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Recently there was a really good article titled "Just Don't Do It." It's a rebuttal to an earlier article published in Business Insider where Ellen Petry Leanse, a former Google executive, claimed women just use the word "just" too much. If only they changed their speech patterns, they could get equality with men.

Image by AZRainman.com
The rebuttal concentrates on something that the original article does not. The advice is essentially that women should learn to speak more like men. This advice isn't based on studies. There's no actual empirical evidence cited that women use "just" mainly in the ways that the Leanse cites or even that women are actually more permissive in their tone then men. Instead, it feels like it's based more on a stereotype and confirmation bias.

Furthermore, there's no proof that the suggested way to speak is actually better at accomplishing its goals or otherwise good on its own merit. It assumes that since men speak that way (assuming the underlying unsupported argument is true) and we, as a group, tend to value their contributions more, it is therefore the way everyone should be. There's a fundamental misogyny to the argument that gets missed.

Now at some point, I'm sure someone reading this is going to roll their eyes, throw their hands up in the air, and start yelling about how I then must be saying that things men do must therefore be inherently wrong and bad and I'm just one of those man haters, blah, blah, blah. If that's what you want to believe, fine, but don't let that get in the way of my point which is this: We have a lot of unexamined behaviors out there that we assume are the way things should be done mainly because it's the only way we've ever done them. That's a fallacy that's known as "appeal to tradition."

And when we use those appeals to tradition as the basis of our arguments, and I argue that's what Leanse did, we can be blind to the social forces that shaped the tradition to begin with. In this case, a culture that tends to undervalue consensus building and empathy, typically considered feminine traits, and overvalue strength and other typically masculine traits. Furthermore, the constant policing of women's language compared to the language of men reinforces a belief that it is women who are inferior and need to catch up rather than perhaps that men might need to adjust their approach in some situations if they want to get better results.

As others have pointed out, what's really happening in this discussions is that current social hierarchies are being reinforced. It's not just this case either. For instance, recently a young girl had some things to say about an author, John Green. She found his online presence creepy and wrote about it on Tumblr. While she mentioned his name, she didn't tag him into the post. Other people used that post and publicized it in an attempt to get John Green to respond, including at least one person who tagged him into the reblogs.

John Green, being human, decided to respond, in my opinion, quite poorly. Now a bunch of people are talking about how the teenage girl should have known better and the negative attention and bullying is exactly what you deserve if you post something like that about someone.

Let that sink in for a moment.

No really.

We know today that there is an epidemic of underreporting. Look at the Bill Cosby case where women waited decades before saying anything about their experiences. DECADES. What response did a lot of them get when they did come forward? Many were the same as this girl got for her post. How dare you attempt to ruin the career of someone famous? Don't make allegations you can't prove.

Now I want to be clear here, I'm not saying John Green is the sort of person she is concerned he might be. I am saying that I believe she feels this way and that, furthermore, I can understand, given the messages she likely grew up with, why she feels that way. Both The Mary Sue and Huffington Post have good posts about the young girl's point of view in this story, as well as the messaging it sends to others. There's a lot of good stuff there, but most important for this is yet again in one of these discussions, we have decided the most important thing to discuss here is how to police a teenage girl's speech. What made me especially angry were the allegations that she is why abuse victims aren't taken seriously while their own speech (both his and that of his defenders) goes unexamined. Personally, I find their speech much more damaging than hers, especially since she only talks about how she feels about his online presence and her detractors are essentially telling her not to trust her instincts which goes counter to the advice out there from people who try to combat sexual abuse of children.

This policing of language as a means of reinforcing the current social hierarchy isn't just limited to women. We see it with the attempts to silence trans people after the marriage equality ruling in the United States. We see it in the silencing people of color. It's common and it's frustrating because people are often so blind to it. When the people with less privilege attempt to speak their minds about how they see the world, their words are called toxic. But even if we, for the sake of argument, agree with that point, often the things said in response are way more toxic and, more importantly, are allowed to exist with little to no examination or reflection.

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of things called toxic aren't actually toxic; they are just uncomfortable. Maybe, just maybe, it's that reaction, driven by that uncomfortableness, that is the real toxicity. Maybe, just maybe, the people who react that way are the ones who need their behavior policed, who need to change.

