Feminism – RI Future

July 22, 2015

RI Women’s Fund opens applications for policy learning program

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The Women’s Fund of Rhode Island has officially begun the application process for its 2015-2016 Women’s Policy Institute.

The institute, which began in 2011, works to increase the number of women leaders that are involved in state policy creation. Members will first be trained, and then will work to draft and support legislation concerning women’s issues. It has already been responsible for major policy changes, such as paid family leave and workplace pregnancy accommodations.

The program is open to women 18 or older who work in all sectors, and come from all backgrounds, races, and interests. The Women’s Fund said that “ideal candidates are passionate individuals looking to gain new skills and make a difference in the lives of women and girls.”

Candidates are chosen through a competitive application process. All applications are reviewed and applicants will be invited for in person interviews. After that point, 15 candidates will be chosen and invited to join the Women’s Policy Institute.

Those who are interested in applying can attend an informational session on July 28 at 5:30 pm at the Law Firm of William J. Conley, 123 Dyer Street.

Those interested may apply at www.wfri.org.

Applications are due by August 11, 2015, and can be mailed to the Women’s Fund at One Union Station, Providence, Rhode Island, 02903, or by emailing shanna@wfri.org. Applicants that have been selected for interviews will be notified by August 17, 2015. Sessions for the institute will begin in mid-September, with a monthly two-day retreat on Fridays and Saturdays. The Women’s Policy Institute is free of charge.

November 26, 2013November 26, 2013

Welcoming inclusive headline HERE

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It looked to me like RI Future’s Bob Plain confronted a fork in the road last week. The road began with the RI Future headline, “When the NRA jerks her chain, Doreen Costa barks.” I share the disdain for elected officials who are beholden to the NRA, but it wasn’t those politics that caught my attention. It was the sexism of portraying a woman in office as a dog on a leash. A couple of us commented on the post, objecting to the headline. And that was where the fork in the road developed.

It would have been easy, and familiar, for the post author and editor to dismiss the objections as feminist hypersensitivity. We’ve heard that one before, fellas, about a million times. (Play along with a bingo card.) In fact, “lighten up” is a time-honored defense – or really, more of a derail. If you shoot the messenger, you’re also announcing your complete dismissal of the message.

At this fork, the other path to take is to consider – not automatically embrace, but truly consider – the message you’re getting. I’m really pleased that RI Future took this path (which included inviting me to write this post), because this fork in the road has consequences.

Before I discuss those consequences, I must also mention the muddy middle path that people often try to take. People get in this mud when they respond, “it was not my intention to cause offense, and I apologize to anyone who was offended.” We call that a fauxpology or a nonpology, because it’s just a slightly nicer way of dismissing the received objection and absolving the actor. A real apology acknowledges: “I messed up.”

So, what’s so important about these forks in the road? They are little decision points that affect the climate of an organization, a space or a virtual space. As a sociologist, I’ve spent a lot of time studying how privileged people hold on to their privileges, or sometimes share them. And yes, managing a space is a privilege, often accompanied by other (race/class/gender/ability/etc) privileges. Whether the “space” is a group blog, a workplace, a country club, or an occupation, there are some parallels in how they might be protected or shared.

The easiest, and least generous, way to share is to accept different other people as long as they make no issue of their difference. I interviewed a country club member who quipped about their admission of African-Americans, “okay, I’ll be the well-behaved WASP with dark skin.”

The more genuine way to share is to consider how your space, and your own routines, might need some adjustment in order to become truly welcoming. Part of privilege means that you typically don’t have to do that reflection.

Once, a group of us were talking to a professional baseball scout. A woman who loved baseball asked if any women did his job. He said no. A little later he was trying to describe the process of evaluating minor league players. He said it was like when people evaluate women: anybody might be able to say “she’s an eight,” but the scout is able to articulate the specific elements that combine to yield that evaluation.

