Help! I'm... a feminist romance reader?

This post was written by guest writer Adrienne. She is attending Texas A&M for her Ph.D., where her specialty is detective fiction. She's also a reader of romance.

So so sorry for the long delay. I'm done with the move and have my life back!

Like many other women, I grew up reading romance novels. My family are all very heavy readers, and amidst all types of books, my mother read romances. One of my few fairly useless super powers is the ability to read way too quickly for my own good (my ability to resist mosquitoes is far far more useful). I never could check out enough books from the library, and so I started picking up my parent's books. Eventually my mother discovered and tried to stop my romance nabbing ways.

Now, I'm fairly sure that the reason my mother got upset that I was reading them was because of the *gasp* sexual content. And years later, I regret reading the novels and would never recommend most romances to young girls, but not for the same reason as my mother. These novels gave me a completely unrealistic and unhealthy outlook on sex, myself, and relationships. I do think that readers of romance have a far more complex relationship with the subject matter than previously imagined.¹ Subject matter and ideology is not consumed uncritically. Women frequently twist and turn content to create a more realistic or more personal fantasy. I do not want to suggest that my experience was the same as all young girl's when reading romances, or that my experience was wholly naive, shallow, or one-leveled, and yet it was and probably still is a damaging experience. The romance novels reflect and create (in a nice circle as most literature does) cultural norms and expectations about love, relationships, and sex.

Let me summarize the romance: once upon a time, there was a very special woman who was going through some difficult problems, and she met a very special man who had something missing from his life. They met, gave each other what the other was lacking (for the woman- usually some type of fix to her problem, for the man- usually teaching him to love), they had sublime awesome sex, and lived happily ever after for the rest of their lives.

I'm being both mean and nice in my description, I think. I'm purposefully leaving out many of the most problematic and sexist aspects in order to describe as many types of romances as possible and in some delusional attempt to be fair. I'm also very aware that I'm leaving out many of the ways romance subvert or attempt to subvert gender roles, patriarchy, and traditional relationships.

The lessons that I learned from the hundreds of romances I read? 1) that an individual is incomplete, 2) I'm only important because I'm super special (a princess, a sad orphan abandoned by everyone and now chased by someone powerful and evil, a slave with super brain powers and the heart of gold, etc), 3) that sex is perfect and completely mind blowing (and man was I excited about this), 4) that love is only real if it's forever, and 5) that my future partner has to continually sweep me off my feet. If I wanted to be really and truly honest with myself, I would say that I still struggle with each and every one of these concepts even though my head understands that all of them are complete and utter bullshit. On the upside, I think contemporary romance novels (specifically certain types like chick lit and paranormal) are trying (keyword: trying) to combat a few of these: specifically 1, 2, and 4.

I'm going to use Sandra Booth's sub-genre summaries to explore movements from the 70s onward. The traditional romance prominent in the 1970s and frequently returned to through the decades has an amoral stock hero and a virginal and virtuous heroine.² This reinforces gender stereotypes and promotes a culture in which un-angelic women (adventurous, sexual, etc) are bad women and therefore undeserving of protection from rape (frequently "asking for it").³

Romance frequently makes force, coercion, or men's lack of sexual control sexy and romantic. And that's so dangerous. Obvious, right? Apparently not. Yes, it is a fantasy. And as many critics have said- it's important to think of this as a fantasy and to accept that women don't uncritically consume this. But these are published and consumed in a rape culture. We don't usually fantasize about things completely related OR completely unrelated to us.

Romance in the 80s began to more frequently lessen gender stereotypes and weaken these rape myths. The hero moved from being amoral to "following the heroine's moral 'norm'" (96). Paranormal romance and humorous feminist romance began to emerge in large numbers during the 90s. Originally (as Sandra Booth contends) the paranormal was a regressive return to angel/monster dichotomy⁴ and humorous romance was the successful feminist and anti-patriarchal romance sub-genre.

I'm happy to say, that I think paranormal is slowly becoming a sub-genre in which some of the most exciting queer or feminist romances can currently be found. One of the reasons that paranormal is such a hopeful and interesting place for progressive work is the desire (and semi-ability) to create a social structure outside of normal (aka heteronormative patriarchal) structure. Society can have totally different rules- e.g. it can be matriarchal or androgynous.

Although Lynn Coddington wants us to believe that romances aren't "formulaic" and are wrongly assumed to be "universally badly written," I only partially agree with her (62). As with most popular culture, there is an erroneous assumption that romance isn't art and therefore isn't well written. That's utter crap. And crap a lot of us believe. Our dear blog mistress (and my dear friend) Courtney recently told me how surprised she was to enjoy Gail Carriger's parasol series because she assumed most of "that type" of fiction was badly written. There are many romance authors that are beautiful writers. But not formulaic? I just don't buy it. I've read thousands. And while yes... there are some surprises, some diversity... publishers still pay very close attention to what is in demand and what formula is currently popular. There are formulas. And when we read that formula over and over again, surely we start to believe and internalize the formula. For Coddington, "Romances are not all the same. They do not construct gender relations in uniform way, and they do not tell trivial stories. They represent a range of possible gender constructions," and I call bullshit (66). That range of possibilities only cover a few feet on a mile long continuum of gender constructions. And the idea that we've created some possibilities for women so we can stop is a very damaging and complacent place.

But there are some romance novels that I applaud. Because this is long already, I'm going to pick three from paranormal detective/romance that I'm excited about. I'd love readers to respond with other genres, sub-genres, and/or specific authors which respond to the issues I've raised in this post.

Laurell K.Hamilton. I found Guilty Pleasures in the young adult section of my library when I was in jr. high . I've been a fan ever since. Although problematic in many ways (writing, editing, etc), I applaud her for creating a powerful female who has frequently focused on her job. They're decidedly non-monogamous, they definitely challenge concepts about the monster/angel dichotomy, and they're sexy. Packed full of all different sorts of sex. I actually wish reader response wouldn't jump so frequently on the "OMG she's a slut" bandwagon. I wish the books were more glbtia friendly (although there seems to be a nice move that way). And I hold my breath because the baby discussion has come up a few times now. Child free by choice... please don't leave me now.

One of my favorites is Charlaine Harris's works- all of them not just the Sookie Stackhouse series. The trend to not have one relationship, not be happily ever after, is one of the most successful and prevalent in recent work. In the Sookie series, she dates, it doesn't work, they break up. She's single sometimes, and she's in different relationships other times. It's a nice pattern, a realistic pattern. The Grave series deals with issues of incest, questions social stigmas in relationships, and plays with the concept of female community and female victimhood. The Shakespeare series very purposefully focuses on abuse.

Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series. This series deals with questions of class, race, gender, sexual orientation galore. Talk about novels that question authority, structural patriarchy, and male power. They also have interesting sexual dynamics, and create not just a strong heroine but a strong community of characters. There is continuously more of a focus on peer and friend relationships over romantic relationships.

These definitely fight misconceptions about love and relationships that I raised earlier including that love is forever and that an individual is incomplete without a partner. Paranormal romances are definitely not good at addressing the "special" problem (paranormal heroines are usually the only vampire/werewolf hybrid or the long lost fairie or the alien queen), but other types of romances have more successfully addressed this. I would also like to see more novels that portrays sex as realistic - less "holy crap mindblowing can't think of anything during sex but that sex is awesome." We all know that sometimes in the middle of sex we think "Oh shit, is the oven on?", and that's okay.

