This is important because people are so incredulous and naive when it comes to believing sexism *gasp* STILL exists that using outdated figures makes your argument even more ignorable.

I can see she was pissed off at my class and race, the advantages I’d had. Almost every single other person in that damn bottle-drama collective was a middle-class white woman, so why didn’t she have a go at them? And fuck her for shoving me, I know she’s pissed off at the kyriarchy, but jeez, I’d just had the same thing from a right-wing fuckhead male student politician a few days before, and it was pretty trigger-y from what my father used to do, you know? So fuck that. Fuck. That. Shit. (Identifying as queer was racist too, okay, I see there’s connections, what with her saying Foucault was a white male, but I refuse to stop id’ing as queer, given how much bloody trauma & violence it cost me to admit it to the world, even as I try to be more aware, you know?). I’m no one’s gratuitous punching bag, because I’m conveniently different from the rest of the collective, like it was a playground again.

That was ten years ago, and I’ve searched and searched myself since, trying to work out what the hell went on, and the limits to what I might be seeing or not seeing with my privilege-goggles. What might I not have seen, what might I have done? In the end I think it was mainly a convenient scapegoating/bullying over other internal-politics-power-struggle issues to me (who controls the lesbians, Women’s or Queer Department?), but of course fueled by privilege/identity differences. That happens.

That confrontation had one “positive” for me, and that’s to try to become a lot more aware of my identity privileges, which is a life-long process, so, hey. But jeez, reading over this, I still hold anger, which I’ll have to let go; these events are so linked into me getting CFS.

Some of the most surreal conversations I have had since coming to graduate school have been in a science education discussion group I was part of, that had 8 women and 2 men. 2 of us were physical scientists and the other 8 were biologists. The biology department, much like the university as a whole, is about 70% women. The physical sciences, engineering, math, and CS majors are <50% women and are not in the same buildings as biology. Apparently this leads to some cluelessness about each others' departmental cultures. In any case, every time the subject of gender came up, several of the women who were biologists acted a little incredulous that it would be an issue in other departments, because it had never been an issue for them. I mentioned that this was possibly due to a more even ratio in life sciences and got brushed off. It was officially Not a Problem Anymore, compared to racial and/or ethnic diversity, according to this group of white women. (And yeah, there are definitely a lot of problems with science education and class and race too…for sure, I agreed, but that didn't mean that we had to treat discussion time like a scarcity and never discuss gender issues ever.) The more frequently I was brushed off when this came up, the more unwelcome I felt when I would bring up anything related to physical sciences. I got accused of being overly assertive or dominating in the way I talked in discussions, even though I would sit there taking a tally of who was talking most, and it wasn't me, although I did try to temper how I talked. (Someone kind of implied that being assertive or aggressive, or arguing too much, was using patriarchal tools. Kind of ironic, since they were excusing the status quo.)

Luckily, things changed when I got most of the other people to attend a talk by Avi Ben-Zeev, who is a psychologist who studies the Stereotype Threat specifically as it relates to women and math. Pretty much all the women in the math department turned up for that, and a number of pretty horrific anecdotes came out about blatant sexism in the math department. (Women in the math lounge working together were accused of being part of a "lesbian mafia".) After that, my colleagues didn't question gender issues that I and my astronomy counterpart would bring up.

I don't think that being assertive is anti-feminist, but I've noticed that geek women who spend time in male-dominated environments adopt a particular style of assertiveness, either to be part of the group or as a defense mechanism, and it sometimes becomes an issue when talking with women who are part of another feminist tradition. I have a really hard time talking to women's studies majors and sociologists in person. I've gotten over my issue with this particular group of biologists since I realized that they were sensitive about not being considered a real science by some blowhard physical scientists with a superiority complex. Having defended my own field (geology) to those types, I had to make it clear that when I was talking about possible differences in the experiences of biologists and physical scientists, it wasn't that I thought they were inferior, just that their experience of being amongst a group of at least 50% women wasn't universal.

Hew. That came out much longer than I expected it to, and much rantier. :/