Hi all,
happy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover (a.k.a: Pesach) and upcoming Western Easter (which some people may know as the day before the day with all the cheap chocolate) and hope you are enjoying the Northern Hemisphere spring where spring is present.
«««« Note: this post is both opinionated and a bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfeminism and post-Buffyist (there was a post about some post-Buffy shows on http://moshez.livejournal.com/ , but Google does not find it), and so may offend some people. It was not the first post I made to this list and while being a straight male, I'm honestly not a sexist person, so I'm going to risk it.
Feel free to let me know if you have problems with anything I said here and I'll try to reply in the Verbal Judo fashion - http://unarmed.shlomifish.org/909.html »»»
Well, anyway, you may wish to peruse reading this post that I've written on my blog as a reply to a different and older post by the wonderful Katrina Hill ( https://twitter.com/ActionChick ) on her http://actionflickchick.com/ blog:
* http://unarmed.shlomifish.org/2396.html - “About Female Action Heroes”.
* Original post - http://actionflickchick.com/superaction/wired-interviews-the-action-flick-ch... - part of my motivation for publishing the post on unarmed.shlomifish.org is because the original page ate my original comment and because the second comment became devoid of links.
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Anyway, in the post I start from the premise of the post of discussing awesome female ass-kickers, go on to discuss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_%28TV_series%29 and other shows I watched back around the Web 1.0 days, and their influence on my work as a writer of fiction and essays. Then I cover the so-called Judeo-Christian ethics and why they have discriminated against women (and to a lesser but also important extent - men), followed by what I think is an action hero.
Then I cover several prominent Jewesses who championed the break from the Judeo-Christian ethical system.
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Anyway, part of my theme in my stories (see http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/stories/ ) and some of the recent essays (and I hope you don't take it the wrong way) is that in order to gain true liberation, females should be:
#. Competent #. Confident #. Resourceful #. Not feel bound by many invisible or stupid rules. #. Take decisive action and risks #. Not read into the minds of people who open doors to them. Seize opportunities. #. Realise that "reality to be conquered must be obeyed", and not try to make unnecessary enemies by semantical accusations ("Girl? Does she call you a 'boy' by any chance?"). #. Interact with men rather than exclude themselves from them. #. Be forgiving and not hold a grudge against people for their past sins. #. Etc.
And all that while not depriving themselves of sexuality and sexiness among members of the appropriate sexes (MOTAS), in part because being sexually attractive (and naturally - not only physically) is indicative of competence and values, rather than the opposite as was sometimes implied recently.
Slashdot reported that http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/12/06/2228210/how-men-and-women-badly-e... men are thought to be smarter than women despite the fact that males and females are fairly equal overall in intelligence tests, both men and women think that their fathers are smarter than their mothers, and that their sons are smarter than their daughters. I think part of the problem is that men are conditioned or encouraged to be more showy in what they know and do (not saying why this is the case), and flaunt their knowledge and intelligence, even if they are not 100% sure that what they say is true, and they take risks more doing that. This is while women tend to need to be sure that what they say and do is 100% right and flawfree.
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I think that technology not only empowers females, but also youth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Smith was a female and was only 10 years old when she helped end the cold war, by the simple act of writing a letter. Similarly, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Aragon was female and 10 y.o when she became an Internet sensation by doing a simple piano+vocals cover of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_This_Way (but one which I like better than the original).
Paul Graham discussed the empowering of youth here - http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html (What You'll Wish You'd Known - advice for high school students) and here - http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html (Lies We Tell Kids), and I'm planning to cover it here:
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-all-cards-on-the-tab...
There is no good reason why young people should necessarily always be less able than their older peers, just because we've recently been conditioned to expect children and teenagers to be locked in a pre-school environment which is distanced from the outer world. During the middle ages, craftsman finished their http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece (which now means something completely different) at a young age, and got married at a much younger age than today.
