Women, Men, Power, Priviledge

Cynthia Nixon, who’s character “Miranda” is an
archetype of female empowerment

So I was thinking recently about what it means to be a strong woman, or a woman with power.  In my own experience, I’ve seen that the styles of the male project managers I work with are very direct.  When they ask for something, they expect it to be done, and don’t fuss about trying to convince people to do it. I’ve tried this and it doesn’t work.  From me, people want to be “asked.” They want me to subordinate myself to them in order for them to feel ok doing what I asked.

The (still prevalent) biases between races, genders, etc are well documented.  We know that they continue and will for a while, because in the grand scheme of things, equality is a very recent idea. Women also (on average) appear to be better communicators and social facilitators.

This got me thinking backward.  I wonder if the long standing power inequalities of men and women have groomed modern women to compensate for their lack of overt power by making us better at complex manipulation and social navigation.  We can’t just come out and ask for what we want and expect to get it, so women have been selected for who can still get what they need by more…creative means.

This lead me to think that all those guys (my guy included) who complain that women aren’t clear, that we are always trying to make things more complicated, or worse, that we’re evil manipulators, well, maybe you have your own ancestors to blame.

(p.s. my use of maybe in that last sentence was strategic.  Apparently, people are more likely to not challenge what a woman says if she plays down it’s forcefulness with a “maybe” or a “I’m not sure, but”)

This Guy is Smart (and also a good talker)

This guy talks about what I guess I knew intuitively when I was younger.  You can’t have a great job and a great career (and marry the person of your dreams) just anywhere.  You have to go to the right place where the right opportunities are available.

I left Hamilton and went to Toronto and didn’t look back. I knew that I was more likely to meet people I would like and have career opportunities I would excel in in a big city.  Steel town was never going to do it for me.

I think of my friends who are still in Hamilton and I know, to some extent, their lives and careers are shaped by being there.

Immigration has been driven by this forever, but for some reason moving and “leaving home” still has a stigma for many.  Sometimes you get called opportunistic or ungrateful.  I think that every person is different and has to go where they will get to be the person they want to be.

TV Shows That Are Good

Mad Men -  Because if you can’t portray minorities with deceny because of the time period, then you might as well make the women complex.  Bravo.  I see a bit of myself in every female character on the show. Given the circumstances I could be Peggy, Joan, Betty, Trudy or Bobbie.  Depends on my hotness : smartness : talentedness ratio, really.

Dexter – We all want revenge against the wicked; and we all know that it makes us wicked in turn.  Dexter fulfills all fantasies.  There should be a fundamentalist Christian version of the show.  Y’know, maybe someone who could smite people down with the power of their thoughts. It would probably make them a less excitable bunch.

Battlestar Galactica – Maybe this one is just good because all the other sci-fi stuff is crap.  I loved Star Trek.  I totally identify with everyone in Trekkies the movie, but BSG makes it look like schlock.  It’s more nuanced, more thought out, and more relevant to the actual human experience.  We’re flawed, our creations are flawed, and yet we keep hoping and striving,  Ahhhh, a show after my own life-philosphy (except more optimistic because it assumes a grand order to things).

30 Rock – This is just the best written show currently on television.  Period. I’m not going to get into the debate on what is the best written of all time, because All in the Family would place higher in my books and I’m sure there are others out there that I haven’t seen.  But still, Tinay Fey is an amazing writer and this show is clearly too smart for most people in America.

It’s Coming Back

Vancouver post shop Rainmaker is redeveloping the ’90s animated series ReBoot as a trilogy of feature-length films, with the help of the social networking site Zeros 2 Heroes.  link

Yay!! Reboot is one of my all-time favourite shows! This is so alphanumeric. I can’t wait.

Rights Contradiction?

I read here (post 7) that without a terms of service saying otherwise, User Generated Content such as comments is the property of the user. The logic is simple, in order to copyright an idea you simply have to write it down. So the minute I type “This post sucks!” it becomes the exclusive property of moi.

Thus, unless a webmaster includes a Terms of Service legally allowing them to manipulate/delete the content, technically it is illegal for them to do anything to it. In your face Perez!