As I've been thinking about and reading up on romance, I've discovered that romances also helped me learn that 1) I can be an empowered woman, 2) I can be sex-positive, 3) women can be subjects and women-focused, and 4) women's bodies are beautiful. I'm excited and hopeful for a positive progression that leans towards these lessons with less of the negativity that for so long has accompanied the romance.

I also applaud romance for being a genre written by women for women. And romance is a wonderfully give and take process.⁵ Indeed, the few blogs of romance authors that I check out occasionally, have a far more interactive author/fan base than the general literature/fiction author has.

I want more out of the romance genre. And I want other fans and authors to understand and want more as well. We deserve it.

Further reading on being a feminist romance reader:

There are a number of resources about being a feminist and a romance reader like Kay Mussell's interview: Are Feminism & Romance Novels Incompatible , Catherine Asaro's response to the same question, College Candy's Defense of Romance Novels, and of course Smart Bitches Trashy Books has taken up this issue a number of times including Feminism is a Dirty Word and their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms.

Notes

¹ This has been suggested in work on the romance genre by scholars such as Lynn Coddington, Janice Radway, and Laura Kinsale.
² Sandra Booth explains that the traditional romance "acts as a vehicle to display the heroine's virtue... The hero [amoral and unstoppable] acts as a foil to the heroine who is presented as the moral 'norm.' Because she must assert and protect her virtue, the heroine in the traditional romance is often presented as passive, self-sacrificing, and virginal" (94-95).
³ Also Tania Modelski points out that "The myth that men are unable to control their sexual drive beyond a point and that women lead men on- and so deserve what they get- by accepting romantic or sexual overtures from them is a myth that has all too often proved lethal to women" (17).
⁴ The construct where the heroine is angelic and perfect, and the hero is monstrous and violent. Very Beauty and the Beast esque. Only we know that the Beast really is a monster and doesn't have this shining heart of gold.
⁵ Lee Tabin-McClain points out that "Romance formulae differ from earlier generic patterns in that they change based on intensive publisher research into reader preference... other aspects of romance fiction give it a sense of a collective authorship" (296).

References

Booth, Sandra. "Paradox in Popular Romances of the 1990s: The Paranormal Versus Feminist Humor." Paradoxa 3 (1997): 94-106.

Coddington, Lynn. "Wavering Between Worlds: Feminist Influences in the Romance Genre." Paradoxa 3 (1997): 58-77.

Modleski, Tania. "My Life as a Romance Reader." Paradoxa 3 (1997): 15-28.

Modleski, Tania. "My Life as a Romance Writer." Paradoxa 4 (1998): 134-147.

Tobin-McClain, Lee. "Paranormal Romance: Secrets of the Female Fantastic." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11 (2000): 294-306.

Teaching composition: How do we make students conceptualize themselves as writers?

At the risk of a very boring lead-in to this post, here's a thing I wrote for class! We had to write a kind of "what I learned this semester" assignment for my pedagogy class, after teaching according to the prescribed syllabus. So I thought I'd share it with you guys and get your thoughts, especially since I haven't been posting lately. So enjoy!

The main goal of a writing teacher is to improve her students' writing, but in order for this to happen, an instructor must convince her students that they are writers, not merely students, engineers, scientists, or mathematicians taking a writing course. By doing so, she can be more confident that her students will get something more meaningful and lasting from her class than a passing grade. In the worksheets that my students filled out at the beginning of the semester, most students indicated that what they would gain from my class was a basic competency in writing for their future professions. Those that find the class relevant only think it is relevant for their future professional life (and perhaps for the rest of their undergraduate careers). One student wrote, “My boss one day will expect me to write well, and will judge me on my writing ability, so I hope to improve my grammar and writing for my future job.” While there is nothing wrong with this personal goal, nor is it problematic for a writing teacher to indicate to her students that professionals are often expected to write in the course of their jobs, students will be more successful and will get more out of a writing course if they see writing as a skill they will use, and already use, outside of the classroom and the workplace.

Almost all students are writers before they enter a freshman composition course. They write emails; on a myriad of internet sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and blogs; in the margins of books; in notes, letters, and birthday cards; in diaries and journals; in school newspapers or yearbooks; and some even write fiction or poetry. They belong to discourse communities before they enter academia; they attend church, belong to clubs and organizations, volunteer, belong to service or social justice groups and communities. While students often think that a composition course will only help them to participate in the discourse communities to which they are newly inducted (academia and their respective professional fields), relating a composition course to the discourse communities to which students already belong should be a responsibility of a writing instructor, and doing so will help students to invest in the course beyond their commitment to learning grammar or getting a passing grade. Many of my students have told me that they do not see the relevance of my class to their lives, usually in response to my comments on their essays asking them to be engaged and interested in their writing. Indeed, how can I expect them to be engaged when the assignments are easier for them to complete successfully if they do not care about the topic at all? Assignments that ask them to be objective and without bias are difficult enough at their age, but I also think they are counter-productive when made high-risk major grades. There are ways to teach our students to summarize fairly and without overt bias, but basing a major assignment on those skills made my students feel as though their positions did not matter. After the first two assignments, which explicitly forbid students from making their positions their arguments, many of my students were cautious about sharing their positions in the third paper. More than once I heard in class: “So, we're allowed to state our opinions?” Because I had been teaching them to make arguments that could not reveal their positions, my students did not know how to conceptualize their positions as positions, supported with reasoning and argumentation, as opposed to opinions, mere statements of unsupported preference.

Further, these two assignments forced me to ban the word “bias” from my students' papers. All semester, I have struggled to convey to my students that everything written includes some bias, and thus to use the word as a weapon is not in good faith. Their use of the word “bias” in this way is partly a result of a cultural preference for objectivity, but our emphasis in ENGL 104 on objectivity in the first two major assignments does not help. By demanding essays that refrain from stating positions, and calling this objectivity, I produced students that believed arguing for a position is biased and illegitimate. And because my students did not argue for a position until the fourth paper, I was only able to talk with them about being fair, as opposed to objective, in arguing for a position for a few weeks. They did not receive almost any practice in this, despite the fact that this skill is just as important as avoiding overt bias when necessary. In fact, in most discourse communities, arguing for positions in a fair way is far more useful than summarizing objectively or analyzing without overt bias.

Another way that writing courses often do not position students as writers outside the classroom is by not allowing for revision. In most discourse communities, revision is an important part of the writing process, and if the community does not allow for outright revision, then it allows for responses, dialogue, qualifications, and corrections. Only in academia (and then only at the undergraduate level) is the draft turned in on a deadline a final one, graded with no chance for discussion, revision, or correction. This process decontextualizes student writing, and makes assignments unrelated to the discourse communities in which our students participate, where most texts are not utterly final and finite. Further, not allowing for revision does not encourage (or, as is sometimes necessary, force) students to draft multiple times, a process necessary for successful writing.

