Liminal states

When Kevin Logan went to his high school prom in 2006, he was hoping it would be a night to remember. What he’ll remember, though, will be standing outside in the parking lot while his classmates danced inside.

As Logan walked up to the prom, clad in a pink prom dress, West Side High School Principal Diana Rouse blocked the doorway and refused to let him inside….

Logan claims Rouse ordered him to leave and called security. Humiliated, Logan claims, he walked to the parking lot to take pictures with his friends while everyone else danced inside. As they snapped photos, word spread inside that Logan was not being allowed into the prom. According to the suit, students and teachers came outside to voice their support, with some asking Rouse to change her mind. She refused

Mallory Simpson’s excellent article on CourtTVNews has more details, including the encouraging news that a woman student was allowed into the prom dressed in a tux.  It also illustrates the routine humiliations that people in high school for people face if they fall outside societal gender norms:

During the first week of Logan’s senior year in high school in Gary, Ind., he was taken to Rouse’s office by security guards, where he was questioned about the purse he was wearing.  But, he was sent back to class without being disciplined, according to the suit.

How generous: they merely dragged him to the principal’s office, but didn’t actually discipline him, for expressing his gender identity.

jon

PS: A May 2006 article from the Advocate gives some additional background.

Over the last couple of days, I had very similar conversations with a couple of people who are looking for a new job. They found my perspective helpful, and so I realized it might be more generally useful. [Caveat: since both of them are ex-Microsoft people (who have good reasons for considering going back there) the first paragraph is somewhat skewed in that direction; the underlying prinicples are more general.]

It’s important to keep in mind that you are the scarce commodity here: there are more jobs at Microsoft that need somebody with your skills than there are people with your skills and who already have experience at Microsoft. your goal should be to go back in at a substantially higher level than when you left; and to go into a job that takes you in the direction you want to go in your career and life.

It’s useful to spend time thinking about what your dream job is. For example, if spending time with your family is important to you and they live elsewhere in the country, your dream job may well be located closer to them (or involves a lot of travel there, if you don’t mind traveling). If you’re into making sexy products, it’s more likely to be consumer-focused than infrastructure or enterprise-focused; conversely, if you’d rather be behind the scenes working on the nuts and bolts, think about who does that kind of stuff in a way that you really respect. For some people, it’s in a particular field (“I want to work on innovation”) or scope (“strategic”) or discipline (“a software developer”); for others, the environment might be more important (“I want to work in a gender-balanced organization which has good female role models”).

You probably won’t be able to get your dream job in your next job; what you want is something that’s noticeably closer than where you are now, and makes it a lot more likely that the following job (at Microsoft or elsewhere) has even more of the dream job characteristics. Of course even that “on the path” job might not materialize; and I’m certainly not saying to hold out for perfection.

Still, thinking about where you want to be going will let you make better decisions about the jobs that do come up — and about where to invest your effort looking and networking.

Thoughts on this? How else do people think about this kinds of stuff? etc. etc.

jon

James Grimmelmann has an excellent post over at the Laboratorium. His summary:

Another member of a professorial mailing list I’m on asked whether Facebook may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Nicknamed the “Bork Bill” (a newspaper published his video rental records during his confirmation hearings), the VPPA protects your privacy in the videos you rent and buy. Well, guess what? One of Facebook’s Beacon partners was Blockbuster, so some of the items that wound up in people’s news feeds were the names of videos they’d bought. Oops.

I dug a bit into the legalities of the issue, and this is roughly what I came up with: Facebook and Blockbuster should hunker down and prepare for the lawsuits. Their recent move to allowing a global opt-out may cut them off from accruing further liability, but there’s probably an overhang of damages facing them from their past mistakes.

As usual with James, it’s a very detailed analysis; the discussion is also excellent.

