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rawbone8
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madame_zora
Sexy Member
"Impaled" and "crotch" too close for comfort?
The colour thing is weird to me. I'm not a girly girl so a pink background is kind of nauseating to me. I thought the tits were a dead give away of my gender...
The colour thing is weird to me. I'm not a girly girl so a pink background is kind of nauseating to me. I thought the tits were a dead give away of my gender...
Yeah, I'm gonna come back to this thread for a while, even though I realize that most people appear to think I'm taking this way too seriously and over-intellectualizing the matter. But guess what? That's how I am, and this isn't a sudden new approach I'm using on the boards in terms of my posting style.madame_zora said:
My problem is precisely what Madame Z. is saying implicitly - that these colors connote specific notions of gender. In particular, I have issues with the pink for "girly girls" and the white for "invisible" transsexuals.
The first of these, the 'pink', is one of those ways that people start to instil "correct" gender behaviors in children - by color-coding them to be either "sugar and spice" or else "snips and snails and puppy dog's tails". It's that key moment when gender stops being about whether you have a penis or a vagina and is instead about the socio-cultural imposition of 'expected' behaviors and the pigeonholing of male and female children in accordance with prevalent stereotypes. Worst of all, it's one of those things that is so 'normalized' in our culture that it's almost never questioned. And that's why I find it kinda sad to see that replicated here ... reducing people to stereotypical color-codes so that we know whether to anticipate a "macho" post or a "girly" one.
The second of these, 'white' (or should I say 'clear' in terms of the board color scheme) with regard to transsexuals and transgendered people, is in turn a replication of the prejudices of numerous states and organizations - refusing to accept the gender of transsexuals (something which they have had to actually undergo a lot of unpleasant questioning, ridicule and surgery to achieve) and marking them as simply 'invisible', or 'improperly gendered'. A male-to-female transsexual is a woman, and a female-to-male transsexual is a man; but these boards can't acknowledge this in their new color-scheme ... transsexuals remain simply 'nothing' in terms of this color code.
Maybe there are a couple of additional reasons why I respond to this so negatively. First of all, I live in a nation where the idea of color-coding people has specific connotations of Nazi practices during the Third Reich; with the best-known examples being the yellow stars given to Jews and the pink triangles given to gay men. But, hell, if it hadn't have been for the threat of a red triangle, maybe my great-grandparents and grandparents might have spent a little more time in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Secondly, a more personal anecdote about why I dislike gender-pigeonholing; due to one of those childhood events that somehow etches itself into your mind as a defining moment of being excluded. The principal of the scarcely-progressive school I was in (at about age 10) walking along the corridor and asking the assembled children to "form three lines - girls, boys, and [my full name]"; ensuring that I was made to feel the object of ridicule and of being at once invisible in gender-terms and yet overly-present through having been placed outside the gender dichotomy, as a symbolic 'other', by this mindless buffoon. So I get a little pissed at seeing the same treatment handed out, albeit in a more tacit, implicit way, via LPSG color-coding.
*drops two more cents in the meter on his way out*
madame_zora
Sexy Member
Problem solved. I put "no response" to the question of gender and it removed the colour. I find that acceptable, no colour for no response, how about you Alex?
Actually, as anal as you are probably being, I agree. Since the site is at least 90% male, having one of the very few pink backgrounds made me feel like I stuck out, and not in a good way. I do everything I can to distance myself from being type cast as your average, dreary, vapid "girl" and the colour pink just carries so many connotations of "sugar and spice and everything nice" that it makes me want to hurl. I already get enough admonishments from idiotic men who wonder why I have to speak so bluntly- why I don't try to "catch more flies with honey". I don't want any fucking flies and I don't like having hundred year old logic explaining why I have to be a twit today.
There are usually simple enough ways to fix these things, and dissecting the hows and whys is always of interest, at least to me.
Actually, as anal as you are probably being, I agree. Since the site is at least 90% male, having one of the very few pink backgrounds made me feel like I stuck out, and not in a good way. I do everything I can to distance myself from being type cast as your average, dreary, vapid "girl" and the colour pink just carries so many connotations of "sugar and spice and everything nice" that it makes me want to hurl. I already get enough admonishments from idiotic men who wonder why I have to speak so bluntly- why I don't try to "catch more flies with honey". I don't want any fucking flies and I don't like having hundred year old logic explaining why I have to be a twit today.
There are usually simple enough ways to fix these things, and dissecting the hows and whys is always of interest, at least to me.
I think my other objection (oh goodie, I find it objectionable on another level too ) is that the color-coding always foregrounds gender in every post a person makes: it makes each post stand out as either a 'boy post' or a 'girl post', with gender somehow being shown to shape the post over and above any other factor. With the previous system, you were free to decide which factors from a person's profile details were most relevant to an individual post: their location, age, gender, sexuality, or all/none of these. With the color-coded system, however, the issue of gender is rammed down your throat as somehow the key, all-defining factor.
) is that the color-coding always foregrounds gender in every post a person makes: it makes each post stand out as either a 'boy post' or a 'girl post', with gender somehow being shown to shape the post over and above any other factor. With the previous system, you were free to decide which factors from a person's profile details were most relevant to an individual post: their location, age, gender, sexuality, or all/none of these. With the color-coded system, however, the issue of gender is rammed down your throat as somehow the key, all-defining factor.
jeff black
Expert Member
Matthew said:
Well, if all the cool kids are doing it, I want to be white too!:biggrin1:
Goodbye PENIS, hello no response.