Gosh, I said, I wonder why no women are in this occupation. Some people don’t want to reflect on the ways their spaces are welcoming/unwelcoming to different sorts of people. As I said, you don’t have to. But if you would like to attract more different other people, do it! I have no sympathy for those who only do the former stingy version of space-sharing, and then bemoan the fact that “diverse others” are not filing in. I’ve heard that repeatedly. But whether it’s a strategic derail or oblivious ignorance, I will object. Impact matters more than stated intentions.

Thank you, Bob, for listening, considering the impact, and staying off the low road. That road only leads to the same good old boys’ club, and not to fairness and justice.

June 5, 2013June 5, 2013

Bravery in a hard world

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I came across a very good article by Maddy Myers, the former games critic for the defunct Boston Phoenix. Naturally, I found it when one of its subject, Anita Sarkeesian, a noted feminist games critic I’ve written about before, tweeted about it. Myers closes it out with this ending:

Anita Sarkeesian isn’t the only woman out there talking about videogames. She’s also not the only woman talking about feminism and videogames. But the list of women doing this remains quite short, and I wish it weren’t.

She’s not going to save the world, nor cover every nuance and facet perfectly, nor convince every last hater of the error of their ways. Not all by herself. There won’t be one magic publication that saves games journalism, nor one magic game that proves games are art, nor one magic feminist who convinces all of the misogynists. There will be many, many, many voices, and it will be a long, slow grind.

The only way to solve this scrutiny problem, I think, is to somehow get more women involved in this industry across all fronts, until the scrutiny that comes from being a minority begins to lessen, and until misogynists realize more definitively that they are the minority now.

But why on earth would any woman join, let alone stay, in a culture that vocally excludes her? Why would she not just go back to playing against the AI on her own, no longer bothering to frequent public videogame spaces? Why would she keep publishing articles, or keep making games, when so many people have yelled at her to get out, or else?

I don’t have a solution to this, other than to hope it will get better if we all just keep talking.

It reminds me a bit of the squabble I had with Justin Katz in my last post; when I criticized Katz’s argument that conservatives were staying home and living their lives in the manner that best represented their values rather than run for office and face the sort of political attacks that come with that ambition.

It reminds me also of a recent exchange I had on Twitter with a person who asked why there was no movement across Rhode Island for regionalization. When I suggest this person take up the cause themselves, they replied that they weren’t willing to lead like that, preferring to provide assistance from the background rather than face the opposition that would undoubtedly come. How then, I asked, can they expect someone else to lead such a movement if they won’t themselves? Good question, was the reply.

It also reminds me of the fearful nature of Occupy, distrustful of authority as it was. One of the things that makes masked anarchists such poor leaders is their inability to even show their faces. Like Katz’s conservatives hunkered in their homes, some in Occupy definitely sought to escape the reactions that people would have to them speaking their opinions.

Myers’ article, well worth reading, is a good response to fears of political attacks. Being a woman on the internet is hard. Shrill and petty as Rhode Island politics can occasionally be, rhetoric never stoops to the point where one candidate suggests that another should be raped and killed. And that’s par for the course for the hate directed at feminist game critics or usually any woman who speaks out against a culture of sexism (actually that might be subpar, most rhetoric is considerably worse and far more graphic).

Which is why it’s humbling to me to realize how powerful the women I know are, even if they’re just doing what they always do. Whether it’s the women from RI-NOW who hosted May’s Drinking Liberally introducing themselves, or past teachers who asked me to question basic assumptions about society to my own family. My mother faced down a death threat caused by her activism, and though I doubt my grandmother would classify herself as a feminist, much of her life is a testament to a woman who had to fight hard to keep her children fed and housed.

The point is this. Change rarely comes from a moment of mass epiphany, or through the leadership of an especially charismatic individual. It takes individual acts of bravery; black people defying segregation, women going to work, workers organizing, homosexual couples holding hands in public, etc., etc. This isn’t the kind of bravery that wins accolades, except in a few cases. It’s the kind of bravery that earns hatred and ire.