Thanks to technology (both tangible and mental) we can expect youth to become empowered again. I'm glad I started my long journey into software development using XT BIOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC and other dialects of BASIC because it was a bona fide programming language for its days (back in 1987 when I was 10 years old) that trusted me with power and allowed me to shoot myself in the foot, whereas the only thing you could do with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29 was draw some drawings, and it treats its users in an infantile way, which I think no one really appreciates (including not children).
( I would not recommend learning BASIC anymore because the world moved on since then, but I hope you get my point. )
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Well, hopefully you were not too bored up to here, so I can just in another self-promoting way recommend you take a look at my stories, especially http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/human-hacking/ (The Human Hacking Field Guide, recently subtitled “Who said girls can’t code?”) which tells the whereabouts of several teenagers in 2005 L.A. who extensively deal with working on open source software, and to a somewhat lesser extent free/open/Internet “content” authoring, and also includes several instances of social engineering (or "Human hacking").
The abstract reads:
<blockquote>
Jennifer is a trendy and popular high school senior who is living and studying in the vicinity of Los Angeles. Her best friend, Taylor, convinces her to try to become a developer of open source software. He puts her under the tutorship of a different friend of his, the female open source contributor Eve, who prefers to be called “Erisa”, and who is a self-conscious and rebelling punk, with whom Jennifer finds it hard to deal. Jennifer remains determined to learn how to become an open source developer from Erisa, but there are some surprises along the road.
</blockquote>
The story is available under CC-by-sa under this interpretation - http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/ - and you can also buy exemptions from it. Finally, like I said in https://twitter.com/shlomif/status/315159699735580672 “In my stories, I aim to project reality as it hopefully will become, rather than as I or other people perceive it and take it forward towards better perfection.”. Moreover, I also would rather err on naïvety than on cynicism.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
On 3/24/13 6:32 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
And all that while not depriving themselves of sexuality and sexiness among members of the appropriate sexes (MOTAS), in part because being sexually attractive (and naturally - not only physically) is indicative of competence and values, rather than the opposite as was sometimes implied recently.
You had me up until this point. How is being sexually attractive indicative of competence and values? By this logic, only Miss/Mr. Universe winners should run for President.
Ryan Kaldari
Hi Ryan,
thanks for your E-mail.
On Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:13:41 -0700 Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 3/24/13 6:32 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
And all that while not depriving themselves of sexuality and sexiness among members of the appropriate sexes (MOTAS), in part because being sexually attractive (and naturally - not only physically) is indicative of competence and values, rather than the opposite as was sometimes implied recently.
You had me up until this point. How is being sexually attractive indicative of competence and values? By this logic, only Miss/Mr. Universe winners should run for President.
<A bit of a guy/celebrity/sex talk here - proceed with care and please don't ban me>
Well, this is a bit polarising. First of all, I'm not a big fan of beauty pagants like that, in part because a lot of the really attractive (and honest) girls and boys know better than to enroll, and in part because the judging there can be extremely tainted. Instead of judging by beauty alone, you judge by "personality", and a lot of other silly stuff, which yields something incredibly weird.
Anyway, there are more measures to being sexually attractive than taking first place at a silly "competitive" contest, and not every Alpha Female or Alpha Male would be a suitable president or governor or even mayor or boss or whatever. Would http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall be a good president? Would http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Grimmie ? Would http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lawrence ? (They are all American and as far as I know - were born on American soil) They have all achieved tremendous things by now (the latter two despite their youth and despite being female), but it takes more than that.
And speaking for myself, I would rather have either Ms. Grimmie or Ms. Lawrence as my girlfriend (and I think most truly competent men like me would too) than the winner of Miss Universe, which I daresay I proudly admit I don't recall the name of any of the recent ones, and never cared too to see it). And for the record, I've seen and met women who were far more beautiful than both Grimmie and J. Lawrence, but that doesn't make them any less attractive, simply because when choosing a significant other, I care about much more than looks (despite the typical stereotype about men).
