This morning, I woke up out of a dream about a guy I used to know via homeschooling circles. I guess he had been kind of a political activist before having kids and then ended up homeschooling his gifted-learning disabled children and ended up channeling his passion for activism into this new interest.
He had gone to some big name school like Harvard, though it wasn't Harvard, so he knew how to get things done in the public sphere and he founded his own publishing company to publish his own books to promote his basically cockamamie theories. Because he was the author and the publisher, there were no real checks and balances.
In my experience, parenting lists -- and homeschooling lists are a kind of parenting list -- are typically dominated by women. They are full of mostly moms not dads.
Men tend to have a hard time posting on female-dominated discussion boards but inevitably some guy figures out how to open his mouth there without being handed his head for it and ends up one of the most powerful voices there. Gender norms mean you can't disagree with such a guy because a dozen women will hand you your head if you try. He doesn't even need to fight you if he doesn't really want to do so.
I know because I was usually the woman arguing with such men and it's part of why I left all kinds of lists. You want to see toxic Patriarchy at its (cough) "finest" (cough)? Join a mostly female list with one or a few dominant male voices. Women are, collectively, their own worst enemy in that regard.
So he went around promoting his theories that homeschooling is best and everyone was better educated before public schools were invented and promoted as a means to create factory workers and literacy rates were higher before public schools were created by the upper classes to turn the lower classes into dutiful factory workers and stop thinking for themselves.
That's obviously bullshit on the face of it. If you know a smidgen of history, you know literacy rates used to be appallingly bad, but I met this guy through an email list full of very smart women many of whom had themselves gone to places like Harvard and no one was calling him on his shit. They were eating this up for various reasons not pertinent here and I suspect that some of the people more in the know were trying, but failing, to find some means to counteract his influence.
So I repeated his cockamamie theories on Hacker News once and someone busted me and I was like "Well, duh. Yeah. Okay. How did I fall for something so obviously wrong on the face of it?"
Me dreaming about this man I used to know is no doubt because I have a lot on my mind. It is being posted here to say that it's tough for women to find their way out of certain kinds of logical errors due to social dynamics like this.
Women are more or less expected to kowtow to men. If you join a male-dominated platform like Hacker News, you probably won't be prepared for the climate and even if you are the men will still be hostile to a woman arguing as vehemently as they do.
I used to be happy to argue with men on Hacker News. It tended to go weird and bad places and I spent a lot of years sorting out how better to interact with Hacker News.
Hacker News is a frustrating experience for me. It isn't the networking opportunity for me that it so clearly can be for men who wish to use it that way and there are myriad ways in which it is merely an exercise in frustration, but it did help me figure out something about saying things in public that hold water and doing so in the right way that I was not learning from female-dominated email lists with one or a few male voices running roughshod over all the ladies.
For some years, my best friend was a Canadian woman who was running a small business. She talked once about "How do you establish yourself as an expert?" and she more or less described what this guy had done: You get a book published and now you are "an expert."
Of course that's basically a con job, especially since the books he was publishing were not having to in any way pass through a system of checks and balances. There was no editor saying "Whoa, dude. Where are your fact checkers here? What citations support this cock and bull story of yours?"
He wrote it. He published it. He said whatever he felt like, basically.
My Canadian friend could see it was a con job, but was failing to come up with a better answer. She knew it was a kind of circular logic and she kind of laughed at it, but, like me, she wasn't really finding the path forward she wanted.
Blogging is sort of the modern day equivalent of what he did, only people are more likely to realize that merely hitting the publish button doesn't somehow magically mean you know what in heck you are talking about. I am guilty of being free to speak my mind much as he did though I don't have the money he had to do so via the dead tree version of publication but at least people aren't bamboozled these days by "She HAS A BLOG. She must be an expert." the way some people were snookered by him and his self-published books.
I don't blog with any delusions that simply hitting that publishing button will convince anyone I know my stuff. I know that I need to actually meet some bar of credibility in terms of what I say and can't use "I got published" as some proxy and false signal implying I have expertise the way he seemingly did.
I think for some things, having a genuine and viable business is how you prove it works. People pay for it because it actually does the thing they need done and that's all there is to that.
I am still trying to sort out how "talking" -- aka blogging -- about stuff relates to establishing a viable business. I would kinda of like to start a clothing line and I can readily see that blogging about my opinions of body politics and such could potentially be a great way to cut my own throat.
But if I did actually start a clothing line and I'm actually RIGHT about some things, maybe making clothes that is actually better in some meaningful way because I have thought about those things would make it fly off the shelves and sell like hotcakes. You know: So long as I mostly kept my big fat mouth shut about certain things.
