Import awards ceremony tonight!

…What? No, not the Oscars – who cares about those? I mean something much more important – The Bloggies!

Winners will start being announced at 8 pm EST (5pm PST) via their twitter feed and Facebook page. Blag Hag is nominated for Best Weblog about Religion – but I gotta admit, I think Friendly Atheist is the favorite in that category. Oh well, as long as we don’t lose to Norse mythology or the person who thinks they’re talking to their dead child’s ghost.

Unfortunately I’m going to be a grad student recruitment dinner when the awards are announced. Well, I mean, it’s great because I get to meet the prospective students and get free delicious food, but it will also be kind of rude for me to stare at my iPhone the whole time. I’ll have to surreptitiously check it occasionally.

Irrationality or Frustration?

My blood pressure has gone down a bit now that I’ve had a chance to sleep, but I want to address one point before I’m stuck in lab pipetting all day. Some commenters, even those who claim to generally agree with me, seem to think that I’m “irrational” and “overreact” to “little” sexist problems, which only proves I have a “chip on my shoulder.”

Let me try to explain what it’s like, in a context you may relate to better:

Imagine you have a science blog. You spend all of your time critiquing and poking fun at anti-science ideas, and your followers love those posts. But you’re also an atheist, and occasionally you blog about that too. First you make little posts about religion that have nothing to do with science – and while a couple people may get upset or use already refuted arguments, you’re able to reply to them and explain the situation patiently.

This goes on for quite some time, and more and more people start emailing you saying that while they didn’t understand in the beginning, they now totally get where you’re coming from – and some even agree with you! It’s rewarding to know that your patience paid off, especially when that patience isn’t always found at blogs explicitly devoted to atheism, which sometimes eviscerate and belittle any pro-religion argument.

But then one day you decide to write a post about the intersection of science and religion. Now many of your readers feel personally hurt. But to make matters worse, your blog post suddenly becomes very popular – now you have hundreds of people commenting on your blog, using the same old tropes that have been debated and debunked a million times before.

And since there’s just not enough time in the day to respond to every comment (you do have a job, after all), you may make a general post about how all of their arguments are the same old crap. Maybe “same old crap” isn’t the best phrase to use, because it incites them more. They start saying you just have a vendetta against religious people, and obviously have no rational responses to their arguments, otherwise you would have spent all day replying to them.

But really, you’re just human. You’re frustrated that you’ve spent years slowly educating people about a topic, but when you turn the spotlight on your own group, you realize you have so much work to do. And really, many atheist bloggers say you’re not strident enough – if people get this upset by you, what would happen if they visited an exclusively atheist blog? You have many friends – also bloggers or important people in science – saying they totally agree or sympathize with your post, but they don’t publicly say so for fear of also facing the wrath of these people. You feel alone in what you consider an important battle, facing an endlessly respawning horde.

Replace “science” with “atheism” and “atheism” with “feminism,” and you have me.

So yes. When I read comments on posts about feminism or sexism, sometimes I lose my cool – because a cause that seems very important to me now seems hopeless. Because tropes like “you’re being irrational,” “you have no sense of humor,” “you’re overreacting,” “most people didn’t have a problem with it,” “why don’t you worry about things that matter,” and “you have an agenda” have been historically used to silence women’s voices from political issues like voting and birth control, to pointing out sexism on blogs and twitter. Hearing them is like hearing someone assert “But I didn’t evolve from a monkey!” for the billionth time.

It’s hard to remind myself that many of you don’t realize that those are tropes and that they’re so triggering to a feminist. I know I need to be more patient sometimes, but I’m human. Maybe you still won’t agree with me about what I consider sexism or my views on feminism, but hopefully you’ll understand why I get so upset when I realize my uphill battle is more like scaling Mt. Everest without climbing gear.

You know, maybe they're right

Maybe my profile picture on my blog is just begging for harassment and sexist comments. I mean, look at how slutty I look, what with part of my collarbone showing, and that big smile. God, I can’t believe I had it up so long without noticing how horrible it is.

But I know a lot of other atheist and skeptical blogs have photos on their main page, so maybe it’s not just putting up a photo at all – maybe I was choosing inappropriate content. After much consideration on what all of these photos had in common, I found some photos of myself that fit in better with the overall theme:
Not pictured: Multiple Livestrong bracelets, baggy cargo pants
I’m not sure which one I like better, though. What do you guys think? Bro Jen, Or Pseudo Penn Jillette? I personally prefer Bro Jen, but you can still see a hint of boob, which, I know, is totally unacceptable.