The solution to these problems is assignments that allow my students to participate in different discourse communities. In such a project, I would elicit from each student a discourse community to which they already belong (a church congregation, a blogging community, a school newspaper, an activist community) and have them work with me to produce a writing assignment positioned within that community. The first part of this project would be a fair, researched summary of the characteristics of the discourse community, while the second part would involve making an argument within that community. Because I think students should participate in and take responsibility for their own education, students would be responsible for working with me to create a rubric for assessing their assignment, based in part on the first part of the assignment. Both portions of this assignment would allow for revision after the draft is turned in. If students are unhappy with their final product (or their grade), they would have the option to revise.

This type of assignment would result in several positive outcomes. First, by having students identify discourse communities to which they already belong, it would position my students as writers outside the classroom. They would be encouraged to be invested in the assignment and in themselves as writers within a particular discourse community outside of a professional or academic sphere, which would likely result in their greater commitment to improving their writing beyond the desire for a good grade. Second, it would reduce the emphasis on objectivity that the current syllabus has, and introduce my students to position arguments, those arguments my current students have called “opinions” and “biased” all semester, much earlier. Third, it would allow for and encourage revision, indicating the vital role this part of the writing process plays. This would also allow for a discussion of how texts in other discourse communities allow for revision, discussion, response, and correction, and thus position students' writing as not merely anchored in academic or professional discourses. Last, this type of assignment would position other discourse communities as comparable and just as legitimate as the academic discourse community, to which the remaining course assignments would be written. The course would thus avoid the preference for privileged discourses, and the delegitimization of underprivileged discourses, that is found in both the university and in our larger culture.

It is the responsibility of the writing instructor to teach students to write, but to what end? Students who enter a freshman composition course should not be given only the option of becoming a better academic writer, but also a better writer within the discourse communities to which they already belong. The composition course should be an opportunity to become a better academic writer, a better blogger, a better editorial writer, a better Twitter-er, a better activist writer, a better newspaper column writer. Without that opportunity, what a student does in a composition classroom is unlikely to stick with her, unlikely to translate outside the walls of the university, and unlikely to give her the sense that she is capable of creating change through her writing.

Privileged college students and "hobos": Exactly alike?

So usually the Battalion is boring. But when it decides to spice up the boring with offensive, it goes all-out. One of this week's issues features an opinion piece comparing college students and "hobos." Yes, you read that right. Because privileged college students and homeless people are exactly alike! And comparing them is hi-larious! And "hobo" is a totally not-offensive, not-dehumanizing term!

I was only thinking about how I could eat my lunch and study at the library, but the lack of a home base made me feel like a vagabond. I gave the subject more thought and realized most college students demonstrate the habits of hobos.

Ahahaha! Get it? College students are just like hobos because they lack a "home base." Never mind that they have homes. That's not what being homeless is about! It's about napping outside!

Many off-campus dwellers find themselves in situations similar to this: a full day of classes while running on two hours of sleep simply will not cut it. What's a college student to do? We nap. Anywhere and everywhere we can: outside, inside, on park benches, on the stairs, in class, on couches in the library, on the grassy knoll, in quiet areas or loud. It is possible to find nappers in the most obscure places on campus.

We could debate about whether this author meant something different by using the word "hobo" instead of "homeless." Hobo implies some choice in lifestyle as well as carrying a slightly romantic air. That we've romanticized the "tramp" or "hobo" is in itself problematic; it allows things like this article to imply that homeless people choose to be homeless, or enjoy being homeless. It elides the systemic inequalities in our country that lead to crippling poverty and homelessness. It elides the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are single women with children, by putting forth the image of the "hobo," a carefree, wandering man. And the comparison of the homeless with college students assumes, incorrectly, that there's no such thing as a homeless college student.

What this article actually says is offensive enough, but what it elides makes it reprehensible.

It isn't easy to live the life of a college student, or a hobo, but it will not last forever. Unless you decide to further your education, a job after graduation will give you a bit more stability. The job you so desire will give you a constant influx of cash that will hopefully allow you to keep your cool in the presence of free food, while wearing clean clothes on a regular basis. Rest assured, this lifestyle is temporary.

This conclusion is horrifying. Let's not talk about actual homeless college students, for whom sleeping in the library is not just a convenient alternative to going to your dorm or apartment, but one of very few undesirable options. For whom getting something to eat, a place to shower, or a place to sleep are a struggle, all on top of keeping up with schoolwork and paying for tuition. This could have been a thoughtful article, one that pointed out that joking about being "homeless" because you're broke (not poor) and nap on campus is incredibly insensitive and offensive. It could have motioned toward the fact that A&M likely has its own homeless students, who have few resources in dealing with their struggle. Instead it emphasizes that your own "hobo" lifestyle in college is temporary (and thus humorous!). By celebrating the financial security of the upwardly mobile (and, for the most part, already middle- or upper-middle-class) students of A&M, this piece has a problematic takeaway: Your privilege means you can make jokes about whatever you want, because serious downers like homelessness and poverty don't touch your life. It's not a problem if it's not your problem.

If you're homeless in the Bryan/College Station area, contact Family Promise or Twin City Mission. (Feel free to list other resources in the comments.)

You can contact the opinion editor for the Batt, Ian McPhail, at opinion@thebatt.com, or the general editor, Matt Woolbright, at editor@thebatt.com.

Connecting with female characters in geek television

Cross-posted at Geek Feminism.

s. e. smith wrote this amazing post a while back at Bitch's Push(back) at the Intersections: "I Just Don't Like That Many Female Characters." And I read it and was like, "OMG GEEK CULTURE." Because, really:

'I just don't really like many female characters, you know?'

I see this coming up again and again in discussions about pop culture; this is an attitude I myself once embraced and espoused, like it was a badge of honor to dislike most female characters. I thought I was being oh-so-edgy and critiquing female characters when really I was engaging in an age-old form of misogyny, where people prove how progressive they are by saying they hate women.

I know, it sounds weird. But there is a thing that happens where some feminists declare themselves firmly to be 'one of the guys.' I'm not sure if it's a defensive tactic, designed to flip some attitudes about feminism and feminists, or if there is a genuine belief that being feminist means 'being one of the guys.' Once you are 'one of the guys,' you of course need to prove it by bashing on women, because this is what 'guys' do, yes? So you say that you don't really 'connect with' or 'like' female characters you encounter in pop culture.

If feminists feel pressure to be accepted as "one of the guys," imagine how geek women feel, particularly early in their lives, when they often feel isolated from one another.

This tendency to dislike female character reminds me of another "being one of the guys" strategy: I often meet women who tell me proudly, "I just don't get along with women.* All of my best friends have been guys." These women also often think that this fact actually makes them progressive (because nothing's more radical than failing to create female-centric relationships!). And most of the women I've known who say this are geeks. It's actually one of the reasons it took so long for me to become friends with geeks, because "I don't get along with women" is dealbreaker for me. Any woman who says this is either a) telling me that I can never expect more than perfunctory friendship with them or b) inviting me to denigrate women as well, as the basis of our friendship. And no thank you.

Which is not, of course, to say that these ladies are horrible people. Women who refuse to connect with other women, fictional or real, are not causing the problem, but perpetuating it, because they've bought patriarchal narratives about women hook, line, and sinker. They seek connections with men, because men are the rational, smarter set, and by doing so they feel required to malign their own genders, because, as smith points out, "bashing on women" is just what dudes do. But loving other women, connecting with other women, is one of the most radical feminist act one can perform. And I think that goes for fictional characters, too, especially since I know that my personal path to feminism would have been greatly hindered if it weren't for Xena and Buffy.

