by Dave Freer
(Yeah, I know, I haven’t got in enough trouble all by myself lately, so, here is my friend Dave Freer taking up one of my favorite themes. Dave for those of you who are lucky enough not to have read him yet — because you get to read all of his work NEW, you lucky sobs — is a wonderful writer and manages to be funny and moving all at once. He blogs at Flinder’s Family Freer and also at Coal Fired Cuttlefish [and yes, his mind is what you expect from someone who comes up with THAT notion: Delightfully creative. And more than a little scary!])
So, let’s get back to the Writing Pink Ghetto
“I know what darling, we’ll paint the whole place pink.”
“Pink?”
“Yes. Even cerise, maybe.”
“With lace frills?”
“Oooh yes. That’ll put those nasty Nazis off.
“You’re barking mad, do you know that? Instead of giving bastards one excuse to kill us you give them two.”
“You’re just being mean to me!”
Let’s face it: Ghettos aren’t funny. And any sane human wants no more of them.
Well. Maybe. Sane… maybe. Decent or nice are a different matter, but like sanity are relative terms. You can be sane and a lowlife. The two are not exclusive.
Let’s look at history and the article (http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/women‑gangs‑dominate‑business‑areas‑creating‑pink‑ghettos/story‑fn7ki14e‑1226290981814) that prompted me into my usual satirical snark. The link is one, but pretty much the same article popped up all over, like toadstools after rain. To summarize to save you reading it, some consultant types found that HR and PR departments in many large companies had become entirely female or with a few gay males. There was suitable outrage from feminist business-woman types about the fact that these were now seen as low status departments and their feminization limited their effect on the boardroom, which was yet more discrimination against women. The comments were telling too: there were the handful of parrots (trust me this is very bad for your hands) who bitched about evulll men, and a few misogynists who thought letting them out the kitchen was a mistake (I have always thought letting them into the kitchen was a mistake, but then that could be because I like cooking and Barbs detests it, and saying this really flat-foots your average femme-nasty)… and the vast bulk who said ‘how true, and how horrible working in those departments had been, and how much happier/more effective environments with a broader cross-section had been. ’ The posters seemed a cross section of men and women.
I thought about the whole boiling ferment and thought about how it relates to my own industry, and about how some of it was raising the bullshit meter and logic screens. And then I went and had lunch, which proves I have a very strong stomach and fairly low intellect.
Look , I have seen the same thing in other places. Schools and libraries to think of two really important ones. And it is sweeping publishing, writing and… even reading. What’s somewhat more worrying is that there are people who think its a good thing (TM). Let’s just drift back into that thing we never learn from, ergo, History. The term ‘ghetto’ comes from Venice – which as some of you may remember is where I set SHADOW OF LION, and where the social and political background of that 15th century series is set. I’ve been to the Campo Ghetto, read about its history. And it’s not particularly nice reading. But here are things you may not know. 1) in comparison to most of the rest of Europe (and a lot of other spots too) Venice was a liberated spot, and a good place to be a Jew. This doesn’t make it wonderful, but as all things are relative, means if you handing out prizes for integration and tolerance back then Venice would have been a long way ahead of Rome (or just about anywhere else), which makes Venice bashing (in modern terms too) a little… odd. 2)The gates on the ghetto could be locked… from the outside (to keep Jews in during various ‘important’ times in the Christian calendar, like Easter). And also from the INSIDE to keep rampaging pogroms out. 3)The Ghetto had its own rules, laws… and naturally leaders and law-makers, who were very powerful in that sphere.
Two other things of course have come out of history since then. One is that ghettos develop when a certain critical mass of whatever group it is bunch together, whether they are made to or choose to: other people either expelled or choose to move out. It takes a fairly determined effort to stop this happening. It’s almost inevitably bad news, socially and in terms of worsening discrimination in the long run. And the other is the development of ‘ghetto pride’ where the positive aspects of grouping are praised and anyone leaving (or speaking against it) is regarded as a traitor.
