Electronic OtherRealms #28
                               Fall, 1990
                               Part 6 of 18

                     Copyright 1990 by Chuq Von Rospach
			    All Rights Reserved.

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I'm Not a Nice Girl
Commentary by Laurie Sefton

Let's start out with what not being a nice girl means....

There's probably a lot of not nice girls out there reading this
editorial, because they've bypassed one of the "societal norms" --
they're either (or both!) reading science fiction or using computers.
If you remember to those long ago days when you first heard that only
boys read science fiction.  And certainly only boys did computers; I
still surprise people who have been asked to contact me for advice on
their computer systems -- you can almost hear the "but, girls don't do
computers" at the other end of the phone.  A lot of you were probably in
"non-traditional" (i.e.  traditional being teaching, nursing or home
economics) majors in college.

But you keep hearing the people over the years telling you to not be so
aggressive -- it's not feminine, the ones who intone that "boys don't
date girls who are smarter than they are" -- so don't let on that you
have any brains, the ones who proclaim that you must be interested in
marrying an engineer, since you've chosen (or been chosen by) to go to
the state engineering university, who say you shouldn't make more money
or hold a higher position than your husband/boyfriend, because it might
hurt his ego (and somehow that counts for more than how you feel).

In essence you're told that being a nice girl is being quiet, smiling a
lot, being subordinate to all the men in your life, submerging all your
feelings, because, as a woman your life just isn't worth as much as a
man's.

Bullshit.

This is the only me I've got, and I'm certainly not going to waste it
worrying about whether I should be nice, because there's some nebulous
someone in society who expects that of me.  I've heard all the insults
(or what the people who were hurling them at me thought were insults) --
"you're too damn aggressive for a woman", "why aren't you a team player" --
team player meaning that I do the work, and hand it over to the men
for credit, and the infamous:

"If I didn't see you with your boyfriend, I'd say you were a lesbian."

Like there's something wrong with being a lesbian?

Feh.

You bet I'm going to compete as hard and fast as I can, and not defer,
and express my opinion, and I really don't care what those stupid
rulemakers say.

I'm *not* a nice girl.

First topic: getting a "life."  I was recently accused by one of the
local USENET jackals of not "having a life".  Now, said jackal spent the
first month of his latest employment hitting his management up for a
USENET feed. I wonder what sort of life he must have if he can't live
without his daily BBS fix, and if the only goal he has is seeing how
many sniveling sycophants he can have licking the soles of his boots and
how many people he can piss off along the way (with, of course, the
belief that if you get upset at what he says, you obviously Have A
Problem, not him).  I can also say he is so full of shit that not only
is it running out of his ears, but that he can probably single-handedly
cure the lack of nitrogenous nutrients in California's central valley.

What sort of not-boring life am I leading? Well, for one thing, I work
for Apple, and in the current economic situation, working anywhere in
the valley provides a lot of stimulus.  I've not only convinced Stanford
and San Jose State to let me into their respective grad schools, but I
have Apple paying for it.  I've been used as a resource by various
governmental agencies to tell people whose computer sites have been
broken into how to 1.) clean up their security and 2.) deal with the
other governmental agencies.

I can say "hello", "goodbye", "how are you", "I'm fine", "you're an
asshole" and "your mother fucks camels" in Farsi -- very useful stuff.

I have a slightly larger vocabulary in Gaelic.  I like bagpipe music and
am fairly awful to almost mediocre on the chanter.

I've read Dumas and Zola in French, Cervantes and Valle-Inclan in
Spanish, and can grind my way through chemical texts written in German.
I first learned spoken french by listening to hockey broadcasts for the
Montreal Canadiens.  I then went to Morocco.  My accent is interesting.

I had my first concussion from a hockey puck at age 7.  Many more
followed.  I've fallen off of various horses, motorcycles, and sleds.

I've had licenses to run both a water treatment plant in a town of less
than 10,000 people, and a license to operate a radio station that
broadcasts with less than 10Kw of power.

I've taken prizes for art, debate, and swimming.

I have a large collection of biographies of Queen Victoria, and even
larger collection of wine, and I can tell you all sorts of interesting
ways to poison people.

This is "having a life" -- whining and bitching electronically as your
main pastime is not.

Speaking of education....

I'm going back to grad school.  One of the quasi-requirements for the
one of the grad schools was taking the GMAT -- the Graduate Management
Admission Test, and while the nice folks representing the grad school
didn't say you had to take the refresher course for the exam, it was
"highly recommended" -- and we all know what that means.  So, for three
weeks in May and June I spent my Saturdays in a prep course.  I thought
at the time that I might need some refreshing -- after all, it had been
eight years since I previously took grad examinations.

Oh, my.

The first week was six hours of math refresher.  I found that while I
hadn't factored a polynomial, or approximated a square root by hand in
quite a few years, that I still knew how.  However, the fresh young
faces straight out of college were at a total loss.  They had no concept
of basic algebra, no ideas of how to figure out a simple geometric
problem, and had apparently never been taught anything about square
roots, except for where to find the button on the calculator.  These
were future MBA students, though.  The first question they asked was
"can we form study groups?".

The English refresher the next week was even worse.  Most had not heard
of a lot of parts of speech -- oh, they had noun and verb down, but
adverbs, conjunctions and participles, much less gerunds, were totally
beyond their ken.  Their vocabularies were rather sad -- they couldn't
answer what the idea behind a paragraph was because they couldn't
understand the words.  Exactly what passes for an English requirement at
the universities these days?

As it turns out, on the morning of June 16th, 1990, I drove up to
Lincoln High School in San Francisco, took the exam, and am now getting
lots of mail from lovely places where it snows in the winter which want
me to spend large chunks of money to go to their graduate school.

As for those in the prep class who were possibly learning the tested
subjects for the first time in their lives, I don't know which would be
worse; that they didn't score high enough on the test, and didn't get
into MBA school, or that they did.

People can tell me to get a life.  I just smile and point out that if I
get any more, I'll go crazy.  My calendar's full, thank you.  What "get
a life" really means is "I don't like what you do, so it's meaningless".
Which is crap.  Nothing more than a weak attempt at someone far lower
on the ladder of life trying to even things up by bringing you down.

Remember, it only works if you let them.

Me? I'm not going to let them any more, which is why I've finally
started writing this long-threatened column.  It's time for people to
realize that "nice girl" is no different than "nice nigger" -- I live my
life to please me, not to please some male misconception of what I ought
to be.

Nice girls smile on the outside and say nothing.  I'm not going to do
that any more.  When I smile, you better make sure it's because I'm
happy.  I smile when the claws are out, too -- from the joy of the
hunt....



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