The Internet Architecture of Gender : Women on YouTube

foto from http://www.flickr.com/photos/butterberries/3879989340/

Content is the final layer of the internet cake. “Content is king.” Even though in the Long Tail, Chris Anderson says, that “in a world of infinite choice, context, not content, is the king.” (22) Clearly, the issue is that we are still talking about kings not queens.

 In Unmarked, Peggy Phelan said that “If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture. The ubiquity of their image, however, has hardly brought them political or economic power.” (23)
These wonderful halcyon days, where the ‘apple at last hangs.. indolent-ripe on the tree’ (24), pose a question. Who eats the apple now? Almost exclusively, public debates about gender and the internet have focussed on issues of the digital divide. As if the problems facing women can be solved simply by giving them enough computer skills and internet access to freely provide the bulk of the content that men can mine for money.
Since getting access to reliable contraception and abortion, women have had the freedom to engage in sexual activities in a way unprecedented in civilization. However, there is no evidence of changing socio-political dynamics other than a post-feminist YouTube culture of exposure and exploitation. There are no women winners in the porn industry, although it was the practically the first public content on the internet.
From the moment the internet became commercial in 1988/89 sex became the big business traffic. In 1995, 4 out of the 10 most popular bulletin boards were sex related (alt.sex). Adult businesses developed uuencode to transform text code into pictures. HTML set the stage for the picture porn explosion which has continued with development of streaming video. There is a lot of money in porn on the internet, but it is not flowing into female purses. Tera Patrick, infamous as one of the few exceptions, believes that the industry won’t see another female star reach her relative power due to market saturation of free content and the lowering of entry barriers for content producers. (25)
Phelan said that you can’t protect porn under the guise of free speech. Porn perpetuates dominant gender power relations and is a continual enactment of oppression.  In 1965, Marcuse wrote that “what is practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” (26)
Marcuse believed that tolerance should be subversive, undermining dominant ideologies rather than perpetuating them. It follows that whenever tolerating a freedom of speech is at the expense of a section of the community, then there is a power imbalance at the bottom of things.
Angela McRobbie says, “The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom.” This individuation goes hand in hand with the self government of the modern neo-liberal subject in which wrong choices are always individual not societal. (27)
The poor postfeminist girl must try to embody sex, gender, career, beauty, porn, popularity, individuality and happiness in her visible identity. Failure to do so is her problem alone. In silence.
Internet governance must encompass all these things, because the internet and its governance produce and reproduce all of these things. Lessig calls for a new breed of technocratic philosopher kings to dispense wisdom and be our guardians. (28)
Kings, you note, not queens. May all the queens of cyberspace arise and reclaim their realms.

22. Anderson, Chris “The Long Tail” (2006) Hyperion: New York

23. Phelan, Peggy. “Unmarked - the politics of performance” (1993) Routledge: New York


24. Whitman, Walt. “Halcyon Days” in “Leaves of Grass” (1891-92) Retrieved on May 27 2010 from http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/324

25. Nowak, Peter. “Sex, Bombs and Burgers”. (2010) Allen&Unwin: Crows Nest, Australia

26. Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) in “A Critique of Pure Tolerance” (1968) Boston Beacon Press. pp 95-137

27. McRobbie, Angela. “Postfeminism and Popular Culture” in “Interrogating post-Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture” eds. Tasker, Yvonne & Negra, Diane. (2007) pp26-39 Durham, NC: Duke University Press

28. McCullagh, Declan “What Larry Didn’t Get” (2009) Cato Unbound Retrieved on May 20 2010 from http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/04/declan-mccullagh/what-larry-didnt-get/

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The Internet Architecture of Gender : Discrimination by Default

foto from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakka/123380632/

Lawrence Lessig says that code is political - code has values. (16) Code also has binary values. 1010101010101. In the most literal of senses, the bits of information that make up all code are built on dichotomy: on/off, 1/0. Just like black/white or male/female. No room for indecision or shades of grey.