He had gone to some big name school like Harvard, though it wasn't Harvard, so he knew how to get things done in the public sphere and he founded his own publishing company to publish his own books to promote his basically cockamamie theories. Because he was the author and the publisher, there were no real checks and balances.
In my experience, parenting lists -- and homeschooling lists are a kind of parenting list -- are typically dominated by women. They are full of mostly moms not dads.
Men tend to have a hard time posting on female-dominated discussion boards but inevitably some guy figures out how to open his mouth there without being handed his head for it and ends up one of the most powerful voices there. Gender norms mean you can't disagree with such a guy because a dozen women will hand you your head if you try. He doesn't even need to fight you if he doesn't really want to do so.
I know because I was usually the woman arguing with such men and it's part of why I left all kinds of lists. You want to see toxic Patriarchy at its (cough) "finest" (cough)? Join a mostly female list with one or a few dominant male voices. Women are, collectively, their own worst enemy in that regard.
So he went around promoting his theories that homeschooling is best and everyone was better educated before public schools were invented and promoted as a means to create factory workers and literacy rates were higher before public schools were created by the upper classes to turn the lower classes into dutiful factory workers and stop thinking for themselves.
That's obviously bullshit on the face of it. If you know a smidgen of history, you know literacy rates used to be appallingly bad, but I met this guy through an email list full of very smart women many of whom had themselves gone to places like Harvard and no one was calling him on his shit. They were eating this up for various reasons not pertinent here and I suspect that some of the people more in the know were trying, but failing, to find some means to counteract his influence.
So I repeated his cockamamie theories on Hacker News once and someone busted me and I was like "Well, duh. Yeah. Okay. How did I fall for something so obviously wrong on the face of it?"
Me dreaming about this man I used to know is no doubt because I have a lot on my mind. It is being posted here to say that it's tough for women to find their way out of certain kinds of logical errors due to social dynamics like this.
Women are more or less expected to kowtow to men. If you join a male-dominated platform like Hacker News, you probably won't be prepared for the climate and even if you are the men will still be hostile to a woman arguing as vehemently as they do.
I used to be happy to argue with men on Hacker News. It tended to go weird and bad places and I spent a lot of years sorting out how better to interact with Hacker News.
Hacker News is a frustrating experience for me. It isn't the networking opportunity for me that it so clearly can be for men who wish to use it that way and there are myriad ways in which it is merely an exercise in frustration, but it did help me figure out something about saying things in public that hold water and doing so in the right way that I was not learning from female-dominated email lists with one or a few male voices running roughshod over all the ladies.
For some years, my best friend was a Canadian woman who was running a small business. She talked once about "How do you establish yourself as an expert?" and she more or less described what this guy had done: You get a book published and now you are "an expert."
Of course that's basically a con job, especially since the books he was publishing were not having to in any way pass through a system of checks and balances. There was no editor saying "Whoa, dude. Where are your fact checkers here? What citations support this cock and bull story of yours?"
He wrote it. He published it. He said whatever he felt like, basically.
My Canadian friend could see it was a con job, but was failing to come up with a better answer. She knew it was a kind of circular logic and she kind of laughed at it, but, like me, she wasn't really finding the path forward she wanted.
Blogging is sort of the modern day equivalent of what he did, only people are more likely to realize that merely hitting the publish button doesn't somehow magically mean you know what in heck you are talking about. I am guilty of being free to speak my mind much as he did though I don't have the money he had to do so via the dead tree version of publication but at least people aren't bamboozled these days by "She HAS A BLOG. She must be an expert." the way some people were snookered by him and his self-published books.
I don't blog with any delusions that simply hitting that publishing button will convince anyone I know my stuff. I know that I need to actually meet some bar of credibility in terms of what I say and can't use "I got published" as some proxy and false signal implying I have expertise the way he seemingly did.
I think for some things, having a genuine and viable business is how you prove it works. People pay for it because it actually does the thing they need done and that's all there is to that.
I am still trying to sort out how "talking" -- aka blogging -- about stuff relates to establishing a viable business. I would kinda of like to start a clothing line and I can readily see that blogging about my opinions of body politics and such could potentially be a great way to cut my own throat.
But if I did actually start a clothing line and I'm actually RIGHT about some things, maybe making clothes that is actually better in some meaningful way because I have thought about those things would make it fly off the shelves and sell like hotcakes. You know: So long as I mostly kept my big fat mouth shut about certain things.
Not to say I shouldn't ever talk about such things. But framing, timing etc matter.