Author: Ashley

Writing

The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome

Ashley

I was watching Good Morning America before leaving for work yesterday, and they had yet another report of a female teachers having sex with their students. I have to admit I was only half listening to it, so I might have missed a few points they touched on.

But what is the media’s obsession with it? I call it an obsession because when one incident happens they seem to scour the country for additional instances. Why haven’t we heard about any male teachers having sex with their students? I doubt that it’s not happening. My guess is that in their eyes it’s not as sensational or not as much as an oddity; women just aren’t supposed to do those things.

Women aren’t supposed to be violent or attracted to teenaged boys, but ironically the media has been treating these events much differently than if they were perpetrated by men. You’d think that to make it even more sensational they would emphasize the violent act that these women are charged with.

In this ABC article 42-year-old woman is “arrested for having sex” with 16 and 17 year-old male students. The official charges are “rape and endangering the welfare of a child.” If we were talking about a male teacher and a female student, the headline would probably be NY Teacher Charged With Raping Student instead of “NY Teacher Allegedly Had Sex Wth Male Students”. In this ABC article from 2004, the headline is “Queens Teacher Facing Statutory Rape Charges”, although in the article they say “he began a consensual sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl last summer.” They go with the sensational headline – it’s what sells.

Having sex and raping someone are complete opposites. One implies consent while the other is violent. Why aren’t we applying the same standards to the women arrested for the same crime? Is it that women are supposed to be inherently gentler and therefore it couldn’t be rape? Is it that there’s a perception that these boys aren’t being raped? (FYI, unless the New Jersey law has been rewritten since I took my women’s studies class, women cannot be charged for raping a man 18 or older. They are charged with seduction. ). Or is the media just feeding us what we want? Maybe it’s a bit of all of those questions. I don’t have the answers since I don’t have the time or money to research it. But the media needs to be more aware of how they’re approaching these stories. If any reporters or editors read my lowly little blog, perhaps they’ll think twice about the headlines they’re writing and present a more balanced view of what is really going on.

Writing

Blogher – My To-Do List

Ashley

I just got home from Blogher, and here’s my To-Do list.

  1. Enble Comments – I keep meaning to, but I just can’t bring myself to futz around with the code.
  2. Ethics Manifesto – The idea for this was spawned from the Citizen Journalist Birds-of-a-Feather session. It was suggested that we look at Jay Rosen’s Q&A page to develop our own.
  3. Link to Women Bloggers – We kvetch that more women need to be in the Technorati Top 100 but we’re not linking to each other. I’ve already added the Blogher roll.
  4. Create My A-List – I don’t read all of the Technorati Top 100 blogs and don’t like them all. In the morning discussion it was said that we should be defining what our top 100 list is.
  5. Ask for Links – Halley Suit said to just ask for someone to link to you and to ask 3 times. (Kinda the same logic if you’re trying to get someone to go on a date with you.) It was suggested that we also read Women Don’t Ask, a book about how women can negotiate more effectively (I think)
  6. Upgrade Blogging Software – After trying to implement comments, I’ve realized that I have an ancient version of MoveableType – 2.11. added 7/31

Also on my To-Do List that has nothing to do with Blogher – read the next volume of Y: The Last Man – a futuristic feminist sci-fi comic. I bought the first volume, was hook, but see no point in buying the individual comics when I prefer them all in a book version, but I digress.

Marketing

Cute Single Mormon Up for Sale!

Ashley

I’ve been checking out the blogs of all the presenters for BlogHer. Besides realizing that I’ve obviously been living in a hole as I haven’t read some of them, I’ve come across some truely great stuff.

One thing in particular is Heather Armstrong’s (Dooce) comments on the www.datelance.com billboard. Heather had me laughing my ass off.

So if you go to www.datelance.com you see this guy has a way too slick site. Ignoring the rather weird selling point that he’s a “returned missionary”, do you really want to date someone who has a button on their site to set up a date? And if he’s really hard up to get someone to go out with him, there has to be something wrong. But in reality this is just a marketing ploy for the company he works for. This is all just wrong and creepy on so many levels.