Anyway, what I'm trying to say? Thing is there's more than just looks that can make you attractive and that includes your skills. It may seem farfetched, but having had a conversation with my cousins' cousin (who is a very cute female, and not a software developer) about various stuff, I ended up mentioning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shlomif/Freecell_Solver , which is a solver for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell and other solitaire games, and she went on to ask me about its general algorithm and its evolution (which made me feel important and coveted).[Freecell]
The whole thing of "you need to love me for who I am" is ridiculous, because a sexually attractive person is competent, has achieved quite a lot since he matured, and will likely achieve more (and probably at a bigger capacity) in the future. I'm not attracted to Christina Grimmie because of her looks, as much as I am because of her wonderful singing, her great videos, her honesty and humility in conveying her whereabouts, thoughts, feelings, strengths and faults; her relentness quest to improve herself and her work from her earlier videos; her positive and effective way of marketing herself; and her kindness and support of fellow musicians and artists who are either not as successful as her (at least not yet), or who are more mainstream (at least for now - ;-)). And she only turned 19 recently, at which age, back in 5 May 1996, I only graduated out of high school, worked at a few low-paying jobs as a software developer, and didn't finish writing the more permanent draft of my first serious story ( http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/TheEnemy/ if you must know. ), which I haven't published online for many years, and didn't even have any web site at any location. And the only videos I published by now on YouTube were two screen recordings of Freecell deals getting solved automatically, while reusing Creative Commons music as the background (here - http://www.youtube.com/user/ShlomiFish/videos?view=0 - one of them got 3,003 views and 5 likes, and two comments from a friend, which I'm still content with.).
Thing is: I don't want to get involved with females who are 100% my fan girls or groupies (and probably not very competent), but rather with women who are competent on their own right, and have a lot for me to look up to, admire - and find attractive.
Of course, different men (and women) find different women attractive. I was much more attracted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_Summers on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_%28TV_series%29 than I was to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Rosenberg , but many men and women whom I talked with seem to have found her more attractive. (And retrospectively, I can say that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_%28Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer%29 was purely awesome. ) Similarly, I at first believed that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milady_de_Winter was what Neo-Tech calls a "mystic" or "neocheater", a person who is lazy, incompetent, destructive and pitiful, similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Nemo or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra , until I realised that despite being the typical antagonist / "bad girl" - she was part of the ultimate good in the story and was sexy, resourceful, and intelligent - sort of like Faith only in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers .
( It's too bad many authors and writers of fiction wish their antagonists bad luck and make them die or get out of sight by various means, and I hope I didn't duplicate this mistake in my own stories, where the antagonists end up living happily. )
Similarly, I mostly perceived http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Joan_Hart as "cute" rather than "hot" or "sexy", based on the characters she portrayed, but someone I talked with on IRC said she was "a hottie".
Of course, my perceptions are subject to change. I recall a fellow female student I studied with in the Technion who had a cute face, wore glasses, kept her hair in a pony tail, and tended to wear something similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OshKosh_B%27Gosh , and in general had what I call the tomboy look, and whom I perceived as cute rather than sexy. However, after she agreed on her and me becoming partners for a course about algorithms, she turned out to be competent in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science and also was able to competently cope with my inability to contribute to our last homework sheet ( due to a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomania ). This made me quite attracted to her, and then the semester luckily ended, in part because she was off limits to me due to the fact that she: 1. Already had a boyfriend, and 2. Smoked cigarettes.
I hope you get my wave, and sorry for the stream of consciousness.
What I was trying to say is that: 1. Sexual attractiveness is indicative of competence. 2. Sexual attractiveness is a function of much more than looks for most men like me. 3. Some men may consider physical looks important for a relationship (like me). Other men can see past that (and good for them). 4. There are many sexy heroes and heroines and they vary in their fitness and abilities for various tasks. [Abilities] 5. Those who win some beauty "race-for-the-1st-place", such as Miss Universe, are not likely to be the most competent, or even most coveted, females or males around (so-called "Alpha females" and "Alpha males"), just like most of the lauretes of Nobel prizes in physics, did not win some silly physics contest (and there were something like ten Nobel prize lauretes who all came from a few classes in two high schools in Budapest, Hungary.)
