She Queried
It’s been noticed that when you google certain phrases with a feminine pronoun like “she invented,” “she succedeed,” it corrects your query by asking “Did you mean: he succeeded?”
I love this feature because my spelling is really bad, and it works fabulously as a quick spell check. Unfortunately it bites you in the rear when you’re misspelling a commonly misspelled word.
The “he” suggestion doesn’t happen on phrases like “she cleaned,” “she left,” “she cried,” just so’s you know. Try it for yourself.
In the past week or so it’s been blogged, Digged, and picked up by CNET. But you can’t blame Google, and I don’t believe it’s anything they should “correct.” It’s a reflection of what’s on the internet, unfortunately. I wouldn’t want to ask them to blur results or correct hints anymore than I want any other bad news sugar-coated. As Bill Murray shouted in Stripes, “That’s the fact, Jack”.
Not that this isn’t terribly disappointing to Jill, who came tumbling after, mostly just so Jack wouldn’t feel really dumb. Jill was nice like that.
Today I came across this neat little app, via Scribbling.net (Gina Trapani rocks the world) where you can plug in any blog or website and find the ratio of he verses she used on the site.
I was very pleased with myself: 51% he/49% she. What’s interesting is that when I checked blogs or sites written by women, the ratio tended to be quiet balanced, really close to 50/50. Sites written or maintained by men or mostly by men, not so much with the balance… more like 70/30 even as disparate as 86/14. This was true for small niche sites, as well as for larger web-only publications.
Begs the response to the begged question… but does that mean there aren’t equal contributions by women of Stuff That’s Good and Important? You tell me.
This is the internet of a world where the contributions of Passionate Users are lost to thoughtless malice and men take video themselves murdering a girl and upload the results as a trophy. This stuff makes me want to cry like a girl and hit like a boy, all at the same time.
Don’t make me kick all your asses, people.
One of my heroes is Amelia Earhart (is it totally corny? I don’t care). She had written a letter to her husband, just in case. Because she made so many “first” solo flights.
“Please know I am quite aware of the hazards,” she said. “I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”
So, when I’ve had enough of trying to figure out which wave of femi-nihilism I’m riding, I think of Amelia Earhart, and I also think of Virginia Woolf, describing how she strangled the “angel in the house” in self defense.
The web shouldn’t be ancient Greece, where a good woman doesn’t speak, and isn’t spoken of.
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