Madison Metricula

(Image credit: 3dtotal.com)

Crowdfunding is not a panacea to the economic inequities of the world; but if GamerGate is any guide, it’s certainly a devil of some sort. In the tangled thread of gendered pathologies that this three-month long yarnball of fury has gathered lies the movement’s shocking antipathy to crowdfunding, with one twitter user sneering that it was “welfare for hipsters.”

A few days ago, I had occasion to share a dinner with game developer Brianna Wu (read my interview with her here), which she then tweeted about. Almost immediately, men from GamerGate descended, sneeringly asking whether Patreon or Kickstarter had paid for the dinner (not, apparently, fully understanding how crowdfunding works). When I snarked that the Illuminati had actually picked up the tab, another gentleman skated in to tut tut me for not taking the inquiry seriously, accusing Ms. Wu and myself of failing to act professionally. It was, after all, about ethics in games journalism. 

The antipathy runs deeper still. In a cosmic display of irony that excels even the movements most ferrous moments, one 8chan thread hundreds of posts long plotted to find some way to “take down” Patreon because it was such an important funding source for many of their targets in the gaming industry. They were, apparently, unaware that 8chan itself is funded through Patreon donations.

Actually, it’s about ethics in affordable dining.

To be certain, many of the independent developers, journalists, and critics that GamerGate has targeted have been crowdfunded in some way. Back in August and early September, it was commonplace for Gaters to suggest that there was an ethical conflict inherent in a journalist covering a game developer that they had donated to in some fashion, or a journalist covering a developer who had donated to them. Strictly speaking, this is not an entirely unreasonable concern on its face — even if, like most GG forays, it gets at corruption by attacking the little guys first — but in addition to there being no evidence of quid pro quo or wrongdoing, most of the targets were women or pro-feminist men, the vast majority of whom were by no means rich or influential.

Gaming websites, like Polygon and The Escapist, even tried to offer an olive branch to the Gaters by rewriting their ethics policies to include disclosures on crowdfunding donations. Kotaku even outright prohibited their staff from writing about games they had donated to.

I felt that these moves, while well intentioned, were sops to the angry mob that had harassed Jenn Frank mercilessly and drove her from games criticism because of her so-called “conflict of interest” in writing about the harassment of Zoe Quinn; she had donated to Quinn’s Patreon account, you see. These tenuous connections, gossamer-thin threads spun into a thick rope of corruption by GamerGaters, were used as licence to viciously assault and malign anyone that said a word against them. The Escapist’s co-founder and general manager Alexander Macris, meanwhile, who had expressed pro-GamerGate views and provided a platform for Gater independent developers (and known harassers) on his website, was not similarly excoriated for the fact that he had given to an IndieGoGo campaign for developer James Desborough’s  game set in the flagrantly misogynistic Gor universe.

Instead of starting a constructive conversation on the matter, games websites either bowed to hordes harassing women, or remained silent.

The Habit of Artistic Freedom

“[If we] have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room… then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.”

~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

So why the double standard? Misogyny, yes, but as always it’s more complicated than simply attacking women because they’re women.

The contempt for independent crowdfunding, especially when done by women or queer people, is more global than a single debate on disclosure, which GG’s petty hypocrisies reveal to be a smokescreen anyway. After all, crowdfunding is a marvellous innovation because it leaves creators less beholden to powerful interests than they have ever been; the whole point is that it remunerates creators for their work while not tying their food/rent money to the whims of a large corporation or advertisers. This liberates creators — whether they are writers, artists, programmers, or academics — to speak more, not less, freely. This should be good news for those concerned about the genuine ethical issue of intellectual freedom athwart the necessities imposed by a paymaster.

I would contend, however, that it’s precisely that freedom which GamerGate fears.

Crowdfunding means that someone challenging the status quo can get an income. Without being beholden to the sclerotic interests of the industry at large, they’re free to make games how they want, criticise how they wish, and write without fearing advertisers. It is that efflorescence of speech which scares GG, because it means they can no longer rely on the industry to snuff out dissent on market-unfriendly political issues — be they talk of working conditions in the industry or frank engagements with the discourses of race and gender in gaming, or critiques of aspects of gaming’s consumer culture.

I do not mean to lionise crowdfunding; many good critiques have been made of it and it does not fully level the playing field. But it does offer a source of income that did not exist before, one less ethically-fraught or compromised that permits the very thing that GamerGate claims to support: artistic freedom.

As per usual, GG is offended that a woman they disagree with is able to support herself at all through her work. There’s a lot here about this mysterious economy of what is deserving and undeserving; the meritocracy of arcane standards. GamerGate’s adherents do not hate crowdfunding per se as much as they feel it somehow circumvents “legitimate” market pressures that would otherwise suffocate people like feminist critics or artsy avant-garde game devs. To them, it breathes life into things that the industry edifice, operating with unimpeded capitalist physics, might otherwise crush out of sight and out of mind, never able to discomfit the worldview of GamerGate’s easily offended lot.

Artistic freedom for all, except critical women or queer people, or the occasional male ally, lest they say something that slanders a young man’s favorite game.

There’s a reason that Virginia Woolf described freedom as 500 pounds a month and a room of one’s own with a lock on the door. Freedom from want, from what Hannah Arendt called the demons of “necessity,” are preconditions to meaningful political action. Until that needful day when we are all freed from these demons, long live crowdfunding.

In Illinois, it is legal to breastfeed anywhere. That's the law. Period. Here's the text of the law:

A mother may breastfeed in any location, public or private, where the mother is otherwise authorized to be.

That couldn't be more clear. So it's strange that the Illinois Bar Examiners seems to be doing everything it can to make it difficult for a young lawyer to breastfeed.

Kristin Pagano is a 2013 graduate of the USC Gould School of law. She passed the bar exam in California, but she and her husband moved to Illinois. She needs to take and pass the bar in Illinois in order to get a job as a lawyer in Illinois, and the earliest she can do that is February 2015. Pagano is having a baby and it is due in January of 2015, and she plans to breastfeed. Anticipating that she would have engorged breasts during both six-hour days of the exam, Pagano asked the administrators for a set of reasonable accommodations. Private rooms, extra time, that sort of thing.

Her request was denied. The examiners said she could drop her pump off in the Help Center, outside of the test room, and access it during bathroom breaks, where presumably she'd have to pump in the public bathroom. The examiners also refused to give her extra time on the exam.

Exasperated, Pagano asked if she could just pump in the exam room, in front of the proctors and all the other test takers. That request is still pending, but remember that these people are arguing that she can't even bring her pump with her into the room, which would seem to be a clear violation of Illinois law.

In an exclusive interview with Above the Law, Pagano expressed that she really doesn't want to have to pump at her desk in the middle of the exam:

Read more Read more

Here I am, a hormonal, emotional pregnant woman, bawling my eyes out about this. All I'm thinking about is how I am supposed to complete (and pass) the exam if I have to physically leave the room every time I pump? Do I really have to pump in an unsanitary bathroom (which could be on the opposite of the building)? Do I sacrifice my health (and my child's) and sit there with painful, engorged, maybe even leaky breasts in order to complete the exam? If I am allowed to pump in the exam room, will the proctors be briefed about my rights ahead of time so I am not singled out and kicked out by an uninformed proctor? Will I be harassed or embarrassed by the proctors or other test-takers?

She shouldn't have to worry about this. There should be an established protocol for breastfeeding mothers, and if Illinois doesn't have one that comports with relevant law, it needs to make them, now.

And that protocol should not be "take the bar some other time." The bar exam is offered twice a year, February, and August. If Pagano has to wait to the August exam, she won't know her results until perhaps November. All that time, Pagano's job search will essentially be on hold. It's very hard for a new lawyer to get a job in a new market until they pass the bar. The Illinois decision effectively renders Pagano unemployed for 2015.

And for the idiot, childless men out there, let's remember that Pagano would likely still be breastfeeding when the bar is offered in August. She might even still be breastfeeding in February 2016. It's completely unfair, and you know, likely illegal, to prevent a mother from doing something she has a right to do (take the bar exam) for over a year just because she's breastfeeding. Her breasts aren't going to stop producing milk just because she needs to focus on a test for two days.

And while Pagano is the story, there's no way she's alone. How many other new mothers have been forced to delay their bar examination, and thus their ability to start their careers and represent clients because the Illinois bar examiners can't even figure out how to follow their own state laws?

The issue isn't whether Illinois should make a reasonable accommodation for Pagano now, the issue is that Illinois has not already made reasonable accommodations for the thousands of new mothers who would like to take the bar exam over the years.

And would looking at it change your mind about ending a pregnancy? With new laws across the country requiring women who seek abortions to view a sonogram first, Phoebe Zerwick goes into clinics to find out how that feels. A Glamour exclusive.

An actual-size sonogram at nearly seven weeks' gestation; 33 percent of abortions occur before then.

When a pregnancy is planned, a sonogram marks a joyful beginning. Soon-to-be parents post the grainy images on Facebook, tack them up on refrigerator doors, or paste them into baby books as first entries. But for the 3.4 million women across the country who face an unintended pregnancy every year, the scan can be a different story.

In Virginia a 24-year-old remembers studying her sonogram at the abortion clinic where she'd gone to terminate her pregnancy. "It bothered me to see it, but I needed to know what it looked like," says Casey,* who works in international affairs and very much wants children someday but wasn't ready to be a parent with her boyfriend of less than a year when Glamour interviewed her. "I don't know if it's plain old curiosity or a sense of responsibility, or probably a mixture of both."

A 21-year-old mother from Cleveland still pulls the sonogram she got at an abortion clinic out of its manila envelope, where she placed it after she got home. "I'll probably keep it in a drawer with my Social Security card and other important papers," she says. She remembers seeing the flutter of the tiny heartbeat on the clinic monitor. But with two young children and a job cleaning office buildings, she knew that she couldn't raise a third baby, not on her own. "I looked at the bigger picture," she says. "And I did what I had to do for the kids I have." She too chose to end her pregnancy.

But in Colorado Springs, Charlotte, a 17-year-old high school student, did not. She'd initially decided on an abortion after hooking up at a party with her ex, who then wanted nothing more to do with her. At three months along, however, when she went to a crisis pregnancy center—a facility that offers support and services to pregnant women but opposes abortion—a sonogram made her rethink. "I saw this little hand with five fingers, and it was like he was reaching out and saying, 'Please don't hurt me,'" Charlotte recalls. "It was life-changing." She carried the baby to term and put him up for adoption—the right decision, she says now, even though she feels his absence every day.

Sonogram laws, which require doctors to offer or perform an ultrasound before any abortion, are part of a dramatic increase in antiabortion legislation sweeping the country. In the past three years alone, 222 of these restrictions have passed—33 more than in the entire previous decade: Some of them ban the procedure outright after 20 weeks of pregnancy; others mandate that facilities meet specifications such as a certain width for hallways. Because of laws like these, at press time Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming each had only a single abortion clinic or provider in the whole state.

Many of these laws are aimed at abortion providers or clinics, but sonogram restrictions are unique in that they target women, with the intention of changing their minds. Pro-life advocates believe that seeing an image of the embryo or fetus will persuade patients to carry their pregnancies to term. Pro-choice proponents view the laws as insulting (women, they say, fully realize an embryo could become a child); they also argue that these restrictions can add unnecessary costs for a patient and intrude on the privacy between her and her doctor.

But what do women looking at the sonograms think? To find out, Glamour asked me to go on the road to capture the raw and very personal reactions of patients caught in the cross fire. And although the answers are complicated, one thing is clear: Abortion politics may be as ugly as ever, but the women I met were making tough choices in trying circumstances—and doing so with great integrity.

Inside an abortion clinic
There's no sign on the fifties-era office building for Falls Church Healthcare Center, about 10 miles outside of Washington, D.C. Some days patients find their way to the third floor without incident. But most mornings volunteers escort women past the protesters marching outside. The center was opened 12 years ago by Rosemary Codding, now a 72-year-old grandmother, who wanted to provide gynecological and prenatal care along with a place where her patients could, when they needed it, obtain abortions without judgment. The waiting room is typical of a medical office, except for the spiritual quotations decorating the walls (a prayer from an Episcopal priest reads: "Bless this building and those who work here.... They are doing God's work...") and the shrine of smooth pebbles in memory of George Tiller, M.D., the abortion doctor slain while ushering at his Kansas church in 2009. Like all providers in Virginia, Codding's staff has been performing ultrasounds before every abortion since July 2012, when the state law took effect.

Although the images have become politically charged, the science behind sonograms is straightforward. When an ultrasound sensor is placed inside a woman's vagina or on her belly during an exam, the sound waves produce a moving picture. At six weeks the sonogram can often show a fetal heartbeat. At eight weeks—the point at which two thirds of abortions have occurred—a distinct shape is just starting to emerge. (Many women I spoke with described it as looking like a peanut.) At nine weeks the beginnings of arms and legs are visible. By 13 weeks—when 92 percent of abortions will have taken place—the fetus weighs nearly an ounce, with a hint of facial features.

Most abortion providers routinely use ultrasound to help determine how far along a pregnancy is, but now in 12 states the test is required in virtually all cases. In Texas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin, the law mandates that women be shown the image and hear it described (a doctor will detail the exact dimensions of the embryo, for example, or the internal organs of the fetus). In the nine other states (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia), women must be offered a view of the sonogram; in most of these states, if the women don't want to look, they must sign a waiver. To Codding, these laws are invasive. "The only thing they do is disrespect a woman," she says. "To pretend she doesn't know what happens with a fertilized egg is an affront to the thoughtfulness that all women have about every aspect of their lives." In Virginia, as in Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana, most patients must also wait 24 hours after the ultrasound to have an abortion. That usually means a second visit, often requiring another day off work for women and extra staff for the clinic.

Codding gave me complete access to her patients, six of whom chose to talk to me over the two days I spent there. "You know what? The ultrasound didn't make me sad," Jane, 36, a married mother of two and a restaurant owner, told me about her decision to end her pregnancy. "I was determined. That's why I came here. I've totally completed my family." But the scan was wrenching for another mother in her thirties—this one almost seven weeks pregnant and getting divorced. Celia's Catholic upbringing had taught her that life begins at conception, and yet she felt she needed to put the two children she was already raising first. "As it is, I rarely have time for them between work and our schedules," she said, holding back tears. "I can't imagine what it would be like with a baby. And what kind of life could I give this child?"

Five of the women I spoke with at Falls Church went ahead with their abortions. The sixth, Juanita, 40, came to the clinic undecided. She'd already raised two sons on her own and was planning to show her boyfriend the sonogram for a final talk. "It's just a sac; it's six weeks," she said the day of her ultrasound appointment, though she acknowledged that ending the pregnancy would violate her faith. "If I do have the abortion, at least I have something. It's sad, but the sonogram gives me a memory." She never told me her decision.

Next, a crisis pregnancy center
I wondered whether women's reactions would be different at a crisis pregnancy center (CPC), since these facilities are set up to convince women not to get an abortion. There are an estimated 3,000 CPCs across America; the one I drove to is located on a commercial strip in Norfolk, Virginia, and is a branch of the Keim Centers, a Christian-based pregnancy-counseling nonprofit group that provides pregnancy testing and parenting classes at no cost. A patient can also get an ultrasound (as is true at many CPCs) and use it at an abortion clinic to skip the scan there. "But my hope is she would come in and see the ultrasound and talk things out and change her mind," says Shannon Elrod, R.N., the Centers' director of nursing services. "I always say, 'That which we can't see we don't believe.' Ultrasound is a great tool to show what is going on." Hanging over Elrod's desk is a plaque with words from Psalm 139:16: "You saw me before I was born."

Keim's Norfolk ultrasound room is set up for comfort, with extra chairs for boyfriends or husbands and lights that dim. A patient's sonogram is projected onto a large screen on the wall for better viewing. Elrod felt that allowing me to speak with women during center hours would be too intrusive; instead she selected a few former clients for me to interview. Unsurprisingly, all of them were women who had chosen to continue their pregnancies.

One had landed in the emergency room with back pain; doctors asked whether she could be pregnant. The then 20-year-old college student said no, but the test showed yes. Active with her church, she was against abortion, yet her boyfriend was pushing for it and she was terrified she'd lose her track scholarship. She found Keim online and says the ultrasound gave her clarity: "You could actually hear the heartbeat," she told me. "It proved that there was life in me." She and her boyfriend broke up, but she kept her scholarship and forged ahead as a single mom.

Another woman, Sandy, had gotten pregnant from a one-night stand with a fellow sailor when she was a petty officer in the Navy and deployed at sea. A married mother and 26 years old at the time, she was consumed with guilt because she loved her husband. Sandy was determined to get an abortion but found herself stuck without any women's health services on the ship. By the time she got back to shore, she was 21 weeks along. The sonogram at Keim, Sandy said, "changed everything for me. I actually saw the baby as a baby." She confessed to her husband, kept the child, and has worked hard to restore their marriage.

NEXT: Is this policy helping or hurting women? »

The bigger conversation
All in all, I spoke with 20 women across the country, including those I met in Virginia. To find them in other states, I turned to advocacy groups on each side of the issue—Focus on the Family and the National Abortion Federation—as well as Exhale, a more neutral postabortion support group.

What did these women choose? After seeing their sonograms, 10 of them had an abortion, nine did not, and one was still deciding. The results are biased, of course—some of the women were hand-picked because their story supports a group's particular agenda. But what struck me most was that no one minded having the ultrasound. Yes, many women at Falls Church resented having to come in twice for an abortion because of the law's 24-hour wait, but the scan itself wasn't a problem. In fact, several regarded it as a way to hold themselves accountable. "I was OK with seeing it," said Celia, the Catholic mom who went through with the abortion. "I have to be responsible for what I do."