If you want to make a change, then that hatred and ire won’t stop you. If you truly believe you’re right, then righteousness must carry you forward.

October 20, 2012October 20, 2012

Where Goodness Runs Up Against Freedom

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On Monday I took a walk to the bank to deposit a couple of checks. On my way I watched two men in a pickup truck stare for longer than is decent as a female jogger ran by. That classic no-blink, head following the jogger’s movement kind of stare. I’m pretty sure everyone knows it. It’s a small interaction, but it’s a daily occurrence. It’s also why I have the utmost respect for women who jog, because stares are the least of their worries.

Later that night I ended up checking out LoveGov, which features as part of its mission statement the “right to individual privacy”. When you see that on the Internet, it usually means the ability to protect personal information from view or misuse, and often it means protecting anonymity on the Internet. In a larger context, it usually fits into “Internet freedom”, which organizations like Demand Progress have taken the lead in fighting for. I want to be clear, I don’t think LoveGov or Demand Progress are advocating anything of the sort that follows.

Zombie Reddit — This image of a zombified Reddit alien was used to represent the founder of a number of sexist and racist subreddits.

But, idling about the Internet, I stumbled across this article on Reddit and its user-created censorship of Gawker and the reasons and consequences. To sum that up, a reporter from Gawker was investigating a Reddit moderator (who don’t run the site, and are pretty much given free rein) and decided to publish the Redditor’s real name. The Gawker reporter, Adrian Chen, describes this Redditor as specializing in “”. The current focus of this guy was on a part of Reddit called “CreepShots” which is summed up nicely in this manner “When you are in public, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. We kindly ask women to respect our right to admire your bodies and stop complaining.” Essentially, “we’re going to take pictures of women (usually their breasts and bottoms) and post it on the Internet. Good day.”

So you might see why this makes my jaw drop. But then there’s also something here. Someone decided that the creeps needed to be outed. And out them they did, which is leading police to pursue charges against at least one man. In fact, good people, lead by an anonymous woman are doing so, collecting information on those who posted on CreepShots and posting it publicly to a Tumblr called Predditors, as well as sending it to employers and law enforcement. If you scroll through it, you find a bunch of average men. Average men who just happened to take pictures of women without consent and then post those pictures publicly online.

Reddit, in case you’ve forgotten, was a major player in the SOPA/PIPA Internet blackout. In fact, while this was happening, some of its heads were touring the country touting Internet freedom and activism.

Naturally, the creepers are running scared. One of the fundamental rules of Reddit is “don’t post personal information“. Any of them could be next. And in response to this, the outing of people doing frankly disgusting acts, how did much of the Reddit community respond? When word leaked that Mr. Chen would expose the identity of Violenacrez (a well-connected moderator), the Reddit moderator community preemptively banned all Gawker links across various sub-boards on Reddit. Mr. Chen sums it up simply:

Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit’s role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women.

I am OK with that.

As a feminist, I’m disgusted by these actions. This is the sort of action that people who’ve made the mistake of treating anonymity as equaling “male” would undertake. I know it’s surprising to folks, but it’s no longer a man’s web. The stereotype of computer users being nerds who’d drool over the thought of a woman has long since passed. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are dominated by women. Female consumers are the economic engine that makes the Internet profitable.

Ada Lovelace 377 px — Ada Lovelace, probably the world’s first computer programmer.

And as someone who values liberty and free speech, I’m disgusted. There are times when anonymous speech is right and just. And then there are times when anonymity is used merely to shield yourself from the consequences of reprehensible behavior. And the latter is what every poster on Reddit who ever posted a creepshot is engaging in. It’s what every pseudonymed commenter on the Journal or GoLocalProv who posts something they’d never ever say in public engages in. You have the right to say whatever horrible thought springs into your head. But you don’t have the right not to suffer consequences. Especially if it’s sexist garbage.

Good on the people behind Predditors for creating consequences.

As an added note, Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, named for the first computer programmer.