So it hurts my heart when geeks inexplicably "hate" female characters on geek shows. Indeed, the two examples smith uses are actually from geeky/fantasy/SF shows: True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It seems like misogynist write-offs of female characters are disturbingly prevalent in allegedly progressive fan cultures (like the overtly feminist Buffy), and the ones that have been pissing me off lately are, of course, Doctor Who-related. A sizeable part of DW and Torchwood fandoms has a lot of ire for female characters from these series. The two I want to focus on, in part because hatred of these characters is well-represented in both fan communitities, are Gwen Cooper (from Torchwood) and River Song (from Doctor Who).

[Spoilers for season 5 of Doctor Who and Torchwood: Children of Earth (season 3) below the fold.]

[Trigger warning for imagined violence against female characters, slut-shaming, and other misogynistic language.]

Learning Curve...

My friend Rena wrote this post recently, about how her recent exposure to feminism has helped her to learn some things about healthy relationships. She's a lovely lady, and I hope you enjoy! (Courtney)

Cross-posted from JMBL.

Having just ended a relationship, I thought it might be a good idea to catalogue what this relationship taught me. Well, I was also partially inspired by another blog post I read.

This relationship taught me a lot about what I like and don't like... and what I want and don't want. Aside from personal preferences though, I also learned a few things about what a good relationship should be.

Relationships are built on trust and communication.

Well, I've always known that, really. It was one of my keywords back when I was 18, before I got married. Yet, I think I didn't pay enough attention to it . This applies really to any relationship: friends, lovers, family... the quality of the relationship will depend on the level of communication and trust.

The confusing part for me this time around was attempting to figure out how to make this work with someone who had some rather fundamental differences in belief. Yes, I believe it's possible for two people to not believe in exactly the same things, or necessarily be passionate about the same things, and still have a healthy relationship. It's something I had no previous experience with though, since my only previous relationship was with someone who shared all of my fundamental beliefs. I think that hesitation and confusion led me to be far more forgiving of some things than I ought to have been.

Warning Sign #1: No respect for Boundaries

One of the things that this experience really drove home for me was that someone who can't respect boundaries is not someone I ever want to be in a relationship with. When they ask me about things that make me cry, and know that this causes me distress, yet continue to ask and to push, that's a sign that they care less about hurting me than about what they want. When they ask me to do something to which I clearly say no, and continue to ask again and again, until I finally say yes, that's a sign that they're going to push for what they want, regardless of what might be best for me. When I clearly state that something is not okay, and they try to do it anyway, then claim they have forgotten... it's more likely a sign that they care more about what they want than about showing me respect.

Warning Sign #2: Reluctance to Clarify

First, a really great quote about how to clarify what you want from someone else before you enter into a non-exclusive relationship (though I think some of these things would be good to talk about before entering into an exclusive relationship also):

I always set down at the outset - what does the other person want to be told, or not, about other partners?  How do we handle mutual friends, and who can get told, or can nobody?  How much notice is needed before showing up?  What things, sexually, are off-limits?  Does the intimacy end at the bedroom door - all affection becomes friendly once outside it - or are we holding hands walking down the street and kissing on street corners?  What labels or answers do we feel comfortable giving when other people ask?  And the biggest agreement, which is if anyone's feelings change, the other person gets told immediately - whether it's growing disinterested or falling in love.  Either one can make everything end badly.

(It's a great post, but please be warned if you go to read it, that some of the content may be triggering for rape victims.) When I read this post, it made me realize that there were several things I hadn't asked that I probably should have. Being in a relationship where the lines are fuzzy and you are often confused is a sign that you need to clarify. Reluctance on the part of the other person to make those clarifications is definitely a warning sign. Asking and receiving no response may be a sign that you need to get out.

Warning Sign #3: No Response to Feedback

With me, I was in a situation very different from any situation I'd ever experienced before. This really drove home the need to be able to give feedback and have that listened to and responded to. Yes, response is crucial. See my last post. Effective communication requires feedback. If I say something and get no response, I don't know if I was clearly understood. Good relationships require you to be able to both give and receive this kind of feedback, because good relationships are all about figuring out what works for all parties involved. There is no generic template here. Each pairing of people entering into relationships have their own unique preferences and issues. When someone cannot, or is not willing to, discuss feedback issues, that's a warning sign that they may not really care about that feedback.

Warning Sign #4: You Can't Take What I Say Literally

Everyone jokes around sometimes and uses sarcasm or irony to mock things. Sometimes. When I find myself needing to reverse the meaning of about half of what someone is saying though, that starts to become a problem. When their manner of joking is to frequently insult me, though they clearly intend it to be taken as a joke, I start to wonder if it's really a joke. And then I found this:

Our culture tells men constantly that women emasculate you, that they're gross and icky, that they ruin everything, that they deserve violence and punishment, thatthey ruin your life once you're married, that they deserve to be hated. And you and your buddies joking about how women are only good for sex and cooking are not fucking helping.

In this post, Courtney links to another post that has much more eloquent things to say about the issue than I ever could. The point though? The point is that just because you didn't really mean it, or just because you intended your words to be taken as a joke - doesn't mean that they were. When someone you're in a relationship with tells you that the solution to this is that you need to lighten up and realize that they are not serious/joking most of the time, that's a warning sign. The real solution? They need to work on clearer communication. Maybe they should learn to say what they actually mean instead of wanting other people to always understand that they do NOT mean what they are actually saying. It might even be a warning sign that they DO mean what they are actually saying, and that calling it a joke, or saying, "I would never actually mean that!" is merely an excuse to cover their butt.

Warning Sign #5: I'm Going to Tell You What I Am; That Makes it Okay.

Here's my last thing to keep in mind for the future. I recently read this article:

This is the “I’m Such A Dick” Gambit. And before we proceed, it is time to discuss. For the “I’m Such a Dick” Gambit, aside from being the world’s Number One Most Popular Rhetorical Device To Open Your Sexist Op-Ed With, is also one of the more fearsome and annoying weapons of psychological warfare in existence.

I really HIGHLY recommend the article. Because here's the thing: When someone tells you that they are a bastard, they're often doing it to manipulate you.

I’m such a dick! Do you not find me charming?


We have already established that this person is an asshole; he admits to it. We’ve also established that being an asshole is funny and cool. Your choices are to laugh along, congratulate him on his discernment — wow, people who aren’t Dick really ARE losers, aren’t they? — or RUIN EVERYTHING FOREVER BECAUSE YOU’RE MEAN AND HATE FUN. Magically, by admitting that he is a total prick sometimes, Dick has managed to leave you, the person who objects to his behavior, holding the bag.

Saying what they are is a ploy to take away our ability to object to their behavior.

(And if the confession is made with any degree of sadness, watch out. Chances are that you are dealing with a Level Two Dick, or “Pity Dick,” who is shielded from critique by his own poor self-esteem, forged from the fires of Hell into an unstoppable weapon that lets him get away with basically anything, because if you’re mean he might cry.)

