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]

I thought he was saying that Alan Turing was effeminate, which is an easier claim to defend.

I mean, I assumed that it drew on the historical record of descriptions of Mr Turing, e.g his high-pitched voice. It may be wrong on those terms, but is it a generalisation?

[extemporanea]

"Gay" and "effeminate" are not synonyms. I think "effeminate" has resonances that go way beyond "high-pitched voice", and if it was the voice he was referring to, he should have damned well said so. (Sorry, still got my grrr on slightly).

[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

[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.

[ext_5398]

I tried to parse the article several times. There are words, and they form sentences, but I really have no idea what he's on about. It literally does not make any sense.

[extemporanea]

I think there is actually a sort of an argument there, he's just left out huge tracts of assumption and logical connection between his points. And I think I disagree with some of his points.

[virtualkathy]

You know, I was kind of embarrassed, but now I feel better. I thought maybe my sahm brain was atrophying so badly I couldn't read any more. But if confluence had the same reaction...

It may also have had something to do with my goat being got by that very same paragraph, I couldn't see the words through the irritation.

[dicedcaret]

I had a go at reading the Sterling article, but gave up when he started going on about how gender wasn't mathematical but actually the result of some magical pixie dust that Mother Nature sprinkles on us when she gives us the ability to think.

Kind of ironic considering he was addressing a school of logic and language. Ouch.

"Bruce, mate, as one bloke to another, I'd have to say you stepped on your dick when you wrote that speech."

[extemporanea]

Hee. Perfect quote in the perfect place. I'd missed the School of Logic and Language connection. As you say, ouch.

[dicedcaret]

"Bruce, mate, as one bloke to another, I'd have to say you stepped on your dick when you wrote that speech."

The mental imagery is just too wonderful :D

[bend_gules]

I think I'd need to confirm the point that Turing's test was for a 'woman'.

And Sterling does seem to harp on the 'female' experiences, assuming that only women have them, and that they cannot have 'male' experiences (which are presumeably the default: having jobs, paying bills, and making decisions).

I confess it is interesting to wonder how would CS, and AI, be different as a discipline, if it were 95% women-populated, rather than men-populated. Maybe it would be identical, but somehow I suspect not.

[ext_737886]

Egad. I finally got around to reading this. As confluence says, it really *makes no sense*. Some fleeting glimpses of potentially interesting ideas, but the interesting parts go completely unquestioned and unpacked, in favour of being thrown into a great big word soup of glibness and gender essentialism. "I'm a science fiction writer! I'm an art critic! Hear my Words! Look at my Ideas!" Oh gods.