Fun

Google Map Hack – Distance Calculator

Ashley

I recently discovered that I have asthma. So now that I have an inhaler I’m exstatic that I can run a mile for the first time since I was 10. Hopefully one day I can run a 10K. So I’ve been trying to figure out a route I can run in my neighbourhood that will be feasible, challenging and not discouraging. Failing driving around various routes to get the actual milage, I turned to see if there was a hack. And lo and behold there is! Sue and Paul (whoever they are) have the Gmap Pedometer.

Marketing

Spam-a-lot Adventure

Ashley

So my spammers are obviously using some program that takes bits of novels, mashes them up, and spits them out as the text versions of their spam.

What I want to know is what books are they using? Some of them look like they could be rather interesting. I think the latest one I recieved is from Captain Blood.

Of course it’s a sad reflection on your marketing when your audience is more interested in your fake text than in what you actually have to sell.

Madness

Save Douglass College

Ashley

Well it’s finally happened. Rutgers is seriously talking about elliminating Douglass College as we know it. It’s my alma mater and the largest public women’s college. Of course there are people who say that there’s no need for an all-women’s college in this day and age. Or ask that once you graduate you have to work with men, so how is being educated in that setting a good thing?

Well, I firmly believe that because I went to Douglass I’m a stronger woman and better employee because of it. And there is still a need to have a women’s college, even today. Why? Well I can just take a stroll around the engineering department in the company I work for, I can count on one hand the number of women I bump into. And if you read the Transforming Rutgers report you’ll see that the percentage of women in the engineering school is appalling, but that doesn’t take into account the number of women at Douglass. We have to create environments where women know that they’ll have the support that they need to succeed in traditionally male programs.

Some of the same reasons that you need women’s colleges are the same reasons that BlogHer came into existence. The things that concern women are not being addressed in traditional settings. We get told to work within the system, but sometimes that just doesn’t work. You have to go off, get together, and do what you want/need to get done. It’s not something that’s going to get resolved anytime soon.

Save Douglass College

Madness

Canadian Trial Lawyer Looks to Gag Everyone, Even Bloggers

Ashley

Peter Ritchie, defense lawyer for Robert Pickton, has asked the Crown to prohibit any court spectators from talking about what they see and hear at the trial-not just reporters. If you are not aware of the Pickton trial, Robert Pickton is accused of killing 29 women who were prostitutes on the roughest streets of Vancouver, Canada. Court TV has an excellent summary of the Pickton case that explains why this trial is so important to so many families, and not just the families of the women he is accused of killing.

So what does this trial have to do with blogging you might ask? Well I’m guessing that Mr. Ritchie is asking for this unusually strict request because foreign (American) bloggers will be hard to keep quiet. A fact that has recently been highlighted in the Adscam trial. You see, in Canada you can have a complete media blackout on courtroom proceedings during a criminal trial; we’ll have none of the Michael Jackson brew-ha-ha reenactment. But it’s hard to stop a courtroom spectator from talking to a friend across the border, who then happens to post it on his blog. Who do you go after at that point? The spectator? He might not have known his friend was going to blog about it? The blogger? He was not in the courtroom, his servers are in the US and so is he – a conundrum indeed.

This situation raises a good question: What happens in a society that traditionally was able to uphold laws because only a select few had the capabilities of breaking those laws? We’ve seen something similar with copyright laws. Media today is owned by a handful of corporations. It is harder for one of their reporters to violate a gag order since head office doesn’t want to deal with the negative pr and legal headaches that go with it. If an individual who is not part of the traditional media hierarchy violates a gag order, there isn’t a managing editor or a team of lawyers ganging up against him and prohibiting the publishing of his report. Now add international borders into the mix. If a company wants to continue having their reporters let into Canada, they’re not going to violate any Canadian gag laws. If a blogger is afraid he’ll get arrested the moment he steps into Canada, then he just won’t ever go there;It’s up to the individual. Big difference, right?

So how do you control what people do when you no longer can enforce the laws? You don’t. You control the flow of information at the source. Ah, just like we’re seeing the music companies trying to do. And that’s what Mr. Ritchie is asking the Crown to do. The request is not completely unprecedented in Canada.

