About Time To Say How *About* Those Menz

So... back in the summer of 1983 or 1984 I lived in an off-campus house with about six other people, one of whom was a rising-star chef and caterer in town. She was from somewhere on the east coast, had an undergraduate degree in art and a masters and/or PhD in ceramic engineering from, I think, Cornell. She'd moved out in the 1970s for a job at one of Boeing's materials research labs and... been pretty much sidelined the moment... the entire male chain of command in her department discovered that someone had hired a woman with a technical degree. Now to (strive to) be fair, she would have been hired at roughly the peak of the infamous cost-plus military contracting scandal, when contractors would pad out costs as extravagantly as possible in order to increase the fixed-percentage defined profits. And so like the rest of the industry Boeing was also hiring, and paying engineers and architects to perform vocational-school-level drafting, and therefore it's not *too* surprising that upon hiring her they relegated my old roommate to marginalizing, deadening, discouraging, and demeaning make-work.

Fairness aside, though, she said management, and her co-workers, and practically everyone else she had contact with made it absolutely clear, though in meticulously rehearsed un-actionable terms, that she wasn't welcome, she'd never be welcome, and she should just find other work, definitely not for Boeing and preferably not in Washington State.

In other words the problem wasn't her, her brains, the provenance of her advanced degree, or the high marks she got from her professors, nor was it the complexity of the tasks she was assigned, nor was it the complexity of *any* science or technology task in her department, which she was certainly competent to perform. Instead it was the consciously, egregiously hostile environment she had to face if she wanted to be a woman working in hard sciences.

So. When I read Mary Garth's post in Stone Court about Lisa Belkin's New York Times article documenting how when it comes to women dropping out, classroom and workplace hostility accounts for more than "math is hard" I wasn't terribly surprised.

Nor am I surprised with Garth's observation that if the problem is systematic boys-behaving-badly-club behavior then maybe the solution isn't "fixing" women applicants with more leadership and coping skills but, as Garth pithily puts it in her title, "Change the Men, You Idiots!"

[Via Ann Bartow. --fl]

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Similarly there's a pretty sharp guest post by Jennifer Drew over at The F-Word decrying the new-ish tendency to use the word "vulnerability" when discussing victims of men's violence against women and girls**.

I will return to the word vulnerability. Take, for example, a court case which recently ended with the conviction of Karl Taylor who deliberately murdered Kate Beagley. Judge Giles Forrester, when passing sentence on Taylor, told him: “You took advantage of the vulnerability of that girl [girl? Beagley was an adult woman] for your own ends.” No, Judge Forrester, Karl Taylor did not take advantage of Beagley’s supposed vulnerability. What Taylor did was to deliberately plan his attack and manipulate the situation in order to get Beagley away from the eyes of passers-by. Taylor murdered Beagley as they sat on a park bench late one evening. Note: Taylor murdered Beagley when it was dark and his murderous attack would have been less noticeable than if it were daylight. I see no vulnerability here, but rather clever, careful planning on Taylor’s part, plus his misogynistic hatred of women.

...

Defining women and girls who are victims of male violence as ‘vulnerable’ not only pathologises them, but presumes only ‘vulnerable’ women and girls will be subjected to male sexual and physical violence. This also feeds into the ‘just world belief’ which many women and men subscribe to. In essence, if a woman adheres to certain rules she is supposedly guaranteed never to be subjected to male sexual or physical violence.

...

Very clever is it not? Once again the focus is put on the actions of the female victims, deflecting attention and accountability away from systematic male violence against women. Yes, individual men do commit violence against women, but portraying these males as individual deviants who are attracted to the ‘vulnerability of women and girls’ serves another purpose. By portraying female victims of male violence as ‘vulnerable’ we can ignore how patriarchal society teaches men as a group their biological maleness supposedly makes them innately superior to women and therefore it is natural for men to dominate and control women.

Read the quotes in context here.

Same sort of issue, just a different context: the solution of teaching women to be less "vulnerable," while not exactly useless, does sort of quickly run into diminishing returns. The value is limited because... look, what happened at U-Conn the other week didn't happen because Melissa Bruen was particularly *vulnerable.* I mean she physically subdued her first assailant and then fought her way out of a whole fucking *crowd* of attackers a few moments later. I'm around 6'4" and 220 pounds and I couldn't say I could do the same so... again if the problem isn't really about the *victims* then maybe it's time to start looking at... "changing the men, you idiots."

Now. I happen to think that *if* we're going to use the language of "idiots" each of us needs to be careful assuming that we're not one of the idiots Mary Garth suggests is getting in the way of changing men. (This is a rare area where anti-feminists can take most but not all the credit for really bad approaches.) But I *also* think *affirmatively* bringing it to men to end discrimination and assault is the direction we need to turn.

(Note: A development I just ran across a minute ago isn't *directly* related to this post, but Ann Bartow has a link that suggests one possible avenue for doing something about it. That's for a different post though. For now I'm just trying to endorse the idea that it's past time we )

[** Note: Drew singles out a case where a judge uses the word "children" when only girls were attacked, but in general there are approximately as many predatory male pedophiles who specialize in boys as specialize in girls. And while I'm pretty sure that, at least locally to Seattle, the term "vulnerability" is used in reference to minor boys, based on my own experience where the attitude was something closer to "well, he just got an early start with the ladies, didn't he" instead of ZOMG, I'll grant her the point. --fl]