Zero has been troubling for sometime now, most famously in the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea who is credited by Aristotle with creating dialectic argument. How can being be many? How can something be nothing? And was zero a number or a separation? Although some form of zero has been in use for thousands of years, including an early form of binary similar to Morse code created by the Indian scholar Pingala, the Persian mathmatician Al-Khwarizmi was the first to define zero as a numeral 1500 years ago, and rules governing the use of zero first appeared in Brahmagupta’s book “The Opening of the Universe” in 628AD. 

Although Leibniz calls zero “an amphibian between being and non-being”, (17) he also hoped it would convert China to Christianity through the power of union between zero and one, nothing and god, seeing as how everything falls in between. If this is indicative of the potential power of 1s and 0s then believing them to hold the power to permanently ascribe gender is nothing unusual.

The power of binaries at the deepest level continues a discourse of difference between male and female, rather than a unity or trinity or something else altogether. As Baudrillard said about language, meaning is derived as much through absence as presence. We understand dog to mean ‘not cat’. Signs are situated within a web of meaning and the ‘not’ is as important as the ‘is’ for our understanding. This powerful gravitational force prevents us from achieving escape velocity from the gender well.

Evelyn Fox Keller as a practising scientist writing about gender, notes that the dichotomies that encode our thoughts limit our thinking. For example, no one searched for mobility in the ovum because of the assumption that male/female correlated to active/passive. The binary mindscape we inhabit is inhibitory.  (18)

And in the digital world, our Weberian bureaucracy, we are compelled to answer to our sex over and over, regardless that it is either neither here nor there or immediately obvious under the circumstances. Default values. The iron cage of rationalization has enclosed us with the ‘irrationality of rationalization’. (19)

The International Standard ISO 5218, Information Technology - Codes for the representation of human sexes, specifies:
0 = not known
1= male
2= female
9= not applicable
“No significance is to be placed upon the fact that “Male” is coded “1” and “Female” is coded “2”. This standard was developed based upon predominant practices of the countries involved and does not convey any meaning of importance, ranking or any other basis that could imply discrimination.” (20)

This standard is, by the way, used in several national identification numbers, including China and France. Many nations use other techniques to separate citizens numerically by sex. eg. Bulgaria uses odd national identification numbers for females and even numbers for males, Estonia reverses the polarities. 

Our constant self identification as ‘gendered’ epitomises Foucault’s notion of governmentality. The sadness to me is the disappearing Ms. Ms is resistance to being defined by marital status, which means loss of self possession and second class citizenship in many countries. One or two small letters that signify a large battle.

When I google Ms, I get many results for either Multiple Sclerosis or Microsoft. I have noticed in recent years that many database forms have dropped Ms out of the list items. When I’ve insisted on being Ms, it frequently makes no difference. Even the Hon. Carmel Tebbut, my local female MP, has ignored my request to be Ms and sends me Mrs letters. 

As I teach web and database design, I realise just how little thought goes in to the creation of default fields. All the effort goes into the tricky parts like the relationships. Not the easy bits like what sex or title someone is.

As Lu-in Wang says in her recent book about race and law, “Discrimination can occur by default because discrimination is the default.” It is a self fulfilling prophecy. (21)

Discrimination is biopolitical. Code is political by default not just design.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

16. Levy, Steven. “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown” Wired Magazine Archives. Retrieved on 27 May 2010 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig_pr.html
17. Padua, Sydney. “2D Goggles” Retrieved on 27 May 2010 from http://2dgoggles.com/
18. Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Gender, Language and Science”. (1996) Templeton Lecture Sydney University. Retrieved on August 15 2009 from http://www.scifac.usyd.edu.au/chast/templeton/1996templeton/1996lecture.html 
19. Ritzer, George. “Sociological Beginnings: On the Origins of Key Ideas in Sociology”, (1994) McGraw-Hill: New York pp154
20. ISO 5218:1977 International Organisation for Standardisation Retrieved on 15 April 2010 from http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=11219
21. Wang, Lu-in. “Discrimination by Default” (2006) New York University Press: New York

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The Internet Architecture of Gender : Women in the Tubes

