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Mar. 13th, 2009 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikThis started out as a reply to a comment in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yuki_onna's journal... but it seemed a shame to foist it of on the unsuspecting, and I got caught up in the personal history bit. So it's here instead. The comment was about reading a lot of SF/F as a child, and, as a woman, dreaming as a boy, just because that was the context that kind of thinking happened in.
I was trying to explain this to one of my gongfu brothers Monday. I was a geek, I read geek fiction, which was mostly boy fiction, and the whole gendered thing just didn't really phase me, until all of a sudden it did.
I was trying to remember what the tipping point was. I think I had blithely assumed that sexism was very very far away from me until I was thirteen or so. If there was a moment, it was the moment when my dad came home...
Okay, wait, step back a moment. I was thirteen. I was at the university, taking twenty credit hours. (This was arranged by my program and not my choice.) There were both good and fucked up things about this. My parents were getting a divorce. My dad came home, and managed to find me folding laundry as opposed to reading, studying or playing piano (which is what I usually was doing).
My father was a computer science professor and had always been the academically supportive parent. (My mom wanted a nice normal daughter with lots of friends, and spent most of my youth telling me that I was lazy, disorganized and generally without redeeming qualities and just skated by on being bright, which wasn't something I'd earned.) He was the one who bought me college level math texts when I was eight after the incident with my older half-sister's algebra. (This was really great.) Who started me programming when I was six, and encouraged me to hang out with his grad students. Who talked to me about the important of having a job that you loved. I'm not saying he was a nice person, but he was really happy that one of his children seemed academically inclined.
So anyhow, he came home - I don't know if he was drunk, but he'd been drinking - to find me folding my laundry on the living room couch, and started ranting about how women don't really like having careers and getting advanced degrees and so on and I should really look into finding a strong man who could protect me.
I just remember sitting there, wondering if he waited until I was doing something gender appropriate, furious, and humiliated... but even more perplexed and appalled because... too late. He just noticed that I was a girl? It slowly dawned on me that this was that sexism thing I'd heard about. Chances are I'd seen it before and been oblivious, but it hurt to learn it first from my father, damn it. I have generally had pretty low expectations of my parents (and in context it's not like this was a particularly big thing, all things considered) but that one still surprised me.
I don't know that was the tipping point. It's not like everything happened all at once. But it was around then.
yuki_onna's journal... but it seemed a shame to foist it of on the unsuspecting, and I got caught up in the personal history bit. So it's here instead. The comment was about reading a lot of SF/F as a child, and, as a woman, dreaming as a boy, just because that was the context that kind of thinking happened in.I was trying to explain this to one of my gongfu brothers Monday. I was a geek, I read geek fiction, which was mostly boy fiction, and the whole gendered thing just didn't really phase me, until all of a sudden it did.
I was trying to remember what the tipping point was. I think I had blithely assumed that sexism was very very far away from me until I was thirteen or so. If there was a moment, it was the moment when my dad came home...
Okay, wait, step back a moment. I was thirteen. I was at the university, taking twenty credit hours. (This was arranged by my program and not my choice.) There were both good and fucked up things about this. My parents were getting a divorce. My dad came home, and managed to find me folding laundry as opposed to reading, studying or playing piano (which is what I usually was doing).
My father was a computer science professor and had always been the academically supportive parent. (My mom wanted a nice normal daughter with lots of friends, and spent most of my youth telling me that I was lazy, disorganized and generally without redeeming qualities and just skated by on being bright, which wasn't something I'd earned.) He was the one who bought me college level math texts when I was eight after the incident with my older half-sister's algebra. (This was really great.) Who started me programming when I was six, and encouraged me to hang out with his grad students. Who talked to me about the important of having a job that you loved. I'm not saying he was a nice person, but he was really happy that one of his children seemed academically inclined.
So anyhow, he came home - I don't know if he was drunk, but he'd been drinking - to find me folding my laundry on the living room couch, and started ranting about how women don't really like having careers and getting advanced degrees and so on and I should really look into finding a strong man who could protect me.
I just remember sitting there, wondering if he waited until I was doing something gender appropriate, furious, and humiliated... but even more perplexed and appalled because... too late. He just noticed that I was a girl? It slowly dawned on me that this was that sexism thing I'd heard about. Chances are I'd seen it before and been oblivious, but it hurt to learn it first from my father, damn it. I have generally had pretty low expectations of my parents (and in context it's not like this was a particularly big thing, all things considered) but that one still surprised me.
I don't know that was the tipping point. It's not like everything happened all at once. But it was around then.
