Friday News: Critiquing Anita Sarkeesian’s Critics, the new waterproof Kobo reader, pregnancy app Glow, and new book on 3 top newswomen
Publishing Newsapplication / Biography / ereader / gaming / gender / harassment / journalism / Kobo / Misogyny / pregnancy / sexism / waterproof28 Comments
Tropes vs Anita Sarkeesian: on passing off anti-feminist nonsense as critique – A really great, thorough analysis of the dangerous idiocy that are the attacks on Anita Sarkeesian. Not only does Ian Steadman uncover the hypocritical illogic of Sarkessian’s detractors, but he does it in a way that models content-based rational critique, demonstrating the difference between critique and assault.
There’s nothing in what Sarkeesian says about games that you wouldn’t expect in a Kael-type film essay – but the bile that she’s had to put up with for saying it has been extraordinary. Even before the Kickstarter fundraising finished she was subjected to death and rape threats. Someone made a game where players could beat her up, she was subjected to racial and sexist slurs, and she was labelled a liar and a con artist. Sarkeesian became a lightning rod for attacks from anyone pissed off at the concept of serious literary criticism of gaming, especially from a feminist perspective.
And, again, what Sarkeesian is doing is standard pop culture criticism, of the kind that films and books have been subjected to for decades – and TvsWVG is pretty good. It’s thorough and accessible, and it’s both a good introduction to the concept of feminist cultural criticism and an example of the increasing respect that games receive as an artform. The world was a very tedious place when all people asked was whether games were art at all; now that we know that they are, in their place come both external critiques (which includes TvsWVG) and intelligent responses from the industry itself (such as Jonathan Blow’s Braid, a platformer which deconstructs the “damsel in distress” trope). –New Statesman
Kobo Aura H20 is World’s First Waterproof Ereader – How many e-reader users would love a waterproof device? Well, now Kobo is delivering the new Kobo Aura H20, which will even be safe in the bathtub. It’s interesting that the new Kobo costs more than the Amazon Paperwhite, but judging from how the HD model sold last year, it’s not unreasonable to believe that people will pay the premium price for water resistance. According to Tech Crunch, the cost for US readers will be $179.99, which makes it a better deal than the current third-party waterproof treatment for Kindle Paperwhite.
The Kobo Aura H20 will go on sale at the beginning of October and will cost £140 in the UK, £30 more than Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite.
Kobo launched the Aura HD last year as a premium, large screen ereader device focused on the hardcore reader, a “niche device” which Kobo thought was going to account for just 5% of its hardware sales.
What it found however was that the Aura HD made up about a quarter of all hardware sales in the last year. –Yahoo News UK and Tech Crunch
How An App Helped Me (And 20,000 Other Women) Get Pregnant – Although I started reading this article with a pretty significant dose of skepticism, I found it really fascinating and engaging, in large part because an app designed to help women get pregnant (designed by PayPal founder Max Levchin, of all people), can also be such an interactive educational tool for women who have been extremely poorly served by the medical community (aka all women). Despite the supposed expertise of women’s health practitioners, there’s a lot of ignorance and unnecessary medical intervention where women are concerned (e.g. the fact that they routinely remove healthy ovaries when doing a hysterectomy, forcing women to take hormone replacement therapy — and don’t even get me started on one of the leading HRT treatments and the horses sacrificed to produce it.). There is also a lot of good stuff here for anyone writing pregnancy into their books, or an intentional pregnancy attempt.
In over two decades of seeing reproductive health practitioners, not a single doctor had ever suggested that I track my cycle. When I had started to entertain the idea of getting pregnant, I asked one of my doctors for tips on what I should do, and she looked at me rather oddly and offered this sage advice: “Just have sex.”
But as I would come to find, it’s not actually that easy. The fertility window is already pretty narrow, and as you get older you’re honestly only looking at a day or two when you can actually get pregnant. When you’re 35, you don’t have time to be casual about it. I realized that I had spent far too much of my life clueless about the happenings in my pelvic region. I wanted all the information laid out cleanly for me. Very quickly, and with lovely graphics that didn’t offend my discerning taste, Glow managed to illustrate everything I didn’t know. –Gizmodo
Katie Couric Crudely Slams Diane Sawyer in New Book – Although I’m no fan of Katie Couric, I’m even less of a fan of the kind of salacious sexism we’re seeing on display in the snippets and discussion from an upcoming book on Couric, Diane Sawyer, and Christiane Amanpour. When men compete for an anchor chair, do we say that one “snatched” the chair from another? Not that the lives of journalists — male and female — should be sanitized or idealized, but women, in particular, have a terribly difficult time separating the personal from the professional, and books like this don’t help at all.
