taking it personally

[extemporanea]

Circumstances of late have conspired to give me a sudden need to be Randomly Feminist. This is mostly about a confluence of recent articles bouncing hither and yon across the 'net, but last night I also dreamed I had a massive argument with Tony Stark about my complete refusal to wear high heels, so there's that.

• This is Bruce Sterling's Alan

Comments

[strawberryfrog]

>"Gay" and "effeminate" are not synonyms.

Well, yes. You do not need to tell me that, I know this from co-workers etc.

>I think "effeminate" has resonances that go way beyond "high-pitched voice"

I did not aim to conflate them.

Alan Turing was a pipe smoker and a marathon runner. And had a high-pitched voice, ate apples and had lots of other eccentricities. We know this from descriptions of him. It's factual, as far as descriptions of people in the recent historical record go (pretty good, I would think).

Were someone to ask if Alan Turing was necessarily a pipe smoker, I wouldn't know where to begin in parsing the question - he was a pipe smoker and necessity doesn't come into it.

So was Mr Turing effeminate? I don't know, the easily accessible web pages do not say plainly. Some ascribe his vocal habits to Asbergers, but unfortunately a definitive diagnosis of that long after his death is not possible, and it would not be an either-or thing anyway.

A biography of Alan Turning would probably answer the question, but I'm not about to read one just for the sake of this discussion.

So either Bruce Sterling has read more about Alan Turning that you or I and is speaking about the estimation of Alan Turning's contemporaries, and his statement is more-or-less factual about the individual; or Bruce Sterling is equally ignorant of that detail of Alan Tuning's mannerisms and is relying on stereotypes for some unknown reason. I do not know which.

I didn't get much from Mr Sterling's article, it's got lots of style but is light on substance.

[extemporanea]

aargh, sorry, I really shouldn't answer comments in a hurry when being continually interrupted by students. Of course I know you know that they're not synonyms, I'm saying Sterling doesn't seem to think so, and he does seem to conflate them. And I hate the word "effeminate". It has hugely negative connotations, and seems to suggest lazy thinking to me. I have a vague sense that somewhere in all the confused non-argument Sterling is trying to suggest that Turing's enforced hormonal treatment at the end of his life did give him feminine characteristics, but it's a horribly badly explicated connection, if that is what he's trying to do.