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
<Footnotes> [Freecell] I explain why Freecell has been big business in Israel here: http://blogs.perl.org/users/shlomi_fish/2013/03/ann-my-transition-from-softw...
Quoting:
<quote> Some people told me that my solver for Freecell and other solitaire games, simply called Freecell Solver is useless, but it's not - it's just a niche program. And I received hundreds of E-mails about it. Furthermore, given that Freecell is (or used to be) a big phenomenon in Israel, where many boys and girls starting from 18 found themselves playing it on the Israeli military computers out of boredom, then the fact that I have written a solver for it, has impressed many people I talked with or met, including some attractive (both physically and intellectually) young ladies (or what people may refer to as "hot chicks"), and they ended up asking me about how it was written, and which algorithms it employed.
So Freecell Solver was one of my most successful programs, not despite being a niche program, but because of it. Niche programs own. Not only that, but niche everything is great. Many people whom I referred to my stories helped themselves to the screenplay Star Trek: "We, the Living Dead" because it contained Star Trek in the name, and because there are quite a few fans of the Star Trek franchise and worlds. </Footnotes> </quote>
[Abilities] I can write very well, and am a good software developer, and capable at maths, and have many other skills. But I'm not likely to win a martial arts fight against a competent martial artist, and I'm not sure I will make a good boss, prime minister of Israel, governor of New York and/or California, or president of the United States (but I'll be happy to consult for competent men who will fill this position), and it will take me a lot of time and effort to record even a half-decent video on YouTube. In Dumas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers , Louis XIII delegates the task of actually managing France to his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, not because Louis XIII was not a good and competent man, but because he knew that Richelieu was better for that task.
</Footnotes>
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Shlomi Fish shlomif@shlomifish.org wrote:
And speaking for myself, I would rather have either Ms. Grimmie or Ms. Lawrence as my girlfriend (and I think most truly competent men like me would too) than the winner of Miss Universe, which I daresay I proudly admit I don't recall the name of any of the recent ones, and never cared too to see it). And for the record, I've seen and met women who were far more beautiful than both Grimmie and J. Lawrence, but that doesn't make them any less attractive, simply because when choosing a significant other, I care about much more than looks (despite the typical stereotype about men).
This is veering rapidly towards the kind of bizarre off-topic creepiness that had you banned from the Ubuntu-Women mailing list back in the day, Shlomi. Please keep it relevant to the topic of the list, which is "to discuss and explore opportunities to engage and encourage women and transwomen's participation in Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and the "free knowledge movement.""
Thanks,
-Leigh
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Shlomi Fish shlomif@shlomifish.org wrote:
And speaking for myself, I would rather have either Ms. Grimmie or Ms. Lawrence
This is veering rapidly towards the kind of bizarre off-topic creepiness that had you banned from the Ubuntu-Women mailing list
+1. Shlomi, your posts are making me uncomfortable. Please stop.
SJ
Just FYI in case he's doing this to others, I got a private reply to this from Shlomi. I've asked him not to contact me again.
-Leigh
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Leigh Honeywell leigh@hypatia.ca wrote:
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Shlomi Fish shlomif@shlomifish.org wrote:
And speaking for myself, I would rather have either Ms. Grimmie or Ms. Lawrence as my girlfriend (and I think most truly competent men like me would too) than the winner of Miss Universe, which I daresay I proudly admit I don't recall the name of any of the recent ones, and never cared too to see it). And for the record, I've seen and met women who were far more beautiful than both Grimmie and J. Lawrence, but that doesn't make them any less attractive, simply because when choosing a significant other, I care about much more than looks (despite the typical stereotype about men).
This is veering rapidly towards the kind of bizarre off-topic creepiness that had you banned from the Ubuntu-Women mailing list back in the day, Shlomi. Please keep it relevant to the topic of the list, which is "to discuss and explore opportunities to engage and encourage women and transwomen's participation in Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and the "free knowledge movement.""
Thanks,
-Leigh
-- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca