soldiers.

But I don't think a meme with so much underlying unpleasantness is anything like the way to honour their work or be touched thereby.


I don't have to be offended at a problematic thing to note that hey, something here is problematic.

I owed someone an apology the other day. Some people may recognize the phrase as there were witnesses, but I am being intentionally vague as the exact situation is potentially distracting from the point.

The situation was not entirely one-sided but it was obvious this other person felt hurt by what I had said, and that part of their lashing out was because of that hurt. My words had been intended to provoke a different response, but that was not what happened. Instead, they did injury.

I made the choice to address the fact that I'd hurt them rather than elaborate on the more complicated parts; which may be necessary in some future time, but would only at this moment increase the bad feeling all around. I chose to apologize.

In this situation, specificity as to what is being apologized for was necessary enough that "I apologize" or "I'm sorry" alone would not suffice. I needed to note it was the hurt, not some other part of the interaction, being addressed.

So I typed.

And the apology came out of my fingers as:

"If you were hurt by words, I apologize."

Actually, it came out with another more weaselly word in it than that, which I deleted immediately (recognizing it as a product of the part of me that wanted to bring up the other stuff now, and damn any bad feeling that caused). Which caused me to reread, and see what I'd really said.

I'm actually grateful that my snark almost slipped free, because I might have otherwise missed the damned "If" even as I was trying to make a proper and sincere apology. Because I didn't mean it, so I wouldn't have typed it, right?

Wrong, apparently. I've read too many apologies that included that sort of if. It came out automatically.

"If"

In this situation, that is the worst weasel word possible.

It suggests maybe the other person isn't really hurt, that they're faking the feeling or just plain don't have the capacity to feel such a thing. It suggests that I the high and mighty have a better idea what they feel than they do. It suggests that an apology should be conditional. "If, and only if you *really truly* feel this way and *really truly* prove you deserve it do I apologize. Otherwise, screw you."

Except that I know this person well enough to know they really were hurt.

That was the polar opposite of what I was trying to do with my apology.

I stared at it a while, then deleted those two letters and wrote instead,

"As you were hurt by my words, I apologize."

"As" pointed to the hurt as the cause for the apology, which implicitly affirms that the feeling is real and recognized. Much better.

(Later still I figured I could have made it shorter and simpler still by one tweak of punctuation: "You were hurt; I apologize." But by then I had sent my apology into the world.)

I hate that if. I have read rants far longer than this on why that "if" is pernicious and usually only used by people in the most insincere fauxpologies. I know better than to use that "if". And it still came out of my fingers.

This is why it helps to look at every word that comes out, however quickly and casually written. Things that seem easy, one short simple line, turn out not to be. We're sometimes trained and conditioned in ways we don't even catch until later.

I could have had my entire intent wiped out completely by two characters.

I Really need to buckle down on this stupid book if I really intend it to be done before the baby makes an appearance.

Of course, things were complicated by going back to make a POV change for several major scenes. I had to go through the scenes a couple of times to be sure where I should have the changes, which I can't do easily on the Dana, so the usual solution of "Run off to the library to type without distractions" wasn't as feasible as it should be.

__________________

Green Arrow: Year One (Andy Diggle and Jock)

This comic is four years old, nigh on five, so not exactly new, but I decided to pick it up because I always liked Green Arrow, and a Year One story, being a retelling of a character's origin, is going to be a newcomer-friendly entry point. (Not, I grant you, usually a major issue with your average superhero, but I've read enough other comics of other genres, especially manga, where that isn't the case, I'm allergic to reading too much out of order).

Anyhow, I recall the Green Arrow origin story always involved him being stranded on a random island with a bow and a need to survive. I don't recall if it always involved discovering criminals on said island, and beating them to get off, but it sounds like typical super-hero stuff, and that twist didn't feel new.

This version of the story is well written considering how much was crammed into its length, and the usual restrictions and assumptions of comic-book heroism (this version of Green Arrow is right back to maiming rather than killing people, and devising trick arrows to prevent needing to shoot deadly bolts at anything other than animals), but falls right into the obnoxious, noxious and undesirable territory of "What these people need is a Honky" when the current incarnation of criminals on the island turn out to have enslaved the local population (Those they didn't just murder and dump down a well -- that particular discovery scene was... effective), to grow their massive secret poppy crop. Of course, they're helpless to save themselves until some blond guy comes by and does it for them. I *don't* recall the original story being one of these, so if I'm right, that's a regression.