So let’s slip back to the feminization of HR and PR departments. ‘They’re service industries, they’re regarded as unimportant, and that’s why women are shunted off there into a dead end with no effect on the boardroom.’ Oh dear. My Bullshit meter just exploded at the logic flaws… HR — besides settling cat-fights and organizing team building exercises — aren’t those the people who hire-and-fire, specifically HIRE people? Surely the kind of hires and where they are hired to is 1)vital to the company’s future and bottom line. It is, in strategy terms, your most powerful and direction influencing department (try strategy games if you don’t believe me. You can win or lose based not such on your skill in playing as who you choose and where you put them. And in real life, more so.). If you can’t do anything while controlling it, consider getting a big L tattooed on your forehead. For ‘learner’ of course. Couldn’t be for ‘loser’. 2) Who, if not the HR department, ends up controlling who is in each department? So if it’s an all female and gay male (I quote – seen as ‘weak’ by other males) department, who made it thus? Who favored ‘sisterhood’, and who wanted to go to that department? Who let them? As for PR… yeah it’s a lot of waffle… by which companies sink or win Olympic swimming medals. Apple has good PR. That’s why they sell a lot of products. Be the products brilliant (or about par or shoddy) or not, without PR they’d be selling about the same as my books – which have the benefit of no PR bar my little efforts.
If these potentially powerful forces are weak and lack boardroom influence… why? Is it because they put gender – and/or other factors before effectiveness? And if it really is the case that it’s just because they’re all women, what pragmatic step can they take to change that? They really are in the best possible position to open the gates to the Ghetto. Yes, it will mean they’re not 98%+ female departments any more. And yes, it will mean the company – looking for some sort of gender parity to keep itself out of trouble with those who will call ‘discrimination’ otherwise, will need to make that HR department work at finding female IT workers or metallurgists, seeing as your female numbers from HT and PR will drop.
As with teaching and librarianship — it’s hard to imagine positions which should more respect, which should wield more influence, or which I regard as more important. So ask the hard question: why aren’t they influential, well paid, keenly competed for by the best… and what can we do to change that? And the answer is obviously NOT ‘more of the same’ Eventually you have to realize that repeating the experiment won’t change the result. It’s time to try something different, being pragmatic, even if it messes with your biases.
So how does this play into writing? As I said, it too is suffering from ‘pink Ghetto’ cries, with all the same complaints and all the same non-solutions. Romance – the biggest, richest most powerful genre sector – constantly complains it is not taken seriously. Yet there are women – often the same women who are successful in that genre or YA which is overwhelmingly female dominated – bitterly complaining about sex ratios on the TOC’s of tiny hard science short-story anthologies (my favorite whine here comes from Aussiecon when a female author of literary fantasy complained about the fact that she was excluded from Hard Science. Did she have a Science background, or any grasp at all of science, she was asked. Well no, but you didn’t NEED that, you didn’t even have to write that. You should be on the TOC even if every other male-written story was written by a scientist and was about hard science and yours was about the feelings of girl unicorns for other girl unicorns. It was just pure discrimination that kept women out.) The whines about men getting all the reviews and literary prizes are rather like being chained down in a room with 50 mosquitos and Oprah re-runs (especially considering the non-effect of said reviews and prizes). The answer ‘women only contests’ makes me think of tennis (I need to sleep more, and I find Wimbledon very sopor-soothing). Women, even militant feminists, who tried take on male champions, failed. Men are just more muscular and faster. So: they have Women’s Championships… which make sense if you are willing to accept that physiologically or mentally you are less-than-equally able. This does NOT apply to writing skill, in my opinion. It must do so in the opinion of those who initiate, sponsor, and accept prizes from such competitions. It’s not exactly liberating is it? Yet women editors are no novelty, and outnumber males (and some are right at the top), women writers outnumber males by a huge margin, and women readers outnumber males by an even bigger one. JK Rowlings, Janet Evanovich and Stephanie Meyer barely earned any money at all… Any suggestions that there might be a problem with, for example, the overwhelming female writer/reader situation in YA fiction is met by a fierce clash of the Ghetto gates…
Lady Guardian: “This is OUR patch. WE make the rules here. It’s our turn now. Jacqueline here deserves our support far more than Joe, who shouldn’t even try to write YA. He’s a filthy hetero white male. She’s the victim of sexist persecution.”
Voice of Reason: “Um. She’s lived a pampered life, went to a liberal art college paid for by her father. And her brother had to go out and work at 16. Joe is the last 13 children and had to teach himself to read, never got enough to eat, and his book is funny, warm, and brilliant. Jacqueline’s reads like yet another carbon-copy of the sparkly Vampire.”
