2006-10-17

comment spam, patriarchy edition :

Not this debate still. We haven’t moved beyond talking about gender, because we keep forgetting the problems still exist.

To Speak-Up I said:

How does this “just happen?”

I think it goes like this, men were planning this conference and have decided what is “cool.” Tokion is about as boy-design crazy as I can imagine a magazine to be: it's all b-boy and j-pop and boy indie rock and graffiti — an aesthetic of urban tastes that has been consistently defined by its male participants.

So the organizers (male) went looking for women that fit their aesthetic criteria (their male sense of cool) and the only came up with a handful. I can bet you know that those women have already adopted the swagger of the patriarchy in order to fit into the urban cool aesthetic. And that list apparently was small because the club of urban cool has men as its gatekeepers.

And they didn’t at any point decide that “hey, we don't have a broad enough perspective here lets talk to some of the people outside our bubble about recruiting more women — lets talk to Ellen Lupton or the Wooster Collective or Lorainne Wild or Louise Sandhaus or whomever about filling in the gabs in our boy-dominated perception of the world.”

So of course it was a circle jerk, you don’t invite chicks to one of those. It would defeat the purpose — creating a conference to reinforce our patriarchy.

That's how it “happens.”