frak

No time to expand on that exclamation.  Just frak!

Office Politics

The trouble with departments is that people don't agree and they don't trust.  I hate it.

Being female in public

I am in one of the safest cities in the world. It is broad daylight. I'm surrounded by people who would most likely come to my aid, or at least call authorities. No-one has threatened me or acted in a threatening manner. Yet, overhearing conversations by dudes today (and often) makes me feel unsafe. They have no idea how their casual hatred of all things feminine manifests. They probably would not understand the creepy meter that most women have and use. They would be baffled by my fear of them.

Because they are not going to jump up and cause me physical damage right here right now. No, they wouldn't understand that I fear them because dudes like them (older, white, full of confidence) run the world I have to live in. And their casual hatred as I name it, creates an atmosphere where who I am is lesser. Who I am is unimportant. What I want or need doesn't matter. Men who have [what they consider] important needs can hurt me to fulfill those needs. I do not necessarily just mean rape or violent crime here. I mean they can undermine me at work and be rewarded by others (it's just a joke; don't be humourless feminist). They can limit my access to commodities. They can damage my economic wellbeing. They can create a system where I am expected to be nice and help people while they are expected to compete, succeed, or just play.

It is insidious; it makes me want to scream; and it is wrong.

US States I've Visited or Inhabited

Here's what you do:

Copy my note. Click on “notes” under tabs on your profile page. Select "write a new note" in the top right corner. Paste the copy in the body of the note. Delete my Xs and add your own. Once you've saved, don't forget to tag friends (including me) if you want to.

Just for fun, put an 0 beside the states where you have lived.

Airports don't count!

Alabama -X
Alaska -
Arizona - X
Arkansas - X
California -X
Colorado - X
Connecticut - X (if you count a train ride through)
Delaware -
Florida - O
Georgia - X
Hawaii -X
Idaho -
Illinois - X
Indiana - X
Iowa - X
Kansas - X
Kentucky - X
Louisiana - X
Maine -
Maryland - X
Massachusetts - X
Michigan - X
Minnesota - X
Mississippi -X
Missouri - X
Montana -
Nebraska - X
Nevada - X
New Hampshire - X
New Jersey - X
New Mexico - O
New York - X
North Carolina - O
North Dakota - O
Ohio - O
Oklahoma - X
Oregon -
Pennsylvania - X
Rhode Island -
South Carolina - X
South Dakota - X
Tennessee - X
Texas - X
Utah - X
Vermont -
Virginia - X
West Virginia - X
Wisconsin - X
Wyoming -
Washington - X
Washington, DC - X

Here's the thing

Health Insurance companies are trying to train Americans to engage in healthy behaviors. I'm perfectly happy to allow that behavioralism and greed work in this context. Paying for gym memberships to *force* insured employees to work out is not a bad deal, in my estimation. Yet, there is more required of the consumer/employee/patient/member (do you see why this is troubling?). Rather than a simple exchange of better behavior for a subsidy, which nets the company fewer high-end health care expenditures in the long term, the insurance companies take this opportunity to -you guessed it- collect data on their participants (yet another noun in the mix). Thus, to enroll in the program, employees must fill out an online health assessment.

An assessment you say, no problem. The assessment could ask questions about relative fitness, such as How many times a week do you exercise? For how many minutes? At what intensity level do you engage in ___ exercise? It might ask related questions about nutrition such as how many ounces of red meat do you ingest each week? Or how many servings of vegetables and fruits you consume each day. Alas, there is no such question on the assessment. Those questions might interfere with cultural norms.

Instead it goes straight for problematic indicators such as height, weight, and waist circumference. Does anyone know their waist circumference at the drop of a hat? I know I do not, but I digress. These indicators are easy stats for companies to take, but they are just the beginning... for some member, not all.

You see, at the beginning of the assessment (I have been moved to loathe that word), one is asked M or F. You know, the omnipresent question, that government forms ask (why?). The computer uses the sex of the participant to adjust the rest of the questions. Thus, all get asked about their LDL and HDL (seriously?), but there is a special section for people who answer "F." One page of the form asks these seriously invasive and offensive questions.

They include:

At what age did you have your first menstrual period?
Younger than twelve
12
13
14 or older.

There is no choice for none of the above. What about primary amenorrhea? There is no way to opt out of the question. The computer form will not continue without an answer. Can you tell me what this has to do with working out at the gym? Please. Because you and I both know the answer is nothing.

