Ripley, Believe It Or Not

So far, here's the reaction I've seen to Doctor Who announcing the first female Doctor:

• 25% people happy about the new casting
• 12% people saying “it’s about time”
• 5% dudebros complaining
• 30% people eagerly anticipating the dudebros complaining
• 20% progressives complaining she isn't also black, Muslim, gay, etc. 
• 5% arguing whether she is now a “Time Lord” or “Time Lady”
• 3% fans trying to correct newcomers ("You call her 'The Doctor,' not  'Doctor Who.'" “Oh,  I get it: it’s only the show that’s called 'Dr. Who’” "No! you have to spell out ‘Doctor!’”)

As you can see, I was pleasantly surprised by how little complaining there was.  Of course, social media is not a representative sample of opinion on anything.  But there are people who were perversely fascinated by especially sexist criticism, and they seemed to be having trouble coming up with particularly extreme examples.  So I’m assuming they didn’t have much to choose from.  Of course, that could be because they’ve been burnt by past campaigns against women in science fiction.

But on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by how many people are acting like this is completely unprecedented. Trekkies are off to the side, waving their arms to get our attention and point out that they did have a female captain for seven years. It’s like when Wonder Woman opened, and people were talking about how this was a new era with a female-led action franchise, there were a number of memes showing Buffy, Xena, and Katniss looking miffed at that. To be clear, I’m not denying that women have been tremendously under-represented as characters in these genres, I’m just curious as to why we keep forgetting the previous steps we’ve taken.

It reminds me of something from the music business. I remember years ago someone pointed out how, at the end of the year, when they’re writing their retrospect stories, they always seem to declare this the Year of the Woman, that this was the year women finally asserted themselves in the music industry because of the success of singer X, singer Y, and Madonna.  And yet, things never seemed to change much, and popular music continued to be male-dominated.

I’d always assumed that was because the music business has women in visible positions, but not powerful positions.  There are lots of women singing songs written by men, being produced and promoted by men, with most of the profits going to men. So we’re constantly overestimating how much real power women have in the industry.

But now I’m not so sure. Maybe we do have a problem with shifting our perspective in response to incremental progress. That’s not too surprising, really, since our ideas about the state of the world are deeply ingrained. And humans are notoriously bad at noticing slow, steady change. So I guess the lesson here is to revisit our assumptions more often.

This Is On You

I think Hugh Laurie summed up the U.S. election recently when he appeared on Colbert. Most news focussed on Dr. House diagnosing Donald Trump. But that's not what I'm talking about - after all, do we really need one more person trying to explain what's wrong with him at this point? No, what I thought was insightful was his confusion at people's attitude to Hillary Clinton. As he put it:

The people who hate Hillary hate her so much...I feel as if I've missed the first reel of the film where she burned down the orphanage or something.

That's been my attitude all along. And it's fitting that I saw my views spelled out so clearly on a talk show, because I also had another moment of clarity about Hillary Clinton while watching a talk show.

It was back during the 2008 election campaign, when Bill Maher was on Leno. He happened to mention her name, provoking a few boos from the crowd. Rather than use that as a springboard to take easy shots at her, he challenged the booers, saying,

If you hate Hillary Clinton, that is so on you. She's a bland centrist. If you hate her, those are your issues. You were molested by a real estate lady or something.

Ironically, I could only find the exact text of that quote at a right-wing blog. But back to the issue. Maher has got a point. Centrist Democrats are the vanilla of politics: not everyone will like it, but no one will really hate it. When you actually look at what Hillary stands for and does, you can certainly explain why Republicans will not be won over, or why the far left won't be excited about her. But there's really no explanation for hatred.

But the understanding of Hillary hatred gets more difficult when you look back at her long-term popularity as a poltician. Sady Doyle points out that she's actually been quite popular once she has a job. Her highest popularity was only a few years ago when she was Secretary of State, but her approval ratings plummet when she runs for President. Of course, you can expect a politician to lose some popularity when exposed to political campaigns, but even that can't explain the night-and-day difference in how she's been seen over the past eight years.

People grasp at different explanations, like a lack of charisma. But I don't remember anything this antagonistic against Mitt Romney or Al Gore. But a bland poltician who gets instantly hated when she shows career aspirations? Let's face it: it's all about gender. We've reached a point where we're okay with women in positions of power, but we still haven't accepted women being assertive or striving to achieve.