The almost total absence of women from the infrastructure of the internet is striking. Both the management and manufacture of the wires, pipes, and cables of the internet infrastructure is gendered by absence. Even Malaysia, where women constitute half of all computer scientists, has the lowest numbers of women in the area of external cabling or outdoors infrastructure construction. In Malaysia, ICT is seen as a respectable career for women, as opposed to medicine which is considered too physical, combining quiet private office work with good remuneration. (11)

US and Australia have had declining female participation in the internet infrastructure over the last 30 years, aside from in companies like IBM and CISCO who have been consistently incorporating positive discrimination strategies to remedy a shortage of skilled workers and gain a competitive edge. Billions of dollars globally are currently being invested in infrastructure and all the G30 nations are presenting reports on mantaining standard of living in the information economy through innovation and increasing the skills of the population.

Yochai Benkler says that “communications technologies have ‘biases’ that affect the patterns in which societies that utilize those technologies interact with and around information and knowledge.”

Technological biases interact with social patterns of use. Through a reflexive relationship with existent institutional frameworks and incumbent social relations, there is ‘institutional and adapative lock-in’ which limits new technological possibilities and causes a ‘network effect’. This contributes to perceptions of desirable innovations and practises, creating a ‘feedback effect on the path of technological development’. Organisations invest most heavily in technologies that fit their values and needs. Those technologies reinforce the continuation of existing practises. (12)

According to Judy Wajcman, “SST studies show that technology does not develop according to an inner technical logic but is instead a social product, patterned by the conditions of its creation and use.” (13)

On the one hand, women are excluded from the business side of decisions about technology. The number of women on boards, in CEO, CFO or CTO positions or in government through out the Western world remains minimal, less than 15% is a generous interpretation of available figures. On the other hand, following the design concepts of ‘lock-in’ and reflexive reinforcement described by Benkler, then gender discrimination is likely to be occurring by design. From the bottom up.

The smallest decisions made at the lowest level of the internet’s layers, the infrastructure, can ‘lock-in’ everything above. Elizabeth Churchill describes how the lack of women in powerful technology design positions maintains the dominance of ‘gender neutral’ design practises that don’t consider women. She gives several examples, including car airbags, which have been so dangerous to people shorter than ‘average’ height (mainly women), that cars with airbags now have to have ‘turn off’ mechanisms and there are legislations against small statured people travelling in seats with airbags. (14)

The high numbers of women in Malaysian ICT education and industry described by Lagesen suggests strongly that the lack of women in western ICT is a cultural construction. Lagesen makes the point that all of the women she interviewed not only enjoyed working with computers but did computer science because their families and friends encouraged them. It was a sensible and supported career choice. (15)

This occurred in a particular socio-economic climate. In Malaysia, ICT is a government priority area, on the back of a previous governmental push to redress women’s disadvantaged education position. So young Malaysian women had a larger pool of female role models in ICT professions and at university than available in the ‘Western’ worlds, as well as strong encouragement across the board to learn computing for themselves and Malaysia’s future.

Malaysian women in computing is a modern story. The story of the internet was written much earlier on the wires and pipes of older communications technologies, where there are very few women in the tubes. If our freedoms are architected in the code layer, then they are built on a gendered base.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

11. Lagesen, Vivian A. “A Cyberfeminist Utopia? Perceptions of Gender and Computer Science among Malaysian Women Computer Science Students and Faculty”. (2008) Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp1.  Sage Publications Available at  http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/5.

12. Benkler, Yochai. “Communications Infrastructure Regulation and the Distribution of Control over Content” (1998) Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 22. No. 3. Pp 183-196. Great Britain: Elsevier Science Ltd. Available at http://www.benkler.org/ 

13. Mackenzie, Donald & Wajcman, Judy “The Social Shaping of Tehcnology - Second Edition” (1998) Open University Press - Buckingham

14. Churchill, Elizabeth. “Sugared Puppy Dogs Tails: Gender and Design” (2010) interactions XVII.2 - March/April 2010 Available at http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1346

15. Lagesen, Vivian A. “A Cyberfeminist Utopia? Perceptions of Gender and Computer Science among Malaysian Women Computer Science Students and Faculty”. (2008) Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp10.  Sage Publications Available at  http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/5.

