The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

As promised, this is the follow up to my last post on why women are not blogging politics. It has taken so long for me to get back to this, and so much has been written in the mean time, that there is probably not too much more that I can add. Jenny Ejlak, writing in the Crikey Daily Email on 25 August, made the point that I was trying to make so much more eloquently than I managed. Nevertheless, there are still a couple of points that I feel I could reiterate.

My last post was in response to a question raised on twitter by Jonathan Green and was quoted by Possum Comitatus on his blog post on the Crikey Blogs website. On Possum’s blog, Venise Alstergren, comment 86, accused me of “whinging” in what amounted at a personal attack. While the attack itself doesn’t bother me, (my family and I had a great laugh at some of Venise’s more outrageous assumptions), her comment and others demonstrate and raise a number of points that still deserve some attention.

Today on Twitter, GreenJ, one of the Crikey writers asked “serious question: why don’t women (proportionally the unbalance is weird) subscribe to crikey?” This question was retweeted by Pollytics who took the issue up on his (her?) blog, asking “where are Australia’s female political bloggers?” [oops, just burnt the soup because I’m trying to blog while cooking tea] Some of the people who left comments, especially JaneShaw, Anna Winter, and BH, made similar points to those that I had made on Twitter, but I’m going to repeat them here anyway.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day and as promised, here is my post about “women excelling in technology”. Because this is Memes, and we have our own interests and perspectives, my take on the excellent female technician is Dr Susan Calvin of US Robotics.

Susan Calvin is, of course, fictional. She features in many of the early robot stories of Isaac Asimov. The author is slightly self-congratulatory about his creation:

You will note, by the way, that although most of the Susan Calvin stories were written at a time when male chauvinism was taken for granted in science fiction, Susan asks no favors and and beats the men at their own game. To be sure, she remains sexually unfulfilled—but you can’t have everything. (Asimov, The Complete Robot, Granada, 1982: 265)

Nice. Women can be as talented and scientifically rigorous as men, but only by suppressing their identities as sexual beings. You can have science or love, but not both, apparently.

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I was having a debate about Sarah Palin with a self-described conservative friend recently, and he remarked how “the left” (leave that indifferentiation aside for the moment) had gone ballistic in its hatred for her. Not more than the vitriol “the right” reserves for Hillary Clinton I suspect, but I feel he has a point.

Much of the criticism is focussed on her inexperience (a question that must be asked of the Obama camp as well, to be sure), but a certain amount has caricatured her as a red-neck, gun totin’, caribou killing hillbilly. Now the red-neck, gun totin’ brigade has not done a lot for US credibility in last eight years, and I reserve my deepest levels of contempt for people who find it necessary to demonstrate their superiority over animals by killing them with high-power, precision targeted weapons, but I wonder whether the same level of condemnation would be aroused if Palin was male? Larvatus Prodeo canvasses a similar question here, and some of the comments are revealing. “Gun totin’ hick” isn’t a good look in relation to US foreign policy, so why weren’t these accusations levelled at George W Bush, or at John McCain?

Predicably, Republicans are squealing “sexism.” Well at least they’ve learned the word: eventually they’ll realise that a woman doesn’t have to be “one of the boys” to be considered for high office. I don’t think all this criticism is sexist, but there is certainly an imbalance in the progressive commentary, and it wouldn’t hurt their credibility if they examined that. I believe there are more than enough reasons to argue against Palin as VP without descending to class-based stereotypes.

It seems that most commentators have respected Palin’s call to leave her daughter alone. For my part, I’d prefer it if they skipped the hick-baiting, and asked questions about how Palin’s policy of abstinence and narrow definitions of sexual morality will address the problems of unwanted pregnancy, when they don’t even work in her own family.

Unspeak warns of a sickly new euphemism being deployed by anti-abortionists: