Thought for the day

I recently posted about fighting street harassment using mobile phones. The idea has two parts: one, make it simple and fast to report street harassment. Two, take away the anonymity of harassers by taking a photo of the person doing the harassing (when safe) and posting it along with the harassment report.

To my flabbergastment (yes, I made up that word), the most common objection to this project was this: If you give women an easy way to post photos and stories about men who sexually harass them on the street, they will use it to falsely attack men they don’t like. Co-workers seem to be an especially big concern.

[...]

Several people don’t want to support the project at all because they believe the potential harm – of women lying in order to damage the reputations of men – exceeds the potential good – reducing the incidence of street harassment. In simple terms, better women harassed than men falsely accused of harassment.

— Followup: You can do something about street harassment

WisCon Day 1: First Day, First Panels, First Supper. Firsting.

Day one of WisCon tends to start a bit late. I was up and registered by 9:30 (local time), and started hanging around some of the public spaces -- second floor (near registration) and the hotel lobby -- looking for people that I know.

And I conveniently ran into a lot of people. polyfrog, pokershaman, wild_irises, redbird, and so forth. Those first few, "Hey, what's new in your life?" moments. I had a good lunch with Ian H. at the Nepali restaurant, which is, I think, my favourite restaurant in Madison (there's something about their Dal that's tremendously tasty). After lunch, I went to the gathering. I really wanted to see hypatia's locksport table. Totally packed! Exceedingly popular event. So I wandered away, gabbed with deepforestowl and maevele and a few others. Eventually, I found a spot at the spillover locksport table, and tried to call up the information that I read 20 years ago. I managed to get one tricky five-pin lock to open, but all the others eluded me. I could feel pins "catch", but I was having difficulty maintaining the "right" amount of torque to ensure that the bottom part of the pins could drop without hindrance.

All-in-all, good fun. I'll probably look into getting a set of tools at home so I can practice more.

At 4:00, I went to the "Chicks Dig Time Lords" panel:

Chicks Dig Time Lords

There is a perception that there weren't many women in Doctor Who fandom before the New Series was launched. This is patently false. Women have had a major role in Doctor Who fandom since the inception of the show. Do women approach and experience their Doctor Who fandom (or other media fandoms) differently than men? This panel explores different approaches within an assumed male-dominated fandom. Approaches to fandom discussed will range feminist critique to costuming to fan fiction.

Mostly the panel had little to do with that write-up. There was some early acknowledgement that women attending Doctor Who conventions before the New Series were looked upon as odd creatures ("Will you be our mascot?"), but most of the rest of the panel was more "My Doctor Who squeee: let me describe it to you!" And that was kinda fun, but not really the Srus Kdemic Nalisis™ that the description made it out to be.

Quotoids:

"Our fandom is bigger on the inside..."

"The sixth Doctor has a costume that was made for radio."

A lot of the conversation had to do with whether or not anyone was having sex on the Tardis. (Were Ian and Barbara lovers? Does the Doctor have a willie?) The conversation was fun and raucous. There was only a little tiny discussion of the Matt Smith episodes (mostly because people were trying to not spoil episodes that some people might not have seen). The consensus seems to be that people like Matt Smith, that people love Amy Pond, and that people hate the Mighty Morphin' Power Daleks.

I had dinner with the crowd including bookzombie, lcohen, j00j, boxofdelights, kalmn, clawfoot, eeyorerin, epi_lj and other people and partners and so forth. I was happy to put a face to j00j, who I've seen commenting on the DreamJournal and so forth. It was great to meet the juggler and bookzombie's SO.

Then it was off to the Opening Ceremonies, in which Ellen Klages and Pat Murphy did an incredibly funny performance as libraries talking about respectability and science fiction. "You're reading a book! Respectable! But it has a rocket on the cover. Too bad."

(Ooops. Running out of time. Must finish this a bit later).

WisCon Day 1b: Class, Fat Sex and Dishes

(Ooops. Just back from lunch, now).

Friday evening. After dinner. There was a panel I wanted to see -- a class 101 panel:

Class Basics

Of all the "isms" and oppressions in the United States, class is one of the least explored and least understood, and yet having an understanding of how class issues affect people here and around the world is vital. As with race, ability, and other issues, it is not the job of people who grew up dealing with class barriers to educate the rest of us, but sometimes we find folks who are generous enough to give their time to teaching. If you feel like you don't know enough about class, classism, and how class background and class privilege inform the world around you, come join us. Serious information, given with patience and humor.

The panel had some really great panelists: wrdnrd, Nisi Shawl, wild_irises, and Jennifer K. Stevenson.

I really liked the way wild_irises framed the conversation. She suggested that whereas race was the elephant in the room that we're not talking about, class is the issue that we don't even know enough to know that we're not talking about it.

There were some really great points of conversation that came up. In particular, I liked one audience member who talked about how different people seemed to be using "class" as a label to mean different things: how much money one has, what your parents did for a living, level of education, a set of cultural behaviours associated with family-of-origin, accent/dress, etc. And, importantly, that these differing definitions sometimes lead to people talking past one another in the conversation.

I was very sympathetic to this argument, but I think it's worth noting that lacking a vocabulary about class is not really a random happenstance. I do think that the fact that dialogue about class often comes hand-in-hand with labour awareness and/or socialism and that the U.S. has been waging a propaganda campaign against socialism for a century is something that should be put on the table.

sparkymonster made an excellent point about how we embody class -- there are markers or signifiers of class such as dress or way of speaking. It was an excellent point, delivered in Sparky's excellent way.

But I must confess that I mostly feel that the panel didn't satisfy my conversational craving. I wanted something crunchier. The discussion didn't veer off into the realm of fail, but it didn't really provide a list of definition or a framework or anything. In talking about this with wild_irises, later, she said that she didn't want a list-making panel, knowing that geeky people will spend the entire time debating the boundaries of the list. I hafta conclude that I think that she's right. I think that the panel was what was necessary in a Class Basics panel, and maybe I need to conclude that I'm not in the target audience for that panel; I hadn't been inclined to think that way before the panel, but maybe it's true.

I did get a good book recommendation: A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. Well, actually, there was a second recommendation: Thinking Class by Joanna Kadi, but wild_irises had previously suggested it to me. I also really liked a line that one panelist (I think it was wild_irises) made. Quoting Shaw: "You're not working class; you're unsuccessful middle class."

After that panel, I followed sparkymonster to the Fat Sex panel. Because, hey, it's hard to not follow sparkymonster around.

Fat Sex -- There's More To It Than YS PLS

Only "freaky" (read: fetishists) people want to have sex with fat chicks, right? Wrong. So why are fat women so limited in their presentation? Hypersexualized or desexualized, fat women (and, very often, fat nonwomen) are given only two roles. This panel will break out of those boxes and discuss the range of sexuality and sexual presentation that we SHOULD be seeing in portrayals of fat people.

It was a fun panel, clearly interested in talking about the topic at hand while being a rollicking good time. I don't have very many notes, but I wrote two quotations:

"There are a lot of Klingons in Iowa."

In another part of the panel, Heather was talking about questioning which behaviours cross the slut line. Is it always obvious where the slut line is? And someone asked, "Is it a line you can stand in?" (There was some conversation of using the word, slut, in a pejorative sense, but the joke, here, was funny to me.)

After that panel, I was pretty beat, so I went to my room so lie down for a bit. But earlier in the day I'd volunteered to help out in the con suite at the very end of the day. So from about midnight onward, I made hot dogs and cut up pizzas and finished my volunteer shift washing a metric buttload of dishes at three in the morning. By the time I got to bed, I was beat.