F.B.I.

Present day 'girl watchers' can get this badge. Or a tshirt. Or a tote bag....

The language touting this badge is particularly tasty:

As an FBI agent (Female Body Inspector), it is your duty to serve the public by ensuring that every part of the female body is in perfect working order.

The Connection of Space to Values

Holly Near endorsing the idea of The Women's Building in SF:

“If we are building a culture that is respectful of our lives, then we need a respectful place in which to build it. Sometimes when we borrow other people’s space, we also have to borrow their restrictions.”[i]

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[i] Holly Near quoted in “What are leading women in the community saying about the Women’s Building?” Women’s Building of the Bay Area [no date but prob 1978]

Relevant

In wandering around the internet this morning, I find that the anti-street harassment movement is flourishing. There is new press coverage, a new book, new orgs... (several of which appear in my links to the right). It puts in me in the somewhat odd position of feeling like the history I'm working on is relevant. It also reinforces the current trajectory of the book, namely that what unites everything from campaigns for public restrooms to the Hollaback movement is a quest for privacy in public in the belief that privacy holds the key to (feeling) both safe and autonomous.

Look, there is even an accessible PSA that articulates a few of the issues raised in my work!

"Give Her a Kiss First Man"

(Before: Dovre Hall, Sons of Norway meeting hall)


I'm working on a piece about social change organizations that buy/build their own spaces. I want to look closely at the decision to take on (through building or buying and refurbishing) a building. What led the org to that decision? What did they try before making this commitment? How did they choose a location? What did they envision for the relationship of the organization and its new neighbors? Because I'm playing with some new ideas, I decided to play with the model for this part of the study and I'm comparing the San Diego YWCA (which built in the 1920s) to the San Francisco Women's Centers (which bought and refurbished a building in the Mission district in the late 1970s). It is kind of odd to compare different orgs, in different cities, in different time periods, but I'm hoping that leads me to think more deeply about the issues involved. Both orgs were committed to social change (though the SFWC were more upfront about this) but both also felt that there was a need to offer women a bevy of services now. I think that combination of social change and social service is important. What else will I find? Both are quite successful and not only manage to pay off their buildings, but keep them running for decades, adapting the physical space to meet the evolving mission of the organizations.

(After: The Women's Building)

The one piece that gives me pause in all this is that the SFWC people were incredibly self- reflective. The papers of The Women's Building are full of analyses of what a building would mean for the organization, what challenges they expected to face, how they might meet those, how they should work with their new neighbors alleviate any animosity that might come from them repurposing a building that reflected the older immigrant heritage of the area, etc. etc. Really? I feel sort of guilty. They did much of my work for me, it seems. I guess my job is to weigh in on what they got right but it feels odd to skip the first step that I usually face, which is just figuring what happened. It feels a bit like I am jumping straight into the deep on this one, hence the Monty Python reference in my title. Ah well, off I go to "stimulate the clitoris"...

Chicago gets on board!

The anti-harassment movement is getting recognized by more transit authorities, it seems. Here is one of the CTA's posters.

Virtual Revenge -- "Hey, Baby"

And now we have this: a new video game in which a presumed-female (it is First Person Shooter, so you never actually see yourself, just how people act toward you) retaliates against the catcalls of a walk through an urban setting. Interesting to me is the number of comments that focus on the (poor) graphics and sound effects of the game -- not the premise. I fully expected full-on rants, not just one recommendation for a psychiatrist and one reference to the "punch" packed by "feminist atheists." Also missing are defenses of the male-characters' behavior or street commentary in general. Color me surprised.

Indeed, one strong point of the game may be its ability to unite multiple audiences in their disdain for it. If only we could all agree so readily that street harassment is a) real and b) bad. Research by Carol Brooks Gardner and others reveals that most men do not intend to harass, but rather are motivated by boredom or a desire to impress their buddies. Kudos to Ms. Magazine blogger Kate Whittle for concluding, "society needs to teach men that making women uncomfortable should not be a casual pastime."

Artificial Gender

A friend stumbled on this and I'm playing with it this morning.

This 'analyzer' looks at a blog and guesses/predicts the gender of its author. Breaking the Code was rated as likely written by a woman: 67%. My other blog was got a 72% 'woman' rating.

I've seen these kinds of programs for other types of writing in the past and remember trying out some of my grant language years ago when Peggy and I were working on increasing assertiveness in our professional language.

What reminded me of that was running another friend's (now somewhat neglected) blog through the "genderanalyzer" and finding it got a 55% woman rating.

Hmmm... the last group of students in my Women and Public Space class regularly dissolved into debates over whether the internet was a truly or at least potentially gender-free public space. I think I will send them to this site next time around and let them play with it. Will they argue that gender is fluid, that gender can finally be divorced from biology, or that, based on the existence of the website in the first place, gender persists as a fundamental category of social organization even in realms where physical bodies are not present?