Among the surprising stories is Katie Couric’s response to Diane Sawyer landing a much-sought-after 2004 interview with the 56-year-old woman (she was three days short of 57) who gave birth to twins: “I wonder who she blew this time to get it.”
A rep for Couric declined to comment on the allegation, but a source close to the global anchor for Yahoo News said this, “It’s sad that? the author and her PR team continue to alienate their target audience by relying on classic anti-feminist caricatures, tabloid-like misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about these three extraordinary women. Thankfully all three of them have survived and thrived after dealing with far worse than a couple of gossip items.” –The Hollywood Reporter
I am VERY excited about the idea of a waterproof ereader, but I’m not sure I want a Kobo. I hear a lot of bad things about their customer service. Is that still a problem?
Ros, I have two Kobos and every customer service interaction I’ve had has been pleasant and helpful. I am a big fan of my Aura HD and can’t wait to see how the Aura H2O does.
I love the piece on what has happened to Anita Sarkeesian–and really, to pretty much any woman who is a bit too loud online, in her critique of society at large. Thank you for the link.
At one point I had to contact Kobo customer service because I could not transfer my Sony library to Kobo. (This was after Sony closed their store.) I quickly got to talk to someone on chat, and she sent me a list of 26 steps (uggh), which did eventually work. But 26 steps! I sent an email saying it worked, and they replied:
“It warms our heart to know that you were able to get your book loaded to your Sony eReader”
Which I thought was just a little weird. (Warms our hearts? What?) But I can’t really complain about their customer service.
I’m hoping Amazon will copy Kobo and make their next e-ink ereader waterproof. We just got a hot tub so I really want this feature. I’ve started buying a lot more of my books from Kobo because of the coupons so it just might be worth making the switch for me.
No one ever told her to track her cycles? That’s like hippy getting pregnant 101. My mom did that (with test strips for pH and everything) thirty fricken years ago.
Thanks, everyone, that’s encouraging to know.
@Isobel Carr: I’m not surprised no one ever told her to track her cycles. No one ever told me that either. I consider myself a smart, well-educated woman, but that whole piece was missing from my education. I actually went on a rant about it to my husband after I started researching and tracking my cycles with a different app. I had these huge gaps in my knowledge about my own body — stuff that wasn’t covered in early sex education, high school sex ed, doctor visits or romance novels. Maybe the hippies knew it 30 years ago, but it isn’t getting passed down, at least not to a lot of us.
@Heather: I believe you, but I find this both surprising and depressing. It wasn’t just hippies in the 1970s and 1980s, every woman I talked to about sex, pregnancy etc. in college and beyond (which basically means every woman I knew then) was aware of cycles, not least because of the Pill (women who weren’t on it tended to know how it worked). And there were a ton of jokes about the rhythm method and large Catholic families, so that was another way people learned about fertility being cyclical. I’m really sorry to hear that this kind of information is not part of unremarkable conversation among women today.
I got a decent education on the biological side of my body, but I always felt it was because I got lucky on the teacher, and it was an all-girls school.
Sex education, well… Saturday morning cartoon of the “you’re not ready” meets “scare ’em straight”. The science teacher was not invited to that viewing.
@Sunita: I suspect it just depends who your friends are and what you’re reading. I have never needed to pay much attention to either birth control or family planning, but it feels like something I’ve always known about. Maybe it doesn’t get passed on because it’s assumed that everyone knows?
@Sunita: I also knew about cycles very early on (and all the jokes about the rhythm method), but I don’t remember anyone in the medical community teaching me how to determine when I was ovulating, let alone anything about the different hormones in the female body and how they all worked. And when I went on the pill, there was ZERO discussion about the range of implications of taking hormones in this fashion – not only the amount but the type. Most of the really valuable knowledge I got about women’s health came from either nurse practitioners who promoted complementary health practices (while my gyn merely conducted exams or procedures) or from my own research and recommendations from friends (the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves and the books of John Lee and Christiane Northrup, for example). I have friends who’ve had hysterectomies and had no clue they should ask about whether their ovaries needed to be removed, and have spoken with many women over the years who don’t really understand all the differences are between progesterone and estrogen, let alone natural or bio-identical hormones v. Premarin, or even the use of xenoestrogens in the environment. It’s extremely depressing, and I think it’s depressingly common, too, even for women who have access to high quality health care.