Which raises the crucial question, Do sonograms change minds? Published studies say no: In the largest to date, examining 15,168 pregnancies at 19 abortion clinics, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that only 1.6 percent of women who viewed their scans opted not to terminate. Even among women who were less certain about their decision, just 4.8 percent chose to continue their pregnancies. Elrod says she's seen different results, telling me that around half the women considering an abortion at Keim change their mind after viewing their sonogram—a number consistent with data collected by Focus on the Family. But there have been no peer-reviewed, published studies of women at CPCs. (Tracy Weitz, Ph.D., a coauthor of the UCSF study and admittedly pro-choice, says she has tried to conduct one, but the centers have turned her down.)

The pattern I observed: Women who chose to go to a CPC tended to be more vocal about their faith and see a human life in the sonogram, while those at an abortion clinic felt the scan revealed an unformed mass of cells. The difference had less to do with comfy chairs or big-screen viewing and more to do with the patient's beliefs before she even set foot in the door. I noticed too that many of the women I interviewed from CPCs were still unsure about their decision at the time of their appointments; they also often first sought care later in their pregnancies—on average at 11 weeks, compared with seven weeks at abortion clinics—which affected how they reacted to the image. Hannah, for example, a minister's daughter, was 20 years old, 11 weeks pregnant, and working with a landscaping crew in Mobile, Alabama, when she went to an abortion clinic and had an ultrasound. On her way out a protester directed her to a CPC down the street, where she had another ultrasound that she looked at more closely. "You could see every little detail—the eye sockets, the hands, everything," she said. In that instant she decided to continue her pregnancy. "It was that mommy feeling of 'I'm protecting my baby.'" But Janet, then a 25-year-old administrative assistant in Cleveland, saw something very different at only five and a half weeks pregnant. She'd gone to an abortion clinic because she and her boyfriend wanted to be married before having a child. "When I saw that it was just a small circle," she said, "I was fine with my decision to have the abortion."

The more stories I heard, the more I could understand how both sides have become so convinced they are right.

A very private decision
The sonogram laws were, of course, intended to help eliminate abortion. Yet it's unclear if they've had that effect. At least one pro-life expert admits they've fallen short of expectations: "Some ultrasound laws have probably done good," Michael J. New, Ph.D., an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who studies abortion legislation, told me, "but probably not as much good as we would have hoped." Statistics show that the U.S. abortion rate did drop 13 percent between 2008 and 2011 to an all-time low, according to the reproductive-health research group the Guttmacher Institute. But it's hard to tease out why: Use of birth control, especially methods like the IUD, went up, and fewer women were getting pregnant to begin with.

Codding, of Falls Church, is adamant that these laws are harmful. "Sonograms may help some women be involved in the process," she says, acknowledging the patients who told me the scan made them feel more accountable. "But it should be the choice of the doctor and the patient—not the law—whether to have this test. These laws don't have any effect other than interjecting government between the doctor and patient."

We may never know exactly what impact sonograms have on a woman's decision to continue or terminate her pregnancy. But simply asking the question taught me this: For almost every woman, the decision to end a pregnancy is not about politics; it's profoundly personal.

"You can take each woman's story, and if she's sad, count it as a point for the pro-life movement. And if she's stronger, that's a point for the pro-choice movement," says Kate Hindman, 21, a volunteer with Exhale, a support group for women who've had abortions. But all the stories she hears are much more nuanced, including her own. After discovering she was pregnant at 17 by a guy who was seeing someone else, she'd hoped her sonogram would convince her not to have an abortion.

Hindman remembers seeing the image, the arms and legs beginning to emerge, and a white spot that she imagined was the heart. "I said, 'Wow,' and I was crying," she says. "But it didn't change my mind." She had the abortion, then worked to make peace with it. "Many women who call Exhale are a little sad or confused," Hindman says. "But then they talk about why they made this decision, and it's striking how deeply and thoughtfully they considered it. People assume abortion is simple. It's not. Women are weighing this reason against that reason, what their heart wants versus what their head wants. It's such a huge choice."

Phoebe Zerwick is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for O, the Oprah Magazine.

And would looking at it change your mind about ending a pregnancy? With new laws across the country requiring women who seek abortions to view a sonogram first, Phoebe Zerwick goes into clinics to find out how that feels. A Glamour exclusive.

An actual-size sonogram at nearly seven weeks' gestation; 33 percent of abortions occur before then.

When a pregnancy is planned, a sonogram marks a joyful beginning. Soon-to-be parents post the grainy images on Facebook, tack them up on refrigerator doors, or paste them into baby books as first entries. But for the 3.4 million women across the country who face an unintended pregnancy every year, the scan can be a different story.

In Virginia a 24-year-old remembers studying her sonogram at the abortion clinic where she'd gone to terminate her pregnancy. "It bothered me to see it, but I needed to know what it looked like," says Casey,* who works in international affairs and very much wants children someday but wasn't ready to be a parent with her boyfriend of less than a year when Glamour interviewed her. "I don't know if it's plain old curiosity or a sense of responsibility, or probably a mixture of both."

A 21-year-old mother from Cleveland still pulls the sonogram she got at an abortion clinic out of its manila envelope, where she placed it after she got home. "I'll probably keep it in a drawer with my Social Security card and other important papers," she says. She remembers seeing the flutter of the tiny heartbeat on the clinic monitor. But with two young children and a job cleaning office buildings, she knew that she couldn't raise a third baby, not on her own. "I looked at the bigger picture," she says. "And I did what I had to do for the kids I have." She too chose to end her pregnancy.

But in Colorado Springs, Charlotte, a 17-year-old high school student, did not. She'd initially decided on an abortion after hooking up at a party with her ex, who then wanted nothing more to do with her. At three months along, however, when she went to a crisis pregnancy center—a facility that offers support and services to pregnant women but opposes abortion—a sonogram made her rethink. "I saw this little hand with five fingers, and it was like he was reaching out and saying, 'Please don't hurt me,'" Charlotte recalls. "It was life-changing." She carried the baby to term and put him up for adoption—the right decision, she says now, even though she feels his absence every day.

Sonogram laws, which require doctors to offer or perform an ultrasound before any abortion, are part of a dramatic increase in antiabortion legislation sweeping the country. In the past three years alone, 222 of these restrictions have passed—33 more than in the entire previous decade: Some of them ban the procedure outright after 20 weeks of pregnancy; others mandate that facilities meet specifications such as a certain width for hallways. Because of laws like these, at press time Missouri, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming each had only a single abortion clinic or provider in the whole state.

Many of these laws are aimed at abortion providers or clinics, but sonogram restrictions are unique in that they target women, with the intention of changing their minds. Pro-life advocates believe that seeing an image of the embryo or fetus will persuade patients to carry their pregnancies to term. Pro-choice proponents view the laws as insulting (women, they say, fully realize an embryo could become a child); they also argue that these restrictions can add unnecessary costs for a patient and intrude on the privacy between her and her doctor.

But what do women looking at the sonograms think? To find out, Glamour asked me to go on the road to capture the raw and very personal reactions of patients caught in the cross fire. And although the answers are complicated, one thing is clear: Abortion politics may be as ugly as ever, but the women I met were making tough choices in trying circumstances—and doing so with great integrity.

Inside an abortion clinic
There's no sign on the fifties-era office building for Falls Church Healthcare Center, about 10 miles outside of Washington, D.C. Some days patients find their way to the third floor without incident. But most mornings volunteers escort women past the protesters marching outside. The center was opened 12 years ago by Rosemary Codding, now a 72-year-old grandmother, who wanted to provide gynecological and prenatal care along with a place where her patients could, when they needed it, obtain abortions without judgment. The waiting room is typical of a medical office, except for the spiritual quotations decorating the walls (a prayer from an Episcopal priest reads: "Bless this building and those who work here.... They are doing God's work...") and the shrine of smooth pebbles in memory of George Tiller, M.D., the abortion doctor slain while ushering at his Kansas church in 2009. Like all providers in Virginia, Codding's staff has been performing ultrasounds before every abortion since July 2012, when the state law took effect.

Although the images have become politically charged, the science behind sonograms is straightforward. When an ultrasound sensor is placed inside a woman's vagina or on her belly during an exam, the sound waves produce a moving picture. At six weeks the sonogram can often show a fetal heartbeat. At eight weeks—the point at which two thirds of abortions have occurred—a distinct shape is just starting to emerge. (Many women I spoke with described it as looking like a peanut.) At nine weeks the beginnings of arms and legs are visible. By 13 weeks—when 92 percent of abortions will have taken place—the fetus weighs nearly an ounce, with a hint of facial features.

Most abortion providers routinely use ultrasound to help determine how far along a pregnancy is, but now in 12 states the test is required in virtually all cases. In Texas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin, the law mandates that women be shown the image and hear it described (a doctor will detail the exact dimensions of the embryo, for example, or the internal organs of the fetus). In the nine other states (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia), women must be offered a view of the sonogram; in most of these states, if the women don't want to look, they must sign a waiver. To Codding, these laws are invasive. "The only thing they do is disrespect a woman," she says. "To pretend she doesn't know what happens with a fertilized egg is an affront to the thoughtfulness that all women have about every aspect of their lives." In Virginia, as in Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana, most patients must also wait 24 hours after the ultrasound to have an abortion. That usually means a second visit, often requiring another day off work for women and extra staff for the clinic.

Codding gave me complete access to her patients, six of whom chose to talk to me over the two days I spent there. "You know what? The ultrasound didn't make me sad," Jane, 36, a married mother of two and a restaurant owner, told me about her decision to end her pregnancy. "I was determined. That's why I came here. I've totally completed my family." But the scan was wrenching for another mother in her thirties—this one almost seven weeks pregnant and getting divorced. Celia's Catholic upbringing had taught her that life begins at conception, and yet she felt she needed to put the two children she was already raising first. "As it is, I rarely have time for them between work and our schedules," she said, holding back tears. "I can't imagine what it would be like with a baby. And what kind of life could I give this child?"

Five of the women I spoke with at Falls Church went ahead with their abortions. The sixth, Juanita, 40, came to the clinic undecided. She'd already raised two sons on her own and was planning to show her boyfriend the sonogram for a final talk. "It's just a sac; it's six weeks," she said the day of her ultrasound appointment, though she acknowledged that ending the pregnancy would violate her faith. "If I do have the abortion, at least I have something. It's sad, but the sonogram gives me a memory." She never told me her decision.

Next, a crisis pregnancy center
I wondered whether women's reactions would be different at a crisis pregnancy center (CPC), since these facilities are set up to convince women not to get an abortion. There are an estimated 3,000 CPCs across America; the one I drove to is located on a commercial strip in Norfolk, Virginia, and is a branch of the Keim Centers, a Christian-based pregnancy-counseling nonprofit group that provides pregnancy testing and parenting classes at no cost. A patient can also get an ultrasound (as is true at many CPCs) and use it at an abortion clinic to skip the scan there. "But my hope is she would come in and see the ultrasound and talk things out and change her mind," says Shannon Elrod, R.N., the Centers' director of nursing services. "I always say, 'That which we can't see we don't believe.' Ultrasound is a great tool to show what is going on." Hanging over Elrod's desk is a plaque with words from Psalm 139:16: "You saw me before I was born."

Keim's Norfolk ultrasound room is set up for comfort, with extra chairs for boyfriends or husbands and lights that dim. A patient's sonogram is projected onto a large screen on the wall for better viewing. Elrod felt that allowing me to speak with women during center hours would be too intrusive; instead she selected a few former clients for me to interview. Unsurprisingly, all of them were women who had chosen to continue their pregnancies.

One had landed in the emergency room with back pain; doctors asked whether she could be pregnant. The then 20-year-old college student said no, but the test showed yes. Active with her church, she was against abortion, yet her boyfriend was pushing for it and she was terrified she'd lose her track scholarship. She found Keim online and says the ultrasound gave her clarity: "You could actually hear the heartbeat," she told me. "It proved that there was life in me." She and her boyfriend broke up, but she kept her scholarship and forged ahead as a single mom.

Another woman, Sandy, had gotten pregnant from a one-night stand with a fellow sailor when she was a petty officer in the Navy and deployed at sea. A married mother and 26 years old at the time, she was consumed with guilt because she loved her husband. Sandy was determined to get an abortion but found herself stuck without any women's health services on the ship. By the time she got back to shore, she was 21 weeks along. The sonogram at Keim, Sandy said, "changed everything for me. I actually saw the baby as a baby." She confessed to her husband, kept the child, and has worked hard to restore their marriage.

NEXT: Is this policy helping or hurting women? »

The bigger conversation
All in all, I spoke with 20 women across the country, including those I met in Virginia. To find them in other states, I turned to advocacy groups on each side of the issue—Focus on the Family and the National Abortion Federation—as well as Exhale, a more neutral postabortion support group.

What did these women choose? After seeing their sonograms, 10 of them had an abortion, nine did not, and one was still deciding. The results are biased, of course—some of the women were hand-picked because their story supports a group's particular agenda. But what struck me most was that no one minded having the ultrasound. Yes, many women at Falls Church resented having to come in twice for an abortion because of the law's 24-hour wait, but the scan itself wasn't a problem. In fact, several regarded it as a way to hold themselves accountable. "I was OK with seeing it," said Celia, the Catholic mom who went through with the abortion. "I have to be responsible for what I do."

Which raises the crucial question, Do sonograms change minds? Published studies say no: In the largest to date, examining 15,168 pregnancies at 19 abortion clinics, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that only 1.6 percent of women who viewed their scans opted not to terminate. Even among women who were less certain about their decision, just 4.8 percent chose to continue their pregnancies. Elrod says she's seen different results, telling me that around half the women considering an abortion at Keim change their mind after viewing their sonogram—a number consistent with data collected by Focus on the Family. But there have been no peer-reviewed, published studies of women at CPCs. (Tracy Weitz, Ph.D., a coauthor of the UCSF study and admittedly pro-choice, says she has tried to conduct one, but the centers have turned her down.)

The pattern I observed: Women who chose to go to a CPC tended to be more vocal about their faith and see a human life in the sonogram, while those at an abortion clinic felt the scan revealed an unformed mass of cells. The difference had less to do with comfy chairs or big-screen viewing and more to do with the patient's beliefs before she even set foot in the door. I noticed too that many of the women I interviewed from CPCs were still unsure about their decision at the time of their appointments; they also often first sought care later in their pregnancies—on average at 11 weeks, compared with seven weeks at abortion clinics—which affected how they reacted to the image. Hannah, for example, a minister's daughter, was 20 years old, 11 weeks pregnant, and working with a landscaping crew in Mobile, Alabama, when she went to an abortion clinic and had an ultrasound. On her way out a protester directed her to a CPC down the street, where she had another ultrasound that she looked at more closely. "You could see every little detail—the eye sockets, the hands, everything," she said. In that instant she decided to continue her pregnancy. "It was that mommy feeling of 'I'm protecting my baby.'" But Janet, then a 25-year-old administrative assistant in Cleveland, saw something very different at only five and a half weeks pregnant. She'd gone to an abortion clinic because she and her boyfriend wanted to be married before having a child. "When I saw that it was just a small circle," she said, "I was fine with my decision to have the abortion."

The more stories I heard, the more I could understand how both sides have become so convinced they are right.

A very private decision
The sonogram laws were, of course, intended to help eliminate abortion. Yet it's unclear if they've had that effect. At least one pro-life expert admits they've fallen short of expectations: "Some ultrasound laws have probably done good," Michael J. New, Ph.D., an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who studies abortion legislation, told me, "but probably not as much good as we would have hoped." Statistics show that the U.S. abortion rate did drop 13 percent between 2008 and 2011 to an all-time low, according to the reproductive-health research group the Guttmacher Institute. But it's hard to tease out why: Use of birth control, especially methods like the IUD, went up, and fewer women were getting pregnant to begin with.

Codding, of Falls Church, is adamant that these laws are harmful. "Sonograms may help some women be involved in the process," she says, acknowledging the patients who told me the scan made them feel more accountable. "But it should be the choice of the doctor and the patient—not the law—whether to have this test. These laws don't have any effect other than interjecting government between the doctor and patient."

We may never know exactly what impact sonograms have on a woman's decision to continue or terminate her pregnancy. But simply asking the question taught me this: For almost every woman, the decision to end a pregnancy is not about politics; it's profoundly personal.

"You can take each woman's story, and if she's sad, count it as a point for the pro-life movement. And if she's stronger, that's a point for the pro-choice movement," says Kate Hindman, 21, a volunteer with Exhale, a support group for women who've had abortions. But all the stories she hears are much more nuanced, including her own. After discovering she was pregnant at 17 by a guy who was seeing someone else, she'd hoped her sonogram would convince her not to have an abortion.

Hindman remembers seeing the image, the arms and legs beginning to emerge, and a white spot that she imagined was the heart. "I said, 'Wow,' and I was crying," she says. "But it didn't change my mind." She had the abortion, then worked to make peace with it. "Many women who call Exhale are a little sad or confused," Hindman says. "But then they talk about why they made this decision, and it's striking how deeply and thoughtfully they considered it. People assume abortion is simple. It's not. Women are weighing this reason against that reason, what their heart wants versus what their head wants. It's such a huge choice."

Phoebe Zerwick is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for O, the Oprah Magazine.