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The Internet Architecture of Gender : Is the Internet an Ogre?

 

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/19melissa68/

 

The internet, like ogres and onions, has layers. Layers, transparency and the end-to-end principle are considered the defining characteristics of a free, accessible and innovative internet. Lessig describes the internet as the most important ‘innovation commons’ the world has ever seen, both through culture and architecture. (6)

  

The end-to-end principle means a network should be as basic as possible and intelligence should be located at the ends. This can be traced back to Paul Baran’s shift from circuit to packet switching network design but was first articulated in 1981 by Jerome Altzer, David Clark and David P. Reed. It is NOT the default property of networks but a constructed one that is critical to the operation of the internet as we know it. (7)

The internet is really a network of networks, combining so many different technologies, companies and countries that as the internet has grown, problems of governance have arisen. Internet architecture was based on the layers principles as described by Solum and Ching, where the first corollary is the ‘principle of layer separation’ and the second corollary is the ‘principle of minimal layer crossing’. (8) The internet is arranged in a vertical hierarchy of layers and wherever possible issues within one layer should be addressed within that layer only. If layers must be crossed, either literally or legislatively, then the least distance crossed is the best ‘fit’.

The idea of utilizing internet architecture principles to inform the governance of the internet is generally credited to Yochai Benkler, Harvard Professor of Law. This was developed further by Lessig, Solum and Chung. Currently the UNCTAD (post WSIS2005) proposes, in the Information Economy Report 2006 (IER), to use the layers principle for internet governance. (9)

Benkler	Solum&Chung	IER
The Content Layer—the symbols, images and material that are communicated.	The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.	The Content Layer—the symbols, images and material that are communicated.
	The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.	The Application Layer—the online technologies or programs
The Logical Layer—TCP/IP, the ‘code’ or software that enables data to travel across the wires and cables	The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.	The Logical Layer—TCP/IP, the ‘code’ or software that enables data to travel across the wires and cables
	The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
	The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc.	The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc.	The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc.

Lessig explains that the internet mixed free layers with controlled layers. The infrastructure or physical layer is fundamentally owned. The content and application layers are partially owned, but the center, the code, was free.

The internet is an ogre analogy can now be extended. As the donkey replied to Shrek, “You know, not everybody likes onions. Cakes! Everybody likes cakes. Cakes have layers.” (10) The code is the cream in the cake.

(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)

6. Lessig, L. “The Future of Ideas” (2002) New York: Vintage Books Chapter 2 p23. Also available at http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html

7. Lessig, L. “The Future of Ideas” (2002) New York: Vintage Books Chapter 3 p34. Also available at http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/the_future_of_ideas_is_now_fre_1.html

8. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" (2003) U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. p4. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263
9. “Information Economy Report 2006” (2006). UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Paper E.06.II.D.8. Available at http://www.unctad.org/Templates/WebFlyer.asp?intItemID=3991&lang=1

10. “Shrek” (2001) Quote from http://www.billionquotes.com/index.php/Shrek 

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The Internet Architecture of Gender : Decoding the Layers

The internet, like any new technology, has a disruptive effect on society and governance. As Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project says, “For a while, when its effects are new and unanticipated, it empowers in a relative sense some actors at the expense of others. This relative empowerment alters the composition of interest groups, further promoting political change.” (1)


The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when the gender gap has actually been increasing in many indicators of highly developed countries, which is somewhat of a surprise to those who believed that the second wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s had born legitimate fruit.


It seems, on reflection, that legislation of equal opportunity and the rhetoric of empowerment has failed to have any effect in some crucial areas, most noticeably computer science, ICTs and engineering, where the numbers of women in higher education and employment have actually declined since the 1970s. (2) 

an example of gender division by workplace from The Guardian, UK.