Armed with that perspective, you can also understand everyone's sudden love affair with Michelle Obama. She's campaigning for Clinton, essentially saying the same things, and getting heaps of praise for it. And people are saying - with varying degrees of subtlety - how much better it would be if she was the one running against Trump. But that's naive. Of course we love her; she's not running for president.  Give her the nomination and the knives will come out.

One of the most disappointing aspects of this problem is how the prejudice is perpetrated by both genders. Throughout the campaign, I've seen so many women express the same vague-but-strong dislike of Hillary Clinton. There'll be talk of attitude, mannerisms, maybe a comparison to a disliked woman you knew in the past.

I know, as a man, I'm not normally in position to school women on sexism. But as a straight-white-able-bodied-cis-male, if there's one thing I do know, it's prejudice. So let me tell you: prejudice doesn't feel wrong. In fact, it doesn't feel like anything. It feels like you, your feelings. When you hate someone but there's no logical reason why. Or when you're okay with Group X, you just don't like this particular member of Group X. That's what it feels like, and you have to challenge yourself on that. It's something we all have to learn to do.

Try To Keep Up

Today I saw a news bite that Jamie Lee Curtis had criticized Donald Trump for his attack on Lindsay Lohan.  I was like, wait, what?  I thought it was Marlee Matlin that he had criticized.  Oh, that was earlier today, leaked from Celebrity Apprentice. The loan insult was from an old Howard Stern. That's it, even for a person like myself, who tries to keep up with current events,  even with our 24 hour news cycle, the scandals are coming to fast to digest. We have reached the scandal singularity.

The reaction to accusations of sexual assault against Trump have followed a predictable pattern. You may have heard of Lewis' Law "Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism." I think we need a new law: People's reaction to women finally coming forward to talk about sexual assault is why women are so reluctant to talk about sexual assault.

On the one hand, there seem to be more people willing to listen instead of dismiss the allegations. Some of it is because people are finally getting experience and understanding of the issue. Though I suppose it's also because the allegations square with Trump's public personna more easily than they did with Bill Cosby. It's also easier to understand their desire to keep quiet given the accused's quickness with litigation. But on the other hand, the partisan nature of this issue had meant that people ate dug in on both sides, so the fight is going to be extra toxic. But it's further evidence that people are coming to accept this election as the referendum on civility that I always saw it to be.

I Don't Always Study Chromosomes, But When I Do, I Prefer Dos Equis

This week we found out that Dos Equis beer is going to be changing the "Most Interesting Man In The World" character from their ads. They're still using the same concept, but they'll have a new actor in the role. The current Most Interesting Man will get some appropriate send off, supposedly a one-way trip to Mars.

So now they're going to have to come up with a new Most Interesting Man. But in our enlightened era, some people have suggested they have a Most Interesting Woman In The World. I'll leave it to you to decide/argue whether that's a good idea or not, but either way, it brings up the interesting question of what the Most Interesting Woman would be like. After all, we don't expect women to have their own identity, never mind a complex, multifaceted identity. So there really aren't many adventuresome, hyper-talented role models for women. The Most Interesting Man seems to be inspired by Ernest Hemingway, but who would you use as the basis for the female version? Here are some ideas:

• Jane Goodall
• Dorothy Parker
• Kim Gordon
• Anaïs Nin
• Nellie Bly
• Ani DiFranco
• Hedy Lemarr
• Carrie Fisher
• Laurie Anderson
• Björk
• Hillary Clinton
• Amelia Earhart
• Yoko Ono
• Oprah Winfrey

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, # 28

CoverGirl has a line of Star Wars makeup.

Take The Pink Pill And Believe Whatever You Want To Believe

The "Female Viagra" is in the headlines. That's what the media is calling the first drug to increase women's sexual desire, which I'm sure the company's marketing department just loves. I've seen several stories on the drug, one of them just ten minutes ago, and I don't remember the drug's actual name.  I just know that the pill is pink, in contrast with Viagra's equally stereotypical blue.

Addyi (I looked it up) is controversial because it's struggled to get approval, and required a PR campaign by the manufacturer playing on the perceived unfairness of the huge number of drugs available for men's erectile dysfunction, to the complete lack of drugs for women.

I can't speak to the issue of whether it should be approved, but the thing that has bugged me about this story is that it is quite simply not the female Viagra. Viagra is a drug for men who want to have sex but find it physically difficult. This drug is for women who (presumably) are physically able, but don't want to.  It's a depressing statement about our attitudes towards sexuality that we confuse two things that are so different; it's as though we just file both ideas under this vague category of "sex stuff" and don't examine them further.

