{ 2008 07 26 }
Troubleshooting
- Follow-Up: Last weekend’s post elicited a pair of comments regarding opposite ends of the half-plus-seven boxplot. We’ve got inadvertent cougar hunting in Seattle and a generalized fear of prison in the Dakotas. My advice to both: Look at her shoulders. I’ve advocated the aesthetic appeal of womyn’s upper arms for at least a decade now, and now I’m advocating their probative value. Luckily, summer is the time for halters, camisoles, and tank tops.
Though I originally thought it might be amusing to go into some depth on this topic, that approach now strikes me as a crass overindulgence in objectification. Keep your eyes peeled, and you’ll see what I mean soon enough.
- Engineers in Stiletto Heels: I found a moment yesterday to look in on The Park Bench, and a journey down the proverbial rabbit hole was quickly underway. This post addresses the issue of this Newsweek article about these Nerd Girls. With all due respect to the Park Bench, a forum I hold in pretty high esteem, I had a slightly different reaction to the source material.
For starters, the Nerd Girls, in building their website, succumbed to the impulse to affix bells and whistles before tightening the nuts and bolts. Yes, the design has a certain overarching spiffy-ness, but it doesn’t seem that anyone bothered to make sure non-alphabetic characters were being displayed correctly. Also, the blog posts appear to conform to the facile uniformity of corporate advertising.
More importantly, this is a misallocation of the word “nerd.” Whereas these girls are portrayed as being eloquent, fashion-forward, and interested in hard science, the dictionary definition of the word “nerd” emphasizes social ineptitude. Thus, these are not, in fact, nerd girls, but simply high-functioning young women. Props for that, but please stop misusing my language (American English).
Lastly, I’d like everyone to recognize that this is just one more organization (Nerd Girls, Inc., funded by IEEE) among a myriad of such endeavors already engaged in encouraging everyone BUT white males to seek higher education. Who among us will be responsible for stopping corrective social justice efforts before they simply invert the previous unjust order?
- Passive-Aggressive: No, I will not comment on the Favre/Vikings affair.
- Another Rabbit Hole: This post on Slate’s XX Factor makes a non-comment on this post on Jezebel (which I do not frequent) that seems to soften this segment from National Public Radio (NPR), entitled “Sex Without Condoms is the New Engagement Ring.” I don’t have ages for any of the people involved, but the whole thing reeks of a perspective gap between people slightly older than myself, who were children when AIDS was a scary new bogeyman, and people either my age or slightly younger, who were indoctrinated with what I’ll call the “condom imperative” while society checked the spread of HIV and developed functional treatments. I think the NPR piece is a bit too serious - as one might expect. If you’re only going to experience one of them, I’d go with the Jezebel post. It may be poorly edited, but it’s personal, poignant, and amusing. Basically, it reminds me of something Sarah Hepola might write.
- Young Adulthood: Sometimes, I like to read about psychological theories. It’s a way to objectify and assess myself that won’t necessarily involve guilt over the pizza I just ate. According to Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development, “young adulthood” lasts from ages 28-40. The good news is that, despite how I may feel on a college campus, I have 12 more years to be young. The bad news is that this period’s definitive psychosocial crisis is defined as “intimacy v. isolation,” and I plan to be parked in front of my laptop all weekend. Maybe I can resolve that crisis next week.
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