I'm sitting here, enjoying my morning cup of tea and the sounds of Lala (running around in a diaper with a blanket over her head) and Gogo (currently in the playpen) laughing at each other. I'm also catching up on the news from overnight/yesterday.
What I've been reading the last several days have made me sick and very afraid for the girls' futures.
*Cyber Bullying/Bullying in general: There are so many stories about kids getting bullied via social media. The draw of it is that you can do it anonymously. That old schoolyard saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is completely false these days.
The most recent story that made me fear for the future was of a young girl who donated 14 inches of her hair to make wigs for children going through chemo or dealing with being bald for other reasons. She's 12. Can we for a second admire her selfless act? She got a darling pixie cut, went back to school, and was immediately bullied. Because she cut her hair and "looked like a boy". Who cares about why she did it, she was picked on.
I had super short hair for a lot of my childhood and was called boy often. It sickens me that these kids trying to do good, but their peers don't recognize the good and jump on an opportunity to bully. The school refused to see it as bullying, which is of itself a whole other matter....thank goodness the school district we're in has a zero tolerance policy.
I wouldn't say I was bullied in today's definition (that's another post), but these days, there are so many avenues for doing/receiving it. The reasons why people do it (and it's not just kids either) is because they disagree with what someone is doing or how they look...or because an individual is "different". I wonder just how incredibly insecure these people are to pick on others, especially through the vale of the internet. I wonder why they believe this is acceptable.
I'm tempted to ban all online interactions until the girls are in college.
*GamerGate: The hubs and I are both avid gamers. I was working in the gaming industry before I had Lala. I've been playing games my whole life. I never felt "different" for liking them, since it was just part of who I am.
It wasn't until my first role as a QA tester that I realized just how differently women were viewed in the gaming world. I was part of a multiplayer test for a racing game, and the guy I was testing with was mouthing off about how I was "totally cheating" because I was getting specific power-ups/winning races/etc. There was a crowd of the other testers around us (it was the end of the day) and all of them were guys. He kept saying that I didn't know what I was doing, that I had unfair advantages, that I didn't actually know how to game. All of this because he was losing...badly...finally, at one point, our lead looked at him and told him he'd better just put his foot in his mouth because he was getting his ass kicked by a really good gamer...who happened to be female. I left that company soon after.
In case you've been under a rock lately, GamerGate is a phrase currently being used as a rallying point for a misogynistic group of individuals in an effort to remove women from mainstream gaming culture. It started as an unethical attack on a single female developer and has spiraled out to target any woman in gamest development, game journalism, or nerd culture in general. While some people will claim GG is about getting better ethical standards in game journalism, absolutely nothing has been proposed, advanced, or even theorised on how that can be done or what current practices are unacceptable. Instead, an outpouring of hate directed at women has been put forward on a scale not seen since the Iranian revolution.
*The fact that they're WOMEN: There are so many things that are putting shame on people simply because physically, they're female. (I'm going to use the royal "we" here...don't get thrown off) We get blamed for rape because how we were dressed/acted/looked gets interpreted as consent or quite clearly, we were "asking for it". Schools are banning yoga pants...because it's the girls fault for "tempting men" because obviously guys have zero control over themselves. We're getting the ability to make choices about OUR bodies taken away because we don't have the best interest in mind...obviously we don't know our bodies as well as men do. (That's not a statement for pro-life/pro-choice...simply that we're not getting to choose what's best for us...some choose one thing, and others do the opposite...but we should be able to make our own decisions about our own bodies, right?) It's just frightening. It almost seems like we're going back to the days where women were considered second class or even property. Having two daughters I'm raising makes me so fearful about how their world will be when they are adults.
This whole raising kids thing is scary, and then you throw gender into the mix and it gets even scarier. I can only hope that the world turns around and figures itself out. Otherwise, screw it, we're moving to the mountains and living off the land.
I, too, have been getting frightened that we are once again retreating. It's 2014. My god, is that scary, that we are still not considered "people" but "woman or man" in this day and age. All we can do is keep trucking along, being our awesome selves and refusing to see arbitrary gender lines (as often as possible). The sad thing is that there are some women that still see us as second class citizens, which is equally, if not more, frustrating.
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