LG: “Well, Jacqueline’s mother was a victim.”
VoR: “Jacqueline’s mother was an only child, and spoiled darling and inherited a fortune.”
LG: “You can never understand how she SUFFERED. Punishment must meted out unto the 10th generation. Or more. The sins of the father shall visited on the (male) child.”
VoR: “Didn’t know you were fundamentalist Christian.”
LG (belaboring VoR with a pole-axe and a lawyer).“How DARE you! I’m Wiccan!”
There is of course a logical answer to all of this, but it is a disempowering one… to the leadership. The ghetto isn’t being barred from outside any more. And no matter how you complain, bringing more areas into ghetto-only will not help. If for example, you force Hard Science writing past the critical mass point… all it will do is make the situation worse. It’s like Liberal Arts Colleges – already at 75%+ female students, attacking the 20 male student strong Physics department for having no women. If they succeed in forcing the Physics professors to accept and give first class marks to essays on the feeling of girl unicorns for other girl unicorns while the males have to do Feynman diagrams… well, shortly you will have no male students, your physics department will be worthless, and your college sex ratio will be up to 76%+ female. A win all round, yes?
The pogroms are over.
Open the Ghetto. Get ‘non-pink’ people in too, and go out. And sometimes they may end up on top… but unless women are completely inadequate, some women will too. And some, having done well in one field, will show they have a perfectly good grasp of solid-state electronics too. If women aren’t winning prizes and getting reviews… start new competitions – ones in which the work made anonymous and is judged by 50:50 panel. Women are NOT (outside the few who feel terribly threatened by a 50% increase in competition and are squalling loudest) any less capable than men. And there are men who can write about the feelings of girl unicorns for other girl unicorns.
And everyone will be richer for it.
Ooh look, there goes a winged pig, chased by a girl unicorn…
According To Hoyt 
In IBM where I work HR is a weak department because they don’t have the knowledge to do the really important HR work. They cannot evaluate employee performance, because you cannot apply objective standards to knowledge workers. Therefore, they cannot be responsible for hiring and/or firing. Their job is the much weaker matter of compliance – making sure we don’t get in trouble for not following this law or that regulation.
PR is important, but we call it “marketing”. PR that is not marketing based is mostly useless.
These departments are inherently weak because they are fluffy and hard to measure. There is nothing wrong with selecting a job that is had to measure, but if you do it don’t expect to be treated the way those who make or break the company are measured.
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Dave, besides the “talk about oppression” there’s also the talk about “Male Privilege”. [Frown]
Oh Sarah, sorry if this is too political.
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Often overlooked, some of those Male Privileges included the privilege of being conscripted and offered up on the battlefields of Earth as human sacrifice. Also included were higher stress levels with correlating greater likelihood of death from stroke, heart attack and other stress related factors.
Women have often managed to compete effectively with men for both power and prestige but many prefer to complain rather than work (frankly, that is true of many men, too, but they don’t get to blame it on sexism.)
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I’m sorry to say it, but I am so glad I had sons, and not daughters in this age of female victimology. Better to be treated like the Big Evil than indoctrinated into whiney victimhood.
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Me too. One thing I’ve noticed is that almost every female friend the boys have is drugged to the hilt. Sorry, “medicated”. We hear about what this nonsense is doing to boys — it’s obvious. But I think the REAL victims are young women who are expected at once to be superhero-tough AND “victimized” by everything. NO ONE could hold on to both of those at once, so they have to be medicated into a semblance of normality. I’ve said it before — if aliens wanted humans not to reproduce they couldn’t have come up with a more fit program than current so called “feminism.”
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I have long thought that the real victims of slavery were the slaveholders — it must be terribly corrupting to have such unearned privilege and power.
Which is to say: argument over who the REAL victims of any practice is are distraction from the problem, that we are all victims and need to focus on solutions rather than perpetrating the problem (or changing whose boot is on whose throat.) To steal from The Right Stuff, we’re arguing pussy when the problem is monkey.
