Tag Archives: marvel

Our degenerate modern linkspamming society (18th December, 2009)

How the Geek Stereotype Stunts Computer Science: Lisa Grossman, writer of "Of Geeks and Girls", responds to some Hacker News comments: “The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and thatâ€™s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.”
Dear Marvel Comics: Rusalka appreciates Marvel Comics’ efforts to spotlight female superheroes in comics. But why are they spotlighted as “girls” or “ladies” rather than “women”?
Denver University â€œCyber Civil Rightsâ€ Symposium Recap: Eric Goldman recounts the â€œCyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age" symposium, with special attention to Danielle Citron's session on harassment of women online and legal solutions to it.
Thinking Out Loud: Is Social Media the new Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech?: The Learned Fangirl wants to avoid a "separate but equal" tech ghetto for women.
Nerd Girls: a video documenting the Tufts University’s “Nerd Girls” team, women engineering students building a solar car.
Management changes at Canonical: Jane Silber, current COO of Canonical Ltd, will take over from Mark Shuttleworth as CEO in March 2010. (Canonical is a company owned by Shuttleworth and is the sponsor of Ubuntu development among other ventures.) There’s been much discussion around the Linuxosphere (Linux.com, Slashdot, LWN), but most of it around Shuttleworth’s decision.
Charting a course from virtual reality to the White House: CNET News profiles Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO for the Obama administration in the US.
UbuntuGeek republished a laptoplogic article (original now gone): Is Ubuntu Ready for a Non-tech-savvy Girlfriend? Is making sure to specify “non-tech-savvy” enough to get this article out of the So simple, [a woman you know] could do it? trap, or is it playing into it?

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if youâ€™re a delicious user, tag them â€œgeekfeminismâ€ to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Quick hit: Marvel writer defends rape in Spiderman comic

Via Hoyden who link to IO9’s post on the subject.

When is rape not rape? When it’s a supervillain pretending to be Peter Parker and having sex with Parker’s roommate, who thinks she’s having sex with Parker himself, according to one of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man writers.

The writer, Fred Van Lente, responds:

My understanding of the definition of rape is that it requires force or the threat of force, so no. Using deception to trick someone into granting consent isnâ€™t quite the same thing.

Which is not to say it isnâ€™t a horrible, evil, reprehensible thing that Chameleon did. He is a bad man.

He insults parapelegics[sic] and dips people in acid too.

‘ware rape apologism in the IO9 comments :-/

The Left Hand of Link Roundup (Sep 9th, 2009)

Technology for “keeping kids safe” unsurprisingly sometimes serves a dual purpose, as Lauredhel points out: Your kidsâ€™ â€™secureâ€™ online chats being sold to marketers
Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Claims of sex differences fall apart. Newsweek describes Lise Eliot’s book Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gapsâ€”And What We Can Do About It, in which she reviews evidence that parents cause the differences in infant behaviour that some people claim is innate.
Bitch magazine: Princess synergy: Disney’s acquisition of Marvel is good for boys, but what about girls?: “My concern is that the resulting products will continue to be two unfortunate sides of the same gendered coin: Good-Girly Princess and Oversexed Superheroine.”
laughingrat on Impostors: “I wonder if, for instance, my college adviser would have been able to get away with pretending I was too stupid for graduate school–he said as much to me in a slightly gentled-up fashion–if I hadn’t myself learned to be so self-deprecating.”
Azurelunatic on women-only spaces, being one of the boys, GRS, and the Vorkosiganverse.
FemaleScienceProfessor asks people to start seeing micro-inequities, those little niggling incidents that are so easily written off as probably not sexist, just someone having a bad day, or being a jerk.
Webcomic A Softer World takes on I don’t see gender, I just see people.
Greta Christina discusses sexism and racism in the skeptical and atheist communities, and about how being white and male-dominated will perpetrate itself in unhelpful ways. There is some overlap between these communities and geekdom, so it isn’t surprising to hear that some of the defensiveness is similar.

Link Roundup Strikes Back (August 15th, 2009)

Gender gap in pay explained by choice of major
Roll call: Women in Python. If you’re a woman who uses Python, go let Pam know!
Notes from the DrupalChix panel at DrupalCampLA last weekend
A big warning flag on “District 9” for some major RaceFail and ancillary GenderFail (see comments). Previously: a promotional competition for the movie was open to men only.
Johanna at Comics Worth Reading Reviews Marvel Divas #2: “This is actually pretty good.” (Background on the wiki.)
Sarah Mei on Teaching Ruby to high school girls
Simone Peterson Hruda: Reflections on Black Women in Engineering via the Women in Science blog.
Belatedly, also at the Women in Science blog: Women of the Apollo Program

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Tag Archives: marvel

Quick hit: Marvel writer defends rape in Spiderman comic

The Left Hand of Link Roundup (Sep 9th, 2009)

Link Roundup Strikes Back (August 15th, 2009)