Technology is not gender neutral although much of the rhetoric, like the end to end principle, simplicity and net neutrality, obscures this. Technology is socially shaped. As Hrynyshyn says, ‘values are embedded in a technology through a social process of the interaction of different groups of relevant actors who are involved in the process of design…. Often what is not recognized is that the decision about the development of technology are made by agents with different locations in structures of social power, and the different locations create differences in the extent to which different agents are able to participate successfully in the process of social shaping.’ (3)


I am taking a social shaping of technology approach to this situation (as described by Mackenzie and Wajcman, Williams and Edge), where at every stage in the development of a new technology a decision is made, a fork in the branching logic paths is taken that incrementally changes the direction of development, and of necessity excludes some directions. As Lessig puts it in Code 2.0, 'The ‘nature” of the Internet is not God’s will. Its nature is simply the product of its design. That design could be different.’ (4)


I am using the Layers Principle as adapted by Solum and Chung from Lessig’s work, and endorsed by the WSIS in 2005, for my analytic framework. The six layers that constitute the Internet are:


• The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.
• The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.
• The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.
• The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.
• The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physical layer.
• The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc. (5)


These layers were defined for internet governance but also serve as a way of examining how different structures have evolved in seemingly comparative isolation from other layers and how these isolated instances are part of the interrelated whole. How the internet has created a society in which women, in many important areas, are further from equality and self determination than they were in 1960. How we can decode the layers of gender discrimination to see how the architecture of the internet limits our global society.


(The Internet Architecture of Gender / to be continued....)


1. Milton Mueller, "The New Cyber-Conservatism: Goldsmith/Wu and the Premature Triumphalism of the Territorial Nation-State: A review of Goldsmith and Wu's 'Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World'" (June, 2006). Internet Governance Project. Paper IGP06-003. Available at http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/MM-goldsmithWu.pdf

2. Maria Klawe, Telle Whitney, Caroline Simard, "Women in Computing - take 2" (February, 2009). Communications of the ACM. Volume 52, Issue 2. Inspiring Women in Computing. Pages 68-76. ISSN:0001-07682. Available at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1461947#

 3. Hrynyshyn, D, "Globalization, nationality and commodification: the politics of the social construction of the internet" (2008) New Media and Society. Volume 10 (5): 751-770. Available from http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/10/5/751
4. Lessig, L. "Code 2.0. Chapter 4: Architectures of Control" (2006) Available at: http://codev2.cc
5. Solum, Lawrence B. and Chung, Minn, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" U San Diego Public Law Research Paper No. 55. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=416263

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Matildas through to Asian Cup Semis but lose Lisa De Vanna

via abc.net.au

Lisa De Vanna broke her leg in a nasty collision with the Chinese goalkeeper, part way through last night's qualifier for the Asian Cup. Australia will still make the semis but we've lost our best striker. As Tony Tannous at the Roar said,
"The team appears to have evolved since the sensational effort at the 2007 World Cup. The stars though remain the left footed trio of De Vanna, Garriock and McCallum.
The latter pulls the strings from her deep-lying central midfield spot, Garriock adds the drive and quality on the ball from the left side of central midfield, while De Vanna is simply dynamite, blessed with incredible pace and wonderful ability on the ball.
She is the Harry Kewell of the women’s game, minus the injuries. Fingers crossed Kewell can emulate De Vanna’s performance come June 13."
Best wishes for Lisa's recovery and eventual return to the game.

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TEDxSydney Squared

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Citizen Kirby for President! There were many many great moments yesterday at TEDxSydney, at Carriageworks, not the least some inspiring conversations with fellow attendees in the aftermath. I look forward to reconnecting in future having discovered such interesting intersections of social fields and ideas. My own little square in the collaborative cube was inspired by Elizabeth Churchill, Principle Research Scientist at Yahoo! Resarch, whose writing I've been following in Interactions, (the magazine for experiences-people-technology).

Me (or I) is now a hybrid entity, similar to Donna Haraway's cyborg self, but in a more local and pragmatic fashion. When I make choices about my life, I automatically factor in my appliances and my applications. ME (version 3.0 to extend an old Tshirt slogan) is the sum of my embodied self and my augmented realities.

