Blog: April 2007

Matt and Ksusha starred as April's Guest Chefs, preparing the cuisine of Turkey. The fabulous salads and spreads were so delicious we just about filled up before the soup and main courses, not to mention the wonderful baklava for dessert (which was so good I forgot to photograph it). Matt picks up a cookbook from every country he visits, and his recent trip to Turkey to film a documentary was no exception.

Google, meanwhile, has installed a wall of storage bins full of LEGO bricks for engineers to play with. To kick off the creativity, Google commissioned a LEGO artist to build a LEGO Google logo. "Rather than build the logo out of standard rectangular LEGO bricks, Sean used the myriad of fun and crazy LEGO shapes that come in every standard LEGO kit... Wheels, doors, slopes, circles, hinges, trees, hats, coffee cups, fences, flags, and more." My favorite clever piece is a little LEGO person situated at the edge between the yellow 'o' and its orange shadow: his orange torso is firmly planted in orange territory, but he is leaning backward so his yellow head is over the line into yellow.

Those of us who aren't women don't always realize the verbal abuse many receive from asshole men. Here's an example.

At Drinking Liberally on Thursday, Jill made an interesting point: while women can at least walk away and try to forget the harassment (not fun, for sure), when this behavior goes online, the nasty words never go away. A group of juvenile law students ran a contest in February to identify the "hottest" women at "top 14" law schools. (As Jill pointed out: why top 14? Wonder which school they were from?)

The contest organizers posted pictures from the women's online profiles, and posters on the forum quickly started denigrating the students, especially those who asked to have their pictures removed. According to the UVA Law Weekly:

AutoAdmit members continually referred to some of these UVA Law students as "whores" and "sluts," among other terms too obscene to print. In other representative threads, an anonymous AutoAdmit poster wrote about performing sex acts on them, while another told them to "[g]et raped." What's more, nearly all of these threads are accessible through any Google search that includes the students' names.

Jessica Valenti, one person who has been subjected to completely undeserved humiliation online, wrote a terrific article about sexist conduct online.

Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist? Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: "There's the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home."

While the obscenity thrown at bloggers like Jessica and Jill is completely inexcusable, at least they have chosen to be public spokespeople and are, sadly, used to this sort of abuse. Not so the other women on the AutoAdmit contest, whose names have been withheld from press accounts but for whom an online search brings up pages of postings with titles calling them "bitches" by name and making claims about the size or genuineness of their breasts.

The women most suffering from this search-results besmirching are those who have little online presence and who have unusual names, because there are fewer conflicting pages that might beat out the defamatory ones on a search. Civil libertarians (with whom I almost always agree) like to say that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and so in this case one effective remedy is to go public (leading to news stories that will outrank the abusive posts) or write a blog.

However, all of these remedies make the subject an even more public person, and this means that privacy is often a one-way trap door. Once lost, privacy can never be regained, and some people have it taken from them in what clearly a violation of these women. Friends who have avoided making Facebook or Friendster profiles, particularly women, often cite the fear of losing this privacy. Will we read a trend story in the New York Times one day of couples giving their children common names in a deliberate attempt to create some privacy in a world where that is increasingly difficult to preserve?

"The inaugural burrito (carnitas with lettuce, salsa and avocado, no beans) was loaded into the breech at the Alameda terminus at 10:05 AM and was served to a beaming Cavanaugh, Vice President Walter Mondale and New York mayor Ed Koch in Weehawken 64 minutes later."

Read it.