Looking specifically at Blockbuster’s liability, there’s an interesting parallel to my as-yet-unanswered question in the thread about Beacon’s announcement of a global opt-out about whether Beacon caused advertisers to violate their privacy policies. In the web 2.0 world, the dependencies between software components mean that service providers (Facebook in this case) can put their customers (Blockbuster) at legal risk. As Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Facebook et. al. compete, it will be a major advantage to whoever first seizes the high ground by providing services and platforms that are noticeably less risky. In addition to the classic considerations like security and ability to deliver on service level agreements (SLAs), this will increasingly include considerations like well-thought-out policies — and getting and listening to a broad range of perspectives, including from privacy advocates, before launching new services.

There was a great article in the Seattle PI on Friday about Seattle Anti-Freeze and how their participative, theme-based gender-balanced parties are “finding a cure for the common cold”.

Gayle Laakmann, one of Anti-freeze’s founders, interned for me several years ago at Microsoft Research, and since this gave me an opportunity to get in on the ground floor for when she’s running the universe, I’ve made a point of staying in touch with her. Gayle’s posts like Evite vs. Facebook invites and Report card on Evite and its alternatives (looking at Renkoo, socializer, etc.) are not only incredibly useful in their own right, they also give a behind-the-scenes look at how an idea that started as a one-shot party took off on social networks. Now, other events and subgroups are starting up: an indoor soccer team, runners who “often break bread and enjoy some drinks after their runs”, ski and snowboard bums … no doubt more to follow.

Interestingly, both the article and Gayle’s recent A shout-out to other groups post highlight that this is part of a larger trend focusing on participative events. Why should burners have all the fun?

In any case, it’s a relief to know that once Gayle’s in charge of things, there’ll be good parties. It’s something for all potential future overlords* to keep in mind: everybody knows, fun rules.

* in the gender-neutral sense of the word, of course

Somebody pointed out to me in email that my repeating the characterization of me as “airing dirty laundry” looks like an example of something that politicians (and persuasive communicators in general) are warned against: publicizing the attacks against you.  It’s an good point, especially since attempts to combat or defuse the attacks often reinforce them — think of Tricky Nixon saying “I am not a crook”.

On the other hand, it’s often very important to talk about the language your critics and opponents [or others for that matter] use; and there’s usually no way to do that without repeating their language.  In a situation like this, I try to explicitly use quotes, to highlight that “airing dirty laundry” is a phrase that has some meta-level significance.  Links to a web page with a definition or discussion of the term are also useful — bear in mind, though, that they call further visual attention to the phrase.

This does require awareness of the convention from readers, and making the effort to apply it.  Most people are pretty familiar with the idea of visibly quoting something to be able to discuss it when talking — you often see people making stylized quotation marks with their fingers to show this.   While folks may not have seen it in online discourse, it’s a straightforward extension — and one that people ware used to thinking about abstraction already understand.  And while there’s always a risk that people reading quickly will misunderstand, noticing this convention becomes second nature, so I think given the target audiences of this blog it’s a reasonable tradeoff,

Or so it seems to me that this stage.  My position may well evolve … I’m curious what others have to say.

jon, “asking for feedback”

A kerfuffle that recently went on in one of the online communities I hang out in is a nice illustration of some of the complex interaction between moderator privilege in discussion forums, power vectors and bullying.

Briefly, a poster engaged in a bunch of techniques such as using loaded and admittedly-pejorative terms in a theoretically-neutral discussion, lashing out at critics while claiming victim status, ignoring constructive suggestions, and trotting out the hoary “I’m privileged” chestnut of disclaiming responsibility while attempting to put the burden of making up for his ignorance on others (“I’m looking for some specific suggestions here” aka “I don’t think my mistakes is important enough to feel like doing the work myself”). While I don’t see the guy as a bully in general, this is classic bullying behavior.

What made this case particularly interesting is that the moderator took the bully’s side. As moderator, he could edit the discussions after the fact to rewrite history — and he did. For example, he deleted a post as “an off-topic flame” (later reposting it on his private friends-only blog). He deleted a thread of mine and then posted his response (quoting my original words, but now in a way that marginalizes them) in a thread he had started. And so on.

