my thanks to feminism

I’d like to give thanks to feminism.

That comes after i, grudgingly, reluctantly, finally came to accept that i am not, and should not be, a feminist. For most of my life i, a man, had been more of a riot grrrrl than mos of my girlfriends. I’d been enraged again and again for what i saw as submissive attitudes of them, even ones that could equally well be read as submission to me. In more than one way, i wanted the role of the girl: I wanted to be approached instead of to approach, i wanted to be seduced instead of seducing, i wanted to accommodate to their lives instead of providing a grand narrative for them to accommodate to. I actually felt that the two people in a relationship should do a bit of each, and it pissed me to no end that no woman at all accepted to. Lazy, prideless girls, i thought. But i came to realize it does not make any sense for them to do any of that, and it came together with me realizing feminism is not an answer to anything.

But feminism has been useful to me, in very personal ways, and i want to give thanks.

not beauty

I’ve been hearing repeatedly from girls that the foremost demand society makes on them is beauty. But i think this is a huge mistake. They are not expected to be beautiful, but to make themselves beautiful, which means that the actual beauty is unimportant, as long as they conform to the character.

ALD#2011: Jussara Rocha Ferreira

Ada Lovelace Day is all about celebrating great woman scientists. About the role models that inspire us into being all we can be. About ladies that not only kick ass, but do so with their amazing brains!

This year i want to pay homage to my aunt:

Jussara Rocha Ferreira

Jussara is an extremely competent scientist and she groks all that anatomy thing inside out. She began her studies as a veterinarian, but by now i believe she can tackle anatomy from any possible angle. And of course she’s got an impressive curriculum. But there is something more important.

I want to pay homage to Jussara today because of the attitude she taught me about science and research. For her, it was never just a job, or more to the point she showed me that research involved some administrative red-tape, but that it was much more than that. She showed me how science could be an enterprise of the brain, how it could be your very own adventure of understanding the world, how thinking made you free. She showed me how excelling at your thinking was a pathway for your own happiness. How being hard and demanding was not a matter of passing an exam, but a matter of pushing yourself harder and farther.

Maybe this will come as a surprise to her. Because she never really said any of this to me, explicitly. But her greatness just gets to you. I am very sure that she was an inspiration for very many of her students.

it’s totally ok if you don’t get rich

I have long been saying that money is not the tits — as in, not the main thing you have to focus on, which turns out to be an amusingly inappropriate metaphor in the context — so i would like to extend a big heartfelt THANK YOU for Sasha Pasulka‘s post called “Hey, Guys, it’s totally Okay if you don’t get rich“. She compares the expectation that men will get those impossible fortunes in their almost-30s to the expectations that women will be airbrush-skinny and beautiful.

Her point is that while our culture is terrible with women at least there is some awareness of the problem, but that the same culture is also unfair to men but in that case no one talks about it at all.