UPDATE 7/8/2015:
Since I posted this yesterday, new information came to light. Multiple articles and threads I read all assumed that virjn is the person who posted the original text regarding John Green. However, further research seems to point out that a person writing as peach-pocket wrote it instead. It's hard to verify for certain because all posts from virjn are gone as is the one listed as the source of a number of people's reblogs.

Some people browsed through peach-pocket's account and highlighted posts that showed they are an adult. That's understandable but there are two issues I see. 1) They are also ignoring posts where they talk about suffering from mental illness and also feeling like they have a hard time communicating what they feel with other people and 2) the majority of comments and arguments I saw were made with the assumption that the poster was a teenage girl. That is important context to the comments made.

In "An Immersive Experience" I discussed my push to consume more media where women are prominently featured as characters and/or constitute a significant portion of the creative team. Thus, it should be no surprise that while looking through the newest releases on Comixology, Mad Max: Fury Road: Furiosa #1 caught my eye. However, between its $4.99 price and having been stung by such purchases in the past, I thought it would make sense to read some reviews before investing in a new series.

A quick Google search brought me to the Mary Sue and a review by Ana Mardoll, "Review: We Need to Talk About the Furiosa Comic." The review quickly made it clear, with citations and panels from the book, that this was not something I needed to buy right now. I was disappointed and everything, but this sort of thing happens so often it didn't seem to make sense to say much about it.

But then I saw a retweet by Mardoll of a share of the review by one of the creators of the comic book.

Quite extraordinary review of Mad Max: Furiosa here - http://t.co/6dSzo6qbGS Incredibly subjective, very angry. But fascinating.

— Mark Sexton (@Mark_H_Sexton) June 20, 2015

I don't really get this. All reviews are subjective. Also, the fact he thinks the reviewer was very angry hints at a lot about him. I looked through some of his other tweets and found this conversation.

@KameronJdevine Interesting. Could answer this any number of ways...

— Mark Sexton (@Mark_H_Sexton) June 17, 2015

@KameronJdevine Best answer is that the use of institutionalised rape by Immortan Joe is not only central to the story -

— Mark Sexton (@Mark_H_Sexton) June 17, 2015

@KameronJdevine - but without it, the story could be viewed merely as a bunch of young spoilt girls whining about being kept in relative -

— Mark Sexton (@Mark_H_Sexton) June 17, 2015

@KameronJdevine - luxury by an older man who's concerned with their safety. Not really much room for dramatic tension there..!

— Mark Sexton (@Mark_H_Sexton) June 17, 2015

Let that sink in for a moment.

The reason why rape is used so heavily in the first issue is because the concern by at least one of the creators is that without it too many people wouldn't understand why a bunch of women would want to leave Immortan Joe. In fact, those people would only be able to view the wives as a bunch of spoiled young women who can't understand that Immortan Joe is just caring for them.

My first question is what the fuck?

My second question is who seriously thinks this way outside of a small number of misogynists?

My third question is why would that be the audience you cater to? Why is it their ability to feel dramatic tension that you seek?

Not only do they decide to center on that view point and craft their work so people with it are able to feel dramatic tension, but as a number of reviews point out, the book reinforces that point of view. For example, the wives are told multiple times that they need to show more gratitude for what they've been given.

Imagine making that argument to a male character, like Max. Generally speaking, when it comes to male characters the reader is supposed to understand that any sort of enslavement is untenable. A male character, particularly white male characters, are supposed to want to escape their bonds as soon as possible. Nothing else is needed to create that dramatic tension. But apparently women's natural state is to want to want to be submissive and controlled by others and if they get that and gifts, apparently readers can't understand their need to be their own people.

[NOTE: There are serious issues here when it comes to slavery especially because there are people out there who make these sorts of arguments about African-American slaves of all genders. I've read articles and seen documentaries where people try to make the case that people "need to understand" that African-American slaves were well taken care of by some slave holders. It's a harmful and hurtful argument in that context and the same here. Thanks to @AskelandLori for the reminder and check out Ask A Slave and @afamhistfail for more examples.]