As such, it brings up a difficult ethical question. I'm not aware of any other drug that makes people want something. See, there is a small but significant group of people who consider themselves asexual, because they experience little or no sexual desire. And they seem to be reasonably happy, and bristle at the idea that they need to be "cured."

However, a person with no libido may still want companionship, and it appears that among humans, sex is a key part of that. Further, if you've lost your desire while in a relationship, that will cause tension. And that's the biggest practical argument I've seen for this drug: women in a marriage who are worried that if they don't provide sex, then their partner may go elsewhere for it. I can understand that predicament, but it makes the PR campaign take on an ugly tone: the claim by the ads was that it was unfair that men have their sex drugs, but not women. Yet, scratch the surface and you find that the main beneficiaries of the new drug are primarily the men married to the women taking it.

Could Take A Long Time, Working On The Pipeline

As a techie person concerned with social justice, I've always taken an interest in the drive to get more women working in technology. And one thing that's always bothered me about these efforts is the emphasis on changing the circumstances of tech firms. Often I'll see a story about the low number of women in tech, and they'll interview a few of the women who are working in tech, and they'll talk about the lack of acceptance they've received at work or in university.

My problem with this is that the core problem is that few women are choosing to study tech-related fields, particularly computer-related. I don't deny the problems women in tech have had, I'm just thinking that changing the workplace won't help if there are few women entering the field in the first place.

As it happens, a recent presentation by Microsoft made this very point, using the United States' recent victory in the Women's World Cup. Having now won three cups with largely different teams, it's clear their long-term success is not because the team itself is particularly well run, but because of the "pipeline" continually developing new talent. Girls are encouraged to play soccer at a young age, they have an opportunity to continue on high school teams, and thanks to Title IX, college programs are plentiful and well funded. Microsoft wishes there were a similarly strong pathway for women to get education in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.

But recently, I've been seeing articles from women approaching the problem from the other side: they're sick of hearing people like me trying to fix the problem by getting more women to study tech-related fields, if they're just going to land in an intolerable situation in the workplace that will drive them away. Julie Pagano put it quite vividly, complaining that, "So many 'diversity in tech' efforts are about getting young women into the pipeline; ignore the fact that there's a meat grinder at the end."

It turns out they have a point. Research shows that women leave technology far more often than men, and far more often than women leave other fields.

So I've come to realize that getting more women in technology will take an effort on both fronts. The problem is that they are largely unrelated. One involves changing attitudes in workplaces, the other requires rethinking approaches in high schools or even elementary schools.

Seeing A Difference

Lots of people are talking about the cover of New York Magazine. If you haven't heard, it's a picture of 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of rape.  There are also short write-ups of the experiences of each of the women.  They are as shocking as would be expected, but people still seem fixated on the effect of that cover photo.

That leaves me with a question: why does the picture have such an effect?  It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  We already knew the sort of numbers we were dealing with in this case; we could easily imagine what 35 women would look like.  I know, the medium is the message and all that.  But still, the effect of a visual is striking.

This first came to my attention last year in the case of Ray Rice, the football player who was arrested for knocking his then-fiancée unconscious in a hotel elevator. When the report came out, he was given a slap-on-the-wrist two-game suspension.  But later, when video of the incident became public, there was a widespread outcry, and he was released by his team and given an indefinite suspension.

A lot was said about the incident, but what I found shocking was that the video didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  You could understand the shift in attitude if the video had revealed something that wasn't in the reports of events.  But it showed that the report was pretty accurate.  To me that reveals our complacency about violence against women.  We're used to brushing off men assaulting their partners and accepting it as part of life.  The video forced us to confront what we were really talking about, and to judge the behaviour for what it really is.

I think we're seeing the same effect with the magazine cover.  We've heard for a while now about the sheer quantity of women accusing Cosby.  As much as the numbers have lead to more widespread belief of the women, it's also shifted it from a story of individuals to a story about numbers.  Forcing us to come face-to-face with these women has brought it back to a human level. Again, it shouldn't be that way; we should be able to give importance to a story on our own, without a visual cue. Hopefully stories like this one will allow more of us to remember victims' humanity.

