posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mouseworks at 06:53am on 23/03/2010
mouseworks at 06:53am on 23/03/2010The theory is that if you do something you like for a living, you're more likely to be good at it and will then more likely be successful at making money from it.
The thing is that almost everything I like to do is something that other people who get paid for doing it are more likely to be male than not. And I get told that I must love doing things that are low paid and no fun, like teaching or writing for children (no fun for me, not saying it might not be fun for someone).
May work for guys; doesn't appear to work as well for most women.
Recently, I've been reading a book on women photographers and the same thing comes up -- at the best of times for women, 3/4s of all photographers are guys. Like a lot of technical fields, it was most open to women at the very beginning, then became mostly guys (women can't do the heavy lifting required of assistants) with women in the field if they were lovers or wives of the guys.
And guys sometimes work actively to keep women out of the field.
Sometimes, I wonder if guys do the same things to rival guys that they did to women -- mess with each other's film in the darkroom, put each other down as not being that serious about something. If that's the case, then women are not being singled out for harassment. If it's not the case....
I've also noticed that women are only visible to men if they're in their 20s or 30s. The active and necessary part of child-rearing is something like five to six years before a child goes to school at least six hours of the day. Very few cultures before the 19th Century middle class ever made child-rearing the predominant part of a woman's life. And the mill hands in the 1950s had both parents working for sheer survival. So, women disappeared after the children were out of the house. When an old man asked that women wear mini skirts and high heels to warm the hearts of old men, he wasn't thinking about any women over 35, or that high heels are really closer to Chinese foot binding than shoes women have historically worn over the last 20,000 years in most cultures world wide.
I suggested that old men should shave their legs and wear bike shorts and high heels and didn't go back to the forum to see what the reaction was.
The thing is that almost everything I like to do is something that other people who get paid for doing it are more likely to be male than not. And I get told that I must love doing things that are low paid and no fun, like teaching or writing for children (no fun for me, not saying it might not be fun for someone).
May work for guys; doesn't appear to work as well for most women.
Recently, I've been reading a book on women photographers and the same thing comes up -- at the best of times for women, 3/4s of all photographers are guys. Like a lot of technical fields, it was most open to women at the very beginning, then became mostly guys (women can't do the heavy lifting required of assistants) with women in the field if they were lovers or wives of the guys.
And guys sometimes work actively to keep women out of the field.
Sometimes, I wonder if guys do the same things to rival guys that they did to women -- mess with each other's film in the darkroom, put each other down as not being that serious about something. If that's the case, then women are not being singled out for harassment. If it's not the case....
I've also noticed that women are only visible to men if they're in their 20s or 30s. The active and necessary part of child-rearing is something like five to six years before a child goes to school at least six hours of the day. Very few cultures before the 19th Century middle class ever made child-rearing the predominant part of a woman's life. And the mill hands in the 1950s had both parents working for sheer survival. So, women disappeared after the children were out of the house. When an old man asked that women wear mini skirts and high heels to warm the hearts of old men, he wasn't thinking about any women over 35, or that high heels are really closer to Chinese foot binding than shoes women have historically worn over the last 20,000 years in most cultures world wide.
I suggested that old men should shave their legs and wear bike shorts and high heels and didn't go back to the forum to see what the reaction was.
There are no comments on this entry. (Reply.)