I have testicles, they're fairly sizeable (physically, not metaphorically), and they don't need a separate seat on the subway. In fact, no matter how big someone's balls are (again, speaking from a purely physical standpoint), they will never need an extra seat. Yet some men continue to sit on the train as though they need two, or three, or four seats nonetheless, and the MTA is stopping this nonsense now.

Starting in January, the managing body in charge of New York City's transportation will be launching an awareness campaign that targets men who think their balls are more deserving of seats than anyone else taking the subway at rush hour, BuzzFeed reported.

Of course, the MTA will likely not be targeting those who are actually suffering from elephantiasis (click for video!), but that is a rare condition that most men don't have. And if they did, they probably wouldn't be taking the subway, so none of these dudes have any excuse. Finally someone is going to tell them to close their legs and let other people sit. The MTA will also be targeting people who refuse to practice backpack courtesy. (TAKE YOUR BACKPACK OFF!)

Also, I am going to be real with you, sometimes balls smell and the last time I saw a guy spreading his legs wide on the train, the entire section was also overpowered with a sweat smell that could have been avoided had he not been peacocking and just closed his legs a little. Yes, people can smell your balls. No, usually it's not wanted.

The MTA will be making use of signs, AM NY reported, and possibly making announcements in the trains. It's going to be pretty hard to keep your legs parted as if they were letting every Jew in Egypt escape pharaoh between them, when a disembodied voice is reminding you to keep your balls in check.

So enjoy your "man spreading" while you can, man spreaders! Your era is over and soon you will have to sit like the rest of us: Not crushing our balls, but also not airing them out in public. (Like the dudes in the gym who will literally use the hand dryer for their giant testes. Why do you do that, old men at the gym? Can the MTA talk to you next?)

Image via Mentakingup2muchspaceonthetrain/Tumblr

Five months after Todd Bedrick’s daughter was born, he took some time off from his job as an accountant. The company he works for, Ernst & Young, offered paid paternity leave, and he decided to take six weeks — the maximum amount — when his wife, Sarah, went back to teaching. He learned how to lull the fitful baby to sleep on his chest and then to sit very still for an hour to avoid waking her. He developed an elaborate system for freezing and thawing his wife’s pumped breast milk. And each day at lunchtime, he drove his daughter to the elementary school where Sarah teaches so she could nurse. When she came home at the end of the day, he handed over the baby and collapsed on the couch.

“The best part was just forming the bond with her,” said Mr. Bedrick, who lives in Portland, Ore., and went back to work in June. “Had I not had that time with her, I don’t think I’d feel as close to her as I do today.”

Social scientists who study families and work say that men like Mr. Bedrick, who take an early hands-on role in their children’s lives, are likely to be more involved for years to come and that their children will be healthier. Even their wives could benefit, as women whose husbands take paternity leave have increased career earnings and have a decreased chance of depression in the nine months after childbirth. But researchers also have a more ominous message. Taking time off for family obligations, including paternity leave, could have long-term negative effects on a man’s career — like lower pay or being passed over for promotions.

In other words, Mr. Bedrick is facing the same calculus that women have for decades.

Women’s role in society and the economy has been transformed over the last half-century. Today, 70 percent of women with children at home are in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But only recently have men’s roles begun to change in significant ways.

Paternity leave is perhaps the clearest example of how things are changing — and how they are not. Though the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave for new parents, it requires no paid leave. The 14 percent of companies that do offer pay, like Ernst & Young, do so by choice. Twenty percent of companies that are supposed to comply with the law, meanwhile, still don’t offer paternity leave, according to the 2014 National Study of Employers by the Families and Work Institute. And almost half the workers in the United States work at smaller companies that are not required to offer any leave at all.

Even when there is a policy on the books, unwritten workplace norms can discourage men from taking leave. Whether or not they are eligible for paid leave, most men take only about a week, if they take any time at all. For working-class men, the chances of taking leave are even slimmer.

“There is still some stigma about men who say, ‘My kids are more important than my work,’ ” said Scott Coltrane, a sociologist studying fatherhood who is the interim president of the University of Oregon. “And basically that’s the message when men take it. But the fact that women are now much more likely to be at least a principal breadwinner, if not the main breadwinner, really changes the dynamic.”

The evolving roles of men and women could eventually change workplace culture, he and other social scientists say. If more women play the breadwinner role and more men ask for family-friendly policies, it could become hard for employers to treat them differently on the basis of gender roles.

“If men are asking for more stuff, it can help make the workplace more kid-friendly,” Mr. Coltrane said.

The challenge, however, is not just persuading employers to offer paternity leave but also persuading men to take it.

In certain corners of the economy, paternity leave, which is increasingly called partner or primary caregiver leave, is already the norm, partly because of some companies’ efforts to accommodate same-sex and adoptive parents.

Silicon Valley, which has led the way with corporate benefits and employs a disproportionate number of people in childbearing years, has noteworthy partner benefits, including 17 weeks of paid time off at Facebook and eight at Yahoo. In 2004, Ernst & Young, where Mr. Bedrick works as an audit manager, increased its paid paternity leave to six weeks from two for fathers who are primary caregivers (including same-sex parents and, as in his case, after mothers return to work). Three states — California, New Jersey and Rhode Island — have started programs requiring employers to give both parents paid parental leave, financed by disability money that comes out of payroll taxes.

But over all, paternity leave has been declining. The share of companies that offer it dropped five percentage points from 2010 to 2014, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, highlighting the fact that employers — who have to patch together coverage — don’t always see leave as beneficial to the company. Nearly a third of men report that they had no option to take leave, paid or not, for the birth of a child, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Eighty-nine percent of all fathers took some time off after their baby’s birth, but almost two-thirds of them took one week or less, according to a study by two professors of social work, Lenna Nepomnyaschy of Rutgers and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia. Low-income and minority fathers are least likely to take leave, it found. And men often use sick or vacation days and cite work pressure and unwritten expectations as reasons for not taking longer leaves, according to a study published this year by the Boston College Center for Work & Family and sponsored by EY, the global parent company of Ernst & Young.

Cultural messages tend to reinforce the stigma. Last spring, Daniel Murphy, a second baseman for the New York Mets, was criticized when he took the three days of paternity leave allowed by Major League Baseball. “I would have said: ‘C-section before the season starts. I need to be at opening day,’ ” Boomer Esiason, a radio talk show host and former professional football player, said on his program. (He would later apologize for the remarks.) Mike Francesa, another radio talk show host, added: “You’re a Major League Baseball player; you can hire a nurse.” Men often receive subtle or not-so-subtle messages that leave is unacceptable, even if it’s in the employee handbook.

A lawyer in San Francisco worked at a large corporate law firm when his two children were born. Although the firm offered four weeks of paid leave to new fathers, a partner gave him a different message.

“One of the partners in particular made the comment: ‘How are you going to service your clients? What’s your level of commitment to the firm?’ ” said the lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve professional relationships.

The lawyer did take the full leave, after discussing it with his clients. Another lawyer at the firm helped with immediate matters and the new father was available to clients by email when he was at home. That is common for men on partner leave. Half said they did some work and checked email while they were out, the Boston College study found.

Ultimately, the lawyer said, the only repercussion was that his bonus was smaller because he had four fewer weeks of billable hours. He has since left the firm for another job.

Researchers have described the “motherhood penalty” for women in the work force. The Journal of Social Issues last year published three studies on the so-called flexibility stigma for men, which together leave little doubt that there is reason for men to fear reducing hours or taking time off for family reasons.

One of the studies was by Mr. Coltrane of the University of Oregon. It used data from 6,403 men in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and was the first major longitudinal study — tracking the same group of people over time — to show that taking time off for family reasons reduced men’s earnings, just as it reduced women’s earnings. When men reduced their hours for family reasons, they lost 15.5 percent in earnings over the course of their careers, on average, compared with a drop of 9.8 percent for women and 11.2 percent for men who reduced their hours for other reasons.

When men start diverging from the breadwinner role by taking time off or working fewer hours — or, as Mr. Coltrane puts it, “become active-enough parents and begin looking like what we think of as mothers” — they can be penalized.

Another study found that men who used flexible work arrangements, whether taking temporary family leave or working from home or part time, received worse job evaluations and lower hourly raises. The third found that men who requested family leave were at greater risk of being demoted or laid off because they were perceived to have negative traits that are used to stigmatize women, like weakness and uncertainty, not masculine ones like competitiveness and ambition.

“The implications are dire for gender equality in the workplace,” said Laurie A. Rudman, the lead author of the third study and a psychology professor at Rutgers. One solution, she said, is to recast family leave as a manly thing to do: “Change the conversation of what it means to be a 50-50 husband in order to underscore it takes amazing strength for men to do that — it’s the opposite of weak.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Mr. Bedrick answered the door at his home on a cul-de-sac, carrying his daughter in one arm and dragging their huge golden retriever, Koby, with the other. A giant stuffed giraffe stood sentry at the top of the stairs. The baby, who was 9 months old, had just learned to crawl, so the Bedricks were beginning to baby-proof.

“I would say she does a ton more than me, just with breast-feeding alone,” Mr. Bedrick said of his wife. Still, their division of labor is in many ways a modern one. Since Ms. Bedrick started teaching again this fall, he packs her breast pump bag in the morning and cleans the bottles and accessories in the evening. And recently, as they have been trying to wean the baby off nighttime feedings, he is the one to get out of bed and comfort her when she cries.

“I had that experience of doing anything I needed to do to get her to sleep,” Mr. Bedrick said. “If I hadn’t had those six weeks, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Soon after the Bedricks found out that Sarah was pregnant, Todd was offered a job on a larger team at work. The couple had already decided that he would take leave to delay day care as long as possible.

“I just told them flat out, ‘I’d love to be a part of the team, but I just want to make sure you are aware in advance that I had that planned,’ ” he said. “It wasn’t a heated discussion; it just got approved.”

Even at Ernst & Young, which encourages parental leave, it is unusual for men to take the full six weeks, as Mr. Bedrick did. His main concern was that he not lose any of his work responsibilities. He said that on the advice of an Ernst & Young coach, he discussed that fear with two of the partners on his new team. He came back to his same assignments.

Ms. Bedrick said her husband’s time as the primary caretaker was good for their relationship: “One day he was like: ‘You know when I used to come home from work and the laundry wasn’t done and dinner wasn’t done and I said I totally understand? I didn’t. I just said that. Now I really get it.’ ” She added: “It’s good for him to see it’s a lot of work. You’re not just relaxing.”

No matter how much a couple plans to share the workload, the first few weeks of a baby’s life reshape everything. If the mother is breast-feeding, she already has primary responsibility for the child, and months of solo diaper-changing and baby-soothing duty during maternity leave set lifelong patterns.

“Part of the rationale for paternity leave is if men are able to be very involved early on in the care of their children, they’re going to be more involved ever after, and it will translate to more equal sharing and equal roles,” said Ms. Waldfogel, the professor of social work. Though men who want to be more involved fathers are probably more likely to take leave in the first place, she found that even after controlling for fathers’ commitment levels, those who took significant leaves were more likely to do hands-on child care later.

In her study with Ms. Nepomnyaschy, which analyzed 10,000 children in the United States, they found that fathers who took two or more weeks of leave were significantly more likely to do tasks like diapering, feeding, dressing and bathing later on. Fathers who took less than two weeks, however, were often no more likely to be involved than those who took none at all.

The biggest beneficiaries of all this diaper-changing by fathers, perhaps, are mothers.

One of the clearest ways to bolster women’s participation in the labor force, economists say, is to involve men more at home, for the simple reason that women are more able to work outside the home when they are not doing all the child care. The Institute for Labor Market Policy Evaluation in Sweden found that a mother’s future earnings increased an average of 7 percent for every month of leave the father took.

“When men are committing to do tag-team parenting and they’re willing to sacrifice some of their wage potential,” Mr. Coltrane said, “it’s very helpful for the women and also for the long-term wages of the family.”

Tom Stocky, vice president for search at Facebook, posted a long status update on Facebook on the last day of his four-month paternity leave last year.

“When I tell people I’m on a four-month leave, the initial response is typically surprise that my company offers such a generous benefit,” he wrote. “That’s typically followed by surprise that I’m actually taking it — why would I want to subject myself to that torture (from parents), why would I want to sit around and do nothing for four months (from nonparents), or why would I want to do what is surely a career-limiting move.”

The post, meant for his friends, would soon circulate. He heard from people around the world, and he still hears about it from other men at Facebook.

“A lot of guys at the company reach out to me,” said Mr. Stocky, who manages 150 people. “I’ve kind of become a model or a template — like, ‘This is O.K.; taking four months off is totally cool.’ ”

Most of them, he said, start by asking how they can make their leave the least disruptive at work. He tells them to prioritize what’s best for their families instead. “They’re so worried about the image it will have,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Unplug and don’t email anyone.’ ”

Now that he is back, Mr. Stocky, 36, and his wife, Avni Shah, a vice president at Google, divide day care drop-offs and pickups at the beginning of each week. She does the laundry and cooks for their daughter, who is now 2; he does baths, swim classes and “all the ordering on Amazon Mom, which I love the name of.”

Workplace culture may be both the most important and the hardest thing to change to encourage paternity leave. Facebook and other companies have pushed people to accept leave-taking. Senior management prominently taking leave — and talking about it, as Mr. Stocky has — is essential, people who study the issue say.

Lori Goler, Facebook’s vice president for human resources, said that when a parent-to-be comes by to discuss leave, she refers to it as “the four-month leave” as an encouragement to take all the time offered. Also, executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, deliberately say people are on parental leave as opposed to saying they are “out of the office.”

Even so, not all fathers at Facebook take the full four months allotted to them. Though the time has been increasing, they now take more than two months, on average. A majority of women take the full four months of maternity leave.

At Ernst & Young, about 95 percent of employees who have babies take some amount of time. But 90 percent of new fathers at the firm still take only two to three weeks, not six. Most mothers get three months, and nearly all take the entire time. Men have increased their amount of leave slightly over the last few years, but the company is trying to increase it even more, said Maryella Gockel, flexibility leader at EY.

Alison Hooker, chief talent development officer at EY, said: “We make sure anyone in a senior role makes sure they talk about their families. That tone really influences younger men to take a two-week or three-week paternity session and gets people to six weeks over time.”

They tell a story about Mark Weinberger, the chief executive of EY, going to an important meeting in China. He was asked publicly whether he would be attending the official post-meeting dinner. He responded that he would miss it because he had to get back to the United States in time to take his daughter to her driving test.

Ernst & Young also started a confidential coaching program for parents in 2012. It was just for mothers until someone suggested that fathers be included, too. Though Mr. Bedrick has been back from leave since June, he still meets with his coach every couple of months. At a recent session, they talked about the challenges of managing home life now that Ms. Bedrick has returned to work after her school’s summer break.

Peer influence can change workplace culture, too, according to a study published in the American Economic Review in July. The study found that when a man’s co-workers took paternity leave, it increased the chance that he would take it by 11 percentage points — and that if his brother took it, by 15 points. Co-workers might share information about costs and benefits, like how their bosses reacted to paternity leave, and the effect snowballs over time as the information spreads.

Public policy can also shift cultural norms over time. Many European countries with generous policies on parental leave found that men weren’t taking it. Sweden, Norway, Germany, Portugal and Iceland all increased participation significantly by providing incentives, like paid leave that families lost if men didn’t use it.

“It’s workplace by workplace, and saying that we as a society think this is important,” said Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia. “What we do in terms of the laws and the rights that we provide gradually changes cultural norms. They’re starting to say that taking leave around the time you have a new child is not a bad thing. It’s expected.”

Sarah Bedrick has begun teaching part time so she can spend more time with their daughter. Mr. Bedrick misses the baby during the day, she said, and tries to come home in time to play with her and give her a bath. “Their bond grew,” she said.

Mr. Bedrick added, “I definitely would not have done anything differently.”

A friend of mine posted this on Twitter:

I really respect the amount of self-awareness it takes to ask that question! It’s easy to disavow the trolls sending rape and death threats, but it takes much more courage to acknowledge that you might be perpetuating harmful attitudes in less-obvious ways.

[Author's Note: I felt like it was important to establish some context, but you can also skip the 101-level discussion and jump right to the list.]

This question hints at two important concepts: implicit biases and microaggressions.

We have all internalized harmful stereotypes about women — it’s part of growing up in a culture that inculcates gender roles from a very early age. Our culture has deeply-embedded patriarchal power structures (ditto racist and classist and ableist and transphobic and homophobic and so on…) that we all absorb and have to intentionally question and deprogram. We all, regardless of our background or our conscious beliefs, have implicit biases that affect the way we see the world.

Groups that are dominated by one sort of person tend to develop ways of talking and thinking that implicitly center the identities and experiences of that one sort of person, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, because it communicates to outsiders that they are different (at best; unwelcome interlopers or second-class citizens, at worst). It can introduce, or exacerbate, the further self-fulfilling prophecies of impostor syndrome and stereotype threat. It can put pressure on people to conform to a certain type in order to succeed.

This context is the heart of why inclusive language matters, why a seemingly-harmless joke isn’t that harmless, and why small things seem to sometimes get blown out of proportion.

Which brings us to microaggressions: “social exchanges in which a member of a dominant culture says or does something, often accidentally, and without intended malice, that belittles and alienates a member of a marginalized group.”

These are little things. Things that many people do without thinking about them and certainly without intending anything by them. Things that individually are meaningless, but in aggregate set the tone of an entire community.

Little things reinforce stereotypes and implicit biases instead of challenging them. They insulate members of the dominant group from having to confront their own biases. They communicate underlying attitudes and community norms. Language may or may not shape the way we think, but it is a powerful signal about what sort of behavior is and is not acceptable, and what your personal expectations are.