He/She/They Slimed Me

I'm not sure what to think about this new Ghostbusters movie. If you haven't heard, the main characters are all female. There are a lot of people complaining about it on the grounds of, ew, girls. I’m certainly not in agreement with them.  I like the cast, and the people from the original movie don't seem horrified by what's going on.  So I'm sure it's got as good a chance as any reboot.

Some have seen it as a milestone for women in a couple of areas (blockbusters and comedy) where they're still searching for acceptance. But others have said that it seems like tokenism. After all, producers decided that this movie would feature female leads before anyone had been cast. So you can look at the gender switch as progressive, but it also looks like a publicity stunt to set it apart from all the other reboots and sequels out there.

Into all this comes Annalee Newitz's article criticizing news outlets (including her own site io9) for referring to this movie with descriptions like, "the all-female Ghostbusters." The complaint being that we don't refer to the original as "the all-male Ghostbusters," and thus, we're contributing to the idea that women are the exception and men are the rule.

In most cases, I'd agree. But when conceived from the start as all-female (and we'll figure out which particular females later) then I think it's reasonable to identify them by gender.  It would be wrong to refer to say, The Supremes as an all-female band, since you wouldn't refer to, say, The Beatles as an all-male band. However, I wouldn't be against referring to a band as all-female if it was conceived of as specifically female. That is, you wouldn't call Weezer "all-male" yet I think it's reasonable to call their tribute band Sheezer "all-female."

Having said all this, I realize that there is a counterargument: I'm criticizing the fact that this movie was conceived of as "all-female," but the fact is that lots of movies are conceived of as "all-male," even if it's not explicitly stated.  For instance, The Expendables probably wasn't described by its producers as an all-male action movie, but the genders of its characters were as certainly male as the new Ghostbusters is certainly female.

An Ebbing Tide Lowers All Boats

I heard a joke once about the Russian people trying to decide which revolutionaries to support. I couldn’t find it online, but I remember the punchline was that they had to choose between the group who wanted the tsars to be as poor as the common folk, and the group who wanted the common folk to be as rich as the tsars.

Which brings me to the Trivago guy. A lot of people have been criticizing his appearance. But this is just a lot of piling-on with a particularly visible person. Honestly, if you saw him on the street, I'm sure you wouldn't notice him.

Some people have welcomed the extra scrutiny on Trivago Guy's appearance as a new level of equality, since his being judged brutally on his appearance with no consideration of his personality is very much like the female experience. Well, that's true, and hopefully some men will learn from that, but this isn't what I had in mind with equality. The idea wasn't to bring everyone down to women's predicament, it was to get everyone the rights and privileges that had previously only been available to men. Or, to put it another way, when looking at women's income disparity, I would think that all but the most radical would fix it by increasing women's salary by 30%, not dropping men's salary 30%.

When it comes to appearance, I think men have it pretty close to ideal. Yes, I know everyone has their anecdote of a fashion disaster, but for most of the people you see in an average day, the men generally look quite acceptable, yet spend very little time getting to look that way. It's a balance between looks and effort that I think most women would choose if media and beauty magazines had not set the bar for respectability so high. So instead of criticizing men as though  they're women, we should cut women slack like we do men.

Offend In Every Way

There's a word on the net: "mansplain." If a woman is offended by something a man does, mansplaining is the man explaining to her that she shouldn't be offended.

I have mixed emotions about this concept. On the one hand, there have been a lot of egregious examples of guys trying to explain away some really obviously bad behaviour. But I'm not comfortable with blanket use of the term. That is to say, I have no doubt that most - if not all - of the incidents that have been labelled as mansplaining are just guys trying to excuse unacceptable behaviour, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will always be true that the explaining man is in the wrong. This disappoints me when - in the frenzy of condemnations against a man's offensive behaviour - some people take a more sweeping condemnation, thinking of the mansplainer as inherently wrong; this view implies that if a person is offended by something you've done, then you are obviously in the wrong, and you have no right to explain your way out of it.

Again I'm not defending individual mansplainers - all the examples I've seen of them are pretty pathetic - I'm just defending the concept.  But on the other side of the equation, there are a lot of people celebrating the very idea of not caring if you offend people. I saw this image of a Stephen Fry quote being passed around on Twitter

Most of the graphics depicting quotes by famous people that go around the Internet are wrong, so I looked this up at Wikiquote, and found out it is indeed genuine.  It comes from a discussion with Christopher Hitchens in 2005. Fry reiterated at the time that he does oppose laws that ban people from offending others. What's odd is that the article about the event cites the quote only after several paragraphs reporting on Fry's experience of looking for his Great-Grandfather's grave in a Jewish cemetery recently desecrated by anti-Semites. And Fry has worked for the acceptance of homosexuality and atheism, so he's hardly okay with people being offensive.  And that's the problem with this blanket defence of offensiveness: being against banning offensive behaviour doesn't mean that offending others is an admirable pursuit.  Or - to answer Fry's question at the end of his quote - if someone is offended by something you've done, then one or the other of you is acting unreasonably; it might be the offended person, but it might also be you.

