#gender politics
On today’s episode of “why am I Facebook friends with this person?”
By Joseph Gelfer PhD on March 16, 2018
Despite the fact that women played a key role in the development of modern technology, the digital domain is a disproportionately male space. Recent stories about the politics of GamerGate, “tech bros” in Silicon Valley, and resistance to diversity routinely surface despite efforts of companies such as Google to clean up their act by firing reactionary male employees.
The big tech story of the past year is unquestionably cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. So it’s a good time to look at how cryptos replicate the gender politics of digital spaces and where they might complicate them.
Women’s Representation
Crypto holders are not evenly divided between men and women. One recent survey shows that 71% of Bitcoin holders are male. The first challenge for women is simply their representation within the crypto space.
There are various efforts on the part of individual women to address the imbalance. For example, Stacy Herbert, co-host of The Keiser Report, has recently been discussing the possibility of a women’s crypto conference noting, “I know so so many really smart women in the space but you go to these events and it’s panels of all the same guys again and again.” Technology commentator Alexia Tsotsis recently tweeted, “Women, consider crypto. Otherwise the men are going to get all the wealth, again.”
Clearly, the macho nature of the crypto community can feel exclusionary to women. Recently Bloomberg reported on a Bitcoin conference in Miami that invited attendees to an after-hours networking event held in a strip club. As one female attendee noted, “There was a message being sent to women, that, ‘OK, this isn’t really your place … this is where the boys roll.’”
The image of women as presented by altcoins (cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin) is also telling. One can buy into TittieCoinorBigBoobsCoin, which need no further explanation. There is also an altcoin designed to resist this tendency, Women Coin: “Women coin will become the ultimate business coin for women. We all know that this altcoin market is mainly operated by men, just like the entire world. We want to stop this.”
Cryptomasculinities
The male dominance of cryptos suggests it is a space that celebrates normative masculinity. Certain celebrity endorsements of crypto projects have added to this mood, such as heavyweight boxer Floyd Mayweather, actor Steven Seagal and rapper Ghostface Killah. Crypto evangelist John McAfee routinely posts comments and pictures concerning guns, hookers and drugs. Reactionary responses to feminism can also be found: for example, patriarchal revivalist website Return of Kings published an article claiming, “Bitcoin proves that that ‘glass ceiling’ keeping women down is a myth.” Homophobia also occurs: when leading Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos announced he was making a donation to the LGBTQ-focused Lambda Legal he received an array of homophobic comments.
However, it would be wrong to assume the masculinity promoted in the crypto space is monolithic. In particular, it is possible to identify a division between Bitcoin and altcoin holders. Consider the following image:
This image was tweeted with the caption “Bitcoin and Ethereum community can’t be anymore different.” On the left we have a MAGA hat-wearing, gun-toting Bitcoin holder; on the right the supposedly effeminate Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the blockchain platform Ethereum. The longer you spend reading user-generated content in the crypto space, the more you get the sense that Bitcoin is “for men” while altcoins are framed as for snowflakes and SJWs.
There is an exception to this Bitcoin/altcoin gendered distinction: privacy coins such as Monero and Zcash appear to be deemed acceptably manly. Perhaps it is a coincidence that such altcoins are favored by Julian Assange, who has his own checkered history with gender politics ranging from his famed “masculinity test” through to the recent quips about feminists reported by The Intercept.
In conclusion, it is not surprising that the crypto space appears to be predominantly male and even outright resistant to fair representations of women. Certainly, it is not too dramatic to state that Bitcoin has a hyper-masculine culture, but Bitcoin does not represent the whole crypto space, and as both altcoins and other blockchain-based services become more diverse it is likely that so too will its representations of gender.
Joseph Gelfer is a researcher of men and masculinities. His books include Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and The Problem of Patriarchy and Masculinities in a Global Era. He is currently developing a new model for understanding masculinity, The Five Stages of Masculinity.
Bizarre and very troubling vintage men’s magazine covers from Gary Panter’s reference art collection. “Mating Raid of the RED APE” “True Report: Stone Age Savages Kill Scientists”
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• Body I Am. Become My Art
Hannah Wilke (March 7, 1940 – January 28, 1993)
“So Help Me Hannah, Snatch-shots”
“If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal”, why not universalise the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?” - Hannah Wilke
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Our culture seems to believe that it’s entertaining to teach women to be frightened.
- Kiki Smith
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The moon is always female
and so
am I although often in this vale
of razorblades I have wished I could
put on and take off my sex like a dress
and why not? Do men always wear their sex
always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher
all tell us they come to their professions
neuter as clams and the truth is
when I work I am pure as an angel
tiger and clear is my eye and hot
my brain and silent all the whining
grunting piglets of the appetites.
For we were priests to the goddesses
to whom were fashioned the first altars
of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal
in the wombdark caves, long before men
put on skirts and masks to scare babies.
For we were healers with herbs and poultices
with our milk and careful fingers
long before they began learning to cut up
the living by making jokes at corpses.