Worse, those little things can subtly reinforce the attitudes of actual abusers and signal that they are welcome in our community. (Example: rape jokes are seen as tacit nods of approval by actual rapists.)

Communication is tricky even on the best of days; the best defense against misunderstandings is to develop a finely-tuned sense of empathy, and try to notice as much as possible what we’re doing that might create distance from someone else and keep us from questioning our own assumptions about the world.

Sometimes it’s hard to see these things without getting defensive, or going too far down the road of guilt and excessive self-flagellation. I think it’s important to realize that every single one of us makes this kind of mistake, no one is immune. The determination of character, in my opinion, isn’t whether you slip up, but what you do about it afterward.

If you care about others, nothing feels worse than realizing you accidentally stepped on someone else’s foot. I really think it’s a natural reaction to bristle a bit, to try to minimize it, to protect ourselves from feeling bad. Once I recognized that defensiveness as a natural part of the process, it was much easier for me to realize I was doing it, then apologize and move on instead of digging myself deeper. It takes practice.

The good news, though, is that little things are easy to change. Personally I believe that if you can change the outward tone of a culture, you stand a good chance of changing the actual beliefs and attitudes of that culture.

Caveats: not everyone notices or cares about every single thing on this list, and I’ve probably missed some that my own privilege blinds me to. This is a list specifically focused on sexist microaggressions; while some of the things on this list might also apply to, for instance, transfolk or non-binary folks or people of color, I can’t claim to speak for anyone other than myself.

The post is written as “things men do”, because that’s the question that was asked, but of course anyone can (and does) perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Finally, this list is written for those who, like me, try to err on the side of being maximally-inclusive. Many of these things are common in our culture, and while I try to model good behavior, I don’t correct others’ usage unless they ask. I consider this an application of the robustness principle.

So, without further ado.

1. Using “guys” to mean “people”.

I fear I’m earning a bit of a reputation for this one among my colleagues, as I sometimes good-naturedly respond to “Hey guys, [question]?” with “I’m not a guy, but [answer]”. Yes, most people intend this in a gender-neutral way; no, it is not actually gender-neutral. If you think about it, “guys” is only gender-neutral in a situation where maleness is the assumed default.

Many women don’t notice or mind this, but to some in our male-dominated field it can be a tiny, pointed reminder of the extra work they have to do just to fit in, be seen, be taken seriously.

Personally, it can also make me wonder if I’m being seen at all; I often read a message to a mailing list, or in a chat room, that begins “hey guys” and wonder whether the speaker realizes that not everyone on the list is a man. Worse, I worry it sends the wrong message to other women who might observe the exchange. For instance, if a woman was thinking of getting involved in WordPress development, could all the “guys” messages on the wp-hackers list make her think there aren’t any women in that community?

Don’t do the “guys and girls” thing either, which is marginally better but still makes it feel like an afterthought. Try: “folks”, “y’all”, “everyone”, “team”, “channel”, or just “awesome people”. :) If my own experience is any indication, it’ll sound weird for a month or two and then become normal.

Relatedly, avoid assuming male users in your documentation. Just stop worrying and embrace the singular “they”.

2. Similarly: “girls” for “women”.

Yes, I know it’s the best we have as an informal analogue to “guys”, but it infantilizes women and sounds patronizing. It might subconsciously encourage us to take women less seriously. In general, “girl” should be used to refer to female children only. Like “guys”, this will sound weird for about a month and will then become normal.

Some folks are reclaiming “lady” for informal usage, but I’ve found that can be a bit loaded (personally, I don’t think of myself as a lady; when I was a child, my grandfather would reprimand me for wearing jeans or climbing trees, because those things were “unladylike”). YMMV, but for people you don’t know well, I would stick to “women”.

3. “Mom” as an example of a non-technical user.

I know: your mom, like a lot of people, may not be very good with computers. (My mom, on the other hand, while she doesn’t really give herself credit for it, is quite good at figuring computer stuff out. She programmed with punchcards in college and can do things with Excel that I have no idea how to do. It’s my dad who always needs computer help.)

This tired old trope erases the vast number of computer-literate women who happen to be mothers, as well as encouraging condescension. Again, the context here is a society and a professional field where women already struggle to be taken seriously; no need to pile on.

This trope has its own article on the Geek Feminism Wiki, which suggests alternatives: “When the purpose of the statement is to convey the idea that something is “really simple”, ideal nouns will refer to non-human or purely technical categories, such as cat, non-technical user, Ubuntu user, or “newbie.””

4. Using avatars that are male by default.

If the default (or unset) avatar on your site reads as male, you’re making an implicit statement that your “normal” user is male and anyone else is an exception. Personally, I think using a non-gendered (even non-human) avatar can really showcase an app’s creativity.

5. Describing software or algorithms as “sexy”, “hot”, etc.

By sexualizing something that does not need to be sexualized, you’re creating a college-frat-boy type environment, as well as implicitly conflating quality with sexual attractiveness. If I work with you, I want to know that you’re enough of an adult to be able to appreciate something (or someone) without wanting to fornicate with it.

Anyhow, it’s vague. What is so great about it? Is it really efficient, does it solve a problem in a new way, does it scale really well, does it have a great UI?

Related: Referring to hardware (or cars, or whatever) by female names or pronouns. Yeah, okay, grand naval tradition and all that, but it’s still kind of weird. Can you not tell the difference between women and objects?

6. Assuming women they meet are in non-technical roles.

If you meet a woman in a professional setting, like a conference (or the afterparty!), your first assumption should be that she’s there because she’s interested in the material. This seems obvious, but most women have had the unfortunate experience of being assumed to be “the marketing chick” or there with a boyfriend.

Under no circumstances should you ask a woman to prove her technical knowledge to you (even in jest).

Additionally, there’s a lot of implicit misogyny when you feign surprise upon discovering that a conventionally-attractive or feminine-presenting woman is also a geek. If you tell a woman approvingly that she’s “one of the guys” or “not like other women”, well, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you’ve got some assumptions you need to rethink. (And I’m saying that as a woman who was proud to be called both of those things at one point.)

So, don’t say something like “Wow, I would never guessed you were a nerd!” Technical women often have to walk a fine line between looking properly “nerdy” (at the risk of coming across as sloppy) and looking put-together (but risking being taken less seriously).

7. Fetishizing “hot geek girls”.

It’s not a compliment to get comments like “Wow, a beautiful woman who’s also into kernel hacking?? Will you marry me?”

Rule of thumb: Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to a man! It’s disrespectful to focus on someone’s appearance instead of their accomplishments.

The “fake marriage proposal” is extra weird because it’s grounded in a measure of success predicated on one’s desirability as a sexual or romantic partner. Women are people in their own right and have value independent of their relationships to men. A radical idea, I know.

An unsolicited “I find you attractive!” remark isn’t a compliment, it’s a note from a boner. I think it’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of women in technical careers didn’t get into them in order to serve as eye candy or find a date.

We don’t want to be singled out and given extra attention because “ooooh, a woman!”. Yes, being a woman in tech has its unique challenges, but no one wants to feel like they’re only getting attention because of their gender. We want to be treated normally, like human beings who happen to share some perfectly ordinary and normal interests with you.

8. Denigrating things by comparing them to women or femininity.

Don’t casually accuse someone of being “girly” or a “pussy”, or say that they “fight like a girl”, or make fun of them for liking “chick flicks”. Stop policing masculinity with comments about men who cross the line into “too feminine”.

Be on guard for unnecessarily-gendered terms (hysterical, shrill, “man up”, “grow a pair”, ballsy). Notice how those examples are all predicated on the assumption that acting like a man is inherently good, and acting like a woman is inherently bad?

Those are some of the most overt ones, but this kind of thing is weirdly common. I recently called out a cyclist friend for referring to the lowest gear as the “granny gear”.

9. Stereotyping women’s needs… or ignoring them.

Emery boards as conference swag? Really? Protip: Women use battery packs and stickers too.

Conversely, many apps just outright ignore features that disproportionately affect female users (like the conspicuous absence of period tracking functionality in the Apple’s new Health app). The whole issue of swag t-shirts is a big one in this category.

Which brings us neatly to…

10. Using dark UI patterns.

If you write software that enables harassment and stalking, or makes it difficult for users to protect their personal information, you’re disproportionately driving women off of your platform or making them do extra work. Respecting user’s privacy and emphasizing consent in software design is fundamentally an issue of equality — not just gender, but across the board.

Watch out for requirements, such as “real name” policies, that unfairly impact marginalized groups. Commit to writing software that embodies affirmative consent.

11. Repeating generalizations about gender essentialism.

“Women just aren’t interested in programming/math/logic.” This is a thing that people really think, and say out loud. Statistically, the variation between individuals dwarfs any biological differences, and perpetuating these stereotypes has a real, harmful effect.

Even complimentary stereotypes, like “women are better at communicating” or “women have a better eye for design” contribute to the problem by encouraging a “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” approach to gender. This is also known as benevolent sexism.

Similarly, don’t reduce the gender gap in tech to a problem of “getting more women into the pipeline”. The reality is that women leave the industry at every stage of their careers. Solving the pipeline problem is necessary, but not a magic bullet.

On the flip side, don’t excuse bad behavior with “boys will be boys” type excuses. Dismantling gender stereotypes is also about having more respect for men — believing they are just as capable of empathy and self-restraint as any other adult human being.

12. Assuming every woman in tech feels the same way and/or wants to discuss her experiences “as a woman in tech”.

We’re not a monolith, we can’t all speak for each other, and we often want to just talk about our work instead of being seen as women first. See the Ada Initiative’s great post, Breaking The Unicorn Law.

13. Staying quiet when other men do these things.

Finally: this is everybody’s work. It’s not just the responsibility of those affected to speak up — we all play a part in setting the standards for the communities we’re a part of. Leigh Honeywell has a great post about how each of us can help, in the infosec world or anywhere else:

We aren’t doomed to being the harassment and sexual assault capital of the tech world. We can make a difference. And it starts with each one of us standing up for what we think is right, in the moment when it happens.

The concept of “privilege” seems to often come across as an insult, but I think it’s also a statement that you have power in a particular situation, and it’s possible to use that power for good. Those with more privilege have the power to amplify the voices of others, to challenge the status quo without fearing the consequences of speaking up.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve got. These things serve as a starting point, an MVP, if you will. It’s certainly possible to do more, if you’re willing to devote the time and energy, but these suggestions are the “low-hanging fruit”: small, simple changes that will build the foundation for a better tech culture.

Other great posts along these lines:

Thoughts? Please comment or tweet at me! You can also check out my saved links on Pinboard (basically a firehose of everything I read online).

Who knew? Not only is Thom Tillis the Senator-elect from North Carolina, he’s also an interior designer. At the same time he’s measuring drapes for his new Senate office, he’s taking down the ones in the building where he used to work. Seems Tillis authorized a makeover of the House chamber without asking his fellow legislators. You know, the people who will actually use it while he’s in Washington.

Rep. Grier Martin first noticed the changes when he saw workers covering doors and the masonry walls with drywall. Martin is a Democrat and when folks first got wind of the renovations, most assumed that Tillis just left Democrats out of the loop. But Republican Rep. Julia Howard, who’s spent a lot more time in those chambers than Tillis ever did, was also blindsided.

So far, nobody seems too happy with Tillis. It appears he made a unilateral decision to update the Chamber without consulting anyone. That says a lot about the mentality of our new Senator. His talk of bipartisanship always rang hollow since he was so often recorded scheming to screw his perceived enemies. But this episode really speaks less to his partisan nature and more to his arrogant one. He’s the smartest guy in the room and he always knows what’s best for everyone.

From a political standpoint, the move was stupid. When the Senate revamped its chamber a few years ago, the Democrats in control convened a bipartisan group of senators to approve the renovations. Republicans own this one. At a time when the state has a huge budget hole, schools are underfunded and people were denied healthcare, the GOP leadership decided to spend money making their lives easier instead of helping the people of North Carolina. These ads just about write themselves.

Thom Tillis has always seen himself as a smooth political operator. In fact, he’s tone deaf and clumsy. But he’s also a man on the move. He’s got too much going on to worry about how his bad decisions will affect the people he left behind.

The Observer has an interview with Susan Greenfield this weekend. There are lots of questions it might prompt. Why, for example, has she still not answered Dorothy Bishop’s 2011 question about cause preceding effect when it comes to comments about autism, ADHD and internet use? Is the climate change analogy really all that helpful? Or why are scientists who claim to “march to the beat of their own drum” always a bit annoying?

But it’s hard to get to any of that. Because in the second paragraph we’re confronted with an old, clunky cliche of reporting of women in science, as the writer first feels the need to take us on a tour of the baroness’s body:

The professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford has long, youthfully blond hair and is dressed in an above-knee pink dress and cream wedges. She tells me she plays squash as often as possible with a 21-year-old squash trainer. A remarkably fit-looking 63-year-old, she is an impressive figure in more ways than the merely professional.

This gets in the way of critically appraising Greenfield’s work, just as it has got in the way of a robust critique and celebration of female scientists for decades.

According to an oft-cited paper by Marcel LaFollette, a 1926 magazine once introduced an eminent medical researcher as a woman whose mahogany furniture “gleams”. From the same study, but a 1950 magazine, a senior figure in the Atomic Energy Commission was praised for sewing her own clothes. Later, as Dorothy Nelkin notes, Maria Mayer (Nobel physics prize, 1963) was described as “a tiny, shy, touchingly devoted wife and mother, her children were perfectly darling” and Barbara McClintock (Nobel prize in medicine, 1983) introduced as “well known for baking with black walnuts”.

In today’s more enlightened times, no longer do journalists seek to domesticate female scientists and look past the prizes, publications and other achievements to a gleaming kitchen table. No, they look at the woman herself, but they perhaps linger too long on certain other features of her femininity which similarly obscure her work. As noted by a great 2010 paper by media scholars at the University of Cardiff, Mwenya Chimba and Jenny Kitzinger, descriptions of women scientists in the early 21st century with lines like, “She looks like an off-duty Bond girl, but she’s actually a physicist. Given the chance, plenty of viewers would happily experiment with her.” Or, more plainly, “A sparkling intellect doesn’t get you on to the pages of Vogue.” Welcome to the era of scientific totty.

Part of a larger project considering the representation of women scientists in UK media, Chimba and Kitzinger’s research was rooted in an analysis of 51 interviews with scientists, complemented by research into female scientists’ own experiences of working with the media, as well as journalists and communication professionals.

One clear difference emerged from their study: the attention given to the appearance of women scientists. Half of the profiles of women referred to their clothing, physique and/or hairstyle whereas this was only true for 21% of the profiles of men. Such references might seem fairly innocuous, especially when located within a generally positive article, but Chimba and Kitzinger stress the ways in which references to a man’s appearance carry a different tone. For example, while women might be described as having a “mane of blonde hair”, the focus for men is more likely to be on a beard, with rather different connotations: “His full white beard is worn more in homage to Charles Darwin than the Almighty”. It’s not just journalists doing this though, hunting out a line about “the Nigella of science”, they found it was sold to an editor by a television company’s PR agency.

References to hair and heels, etc might be welcomed as a way of showing off a generally unseen glamorous side to science. A headline such as “Blonde hair, short skirt, big brain” could be a mater of a journalist playfully deconstructing the various stereotypes on offer; challenging images of boffin and bimbo at once. At the same time, however, we shouldn’t forget the ways a focus on female scientists’ appearance may draw attention away from the scientist’s professionalism, and there may be the implicit accusation that she is being manipulative and using her sexuality to attract attention.

Perhaps the most important finding of Chimba and Kitzinger’s work is the way they draw attention to the difference in places women are used in science coverage. For example, one publicity officer for a major science organization explained that if they were dealing with a “real heavy-weight current affairs programme” they would go with a white middle-class male, whereas BBC breakfast shows would ask specifically for a young, attractive woman (see Boyce & Kitzinger, 2008, pdf). Another of their research subjects reports that she had trouble moving from kids television, where her tomboy image fitted fine, to adult programming, because she didn’t suit the image of “thinking man’s crumpet”. Men may signal an aura of gravitas in science, while women are used when the science is being made “accessible” or “sexy”; a possible divide between real scientists and scientifically flavoured “eye-candy”.

Also important, and perhaps key when considering Greenfield, the paper also stresses that women aren’t just the objects of media representation, they are active negotiators of their own image too, even if they do not always have control over the context of it. For example, one spoke of it as a matter of “walking a tightrope” over how much do they use appearance for their advantage, “or is that getting in bed with the devil?”. One mentioned being personally flattered as well as personally and professionally offended. Another said she gave up because of the personal pressure on image.

Men on television get letched over too, of course, and this can make them feel uncomfortable too, but whether it has the same impact on their career is debatable. It’s difficult being a scientist-populariser at the best of times, but Chimba and Kitzinger suggest it is especially risky for women, especially as sexuality gets folded into this. Playing with the term “media whore”, they quote Laura Barton in saying “even in the intellectual world there are slags, and studs”. As the inevitable critique of Greenfield reemerges (as it should) with the publication of her new book, it’s worth remembering this.

This post is an updated version of one from 2010. Alice Bell is a freelance science writer. She’s bored of reading pieces that stumble over scientists’ skirts, and thinks journalists and editors who let them through should feel a bit embarrassed. She recommends you spend your time listening to the Life Scientific instead.

#DearPrudie: "Help! We just found out our midwives are rabid anti-vaccinationists." http://t.co/RA0wS7RxM9 pic.twitter.com/zWfIOVEf09

— Slate (@Slate) November 14, 2014

At first glance, the answer would appear to be no.