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Oh, my solution is to stop all such practices now, and pour buckets of frozen fish over the head of anyone claiming to be a feminist. The “victim” comment was for the KIDS not the adults who buy into this. The poor girls raised in this crap have NO say and will at least for a time buy into it, because… they were born into it. We’re screwing ALL the kids beyond belief, but the girls might not be recoverable. That was my comment on real victims, not the total idiot grown ups.
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Seriously, you people make me happy that I have no spawn to worry about…
I do love the Liberal Arts College analogy, Dave. I watched that happen at my school and remember being outnumbered on the newspaper staff 8:1 and thinking “Why do they continue to complain about the editing and what stories we are covering when _they’re_ deciding who covers what? And why am I covering women’s soccer when they’ve been out of the playoffs for three weeks?”
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Your comment at Instapundit about females being more group-oriented parallels discussions Beloved Spouse & I have had, and for pretty much the same reason of evolutionary advantage. I am minded of a comment from recent FB discussion I read, in which a woman who had lived under both Nazi and Communist governance said the Nazis were better: they only insisted you live by their rules, while the commies insisted you LIKE doing so.
I concur that females (kids) are probably more damaged by this, if only because they are less prone than males to taking the slacker route. My point was merely that ALL are damaged and discussion of the ways and extent of such damage distracts from the primary issue.
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Take heart. In the grand scheme of things, it’s self-limiting.
The single most outstanding effect of feminism as she are preached and practiced today is fewer babies. An organism, be it “society” or “creature”, that adopts traits unfavorable to reproduction is on the way to extinction. The future belongs to those who show up.
I don’t know what our successor society will look like, but I suspect Ms. Atwood was more right than she knows.
Regards,
Ric
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Sigh – While I believe that what damages any of us damages us all (for Society is thus poorer) I am forced to consider, if THIS ( http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/09/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-now-w ) is true, that girls may well be irreparably damaged by a feminism which renders them victims under any circumstance, which maintains that women are fragile and dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Such a view denies adulthood to women, for the essence of adulthood is accepting responsibility for your actions, your choices and your life. Simultaneously pounding the “I am Woman, hear me Roar” and “Women are ever and always victims” memes into little girls heads is a form of child abuse beyond description. We’re lucky they aren’t all insane by such schizophrenogenic messages.
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RES – have you read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography (gripping stuff)? As a child, he was given to his master’s son and his new Northern wife. She wasn’t used to slaves and treated him like a little brother, even began to teach him to read. He called her his angel. And then her husband instructed her about the “proper” treatment of slaves, and Douglass watched his angel turn into a demon. He could still love the angel so many years later and hate what the system of slavery did to her.
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One thing about ghettos is that, for many occupants, complaining is easier than leaving.
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Bias abounds because we are human, I believe. The idea of a “pink ghetto” gives me a shudder. I dislike labels – so limiting – I’m definitively not a feminist, simply me. And I am raising my girl to find her own path and not to give a flip what others want that path to be :)
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You gotta walk that lonesome valley
And you gotta walk, walk it by yourself
Nobody here can walk it for you
You gotta walk, walk it by yourself
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Yes. Of course bias exists. We are ALL discriminated against by virtue of not being cartoon characters. (And even then…) If I had a girl the last thing I would want her to think herself was “a victim.”
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Mostly a pretty good post, but my own experience leads me to think there’s one little factual error.
“HR — besides settling cat-fights and organizing team building exercises — aren’t those the people who hire-and-fire, specifically HIRE people?”
In my experience… no. They are not. Oh, they do the busy work, screening, background checks, form filing, and other pencil pushing of hiring, but in all but the lowest-wage, high-turnover positions, the actual decisions are made by someone else.
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Well DDW, HR often has the power to say “NO” regarding hiring as in if you don’t get past HR then you won’t be hired.
Also, there have been stories where managers want somebody but HR claims the person doesn’t match the “requirements”. Oh these are situations where the manager knows the person can do the job but has to send them first through HR.
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True, they do have veto power in some cases, and some companies. It’s a natural extension of their screening role, though in many fields the HR person doing the screening is not actually qualified to evaluate the applicant, and is just checking off boxes without really understanding potential equivalencies. That can often lead to conflict between managers and HR. But in cases where the manager is high enough up the food chain I’ve seen HR’s veto overruled in cases where it really should not have been.