On that basis, I'd dismiss it as an uninteresting entry. But there's *one* character who does interest me, because in a story whose base narrative type was a bit less pernicious, she could have been a lot more. Taiana first appears as a helpless slave, heavily pregnant. She looks like a wide-eyed innocent with the only note of interest being her willingness to approach the site of a helicopter crash and try to help the men therein. Classic lovely native waif stuff, also classic set-up for the person who draws the Honky in to the local culture if anyone does (In this case, there's no time for that step in the mini-series, so they skip nigh straight from "White man meets natives" to "white man saves natives".)

However, on her reappearances, it turns out that Taiana is a fully-trained doctor, even if one forced to work with primitive tools, and a calm leader of her people. When Green Arrow is slow getting back to rescuing the slaves, she makes her own attempt to free them, which GA mostly aids and abets by creating a distraction to keep her from getting shot in the back. She's the one who gets the slaves to a boat, and finds them guns. Ultimately, she saves his life at least once by pointing a gun at someone (But not shooting, of course. The only people who kill are bad guys.) And, if certain hints in the last pages are to be taken, is doing the last section while in early labour (She gives birth pretty much instantly once her people are free).

I'd call that a thoroughly awesome character, and I would totally read a book just about her and what she does then and afterward (Opening a free clinic, or a series of them, wrangling to get adequate medical supplies against the odds, turning over assumptions about what her people, and particularly a woman therefrom, can do, all while raising a toddler alone) ... except that she spends too much dialogue telling Oliver Queen he's important and he's special and he made all the difference. Because that's the narrative voice of the "What these people need is a honky". (To some degree, it's also a part of this mini-series being Green Arrow's story, and partly a flaw in superhero comics that the super-hero must always be the most important person). But it doesn't matter how awesome the woman who does it all backwards and in high heels while heavily pregnant is. The guy has to be that little bit better -- or at minimum, she has to think so.

_______________

There are times I really want to write the story of Therien Damina.
The gist of the story idea is, he comes to the New World with the Hudson's Bay Company (And yes, there's a background story behind someone with a French name ending up with a British company -- but I don't know that one), and starts to talk to the native population. But then Therien, in his eagerness to help and his too-shallow understanding of the Cree nation, makes some severe mistakes and screws up royally, causing the actual central problem (the only part of which I really know at this point is that it involves a very angry Bear Spirit, which he reads as A Bad Guy, something to be rid of, when it's nothing of the sort). Things only get better when he gets out of the way of the Cree people and lets them fix what he made wrong. The actual heroes I rather intended to be the elders of the people, with some hope that, with sufficient study, I can be sure the ultimate hero is a woman.

Then there are all the times I know why this story is not for me to tell. At minimum, not yet. No chops, no research, no research discipline, not nearly enough grasp of the history or the people. Not nearly enough of the actual story nuggets (Most of which would need to come from the research - even the bear spirit thought popped up due to an essay read for another subject - so won't hit spontaneously the way that the Serpent Prince plot kernels did, which only required looking at an extant story sidelong and asking a stupid question.)

_______________

A thought I mentioned in passing a few times, but which I think is worth chewing on.

When shopping for baby clothes, I looked at what i have so far, and the question "what if we're all wrong and this turns out to be a girl?" popped up.

My conclusion on the spot, and which still seems true looking at what I have, seems to be that there's not a thing clothes-wise that i wouldn't also put on a girl, no problem. NO shade of green or blue that screams boy to me, though some will to other people, no depiction of animals, or dinosaurs, or rocket-ships, that couldn't be put on a female body. The only one that felt even fractionally iffy was the one with the construction trucks, and that one I probably wouldn't have bought for a boy, either, left to my own devices (mom did. And it's pale blue and fuzzy, so I decided it was acceptable.)

The reverse would not have been true. There are still some colours (and I include colours I like, like lavender, not just the pinks I often don't) and some subjects that I would have bought for a girl and hesitated about using if surprised by a boy.A girl can wear blue, dammit, and who cares if she's taken for a boy by random strangers, but a boy can't wear lavender with flowers. Gasp. He might be *mistaken for a girl*. And that would be awful.

Fortunately, I don't seem to have this same sticking point, so far, about picture books (The only children's playstuff I have already in the house besides the everygender-safe stuffed animals), whose stories might actually influence the growing mind, or about most toys (The majority of baby toys and many toddler toys I've seen are pretty gender neutral. This changes as they get older, and turns into a whole different ball game. But the worst examples of female-gendered toys, the ones I would consider the least suited to give to a boy, are the ones *I* didn't much play with as a child and wouldn't buy -- like Barbie.)

But I do see this as a hint of what has been pointed out about current attempts to address gender equality - girls can be more masculine than they used to be and still be girls, but woe betide the boy who is feminine.* Even though the latter takes (at least) as much personal courage.