@Robin/Janet: I’m sorry to hear that your doctor was so uninformative, dangerously so, in fact. Education about the physical effects of the Pill (and of different combinations and proportions of hormones, as research progressed) was pretty standard not just in the university health service I used but also in the clinics that my pink-collar-ghetto coworkers frequented. We all encountered some very old-fashioned doctors and had to work around them, but my point to Heather was more about the extent to which we women talked about these issues and shared information and resources. If that is not going on today (and I’m not saying every women participated in such conversations, just that they definitely existed), that’s a real shame.
@Sunita: I think that kind of sharing is going on to the extent that anyone’s circle of friends is interested, engaged, and informed. I wonder if those discussions were more ubiquitous several decades ago. Remember, for example, when 50 Shades was released and Katie Roiphe wrote that article in Newsweek, that read like a new discovery that women had sexual submission fantasies? Like all the research by Nancy Friday, et al, didn’t even exist. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s Katie Roiphe, but sadly, I don’t think she’s as much an anomaly as we would like. I wonder, in fact, if there’s a cultural perception that more sexual freedom = more sexual knowledge, when the opposite is true (and let’s face it, the sexual freedom thing is rolling back pretty damn fast, too).
My mom tracked her cycles in the late 1960s. I don’t know if she had access to pH test strips; she told me she took her temperature every day. Anyway, it worked in short order, and she went on to have three more pregnancies she didn’t do any tracking for. But she was scared the whole time she tracked her cycles because some incompetent doctor had told her she was likely to be infertile, on the basis of very little information.
My doctors have run the gamut from informative to uninformative. I found out for myself that being on the pill wreaks havoc on my emotions, for example. And it’s only through the vegan community that I found out that Premarin is derived from pregnant mare urine.
@Sunita: It is pretty crazy. I’m on the older end of the spectrum and when I started talking to my doctor a couple years ago about getting pregnant, I asked a lot of questions about what I should be concerned about, problems I might run into, etc. Even then, she was like, well have sex and good luck. Looking back, it pisses me off.
Now that I’ve been reading the hell out of the internet, I’m asking more questions and more specifics…of a different doctor and a nurse practitioner.
I’ve started talking to friends and I’m finding their levels of knowledge are mixed — some know more than me, some about the same.
It’s frustrating that for so long, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
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I don’t get why you don’t have the little device I had in the UK 20 years ago (which you could buy over the counter in Boots the Chemist) where every day you peed on a stick, slid it into the little machine which then told you whether you were ovulating or not. I wonder why they never made it over the pond? Great for wanting to conceive and not wanting to conceive without having to take anything hormonal.
>>In over two decades of seeing reproductive health practitioners, not a single doctor had ever suggested that I track my cycle.<<
Seriously? I think I still have my basal thermometer somewhere, the one I used to track my cycles on graph paper. Knowing how to track your cycle was the first step advised by health care practitioners decades ago for women trying to get pregnant. What are they teaching in med school these days? It saddens me to see women in the 21st C. still aren't getting the information they need about how their reproductive systems work.
@Kate Pearce, ovulation predictors did make it across the pond. I used to see them advertised on television (I think it was in the 1990s). There has been a concerted effort over the past 20 years to keep Americans more ignorant about a wide variety of issues but especially about sex and contraception. Mostly this comes from the religious right, but I think our for-profit healthcare system (and wildly profitable fertility clinics) are also driving that bus.
Since I moved to Kentucky, I’ve met at least one woman who got pregnant because she had no idea that birth control existed, and had never heard of or seen a condom.
She is in her mid-20s now; she was 16 when she had her child.
On a related note: the first writing group I joined in my town was run by a middle-aged man. One of the women, a really talented writer, submitted a story to the group about a girl on a farm getting her first period. It was a gut-wrenching story; the girl’s mother was dead or gone, the father was not helpful, and she was badly isolated. The guy in charge of our group kicked her out & sent her numerous private messages telling her that she should be ashamed of herself for writing such a filthy, disgusting story.
(My writing group no longer includes that man.)
I find it very, very easy to believe that I live around a lot of people who have never heard the word ovulation, let alone any instructions about how to capitalize on it.
Coworker desperate to get pregnant (tried 5 years) and almost at the IVF stage, mentioned to me she had a sharp pain and I sympathised over her cramps, which she denied because she was mid cycle. I suggested she was ovulating and got a blank stare. She went and looked up my suggestion and came back crying and told me this occured every month and no one had ever told her that was what this might be, therefore good time to try. Pregnant within 3 months. I recall being taught this in sex ed at the age of about 10. In the UK. I have a lot more idea about a lot of this stuff than my Canadian counterparts.