Our response might even be to defend them: "No, you're not a bastard. You're just human." Now we've just given them permission to continue acting like a bastard. So when someone starts saying something along the lines of, "I'm such a bastard," it may be a warning sign that they actually ARE a bastard. Feeling bad is different from being bad.

Epilogue

I think I still have a lot to learn about how to have a healthy relationship with someone who doesn't share all of my fundamental beliefs. At the very least though, I've learned a lot about what to watch out for, and how to identify behaviors that are not simply differences in belief, but warning signs that this is not a person I can have a healthy relationship with, regardless of beliefs.

She Geek: Women and Self-Labeling in Online Geek Communities

(The following is a project I did for my sociolinguistics course, and I thought you guys might like it. Enjoy!)

My intent in this project was to examine the labeling of female-oriented geek spaces on the internet. What I found was that self-labeling of geek women often defeats the potentially subversive act of creating a female-oriented geek community.

I would argue that the mere creation or and participation in geek communities labeled “for women” are aggressive acts towards male-dominated geek culture. One of the reasons we can see these communities as a challenge to mainstream geek culture is the still-prevailing myth of internet neutrality.

This myth argues that since we are “disembodied” on the internet, everyone begins on equal ground.

Bodies don't matter in cyberspace. This is not how it works in real life, however, particularly in geek spaces. It is true that until you mark yourself as Other than the privileged class—male, heterosexual, cisgendered, abled, middle-class, and white—you will be assumed to be those things. However, this will not protect you from hate speech or sexist, racist, and homophobic “jokes,” since geek communities often engage in these forms of discourse. Even objecting to these discursive acts, without revealing the state of one's own body, will immediately mark you as Other, and leave you vulnerable to harassment and denigration. By labeling their spaces as for women, female geeks challenge the neutrality myth, by making their female bodies conspicuous and by demonstrating a need for safe cyberspaces for women.

In a study of the language of male gamers playing within a Quake server, Natasha Christensen claims that

Even though the world of cyberspace allows for the possibility that gender can be transformed, men in Jeff's Quake Server continue to relate to each other in ways which support male dominance and heterosexual male superiority. [...] In the bodiless realm of cyberspace, it is fascinating to note that men who are able to create an alternate world where masculinity is defined differently do not take this opportunity. Instead, real life is mimicked not only by taking on the physical attributes of strength, but also by using ways of talk that emphasize aggression and sexual dominance.

[…]

Therefore, in the same way that sports and war help to perpetuate the concept of male dominance through physical strength, the Quake server also promotes the idea of success through aggression and violence. [...] Sports and war games became a way for white middle class men to fight their fears of social feminization. At the turn of this century, online computer games are being used in the same manner. Computer geeks who are especially vulnerable to the accusations of being less than manly are able both through the actions and discourse on Quake to demonstrate the qualities required of hegemonic masculinity. Emphasis is placed on the strength of the masculine body while discourse sets the players apart from anything that is feminine.

The same patriarchal standards that put women at a disadvantage also disadvantage computer and other geeks. Often, geeks cite an experience of growing up with bullying and teasing, precisely because they do not live up to hegemonic masculinity. Instead of using cyberspace to fight against hegemonic masculinity, however, geek men often use it to buttress those standards and fulfill them discursively instead of physically. This is precisely why geek women find online geek spaces—necessarily discursive spaces—to be so unwelcoming and hostile. And it is through alternative discourse, whether blogging or forum writing or fanfiction, that women challenge this culture of hypermasculinity.

By marking their spaces as “for women,” even while inviting men, female geeks mark themselves as physical bodies just as conclusively as the homophobic and misogynistic discourse of Quake players marks their bodies as male. And by doing so, women respond to and challenge both the hypermasculine discourse prevalent in online geek spaces and the myth of the neutral, disembodied cyber subject.

Geek Culture & Its Discontents

Matthew S. S. Johnson writes in “Public Writing in Gaming Spaces” that

Gamers who participate in writing activities, including blogs, strategy guides, walkthroughs, fanfic, and forums, “foster their own sense of agency through active participation in and frequent contribution to gaming communities in the form of written texts. Collectively, they not only gain influence over other gamers participating in games or game-related community projects, but also over the production companies who produce the software that originally inspired them” (271).

Johnson argues that these online gaming writing projects are an example of civic participation and public writing. I would like to expand his argument to include similar writing projects in all geek fandoms. One of the most common reasons that fans cite for joining writing projects like blogs and forums is that they wish to join a like-minded community. When women join geek communities and find gendered hostility, joining or forming a female-oriented alternative spaces is not only a reaction to male-dominated communities, but a civic response to them. Forming a Livejournal group for geek women is, I would argue, a move to challenge and change the mainstream geek communities.

We can see this desire to gain civic agency through discursive acts in many minority geek writings. Garland Grey, for example, writes in 'Cause I'm Nerdcore Like That: Toward a Subversive Geek Identity,

Writing our own comics, and blogs and forming our own communities gives us strength. When confronted with the cultural purity police, the ones who swoop in to Geeksplain to us, we can answer from a position of solidarity. We can create safe spaces of our own. Spaces where we can debate and discuss the ways Science Fiction comments on society’s treatment of The Other, spaces where our voices aren’t drowned out by simplistic fanaticism. A place where, for instance, a group of people can watch one of the X-Men movies and someone can, during one of the many scenes where Cyclops and Wolverine are having tense arguments about who is better for Jean Gray [...] simply scream out GAWWWWD JUST KISS ALREADY! BROKEBACK THAT SHIT! and not have people get all middle school about it.

 Garland argues that by creating separate discursive spaces, like queer-oriented or female-oriented forums, subversive geeks can create their own authority, one strong enough to stand up to the mainstream, white, male, cisgendered geek authority. His example, in which fans can “scream out” a reference to queer subtext, indicates that what non-mainstream geeks need is a space to speak without worrying about hegemonic gender and sexuality standards. Unlike the highly-policed Quake server, then, geek women (and geeks of color, disabled geeks, queer geeks, trans geeks) need a space of free discourse, in order to change the larger geek culture.

So, what does the labeling of these communities do for this potentially subversive discursive project? Let's move on to my data collection and results.

Methodology

My data came from Livejournal, which I chose because it is an online community with a reputation for being more female-friendly than other places online, and thus attracts more women-oriented communities and female geeks to join them.

I used a series of search words intended to bring up mainstream groups that self-identify as geeky or nerdy. This series was as follows: geek, nerd, science fiction/sci fi,Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, comic book/graphic novel, fantasy, Lord of the Rings, gaming/gamer, World of Warcraft. To collect my data, I went systematically through each the search results for each search term and identified the groups meant for women. Each group then needed to fulfill a number of criteria to be included.

Criteria

I only included groups whose titles indicated that they are intended for women. I excluded groups that hinted toward a female focus (like Squee Corner) without explicitly stating that focus. This was mostly to avoid ambiguity. The point of this project is to see how women label themselves when they create geek communities for themselves. Thus I can only count groups that explicitly label themselves “for women.”

To avoid groups that do not attract members or activity, each group must have at least 3 posts. However, the activity does not have to be recent.

If the group is intended to sell something, it will only be counted if the description indicates that the creator/seller herself is a geek.I only included one result that was intended to sell a product, because the creator clearly intended to create a community of geek women, while also selling her geek-inspired jewelry.