This is all fine and dandy and I’m glad that rights are protected in this way, but to me it just seems ironic that the really low quality content on the web is protected, but if celebrities walk down the street they can basically be assaulted by photographers who make money off their image, and this is totally legal.

You may find it hard to feel sorry for celebs, after all their image is essentially how they get paid. But if you don’t feel sorry for them, maybe you’ll feel sorry for this guy who sent in his secret to Post Secret:

Productivity Killer

The TED conference in California every year brings together tons of innovators, thinkers, scientists, artists. (Think IdeaCity, but older and better.) Anyway, it has recently come to my attention that they’re posting videos of speakers who have been there over the years. It’s like a goldmine of recent trends in thinking.

Check out this talk from Malcom Gladwell just to wet your appetite. I’ve been watching these in the background on my computer all day.

Revised Curriculum

People are STUPID. Especially people who get themselves into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt on their credit cards and through loans for renovations and weddings and completely superfluous crap. They are just DUMB. (see NY Times article.) But it makes me think. History? Not an essential class for the stupid among us (and clearly there are a lot of them). I don’t give a crap if the retarded know the origins of our country. They are much better served learning financial planning. I call for an immediate change to the curriculum. Financial planning in topics such as “Delayed Gratification: how saving can work for you not now – but later”, “Meal Planning on a Budget: why buying prepared foods and pop is NOT the best thing to do if you’re trying to save money” and finally at the more advanced level “Things You Don’t Need: why it’s ok not have something just because there was a commercial for it”.

They just need to know. Somebody should tell them before they get into trouble. No?

Switching Teams

I know “Switching Teams” is a Seinfeld reference for going from gay to straight, but I’m gonna use it here to mean crossing the divide between teens and adults.

It totally hit me that I’m not a kid anymore when I read this comic at XKCD.com. I laughed because I imagined watching an awkward, gawky teenager squirm and that made me feel super happy inside.

Clearly I’m totally evil. Making someone who is going through the most wrenching change of their entire life even more uncomfortable than they already are seems like it should be wrong. But somehow I have to hang my hat on the excuse “I was there once too, I should be able to laugh at it, because I’m laughing at myself, however belatedly.”

Yeah, that worked. Guilt gone.

In your face teenagers! You’re totally gonna be embarrassed in a couple of years about that outfit and the way you have your tongue shoved all the way down that really ugly guy’s/girl’s throat! But for now, you have no idea, and I enjoy it.

ADDENDUM: Now that I think about it, I remember enjoying freaking out adults when I was a teenager. So y’know what? The gloves are off. It is ON!

Blame the CRTC

After my experience with having this blog quickly picked up by google and sending out an alert to someone who was named in the blog, I decided to google alert “MuchMusic” just to see if any forums or bloggers say anything about it or the work that comes out of there.

My findings are interesting.  It seems to me that not a lot of people blog about MuchMusic, but many use the word “MuchMusic” as a quick indicator of all things pop in Canada, and often in the past tense.

This isn’t totally troubling, since the kind of people who blog often are not the people who watch MuchMusic.  The Much audience is a little more passive – they want help finding and sorting through music, while I think active bloggers are probably also the kind of people who will go out and search on their own for new music.

But I wonder why MuchMusic can’t have something for both?  And that’s where I think the CRTC comes in.  On-air they’re limited by a license that says they have to be all music all the time, however, they have a legacy of being a youth brand.  But in an environment where the youth market is fragmenting, in order to still be about Music AND Youth, Much has to become the anti-niche channel.  All this while the internet becomes highly niche skewed.

Seems like a rock and a hard place to me.  The easiest way to reach youth?  Online.  The easiest way to attract people online?  Being niche. (at least, that’s the received wisdom).

Let’s see if they can’t give people online something to talk about.

It’s Totally a Conspiracy

Those “Above the Influence” commercials totally make me want to get high, and I never get high. But those commercials are so trippy and whacked it makes me think “Whoa, that looks like it would feel cool.”

It’s the kind of thing that makes you think that “Prison Song” by System of a Down is true. They’re totally trying to get us to take more drugs. Completely. They certainly don’t seem to be able to get people to stop doing drugs.