This week, when the internet learned that a black woman had been cast in a new play billed as the ‘next instalment’ in the Harry Potter series, author J K Rowling reacted perfectly, reminding fans: “Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione”.
.. So it matters. It matters that the “brightest witch of her generation”, the bookish heroine of a generation’s definitive fairytale, doesn’t have to be white every time.
.. The rage that white men have been expressing, loudly, violently, over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to one race or one gender, the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page – that rage is petty. It is aware of its own pettiness. Like a screaming toddler denied a sweet, it becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that after all, it’s only a story.
.. Campbell reportedly told his students that “women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realise that she’s the place that people are trying to get to”.
The Empathy Gap, and why women are treated badly in open source communities
It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues. I once complained online about how offended I was by a news story that said many software developers were on the autism spectrum. To my embarrassment, there were many replies to my complaint by people who wrote “no, I really am on the spectrum and I’m not alone here”.
.. Online communities like those hosting Open Source developers tend to use textual communications. This is a comfortable environment for people who have trouble with face-to-face interaction.
How to Sell a Hijab in Malaysia
But her choice soon became something else, as well: a lucrative source of attention for herself and her multimillion-dollar online-retail startup, FashionValet, which already sold hijabs and later came to include her own line of scarves and a stationery brand. Yusof is now among the growing number of Malaysian women who are trying to revolutionize the hijab’s contentious image. While the scarf has tended to be viewed primarily as a marker of Islamic duty and identity, and sometimes, especially in the West, of female subjugation and oppression, in Malaysia women are free—even encouraged—to inject glamor and prestige into the hijab, and to make money from it.
.. In her posts, she tells readers that choosing to wear the hijab should be an upgrade to their lives. “She is changing the whole reputation of the head scarf,” Farah Alia Razali-Tyler, a law graduate, told me. “When people thought of the hijab, they thought, ‘I don’t want to look like a makcik’ ”—a frumpy older woman. “Now they’re saying it’s okay to be more modern.”
Knausgaard Writes Like a Woman
A survey in 2015 by Goodreads revealed that on average 80 percent of a woman writer’s audience is female as opposed to 50 percent for a man writer’s. In other words, men who write fiction have an audience representative of the world as a whole while women don’t.
.. Was the journalist who insisted that my husband had “taught” me both psychoanalysis and neuroscience (even after I told him this was most definitely not true, that my husband had little interest in either) a sexist idiot or just a man who wanted to believe his literary hero was more or less responsible for his wife’s education? The man wasn’t in the least bit hostile. He just seemed puzzled that in these subjects I was far better read than my spouse.
.. He gave two groups of students the same essay, authored by either John T. McKay or Joan T. McKay to evaluate. John’s was rated superior in all respects.
.. A 2008 study found that when academic papers were subject to double-blind peer review—neither the author nor the reviewer was identified—the number of female first-authored papers accepted increased significantly.
.. “The prescription for female niceness is an implicit belief that penalizes women unless they temper their agency with niceness.” In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don’t have to be nearly as nice as women.
.. After a few words had escaped her mouth, a man interrupted her, took the floor, and expounded at some length. After that, she launched into her point again and another man chopped her off in mid-sentence. At final count, four men had swooped into her remarks before she finally barged in and spoke her mind.
.. What fascinated me about this incident was that the men who interrupted the woman did not seem to recognize they were behaving badly.
.. Somehow, that woman became imperceptible to the men who were speaking in that room. I am wholly convinced that the men who talked over her would have been amazed and embarrassed had they seen a film of the proceedings.
.. he may simply be more honest than many male writers, scholars, and other menfolk who don’t see or hear a woman because she is not competition.