Method

Once I collected the groups that fit the criteria, I counted the gendered words (e.g. girl(s), women, female, heroine(s), ladies) in the titles and subtitles of all the communities for women. If the title and subtitle repeat a gendered word (like Geek Girls Anon: Because Geek Girls Need Love Too), the word is only counted once for that title. If the title and subtitle contain multiple gendered words, I counted each word once for that title (for example, Warhammer Online Ladies: Female Gamers counts as 1 example of ladies and 1 example of female).

Results

I found 52 Livejournal communities that fit the criteria, with the following breakdown: 18 general geek and nerd, 4 general science fiction, 5 Star Wars, 2 science fiction/fantasy, 1 fantasy, 2 Lord of the Rings, 16 gaming, 4 World of Warcraft.

The 52 Livejournal groups had 55 labels. Girl makes up almost 40% of these labels, significantly more than any other label. Considering the great variety of gendered terms used by geek women, the popularity of girl is surprising. So why do geek women choose to label themselves girls so often? None of the groups' profiles indicated that these groups were for anything other than adult women, yet they consistently describe themselves as geek girls.

If the creation of separatist spaces is a radical and civic act, why do women choose the label girl so often? I think that the label of girl can be harmful to the project of challenging geek culture, and that it is often chosen specifically for that property.

 

Feminism & Female Aggression

 

In an article on the BBC News site covering the worldwide phenomenon of Girl Geek Dinners, a networking organization for women with careers or personal interest in technology, the author reports that Girl Geek Dinners rejects the label of feminism. Said one of the organizers:

In a sense [Geek Girl Dinners] is a feminist movement as it aspires to a lot of the same ideals but I don't want it to be seen as something that is feminist as this can be seen as something marginal or negative.

We're not trying to be radical or disruptive, but to show that women have a place in technology. [emphasis mine]

While Geek Girl Dinners is not active on Livejournal, the attitude shown here seems commonplace in communities intended for geek women. Geek women often don't want to rock the boat, and see the political element of making an all-female geek community to be “radical” and “disruptive.” We can see this pattern in some of the profiles of the Livejournal communities labeled with girl, which we'll look at next. 

 

From Girl Gamers:

I created this community so that girl gamers could find each other and talk about gaming with people who take them seriously- not because of some imaginary hatred for the male gender. Some of my favorite people are boys; but any girl gamer will tell you that it's difficult to talk games (I mean *really* talk games) with a guy. It's just a fact of life. We love you, for honest. Try not to feel so threatened, aye? ;)

This entire paragraph is meant to display non-aggression—the reference to “some imaginary hatred for the male gender,” “some of my favorite people are boys,” “we love you, for honest,” and “try not to feel so threatened, aye?” Even the winking smiley face at the end is intended to communicate that this group is not meant to intimidate geek men.

From Geek Girl Chic:

This is a rating community for Geeks with Chic. It's open to Females and Males alike, despite the name of the community. I thought I better open it up to both sexes, can't have me being sexist now can we?

This one is slightly sarcastic, but since the groups actually allows both men and women to join, it still communicates that the group is not threatening to the male-domination of geek culture. Out of the 52 groups on Livejournal, a full quarter of them explicitly invite men to join, indicating that these groups' desire to appear non-threatening to male geeks. The use of the label girl is, I believe, related to this desire. Girl indicates immaturity, non-threatening femininity, and a lack of aggression. Because of the powerful statement that all-female geek communities make in their mere existence, geek women who don't want to be “radical” or “disruptive” use tactics such as labeling themselves girls or chicks or fangirls, as well as describing themselves in non-threatening ways and inviting men to join their communities.

I don't want to shut out the possibility that geek women can reclaim the label girl and use it in a way that does not connote non-threatening, or challenges and plays with the damaging stereotypes imposed by male geeks, in much the same way that geek women use the terms estrogen brigade and fangirl. However, while it is possible for women to effectively claim the label girl, when this labeling is coupled with other tactics of non-aggression, it counteracts the subversive potential of geek communities oriented toward women.

 

Refusing Heteronormativity?

 

There's another, less depressing answer to the question, “Why do geek women call themselves girls?” That answer is that some geek women are refusing to participate in the heterosexual matrix. In a study of nerd girls in a California high school, Mary Bucholtz notes that

Refusal to participate in the heterosexual matrix is also linked to the flouting of conventional displays of femininity and masculinity. […] Nerd girls do not wear revealing clothing, and although sometimes they may wear items decorated with Sesame Street characters or other emblems of childhood, these do not exhibit the combination of infantilization and sexualization evoked by the clothing of the cool white girls. […] (123).

Bucholtz notes that nerd girls in high school reject conventional femininity in their clothing choices, and while they embrace “childish” fashion, their doing so does not correspond with a sexualization. It is possible that some of the Livejournal groups that use girl to describe themselves are doing so in the same vein; by using girl, they are rejecting the conventional femininity connoted with the words ladies or women, but also rejecting the sexualized connotation of girl, one that links girl with submissiveness and non-aggression. Considering the widespread objectification and sexualization of women in male-dominated geek culture, calling oneself a girl can be a radical act in itself, refusing to be considered a female body ready for sexual appropriation by one's subculture.

The ways in which geek women label themselves is complex and multi-layered, and deserves further study. Looking at the ways in which geek women self-label could throw light on how women in more mainstream culture react to the negative connotations of female gender labels, and on the coping mechanisms of women who exist in male-dominated subcultures.

See also: Angie's Girl vs. Woman: The Great Debate

 

Works Cited

Bucholtz, Mary. “Geek the Girl: Language, Femininity, and Female Nerds.” Gender and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the 4th Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Ed. Natasha Warner, Jocelyn Ahlers, Leela Bilmes, Monica Oliver, Suzanne Wertheim, and Melinda Chen. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 1998. Print. 119-131.

Christensen, Natasha Chen. “Geek at Play: Doing Masculinity in an Online Gaming Site.” Reconstruction 6.1 (2006): n.p. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. Reconstruction, 2006. Web. 5 August 2010.

“Geek Girl Chic.” Community profile for geekgirlchic. Livejournal. geekgirlchic, 10 September 2006. Web. 8 August 2010. http://community.livejournal.com/geekgirlchic/profile

“Girlgamer’s Journal.” Community profile for girlgamers. Livejournal. girlgamers, 1 August 2010. Web. 8 August 2010. http://community.livejournal.com/girlgamers/profile

Grey, Garland. “‘Cause I’m Nerdcore Like That: Toward a Subversive Geek Identity.” Tiger Beatdown. Tiger Beatdown, 28 July 2010. Web. 3 August 2010.

Johnson, Matthew S. S. “Public Writing in Gaming Spaces.” Computers and Composition 25 (2008): 270-283. ScienceDirect. Web. 6 August 2010.

Knowles, Jamillah. “Girl Geek Appeal: Women’s Movement Online.” BBC News. BBC, 7 May 2010. Web. 8 August 2010.

Mrs., Miss, and Ms.; or, being a woman is linguistically annoying

(Our first co-blogged post! Courtney brings the swearing and Adrienne the cute swear euphemisms!)

