Monthly Archives: March 2010

For those of you unfamiliar with Ada Lovelace, she was the woman who wrote the very first computer program ever written.  Ada Lovelace Day is a day declared in her honor to celebrate women who work in technology and science.

Naturally, Ada is a hero to all of us girl geeks out there who appreciate science and tech and try our best to force the world past the ridiculous notions that science and technology are masculine fields.

I don’t have a single primary hero to thank for their contributions to science and science awareness today. Rather, I’d like to dedicate my Ada Lovelace Day post to all of those women out there who are trying to spread the word and get other women and girls interested in science related fields.

There are, of course, the wonderful women over at Skepchick, who blog about science on a daily basis and set up wonderful events for scientifically minded folks to gather together – not to mention, they make being a geeky girl look utterly cool.

There’s plenty of women blogging over at scienceblogs.com, like the wonderful and witty Suzanne Franks, who offers a feminist minded point of view, Christina Pikas, a science librarian, and several others.

So today, for Ada Lovelace Day, my heroes are the women science bloggers out there, because the only way that we can encourage girls to enter science and tech related fields is to offer plenty of examples of women who have done it, and been successful, before them. Women who are strong and beautiful and awesome, and these are the women who are out there spreading the word every day.

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• Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrate Women in Technology (wired.com)

In American television, there are plenty of shows that have gay people on them, but those shows are all, in some way, about gay people and/or being gay.  When it comes to other shows that are about other things, gay people go unrepresented.

It rather reminds me of when the only way an african-american could get on TV was to be on a TV show that was entirely about african-americans or submit to stereotyping or both.

There are a handful of minor exceptions to this. Ugly Betty was wonderful for it. Modern Family has a prominent gay couple and Glee just featured a wonderful coming-out story. However, in these shows, there is still a great deal of stereotyping involved. In no way are the characters ever dealt with as if they are just everyday people. The romances are never dealt with as everyday romances, and never with similar treatment to how straight romances are dealt with.

I never really realized the differences until I recently began watching a number of BBC productions.  Before, my usual thoughts were something along the lines of:  “Oh, these shows are being so progressive for featuring gay characters!” now…I’m seeing exactly how much they’re putting those gay characters in that stereotypical box.  When watching American TV alongside BBC TV, the difference in treatment is glaring.

Because, you see, on the BBC shows, the gay characters are treated like any other character. They’re normal, ordinary people. The fact that they are gay, involved in a homosexual relationship, etc. is not treated as something out of the ordinary. The romances are written in the same terms as heterosexual romances. The characters are rarely stereotyped or caricatures (the exceptions being purposely exaggerated comedic sketches).

Why do I have to look to another country’s offerings to find television that treats gay people as normal?

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I love springtime.  For those of you who don’t know, I live in South Georgia, well known for long, drawn out summers that rival the ninth circle of Hell, except Hell’s a little cooler and has lower humidity.  Our winters here also aren’t so much cool as dreary, and this year’s has been one non-stop rainshower. Neither our summers nor our winters are particularly conducive to pleasant outdoor activities. No matter how much anyone loves the great outdoors, it’s hard to have fun outside when the air feels so thick and hot that it’s a struggle to breathe.

But spring is lovely. It’s still cool enough outside to enjoy going out and going for walks, smelling the roses, enjoying the flowering dogwood trees.  It’s always about this time of year that I get the urge to get outside into that sunshine that hasn’t yet turned into something to escape from. Generally, along with that desire for sunshine comes a desire for growing things.

I’m a farmer’s granddaughter on both sides.  Though my mother never had much desire for digging in the dirt (that was usually something she sent me to do, when necessary), I enjoy it a great deal, especially this time of year. I usually plant some lettuces and leafy greens to keep myself and my bearded dragon in salads for the summer, and I have several patches of planted herbs that come back every summer regardless of if I replant or not. (Herbs, with their weedy heritage, are excellent for that…)

I fully intend on getting as much outside time as I can manage before the heat of summer sets in. Perhaps this weekend I can get my little garden prepared for new plants.

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When I was growing up, it was a fairly common thing to see girls going to the prom together when they didn’t have a date – or when all of the prospective dates simply didn’t measure up.  They’d go as couples, they’d go as groups, they’d dance together rather than sit on the sidelines.  I know of at least one straight girl who came to the prom in a tux.

But if that girl is a lesbian, and the girl she’s going with is her girlfriend, and the school would rather cancel the prom entirely than allow lesbians to take part in a time-honored right of passage like the prom.

In the case of young Constance McMillan, it is perhaps fortunate that she is fairly well-versed as an activist, and knew just what to do and which channels to pursue to get the ACLU involved. Now, she’s fighting not just for the opportunity to go to the prom with her date of choice, but for the entire student body to have a prom at all.

Meanwhile, the school officials are trying to put together a “private” prom where they can exclude whomever they might wish without getting sued.  This reminds me all too much of a tradition that is, unfortunately, still common where I live where there’s a school prom that everyone gets to go to, and a private prom that only the white kids get to go to.  It’s not right. It’s sanctioned segregation, regardless of the minority being left out.

I’m proud of Constance McMillen for standing up for her rights like she’s done. She’s bound to be getting a lot of abuse from the student body for being the reason their prom was canceled, but she’s become a hero to so many more in the last few weeks.  We need more activists like her.

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I had planned a rant about healthcare for today, but this morning I read the news that one of the most ever-present fixtures in the movies of my childhood is dead.

Corey Haim is only one of a string of young stars from the 80s to meet an unhappy end, and it wasn’t all that unexpected, considering his well-known issues with drugs. However he died, he was still appreciated for what he had given to a generation of confused adolescents.

Goodbye, Corey. It’s sad to see you go.

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