laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (08/29/83)
I found out what net.women.only is for! Or, rather, I found out what some people want net.women.only for. It is as some of us suspected, intended by certain people to be used for voicing hatred for men and in general acting as if you have the Divine right to subjegate them. You see, I just got some mail which expressed this. Some of the mail was not very explicit, but this one, from which I am going to quote from is. I gather that its author was rather upset when I posted my objection to net.women.only condemning people who work for change but are unwilling to accept the responsibility inherant in achieving that change, but was enraged when i mentioned that i did not consider my 'femininity' to be essential. her conclusion was that I was a traitor to women in general. After all, I did not support her in her crusade to keep the toilet lid down and to force men to do the same, and I have the audacity to disagree with her on the need for both genderless language and net.women.only. She claims that I am failing in my 'duty to fellow women' at great length. I got news for her. Last I checked I only had a duty to myself and that which I chose to accept as my responsibilities, and her whacko ideas aren't among that list. And as for a 'duty' to women in general -- I take people as they come and don't play favourites due to sex... At the tail end of this article I infer she was struck with a revelation. I wasn't a woman at all -- but a man using a woman's name. I do not know what I should do about this. I suppose that if everyone who met me at Toronto Usenix or knows me for some other reason would post that i am female it would only show that i have a lot of male friends who are willing to help me continue the subterfuge. After deciding that i was male, I got a long list of what the "Duty" (yes, with a capital D ) of every woman was to man and how this defined a woman since only such a woman "was universal in her freedom". (Whatever that means ... ) Now I have some pretty strong ideas about freedom myself, and one of them goes that making slaves out of men "in payment for the many years of torture which women have endured" is a lousy idea. And if she intends to get on with her threat and come on over to Toronto and "place her dominion over me as befits a true woman" then she hasn't seen anything like the hostile reaction she is going to get from me. I do not think that we have too much to worry about, actually, since she went on about "mental domination" and "non-violent dominion" which I take to mean that she doesn't know how to use force, but merely wishes (expects?) to have it. Those of us who do know how to use force are thus way ahead of the game. She is doing all this out of compassion "for men, the lesser creatures", by the way. She thinks that if all men were to "take up their rightful place ... as servants of the superior <sex>" there would be an end to hatred. I got some more news. You make a servant out of me, and I am going to hate you rather thoroughly. In fact I hate you right now. I get the opinion that male or female I have just been declared anathema. This is fine by me -- I have survived excommunication already, and I was never in a position to be considered a member of a group supporting her beliefs. She is only making formal my decision to not support racism, one I would freely remake on the spot right now. the problem is that she claims the word "woman" to describe only herself and those "millions of other women" who "are true to the feminist cause" and in general support her beliefs. This leaves me short a word to describe myself. I tend to favour hermaphrodite as an alternative, except that it might get confused with "Aphrodite", a connection that I would rather did not exist. Any suggestions? laura creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
phil@amd70.UUCP (08/29/83)
Am I to understand that some one wrote you a letter with phrases like "the superior sex" (women)? Please tell me you're being liberal with your quotations. Phil "I didn't even know I was inferior" Ngai
ellis@FLAIRMAX.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (08/30/83)
From what I've seen of net.women.only -- mostly comments on stockings
and make-up -- I'd say it's part of some male chauvinist conspiracy
to keep women on the covers of fashion magazines and out of the
math/engineering/business curricula where they're likely to cause the
most change.
BTW, has the percentage of women in technical and other *hard*,
traditionally masculine curricula improved since I was in school
10 years ago ? Back then women were so wimpy the math classes were
were less than 10% women.
I wonder what percentage of women who study english with the pretext
of becoming a writer or professor end up scrubbing floors for some
engineering grad? And who's fault is it?
If only I could meet a women who made enough money to support a
family on alternate years...
-michaellaura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (08/30/83)
All direct quotes, except that I think I added one word in parenthesis. I cannot mail the letter to all of you who are interested. In the first place, I do not mail otehr people's mail to me without their permission, and in the second, we ran out of space on our disk again, and interesting mail of utcsstat!laura was the first to go so it isnt here. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
liz@umcp-cs.UUCP (08/31/83)
What can I say? I never intended net.women.only for anything like voicing hatred of men or as a way of plotting to make them slaves. If such nonsense starts appearing there, I'll start flaming! I know that some men in the past have treated women badly, but I think this kind of thing is turning around -- personally, I have run into remarkably few situations of sexual discrimination -- none I can think of at the Univ of Maryland where I'm a grad student. I realize that such situations can and do occur, but I'm mostly with Laura Creighton in that making generalizations about men (inferior sex!?!?!) in response to a few individual men will only cause many more problems than already do exist. net.women.only is a place to share comman concerns -- not hatreds. Let's work out these situations and responses one at a time -- most of the men seem to me to be trying to understand; let's not flame at them randomly... Wondering how this could even come up... -- -Liz Allen, U of Maryland, College Park MD Usenet: ...!seismo!umcp-cs!liz Arpanet: liz.umcp-cs@Udel-Relay
hammy@mit-eddie.UUCP (J. Scott Hamilton) (09/01/83)
Regarding the turnaround of men's treatment of women, I think a generalization based on college life won't work to well. Here at MIT, it seems to me that many of the students (especially in the graduate school) are chosen for their achivement rather than their social skills. As a result, some of the higher achievers often have disabilities in a social setting, and many seem to have poor interpersonal skills. An example of this is the situation in the EE&CS graduate department. Many women in this department (which has an extrememly poor male/female ratio) worked on a joint paper to express their dissatisfaction with the way they were treated as computer scientists, because of their gender. I guess my point is that the treatment a women receives in a school environment depends on the characteristics of the student body at that school. Also I think that because of the type of males that do well in CS are typically less socially inclined, it can make for a poorer attitude towards women. -- J. Scott Hamilton !genrad!mit-eddie!hammy