(The really funny thing is that my thread that he deleted specifically called him out for abusing his moderator privilege by deleting threads. I tell ya … you can’t make this stuff up.)

Those who have spent a lot of time online will recognize the dynamic. In this particular case the forum’s very new, and so it’s not a big deal: at some point soon, the moderator will either realize that if he wants people to work together he’ll have to stop bullying and start listening and learning … or everybody will get bored and drift away. Regardless of what happens here, the bully will either change his ways, leave the community, or become another “self-exile”, feeling excluded from the power structure and unable to understand why.

Still, it gives a very interesting and unusually clean snapshot into the kinds of power vectors that moderation — or other control over the discourse — inherently introduces.

Thoughts, similar experiences, discussions of how this plays out in other discussion media (wiks, email lists), etc.?

jon

Update on April 12: back to Goodfell3s.

Note on December 12: the theme randomly spontaneously resets to the (blue) default. If that’s what you’re currently seeing, this post may not make a lot of sense.

Another theme from Amsterdamn, as pink as the less-than-successful Leone experiment but at first blush a lot more readable. We shall see. I’ve found the theme editor, and so will be trying to play with font sizes. Apologies in advance if things occasionally look screwy.

To install it, I had to download the .zip file to my mac, FTP it up to the hosting site, SSH over to unzip it (I guess I could have unzipped locally and FTPed to avoid this step), and then bring up the WordPress theme selector UI page. This seems like a lot more complex than it needs to be. I’d really prefer a field on the theme selector page that lets me (as administator) provide a link to the .zip file on Amsterdamn’s site, which would get rid of several steps in the process.

and in the two minutes from when I signed up until I checked the blog’s summary page, its rank went from 4,446,976 to 3,053,157 — at this rate, I should be top 10 by dinner time!

Authority = 1 for now, but no doubt once everybody starts crosslinking and adding to their Technorati faves, it’ll no doubt soar.

The language they use — “claim your blog now” — is interesting. From a marketing perspective I can see that this is a great framing: they’re positioning themselves as helping me take better advantage of an asset I already have; and the analogy to frontier times and staking claims to land or mineral rights is a powerful one. There’s also a subtle implication that my ownership of the blog in some way requires their (or somebody’s) ratification or validation — and of course agreeing to their terms of service.

The interface is straightforward enough, and you get a nice tag cloud (although their index and hence the tag cloud doesn’t include any of my posts from the last three days).  Anyhow, it feels like a steep in becoming more real.  w00t.

CNN’s Peter-Sorel Cameron asks the sixty-four thousand dollar question and really goes out on a limb with his conclusion: “No one really knows what to expect, apart from three legends of heavy rock playing some of the best music in the genre.”   Headline numbers include the 11,000,000 people signed up for a chance for tickets, and average age of band-members: 61 ,
still less than the Stones’ mean age [his term not mine] of 63.25 and Dylan’s “turning 67 in 2008”.

Continuing the theme for the day, I was looking at a couple of abstracts from Christian Jarret’s excellent BPS Research Digest:

• Why do some men insult their partners? concludes “men who habitually insult their wives or girlfriends do so, somewhat paradoxically, as part of a broader strategy to prevent them from leaving for someone else – what evolutionary psychologists call ‘mate retention'”

• Does your boyfriend let you out of his sight? suggests that “certain male behaviours tended to be associated with the use of violence against women.” The ones they discussed in the summary are pretty much what you’d expect: “men who were violent toward their partners also tended to use emotional manipulation (e.g. threatening to hurt themselves if their partner left them), to monopolise their partner’s time (e.g. not letting her go out without them), and/or to punish their partner’s infidelity (e.g. by becoming angry when she flirted with anyone else).” By contrast, ‘mate retention behaviors’ such as telling your partner “I love you” and spending lots of money on her* is associated with a lack of violence.

[The mate retention inventory (.doc file) makes interesting reading … too bad there’s nothing in the digest summary about the assocations of “56. Wore my partner’s clothes in front of others”. I’d really like to check out the full paper … alas, at $29.00 for the online copy, it can wait until I get to a library. But I digress.]