(Random side point. I've always thought I'd take "men's rights" groups more seriously if, rather than wanting to reclaim already-masculine things from those grubby female hands, they wanted entry into traditionally female spheres. If, rather than wanting to have men-only gaming groups to counter womens' desire to occasionally game with each other instead of always pushing into a male-majority space, men's rights advocates wanted to have men's nights that involved giving one another manicures, or learning embroidery and crochet, instead of being the minority, if present at all, at famale-majority get-togethers of this kind. And that's before you get to the "Men's Rights" types who are effectively rape apologists, a group for whom I have two words.)


* Transgender and genderqueerness add piles of complication on both sides. This point, however, is mostly about the cisgendered cissexual boy who still likes 'girly' things, or the cisgendered cissexual girl who likes "boy stuff".

(If you want baby thinkies or renovation updates or the like, ask me later. There's stuff going on, to be sure.)


Getting closer and closer to the end of Soldier. And oh boy is this last segment going to need editing later.

The problem is both that a lot happens and not much happens. Contradictory? Well, yes. Right now, I have long segments which boil down to hobbits soldiers walking. I have stretches where I felt a particular character fell out of sight and needed a moment on stage again. I had stretches where I wanted to establish what the heck the pattern of the caravans and the mountain passes are like. Some will be cut. Some will be abbreviated. Some - and not always the ones I first expect - turn out essential for a character, thematic or world-building reason.

It's because of the last that I seem to have to write them all out. Because what feels essential when I'm drilling through may prove to be one of the first things cut. And what feels like extraneous rambling -- well, I'll be honest. If I think *as* I'm writing it that it's probably unnecessary, it's often cut. Sometimes before the editing (I lost a four-hundred word scene in less than 24 hours this week alone). But that's not usually how I feel while I'm writing. I'm interested in the characters, in working out their banter, in the slow travelogue bits. The fact that much of this will end up extraneous in the long run, and even the fact that I KNOW this, isn't the same as not having fun while writing it.

Once in a while, when the word count piles up, I wish I were the sort of writer who could plan it all out ahead, and write only what I need, and not have to add bits that will only get chopped later. However, when I do know, that well, what's going to happen, it turns as often as not into a bit of a slog for me. I prefer to be surprised. The little moments when someone turns around and says something that is just so true to their character in particular, or commits some small act that makes me rethink their whole personality... those can't happen if I don't allow myself to write a pile of extraneous pages of hobbits soldiers walking.

_____________________

I have another problem with this book.

I've said before that these books overall are my most heteronormative, masculine-focused traditional fantasy stories. The Serpent Prince is mostly the coming of age of a young man in a patriarchal society. I think I fit in enough women (and a few gay characters) with agency and intelligence not to have it come across too badly. However, only two characters carry over into the next book, and both are (straight) men.

Soldier of the Road does not include much female point of view or agency. Period. (It's pretty weak on gay characters, too, moreso since there's a streak of homophobia among some of the soldiers). He meets women and he treats them as humans, but most of their roles are passive. The active players are fellow soldiers and caravan guards, a profession strongly skewed masculine (Also strongly skewed to young and physically healthy males). It's not until halfway through, and a particular frizzy-haired middle-aged wizard, that we have a woman with her own active role.

Oh, and the villain and her daemon both (Though nobody knows, or considers, the gender of a huge invisible daemon-monster while its ripping their limbs off.)

I've been trying to figure out whether there are any characters whose gender I could change. But this is made especially hard with the soldiers, because the difficulty of finding someone with whom to have heterosexual sexual relations with *is* a plot point. Twice. (Since Ketan can't even conceive of trying it the other way). The two most obvious active roles that could change without hurting that plot point are both characters who get killed off, which... has its own problems. (Book one already skirts Woman in Refrigerator territory once).

At one point, I started an attempt at the opening scene from the woman's point of view, because A) I like occasionally giving an outside view of Ketan, B) I have one other section in this book from another point of view, and right now it feels structurally odd to have only the one POV switch (Serpent had three, which worked much better) and C) she could give another perspective on events at the end of the prior book which gives one a way to give a synopsis that doesn't bore those who read said book. But I didn't think it worked, in part because getting even a fraction of her story about why she meets him dragged like all the other hobbits soldiers walking, even if this time it was a farmer walking.

The other thing is, books three and four don't have this problem. Some people finally recur from the first book, and others are introduced, and at least one more woman gets a point of view. And it really is one big story in the long run, divided into books mostly for purposes of structural cohesion and commercial viability.

Which makes me wonder how much I should worry about book two of a long story failing not only the Bechdel test, but several other measures of reasonable gender balance. Since it is a long story.

I was talking to a friend the other day about some frustrations she's been having. In the course of this, she complained "Doesn't (mutual friend) understand I was in a sexually abusive situation, and he can't just (irrelevant)?"