In looking into this, I also began to worry about something in regards to the movie which has been praised for leaving out exactly this sort of approach. If you look at the Comixology page, it appears that the comic was meant to come out *before* the movie.

From the mind of George Miller, the creator of the Mad Max trilogy, the prelude miniseries to the upcoming film Mad Max: Fury Road continues!

This leaves me with the impression that maybe they didn't cover it in the movies not because they saw how awesome it would be to leave it out, but rather because they thought it was already covered by the books and so, why cover it again in the movies, especially when they could drive book sales. What makes me even more uneasy about this is that there's a pretty big overlap in creative teams on both projects. See, the Mark Sexton quoted above didn't just work on the comic, he worked on the storyboards for the movie. He was part of that creative team too.

And that's what bothers me about this. He repeatedly states on Twitter that they treated the women so horrifically in the comic book because otherwise people wouldn't understand why the wives had to leave the Dome or why Furiosa was able to empathize with them. Which baffles me because people sat down and sang the praises of the movie without having that sort of horrific detail on display. The wives said they lived through bad times and the audience accepted it. THIS ISN'T HARD. Yet here we are, after the movie is out, and he's still singing the old song about how we need this sort of thing in order for people to get it. After people have already said that they get it without depicting that violence.

Understanding this is critically important. These justifications for the horrific treatment of female characters in our media need to stop. They serve primarily to reinforce the misogyny in society instead of working against it. Women don't need to have these things happen to them for us to understand that they need to have their own agency and not be property.

(In addition to the Mary Sue review, i09 presented some of the issues in the comic as well.)

A common pattern among companies that traditionally sell more to men attempt to grow their female audience is that they introduce a woman's version that is pink. The ensuing conversations tend to go like this:

Pink PS3 Controller
(Source: The Problem with Pink: Girl Gamers and Marketing Missteps)

Person A: ::rolls eyes:: Pink?!?! Why does it have to be pink?

Person B: But my wife loves pink!

Person C: I love pink!

Person A: Pink is yucky!

Person D: Pink is a female color. All the females I know prefer it.

Person E: Hey, Person D, stop being sexist!

Person D: Don't attack me!

Person F: Yeah, that attack was uncalled for.

And so on and so forth.

So what's going on here and how can we break out of this argument cycle, especially since it never addresses what anyone participating in the conversation is saying.

Issue 1: Girls and Women Prefer Pink

The basis of this argument is that since pink is the color people in some parts of the world use to signify that an infant and/or child is a girl, that means that pink is the color they prefer. I would hope that the issues inherent in this argument are noticeable immediately.

First, baby girls don't get to choose what color represents them (heck, they don't get to choose their own gender anyway, it's assigned to them at birth). In places that participate in this gendering by color, they are swaddled in pink from the beginning.

Second, using color to signify an infant and young child's gender is a relatively recent phenomenom. According to this Smithsonian Magazine article, while pastels for babies were introduced in the mid-1800s, pink and blue weren't significantly used as gender signifiers until after World War I. To further complicate matters, not everyone agreed which color to use for a gender. Pink was considered by some to be a boys' color because of its relationship to red.

Third, we run into the issue that, well, it's unclear that pink is preferred by girls and women who are able to state their own preferences. For instance this survey of favorite color preferences of almost 2000 people showed that among those who identified as female, pink was actually the third favorite color (7% of respondents who identified as female), with blue (29%) and purple (27%) each getting around 4 times the respondents. Blue was favored by both the genders represented in the survey results.

Favorite colors by gender

Nothing here shows that girls and women would choose the color to represent themselves and rather the importance of the color likely has more to do with views on gender roles and the need by some to gender things instead.

Issue 2: Being Anti-Pink

While there isn't much to support pink as being the color girls and women as a group would choose to represent themselves, there are obviously individuals who love the color. For instance, let's say that the statistic that pink is the favorite color of 7% of women holds true for the larger population, that would translate to about 1 in every 14 women. Given that, it is likely that many people over the course of their lifetimes know multiple women for whom pink is their favorite color. This can help reinforce the signifier due to confirmation bias.