Of course, whether or not it’s linked to physical violence, as a mate retention behavior, insulting the other person clearly has the goal and effect of tearing down their self-esteem. So do quite a few others others on the list, such as ’17. Told other men terrible things about my partner so that they wouldn’t like her’ and the first batch of the ones listed above. By contrast things like ’58. Complimented my partner on her appearance’ and the second batch (“I love you/will spend money on you”) show appreciation and are more likely to be done in a way that builds self-esteem. My guess would be that there would be a general correlation between self-esteem-destroying mechanisms and violence … it’d be interesting to see the data. I wonder if the authors would make an anonymized version of their data available?

Anyhow. Two thought-provoking pieces of research, and an interesting synergy. Other thoughts welcome.

jon

* although presumably these results largely generalize in a gender- and orientation-independent way!

Today’s the last of the 16 days of activism against gender violence and so I wanted to highlight December’s Carnival against sexual violence, hosted by abyss2hope. Categories include legal, media watch, personal stories, raising awareness, research, and my fave solutions, which has a link off to shakesville’s excellent What Men Can Do.

A few especially worth highlighting (all previously from Kevin‘s list on A Call to Men):

1. Acknowledge and understand how sexism, male dominance and male privilege lay the foundation for all forms of violence against women.

2. Examine and challenge our individual sexism and the role that we play in supporting men who are abusive.

3. Recognize and stop colluding with other men by getting out of our socially defined roles, and take a stance to end violence against women.

4. Remember that our silence is affirming. When we choose not to speak out against men’s violence, we are supporting it.

Well said. Actually, they’re all worth highlighting; and worth reading in context, so please do.

Thoughts on these recommendations, the rest of the article, other articles in the Carnival, related topics?

An anonymous commenter on Mini patronizingly critiqued me for “airing dirty laundry” about Microsoft on a public forum under the guise of a “helpful” warning me that “my new employer” might have second thoughts about me because I’d presumably “do it to them as well”. (See the thread for the full language and context — it’s near the end.)

Especially in context, it’s one of those comments that’s fascinating on so many levels, and representative of certain kinds of thinking that it’s well worth analyzing. Where to start?

First of all, it’s kind of bizarre and very amusing to critique me for “airing dirty laundry” in a thread that starts with Mini’s saying “What does it take to be disappeared from Microsoft? We can only guess one day Stuart Scott was walking outside of his building when a black Escalade with VI0L8R plates pulled up, Ken DiPetrio swung open a door and said, ‘Get in.'” So no matter what the poster thinks of my argument, he’s shooting himself* in the foot by framing his critiques in this way. In an environment where people value transparency, “airing dirty laundry” is something that’s generally seen as a good thing. Putting me completely aside, showing his lack of understanding while unnecessarily dissing and devaluing whistleblowers and all the people who *do* see appropriate airing of dirty laundry as potentially in the company’s best interests (like Mini and his/her/their fans) isn’t a good way of starting an argument.

For his goal of criticizing my behavior, rather than using the vague and loaded term “dirty laundry” it would have been better for him to be more concrete about what he thought I had done that was against Microsoft’s interests. Making blustering and sneering implications like he did is easier but usually counter-productive, leaving him with a hard time responding when you’re challenged — for example, if he attempts to advance a more concrete argument now he risks looking defensive.

Lots more to cover, including the reason potential future employers at Microsoft and elsewhere would be likely to see this discussion as a positive rather than counting against me (quick summary: it embodies positive transparency and empowers employees by helping them understand existing processes), why the “let me explain” framing similarly backfires, the hegemonic effects of devaluing personal experience, and of course gender issues.

To be continued,

jon

* Or, potentially, if the poster’s a she, shooting herself in the foot. Since the communication style here has several pattern that are much more common among males, I’ll use male pronouns for simplicity; so whenever you see “he” in relation to the poster, please mentally translate to “the poster, whatever gender he and/or she might be” or something like that.