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So there was this link on Shakesville: "Why I don't like Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project"

Here are excerpts from the article followed by my comments. Also: angry Sylar icon!

1. The video promotes metro-centric and anti-religious sentiment.
By aligning their bullying with the religiosity and “small-town mentality,” Dan and Terry tacitly reinforce the belief (especially rampant in queer communities) that the religious and the rural are more bigoted.
There IS more bigotry in religious and rural areas (per capita, anyway). It's ridiculous to take the facts Dan & Terry presented about their own lives and accuse them of being unfair to the religious and/or rural. A whole lot of gay people had bad experiences that they have reason to believe were made worse by the (rural, religious) environment they lived in. But apparently they should just shut up about that?

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The article ends with a bunch of incomprehensible garbage about how we only want to help people who don't actually need our help and that by participating in this project we're exploiting gay teens and erasing their individuality? Somehow?

Also I think the author only watched Dan & Terry's video and conveniently ignored all the others that were made by people who aren't white, middle-class men.


Another important purpose that these videos serve, that the author ignored, is to show people (like everyone, not only gay youth) that being gay doesn't condemn you to a life of misery. That's what a lot of young gay people are being told and that's what a lot of homophobic adults believe. These videos are a powerful counter-message to that.

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ETA: Ha! I was right about this: the author criticizes Dan for just putting out a video and not doing anything to actually change things and I was skeptical (see my comment below) that the author was practicing what they preach. And lo and behold here's this from a more recent post by the same author:
[allegedly a criticism she has received] 13. Ho, what have you even done to help poor, suicidal kids? You just sit around criticizing people! Come up with some tangible solutions!

[her response] I’ll tell you what. You take care of your work, and I’ll take care of mine.
Translation: I wrote this brilliant-ass blog entry, my work here is done. People like Dan who put their faces and voices out there can be held responsible for actually changing things; don't worry, I'll be sure and tell them if they're doing it wrong.

LMAO.

I never watched whole episodes of Attack of The Show but I've seen clips and I saw her on this Daily Show episode. Her delivery just sucks. Her only line that made me laugh was, somewhat ironically, "I don't know what those words mean." Also there have been accusations that her geek persona on G4 was fake; that she doesn't know much about tech and video games and she was just reading the cue cards, whereas the other hosts were actually interested in and knowledgeable about the subject matter. The problem we have with her is not so much that she uses her looks to get her foot in the door. It's that once she's inside, it becomes clear that she didn't have anything else going for her. Stuff like this demonstrates that hotness is not only necessary and sufficient, having other qualities - like humor or talent - is actually a disadvantage.

Something clicked for me today: women who are clever and funny are automatically read as less attractive. See: Tina Fey. I suspect if there had been two finalists for the Daily Show job and the other one was equally attractive but better at doing comedy, they would have preferred Olivia. For example, Erin Gibson, the new Sarah Haskins with her Current TV show Modern Lady, is both very funny and very attractive. Why don't we see more people like her getting wider exposure? And every single joke about Liz Lemon centers around the premise that she's unattractive. Why does that work? Partly because Tina Fey is such a gifted comedic performer that she makes it work. But I suspect it wouldn't work as well with an attractive male actor playing a character that's supposed to be that physically unappealing (unless they do styling to make him look a lot more unappealing than usual, which is also partly how they make it work on 30 Rock).

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I briefly put this as an edited-to-add in the first post but people already read and commented there so here's a new post.

PDF of the actual paper! WHAT? They ran an ANOVA on a discrete variable. FAIL. And they reported M-values, not p-values. What the crap is an M-value? At least the variance they found was pretty small, which justifies a small sample size but ANOVA is the wrong analysis to use when there are only seven possible values of the dependent variable! And how big can your variance get when there are only seven possible values?

The second part of the study is better, though it still has the problem of using discrete variables in an analysis that's intended for continuous variables.

Also it sounds like the students who participated in the study were involved with the psychology department somehow; they got course credit for it and psych students would be much more aware of this and more inclined to participate than students in other departments. So basically the conclusions can only be applied to undergrads who at least took a psych class, or possibly are psych majors. This is potentially a huge source of bias.

Anyway, their methods are a little screwey but I don't doubt that women who aren't inclined to be geeky would find geek stuff more off-putting than non-geeky men would, because of the widespread perception (spread by the MSM articles about this paper, for example) that geek stuff is only for boys. It's not just the MSM misinterpreting the paper, though: from the paper's discussion section on the first part of the study:

This study suggests that a student’s choice of classes or a major can be shaped by simply the appearance of classrooms, hallways, and offices—therefore, providing compelling evidence for the power of environments in signaling who belongs.

The authors of the study are claiming that it's the posters etc. themselves that are the problem. No, it's that these objects signal to people that it's more likely to be an anti-woman environment than the neutral one, due to stereotypes about geek culture - I mean, it's not as if a non-geeky workplace never discriminates against women. The underlying problem is the discrimination. It bothers me that this paper is going to be used as evidence that we can just put up some different posters and then when that doesn't result in equal representation, just blame it on our ladybrains or "opting out" or whatever other bullshit they come up with that allows the patriarchy to keep steamrolling along.

I think it's reasonable to expect some people will read the articles about this paper and institute a "no geek stuff" policy in schools and workplaces in an effort to make women feel more comfortable. That would be stupid. The only effects would be:

1. to make men resent women in the workplace more, because it would be seen as special treatment
2. to piss off the geeks
3. to really really piss off the geeks who are also female
4. to totally fail to address any of the real sexism that the geek stuff symbolizes to some women

What would be a much better solution is to educate everyone about how they might discriminate or create a hostile environment without realizing it, for example by commenting on people's appearance, giving a man credit for work a woman did, expecting women to clean up after everyone, and expecting women in technical jobs to take care of secretarial tasks. ALL of this has happened to me in molecular biology jobs in academia and industry. And it was not cool. And forbidding me from putting Star Trek crap on my desk wouldn't have changed any of it.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/85646400e1/hostage-a-love-story-with-zachary-quinto

I have watched the first 10 seconds of it (yes, I paused the video to type this) and he's already said the word "fuck" of variations thereof about eight times. That's a good sign :D

Here's the rest of the review ( SPOILERS )