You know, maybe they’re right

Maybe my profile picture on my blog is just begging for harassment and sexist comments. I mean, look at how slutty I look, what with part of my collarbone showing, and that big smile. God, I can’t believe I had it up so long without noticing how horrible it is.

But I know a lot of other atheist and skeptical blogs have photos on their main page, so maybe it’s not just putting up a photo at all – maybe I was choosing inappropriate content. After much consideration on what all of these photos had in common, I found some photos of myself that fit in better with the overall theme:
Not pictured: Multiple Livestrong bracelets, baggy cargo pants
I’m not sure which one I like better, though. What do you guys think? Bro Jen, Or Pseudo Penn Jillette? I personally prefer Bro Jen, but you can still see a hint of boob, which, I know, is totally unacceptable.

Oh, how things change

I rediscovered my old Xanga blog the other day. Most of my entries are from age 13 to 15*, so it’s both painful and hilarious to read. For example, I found a post where I was whining about fashion – nothing new there, I suppose, but I loved this line from 2003 (bolded):

None of the clothes I like fit me anyways. At least in the junior department, which is were all the nice stuff is. I’m not like, overweight, but everything there is just so tight that is looks crappy. Like, if I lost 10 pounds it would be perfect. All the jeans are too short even when they’re in the Long style (curse you, height!) and all the shirts seem to be built for girls who are like AA cups >_< I’m not even what you would consider busty and they don’t fit me. Stupid fashion.

…lolololol

God, how was I complaining about fitting into things when I was barely a B cup? If only Young Jen knew how much more annoying it would get to find well fitted shirts.

If you want to read more…well, don’t bother looking for it. I have it friends-locked. No one needs to be subjected to that many Japanese emoticons and personality quizzes.

*I later switched to Livejournal for most of high school and part of college, then finally set up Blag Hag publicly on Blogger. If my trend of upgrading blogging platform continues, I’ll switch to WordPress right when something more awesome surpasses it.

Google can now filter by "reading level"

This is a really neat advanced search feature just released by Google! You can now filter by “reading level,” including within posts for a certain site. How do they determine what’s considered Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced?

The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.

Okay, I’m sure that’s not a perfect method, but it’s still nifty. For example, nature.com comes up very advanced:

I wonder what my blog looks like?Oh…um… well, I’m sure that’s just a result of blogging in general, right? We’re all a bit more informal around here.
…Well, PZ does a lot more reviews of scientific articles than me, I’m sure that helps his score. Surely I must be better than something like
…

I’m going to interpret this as “I write in a way that’s easily accessible to the general public,” rather than “I write like a goddamn moron.”*

*I should note that my ex-boyfriend pointed all of this out to me, along with this. I think this is payback for my quip about engineers being bad in bed. Internet karma, indeed.

Google can now filter by “reading level”

This is a really neat advanced search feature just released by Google! You can now filter by “reading level,” including within posts for a certain site. How do they determine what’s considered Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced?

The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.

Okay, I’m sure that’s not a perfect method, but it’s still nifty. For example, nature.com comes up very advanced:
I wonder what my blog looks like?Oh…um… well, I’m sure that’s just a result of blogging in general, right? We’re all a bit more informal around here.
…Well, PZ does a lot more reviews of scientific articles than me, I’m sure that helps his score. Surely I must be better than something like
…

I’m going to interpret this as “I write in a way that’s easily accessible to the general public,” rather than “I write like a goddamn moron.”*

*I should note that my ex-boyfriend pointed all of this out to me, along with this. I think this is payback for my quip about engineers being bad in bed. Internet karma, indeed.

1,000th post!

And to celebrate, I’m going to go meta-blogging on you.

I can’t believe this is the thousandth post I’ve written at Blag Hag. If you estimate a half hour spent writing each post, that’s nearly 21 days of my life I’ll never get back.

Just kidding, of course. That’s time well spent. I started this blog mostly out of boredom, but now thanks to it I’m a published author, speaking to groups (even internationally!), and have people who actually call themselves fanboys and fangirls.

