Early this morning I looked at the photos the New York Times published which were placed on its front page, and I tweeted that there were no women in the pictures from the revolution in Egypt.
That's because there weren't any, pure and simple. That fact tells us something, and something we will need to continue to pay attention to.
A woman journalist I know immediately "liked" my comment on Facebook because she got it. Many would.
But then, right away, a male Twitterer named @rrichard09 who calls himself a media researcher and runs an erudite blog disputed my claim, saying that in fact videos on other, back pages of the Times in fact showed women were participating in protests in Europe. (The best way to follow twit-fights like this is to separately read the streams @rrichard09 and @catfitz -- it's not really to render them coherently togther.)
This is the sort of literalist and obdurate comment one can expect from knowier-than-thou types on Twitter, but I was undeterred. Der, I get it that women *are* protesting, and I've seen them in other media, but I gotta say, there is something to be said for what occurred with these Times photos: no women. For a reason.
The *front page* photos in fact, fresh from the scene, were all of men. Men praying in rows. Men demonstrating. Men by burning tanks. Men with masks or scarves trying to deal with tear gas. Men shouting or looking worried. Men, men, men.
RR persisted with his complaint. He began talking about "discoverable content," i.e. pushing his futurist view that "the front page" is now an outdated and irrelevant concept, harkening back to actual newsprint days, and that I should get with it and realize that anything can be found anywhere, so actual placement on some digital page doesn't matter.
Oh, baloney, sez I. The front page still does matter. That's why the most important stories are still on the front! After all, the Times editor don't use it to put pictures of fires in Newark, New Jersey, or just any old thing as it streams in, but places the foreign war stories there. People come to nytimes.com to look at what's on the front first -- they don't imbibe all their news by first typing a search term into Google. If what RR thought was true about the concept of "discoverable content" making all content equal on flat plain, then...no one would ever go to nytimes.com as an address. They would never have to. They'd only go to Google. Er, perhaps that's how he (and they) would like things...
This sort of actuality of the optics of the situation should all be obvious, but this dude kept flogging this point as if it were some sort of self-evident truth. The reality is that "the front page" still matters, and at some level he realizes this, even if he would prefer to live in a Vernor Vinges novel called Rainbow's End, where among many other troubling futuristic oddities in a virtualized world, all the books in a library of the future are shredded, and thrown up into the air, to see what might stick...
RR then began blabbering about "data sets". Of course, this on the face of it is patently ridiculous, because the known data set by which one could agree to judge something like, "are there, or are there not, a lot of women participating in these demonstrations in Egypt" might be a function like "X = all the online newspapers of the world" or "X plus Y=all Flickr photos" or "X plus Y plus Z=all Facebook photos" -- or who the hell knows.
Helpfully, I did a search on Google images with the words "Egypt" and "January 25" and send him the link. It's all men in crowds, marches, throwing stones, praying, etc. There was one picture of a woman voting.
Those NYT front page photos also have, in one of them, one woman in the far distance and on other pages, you can find a few more.
Mister Literalist RR seems to think that this then opens the way to refute my complaints. First, he's worried that I'm accusing the Times of being sexist. But that's not the issue. The Times probably *isn't* sexist here, and has probably pretty faithfully shot the photos of the scenes as they really are, even though I've seen flash by on all the news stories the usual crowd of men's names rather than women's names but -- that's how it is. I am not in the business of going around accusing media of sexist bias -- I'm not a feminist. By that I mean I don't make it my life's work to fight for women's rights or equality -- I simply chose to work on human rights, and I believe women's rights are human rights. as the UN slogan has it.
No, the reason there aren't women in this picture isn't because somehow women don't participate in this revolution at all. Of course they do. We have famous pictures already of the woman in the headscarf kissing the policeman. Sure, there are women. But not lots. Most are men. And in many scenes, there just aren't women, period. Maybe it's considered too dangerous. Maybe they don't have a custom of public prayer. But they're not there. And that's because, well, it's not a society with equality for women, as any UN CEDAW report or voluminous amounts of NGO reporting can tell you.
But that somehow seems terribly hard to admit, with this revolution, especially for the left (and by imbibing these fashionable PC views about revolutions and media, PC has positioned himself on the left as well although he is loathe to admit it and his website seems to position him as even conservative).
I think I've definitely put my finger on a sore point here, judging from the shrill reaction from Jillian York, who found this sort of questioning about women's rights as somehow ignorant and inappropriate, and judging from the reaction from PC RR and others on Twitter and Facebook.
This is really the essential point, isn't it, whether the revolution will lead to Islamist fundamentalists coming to power -- whose hallmark anywhere in the world is always suppression of women's rights and even of their very presence.
And that's why there is such neuralgia around this point, with so many not wanting to admit the W-word could be an issue.
The global left doesn't want to admit that the revolution might take this awful turn. And even "conservative media researchers" don't seem to want to admit it. And sure, I'd like to believe that legions of women will be coming out in peaceful rows to take their seats in parliament and government and civic organizations (although they don't have equality in those institutions now). But...it's ok to express some doubt on this score. And these pictures back it up.
The vehemence with which someone would defend several untruths like this is truly disturbing, and for the long run, more than just the question of who is in the Egyptian protests.
Third, there's the refusal to admit that even his own "data set" itself shows...so many men. That the mere presence of a woman here or there somehow discounts my point (it doesn't) -- it's obvious that men are the main actors in this drama, and it doesn't discredit them or their aspirations for democracy if that's the case -- it's how it is, and it could change.
Fourth -- RR is desperate now -- he goes fishing up an interview with a female blogger as if to say, "See? There's this one young woman blogger so your claims are false" -- even though that blogger herself would likely tell us a thing or two about the male domination of society. So there's this belief that the one exception to the whole statement invalidates it -- that software thinking, that binary thinking.
Fifth -- coming right down the tracks on schedule! -- there's RR's claim that I've made "ad hominem" attacks and not "argued on the merits" although there are no "ad hominem attacks" but merely a rightful claim that his use of terms like "discoverable content" is affected. Indeed, I'm a firm believer in the acceptability and even necessity of ad hominem attacks in these debates because they can puncture the artificiality of sterile Internet tendentiousness -- in fact, that's why they are so feared on the Internet.
Sixth, the blocking of dissent. Now, thoroughly indignant and flustered, RC decides to block me, because I'm "not rational" or "not civil" lol. Honestly, how do people get like this?!
Now, when someone blocks you on Twitter, all their previous tweets that would have shown up in the @ mentions disappear down the memory hole. Scary! Fortunately, search still turns them up. But of course, not if Steve Gillmor would have his way...
Why does someone like this RR (who I'm guessing is a young male college student) have such a stake in proving Someone is Wrong on the Internet? I know I have a stake because I know I'm right on this one -- the pictures are worth 1,000 words. In fact, even I am surprised, thinking that Egypt is more secularized than other Arab states, to find fewer visible women protesters than we saw in Iran, which I think as far less secularized. How to account for this? And why can't we be curious, and why can't we ask questions about it?! Why the rigid, doctrinaire approach to this complex and changing scene?!
So now I'm blocked by some Fisking stranger on Twitter because I was not "fair". What can you do with people like that? Only publicize, and keep trying to keep the discussion open...
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