But I'm a pusher, Cady. And now I'm gonna push you. I mean, it really does seem that some sort of peak something has been achieved here:

My wife is nine months pregnant and we are planning a home birth. Our team of two midwives came to our house to do a home visit last week, and shamed us for about 30 minutes when we let them know we would be vaccinating our baby.

Let's take a moment to acknowledge that it is an affront to human dignity as well as to the natural-born right of autonomous perception, to imply (or worse yet, believe) that you can actually be "shamed" by an idiot. Definitions of such will vary, of course, but in my mind, anti-vaxxers are right at the top of the list of people in possession of a moral calculus so dimwitted and selfish that they could not effectively shame anyone for 30 whole minutes about a normal behavioral imperative aimed at both individual and public good, i.e. vaccination.

However, identifying personal affront by any means necessary has long been the provenance of Yacubian man, and the idea of being shamed by a double team of anti-vaxxing midwives is prominent among the reasons why this Dear Prudence question appears, at first blush, so damn peachy.

But, being an optimist, I think it could get whiter. Here are some possibilities, which I'm definitely not going to write this weekend and send sailing into Emily Yoffe's Gmail account like so many handmade origami birds.

• "Help! I Mixed Up My Placenta Pills With My Dog's Fish Oil Tablets"

• "Help! No One on This Commune Will Cater My Vegan Gender Reveal"

• "Help! My Llama Is Getting Skinny-Shamed by a Rare Midwestern Bird"

• "Help! My Mother-in-Law's Trust Fund Administrator Voted for Jesse Jackson"

• "Help! My Polygamous Doula RSVP'ed No to My Handfasting Renewal"

• "Help! My Three-Year-Old Named Our Chickens After the Gorbachevs"

• "Help! My Cat Has Depression and Won't Come Out of Her Yurt"

• "Help! I've Whipped Up a Fortress of Imagined Problems and I Can No Longer See"

I mean, definitely get a new midwife. That's my advice column: Ask a Person Who Suggests You Just Move On.

Further suggestions welcome in the comments.

In 1980, Carol Danvers was part of perhaps the most irresponsible story Marvel Comics has ever put to paper. The plot involved kidnapping, inter-dimensional roofies, and rape, and it ended with Danvers riding off into the sunset with her rapist as her Avengers teammates wiped away tears of joy.

Today, however, Carol Danvers is Captain Marvel, a feminist icon in her self-titled comic book. And in 2018, she is going to be Marvel's first female superhero since 2005 to have her own movie.

Danvers' rise through the Marvel-sphere is, in many ways, the story of women in comics in miniature. And it starts where those stories often started: with the woman as an admiring, leggy love interest.

The Girlfriend

Marvel Super-heroes no. 13 (Marvel)

Carol Danvers makes her first appearance in Marvel's Super-heroes no. 13, published in 1968. Written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gene Conlan, Danvers is ostensibly a security officer at NASA's Cape Kennedy Space Center, but in actuality, she's primarily introduced as a "girl" who, to Captain Mar-Vell, a man who's actually a Kree alien, is as stunning as the heavily guarded aircraft.

"And, indeed, even the shock-resistant senses of Captain Mar-Vell are stunned by the awesome sight they behold," Thomas writes, comparing Danvers to a vehicle. It's a fossilized example of the comic book industry's archaic view of women, a view that was too often applied to Danvers.

Danvers wasn't the only superheroine marginalized in her first appearance. Jean Grey, an original X-Man, was introduced five years earlier in 1963 as Marvel Girl. Susan Storm, a member of the Fantastic Four, was introduced in 1961 as the Invisible Girl. And Black Widow, the only female Avenger to make it to the big screen so far, was just a "gorgeous new menace" in a dress (no costume) in her debut in 1964.

Comics have long been a mirror of American society. The ways women were introduced on the pages reflect how women were seen at the time. Grey and Storm were considered the weakest components of their teams and were bailed out often by their husbands and boyfriends. Black Widow, meanwhile, was a Russian femme fatale and thorn in Iron Man's side. Women were either there to play damsel in distress or to lure men into sexual temptation.

Danvers's primary role, despite being a NASA security chief and former Air Force officer, was to be a love interest. She was a supporting character, a trope really, who had a thing for Captain Mar-Vell but was harsher to his alter ego, Dr. Walter Lawson — a little bit like Superman's Lois Lane:

(Marvel)

Extraordinary things were being done on the pages of Marvel comic books during the 1960s. Men built suits that could fly like planes. Some tapped into the mysteries of the universe with magic. One scaled buildings like a spider. Those things just weren't being done by women. Despite all this imagination and a realm of infinite possibilities, comic book writers, when it came to women, were still constrained by the shackles of real life and the social attitudes of the time.

Carol Danvers was used as a love interest for a long while — not unlike other female characters at the time. And though she's playing a stagnant role, it's an important one. It sets up the rest of her journey throughout the years.

2. A PSA for women's liberation

Ms. Marvel no. 1 (Marvel)

In 1970, Captain Mar-Vell's solo book was canceled, spelling a brief hiatus for Danvers. But the comic book industry was changing without her. The twin effects of the Civil Rights and women's liberation movements began making their mark in the minds of comic book writers and artists during the mid '60s. The comics and storylines created in this period — lasting into much of the '70s — were inclusive and empowering but often skewed toward heavy-handed prescriptivism. Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: the Untold Story explains:

The low-selling Captain America became Captain America and the Falcon, and the new African-American costar began warily dating, and debating, a shrill black militant named Leila. The Avengers tackled women's lib, the Sub-Mariner addressed ecological concerns, and the Incredible Hulk, Thor, and the Inhumans visited the ghetto. Where was the fun in that?

Carol Danvers was not exempt from this. She re-emerged in Ms. Marvel no. 1 in 1977, sporting the ability to fly, enhanced strength, a pre-cognitive "seventh sense," and a short, feathered bob. In that first comic book, writer Gerry Conway offers constant reminders that this woman is tough as nails:

Ms. Marvel no. 1 (Marvel)

Yet Ms. Marvel wasn't exactly breaking molds. Her powers fell into traditional superhero lore, and were similar to those initially borne by Superman. Ms. Marvel wasn't so much presenting an alternative to the patriarchy as she was embodying its ideals.

That may have had something to do with who was writing her. Conway isn't always great at expressing what he thinks about female characters. In 2013, when speaking at a Television Critics Association press tour panel, he said that "comics follow society. They don't lead society."

His work on Ms. Marvel and his treatment of Carol Danvers reflected that. The biggest conceit in the first issues of Ms. Marvel was that Danvers had no idea she was Ms. Marvel. Danvers would get a headache, then come to without any knowledge of the heroic stunts she just performed.

In short, Danvers was a bystander in her own comic.

But even though Conway had a tendency to be ham-fisted with Danvers, he did touch on aspects of Danvers's life as a career-oriented woman. She was frequently pitted against her boss, Jonah Jameson, who wanted to fill his women's magazine with empty-calorie fluff that he believed women "wanted":

Ms. Marvel no. 1 (Marvel)

In that first issue of Ms. Marvel, Conway broached the topics of equal pay, women in journalism, the topics women cover in journalism, "having it all," and balancing a love life with a career, all issues that remain topics of discussion 37 years on.

Though Danvers delivered strong, positive messages about how American society should treat women, the spirit of the character was missing. At times it felt as though she was a vessel for a public service announcement, rather than a unique character with the agency or autonomy that male superheroes routinely possessed. And the moments where she did something that truly defined her character were scant.

How men write women, and the rape of Ms. Marvel

Avenger no. 200 (Marvel)

In the years that followed, thanks to a push from legendary comics writer Chris Claremont, Danvers became a respectable and important character.

Under Claremont, Danvers's origin story was fleshed out — she was in an explosion that gave her Kree abilities — and she began appearing with teams like the Defenders and Avengers and heroes like Spider-Man. Claremont connected her previously disjointed two lives. Danvers held her own. She was confident. She was written as an actual person.

Her peers started becoming powerful and respected as well. Grey went from Marvel Girl to the Phoenix, one of the most powerful entities in the Marvel Universe. Storm was on her path to becoming the Invisible Woman (who would go on to arguably be the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four). And Black Widow finally had a costume and widow-like weaponry.

These breakthroughs would prove short-lived.

In 1980's Avengers no. 200, Danvers finds out she's seven months pregnant with a baby, despite not being pregnant the day before. Strange, father-less pregnancies aren't exactly anything to get up in arms over (see: the Bible). But as James Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief and lead writer on Avengers no. 200, would reveal, a villain named Marcus Immortus kidnapped Danvers against her will. Then, with the aid of machines, he more or less roofied her, impregnated her with a version of himself, and had her memory wiped:

(Marvel)

Carol Strickland, a comics historian who wrote the brilliant essay,"The Rape of Ms. Marvel", points out that George Pérez's art just adds to the fecklessness of this issue.

"The artwork goes to great lengths — two close-up panels — to show Ms. Marvel's ecstasy during the pseudo-mating," Strickland wrote. "Another lesson to be learned from comics. It's okay to rape. Women enjoy rape."

Danvers's tale of cosmic kidnapping and rape gets worse. When she finds out the details of Marcus's plan, Danvers is angry. And she's frustrated that the other Avengers  — many of whom are really happy this baby is being born — cannot grasp the concept that she's been, in her own words, "used":

(Marvel)

As Strickland points out, this flash of anger is well-done. It's how you responsibly handle a scene like this in comic books, how you indicate that a character has been abused and violated against her will. However, later in the book, all this this anger is taken away from Danvers. She feels a soft-spot for Marcus and returns with him to his dimension:

(Marvel)

This sudden change in Danvers's demeanor doesn't strike Earth's mightiest heroes as weird, even though they've heard her tale of brainwashing and rape. Her sudden shift in personality, even after acknowledging that some of it might be due to Marcus's inter-dimensional roofie machines, doesn't elicit any response from her friends or any attempt to talk her out of accompanying Marcus home. Instead, they let their compatriot walk into the sunset, and hope everything works out for the best:

(Marvel)

This is perhaps the darkest moment in Danvers's history, even though the writing doesn't mean it to be. Danvers's fellow Avengers aren't written to be callous. The issue wasn't as scrutinized at the time as it is now — Strickland writes that she received negative feedback and was attacked after writing her essay in January of 1980.

The handling of Danvers's rape is a symptom of a male-dominated industry. There were no checks and balances, no other voices at Marvel. It was only a matter of time before that kind of story would be published, let alone published in a milestone issue of a comic. Claremont, who was responsible for writing Danvers and letting her flourish, was aghast.

"If that had been the point David [Michelinie; one of the writers of the book] was trying to make, that these other Avengers are callous boors, okay then, I may disagree with the point, but if he followed through on it, it would have made sense," Claremont wrote in The X-Men Companion II. "But it seemed to me, looking at the story, looking at the following story, that he was going for: 'This is how you respond to a pregnancy.'"

The power of Chris Claremont and the rise of Binary

Uncanny X-Men #164 (Marvel)

Up until the mid '80s, the conversation surrounding Danvers's character had been more about what happened to her than about what she did on paper. She had too often been a character who was acted upon, rather than a character who acted.This changed with Chris Claremont's second run on the character.

Claremont, a graduate of Bard College, studied political theory and acting in school before interning at Marvel. His interest in political theory was evident when he began writing at the company full time. The clearest example is Claremont's crystallization of Magneto's motivations, showing how his religion and his background as a Holocaust survivor shaped his world view. These elements became fundamental to the character and were always alluded to, if not outright depicted, in the X-Men films.

Claremont was interested in scooping out the guts and marrow of each of his characters to make sense of them. He was paired with the editor Louise "Weezy" Simonson, who created the villain known as Apocalypse. Simonson was one of the few women working in comics at the time and remains a friend of Claremont's to this day. Dave Cockrum, Marvel's ringer at imagining new characters like Storm and Nightcrawler, costumes, and translating the spirit of science-fiction to comics was Claremont's trusted artist.

The three combined to make Uncanny X-Men legendary. And they also combined to give Danvers a new start. Claremont, disgusted with the way Ms. Marvel was treated, wrote a scathing scene in Avengers Annual no. 10 in which Danvers rips into the Avengers for not being there for her and sending her off into another dimension with her rapist:

(Marvel)

Claremont continued Carol's journey in Uncanny X-Men no. 164, where he amplified her powers and gave her a new identity as the cosmic entity Binary. As Binary, Danvers could rip through space at light speed and tap into cosmic energies. Along with these powers, Claremont and his team gave Danvers a dream and the power to realize that dream:

Uncanny X-Men no.164 (Marvel)

The X-Men wanted Carol to join the team. But she had other plans.

"Returning with you means rejecting my heart's desire, but fulfilling that desire means leaving everyone, everything I love. Earth was Carol Danvers' home ... but I fear it has no place for Binary," she tells the X-Men, rejecting their offer of membership and simultaneously raising the stakes about important the dream of exploration is to her.

Danvers would eventually return to Earth under the alias Warbird, a shell of her cosmic self. The bright presence of Binary was dimmed figuratively, and literally, as Danvers's uniform was swapped for a black leotard. Experiencing burnout and depression from her powers and not being able to continue with her dream, Danvers, under the writing of Kurt Busiek, battled alcoholism, ultimately ending with her suspension from the team.

Though this was another nadir for Danvers, it was handled differently. We see her act out, lash out, and really express how she misses the power she had. It's dark, but it defines her.

Becoming Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel #1 (Marvel)

In 2005, Marvel introduced its House of M/ Decimation crossover event. In that series, the Scarlet Witch warps reality, creating a new world based on the hopes and desires of the world's most powerful heroes. In this alternate reality, Danvers is the most famous hero in the world and operates under the title Captain Marvel — the name of her first comic book love interest.

It's one of the more revealing peeks at Danvers's unbridled ambition.

Though that world is a brittle fantasy, Captain Marvel becomes a reality for Danvers in 2012, under the wing of writer Kelly Sue DeConnick. In the first arc of Captain Marvel, DeConnick brings clarity to the character's messy plots and complicated history and focuses each issue on different aspects of Danvers's time in the Air Force, her dreams of exploring space, and what the title Captain Marvel means to her.

In the final chapter of the arc, Captain Marvel no. 6, Carol is traveling through time and is presented with the option to alter the Marvel timestream and live her life as a civilian, or sit passively and watch an explosion give her the powers she never asked for. It's a poetic move by DeConnick, and it gives Danvers agency, freeing her from a Forrest Gump-ish history where things would merely happen to her as an innocent bystander. DeConnick finally gives Danvers a choice:

Captain Marvel no. 6 (Marvel)

DeConnick's Danvers isn't perfect. She's controlling, stubborn, and cocky. She's also selfless, hilarious, and loyal. It would be tempting, considering Danvers's history, to set her up as an avenging angel. But DeConnick is patient and makes her Danvers struggle for each victory. Watching Danvers trade in her leotard for her space captain uniform, and set the pages of artist Dexter Soy's shadowy, stylish world on fire is a fun ride.

In the second volume of Captain Marvel, DeConnick spells out what Claremont hinted at. Claremont crystallized Danvers's dreams of exploration. But DeConnick underlines them — and makes clear all Danvers must leave behind: herromantic interest, the people she loves, and her cat. Carol Danvers follows her dream again (and takes the cat).

Danvers doesn't go to space just because she wants to save the world. It's more than that. It's some mix of selfishness, ambition, ego, desire and selflessness. There is no guilt on Danvers's or DeConnick's part for choosing this path.

Danvers has amassed a fandom largely made up of women known as the Carol Corps. Fans, some of whom are decked out in home-stitched versions of Danvers's space captain uniform, will wait over two hours to see DeConnick speak, and when she does speak — usually words of encouragement to fans to keep their chins up — the entire room goes quiet.

"I'm always surprised at how the book comes up as being a paradigm-changer," DeConnick told me in September. "I don't think of it as that different. I just ... write the person."

DeConnick's approach to Danvers sounds simple enough. But consider for a moment the way Danvers has been presented to us throughout the years. In the '60s, she was compared to a spacecraft; the '70s were insistent on letting us know that she was a woman — and political symbol. The '80s had sent her away for her own good; the '90s saw her fall from grace. We've been waiting a long time to see this woman, this hero, as a person

Throughout DeConnick's run, Captain Marvel has been underscored by the tagline: "Higher, Further, Faster, More." It started as a declaration of Danvers's lust for life and her passion to push herself beyond her limits. With a movie lined up and DeConnick building a world of wonder for Danvers, "higher, further, faster, more" is now an expectation — and a promise of what's to come.

One Monday this September, I woke to the realization that I was officially in abortion overtime. I had entered my twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, which is the point when abortion (except in the most vanishingly rare of medical circumstances) ceases to be a legal option in the state of New York.

I have no desire to have an abortion. I am carrying a baby my husband and I conceived on purpose and whom we can’t wait to raise alongside our older daughter. Yet on that morning, I was acutely aware of having lost one of the most important tools available to women: the ability to exert control over what’s going on inside my uterus.

During both of my pregnancies, I have monitored the weeks available for legal abortion with the same precision that I used to keep track of when to get the nuchal screening, the amnio, the gestational diabetes test. To me, abortion belongs to the same category as the early Cesarean I will need to undergo because of previous surgeries. That is to say, it is a crucial medical option, a cornerstone in women’s reproductive health care. And during pregnancy, should some medical, economic, or emotional circumstance have caused my fate to be weighed against that of my baby, I believe that my rights, my health, my consciousness, and my obligations to others—including to my toddler daughter—outweigh the rights of the unborn human inside me.