I didn't even know that the Queen's English Society was a thing. Did you? Apparently, English needs to be pontificated about by self-nominated pompous people. Not too long ago, this QES decided that Ms. (pronounced miz) is "bad English." For a number of stupid reasons, outlined well by Motivated Grammar:

The QES’s complaints are petty, insane, or both. Case in point: they’d like to see Ms. abolished. Why?

1. It’s an abbreviation, but it has no long form.
2. It’s “unpronounceable” since it lacks a vowel.
3. It was created by “certain” women who “suddenly became sensitive about revealing their marital status.”

 Regarding point 1, this is matter of being beholden to word labels. It reminds me of an objection I once received to preposition stranding; “preposition” suggests “in a position before”, and therefore a preposition at the end of a sentence, where it doesn’t precede anything, must be incorrect.

So it goes with abbreviations; if you want to be literal, an abbreviation is an abbreviated form of something. But Ms. doesn’t need to be a literal abbreviation to exist. It does exist, as anyone can plainly see. If it’s not an abbreviation, that doesn’t stop it existing any more than a mannequin not being human stops it existing. 

Ms. isn’t an abbreviation, but rather a blend. It’s a combination of the two words Miss and Mrs., and it happens to inherit the closing period of the abbreviation Mrs., making it superficially resemble an abbreviation. That’s all.

And if we’re doing an abbreviation witch-hunt, what is Mrs. short for? Missus, one might say, but that isn’t really a word of its own as much as a spelling of the pronunciation of Mrs. Etymologically, Mrs. is an abbreviation of mistress, but the meaning of that word has changed sufficiently that you’d be stirring up a good deal of trouble if you called someone’s wife a “mistress”. I would argue that in modern English Mrs. itself is no longer an abbreviation, but a fully independent lexical item, much like Ms. 

Regarding point 2, well, we all manage to pronounce Ms. pretty well for the lack of a vowel supposedly rendering it unpronounceable. How do we do it? Technically speaking, the standard pronunciation of Ms. doesn’t have a vowel. We were told in school that all words need to have vowels, since each syllable has to have a vowel, but that’s not quite right. Some consonants can function as the nucleus of a syllable, just like a vowel. This is more apparent in some non-English languages, such as Berber or Slavic languages. For instance, in Czech or Slovak, you can apparently tell someone to stick their finger through their throat by saying Strč prst skrz krk (audio), a sentence where every word has a nucleic r in lieu of a vowel.

English does this, too, albeit more rarely. We often reduce and down to a syllabic [n] or [ŋ] between words (as in the restaurants Eat ‘n Park or In-N-Out), and word-final [l] and [r] are sometimes syllabic as well (as in bottle [boɾl] or pepper [pepr]). As you might have guessed, [z] is another syllabic consonant, which explains how we are able to pronounce [mz] as a stand-alone word.

Again, I don’t mean to demonize Mrs., but if we’re getting rid of vowel-less words, wouldn’t we have to get rid of it, too? Mrs. lacks a vowel orthographically, and has to trade its r for two [ɪ]s and an extra [z] just to get pronounced (as [mɪzɪz])! Now that’s unpronounceable!

On the first two points, Gabe is right on. Neither of these excuses to abolish Ms. make any damn sense linguistically, and frankly, if you are in a society dedicated to a particular language, you should know better. But that's kind of the point, and one Gabe seems to miss a little bit. He goes on to argue that Ms. "isn’t some recent feminist invention," but merely a convenient solution to etiquette. As if it being a recent feminist invention would mean that the QES was right. Because feminists never have any good ideas, and the older something is the better.

But pretty much all linguistic criticisms, especially ones that want so much to argue that some linguistic device isn't logical or doesn't make sense, are political. A good example of this is something I hear an awful lot, which is the "logical" argument against double negatives. Double negatives, according to this argument, don't make sense, because they cancel each other out. This argument makes zero sense, because when a person says, that don't/doesn't make no sense, everyone knows that they don't mean that sentence positively. Most understand that it's actually a way to emphasize the negative quality of the sentence. That doesn't make sense is less emphatic than that don't/doesn't make no sense. There is no "canceling out" effect. Double negatives used to be a part of mainstream English dialects (Shakespeare used them!), and the only reason they are denigrated so much now is because they are only used in marginalized dialects, like African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Chicano English. Which means that arguments against double negatives are arguments saying that racially-based marginalized dialects are linguistically inferior. This shit is always, always political.

Which means that the whole point of the QES's argument is to force women to use Mrs. and Miss, and thus place them in a system in which a woman is judged by whether a man has found her worthy enough to grace her with his name. Even when one wants to use Ms. to step outside of this system, some people either won't accept it or habitually "forget." The QES has a quaint notion that creating a title for the unmarried single male makes sense and would answer the confusion and issue surrounding Ms. Gabe is very polite calling this an "inferior solution," but let's take a slightly stronger (oh yes, some of you will read this as bitchier) position. This is straight up a pile of crappola. Men are not judged like women are judged on the status of their romantic entanglements. In an interview, Mrs. matters. A woman's title can impact how she is treated, respected, and hired. Currently, one of the only ways out of this conundrum is for a woman to receive a title that replaces Ms., Miss, or Mrs., like Dr. And how shitty is it that only the privileged get this option. We're lucky. And yet, there is still pressure with the use of Ms. and Dr. to box women back into those societal labels of single or married (worthless or worthy).

I (Adrienne) have had a couple of uncomfortable experiences with titles as a teacher at a university. Frequently students call me Dr., and I explain that I am not a doctor yet and would prefer to be called Ms. I accept Professor because... well I profess, and students sometimes feel more comfortable with this designation. I don't go by my first name because as a fairly informal teacher and a young woman, I am already walking a fine line trying to be comfortable, fun, and me in the classroom while still having authority and respect. More frequently, students call me Mrs. Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine. I'm not married, nor do I want to be married. And my marital status isn't important or any of their business. After picking up quizzes one day in a class a few years ago, I realized that more than half of the students had married me off on their papers. After picking up the papers, I announce that I'm not Mrs. and should be addressed as Ms. In response, a male student leered at me and asked "Does that mean you're single?"... Speechless, my face must have portrayed enough of the anger and disgust I was feeling because he immediately started apologizing. Thank you very much for trying to fit me tightly back into the category as clearly either available to men or not available to men. (And him specifically. Gross.) And thank you for refusing to give me respect or authority because I'm a sexual object.

This is personal. And it is political. And QES and Gabe should recognize that. It impacts our lives. Forcing women to wear Miss and Mrs. is always an attempt to undermine their authority. Female professors, especially young ones without doctorates, feel this acutely. I'm sure lots of other women in many different positions feel this too. Pretending we are living in a non-sexist culture that only has problems with confusion about language and status is damaging.

Feel free to share your Ms./Mrs./Miss/Doctor stories in the comments!

Verbal abuse and "toughening up"

(Trigger warning for descriptions of verbal and physical abuse and douchiness about those things.)

s. e. smith's wonderful "Dear Imprudence" series at FWD/Forward is one of my favorite things in my (ridiculously extensive) blog reading habit. Part of it is just that I find hiring incompetent and uncompassionate advice columnists fucking reprehensible. For example, the "Love Connection" column in the Maroon Weekly is a train wreck. (My inside information tells me that this author doesn't work for MW anymore. Let's hope they don't scrape the bottom of the barrel and finally get someone better.) And smith is great about calling all the shitty, shitty advice columnists out. Which is hugely important, I think, because no matter how bad the advice author is (see: Maroon Weekly), people will continue to write in to them. So we need to hold these authors to a high standard, because their bad advice will continue to affect people's lives.