The point is that both sides are wrong. Whether you think that offending people is always acceptable, or that it's never acceptable, you're wrong. And it doesn't take too much imagination to come up with counterexamples proving that you're wrong. By all means, continue to fight against extremists at both ends of the scale, but don't kid yourself that you're fighting for some absolute, inalienable right. Really, you're just one of many trying to find a reasonable middle ground.

All In All

You probably saw that this weekend, a young man murdered several people in Santa Barbara, California, apparently motivated by anger over his failure with women. That lead to a lot of events on the internet. If you're confused, here's how it happened:

• Violence against women is an obviously emotional issue to begin with, but it's a particularly raw nerve on the Internet, where a number of women have received rape threats as part of online discussions.
• At the same time, there's been a number of men taking up the mantle of Men's Rights Activists (MRA). That's quite a vaguely-defined cause, but it's mostly been men who see their interests as opposed to women's rights, that their rights suffer from the actions of feminists. So there's been a great deal of animosity between women online and MRAs.
• A number of women in online discussions have grown tired of the "not all men" phenomena. That's the situation where they write about some bad experience they've had with men (such as the aforementioned online threats) only to be inundated with men trying to point out that not all men do the thing being complained about. Of course, not many women do believe all men perpetrate violence against women, but it's annoying when that's the first reaction people have to your difficult revelations of personal hardship.
• So in the aftermath of the events in Santa Barbara, there were plenty of women talking about violence against women, which lead to plenty of "not all men" replies. A popular response to the not-all-men response was to point out that not all men mistreat women, but all women are affected by it.
• At some point, someone, somewhere must have said, "surely not all women." And thus was born a hashtag on Twitter, #YesAllWomen. This was full of heart-rending personal examples from women of ways they've suffered from sexism or sexual violence (or its threat.) It also lead to some beyond-tasteless jokes, which provided perhaps the most obvious ever example of Lewis's Law.

I just looked at the tweets with that hashtag, and the bad news is that after four days there are still tweets coming in. But the good news is that they seem to have outlasted the trolls.

So I - like a lot of men - am left wondering, what can I do?  Obviously, don't participate in violence and threats.  But not being part of the problem seems a little weak now.

I've read from some men who have put forward the idea that all men are indeed part of the problem.  The explanation being that no one is perfect, we all - possibly accidentally - perpetuate stereotypes and roles and the status quo.  But I don't buy that.  Although I have a standard of behaviour that some have considered unreasonably high, even I wouldn't claim that a person contributes to rape culture by forgetting to say "salesperson" instead of "salesman."  I suspect this self-blame is done out of the frustration of being powerless over the true perpetrators.

So what can men do? The best points that I have seen are to listen to women's experiences.  Incorporate this perspective into your world view; that is, be conscious that these frustrations and fears are part of the world you live in.  And don't be complacent: Challenge men who disrespect women instead of letting it slide.  Remember women's concerns, and stand up for them when you get the opportunity.  I'll also add the words of Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer:

Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.

Bossyrants

There's a movement afoot among many women to ban the word "bossy." The reasoning is that the word only gets used to describe women, and primarily for behaviour that would hardly be noticed coming from men. Women have long complained of subtle double-standards in how we perceive behaviour.

I can understand where they're coming from. We shouldn't have double standards, in language or elsewhere. But there's one aspect of this that I don't think they've considered: they've assumed that because the behaviour is acceptable in men, that it should be acceptable in women. But couldn't it also be the other way around: behaviour unacceptable from women shouldn't be acceptable from men? Perhaps no one should act in a way that could be considered bossy.

So I propose that instead of banning the word "bossy," let's expand its use to include men. That co-worker who tells you how to do your job? Call him bossy. The politician who tries to micromanage the entire government? Write a letter to the editor calling him bossy. The coach who bad-mouths one of his players in the press? Phone in to sports radio and call him bossy.