Most people, no matter their politics, have absorbed some aspect of the right-wing narrative that abortions are uniformly harrowing and traumatic, when for many women they are brief events that leave no lasting mark.

Talking about abortions in this way may sound heartless and baby-hating—even, I fear, to pro-choice ears. But that’s not because it is heartless or baby-hating; it’s because the conversation around abortion has become so terribly warped. Public discussion of abortion has come to inexorably privilege fetal life over female life. The imaginary futures—the “personhoods”—of the unborn have taken moral precedence over the adult women in whose bodies they grow.

This is why public accounts of abortions are almost always accompanied with ample helpings of guilt and self-flagellation (“the hardest decision of my life,” “something I still think about”), lest the woman sound icy and immoral. In her excellent new book, Pro, a galvanizing call to reclaim abortion as a moral good, the feminist writer Katha Pollitt refers to this as the “awfulization” of abortion. Most people, no matter their politics, have absorbed some aspect of the right-wing narrative that abortions are uniformly harrowing and traumatic, when for many women they are brief events that leave no lasting mark.

And so we need to make it clear that abortions are not about fetuses or embryos. Nor are they about babies, except insofar as they enable women to make sound decisions about if or when to have them. They’re about women: their choices, health, and their own moral value. It might sound far-fetched to suggest that the public debate about reproduction could ever sound this sensible. But there have been times in our history when it did—even when (and sometimes because) women had far fewer rights and freedoms than they do today.

In 1914, Margaret Sanger first launched The Woman Rebel, the newsletter in which she would coin the revolutionary term “birth control.” Back then, babies were the object of less cultish devotion than they are now. There were lots of them, and many more of them died, and so did many of the mothers who bore them at an often-unremitting pace. Sanger’s own mother had eleven children and seven miscarriages before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer at the age of 50. But laws prohibited the dissemination of information about contraception; as a result, desperate women often used abortion as last-resort birth control.

Sanger herself opposed abortion, in part because at that time it was so dangerous. But her argument for contraception was an argument for women’s safety (and their sexual liberation), and it was grounded in the realities of their lives. In the new book The Birth of The Pill, the reporter Jonathan Eig cites Sanger’s description of women “inserting slippery-elm sticks, or knitting needles or shoe hooks into the uterus.” She often told the story of a mother of three who was warned that another pregnancy would kill her. The woman was given no information about how to prevent one, apart from telling her husband to sleep on the roof; she died of a self-induced abortion.

Over the next six decades, Sanger’s battle to increase access to contraception would prove successful, but abortion remained illegal. It is easy to forget that a wide array of political actors fought to change that, from feminists to church leaders to Republicans, including Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who as governor signed California’s liberal 1967 abortion law. The focus of their concern was not unborn children but the women being maimed and killed by often-gruesome procedures. Back then, the debate hewed closer to the reality that abortion has always been a quotidian fact of life.

“I never felt guilty or ashamed,” my aunt said. “I did what I had to do for me.”

This is certainly true within my own family. My paternal grandmother had an abortion when she and my grandfather accidentally conceived during the Depression. “She felt that bringing a baby into that world was just not conscionable,” her daughter, my aunt, recently told me. “So she didn’t.” Instead, she waited and had two children in the 1940s. My grandmother never felt guilty about the abortion, and took her daughter, and her daughter’s friends, to the Margaret Sanger Clinic in the early ’60s, paying for their diaphragms.

My aunt got pregnant anyway, and, unable to get an abortion even with her mother’s help, had a baby at 18. She went on to have two more children and four abortions. One was performed by Robert Spencer, the Pennsylvania doctor who famously ended pregnancies for almost 50 years before the practice became legal; one was administered by someone who “literally used a knitting needle”; one was procured with the help of the pastor who later officiated her wedding; and the last was not long before Roe v. Wade. “I never felt guilty or ashamed,” my aunt said. “I did what I had to do for me.”

Another aunt had an abortion when, with two small children and a new job, she got pregnant accidentally. “How would we raise a third child in New York?” she reflected. “So I had an abortion.” My mother also had an abortion, due to medical complications in early pregnancy, when I was one and a half and before my brother was born. I don’t consider the number of terminations in my family unusual. After all, about half of my 40-ish friends—that I know of—have had abortions. I know so many women who’ve had abortions simply because I know so many women.

After Roe was decided in 1973, the varied experiences of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends, and selves suddenly seemed drained of their value. It was as if in gaining rights, not just to abortion, but also to greater professional and economic and sexual opportunity, women lost any claim to morality—a morality that had, perhaps, been imaginatively tied to their exclusively reproductive identities.

What rose up instead was a new character, less threatening than the empowered woman: the baby, who, by virtue of not actually existing as a formed human being, could be invested with all the qualities—purity, defenselessness, dependence—that women used to embody, before they became free and disruptive.

Forty years of anti-abortion forces aggressively applying the language of family, love, and morality to the embryo and the fetus, and rarely to the women who carry them, have forced women into a defensive crouch. New research from New York University sociologist Sarah Cowan reveals that, although more clinically recognized pregnancies end in abortion than in miscarriage, 79 percent of Americans have been told of a friend or a family member’s miscarriage, but only 52 percent say they know someone who has had an abortion.

The fact is that almost everyone probably knows someone who has had an abortion, and we all need to talk about it more honestly. This applies, most of all, to politicians who officially support reproductive rights and yet defend them in such sluggish and spiritless terms—think of Hillary Clinton’s characterization of abortion as a “sad, even tragic choice,” or John Kerry’s vow to make it “the rarest thing in the world.” Both of these highly calibrated remarks were made in 2005, and Democrats have only gotten marginally less timid in the years since.

Forty years of anti-abortion forces aggressively applying the language of family, love, and morality to the embryo and the fetus, and rarely to the women who carry them, have forced women into a defensive crouch.

But they shouldn’t be so fearful. Feminism is becoming an increasingly vibrant force in mainstream culture, and this year has seen encouraging attempts to shatter the shell of anxiety around abortion. In Gillian Robespierre’s romantic comedy Obvious Child, a young woman’s decision to end an unwanted pregnancy is treated as completely reasonable and non-tragic. (The movie was a merciful antidote to Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, in which bros make feeble references to “shmashmortion.”) A 26-year-old named Emily Letts posted a video of her abortion online, to demonstrate that the procedure shouldn’t be scary. And Pollitt’s Pro inspired numerous women to share stories of remorse-free terminations: “I don’t feel guilty and tortured about my abortion,” Laurie Abraham wrote in Elle. “Or rather, my abortions.”

Politicians—especially politicians in a party that depends on the support of women for its existence—should be proud to make these women the moral center of their arguments. They should be advocating for abortion as a fundamental, safe, and accessible medical option. The immorality, these representatives should make clear, is not in ending pregnancies, but in deepening inequality by denying poor women federal funding for legal abortion via the Hyde Amendment.

And yes, as more women move into representative government, they themselves should be less afraid to tell their own stories and the stories of the other women in their lives—stories that are reasonably likely to include abortion. They can take a cue from the Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores, who in 2013 testified to her colleagues that she was the only one of seven sisters not to have had a baby in her teens. Why? “Because at sixteen, I got an abortion,” Flores said, adding, “I don’t regret it because I am here making a difference.”

What's going on with clowns these days? Roaming small towns in California, terrorizing people in France, missing entire mouths on American Horror Story? I don't know about you but I think the French town of Vendargues that has banned all clown costumes for the foreseeable future has the right idea.

Earlier this month, Jezebel wrote about crazy, bloodthirsty clowns stalking the delicious cheese and fresh bread-paved French streets looking for mayhem. Instead of eating, these gangs of wandering clowns were apprehended with guns, knives and baseball bats. One clown even beat a man with an iron bar.

If Twisty, American Horror Story's resident clown of creepiness and doom, hasn't given…Read moreRead on

What?

Vendargues isn't taking any chances with its Halloween parade this evening so Mayor Pierre Dudieuzere has banned all Twisty the clown look-a-likes in the town of 6,000, according to the BBC. No clown make-up or suits allowed, though maybe he should add bats, guns and knives to that off-limits list? Just sayin'.

Image via Shutterstock.

I was writing in a quiet corner of a Starbucks on Monday when a young blonde woman with a book took a nearby seat. She hadn’t even been there five minutes when a man, probably 20 years her elder and clearly a stranger, grabbed the chair next to her and started talking. About absolutely nothing. Dude literally opened with, “Mondays. The worst, right!?” It somehow got less interesting from there. It didn’t matter to him that this woman’s response was tepid at best, or that she was busy reading – an act that explicitly says: “I am choosing not to be in this universe right now.” He wanted her attention and it was her place to provide it. The guy was friendly, gregarious, poised (as if he’d been through these motions before) and even though he didn’t say a single sentence with any substance whatsoever, his delivery was studiously, unimpeachably innocent. He couldn’t be violating anyone’s boundaries – he was being “nice”! What’s next – are the feminazis going to outlaw smiles!?

The woman sat through it, subdued but polite. So he took and took and took, as much as he could get away with. Eventually, she left.

I was sitting there thinking about how women’s time is treated like a public commodity (yes, I am available for wedding toasts and bar mitzvahs) when, coincidentally, another young blonde woman came and sat down in the same chair. And then a completely different annoying old dude plunked himself down and launched into – I am not joking – a 30-minute, condescending lecture about the history of sampling in popular music. It happened all over again. He wanted her attention, so he took it. Because there’s no law against talking to a pretty woman. And, again, she sat through it.

Why is it that interrupting someone in a quiet moment, wilfully oblivious to their verbal and physical cues, is considered friendly, but rebuffing such an interruption is considered rude? Interrupting is objectively worse than not wanting to be interrupted. We only get one life. Wasting someone’s time is the subtlest form of murder. So why do we let this bizarre inversion dictate so many of our interactions?

Last week, the New York Post ran a pathetically slobbering profile of one Brian Robinson, a self-proclaimed (and self-published) “railway Romeo”, whose book How to Meet Women on the Subway purports to teach lonely men how to go on “over 500 dates” with women they find on public transit and then annoy into submission. In other words, this dude’s favourite time and place to target women is when they’re trapped in a sealed metal tube buried three storeys underneath Manhattan. “There’s always beautiful women down here – tons,” Robinson explains, because nothing says “I respect women” like measuring them in bulk.

Attention, Brian; Starbucks blowhards numbers one and two; men in general. Here is a thing you need to internalise: just because you can get away with something doesn’t mean you should do it.

“Whatever I can get away with” is an inherently antisocial standard of behaviour. It strips your partner of agency and precludes any possibility of genuine intimacy. Why would you want to have sex with someone who is just “letting you” instead of eagerly reciprocating? Why would you want to be tolerated when you could be desired? Who’s OK with having sex that’s only distinguishable from rape on a technicality? (Ooh, I know that one. It’s rapists.) That’s why California’s new “yes means yes” law is so exciting – not because of its legal ramifications so much as its ideological ones. Shifting the way we conceptualise our interactions from “I should fulfil as many of my own desires as I possibly can without getting in trouble” to “I should go out of my way to make sure the people around me feel comfortable and respected” has repercussions far beyond the romantic realm.

Michael Mark Cohen has a cleverly articulated essay on Gawker this week in which he declares “douchebag” the only effective signifier for a particular brand of toxic, entitled white male. (He calls it a “racial slur”, a tongue-in-cheek flourish that will surely validate many white racists with martyr complexes.) “The douchebag,” Cohen writes, “is someone – overwhelmingly white, rich, heterosexual, male – who insists upon, nay, demands his white male privilege in every possible set and setting. The douchebag is equally douchey (that’s the adjectival version of the term) in public and in private. He is a douchebag waiting in line for coffee as well as in the bedroom.”

Douchebag supremacy is built on a long history of getting away with as much as possible – in finance, in romance, in literature, in humour, in politics, in the countless subtleties of simply taking up space in the world. If you can get away with it, good. More for you. Generosity and basic decency are favours, not obligations. It’s an isolating idea, the inverse of empathy. It’s also the reason why traditionally male-dominated communities such as gaming feel so threatened by female voices, and why progressive cultural critics are branded the “thought police”. Because getting away with it is getting harder all the time.

The Post asked Robinson if he has experienced any memorable rejections, and he replied that a woman once threatened him with mace to get him to stop talking to her. That’s how much it takes to stymie a douchebag’s entitlement. He seemed to find it amusing. Typical female overreaction. But the truth is, he almost got a face full of poison. He almost didn’t get away with it. And, some day, he won’t.

I've got to think cases like this happen because old men go bald... and their brain cells escape from their scalps.

The Oregon Court of Appeals overturned the assault conviction of Derrick James Lewis. He had been convicted of assaulting his wife by pulling out her hair.

Not pulling her hair, but pulling OUT her hair, in clumps. From The Oregonian:

Although the wife of 49-year-old Derrick James Lewis was overheard screaming and yelling, "Ouch. Stop it!" in December 2011, the appeals court ruled that pulling out a person's hair isn't necessarily assault. It said assault requires proof of "physical impairment" or "substantial pain."

For those playing along at home, yes, the court is saying that pulling out someone's hair doesn't necessarily hurt them enough to sustain an assault conviction. Or at least that Lewis' wife didn't prove that she was in substantial pain when her husband pulled out clumps of her hair.

For all we know, the hair was asking to be pulled out, I guess.

In their continuing quest to embody the phrase "beneath contempt," the sad, small people behind men's rights website A Voice for Men have set up a website impersonating White Ribbon, a legitimate domestic violence prevention organization. White Ribbon is calling AVFM's copycat website "vile" and imploring everyone who supports their work not to be fooled.

Over at Cosmo, Jill Filipovic has a great piece about the impersonation, starting with a history of the (actual) White Ribbon Campaign, which was founded in 1991 by Canadian men after 25-year-old Marc Lépine killed 14 women and then himself at a Montreal engineering school; his suicide note blamed "feminists" for ruining his life. Today, White Ribbon encourages men and boys to help end violence against women, by not committing or condoning abuse.

That's pretty much the direct opposite of A Voice for Men and its founder Paul Elam, who, as Filipovic points out, has written about one prominent feminist scholar, "I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection." Elam has also made a career of sorts out of claiming that men are victims of domestic violence as often as women. (No.) On his new copycat White Ribbon site, he also claims that the only difference between male and female perpetrators of domestic violence is that he has "found significantly less remorse in women."

Sure. Just to be clear on this, the real White Ribbon site is whiteribbon.ca. The fake site is WhiteRibbon.org, and, unlike the real organization, whose donations are used for violence prevention, Elam's site makes it clear the only real beneficiary is Elam himself. A banner on the top right of the copycat site reads, "All donations for our White Ribbon effort will be used to maintain and enhance this website. Thank you."

The real White Ribbon's statement says that the group is "exploring all of our options," but adds, "we will not be engaging with this group in a public screaming match. They can remain a shrill minority. We will continue to engage with the vast majority of men who believe in gender justice, and want to be part of the solution. And we will do it with the same determination, conviction and passion we have shown for the past 20 years."

Meanwhile, in a clear attempt to add to the confusion, the fake White Ribbon site issued a statement of its own, warning people to "beware of false White Ribbon initiatives" and accusing "other entities" of "inserting dishonest and sexist messages into this movement."

If you'd like to make a donation to the true White Ribbon Campaign—perhaps in Paul Elam's honor—you can do so right here.

Image via the fake White Ribbon

News to no one: It costs more to be a woman. We're charged more for goods and services, are more likely to take time away from work to care for kids or aging parents, and live an average of 5 years longer. We also have to do more stuff to maintain femininity. But would cutting back on grooming change anything?

It's an interesting idea proposed by Leigh Anderson in a piece at Café.com that was originally titled, at least when I came across it yesterday, "Don't Braid Your Daughter's Hair. It Could Cost Her $1.4 Million" (a parenting forum pasted it on their message board as such). Today, the piece appears to be titled less prescriptively and is now called "Can You Guess How Much More It Costs to be a Woman Than a Man?"

Either way, it intrigues me. Anderson rounds up the differences in basic grooming standards required of men versus women from her vantage point on the playground. She writes:

Our culture places a lot of value on the appearance of women and girls. How does…Read moreRead on

The dads are still in their 2009 jeans; they sport t-shirts celebrating their favorite bands from the late '90s; maybe they shaved last Tuesday.

The moms are in jeans and casual tops too, but the fourth pair of jeans they've bought since the first pregnancy. Blouses are loose, meant to flutter over rather than cling to the post-baby stomach, and sport a bit of asymmetrical flair—anything to divert the viewer's attention from the sad, wobbly, drunk-clinging-to-a-lamppost state of our midsections. Makeup is minimal but present.

The boys are carbon copies of their dads in (mostly neat) jeans and sneakers; the girls, while still dressed for play, are a notch up in terms of style: They're in little poplin frocks with mint-green bicycle prints and matching bloomers; they wear soft gray dresses and citron leggings and Mary Janes. With very few exceptions, the boys have short hair, mercilessly shorn by the silent Israeli barber for $15, and the girls have long hair, cut for $25 at a salon where one can sit in a large plastic duck. In my family, my two sons and husband are out the door in 15 minutes flat compared to my 30 or 40—those asymmetrical blouses need to be ironed, and my hair requires some minimal attention to not look like a meth addict's. My husband uses the time he spends waiting for me to work or play the guitar.