Being against the color also can reinforce misogyny in our culture even if it's intended to do the opposite. Many people rightly point out that forcing the color on people due to their gender is not a good thing but they might go too far to then believe that eradication of the color is best, reinforcing the belief that "girly" things are bad.

Issue 3: The Death of Gender Neutral

Another issue is the death of gender neutrality. Lost in this debate over pink and blue is the fact that the same culture that currently embraces those colors to signify gender used to use gender neutral clothing (particularly white) to clothe their infants and young children. Not only that, but children of all genders wore gowns. Much of this was practical, white was easily bleached, gowns made changing infants easier, and the clothes could be reused for other children without worry.

Lego Ad with Girl

Non-white clothing became more common with the advent of washing machines, specialized detergents, and stain-resistant clothing. Specifying one color for boys and another for girls also meant that many families could no longer reuse their clothing. The ability assign gender to an infant even before birth probably helped reinforce this gendering of babies.

Thoughts

Stepping back from these various issues, one thing to keep in mind that the larger issue is our desire to police gender through our consumption of things. The variety of tastes within a gender is always going to be wider than the differences we can point to between two genders. Thus, trying to say that a product is for girls and/or women through the use of a single color is always going to run into issues. Very few products in this world are for any one gender. Offering a variety of colors should be the norm. Saying that a particular color is being introduced to cater to a particular gender should stop. Allow a variety of expressions: masculine, feminine, and neither. Otherwise, I don't see an end to this particular fight.

I want to give a nod to Arin from Game Grumps for his unabashed love of pink.

Much of my free time over the past week or so has been taken up by the game "You Must Build A Boat," an addictive mix of side scroller and puzzle game. Your goal is to build a boat and recruit crew which is done by running through a dungeon defeating monsters (and then recruiting them for your crew), completing quests, and uncovering treasure.

You start out with a small skiff and two monsters already recruited. They help you get into the dungeon where you have to defeat the monsters, disable traps, and open treasure chests and crates that stand in your way. The way to victory, however, lies not in your ability to time your swings, spells, and counters, but rather in your ability to match tiles in sets of three or more and complete quests. Sometimes quests are about how long you can last in the dungeon but other times they have to do with mixing spells in a particular order or matching a certain number of a particular tile. Quests (among other things) can change the difficulty of the dungeon.

The challenges you face in the dungeon keep pushing you to the left of the screen until you are finally pushed off completely. The screen after exclaims "You win!" in large letters even when you feel utterly defeated. Then you find out if you completed any of the quests and, if so, gain your rewards. Quest rewards include recruiting monsters for your boat. Not only do they provide the manpower for moving the boat (which is done by jumping) but they give you benefits such as increasing the power of sword matches.

In addition to monsters, you also have experts on your boat to help you. They sell you upgrades to your equipment and/or provide valuable information about monster resistances and vulnerabilities. Items cost some combination of gold, dust, power, and thought. The last two are types of tiles you match in the dungeon.

One of the things I found in playing the game is that it often makes sense to just keep matching things even if there isn't a challenge currently in front of you or if the tiles are wrong for the challenge. This is also true between sections of the dungeon when a small title area appears and changes often are made to the dungeon's attributes.

The game isn't exactly relaxing given the timed nature of the matching but I find it fun and keep going back for more. It's available through Steam, iOS, and Google Play.

Every so often I see someone issue a challenge that goes something like this: for the next x period of time, only ready books by or about y and/or z. For instance, a challenge might be, "For the next year, read only comics where at least one of the creators is a woman."

While some embrace those challenges, others often try to argue against them. They often give arguments that say while the thing the challenge is seeking to fight against is real and bad, the challenge is just as bad. I'd like to provide a counter to this line of reasoning.

When I studied Japanese in college, the most frequent request our professors made was that we go to Japan and study there at least once during our undergrad careers. Part of their reasoning was that it was impossible to recreate in the classroom all of the nuances of the culture that are necessary to enable us to really grok both the language and the culture (they are interlinked after all). They were absolutely correct and my friends who went to Japan came back much better speakers.

