In the future, even the robots will be feminists

On December 5, I’ll be hosting the 55th Down Under Feminists Carnival. 55 is a good number. It’s like two numbers spooning. Or a cropped top and buttocks. Or collarbones and boobs. Everyone loves boobs. (Which, frankly, would be a better tv show than Everybody Loves Raymond. As long as it wasn’t made by that “we’ve reached peak vagina” guy.)

Anyway, the DUFC brings together the best Aussie and Kiwi posts of the month. It’s a great way to discover new blogs, but also to see how freakin’ awesome the feminists on your internet are. You can submit your own posts, or someone else’s, via the carnival page, or email me at newswithnipples at gmail dot com. The current carnival is at 天高皇企鹅远.

I’m allowed to pick a theme that people might want to write about. So I did, because I do love a theme party: The Future.

On January 26 I wrote:

If you told me over Christmas lunch that 2012 would start with a two-and-a-half week discussion about the different feminisms, I’d have asked if you were on crack.

After a whole year of feminism in public – particularly the hugely successful Destroy the Joint campaign – it now seems quite sweet to be excited by two-and-a-half weeks, doesn’t it?

So, here’s what I’d like in the future. Or at least the next 12 months:

1. I’d like employers who discriminate against female employees financially and opportunitially – yep, that’s a new word, just made it up – to be named and shamed. Because making this shit illegal hasn’t stopped it.

2. I’d like journalists to interview – and photograph – fathers as well as mothers for their stories about children and childcare. I’ve only seen one childcare story in the Sydney Morning Herald that featured a father. One.

3. I’d like moderators on news and comment websites to realise that they don’t need to publish every comment, and the dumbass ones they do publish keep the intelligent commenters away.

What’s on your 2013 feminist wish list?

(I wanted to illustrate this post with a picture of a female robot doing awesome stuff, because robots are cool. Do you know how hard it is to find an image of a female robot who isn’t a heterosexual teenage boy’s wet dream? The only difference between “female robot” and “sexy female robot” in google images is the suggestion of anal sex. And the real actual girl robots only do “girl” things like singing and being charming, or walking on a catwalk. This is the only one I could find that wasn’t drawn like it wanted you to fuck it, big boy, or wasn’t pushing a shopping trolley. Can someone draw an awesome lady robot for me, pretty please?)

Fame, facebook and future lives

Three pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend got me thinking about the future. I don’t mind thinking about the future – apart from that time K and I were discussing being worried that we won’t have enough super, because that felt like too adult a conversation for someone in their thirties who owns a cape and rollerskates. In fact, I often enjoy thinking about the future. I always have great boots in the future. And great hair. And I’ll be Dr News with Nipples in the future, and what’s not to like about that?

Anyway, my latest future-thinking was about young people. I don’t believe that young people are going to hell in a handbasket because they talk/dress/act differently. It’s just arrogant to assume that the way we did things was the best.

So, the first piece, by Tim Elliott – I wanna be famous – started as you’d expect, about how back in our day, kids wanted to be doctors and lawyers, but now they want to be famous. I’m Gen X. In general, we suck at self-promotion. Gen Y is much better at that, and that’s a good thing. (Check out those sweeping generalisations.)

This hand-wringing also ignores the fact that a) what kids say they want to be when they grow up is usually very different to what they actually end up doing, and b) university enrolments are the highest they’ve ever been. And it also assumes that there’s something wrong with wanting to be famous. No one would think it odd if I said I wanted to be a famous academic/writer/journalist.

A similar study in Britain last year found that the top three career aspirations for five to 11-year-olds were sports star, pop star and actor, compared with teacher, banker and doctor 25 years ago.

When my brother was five he said he wanted to be a firetruck. Kids say all sorts of shit, and I can’t see anything wrong with wanting to be a sports star (physically active), pop star (musical) or actor (creative).

Professor Wyn, who as a child dreamed of being a postie (”because they got to ride their bike all day”), believes that ”what do you want to be when you grow up?” is a boomer question for a 2000s audience. ”Many kids don’t have a clear idea what they want to be because people these days are going to be lots of things, and kids know that.”

Not only is it an outdated question, but how many of the jobs that your friends are doing now actually existed when you were in primary school? Even when I was in high school, our careers adviser (who was very good) wasn’t talking about web developing, or data managing, or environmental consulting.

The two other pieces – Peep show can claim a price by Judith Ireland, and On YouTube, all the world’s a stage by Rachel Olding – talk about facebook and YouTube being outlets for narcissism. Yawn. That is just being smug. And it misses the point that these things are just another part of people’s lives, like having a phone and using email. Besides, a journo calling someone a narcissist because they like to broadcast themselves is pretty funny.