Questions...and answers

I've been running into a lot of casual misogyny lately, and it's kind of driving me crazy.

It doesn't really surprise me, I suppose. I've had experience with these sorts of attitudes ever since I was young because I started very young to answer the question, "So what do you want to be when you grow up?", with answers that were not considered the "right" answer.

You see, back in the Sixties, when I was growing up, little girls were still most often expected to answer that question with, "A mommy."

But that answer never came out of my mouth, as far as I can recall. Depending on when the question was asked, the most common ways I answered that question were, "A teacher." Or "A writer." Or "An astronaut." For a long time, I was convinced that I was going to be the first woman on Mars. Oh, well. For awhile, while I was a teenager, my answer was even, "Color commentator for broadcasts of Dodger games." No, really. I love baseball, as those of you who follow along here might have noticed, and I thought that would be a very cool job. I still think that would be a very good job.

Often, when I came up with one or another of those answers, the follow up question was, "But, don't you want to get married and have babies?"

Sigh.

I wasn't quite sure why everyone seemed so certain that being something else and being a wife and mother were mutually exclusive propositions. After all, my dad always told me I could be anything I wanted to be. My mom, not so much - I greatly disappointed her by never giving her any grandchildren - but even she didn't try to discourage me from the other plans I had.

As the women's movement gathered steam, gradually I ran into less and less of those attitudes, at least in some venues. On the other hand, I even left a church at least in part because they kept trying to shove me into that "wife and mother" mold to the exclusion of doing anything else. But, out in the world away from that particular circumstance, people seemed to be more willing to concede that a woman might want to do something else. Or something else, too. Sure, there was talk of glass ceilings and the mommy track, but it was at least admitted that women could do other things if they wanted to.

Now, though, I see more of the attitude that women should "know their place." And, yes, granted, that never really went away completely. But even in situations where women are part of the workplace, I see more of the same "know your place" attitudes directed at women - and not always just by men - than I did for a while. There is expectation - still? again? - that women are supposed to be deferential to men just because they are men. There is a lot of "mansplaining" going on, in which men seem to assume that women don't really know anything and have to have every little thing explained is overly simple terms, much like things must be explained to a child.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

I don't know. Maybe it's just where I live. But the fact is, I run into this crap on a regular basis, and seemingly more now than I did, say, ten or fifteen years ago.

When I came on this video clip shared on my Facebook page today, I decided I needed to talk about this and to share the clip. This is from several years ago, 2006, I think, but everything in it still holds true today. And it seemed appropriate since it grew out of the evolving answer to one question that writer and director Joss Whedon keeps getting asked and explains the evolution of his answer when asked. The question concerns why he keeps writing "all those strong women characters". Bear with the introduction to get to his explanation. It's worth the few minutes to get to the meat of what he said:

In which I prove, apparently, that anything can become political...

It's another busy day today. Not in exactly the way I had planned, but busy nonetheless. I was supposed to go to an SCA Arts and Sciences Day, but my roommate had to go to a work meeting, and so here I am. It's fine, though. I really need to work on the book I'm writing, which I've been doing already.

However, while I was taking a break and bounding randomly around the Internet, it came to my attention that today is actor Alan Tudyk's birthday. This probably doesn't have much to do with anything except to Mr. Tudyk and his family and friends. However, mentioning this gives me the opportunity to celebrate yet another of my geekdoms and share my love for "Firefly", in which he played the role of Wash.

Now, I didn't come to Firefly until long after its short, but long lamented, run on the Fox network. Yay, DVDs. People kept telling my that I really needed to see the show, which can best be described as a space western. And I kept saying, "Yeah, right." And then I did sit down with the DVDs and watched the entire series in a couple of long sessions. It took me about an episode and a half to realize how brilliant the show is. And it is brilliant.

