A year ago, I boldly took my blackberry where it had no business going.
Namely, a blind date.
On Valentines Day (VD).
With a Republican*.
As Fate would have it, six months later I did find my current boyfriend, thanks to Twitter. We met each other by accident, bonding over Chuck Norris and Wu Tang jokes, waiting for a big speech at a conference. (I know, we’re dorks.)
But back to the trainwreck.
So in Part 1 of my homage to Twitter and Valentines Day, I give you archived tweets of #GOPpickuplines: Continue Reading »
An article on the Hotline crossed my inbox the other day – a lamenting blog post on how the Grand Old Patriarchy Party is short on recruiting women into their candidate bench. (Pardon me while I dissolve into a giggle fit.) Women are still vastly underrepresented in Congress – in fact in the 111th Congress, only 17% are women, regardless of party identification. But the idea that Republican Party is LAMENTING the lack of women among their ranks makes about as much sense as a vegetarian large-game hunter sad about not taking down Bambi.
Let’s consider the facts:
On January 30, 2010, young geek girls (particularly those of color) did a happy dance. Caressa Cameron, student at Virginia Commonwealth University and former ugly duckling, rocked it and became our next Miss America. She is also (for those counting) the eighth African American Miss America. 
This post originally was going to skewer the time-honored tradition of objectifying women (which is does) but I couldn’t help soften at the sight of our current Miss America with stringy hair and braces. Caressa, I confess, you are MY GAL. You are proof that not all beauty pageant queens think they can see Russia from their house. Continue Reading »
While many are fuming over the recent Supreme Court case lifting restrictions on political campaign contributions, I’m obsessed with a different kind of gross corporate advocacy. It’s no secret that CBS sold a Super Bowl ad spot to the arch-conservative group Focus on the Family. While they claim the ad won’t be overtly pro-life, I’m guessing it won’t be overt like you can’t be a little bit preggers.
It’s actually not the spirit of the ad that’s ticking me off so much. Yes, I’m a staunch pro-choice advocate. Yes, I vote, support and on occasion work for Democrats. I’m angry because Focus on the Family ruined a perfectly good non-political event. Continue Reading »
After 37 minutes of deliberation, a jury yesterday found Dr. Tiller’s murderer guilty of first degree homicide. 
I couldn’t watch the livetweeting of this case, but the verdict gave me a small and important measure of comfort. In a world that wants us to think the pro-lifers are winning the culture wars, its validating to be reminded that not everyone has lost their minds. I’ve written here about my confrontations with pro-life protesters, but I’d like to explain why this case means so much to me.
Happy Friday, everyone! I’d like to give Apple and the iPad a shout out for helping me remember why I ever started this blog. They were almost as motivational as Sarah Palin in front of a microphone.
In honor of me getting off my lazy mental-couch-potato butt (and with hopes that I will actually be more disciplined) I wanted to share five blogs I’ve come across that I lurve. I have a total fangirl-crush on these blogs – you won’t see “feminist” on the About page – but they’re the best type of third wave. They’re what I’m beginning to call defacto feminists – they celebrate something unique, magically and sometimes catty about the woman experience. And they define feminism and celebrate femininity in their own authentic voice.
I give you five My Gal Blogs of the week:
So besides the State of the Union, two on-going wars, Haiti post-earthquake recovery, and our country’s economy going down the shitter, Apple released a new electronic trinket. They call it … (and unless you live under a rock you already know this….) the iPad.
That’s right.
The unfortunate misnomer ranks up there with Crystal Pepsi, this political ad, and this racist nickname for a holiday party.
Granted, it was an excuse to laugh about being on the rag all day. Trending topics included iTampon and a variety of other riffs, as well as major twitter smackdown on “lady-time” jokes. Continue Reading »
Unless you’re living under a rock, you probably know that Martha Coakley lost her bid to take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts.
I’m just going to say it – I wasn’t surprised at the outcome. Much like Dukakis and Kerry, Coakley didn’t do what campaigns should do between winning a primary and crushing a general election. If you don’t believe me, just go to google and start reading. The shorter version of how the campaign work slowed down can be found via kos and Marc Ambinder from The Atlantic.
Like the Lambeau Field incident during the Kerry campaign, Coakley flubbed a question about a Red Sox legend in a state that takes baseball as seriously as breathing. All politics is local and don’t you dare try to run for office without knowing your home teams and your local heroes. Was that the reason she lost? Of course not. It was a symptom of a larger problem. Continue Reading »
It’s amazing how fast news travels in a 2.0 world. Yahoo officially responded last night for the female dancers at Taiwan’s Hack Day. Unfortunately, this is after the author of that letter tweeted about how the Hack Girls “perked up the hackers.” Other news outlets carried the apology as well as further criticism.
What I found the most surprising was the dialogue I found on a thread from Hacker News. Someone posted Simon Willison’s post, and the comments are an interesting mix.
petewarden (who I’m assuming is a dude) wrote:
“Here’s my practical problem with this:
– We’re missing out on 50% of the people who could be good engineers. Programming is a really effective tool for improving our world, so any waste of talent is a Bad Thing.
– Whatever the moral arguments, accepting go-go dancers at events sucks as a way to attract women into our world.”
Another commenter named seldo noted:
“…from a personal perspective, it makes the assumption that all the male coders in the room are straight, which is in some ways an even more insidious assumption.
You can look at the room and say “okay, sure, there are no women at this event”. You can’t do that with sexuality — but people do anyway.
(I feel I should note that this unfortunate, embarrassing incident aside, Yahoo is an incredibly, almost ridiculously gay-friendly place to work)”
This last comment is a perspective that isn’t pointed out nearly enough.
At the end of the day – and despite the outrage – I consider the Hack Girls kerfuffle a win for women developers, and women’s acceptance in the tech space more broadly. Why? Because some men in that space aren’t standing by and condoning it.
Don’t get me wrong – we’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we reach any sort of parity in that sphere. But I find it enormously encouraging that men have publicly started to stand up for women in the tech space, and make it clear that they want more of us there with them. It’s a clear demonstration that there are feminist hackers out there, and those feminists don’t have a va-jay-jay to stand up for us.
Which is pretty cool.
NOT MY GAL 