Let's Hear It For Bosses

There was a recent incident that has people in silicon valley concerned.  Julie Ann Horvath, a programmer at popular tech company GitHub, quit, complaining of harassment and intimidation.

This was a disappointment on a lot of levels. First, technology - among with all of geekdom - is having a great deal of difficulty dealing with the increasing number of women. Horvath had worked on a project to encourage women in technology.  And GitHub was thought to be a progressive company, with a flattened hierarchy and a fresh attitude.

But Wired then had an interesting alternate look at how that flattened hierarchy can work. We may think of such a set up as being inherently level and equal, but it may not work that way in principle. After all, another way to look at it is anarchic. If there is no imposed hierarchy, them an informal one will develop, and it may be fueled by some unpleasant things, from intimidation to stereotypical expectations as to who will be in charge.  In other words, there will always be a hierarchy, it's just a question of whether it will be held to some rules and standards.

The concept is a weird ideological mixture, so one way or another this situation will go against your hopes and expectations: the lack of regulation in the role-less workplace reflects poorly on libertarian principles. But at the same time, an equal workplace resembles the communist ideal, and add the article points out, communes have had all the same problems.

But it also casts doubt on radical feminism. That's the idea that the structures of society are inherently unfair, and gender equality can only be achieved by rebuilding them. But as difficult as it has been to achieve equality within the system, it seems that a lack of a system can make equality even harder to get.

Girls' Friends

There's been some controversy over a new line of toys from Lego.  "Lego Friends," which is aimed at girls.  And they aren't the only ones: Even TinkerToy, which is even more abstract than Lego, has introduced a new line for girls.

This has a lot of people angry that they're reinforcing stereotypes.  Lego has always been a very gender-neutral toy, so the idea of femming-it-up seems gratuitous.  Personally, I don't like the idea. As a mild-mannered liberal male, I always liked Lego's abstract, androgynous, oh-so-Scandinavian style.

But, the people complaining about the new toys are off target.  Yes, there was a time when a mostly-male business might waste money on products that make little financial sense but reinforce their image of gender roles.  But in today's business climate where no belief is too sacred to be sacrificed for profit, I have no doubt they'd rather sell one product line to both genders.  Introducing a new line of toys is expensive. Aside from the cost of manufacturing new parts, there's the huge cost marketing a whole new brand.

If they are going to all that expense, it could only be because they know that's the only way to get at that market.  So don't get angry at the company; get angry at the parents who won't buy toys for their girls unless they're pink, flowery, and in the same aisle as Barbie.

And I Thought I'd Never Use The Word "Frosh" Again

Usually I don't notice Frosh week now that I'm out of university.  But this week, it was hard to miss in Canada, thanks to the frosh event at St. Mary's University featuring an offensive chant.

It used to be that frosh week was unregulated and anarchic.  But by the time I went through froshdom in 1992, it was starting to be tamed, and there was more oversight and regulation added in the next few years.  You might think the student body would find that intrusive, but most people I knew welcomed the changes, as there seemed to be a general perception that frosh week really wasn't all that fun.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not at all surprised that this chant existed, or that it had been used for years.  What was surprising was the fact that it was still in use.

This is the sort of story that encourages news outlets to get the public's opinion. Normally I hate it when the news talks to the person on the street, or reads out tweets and e-mails on the topic.  But in this case, I think it is called for, as the disparity of public attitudes is the real issue here.  One tweet the CBC read on the air was from a person defending the students, saying, "You can’t sneeze without offending someone."

First of all, while I understand the basic point that it can be hard to avoid hurting anyone when some are quick to take offence, why is it that people with that viewpoint always seem to complain at the worst possible time?  Really, you feel inconvenienced by the idea of not making fun of raping the underaged?  That's really limiting your topics of conversation?

But that quote stuck out for me because it's a problem society is encountering in a lot of places.  If you're a geek, you're likely aware of controversies arising from behaviour at conventions dedicated to sci-fi, gaming, and technology.  There's an increasing number of women at these places, and suddenly behaviours that were once accepted are now frowned on, and the people asked to change feel hard done by.

We're going to have to accept that a more complex society will have more rules.  The more groups that are interacting with each other, the more likely we're going to offend one another.  Certainly there is a flip side, where groups will have to relax their impulse to be offended (hello, Muslim cartoon readers!)  But asking not to make light of rape is definitely in the category of legitimate offence, and if women are going to be equal partners in society, it's not asking too much to stay away from it.  If that's your equivalent of sneezing, then you're just going to have to find a good antihistamine.