And I can only thank heaven I didn't actually say what I thought in that moment -- which was, Of course, it's not like it was real sexual abuse...

Of course, a moment after I thought it, I realised that if anybody else had said that thought aloud, I'd be one of the first to jump down their throats. Also, Bullshit, for several reasons:

1) The situation hurt her as if it were abusive. Ergo...
2) She was there, I wasn't. Her word trumps that of anyone who tries to say she's wrong who wasn't there.
3) If her telling of events is remotely accurate, it fits the definition of not looking for consent.
4) She's not even remotely the kind of person to 'make up stories' for attention. She didn't enjoy talking about it, or get anything but more uncomfortable and unhappy in doing so. Where, then, would she have reason to say it happened if it didn't.
5) She's also not unaware how victims get villainized. It affected a huge number of her actions, the fear of 'what people would think' if she told her side. Because he's a nice guy.
6) Most of all, when she described it to me, I thought it was wrong, nasty, skeezy and bad. And I still do. Even as a part of my brain managed to file it as "not quite abuse", I knew it was inappropriate behaviour, that would hurt the one subjected to it.


The thing is, I'm not exactly ignorant of how we as a culture are encouraged to think that sex is something women owe to men. That it's okay to push and press and manipulate. And how easy it is to doubt a nice guy and someone close and intimate can be the one to commit such an act. I've called other people on not wanting to call things assault or rape. I thought I was sufficiently aware of these issues to not fall into the same trap as others.

So how did I let myself slip into thinking it, even for a second, even knowing the thought was wrong?

Part of it is that in this case, I heard both sides of the story.

In his, he did a couple of things that were potentially skeezy, but with no intention to hurt, and -- and this is of course key -- he swears he stopped as soon as she told him to.

In her version, he did stop when she told him. But then he'd ask and press and try to convince her because *he* wanted to. Knowing she didn't. And soon after, he'd do the same skeezyish thing again. And again. And even absent that, he would pressure her again. No didn't actually stop him so much as give her a temporary reprieve.

The stories were similar enough to be compatible. I can't go into more detail (There are already some people who might think they know of whom I refer. Please, don't go there) but frankly, I could, once I heard both sides, easily see how he could feel he was walking - narrowly - on the side of acceptable, while she would not. It only takes a little wilful denial of how nasty pressure and manipulation can be, or a little denial that the pressure hurt.

The more when he did say, at least once, that he felt that because they were in a relationship, it wasn't wrong for him to want her. Not in the tone of a boyfriend expressing frustration, but of a man demanding his due.

No, he never raped her. But the behaviour wasn't wholly that of someone who respected her, or wanted things to be mutual. It was the behaviour of someone for whom what he wanted in the bedroom was paramount, and what she wanted was irrelevant.

Which comes down to treating a woman like your own personal sex toy.

Which is abusive.

But of course, he's a nice guy.

Also, of course, it's not possible to be sexually abusive without pinning someone down and raping them. Right? it's not real. It doesn't count.

When i was twelve, I was chased around and tussled with a coupled of guys a bit older than me. it started with them throwing rocks. It ended -- well, actually, it ended the moment I slashed the sharp edge of my glasses, folded in my hand,across one boy's face, so I could get up and run like I should have done from the start, but didn't. (Excuses: I was a slow runner, and I was sure they'd catch up. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of scaring me off. I thought I just had to land a punch of my own and they'd back off. I was twelve. Critical thinking on the spot was not my strong suit.) But before that, it ended with me pinned to the ground while he pinched and fondled my breasts. That's sure as hell sexual assault in my book.

I was shaken, but not really traumatized in a real way. But I only have to think about what it would mean for a boyfriend to have done that kind of thing -- not in a safe, trusting situation* where he'd stop at a word if the fun wrestling turned sour, but ignoring my will -- to know exactly how much worse that would have felt.

In some ways, I think it would be easier to classify if he hadn't *appeared* to stop when she said no. (And I say "appeared" advisedly). I wouldn't wish worse on her for the WORLD, but it would be so much easier to convince people this was sexual abuse.

Including, it seems, some part of me, that calls it skeezy gladly enough, but wants to cringe at saying 'sexual abuse'. The words are dangerously powerful. The way some women who believe in equal rights, equal pay, and the lot seem to fear to be called feminists. Because even if you fit the definition, using the word... is scary. It points out the reality of this world.

I have no conclusion, except that I need to check my assumptions. Again.

________________

* And yes, I've played bedroom games that looked like they pushed consent far worse than a few unwanted touches to my breasts. But those involved known boundaries, prestated interests, and a partner deeply trusted.