I have to say that I have a tainted opinion of this case. I was living in Vancouver when charges were first laid against him, and searched on the web to see just how hard it was to find the evidence that was presented. (Because I’m not a citizen there’s no chance of me being called to sit on the jury.) It took some digging, and I was able to find one article that talked about what was presented. And because of what I read, I have an opinion that, for me, will be hard to change. So imagine if your entire jury pool has an opinion already formed. The defendant probably won’t get the fairest trial.

Why should we care if people find out what’s being presented? You say if they have evidence that he’s probably guilty? Everyone is entitled to a fair trial. If the evidence becomes public, the jury pool is tainted. And what happens if he is guilty, and because information was leaked it gives the defense grounds for a mistrial? You get a sticky situation where you have a serial killer set free. Not a real win for any lawyer. I guess Mr. Ritchie doesn’t want to win on a flimsy technicality, and rightly so. However, if you think everyone can easily hold divergent thoughts in their minds at the same time, you have more confidence in the human race than I do.



Stuff

Creating the Chicknorati

Ashley

Congrats to the Bloghercon women – Eleanor, Elisa and Lisa – on getting Bloghercon mentioned on CNN. This conference might just get more of us chicks on the Technorati Top 100.

So I’ve been thinking about what I want out of Bloghercon and things that have bothered me about past conferences I’ve attended. So here’s my 2 cents on potential potholes on the road to greatness for Bloghercon.

  1. Focus on a theme – Look at this as the first conference in a series of many. You don’t have to tackle all the possible topics this time. Nine months from now you can have another one.
  2. Have a goal – Ties in with #1. What do you want people to walk away with? For this year, what do you want to solve or at least start a substantial discussion that continues in the blogosphere after the conference?
  3. Get relevant people to speak – The worst thing at conferences that I’ve been to is that a big name speaks, but they don’t have a direct relationship to what the conference is about or only have a minimal idea of what it’s about.
  4. Tracks – Have various tracks related to the overall theme that people can follow. Might also be a good idea to have people sign up ahead of time for which seminars or workshops they’ll be attending so you know you have enough room.
  5. Seminars v. workshops – While I’m thinking about it, seminars are where you’d have a panel discussion and workshops are where you’d actually have people working in groups or doing exercises that relate to blogging. Some conferences don’t understand this – or maybe it’s the speakers.
  6. Keep it small – 250-300 – Faces become familiar at this size and you might just be able to meet half the people. Next year you can open it up to more people.
  7. Two days – To create meaningful connections you need more than just a day, and it’s easy for people to give up just the weekend. Maybe throw an event the Friday night to get people geared up for the next day. Also it’s easier for people to take a day or two off of work on either side if they need to fly in. And one more for good luck.
  8. Don’t be stereotypically girly – Super political correctness, everyone must feel included, hippie-dippiness leads to violations of #1 – way too many tangents form. Don’t get me wrong, everyone should be able to contribute. Whether it’s by Q&A, a back channel or a social event. And I’ve been known to participate in hippie-dippy Phishhead chanting drum circles where everyone spouts their feelings, but this is not the conference for that. But don’t overcompensate for being “not a man” either. (Yes I have issues. Four years at a women’s college and then being in tech may do that do you.)

My web hosting service has locked me out of my cgi-bin so you can’t make comments on my site yet, but hopefully this weekend I’ll get it up and running. (Elisa had said she wanted to make a comment on my last Bloghercon entry – sorry- soon!)

Bloghercon

Stuff

The Birds and the Bees – Will Our Children Get the Metaphor?

Ashley

For those who want to capitalize on possibly catastrophe, you might want to stock up on almond futures (if such a thing exists). Turns out there’s a nasty little Asian mite that has made it’s way to America and is sucking all our honey bees to death.

Turns out that 80% of the world’s almond crop is grown in California where it’s turning into “vampire mite” ground zero. If you haven’t brushed up on your ag-science lately, if there aren’t honey bees to pollenate the crops they won’t produce fruit. And what’s going to possibly happen to almonds will also happen to lemons, oranges, apples and anything else that needs a bee to reproduce.

Given the media’s penchant toward blowing things out of proportion I’m surprised we haven’t heard more about the bees dying, give that if there are no bees, no fruit, seed for birds to spread and you end up with very malnourished humans.