Bowled Over

The American college football National Championship was decided this week, and all anyone can talk about is the quarterback's girlfriend.  If you didn't see the game - or wisely bailed out early on the one-sided contest - there was a moment when the cameras showed Katherine Webb, girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron.  At that point, the eyes of veteran announcer Brent Musburger sprang out of his head towards Ms. Webb, his heart shooting out of his chest with every beat.  Okay, obviously I don't know that's what happened; as a commentator, the cameras weren't showing him.  But based on the profound effect her beauty had on him I can only assume he was reacting as a cartoon character.

A lot of people found it offensive, or just awkward.  I'd go with the latter: My policy has always been that there's nothing wrong with acknowledging a person's beauty, or even mentioning a personal attraction.  So I see nothing wrong with mentioning that the quarterback's girlfriend is beautiful - though it is about as surprising as mentioning that the quarterback has a strong arm.  You'd think that a guy who's covered college football for twenty years would have noticed the trend in hotness of quarterbacks' significant others.  And that brings me to why it was awkward.  Not that Musburger attested to her attractiveness, but that he was so moved by her beauty that he seemed to lose his composure, as though he had never seen such a woman before - also odd for a guy who's spent most of the last twenty years on college campuses.  Whether you're approaching this issue from a perspective of feminism or chivalry, you'll agree that a man should have some control over his hormones.

This brings up something I've never understood about men.  I mean other men.  And that is their over-the-top reaction to certain women.  Okay, you're a heterosexual man, you're attracted to women.  Some women more than others.  Logically there has to be a "most attractive" woman in the world for you.  But in my experience that woman is maybe 0.01% hotter than the second most beautiful woman.  It seems odd to pick out one exceptional unattainable woman and claim that she is head and shoulders above all other exceptional unattainable women.  Most human traits are like that: there's usually little to separate the top people in any one quality.  If, for instance, you put the top two football teams on the same field, you'd expect them to be so closely matched that there's no way one would crush the other by 28 points.  Okay, bad example.

Really, I think this phenomenon of men claiming one woman as the far-and-away most attractive is something that helps them in relationships.  By maintaining the idea that one woman can be that superlative, they can plausibly maintain the claim that the woman they're with is the best in the world.  If any man were to admit that many women are attractive to him, it would deprive him of any success with women.  Crap.

Sex and Women's Golf (Guaranteed No Cheap Lesbian Jokes)

There's a new LPGA golf tournament this week in Kitchener-Waterloo, the Manulife Classic.  First of all, can we at least wait until an event has happened twice before we call it a classic?

But secondly, the ads for it have placed heavy emphasis on Michelle Wie.  Like a lot of people, it bugs me seeing the attention she gets.  Nothing personal against her, but they are publicising the sport using someone who has played three-and-a-half full seasons but won only two more tournaments than I have.  She's been the face of women's golf for years, despite the presence during that time of two exceptional superstars, Anika Sorenstam and Lorena Ochoa.  The odd thing is, it's not clear why.

It's not unprecedented in women's sports for the uber-successful household-name star to be an athlete who's far from the best.  Tennis's Anna Kournikova, being the obvious example: she famously won as many tennis tournaments as Wie has.  It's hard to imagine a worse role-model for girls: her looks made her the most popular player of her generation, far ahead of players who were actually good at their sport.

In her case, it seemed to be all about sex appeal.  But a few people asked the question, why her?  It seems obvious: she's an attractive woman in a society where sex sells.  But that can't be the whole story - beautiful women are a dime a dozen in our world.  The question is, why did young teen boys spend their minimum-wages on a copy of Maxim with her on the cover, when endless pictures of women are always a Google search away?

Furthermore, why hasn't it continued?  Maria Sharapova is at least as attractive, but with the bonus that she's actually a good player, and thus can be lusted-after guilt-free.  Wie is not unattractive either, but if this were just about sex, Paula Creamer would likely be the face of the LPGA (and look, she's won nine tournaments.)

This whole thing seems to be a symptom of that odd phenomena of modern society where fame is self-fulfilling.  Something arbitrary vaults a person into the spotlight and then they're there for as long as they want.  Why is Wie so well-known?  Because she's famous.  These are the first sports examples of the famous-for-being-famous concept.  In the same way Kournikova taught girls that it's more important to be hot than good, Wie is teaching us that it's more important to be famous than good.