Feminist Pub 15: The Bluestocking hangs up its, err, stocking and hopes for a chatty Christmas and a Feminist New Year

[YonicSleighdriver]

Festive greetings!

This is the 15th incarnation of the Pub and is meant as a place to drop by with random thoughts and meandering chats, on feminist or other related themes. Anything you want to mull over but not necessarily start a thread about. Alternatively, get some booze and snacks and hang out! Lurkers, newbies and oldbies welcome.

We have a pub goat, a feminist cannon for firing at crazy sexists and we cheer each other up when patriarchy grinds us down...

Last pub drinkie linkie:

Pub 14

Jeanne, does that mean you do or don't want to talk about it? I mean - I could waffle a bit about it if you like but not if not required

Is it the music production stuff? If so it's just a matter of terminology and I can try and help

Yes, I don't think I follow the terminology. I'm ok in my ignorance - to be honest, I just wanted to say I'd tried to read it.

ok. I just think it gets interesting as it goes on really, it kind of sets up some ideas and then they all flow together in a series of interesting analogies.

I am really interested in It's Her Factory's take on things because she is a technically classically educated musician AND who is a woman of Colour AND who totally gets and loves electronic music AND who puts it with a sophisticated understanding of neoliberal capitalism, SO you get interesting fusions and truth bombs (interesting to me anyway because of my background)

"By now it is well-known that women, especially women of color who express feminist and anti-racist views on social media, are commonly represented as lacking actual dynamic range, as having voices that are always too loud. As Goldie Taylor writes, unlike a white woman pictured shouting in a cop’s face as an act of protest, “even if I were inclined, I couldn’t shout at a police officer—not in his face, not from across the street,” because, as a black woman, her shouting would not be read as legitimate protest but as excessively violent and criminal behavior. White supremacy grants white people the ability to be understood as expressing a dynamic range; whites can legitimately shout because we hear them/ourselves as mainly normalized. At the same time, white supremacy paints black people as always-already too loud: as Taylor notes, Eric Gardner wasn’t doing anything illegal when he was killed–other than, well, existing as a black body in public space. White supremacy made his voice seem that because Gardner’s voice emanated from a black body, it was already shouting, already taking up too much “breathing room,” and thus needing to be muted to restore the proper “dynamic range” of a white supremacist public space."

I did find that bit interesting (and was able to follow it! I'm not musical so the rest was hard going). I wonder about what she says about everything seeming equally 'loud' on twitter, though? I'd like to think so, but I don't think the net is as good at equalising people as all that.

I follow it's her factory on my bloglovin. I never understand the music theory parts as well as I would like, but the parts I do understand (as you've quoted above Eilis) are really thought-provoking and interesting

I don't know about twitter exactly as I don't use it much but I do think she has a point that you do not need permission to speak or be published. Then the extent to which you are heard or reproduced is a different thing.

A certain philosopher / writer / activist had a brilliant blog (now tragically deleted) upon which she reviewed, scathingly, a book by Alain de Botton. He wrote a furiously angry response which contained the very telling phrase "self appointed". he may or may not have known at the time that she is a professional, university, philosopher (the tone of the blog was in general very playful though also v clever but in a way that wore its cleverness lightly so A de Bottom might not have registered the cleverness or recognised her as a pro). But that expression was so gloriously angry as it clearly meant "as opposed to endorsed by The Establishment, or My Friends". The bitter rage that expression "self appointed" ("who are you to criticise ME?") is I think what It's Her Factory is talking about when a certain kind of person moans about the "noise" of social media.

I like the internet because often in public I actually literally cannot get a word in edgewise. One of the things literal sound does is it fills spaces such that other sounds cannot get in there. No matter how many people start tweeting there is still always room for one more

I don't really know enough about Twitter, but my assumption is that the logarithms (terminology?? Help techy people!) re what appears, whose posts rise to the top, what sinks without a trace/impact may well be subject to the same problems as in wider society. Plus people/companies paying for more visibility etc

But I could well be talking bollocks here

X-post - I see what you mean there Eilis, that makes a lot of sense

The other thing that really resonates with me about that article at the moment is her looking at "breathing space" - who gets it and who doesn't and what it means.

I may have rambled about this before, sorry if I am repeating myself, but I was thinking a lot about this at the end of the year when I was exhausted and fried.

I work for an American organisation and I am constantly struck by how teenagery US mainstream corporate culture is (I am not of course talking about Americans per se) as opposed to Asia or (especially continental) Europe (which is where most of my clients are based). There are ancient rhythms of holidays, eating and sleeping that apply in Spain and Taiwan, to pick random examples (Chinese New Year stops all work for 2 or 3 weeks; the Spanish don't work in August) that are local variants of very similar things, ie, the need to alternate work and rest both daily, annually, and multiple-annually (this is Sabat, of course). the reason why I say US corporate culture is teenagery is that when I was a teen or in my 20s, I thought these things didn't matter. I thought that sleep was for squares, that it didn't matter if you worked on Sunday, that you could do anything you wanted if you stopped spending an hour a day sitting around a table talking to your family and eating (yawn). Of course I was completely wrong, and in a very privileged way: the reason why sleep didn't seem to me to matter, was that I had not noticed my incredible freedom to make up sleep at other times, like Saturday mornings.

