Blogging While Female

Dannica McKellar is one smart cookie.

She graduated from UCLA with a degree in mathematics, is co-author of a friggin' proof, has testified before congress AND has been a substitute teacher.

Now she's a young adult author, having written a magazine-style math book for middle school girls.

Now on the one hand, this is all great...in theory. We really do need to be encouraging girls to, at the very least, not abhor math. I absolutely hate math. I just could never, ever get it (I think it started back in 4th grade, when we had to do these timed worksheets of 100 problems. First the addition, then subtraction, then multiplication and finally division. You only got to move on to the next sheet if you'd completed the previous one with no mistakes. I never got past the subtraction sheet :-( ). I even had completely non-traditional math teachers throughout most of school - my middle school math teachers were women and half of mine in high school were as well.

But I couldn't get it. And now that I know I'm going into a career where I definitely do not need math, I have no incentive to try to learn it now.

So McKellar is trying to prevent there from being another me by writing her math book, that emphasizes how math is used in every day life - y'know, when you bake cookies and go shopping.

~headdesk~

This is where my admiration for the book falls apart (but increases for Wired, because they called her out on the exact concerns I had going into the article). Yes, there are plenty of girls who don't seem to care about anything beyond how they look, but should we be encouraging that? What about the girls like me who would rather have taken an algebra test than buy lipstick? How will these young, impressionable girls know there's another option out there for them if it's not presented to them?

Wired also brings up that this may just be encouraging the girls to be more materialistic. McKellar laughs that off, saying that they already are, and this book isn't going to change anything. No, it's probably not going to turn a switch in someone's head to say "I NEED MORE MAKEUP NOW!!!!!!!!!!" but again, it's not presenting them with other options.

In Dannica McKellar's world, it appears there are two choices for women: vapid and fashionable, or mathematically inclined and fashionable. Where do the rest of us fit in?

So people with too much time and money on their hands have once more decided to study the phenomenon that is MySpace. Yes, that dangerous haven for the dark and depraved monsters of the world that want nothing more than to get their hands on tender young flesh.

Except that it turns out that those who posses said flesh are a lot smarter than grown ups give them credit for.

Allow me to reiterate: no. Fucking. Shit.

Also, apparently there is room to argue with MySpace's claim of 100,000,000 users. Extra! Extra! Water is still wet!

Of course most teenagers know to keep their profiles, or at least select portions of it, private. Not everyone in the school needs to know what you were doing on Saturday night. I'm not surprised that more IM usernames were revealed than e-mail addresses: the spambots don't troll for AIM names (yet); my e-mail address is rarely displayed in a non-mangled format. And guess what? I've been doing that for years, even back in the days when I was a teenager.

And do you have any idea how many profiles on any social site are created as just a way to check on friends or as a duplicate site? I can't tell you how many people on LiveJournal (or, I'm sure, InsaneJournal) have multiple journals for different uses (if LJ hadn't turned into a bunch of idiots I'd be hosting this particular journal over there as well).

We really need to start giving teenagers some credit where it's due. I know back in those halcyon days I hated being lumped in with all of the dumb kids, internet users or not. Know why? Because I knew that I, and (most) of my friends, were smart enough to avoid the really dangerous situations. I can't think of a time when I received unwanted sexual advances from someone I didn't know. I certainly never gave out my phone number/address to someone that I didn't know extremely well (I actually can only think of one person that I ever gave out my home address to. I'm not sure if I ever gave out my phone number because I'm an awkward enough conversationalist in writing). It's silly to think that kids who've grown up with the Internet (I didn't get it until 7th grade, but "kids today" have had it for a much longer portion of their lives) make bigger and dumber mistakes than the rest of us did.

Yes, there are always going to be kids who put themselves at risk. Kids will run out in front of ice cream trucks or take candy from strangers. Setting the MySpace profiles of 14 and 15 year olds to default to "private" is a smart, unobtrusive way to protect as many kids as possible. Thinking that every single person on MySpace is out to kidnap those kids is just unfounded paranoia.