I’m still not quite used to it – the last bit especially – since it has happened so fast. I started blogging in March of 2009, and I still see myself as a random opinionated student with an internet connection. It’s bizarre that a year ago I was the one fangirling over bloggers like PZ, Hemant, and Greta, and now I consider them all friends and “colleagues” – as much as atheist bloggers can be colleagues.

But – forgive me for being cheesy – I couldn’t have done it without you guys, my readers. Thank you so much for reading, sharing, commenting, showing up to meetups, and supporting me through sweet emails (even though I don’t always have time to reply, I swear I read every one with a huge grin on my face). And thank you for hanging in there when I say something stupid – blogging is my way of thinking out loud and learning about myself, and already when reading older posts I can see how much I’ve progressed.

I’ve always had a passion for writing, but never felt like anyone would care about my work. You proved me wrong and are helping make my dreams come true.

And since this suddenly got too sappy, have a silly photo:I was playing Pictionary with my friends, and the word was “blogger” – so they drew me! (Yes, the name was written after the clue was guessed, rule freaks.) A perfect likeness, as you can see.

Anyway, feel free to celebrate in the comments. Or at the very least, if you’ve been lurking, say hello!

A reminder about my comment policy

It seems like my latest feminism related post has devolved into commenters either 1) telling each other how to properly comment or 2) telling me how I’m a horrible person because I’m not moderating the comments. My posts on feminism devolving into flame wars?! Shocking, I know.

So it’s time for a reminder about how commenting works in the land of Blag Hag. If bloggers were like gods (which is pretty much how we see ourselves, with our ginormous egos and all), I’d be very much a deist goddess. I usually won’t moderate comments, except if those comments are:

  • Spam
  • Hateful, abusive, or threatening
  • Trolling or thread derailing
  • Evangelizing or godbotting
  • Mindbogglingly stupid

With the exception of spam and threats, I only ban repeat offenders. That is, I figure most people will occasionally say something mindbogglingly stupid every once in a while (myself included), and I shouldn’t remove them from future discussions for a single event.

My commenting policy is very lax, and for a reason other than laziness. I don’t want Blag Hag to become an echo chamber, so I don’t moderate comments that disagree with me, no matter how insipid or annoying I find them. A lot of feminists blogs moderate out annoying comments by even the most well meaning privilege denying dudes, which is understandable. Those blogs are meant to be safe havens for women who are sick of hearing the same stupid shit over and over again. They’re not feminism 101 blogs.

As much as I want everyone to feel comfortable commenting here, I think it’s important that my blog in particular not delete these sorts of comments. Why? Because I’m constantly getting emails and comments from guys who finally understand and are improving their behavior. They thank me for being patient with them, and for showing what assholes they were being. If I banned them outright, they would have never stuck around long enough to learn more about feminism.

That and as my dad says, “No man is ever totally worthless, he can always serve as a bad example.”* I view comments the same way.

But also, I’m busy. Like, really fucking busy. Grad school hardly leaves me with enough time to blog, and I do at least skim all of the comments to make sure no one is breaking my rules. And when it’s finals week like this past week, I don’t read anything until the weekend – so sometimes a bad comment will sneak through.

In these cases, the proper course of action is not to repeatedly hound me about moderating that comment, thus bringing even more attention to the trollish remark. You know why? Well, for one, you become a thread derailer, which I rank as a graver crime over a single incident of trolling or poorly attempted snarky humor.

And two, I’m kind of an asshole. The more you get upset about a comment someone left on a random blog on the internet and feel like you have the right to tell me what is or is not acceptable for my own blog, the more I’ll lol and leave it there out of spite, and then continue to giggle at your more and more angered pleas for moderation. At that point it doesn’t even matter if I theoretically agree with you on the trollish comment’s craptacularness. Yep, when I’m not being a deist goddess, I’m more of a chaotic neutral trickster god.

So, go forth and make the comments multiply, but don’t make my head hurt while doing it.

*I still find it somewhat disconcerting that my dad has a blog. Oh, the internet.

Speaking in Bothell, WA this weekend

If you’re in the Seattle area and want to join some skeptics for dinner while listening to me talk about boobquake, you’re in luck! The Seattle Society for Sensible Explanations (run by the wonderful SkepDoc, Harriet Hall) is hosting me this Saturday, November 13th. All the information you need is at their website (along with a very flattering bio of yours truly *blushes*). You must RSVP by Wednesday if you want to attend.

See you there!