I feel like working (esp with a family, or any other commitments) for a US company is like working for a bunch of teenagers who keep ordering fast food and staying up all night (and making you do it too) without knowing when and who pays, without understanding the long term toll on your body and mind and relationships and society of everyone just going on and on and on all night and all day and all Christmas.

And the "lean in" thing often just means "push yourself here, where it pays most, and let others pick up the pieces" and is an incredibly privileged position to take.

Even in corporate terms it is a culture of incredible inefficiency. There is a quasi-macho glorification of endurance, when the things that are being done just don't need to be and serve no purpose. I was trying to solve something quite frustrating for a French person I work with, in November when I was pretty low, and he said "don't ruin your health over it", and I almost cried that my health (even as a figure of speech) gets a mention.

So. Space. Space, absence, silence, quietness, is viewed by capitalism as a vacuum to be filled for the purpose of profit. Thinking of this in terms of literal noise is interesting.

Thanks for that link Eilis, it's very interesting and I've bookmarked it for further reading.

This morning I started reading Revolution From Within by Gloria Steinem. I'm still only reading the preface as I had to read it a couple of times to take it in properly as much of it is already resonating with me. Also, she had a friend review her draft and the friend said "I don't know how to tell you this - but I think you have a self esteem problem." This was at a time when she'd been named 'one of the 10 most confident women in America'. I struggled to process what her friend said as I'd always thought of her as a strong woman, and the fact she confirmed a lack of self esteem confused me. Which, to be fair isn't that difficult. I have a feeling that this will be one of those books I'll read three or four times cover to cover then dip into from time to time.

More light hearted: “I want you to consider the emotional toll of your clothes on me in a public venue.”

www.thestylecon.com/2014/06/05/rihanna-slut-shaming-emotional-toll-clothes/?curator=FashionREDEF

Ellis, I take your point about the teenager ness of just work and worry about it later, but I've found the American approach to work to be more relaxed. DH and I have both found that yes, we can end up working at the weekend, but equally we can take time off for personal things without having to use holiday allowance. Right now we're all sitting in the lounge, DD is reading, DH is working on his laptop. We've got friends coming over for coffee soon, and DH will either continue to work from home or go to the office for a few hours.

This seems to be typical of the work culture around here. I suspect it is different in some of the big cities, although DH's firm is based in one and everyone has the same kind of easy approach. Yes, there are times they work late etc, but they also get time off after the panic. It's more of a fluid approach.

In the UK it felt more like being a factory system of work work work.

Kickass, that's interesting - do you mind me asking where you are? Are you and your DH working actually in the US?

I am glad to hear that in er I suppose "normal" US offices there is flexibility for family things because I have always worried about the relatively little annual leave they have

This is interesting because I have just gone from private sector profit-making company, where I had quite a lot of flexibility in terms of managing my own time, but ended up working very long hours (though my US colleagues worked longer in the same way as Eilis's experience), to a HE institution where I have a lot less flexibility with hours but we are encouraged to adhere to them quite rigidly and very very few people in my role work beyond their alloted time except for in exceptional circumstances. (I'm not in an academic or teaching role though). It is very interesting and refreshing, though I notice that I do miss some of the flexibility and trust in terms of managing my own time - but of course I ended up going above and beyond to demonstrate how much I could be trusted and overworked myself!

Really interesting discussion, that I don't have time to take in properly but will return to later and re-read. My experience of US companies chimes quite strongly with Eilis' experience.

Not necessarily a feminist issue solely, but the point about the privilege of being able to make up sleep elsewhere as a young person without responsibilities really spoke to me. It was one of things I found hardest to cope with when I returned after maternity leave.

I also have a great deal of flexibility in my job here in the US and so did DH (he recently retired). I think it depends very much on the specific corporate culture, which can vary enormously from company to company and also region to region. We are in the South, where work expectations tend to be more reasonable and more accommodating to family considerations.

If any of you are looking for an excellent book with a strong female protagonist for your DC aged 10+, I can heartily recommended The Girl Savage by Katherine Rundell (I believe it was recently renamed "Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms"). I've just finished reading it with my DDs and it's an amazing book about the strength and beauty within a human soul.

Oh Adam, you idiot - just because someone has a massive crush on you and your marriage is a bit stale doesn't mean you should start 'oh its not what you're thinking' (euphemism for 'exactly what it looks like'). But who was the outraged woman who interrupted them - Kate or Helen? I think the latter, who is still presumably supposed to be Ian's good friend.

Massive wrong thread fail there - that one belongs in The Archers

Just popping in to whisper to Petula: algorithms

Now going back to my food coma.

Arf @ Errol

thanks fib - I knew I had something wrong there - I'll blame my own food coma!

I'm with you there errol!

Happy New Year, buffy.

errol, I did enjoy your thread mistake.

I work for a US company, and it can be flexible - but it does seem to vary by department/division/region. Obviously some roles are less flexible than others, e.g. those which are directly customer-facing, but even then, "manager's discretion" seems to count for a lot.

We have an internal employee satisfaction survey each year, and someone has to read though every single free-text comment. Haven't been through all 500-odd pages of them yet (just our division, not the whole company), but already I am struck by how some people seem to be working for an entirely different company, if you look at things like how much flexibility some people get compared with my experience. Obviously there are some differences because of different countries having different rules and rights, but a lot of it is down to individual management style and habit, I think.