Anyway, one of smith's posts really resonated with me recently: Dear Imprudence: Just Toughen Up Already! In it, smith criticizes the Ask Amy column for refusing to take verbal abuse seriously. The letter to Ask Amy is from a lady in high school who wants advice on how to deal with her verbally abusive brother. Amy's response is to tell this lady that what she is experiencing is not abuse, and basically that she shouldn't let it bother her. From smith:

Let’s be clear here. Hurt Sister is saying that what her brother is doing is actively hurting her. She cites that it’s a blow to her self esteem, and it makes her feel bad. She’s writing to ask for help. It’s worth noting that all over the world, every single day, people experiencing verbal abuse cry out for help, and they often get responses exactly like Amy’s.

[...]

You know what is verbal abuse? Something that someone identifies as abuse because that person is experiencing it. There are definitely degrees of verbal abuse, but they are all abusive. This is a short letter. We don’t know all the details. But it seems to me, reading between the lines, that her brother is constantly hounding her, is constantly making her feel small and worthless, is constantly saying that he is better than her, is constantly reminding her that she is ‘not doing things right’ and, you know what? That can become highly abusive when you are hearing it over and over.

Especially if you are aware of how it is impacting the way you feel about yourself. Hurt Sister is not writing in to say ‘this is annoying and it bugs me,’ she is writing to say this hurts me and I want it to stop.

Amy’s response is the equivalent of the old ‘sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ adage, with a side of ‘you shouldn’t let the things that other people say about you affect you.’ Well, guess what. Words hurt people. The things that people say about (and to) you affect you, whether you like it or not. It’s not always possible to make a ‘healthy choice’ to ignore verbal abuse, especially when you are a high school student, in your own home, a place that should be safe, and your family member is subjecting you to it.

THIS. This all over the place. Had I read this Ask Amy column without smith's commentary, it would have been triggering. Growing up, I experienced verbal abuse from my father. It took a long time for me to take it seriously, because I actually got the least of it in my family, because it never slipped into physical violence like it did for my other family members, and because when I talked about it, my friends pretty much gave me the same advice Amy gave this young lady. smith again:

There’s a prevailing and extremely dangerous attitude that verbal abuse isn’t ‘real’ abuse, despite ample evidence to the contrary. That attitude manifests in the way that people at all levels deal with abuse, from teachers handling bullying to human resource directors in offices with hostile work environments. If an abuser uses words alone to harm people, that abuser is far more likely to get away with it, and the responsibility for dealing with it will be placed solely on the victim. It’s the victim’s fault for being ‘too sensitive’ and not ‘toughening up.’

So, personal story time. This is not actually something I talk about much, because I've gotten the "you're being too sensitive" reaction a number of times. While most friends I've told about my abusive home growing up did not come right out and say "toughen up," most of them did act like I was overreacting to what they saw as normal parent/teenager conflict. It's taken me a number of years to get comfortable calling it abuse because of this. When I was a teenager, my father was abusive. Verbally to all our family members (my mother and my brother). That became more physical with my brother as he got older. I have reason to believe that his abuse of my mother was well beyond verbal, but we haven't really ever talked about it. We had a code of silence when I was growing up, which I think is fairly common in abusive homes. While we all hated Dad, there was an understanding that it was not okay to talk about it outside of the family. And even within the family, it had to be framed a certain way. Calling it abuse was not okay, because that word indicated a seriousness that would force us to tell someone else. If Dad shoved my brother, it was a "fight." If he yelled at us until he was red in the face for mostly imagined crimes, or told us that we were to blame for him and Mom constantly fighting (and, eventually, for their divorce), or when he basically told us we were (and made me feel) worthless, he was an asshole. But it was still not abuse. And my mother, because she was getting the worst of it, and didn't really want us to know (but of course we knew some, and suspected more), didn't talk about it at all. So breaking that code of silence after their separation when I was 16 was a huge breakthrough for me. But when I talked to my friends about it, I was silenced again. (I was the only member of our family that didn't go to therapy at this time, because we were broke and Mom and my brother clearly needed it more.) According to my friends, what I experienced wasn't "real abuse," and my talking about it downplayed the real abuse suffered by my mother and brother. I was just being too sensitive and exaggerating what really happened because I didn't like my father. For years, I thought those friends were right.

It's still rare for me to talk about this with friends, despite the fact that I'm a fairly well-adjusted adult now. But even as an adult, it's still rare for my friends to take me seriously. The other day, I was telling Adrienne about how my father would remove my and Justin's bedroom doors for days at a time when we were pre-teens and teenagers as punishment, usually for not ratting each other out. She was horrified, and sadly, I was actually surprised by her reaction, despite the fact that it's mine as well. But the taking-off-the-doors punishment usually elicits nothing more than, "Wow, your dad was an asshole." Well, yes. But he was also horrific and abusive. And sometimes I need to hear that from my friends. (Thanks, Adrienne, for being awesome!)

I still have certain family members that think I'm overreacting, or that don't understand exactly why I won't speak to him. It's hard to talk about with them, so they don't know everything. In fact, they know very little, and most of what they do know actually comes from him. They're his family, and he's supposedly turned a corner, so there's been a lot of reconciliation on their end with him. Which means they think a number of things, namely that his chief crimes to his children were being sort of absent and cheating on my mother.  He's manipulative, and their distrust of me, when they are good people and when they know me to be a perfectly reasonable and very smart lady, is plenty of evidence for me that he hasn't changed a bit. Whatever he's told them, it's probably mostly bullshit, and it sure hasn't been admission of abuse. I wish that I could tell them all this, but I can't. They're too sympathetic to him, and I can't talk to people about this when they've been trying to get me to reconcile with him for years now. But, honestly, I think they should at least suspect. As I noted, I'm clever and driven and reasonable, not a whiny child. They know this, and they also know I haven't said more than pleasantries to him in over 3 years. That should indicate that this is not just a temper tantrum, but a defense mechanism, one I only need because something really fucking bad happened.

But I'm also afraid to tell them, because they might react the way that so many have: by telling me that it's not "real abuse," by thinking I'm overreacting, by thinking that I'm too sensitive. And, frankly, I can't handle being told all that again.

(Fun story: I was forced to invite my father to my undergrad graduation because of a guilt trip from this side of the family. Before this, when discussing it with them, I burst into tears and couldn't talk about it anymore. A side effect of this whole damn mess is that when older men make me feel threatened or patronized, I verbally shut down and can't stop crying. Can't do it. The male family member then said, "I'm kind of glad you're crying. It means you still care about him." I've never wanted to punch someone so much as I did at that moment.)

My father scarred me with words. He's made it nearly impossible for me to control myself when male authority figures patronize me (that was not the first or last time I've cried uncontrollably in front of older men, and the other times were much more embarassing, since they were university-related). He's made my relationships with the rest of my family strained and difficult. And he made me feel useless and unworthy of love for years.  And the advice of Ask Amy, the advice of most adults when something like this happens, enabled him to scar me.