#omgstfu

Hi! My name is Faust and I do internets. I am on two podcasts, What Was The Question (WWTQ)((NSFW)) and Games, Anime, Computers, and Collectibles (GACC) ((Typically SFW))

Both are on iTunes and Google Play and easy to find, please share if you like them, rate and review and all that. 

I’m also involved in two youtube/vid.me channels that operate under the name of Jenny Fedora, again easy to find with a search, please comment and subscribe and all that jazz. 

I’m old, probably older than you, but not too old for the internet just yet. I’m smart, probably smarter than you, but not smart enough- well you get the picture. 

I lurk here and there, I don’t really post and when I do it feels awkward. I do arts sometimes, I do music, I write, I read, I like being creative any way that I can, hence the podcasts and youtubes, because I like editing all of that stuff most of all. 

So this is a thing that I’m encountering more and more as I go through life.

I know there was a time when it seemed like there were a lot of obnoxious social rules, and most of them were some kind of -ist (often multiple kinds at once), and I hung out with a whole lot of people who were very much on the side of “fuck all of this polite society nonsense, we don’t need it and we can build something better!”

And then I went to social work school, and one of the things that got super-drilled into me there was the importance of interpersonal boundaries in various professional and social roles.

And part of what I noticed was that a lot, A LOT, of the “fuck social rules” crowd was really saying, in part, “fuck interpersonal boundaries, we don’t need ‘em!”

(And around that time I also had an awful experience with a therapist who was on the who-needs-conventional-interpersonal-boundaries bandwagon, who over-stepped a lot of lines with myself and my spouse.)

And reflecting on it...that’s dangerous.  That’s a lot of where and how Missing Stairs operate.  They thrive in and depend on the “ordinary social rules and roles hurt people, therefore we should have none or at least a lot fewer, therefore I am totally not overstepping my boundaries when I do this thing that ordinary social convention would say I shouldn’t!”

I watched from afar as a group that was very important to me when I was a new adult imploded because of this.  I pretty much left another group that used to mean the world to me because of this.  I’m watching a few different people in wildly different contexts land in really horrible life situations because of this.

I didn’t mean to like this post. It was a mistake. Here’s why. You say intellectuals mostly don’t qualify because their struggle is against the church, the man’s world or such. You say it’s not interesting to draw. You just disneyfied your project.

Oh no, I hope it didn't come off as that! I certainly have nothing against intellectual woman-vs-institution entries: Hypatia, Ida B Wells, and Naziq al-Abid all fit that bill, and I've got several more I've done for the book. It's not that they don't qualify. What I'm saying is they are more difficult to do, because they require a lot more research -- and in some cases, that research doesn't have a guaranteed payoff.

Take, for example, "Amazing" Grace Hopper, one of the first computer programmers. She died in 1992, so I likely won't do a full-on entry on her anyway (as a general rule, I don't do people who've been alive in recent memory, although I do highlight them as Modern Worthies).

Grace was an amazing human being with a truly staggering list of accomplishments. But looking through the Wikipedia overview of her life (as I often do when deciding whether to plunge deeper into research), the only speedbump that jumps out is that people didn't believe her that computers could run compiled code. 

An entry on her would have to dig deep and figure out who, exactly, said that. Why did they say it? What was the context and the world in which this happened? Was this an ad-hominem thing? Was she dismissed because she was a woman? Was it an honest mistake? Were there other obstacles that weren't mentioned in articles about her?

All of these are unknowns to me at this point. I'd have to *hope* a biography on her would cover those questions in a reliable fashion. If not, I'd have to find a lot more info in a lot more places to answer said questions. And the entry could shift a lot at that point. Maybe it turns out to be systematic of a larger conflict I can write about - not what I expected, but cool! Maybe it's chalked up to "navy culture," which I don't know much about and certainly wouldn't want to make sweeping statements on. Maybe there ends up being no conflict at all. I don't know.

Would it be a bad entry if I couldn't find any conflict to write about? Not necessarily, but a biography without conflict runs the risk of coming across as a resume. It's far from impossible to craft a compelling article from that, but it is usually difficult, and takes more time. Making these entries compelling is hugely important to me - half the reason I'm using a pop culture aesthetic and write like I'm telling a story at a house party is to make history more fun and accessible. 

So when I say that intellectual-versus-institution entries are tricky, that's what I mean. They take more time, craft, and thought than other entries. I do one of these entries every 2-3 days (including weekends), just to keep up with both book and web. I'm far from an expert draftsman (I redraw a lot), so it takes me between 10-20 hours to draw one of these images, before factoring in research time. I love brainy ladies (just had a half hour conversation with a friend about Ada Lovelace earlier today), but I have to be realistic about my workload: taking on difficult entries can really throw a spanner into the plans.

I hope that didn't come across as defensive or bullheaded. I'm really just trying to explain where my head's at. The direction of this project has changed a fair bit from its inception, and it'll only get more honed and refined as time goes on. Where my head is at will change too. I appreciate y'all keeping with me, writing in when you have something to say, and keeping me on my toes. Now that RP has a website separate from this Tumblr, I can have more of a dialog going, and I look forward to that.

Okay, it's midnight, back to work.

This is definitely an area of the world that I’ve struggled to find good candidates for. As of this writing, out of the 917 potential women on my master list, only 8 are from Australia or New Zealand - and one of those is dingo-flinging cannibalistic sun goddess Bila, who I’m just gonna admit at this point is never getting an entry.

So, what criteria do I go by? It’s loose, it’s evolved over time, and it continues to change, but generally I look for three things:

Agency. (do they do what they want?)

Conflict. (do they have trouble doing what they want?)

Personality. (do they approach their goals with character?) 

This is more difficult to find than you might think.

Ancient poets and queens definitely had agency, but it’s often hard to find personality or conflict.

Historical headstrong women had conflict and personality, but often not much agency. This makes for a lot of tragic endings, which aren’t much fun to write (or read) about.

Many intellectuals had agency, but usually, due to being born into privilege (thus being able to become an intellectual), didn’t have much conflict. The conflict I find regularly is institutional (woman vs church, woman vs man’s world, etc) - which is both tricky to illustrate (draw her shaking a fist at a building, I guess?) and difficult to write about in an interesting, upbeat way.

This is one reason why I tend towards warrior women in the entries — they usually fit all three criteria, and, as a bonus, often come out as victorious. But obviously, none of this is set in stone. Neither Etain or Corn Maiden, for example, had much agency. I’ve written on plenty of women with tragic endings. Bottom line, interesting stories trump everything.

On top of that (and various language/access difficulties in research), I’m trying to save the best entries for the book, so the print edition has wide-ranging representation. So when I do find someone super-awesome for a hitherto-unrepresented part of the world, I often squirrel them away.

Anyway. Just a general FYI of where my head’s at. :) Believe me, I look at the blank spots on the map too, and think about what I can do to fill them in.