PROTIP: If you don’t want people to think you’re hateful, you probably shouldn’t talk about how the notion of making feminists afraid gives you a misogyny-boner. Or give dudes who say shit like this any upvotes:
Actually, here at Man Boobz we still chuckle about you guys. Pretty much all the time.
Also, Demonspawn? Complaining about women having the right to vote? Probably not a great PR move either.
@shadow
if you’ve never read lord of light i certainly encourage you to. in addition to treating it’s subject without western romanticism, it’s honestly just one of the best sf novels ever written.
I need to give Lord of Light another try. I finally got through Creature of Light and Darkness this past Yom Kippur.
Wow you folks are easily riled.
That was just too fun. I do like all that random word generator bullshit, its fun
You know, it’s very telling this attitude of theirs. Their view isn’t one of “equal rights” but of a special place for men, a place where they can keep women afraid.
Wow you folks are easily riled.
That was just too fun. I do like all that random word generator bullshit, its fun
Uh huh, hur hur hur and and all that. I’m sure you feel very special and important now.
Shorter empathiclogic: I meant to do that.
Sure ya did, and the cat meant to jump on the table and land on the placemat and slide right off the other side.
Just ask her.
As I said, I see it mostly in the cyberspace and virtual reality discourses — spaces historically and even recently dominated by men — and the way it connects to men=mind and women=body binary that’s completely tainted by the hierarchy makes it impossible for me to see it ever as neutral (even if users intend it as neutral, I don’t buy it).
Maybe I missed that day in English class, but I really don’t remember any men = mind/women = meat dichotomy in Gibson and other cyberpunk. ‘Meatspace’ was a derogatory term used by hackers who didn’t like to be anywhere but mentally plugged into virtual reality – and whose non-virtual-reality lives were pretty damn pathetic and desperate. (Remember Hiro in Snow Crash, who in cyberspace has an awesome house and is a badass swordfighter and is a Person Of Importance, whereas in real life he lives in a storage cube and drives a pizza delivery van?)
Also, it’s one thing to perceive a term as non-neutral and another to insinuate that anybody who doesn’t share your analysis is clueless or lying. Seriously, we’re not talking about a historically kyriarchical term like “bitch”.
Mythago: And the hackers are mostly if not entirely men–unless you move into the women authors that nobody wants to call cyberpunk (Pat Cadigan and Melissa Scott). I’ve heard a lot of male academics on how really not-sexist Gibson and Stirling and all are (at a gazillion conferences during the 1990s when cyberpunk was the new academic hot trend), but I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.
And i’m not accusing anybody of lying, but of not knowing all the associations that exist culturally (i.e. the men=mind, women=body is centuries if not millennia old). I was asked why I have the associations I do, and I answered.
And I don’t accept you as an authority on what I am allowed to find problematic or offensive of sexist or whatever.
I call “real life” corporeal reality. (CORPOREALITY! PHWOAR!)
Also, not so much now, but online interactions were the only way I could be out of the damned closet for fucking YEARS. I never understood how folks could think such interactions were always intrinsically shallower just because you can’t see my corporeal form. (Frankly, it’s a relief not to be trapped in that damn thing all the time!)
I call “real life” meatspace because I am tired of people calling it real life or saying it’s more important than the Internet and I figure it’s time we had some contempt the other way. Also, I have so much sympathy with Hiro’s “in cyberspace I’m important, in meatspace no one cares who I am” thing.
I call it IRL most of the time, whether I speak English or French, and rarely think about its meaning. Maybe I should, but I couldn’t use meatspace. Might be my vegetarian side.
Re: Snowcrash. one of my favorite parts of that novel is when Hiro Protagonst (Neal SO not subtle) muses about how the guys doing all the virtual programming thought that Juanita Marquez’ (woman programmer) insistence on faces and expressions was so silly and girly and NOT important, and it turned out to be some of the most important elements of the whole metaverse.
And yeah, the male hackers in all the major male dude’s cyberpunk novels are poor — but they are still the heroes, still the brilliant brains of the hackerverse and still (with the exception of Hiro, as far as I know), white Amurican dudes who are still just so brilliant despite the fact that the US doesn’t still have the dominance in the world economy. But white men still rule.
I love how you automatically make yourself a victim that way your own hate is some how just
What’s up with these trolls resuscitating old threads for aggressive non-sequiturs?