a lot of people have admitted to assuming posters are male until they're proven female
The only time someone ever told me they think of me as a bloke was, I think Keggers (and maybe someone else?), in the Lateshift, where I have been a regular, sporadically (if that makes any sense...).
As I see it, the lateshift is kind of like an all-night bar in Barbelith (at the corner of Being St. and Nothingness Ave.) which I think maybe tends--or has tended--to be more male-dominated than, say, other places I happen to hang out like books, or many headshop threads, and maybe even more than other conversation threads. That's a kneejerk, completely anecdotal, and possibly way-off perception of mine, however.
But it makes me wonder if the "default=male" is stronger in certain fora, say, Comics, Temple, the Laboratory? (These are places I spend less time in, myself so I can't be sure.)
I'd like to explore if "Barbelith's default mode of interacting" as the summary puts it, is in fact the same in all fora--I am so focused: I hit Conversation (not all threads), Policy, Headshop, Switchboards, Books (more selectively), and recently I've made an effort at Music and Temple (but have posted very little in either place). So, I don't feel like I have an eagle eye view--I spend almost 0 time in Comics, Film, Creation, etc.
And, iconoplast, I like the self-scrutiny that I see you doing. You are getting one big thing that I was hoping people would get: there's no "neutral" human as our current culture is set up. And, in practice, this means that, as you discovered, when we try to imagine "neutral" humans, we usually do, unconsciously imagine beings that are actually both gendered (and, for that matter raced)--and that it's usually characteristics that are (rightly or wrongly) associated with the dominant gender, race, etc., that are taken to be more "neutral" than characteristics perceived as belonging to members of a subordinate group. I suspect that the "standard" human body is still imagined to be typically white, male, non-disabled, and adult (but not too old)... Like the old-fashioned habit of saying "men" when one means "human beings"; it's imagined to be neutral, but it's not.
This isn't typically overtly "malicious" on anyone's part, it's a part of how power, privilege, and oppression function, and serve to reproduce themselves. It creates marked and umarked ways of being in the world, and usually helps to make some things/people visible in some ways (e.g., after 9/11 virtually the only images of firefighters on newsbroadcasts were male, although there were many NY female firefighters on the scene), and invisible in others (e.g., reports on the school shootings in the late 90s were much more likely to focus on potential factors like the effects of violent video games and Marilyn Manson, while they almost universally failed to ascribe any significance to the fact that virtually all of the shootings were perpetrated by young men, not young women. If they had been young women, it seems almost inconceivable that gender conditioning/perceptions wouldn't have been a major focus. "Why are our young women becoming so violent?")
I say this not in righteous anger so much as a way of asking: what's going on that visibility works this way? What are the effects of this visibility/invisibility? How does it distort the way I'm seeing the world?
(And, having typed that I ask, why did I need to say: "I'm not angry."....? I have some ideas...another "required reading": Audre Lorde's essay "On the Uses of Anger," which is unfortunately not available on-line, so far as I know. I've been meaning to discuss it in Policy. Too many good threads right now...) |