From there she launches into a sobering array of facts about the time they spend versus us, and you know how this is gonna go: Women groom 15 minutes more per day (45 minutes total) than men do (30 minutes). Women who spend another 45 minutes on their appearance (an hour and a half in total), Anderson notes, earned less by 3% than the so-called average groomers. The kicker: Over three decades of working, assuming you make $50,000 annually, that's $1.4 million less overall.

She gasps:

Now, my first thought is—an hour and a half a day? What on earth are you doing, burning your face off and re-growing it? But then one focuses on the puzzle of it—why does more grooming mean less money? Certainly some grooming is necessary, especially for jobs that are public- or client-facing. Good grooming signals conscientiousness, a commitment to the workplace, being "on top of it." But what tips the balance to punish the women who are primping more? DeLoach posits that perhaps bosses penalize women for looking overly fussy; I posit that whatever subcultures are encouraging their women to look an hour and a half removed from their natural state are not the subcultures directing their women toward high-paying professions.

But it's not just the everyday stuff. Anderson delves into what she calls the "prep work" of femininity — not just the products we slather on our faces each morning, but the maintenance of our bodies, the mani/pedis, the salon time, the waxing, the shaving, the haircuts and color, the exhausting, constant acquisition of work-appropriate clothing for anyone with a job with a dress code.

And when Anderson quotes friend Sarah, who works at a tech company, it actually made me wince when I recalled every lesson I'd ever heard or read about what it's ok to wear as a woman at every age, phase, event and season.

Men don't have age-appropriate [clothing] issues… As a guy, you can wear a button-down shirt and pair of cotton-blend pants from ages 20-60 and be perfectly presentable at nearly all work events these days.

While it's important to note that someone enjoy all the grooming — a lot — while others don't and probably don't apply to be spokeswomen, either — she does bring up a consideration that I believe many women have probably given pause to at one point or another in their existence: What if I just did only what men do to my appearance? Then what? I myself have dreamed of a uniform in triplicate — black jeans, white T-shirt, black flats. Ha, dreamed. Wearing it now.

Anderson concludes that it would be perceived as letting yourself go, not doing the work, and that you'd be penalized either with gossip, bare-minimum, up through not getting that promotion for not looking polished enough. Again, that is likely true for many women, but certainly not all.

She calls it an inequity, a "cultural theft of time" that begins at an early age for girls, whose mothers braid their hair, dress them pretty, detangle and clasp and barrette, and so on. What if — she suggests — we just didn't?

I'll admit it's a seductive idea, and I've long wrestled with my feelings about grooming and femininity, and often feel differently about it from day to day even. But I think it's seductively dangerous. I think Anderson's piece is wonderfully, passionately written and worth a read, but I also think the problem with it lies in not the facts, nor the tone, nor the frustration, nor the wishful thinking, but rather with the resignation that the answer is, always, to change something about us, always us.

This pitfall is tough to avoid. We are all probably guilty of it at some point or another, myself included. It's the trap of wondering why women can't just rise up and rebel correctly enough to change the tide. If we could just solve this puzzle, crack this mystery — we are smart, we are good, we are well-intentioned. Can't we just work hard enough to "fix" sexism?

But that's oversimplified and pointed in the wrong direction. For one, men do have to shave, and get haircuts, and primp and groom — now more than ever.

For two, and this is a big TWO, men aren't paid more because they groom less or spend more time being qualified or smart. They are paid more because they are men. It's not about merit. It's about bullshit. To make a sweeping generalization for the sake of a point, men sure do waste hella time on sports, cars and porn and still manage to get the promotion. That is sexism. The more you realize this, the more freeing it is.

‪So sure, I get it. We probably do waste time on primping for no good end other than feeling good or complying to some predetermined idea we barely consider anymore when we swipe on another coat of mascara. But make no mistake: It doesn't matter if we groom or not. We have a vagina. We present as female. That is reason enough for sexism. Always has been. Always will be.

That said, my personal goal is to dress my daughter as quickly as possible in cute clothes. We braid her hair sometimes, but I've spent so long doing two things at once that I could braid her hair while making a coffee and emailing a friend. If only the world valued that as much as absent-mindedly scratchin' a pair of balls, we'd all be up $1.4 mill at the slot machines of life.

So I think that if we're going to all collectively stop doing something together that we imagine holds us back, here's my prescription:

Stop painstakingly pinpointing what we need to do differently or more or less to be good enough (how we speak, talk, ask for raises, dare to walk down the street, etc.) for sexism, especially when history has proven that it's all pointless effort to combat a shapeshifting set of criteria that will be forever one step ahead, and will change the second we do anyway. Bias always has a good reason. Framed that way, spending your time in search of a good lipstick is a much more rewarding, and much better use, of your time.

Image via Getty.

Life is hard for the male grad student whose heartfelt cry you're about to read. That's because somehow — and he has no idea how this could be happening — he's always offending his female colleagues, who seem to think he's some kind of sexist douche.

A tipster sent us the Crybaby's recent Facebook post, wherein he confesses that he "often offends" the women around him, and he doesn't understand why. He's tried to so hard to learn all those stupid rules said women are always going on about, like not interrupting or calling them stupid or anything. And yet somehow they're still always mad at him! Must be because they're all "highly ambitious, paranoid b-words."

Behold his cogent sociopolitical analysis, with some identifying details redacted:

In other words, graduate school has forced this poor man — utterly against his will — not to neg his female colleagues, interrupt them, or express sexual or romantic interest in them in the middle of a professional conversation. When Camille Paglia talks about feminism undoing Western civilization, well, this is clearly what she means. This man's only recourse is to strenuously avoid any woman in a "power suit" (because apparently he goes to school in a tense legal drama from the '90s).

But clearly we're missing the point here (and what can you expect? We're all wearing power suits right now.) The problem isn't this dude. It's "the Twilight Zone political context of the contemporary American academy." Our mistake.

Image via Shutterstock

Rush Limbaugh spends many hours each day in a confined space, talking and talking and talking into a microphone, getting a mild buzz off the fumes of his own recycled cigar smoke and stale farts. So it's not surprising, we guess, that after all these years his schtick has become not just crude and dumb, but also pretty repetitive. That's what we can draw, anyway, from his hot take on the video of a woman being relentlessly street harassed that went viral earlier this week. Limbaugh finally saw it, and has gifted us with the final word on the matter: It's just "men being polite."

"I was expecting some real boorish, sexist, dangerous — I was expecting some real, real rotten conduct by guys," Limbaugh said of the video during his radio show Wednesday, as highlighted by Media Matters. "I didn't see that. I saw, 'Hey baby,' 'Looking good today, girl,' 'Have a good day."

As Think Progress points out, Limbaugh allowed that out of the 108 separate harassment incidents Shoshana Roberts, the actress in the video, experienced, there were "three, maybe four that would fit the bill that would make you uncomfortable, nervous, whatever." Men were "mildly aggressive," he allowed, but "you see a pretty woman, you react to it." Especially a woman wearing "snug black jeans," Limbaugh added. (Although Rush, you understand, would never address a woman that way, as he rushed to explain. He's a consummate gentleman, and, with four marriages under his belt, probably knows a little something about romance.)

He also couldn't help noting, with palpable glee, that many of the men in the video were black and Latino: ""In the interest of accuracy, ladies and gentlemen, the majority of men that are portrayed in this video are African American and Hispanic and I thought we were supposed to celebrate diversity." (As Think Progress points out, Hollaback, the organization behind the video, has been criticized for that, and apologized yesterday for "the unintended racial bias in the editing of the video that over-represents men of color.")

But Rush's monologues, much like the air in his recording booth, are starting to smell a little moldy: the street harassment monologue feels a lot like his rant from last month about Ohio State University's new policy of affirmative consent for sexual conduct between students. "No means yes if you know how to spot it," he assured his listeners. Or his definitive take on rape culture: "Boys chase girls. They always have." Maybe it's time to take a couple minutes outside, Rush.

Here's the audio of his show, courtesy of Media Matters:

Rush Limbaugh poses next to his own giant head in 2010/Image via AP

I'm glad Walter Isaacson is getting such an outpouring of love from reviewers and talk-show hosts for including Ada Lovelace in The Innovators, his new history of the digital revolution.¹ Thanks to Isaacson, Lovelace is finally receiving at least a few bytes of the attention she deserves for having written the first computer algorithm—a century before the first electronic computer was up and running. He also devotes a chapter to Grace Hopper, a Navy rear admiral who, a hundred years later, invented the first compiler so programs could be written in words rather than in numbers, and the six female mathematicians who designed the software for the first generally programmable computer.

All the hype inspired me to download The Innovators on my Kindle and eagerly sit down to read what I hoped would be a female-friendly version of the history of computing. But the further I read, the more error messages popped up in my brain. For instance, why did Isaacson feel the need to keep disparaging Lovelace, pricking her pretensions to value her own intelligence?

"Whether due to her opiates or her breeding or both, she developed a somewhat outsize opinion of her own talents and began to describe herself as a genius," Isaacson writes, leaving us to wonder in what way Lovelace's suspicion that she was a genius was "outsize" or inaccurate. Given her assurance to her collaborator Charles Babbage that she did not mean to be thought "conceited," was she really to be faulted for acknowledging her passion and talent for math? Considering the long list of obnoxious male braggarts Isaacson profiles with approval, why does he single out Lovelace for such a scolding?

"Ada was never the great mathematician that her canonizers claim," he writes, "but she was an eager pupil, able to grasp most of the basic concepts of calculus, and with her artistic sensibility she liked to visualize the changing curves and trajectories that the equations were describing." Well, fine. Her father was Lord Byron, and I suppose Lovelace did inherit some of his artistic sensibility. But she isn't canonized for her abilities as either an artist or a theoretical mathematician. For that matter, neither is Steven Jobs. What Lovelace is remembered for is her remarkable vision in imagining—in the mid 1800s—the ways in which a computing machine might be programmed to carry out far more than calculations.

Even when Isaacson seems to be praising Lovelace, his accolades give off a whiff of derision. "... Ada believed she possessed special, even supernatural abilities, what she called 'an intuitive perception of hidden things.' Her exalted view of her talents led her to pursue aspirations that were unusual for an aristocratic woman and mother in the early Victorian age." Really? She only believed she possessed special talents? In Isaacson's view, Lovelace seems a loopy aristocratic dame who dabbled in the occult and used her intuition—rather than, say, her genius—to perceive nebulous "things" that weren't there. Not only does this description do an injustice to Lovelace's considerable rationality, but certifiable male geniuses such as Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman often described their creative processes in much the same terms.

Even though Isaacson seems properly exasperated that the female mathematicians who worked so hard—and so creatively—to program the first fully electronic computer weren't invited to the dinner that followed its unveiling, he makes no further reference to the appalling scarcity of female programmers and engineers that impoverished computer science in the decades that followed.

Rather, he celebrates the frat-boy culture that allowed male programmers and engineers to work day and night in the sorts of teams that led to the innovations he documents, never taking into account that this very culture alienated women. Of "Lick" Licklider, Isaacson writes approvingly that he had "a mischievous but friendly sense of humor. He loved the Three Stooges and was childishly fond of sight gags. Sometimes, when a colleague was about to give a slide presentation, Licklider would slip a photo of a beautiful woman into the projector's carousel." Why do I get the idea that the beautiful women in those slides were nude, and that if any female engineers had been present, they wouldn't have seen those pranks as "friendly"?

Isaacson's main thesis is that major breakthroughs proceed not from the blindingly original insights of lone geniuses but from the collaboration of brilliant thinkers, inspired leaders, and disciplined doers. If this is true, then the scarcity of women (and men of color) is not a side issue, easily confined to a chapter on Ada Lovelace and a few pages on Grace Hopper (if not for his daughter's input, Isaacson admits in the acknowledgments, he might not have included Lovelace at all). If the generative power of a team of scientists arises from the variety of creative insights of the individuals who make it up, then the scarcity of women (and men of color) on those teams is a significant obstacle to innovation.

What troubles me is that Isaacson doesn't seem to get that the very culture of rowdy, adolescent, and sometimes misogynist male behavior that he celebrates discourages women from contributing to computer science. Most fathers in the 1950s and '60s didn't take their daughters down to the basement to mess around with radios and transistors, as was true of the fathers of the male innovators Isaacson profiles in his book. Unlike Bill Gates and Paul Allen, most girls were not encouraged to play around with the primitive computers that showed up in the AV rooms of many high schools in the '60s and '70s (I know, I was one of those girls), and most parents didn't buy early PCs and video games for their daughters. Isaacson doesn't even mention, let alone deplore, the racism and educational inequality that kept (and still keeps) most black and Hispanic children from growing up to become computer scientists.

Not only did the absence of female, black, and Hispanic collaborators on all those teams of innovators limit their creativity, the continued absence of female, black, and Hispanic computer scientists is shaping the future that all of us, female and male, eventually will inhabit. As Isaacson joked on The Colbert Report, the geeks are going to inherit the earth. And if all those geeks are male and white, the rest of us are going to inherit an earth that wasn't designed for us.

¹ An article in the October 1, 2014, edition of The New York Times is headlined “The Women Tech Forgot,” with a subhead implying that The Innovators is a history of “How Women Shaped Technology,” while a segment of “All Tech Considered” that ran on NPR on October 6, 2014, makes it seems as if “The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech” are the central focus of Isaacson’s book.

Eileen Pollack's most recent novel, Breaking and Entering, was awarded the Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection. An excerpt from her nonfiction book The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still A Boys' Club (due out next year from Beacon Press) ran in the October 3, 2013, edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. She is a professor on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

Image by Jim Cooke, photos via Wikipedia and Shutterstock

For their upcoming fighting game, Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, the developers at Tecmo Koei have created a new engine to bring their characters to life.

In a suprise announcement following the award ceremony at this weekend's Japan Gamer's…Read moreRead on

Called the "Yawaraka Engine" (やわらかエンジン) or "Softness Engine," it is the result of attempting to up the visual realism of character skin in order to make characters look more naturally realistic on the latest platforms. "The reason that fans would think the game must be on the latest generation is that 'the girls look cuter [on the latest consoles].'" Producer Yosuke Hayashi explained in an interview with Weekly Famitsu. "We call the technology we used to advance skin and breast physics and make that a reality, the 'Yawaraka Engine.' Once you see it on the new consoles, you won't be able to go back."

There are a lot of words I could use to describe the jiggle physics in the Dead or Alive series, but "realistic" has never been one of them. Fortunately, Last Round will include a feature in the settings that will allow players to control the boob-shaking physics affect – though in what manner and to what extent has not yet been revealed. Hopefully this will mean characters don't look like they have water balloons strapped to their chest that bounce around at the slightest provocation.

Aside from the female fighters, the Yawaraka Engine is being used on the male characters to make their muscles look more realistic. The technology itself is still in development and according to Hayashi, "Every day they get 'softer.'" Wonder if that means there is moob bounce, too...

The new game will be bringing back classic stages from the original Dead or Alive and Dead or Alive 2 as well as accessory options for characters. There will also be a streamlined free-to-play version available at launch for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One platforms.

Dead or Alive 5: Last Round is scheduled for release on the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One in Japan on February 19th, and in the West next Spring.

ファミ通.com [ファミ通.com]

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

To contact the author of this post, write to cogitoergonihilATgmail.com or find him on Twitter @tnakamura8.

December 2013's EOF, titled "Mars Needs Women", visited an interesting fact: that the male/female ratio among Linux Journal readers, and Linux kernel developers, is so lopsided (male high, female low) that graphing it would produce a near-vertical line. I was hoping the piece would invite a Linux hacker on the female side of that graph to step up and move the conversation forward. And sure enough, here we have Susan Sons aka @HedgeMage. Read on.—Doc Searls

Yep, I said "girls". Since men were once boys, but women sprang from the head of Zeus full-grown and fighting like modern-day Athenas, you can start flaming me now for using that nasty word...unless you'd like to see the industry through the eyes of a girl who grew up to be a woman in the midst of a loose collection of open-source communities.

Looking around at the hackers I know, the great ones started before puberty. Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains. I started coding when I was six years old, sitting in my father's basement office, on the machine he used to track inventory for his repair service. After a summer of determined trial and error, I'd managed to make some gorillas throw things other than exploding bananas. It felt like victory!

When I was 12, I got my hands on a Slackware disk and installed it on my computer—a Christmas gift from my parents in an especially good year for my dad's company—and I found a bug in a program. The program was in C, a language I'd never seen. I found my way onto IRC and explained the predicament: what was happening, how to reproduce it and where I thought I'd found the problem.

I was pretty clueless then—I hadn't even realized that the reason I couldn't read the code well was that there was more than one programming language in the world—but the channel denizens pointed me to the project's issue tracker, explained its purpose and helped me file my first bug report.

What I didn't find out about until later was the following private message exchange between one of the veterans who'd been helping me and a channel denizen who recognized my nickname from a mailing list:

coder0: That was a really well-asked question...but why do I get the feeling he's a 16yo boy?

coder1: Because she's a 12yo girl.

coder0: Well...wow. What do her parents do that she thinks like that?

coder1: I think she's on a farm somewhere, actually.

When coder1 told me about the conversation, I was sold on open source. As a little girl from farm country who'd repeatedly been excluded from intellectual activities because she wasn't wealthy or urban or old enough to be wanted, I could not believe how readily I'd been accepted and treated like anybody else in the channel, even though I'd been outed. I was doubly floored when I found out that coder0 was none other than Eric S. Raymond, whose writings I'd devoured shortly after discovering Linux.

Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I did. I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly, writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid, so when I needed help, the community was there. I'd never met another programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming than some college students.

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don't generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn't turn the young women into hackers.

Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young woman who's already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.