I think this seems pretty obvious for lots of genres of media. If you want to write a game about slasher films, you really need to watch a ton of them (or have already watched them) so you can reproduce the similarities and differences between the films. It's relatively safe to do this on subject matter, but when people recommend it in other ways, say, gender or race, there's often a backlash.

One of the problems I see right now is that we have a small number of dominant view points (if not one) that rule at least US media. Many of our stories have a rather masculine viewpoint, meaning they tend to glamorize and reinforce certain behaviors and outlooks that we attribute to masculinity, and particularly white and heterosexual masculinity. Within that viewpoint, there can be and sometimes is a variety of viewpoints, giving the illusion of diversity, but they often can be traced back to the same node and other nodes are left unexplored. Likewise, even from that dominant node, there are a bunch of branches that also are underexplored.

These challenges are requests to explore those other branches and nodes. For instance, if I challenged you to read only books from female authors for a year, there's a chance that at least one of those books will not be part of the primary node. You'll now have a jumping off point. From there, you'll be able to start to see the nuances in presentation and the vast variety of ways in which women write books. It becomes harder to say things like female authors write in particular ways or about particular stories. You'll start to have enough different experiences that you'll be able to see the nuances between them.

None of this is guaranteed of course. As with learning a language, circumstances vary and often what you put into it can determine what you'll get out. But I do think it's unfair to claim that balancing out the scales is discriminatory, especially when they often are so unbalanced anyway.

So for the past three years, I've made a lot more conscious choices about what media I consume. I look for diversity in the characters and the creators and love when I find the ones that have both. I try to keep a balance of viewpoints (with rare exceptions). My life has improved greatly because of it. I now am better able to give examples of characters I like or ones that illustrate the difference between sexy and sexualized or that show not all nudity is sexual in nature.

A big part of my immersive experience over the past couple of years has been in comic book form. Comics are interesting because the initial investment is often relatively low and there's a relatively large number of titles so you can experiment. Here are some of the series I've enjoyed over the past three years if you are looking for a starting point.

• Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover
• Bayou by Jeremy Love
• Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro
• Captain Marvel 2012-2013 and Captain Marvel 2014- by Kelly Sue DeConnick [Comics I Love: Captain Marvel]
• Copperhead by Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski, and Ron Riley
• Dragon Girl by Jeff Weigel
• Genius by Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Afua Richardson
• Gotham Academy by Becky Cloonan, Brenden Fletcher, and Karl Kerschl
• Hawkeye by Matt Fraction and David Aja
• Jem and the Holograms by Kelly Thompson, Sophie Campbell, and Amy Mebberson
• Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Witches, a four issue anthology by S.M. Vidaurri, Kyla Vanderklugt, Matthew Dow Smith, and Jeff Stokely
• Katusha, Girl Soldier of the Great Patriot War by Wayne Vansant
• Low by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini
• Lumberjanes by Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson, and Brooke A. Allen
• Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic by various writers and artists
• Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Rios, and Jordie Bellaire
• Princeless vol 1, volume 2, and The Pirate Princess by Jeremy Whitley and various artists
• Princess Leia by Mark Waid and Terry Dodson
• Princess Ugg by Ted Naifeh
• Rat Queens by Kurtis J Wiebe, John "Roc" Upchurch, Stjepan Sejic, and Tess Fowler [Comics I Love: Rat Queens]
• Red Sonja by Gail Simone and Walter Geovani [Examples of Change: Gail Simone's Red Sonja]
• reMind volume 1 and volume 2 by Jason Brubaker
• Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
• Scarlett Takes Manhattan by John Leavitt and Molly Crabapple
• Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky
• Shutter by Joe Keatinge and Leila del Duca [Comics I Love: Shutter]
• Smut Peddler an anthology edited by C. Spike Trotman
• Spera volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3 by Josh Tierney [Comics I Love: Spera]
• Stumptown volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3 by Greg Rucka [Comics I Love: Stumptown]
• Suburban Glamour by Jamie McKelvie
• Thor by Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman, and Jorge Molina
• Wayward by Jim Zub, Steven Cummings, John Rauch, and Tamra Bonvillain
• The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

Have you done something similar? Which comics, novels, movies, etc caught your eye?