My main point though was that (though they may be able to block hires) they do not have the ability to stick people favorable to themselves or their agenda in whatever positions they like, thus shaping the company and culture in the way that the post seemed to be implying.
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Do you know how card tricks work? YOU select the card, but the magician has rigged it for you to select the card he wants you to have. If HR wants somebody hired you can be sure the other applicants submitted will be less suitable, and if they don’t want you your resume won’t make it to the hiring manager.
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You’re assuming the applicant the manager wants to hire has come to his attention via the pool offered to them by HR, which is not necessarily the case, and I would say the higher the position being the less likely it is to be the case.
I’ve also seen instances where the hiring manager does not allow HR to filter the resumes precisely because they lack the technical understanding to do so. HR’s only hope of blocking the desired candidate in those cases is to find a deal-killer in the background check.
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I am sure you are correct. I think however you’ll find that hiring via HR (which probably had people with some experience of other areas) was a historical role in some of these situations. What’s happened of course is that wicked sexist men have taken it away from them once they became an all female dept, making them ineffectual. Or to try another version of reality, they did it so ineffectually (using the wrong selection mechanisms – ‘he has dreamboat eyes’ rather than ‘he can do iterative functions’) that it got removed from them, passing more control to the people who actually knew what was needed. Believe whichever you choose. However they COULD still block transfers and new hires of yet more women to their own department, but don’t… and then say it being all female makes them powerless. A case of eating the cake and not wanting to add the calories…
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All of which proves I must be a victim, because I get the calories without even getting to look at the cake. There is clearly something horribly wrong with the universe.
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I KNOW. If I smell cakes, I gain weight. I think someone is eating the cake and sticking me with the calories. Bastages.
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My daughter understands that our general reaction to most complaints is, in her words, “too bad, so sad, suck it up, princess.” In other words, a whine won’t even get you cheese in our house. Not what we want. Figure out what you want, figure out what you need to do. Do it. If you don’t do it right the first time, come to us, and we’ll help you figure if you need more skills before your next attempt. No whines, please.
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THAT’s how we teach our kids, too.
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Even then it only works up to a point. With a society and culture that teaches them every minute they’re not in your sight that they’re victims and someone is holding them down, while simultaneously telling them they’re pwecious little fwowers and just oh-so entitled, the adults in the room really have our work cut out for them trying to bring kids back down to planet consensus reality.
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There are ways to fight back against Thought Police, namely tying them up in their own contradictions. The Deranged Daughter, who is pre-med got in trouble with an Anthropology professor for disputing the prof.’s premise that the reason for poverty in the Third World was lack of resources (Daughter’s reaction: yeah, if only they had the natural resources of, say, Hong Kong.)
They were headed to full star chamber thought crime prosecution until we coached the daughter on asserting there had clearly been a cultural conflict, daughter coming from a hard science culture while the Anthopologist was soft science. Caught on the horns of multiculturalism the school agreed to respect their different cultures and allow daughter to withdraw from the course without penalty … something she was more than happy to do, having taken the measure of the teacher. Admittedly, had daughter been a boy it is likely to have turned out differently.
The trick is to Breitbart them, make them defend their positions, pointing out the racism/sexism implicit in their positions. As kids are especially sensitive to absurdity of adult arguments, the quick quip quietly deflating pretensions is still the most effective means of innoculating against such idiocy.
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Robert — also pre med, possibly taking same or equivalent class — refuted this by coming from a protected ethnic background (Portuguese mother, don’t you know) which had, nonetheless, been a colonial power. He got an A, but the professor MIGHT have had a nervous breakdown. Not that this is unusual for people who go near my kids…
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Well, yes, but your kids keep a running score of how many idjits they’ve driven out of the profession.
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There are times I think I’m glad I haven’t met Sarah’s spawn. I get the impression they’re minor demon lords in their own right. I base this, not just on anecdotal evidence, but on having read Cat’s Paw.
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They’re sweet, perceptive boys with brilliant minds and occasionally some modicum of manners. Well, at least that’s ONE way of looking at them.
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Oh – not such minor demon lords, then. More like Chief Petty Demon Lords.
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The whole women=minority theme threatens to drive me batty. 52% of the US population is female, how in the heck does that constitute a minority!
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