Funny enough, there is no question in the M form for At what age did you experience your first erection? Your first nocturnal emission? I wonder why not.

There are other questions on the page about "girly bits." The requisite Are you pregnant? Do you plan to be pregnant in the next 12 months? (WTF) and how long has it been since your last pap smear? (Smear - many medical tests other than the papinacoula test use a cytologic smear, but they do not use that language in common parlance)

For invasiveness's sake already. I get it. I'm a Giirrrl. I have scary bits. I bleeeed once a month. Stop with the gendered bullshit people. Either pay for part of my gym membership or don't. It doesn't matter if I bled when I was 12 or 14. The deal says, if I go to the gym 12 times in a month, you chip in 20 bucks toward membership. It doesn't say you get to shame me for having a vagina.

So yes, it is a problem. The assessment asks ridiculous questions of only some members, while allowing others to get through the process with a modicum (but only just) of their dignity.

Addendum: A colleague suggests that even the non-gendered questions should not be asked in an online forum for an outside source, as that information can be used to deny services or coverage. Good point.

Really Associated Press? Who is this WE that you speak of?

I read a headline story in MSNBC from the AP that severely confused and angered me. What follow is my letter to the Associated Press

The headline story "Has America become numb to tragedy" makes a crucial error when it asks "why are we killing each other?" The truth is that WE are not killing each other because 51% of the population are NOT perpetrating these killings. You mention the names of the shooters in the first paragraph: Byran Uyesugi, Robert A. Hawkins, Mark Barton, Terry Ratzmann, Robert Stewart. What do they all have in common? They are men. Male.

Of course, women get killed during the shootings, in some cases exclusively women, but they do not carry them out. If the reverse were true, would your headline fail to announce "WOMEN on killing sprees? Of course not. However, because men are oddly expected to be violent in our culture, you fail to point out the obvious connection between all of these events - the gender of the killers. You might ask rather than whether "we" are numb to tragedy, when we are going to deal with the ways we encourage our boys and men to violence. But that question upsets a status quo eh.

Please report more carefully. Pretending this is an American illness rather than a male illness, does our next generation of boys a grave disservice.

Postscript after the fact: Now that I think about it, they really did mean "we," because the people who matter, the ones who are actually people are men. Women don't count. I keep forgetting that detail.

On Kara Thrace

I'm only just admitting to my Battlestar Galactica addiction, because the show has ended. Part of my cleansing is feeling bereft. And I do.

For other fans (can I just use viewers? fans sounds like we're all twelve), the ending was less than satisfying. Especially, as it turns out, the disappearance of Kara Thrace. Yet, how could we say goodbye to this enigmatic character?

As a bad-ass fighter and supremely skilled pilot, she fulfilled the expectations of her surname Thrace. She could have been a member of the Thracian tribe of warriors, subsumed by Greek culture. She was also "beloved" and "friend," the meanings of her given name, Kara.

Yet, as Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes points out, neither Kara Thrace, nor any female character just goes off alone at the show's finale, although three men do so. She explains that "Our society has a hard time imagining women on their own, not in relation to men," and I agree that one reason Kara disappears rather than wanders off is this very discomfort with unacompanied women. The show, thus fails at the gender equality that it strives towards more than any television show I've seen to date.

Yet, Kara Thrace is an extremely feminist character. She succeeds in both mental and physical realms, builds a career in what Americans think of as a male field, and she relates to men based on her own desires, rather than deferring to their needs.

Surely part of the reason the writers decided to have Kara Thrace simply evaporate during the show's final minutes, proceeds from the impossible plot turns her story has taken. She essentially dies during season three, returning inexplicably with no memory of her absence, later finding proof of her mortal end. There remain few avenues to write your way out of returning from the dead without mysticism.

But I believe that Kara Thrace became the narrative soul of BSG. Because by the end she was not invested in any religion; because she remained one of the original feminist characters, along with President Roslin, who made the show at least reach toward egalitarian ideals; because she formed important bonds w/ other key characters: Admiral Adama, Lee, Roslin herself, Helo & Athena; and because I cared about her like I cared about Hamlet, about Sethe, about Kerewin or Simon. Good fiction means good characters; Kara Thrace had to disappear, because the show was disappearing, and she was the show.