I know people have mixed reactions to the work of Joss Whedon, who created not only "Firefly", but the "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer" television series (and wrote the film of the same name) and its spin-off, "Angel", as well as the series "Dollhouse" and the Internet musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". He also wrote and directed the 2012 film, "The Avengers", and has done some other film work. I didn't like "Buffy" much, to be honest, and I didn't get to see enough of "Dollhouse" to really figure it out, which was why I wasn't particularly eager to watch "Firefly".

'm glad I finally did watch it. But I know that I'm not going to convince those of you who aren't Whedon fans, so please don't consider this one of those "you must watch "Firefly", if you watch it enough you'll fall in love with it" attempts. Rather, I'm just here to say that I love it, not that you have to. I've had enough people involved with fandoms that I don't care for do that to me that I'm not about to try to do that to anyone.

However, I ham going to show you this, which is a compilation of quotes from the show put up on YouTube by someone calling themselves jblottingink. Those of us who love the show have a particular fondness for quotes from the show, which do a good job of highlighting the personalities of the characters. I don't love all of the quotes contained in this clip, but most of the ones I do love are incorporated in it:



And then there is this case, which grew out of a quote from "Firefly", and one university police chief's knee-jerk reaction to that quote. Instead of me rehashing the facts of the case, which I remember from when it was going on, just watch this video report about it. I'll tell you up front that it is one-sided and sides with the professor who posted the quote that upset the police chief on his door, but I think that it also makes a good point:



And that point is, at least in my opinion, that knee-jerk reactions about anything, to the right or to the left, in terms of being too politically correct or not being politically-correct enough, are dangerous. In this specific instance, people have to look at the context of what someone says, not just that they said it. I think the video has explained very well what was meant by the quote, and it wasn't that the person who said it was going to kill the person they were talking to, which was how the police chief clearly took it. Mal Reynolds, as played by Nathan Fillion, the character the quote comes from, wasn't telling Dr. Tam, who was concerned about it, that he (Mal) wasn't going to sneak up on the doctor and kill him, but would give him a fair chance in a fair fight if (not when) he found the doctor to be a danger to the captain's ship and crew. If anything, the professor, by posting the quote, was telling his students that he would be fair with them, not that he would ambush them or treat them unfairly in any way. All the police chief saw, apparently, was the word "kill" in the quote and immediately saw a threat.

Sigh.

Maybe that's what's wrong with the world today - well, one of the things. There are too many people who can only see words in isolation and are not able to (or willing to?) analyze their context to find out what is really meant by all the words, in context. The Right does it. The Left does it. Even the Middle, or what's left of it in the United States today, probably does it on occasion. They all need to just stop it and realize that the world is complicated, words carry all kinds of meanings not just individually but in association with other words in the sentences and paragraphs surrounding it.

We have an unfortunate phrase in our culture here in the US. Often, when someone gets upset with someone else, they sort of automatically say, "I'm going to kill you" or "I'm going to kill them" when they don't really mean anything of the kind. Personally, I'm uncomfortable with that usage. I'm not generally a violent person, and as far as I can remember, I have never, ever wanted someone dead. I've never even wanted someone I'm upset with or have disagreed with hurt, physically or emotionally. Really. But my discomfort is bedside the point here. I am a reasonable person, and so know that of the people who use this phrase, rarely or constantly, roughly one in a million of them, if that, actually mean that they want to kill the person they name when they say that. That the police chief in the case outlined in the video I've linked didn't get that kind of worries me, and not just because of the free-speech implications of someone in authority having the ability to dictate what people can and can't post on their office doors. What I worry about more is the state of mind of someone who apparently assumes that anyone who uses the word "kill", or posts the word "kill" in a context that is clearly not threatening, poses the threat that they are ready, willing, and able to actually kill someone.

That's just a ludicrous leap to make, I think.

Well. I didn't mean to get all political here today. But when I found the video about that professor's case and saw how it tied in to "Firefly", I wanted to share it.

However. It's Saturday. Enjoy however much you have left of the day where you are in the world. It's lunch-time here, and I think I'm going to find something to eat.