Having an iPhone vs an Android will change the ways I interact with the world in subtle ways, opening some doors and closing others. How I organise my music, my filing, my maps and all of the structure I impose on my self, and then on my interactions with others is filtered through my applications and my appliances. Someone recently said (Mark Pesce, I think) that we no longer run late for things, we lose contact instead. We assume that events and locations can get rescheduled or organised. Time and location are not fixed in our lives the way they used to be, as discrete events. So the consistency or range of our communications is of more importance.

I no longer need to wait at home for my family to return. I can't always separate work and life. Boundaries are fluid, social conventions disrupted. This might have some liberating effects, however I am put in mind of nothing more than a giant troupe of mobile bearing monkeys swinging through the urban landscape, hooting and shrieking.

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Barbie Liberation Organization - the Great Gender Swap

via youtube.com

How little has changed since 1991. This was a great prank and I think Barbie no longer says "Math is hard!". But it's sad how little else has changed. Today, more evidence that the gender pay gap is increasing, and has done since 1994. At least that made the news, although it's not making a difference! And that is the sad thing. Who is trying to make a difference right now? Perhaps as Michael Wesley said yesterday (at TEDxSydney) voter apathy is a good thing. If you were scared for your life, you'd try a bit harder to change your world.

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I think I'm turning Japanese. No, really.

via amp-london.com

Why has Bob Geldof turned black? I saw this pic in the Sydney Film Festival mag and thought, funny, he looks like Bob Geldof but black. Maybe it's bad printing but, really. He's not turning Japanese. He's turned black.

Michael Jackson gone backwards. Trying to become white, killed Michael Jackson. This is cultural consumption. It's not enough to have African babies. You can turn yourself black with judicious sunlamping and/or Caribbean holidays. Now, I almost slept with Bob when I was 16 (which is another story) but he was a kind of pasty Irish white then.

Don't you think that tanning is a way of asserting cultural superiority? I was always a complete fail surfie. I used to get called Moby Dick "the great white whale" whenever I went to the beach.

For some reason that compelled me to actually learn to surf unlike most of the other beach babes of the time, however, when did tan get to be important? The consensus is that tan is slimming. That is also another story. If you look at the history, then when tan is in, white is powerful and black is not. So it is a cultural cannibalism.

Dessert anyone?

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Inside and Outside aren't so clear anymore.

Is your house a doggy restroom? Hate rushing home to find your pet has made a mess? You need Potty Patch! Endorsed by the American Kennel Club.

via icanhascheezburger.com

Combine that with Facebook sending your personal stuff out to just about anyone. Not to mention all the other ways that private, intimate stuff is now being shared across space and time. And I think that time and space have just been turned inside out.

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You can have it all, just not all at once - Superwoman in bits

The high-achieving Phillips's selective nostalgic referencing of the '50s is not feminist backlash, says leading feminist Eva Cox – who nevertheless is bemused by the rush of celebrities publishing memoirs about raising families – but is part of the trend towards more intensely scrutinised parenting in a society more interested in debating tax cuts than quality of life issues.

"We've got to work out why the '80s started a pressure cooker timeline, where everything had to be done now and nothing is saved for.

"The next frontier is trying to say what we need to live the long, good life and how do we discard the trappings that make it hard to do so, and that's a conversation we all need to have, not just feminists."

via smh.com.au

Demolishing the Superwoman myth is a good start. Perhaps Juanita Phillips's book will be popular enough to counteract her previous outings as representative of the superwoman genre. She makes many good points about the problems of discussing gender equity pragmatically although I hope her story examines the role of seductive images of imagined domestic bliss. I find competitive craft and cooking scarily dominant in popular culture, although the 'seeking happiness not success' label is always firmly attached!

Seasoning the pressure cooker with some politically articulate spice, as Linda Morris has done in this article about the book, makes the meal more palatable. Although it's a shame that when Morris doesn't remember that the "personal is political" when she assures us that Phillips is not an angry 70s feminist crusader but speaking from a personal perspective, nostalgic for memories of domesticity that worked.

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World of Warcraft - The Internet is for porn

via youtube.com

and better and better.

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The Internet Is For Porn - Avenue Q - Original Broadway Cast

via youtube.com

somethings don't get old.

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