For we were making sounds from our throats
and lips to warn and encourage the helpless
young long before schools were built
to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.
I wake in a strange slack empty bed
of a motel, shaking like dry leaves
the wind rips loose, and in my head
is bound a girl of twelve whose female
organs all but the numb womb are being
cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy,
whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter
of the world girl children are so maimed
and I think of her and I cannot stop.
And I think of her and I cannot stop.
If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.
If you are a man, then at age four or else
at twelve you are seized and held down
and your penis is cut off. You are left
your testicles but they are sewed to your
crotch. When your spouse buys you, you
are torn or cut open so that your precious
semen can be siphoned out, but of course
you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.
For the uses of men we have been butchered
and crippled and shut up and carved open
under the moon that swells and shines
and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant
and then waning toward its little monthly
death. The moon is always female but the sun
is female only in lands where females
are let into the sun to run and climb.
A woman is screaming and I hear her.
A woman is bleeding and I see her
bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts
in a fountain of dark blood of dismal
daily tedious sorrow quite palatable
to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted
that the bread of domesticity be baked
of our flesh, that the hearth be built
of our bones of animals kept for meat and milk,
that we open and lie under and weep.
I want to say over the names of my mothers
like the stones of a path I am climbing
rock by slippery rock into the mists.
Never even at knife point have I wanted
or been willing to be or become a man.
I want only to be myself and free.
I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here
I squat, the whole country with its steel
mills and its coal mines and its prisons
at my back and the continent tilting
up into mountains and torn by shining lakes
all behind me on this scythe of straw,
a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I
wait for the moon to rise red and heavy
in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful
in the dark I wait and I am all the time
climbing slippery rocks in a mist while
far below the waves crash in the sea caves;
I am descending a stairway under the groaning
sea while the black waters buffet me
like rockweed to and fro.
I have swum the upper waters leaping
in dolphin’s skin for joy equally into the nec-
cessary air and the tumult of the powerful wave.
I am entering the chambers I have visited.
I have floated through them sleeping and sleep-
walking and waking, drowning in passion
festooned with green bladderwrack of misery.
I have wandered these chambers in the rock
where the moon freezes the air and all hair
is black or silver. Now I will tell you
what I have learned lying under the moon
naked as women do: now I will tell you
the changes of the high and lower moon.
Out of necessity’s hard stones we suck
what water we can and so we have survived,
women born of women. There is knowing
with the teeth as well as knowing with
the tongue and knowing with the fingertips
as well as knowing with words and with all
the fine flickering hungers of the brain.
- Marge Piercy
• Susan Meiselas - “Prince Street Girls” series: Rosean on A train, 1978
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FEMINISM = GENDER EQUALITY, IT IS NOT A DIRTY WORD!
Why are we so afraid to use the word feminist? No matter what gender you identify with feminism WANTS equality for YOU.
Post #1 in a series - keep an eye out for more
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Got a very excited RE-BRAND coming up so keep your eyes peeled
In the meantime let’s keep the dialogue about mental health and gender equality issues open very excited for you all to see the new blog!
As always - credit to Hattie Gladwell
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I support the right for black men to interact with the police safely and without fear for their own life.
I support the right for trans men to use the correct bathroom without fear for their safety.
I support the right for bi and gay men to marry and adopt kids and donate blood.
I support the right for disabled men to have access to facilities and services with their disabilities accommodated respectfully.
I support the right for immigrant men to be treated with respect and be given full protection under the law.
I support the right for Jewish men and Muslim men to be able to practice their religion in peace without bomb threats and hateful vandalism against their places of worship.
Of course I support men’s rights. I’m just confused as to why so few “Antifeminists” do as well.
Feminism = gender equality
That means we want both genders to feel equal!
Stop saying you aren’t a feminist when, in fact, you are. Don’t hide who you are just so that you ensure no one around you gets uncomfortable.
So true
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Here’s your friendly reminder that equating top/bottom with dom/sub with masc/femme is literally just Sexist Gender Norms 2.0!
the thing about gender reductionism is that it’s a direct consequence of sociological and political theory failing to acknowledge the existence of, and account for, nonbinary people (or even just trans people as a whole). now that people are attempting to do so, they think that they can just get by by moving the boundaries and changing the wording, but keeping the underlying politics the same, and it just doesn’t work like that.
if you want to truly be inclusive of enbies, you can’t just lump us under the categories of “men” and “women” in your discussions of gender politics and patriarchy; you have to consider us as nonbinary people in our own right, not men- or women-lite, and if your politics cannot account for that, then your politics need to go. gender reductionism does nothing but harm trans people and you cannot claim to support us while putting very little thought or effort into doing so.
performative allyship is not allyship.
The solution to an oppressive system that puts people into pink and blue boxes is not to create more boxes. The solution is to tear down the boxes altogether.
- Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Gender is not a spectrum
Some shots of the still life I did for my photography class. I chose gender politics for my subject. This is different than my original idea, but I still like this idea with switching up the gender norms of having pink for boys and blue for girls. Because why should a color identify as masculine or feminine?
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