I don’t think my doctor ever told me about tracking my cycle, but at the time I got pregnant with my now 10-year-old daughter, I was hanging out in an online community whose forums included a trying to conceive thread. I got the book everyone recommended (whose title escapes me) and tracked my temps. At the time I had shortish cycles, and it was quickly obvious I was ovulating around day 9 or 10 instead of the 14 that’s supposed to be typical. I conceived our second month trying, but I can easily see it taking a lot longer if I hadn’t been the type who obsessively researches any new project or venture.
I had sex ed the year Title Nine passed and no one quite knew what it meant. My school decided it meant health could no longer be segregated and if girls and boys were taught the same thing, they might as well be taught in the same class. We had a boys’ gym teacher who had reddish hair and very pale skin which turned redder than a really bad sunburn when he was embarrassed and he was mortified to be teaching girls about sex. We watched movies from the 50s, which always seemed to include girls and boys roller skating hand-in-hand and made veiled statements which, if they had a point, I missed entirely.
Then he had hand-outs about clinical terms and what’s the point of knowing what a fallopian tube or a vas deferens is if you have no idea what ejaculation is (I didn’t and was too embarrassed to ask. I was smart enough that if I’d had the foggiest clue how male anatomy worked, I could have guessed the meaning of the Latin term).
Needless to say, given that Latin terms were hard enough for the poor red-headed and red-faced teacher to teach, we never strayed into anything less clinical than Latin vocabulary. He’d turn so red and give such a brief, panicked glance at the girls’ side of the room when he asked if there were any questions that no one asked. The year before, in the all girls’ health class, we covered periods, pads and deodorant, but not anything related to sex. Given that my mother barely managed to cover periods, I didn’t ask her about sex.
So, having read Everything you wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask, while babysitting, a book which included the question, “How do you know if a woman has had an orgasm?” I wanted to know, how can you tell if a man has had an orgasm. A mystery that it took years to eventually dawn on me.
The TTC book is Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Weschler. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see dozens of women talking about the book changed their lives and filled in gaps created by bad doctors and a lack of education. It’s incredibly depressing, but I don’t think every woman in the US has a working understanding of her body.
As an aside I’d really love to read an article that puts Taking Charge of Your Fertility, the midwifery books by Ian May Gaskin, and Your Best Birth by Ricki Lake (yes, that Ricki Lake, both the documentary and the book) into conversation with the Second Wave Feminists books about women’s health like Our Bodies, Our Selves because my sense is that these texts are doing feminist work but without a feminist lenses.
I’ve heard about doctors needing to explain what PIV sex is and that it’s necessary for conception to young couples struggling to conceive, so women not knowing how to track their cycle or why they’d want to doesn’t surprise me at all.
Abstinence-only sex ed, FTW.
The things going on in the game industry right now are causing a lot of women to quietly change careers, because threats to your life for just existing in proximity to a game are terrifying, nevermind ever ever EVER daring to express an opinion about it. Within the studio it is great, the people are horrified by this and standing up to say it’s not okay, but these are the people who buy our games that are acting like psychopaths. And people wonder why we don’t give studio tours or publish our studio address! Seriously. My boss endured several years of severe harassment, just because she was an executive producer on a really popular game. Because by this awful thinking, if she hadn’t been involved, it would have been EVEN BETTER. (In reality it never would have shipped). Even now, as one of the most successful women in the industry, people simply say about her “Oh, she’s hot”.
(Also, it was entirely by accident I learned about PIV sex in fifth grade, because someone had the courage to ask “But how does the sperm get INTO the woman?” and it was awkwardly shown with overhead projection cells overlapping. Seriously, kids are clueless. I spent a day with a tampon applicator inside of me because the instructions on the packaging did not include REMOVE THAT PART.)
Also also I would love a waterproof e-reader because I read in the tub, and while I have not dunked it YET, I have dropped enough books in the tub to know it’s just a matter of time. Plus it would be nice to take to the beach or read while waiting for the bus in the rain/snow.
I learned all my most useful info online, including which books to read. Probably why I’m a mom. And I remember talking with my friend while we were both trying, and her telling me that her doctor said she should just keep trying for a year… I was horrified and pointed out that that advice is only appropriate for young women, not women our age. She got treatment and I now have three goddaughters. :-) (Not triplets!)