Young women don't magically become technologists at 22. Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood, because that's when the addiction to solving the puzzle or building something kicks in to those who've experienced that "victory!" moment like I had when I imposed my will on a couple electronic primates.

Unfortunately, our society has set girls up to be anything but technologists. My son is in elementary school. Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try.

My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a mom who coded while she breastfed and brought him to his first LUG meeting at age seven weeks. The first time he saw a home-built robot, it was shown to him by a local hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer one of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his school acting like girls were dumb?

Thanks so much, modern-day "feminism", for putting very unfeminist ideas in my son's head.

There's another place in my life, besides my home, where the idea of technology being a "guy thing" is totally absent: my hometown. I still visit Sandridge School from time to time, most recently when my old math teacher invited me in to talk to students about STEM careers. I'm fairly sure I'm the only programmer anyone in that town has met in person...so I'm something of the archetypal computer geek as far as they are concerned. If anything, some folks assume that it's a "girl thing".

Still, I don't see the area producing a bunch of female hackers. The poverty, urbanization and rising crime aside, girls aren't being raised to hack any more in my hometown than they are anywhere else. When I talked to those fifth-grade math classes, the boys told me about fixing broken video game systems or rooting their phones. The girls didn't do projects—they talked about fashion or seeking popularity—not building things.

What's Changed?

I've never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys treat me like one of them, rather than "the woman in the group", and many are old enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about one third women, and no one thought that strange. Of course, the key word here is "old" (sorry guys). Most of the programmers I like are closer to my father's age than mine.

The new breed of open-source programmer isn't like the old. They've changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the first time in my 18 years in this community.

When we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social media people out there—it means I can ignore that end of things—but putting them next to programmers makes being a "woman in tech" feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.

It used to be that I was comfortable standing side by side with men, and no one cared how I looked. Now I find myself having to waste time talking about my gender rather than my technology...otherwise, there are lectures:

• The "you didn't have a woman on the panel" lecture. I'm on the panel, but I'm told I don't count because of the way I dress: t-shirt, jeans, boots, no make-up.

• The "you desexualize yourself to fit in; you're oppressed!" lecture. I'm told that deep in my female heart I must really love make-up and fashion. It's not that I'm a geek who doesn't much care how she looks.

• The "you aren't representing women; you'd be a better role model for girls if you looked the part" lecture. Funny, the rest of the world seems very busy telling girls to look fashionable (just pick up a magazine or walk down the girls' toy aisle). I don't think someone as bad at fashion as I am should worry about it.

With one exception, I've heard these lectures only from women, and women who can't code at that. Sometimes I want to shout "you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!"

I've also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers don't: I was here before the sexism moral panic started. When a dozen guys decide to drink and hack in someone's hotel room, I get invited. They've known me for years, so I'm safe. New women, regardless of competence, don't get invited unless I'm along. That's a sexual harassment accusation waiting to happen, and no one will risk having 12 men alone with a single woman and booze. So the new ladies get left out.

I've never been segregated into a "Women in X" group, away from the real action in a project. I've got enough clout to say no when I'm told I should be loyal and spend my time working on women's groups instead of technology. I'm not young or impressionable enough to listen to the likes of the Ada Initiative who'd have me passive-aggressively redcarding anyone who bothers me or feeling like every male is a threat, or that every social conflict I have is because of my sex.

Here's a news flash for you: except for the polymaths in the group, hackers are generally kind of socially inept. If someone of any gender does something that violates my boundaries, I assume it was a misunderstanding. I calmly and specifically explain what bothered me and how to avoid crossing that boundary, making it a point to let the person know that I am not upset with them, I just want to make sure they're aware so it doesn't happen again. This is what adults do, and it works. Adults don't look for ways to take offense, silently hand out "creeper cards" or expect anyone to read their minds. I'm not a child, I'm an adult, and I act like one.

My Boobs Don't Matter

I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs. That's changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say they want a community where ideas, skills and experience matter more than boobs.

There aren't very many girls who want to hack. I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that girls are given fashion dolls and make-up and told to fantasize about dating and popularity, while boys are given LEGOs and tool sets and told to do something. I imagine it has a lot to do with the sort of women who used to coo "but she could be so pretty if only she didn't waste so much time with computers". I imagine it has a lot to do with how girls are sold on ephemera—popularity, beauty and fitting in—while boys are taught to revel in accomplishment.

Give me a young person of any gender with a hacker mentality, and I'll make sure they get the support they need to become awesome. Meanwhile, buy your niece or daughter or neighbor girl some LEGOs and teach her to solder. I love seeing kids at LUG meetings and hackerspaces—bring them! There can never be too many hackers.

Do not punish the men simply for being here. "Male privilege" is a way to say "you are guilty because you don't have boobs, feel ashamed, even if you did nothing wrong", and I've wasted too much of my time trying to defend good guys from it. Yes, some people are jerks. Call them out as jerks, and don't blame everyone with the same anatomy for their behavior. Lumping good guys in with bad doesn't help anyone, it just makes good guys afraid to interact with women because they feel like they can't win. I'm tired of expending time and energy to protect good men from this drama.

Do not punish hackers for non-hackers' shortcomings. It is not my fault some people don't read man pages, nor is it my job to hold their hand step-by-step so they don't have to. It is not my place to drag grown women in chains to LUG meetings and attempt to brainwash them to make you more comfortable with the gender ratio, and doing so wouldn't work anyway.

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

I remember in those early days, in my haven, if someone was rude or tried to bully me, the people around me would pounce with a resounding "How dare you be mean to someone we like!" Now, if a man behaves badly, we're bogged down with a much more complex thought process: "Did this happen because she's a woman?" "Am I white knighting if I step in?" "Am I a misogynist if I don't?" "What does this say about women in technology?" "Do I really want to be part of another gender politics mess?" It was so much simpler when we didn't analyze so much, and just trounced on mean people for being mean.

December 2013's EOF, titled "Mars Needs Women", visited an interesting fact: that the male/female ratio among Linux Journal readers, and Linux kernel developers, is so lopsided (male high, female low) that graphing it would produce a near-vertical line. I was hoping the piece would invite a Linux hacker on the female side of that graph to step up and move the conversation forward. And sure enough, here we have Susan Sons aka @HedgeMage. Read on.—Doc Searls

Yep, I said "girls". Since men were once boys, but women sprang from the head of Zeus full-grown and fighting like modern-day Athenas, you can start flaming me now for using that nasty word...unless you'd like to see the industry through the eyes of a girl who grew up to be a woman in the midst of a loose collection of open-source communities.

Looking around at the hackers I know, the great ones started before puberty. Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains. I started coding when I was six years old, sitting in my father's basement office, on the machine he used to track inventory for his repair service. After a summer of determined trial and error, I'd managed to make some gorillas throw things other than exploding bananas. It felt like victory!

When I was 12, I got my hands on a Slackware disk and installed it on my computer—a Christmas gift from my parents in an especially good year for my dad's company—and I found a bug in a program. The program was in C, a language I'd never seen. I found my way onto IRC and explained the predicament: what was happening, how to reproduce it and where I thought I'd found the problem.

I was pretty clueless then—I hadn't even realized that the reason I couldn't read the code well was that there was more than one programming language in the world—but the channel denizens pointed me to the project's issue tracker, explained its purpose and helped me file my first bug report.

What I didn't find out about until later was the following private message exchange between one of the veterans who'd been helping me and a channel denizen who recognized my nickname from a mailing list:

coder0: That was a really well-asked question...but why do I get the feeling he's a 16yo boy?

coder1: Because she's a 12yo girl.

coder0: Well...wow. What do her parents do that she thinks like that?

coder1: I think she's on a farm somewhere, actually.

When coder1 told me about the conversation, I was sold on open source. As a little girl from farm country who'd repeatedly been excluded from intellectual activities because she wasn't wealthy or urban or old enough to be wanted, I could not believe how readily I'd been accepted and treated like anybody else in the channel, even though I'd been outed. I was doubly floored when I found out that coder0 was none other than Eric S. Raymond, whose writings I'd devoured shortly after discovering Linux.

Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I did. I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly, writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid, so when I needed help, the community was there. I'd never met another programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming than some college students.

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don't generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn't turn the young women into hackers.

Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young woman who's already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.

Young women don't magically become technologists at 22. Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood, because that's when the addiction to solving the puzzle or building something kicks in to those who've experienced that "victory!" moment like I had when I imposed my will on a couple electronic primates.

Unfortunately, our society has set girls up to be anything but technologists. My son is in elementary school. Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try.

My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a mom who coded while she breastfed and brought him to his first LUG meeting at age seven weeks. The first time he saw a home-built robot, it was shown to him by a local hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer one of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his school acting like girls were dumb?

Thanks so much, modern-day "feminism", for putting very unfeminist ideas in my son's head.

There's another place in my life, besides my home, where the idea of technology being a "guy thing" is totally absent: my hometown. I still visit Sandridge School from time to time, most recently when my old math teacher invited me in to talk to students about STEM careers. I'm fairly sure I'm the only programmer anyone in that town has met in person...so I'm something of the archetypal computer geek as far as they are concerned. If anything, some folks assume that it's a "girl thing".

Still, I don't see the area producing a bunch of female hackers. The poverty, urbanization and rising crime aside, girls aren't being raised to hack any more in my hometown than they are anywhere else. When I talked to those fifth-grade math classes, the boys told me about fixing broken video game systems or rooting their phones. The girls didn't do projects—they talked about fashion or seeking popularity—not building things.

What's Changed?

I've never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys treat me like one of them, rather than "the woman in the group", and many are old enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about one third women, and no one thought that strange. Of course, the key word here is "old" (sorry guys). Most of the programmers I like are closer to my father's age than mine.

The new breed of open-source programmer isn't like the old. They've changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the first time in my 18 years in this community.

When we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social media people out there—it means I can ignore that end of things—but putting them next to programmers makes being a "woman in tech" feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.

It used to be that I was comfortable standing side by side with men, and no one cared how I looked. Now I find myself having to waste time talking about my gender rather than my technology...otherwise, there are lectures:

• The "you didn't have a woman on the panel" lecture. I'm on the panel, but I'm told I don't count because of the way I dress: t-shirt, jeans, boots, no make-up.

• The "you desexualize yourself to fit in; you're oppressed!" lecture. I'm told that deep in my female heart I must really love make-up and fashion. It's not that I'm a geek who doesn't much care how she looks.

• The "you aren't representing women; you'd be a better role model for girls if you looked the part" lecture. Funny, the rest of the world seems very busy telling girls to look fashionable (just pick up a magazine or walk down the girls' toy aisle). I don't think someone as bad at fashion as I am should worry about it.

With one exception, I've heard these lectures only from women, and women who can't code at that. Sometimes I want to shout "you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!"

I've also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers don't: I was here before the sexism moral panic started. When a dozen guys decide to drink and hack in someone's hotel room, I get invited. They've known me for years, so I'm safe. New women, regardless of competence, don't get invited unless I'm along. That's a sexual harassment accusation waiting to happen, and no one will risk having 12 men alone with a single woman and booze. So the new ladies get left out.

I've never been segregated into a "Women in X" group, away from the real action in a project. I've got enough clout to say no when I'm told I should be loyal and spend my time working on women's groups instead of technology. I'm not young or impressionable enough to listen to the likes of the Ada Initiative who'd have me passive-aggressively redcarding anyone who bothers me or feeling like every male is a threat, or that every social conflict I have is because of my sex.

Here's a news flash for you: except for the polymaths in the group, hackers are generally kind of socially inept. If someone of any gender does something that violates my boundaries, I assume it was a misunderstanding. I calmly and specifically explain what bothered me and how to avoid crossing that boundary, making it a point to let the person know that I am not upset with them, I just want to make sure they're aware so it doesn't happen again. This is what adults do, and it works. Adults don't look for ways to take offense, silently hand out "creeper cards" or expect anyone to read their minds. I'm not a child, I'm an adult, and I act like one.

My Boobs Don't Matter

I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs. That's changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say they want a community where ideas, skills and experience matter more than boobs.

There aren't very many girls who want to hack. I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that girls are given fashion dolls and make-up and told to fantasize about dating and popularity, while boys are given LEGOs and tool sets and told to do something. I imagine it has a lot to do with the sort of women who used to coo "but she could be so pretty if only she didn't waste so much time with computers". I imagine it has a lot to do with how girls are sold on ephemera—popularity, beauty and fitting in—while boys are taught to revel in accomplishment.

Give me a young person of any gender with a hacker mentality, and I'll make sure they get the support they need to become awesome. Meanwhile, buy your niece or daughter or neighbor girl some LEGOs and teach her to solder. I love seeing kids at LUG meetings and hackerspaces—bring them! There can never be too many hackers.

Do not punish the men simply for being here. "Male privilege" is a way to say "you are guilty because you don't have boobs, feel ashamed, even if you did nothing wrong", and I've wasted too much of my time trying to defend good guys from it. Yes, some people are jerks. Call them out as jerks, and don't blame everyone with the same anatomy for their behavior. Lumping good guys in with bad doesn't help anyone, it just makes good guys afraid to interact with women because they feel like they can't win. I'm tired of expending time and energy to protect good men from this drama.

Do not punish hackers for non-hackers' shortcomings. It is not my fault some people don't read man pages, nor is it my job to hold their hand step-by-step so they don't have to. It is not my place to drag grown women in chains to LUG meetings and attempt to brainwash them to make you more comfortable with the gender ratio, and doing so wouldn't work anyway.

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

I remember in those early days, in my haven, if someone was rude or tried to bully me, the people around me would pounce with a resounding "How dare you be mean to someone we like!" Now, if a man behaves badly, we're bogged down with a much more complex thought process: "Did this happen because she's a woman?" "Am I white knighting if I step in?" "Am I a misogynist if I don't?" "What does this say about women in technology?" "Do I really want to be part of another gender politics mess?" It was so much simpler when we didn't analyze so much, and just trounced on mean people for being mean.

A note to men: Don't get too carried away with being the kind of dudebro who prides himself in never putting the seat down. It might just go very, very wrong for you one day.

The brave poop experts at Uproxx first caught wind of this man's toilet awakening. In what is sure to take on a life of its own and become an urban legend weary women tell their lazy husbands or boyfriends, a Redditor posted to r/TIFU ("Today I Fucked Up) and shared his soon-to-be-legendary story about his weird pooping habits. JayDogSmith recounted his sad tale of public humiliation for being outed as a bad pooper, bro:

So I'm hoping a load of people are going to come out in support of me here but I've got that sinking feeling I may be alone in this.

Our toilet broke so I was in shopping for new ones and the sales person joked (no doubt for the millionth time) that I'll want one that automatically puts the seat down after I'm finished with it. I 'joked' back and said if I didn't have a wife I could save money and not buy one with a seat and I'd never have to hear women complaining about putting it down again. To which he gave me a strange look and said "but what about when you need to poop?" I naturally pointed out that I'm a guy and therefore don't put the seat down, I sit on the rim of the bowl. Several embarrassing moments later, I realize that I've misunderstood my entire life and that guys do indeed use the toilet seat. I left empty handed and red faced.

Thinking about it now, it makes sense. Especially how men's restrooms have seats. But I just assumed it was a unisex/cost saving/oversight deal.

The truth is, we're all probably pooping wrong, But if you're doing it this way, by cramming your ass on the cold porcelain rim of your toilet, you are doing it extra super special wrong. Even other Redditors commenting on the story know better:

But, seriously, did you ever think, "Wow, this porcelain is cold, and sometimes wet and caked with dried piss. And I have to spend extraordinary effort to not hit the water with my ass and balls. What could I use to get around some of these obstacles? If only they made a toilet seat for dudes..."

If only!

Image via Shutterstock.

A 73-year-old teacher at a prestigious Christian secondary school in Canada has been fired after several of her students discovered nude scenes she filmed more than 40 years ago.

Jacqueline Laurent-Auger has been a drama teacher for 15 years at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite private school for boys. Some of those boys—who were presumably online looking for Bible verses or chicken soup recipes or very early Mother's Day gifts—somehow managed to stumble across Laurent-Auger's acting work from the '60s and '70s, when she was a young actress in Europe, appearing in films like Le journal intime d'une nymphomane (The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac), and according to her IMDB page, Swedish Sex Games and Nathalie: Escape from Hell.

The films aren't pornographic, Laurent-Auger told the Globe and Mail newspaper, more like soft-core in the style that movies in the '60s and '70s often were. (Also, they were filmed 40 years ago.) But none of that particularly mattered to Brébeuf; Laurent-Auger says she was told by school officials in July that her contract would not be renewed. She asked if there was any issue with her teaching performance and was told no, there was not.

In a statement to the Globe and Mail, the college blamed Laurent-Auger and the Internet in equal parts, writing, "the availability on the Internet of erotic films in which she acted created an entirely new context that was not ideal for our students. After discussion and reflection, we concluded that adult films must remain just that, a product for adults. That's why we decided not to renew Mrs. Laurent-Auger's contract." The statement also said her "erotic scenes" called her judgement into question, given that they were not "models to follow for high-school students becoming initiated into theatre and arts in general."

Laurent-Auger's story has been met with widespread sympathy in Canada; one columnist called the decision "so unfair I can hardly believe it," adding, "obviously for Brebeuf College, prestige is not always combined with good judgment."

For her part, Laurent-Auger seems both furious and, appropriately, not particularly repentant for the imaginary sin of being naked half a century ago.

"This is petty and small-minded," she told the Globe and Mail. "We're in the year 2014, not 1950."

Image via Cinema Deliria/screengrab