My critical thinking faculties are also largely offline right now.

I'm suffering rather at the moment from what my folkie friends and I have been calling Typhoid Kevan. Kevan came to the National Folk Festival (over the Easter weekend) with some sort of nasty respiratory infection and spread it around with every affectionate bear hug he gave, and he gave a lot. So I missed the last night of the festival because I was in bed by eight (but Cherie and I watched the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who together, so that was something).

The next day I had to help pack up camp and drive home with Jus – he kindly did most of the eightish hours' drive, though. I did about an hour and a half. Let me tell you: when you're feeling sick and wobbly, the last thing you want to do is stand in the cold and pull up tent pegs.

So then I stayed at home for two days. It was nice apart from a serious attack of Guilt from my Guilt Gnome, who doesn't really believe that I'm allowed to take sick leave, and is afraid that I'm going to be fired for it. There are Reasons for this, unfortunately, but I wasn't really feeling up to having a monster conversation with him/her/it about it yesterday.

Today I'm back at work. I have lots of things on my plate at the moment, the most immediate of which is processing our Annual Reprints. I came in to a desk entirely covered in the sodding things. Piles of textbooks, all with print-outs of corrections in place.

The interesting thing about reprints is that all the pages I have to check pretty much look the same. Some of them are printed and some of them are emailed PDFs, but the corrections should just look like the printed book except fixed. So if someone leaves a pile of books on my desk with no note and pages inside, I'm going to check them against the marked up book and notate my spreadsheet.

Guess what! The piles were just the reprints guy leaving a bunch of books I'd already done two weeks ago on my desk! AWESOME. Just wasted my morning.

I would like to go back to bed now, please.

If you're a girl, no-one will like you.

This is the message I've been getting recently. First was PvP's recent comic "Bed Bath and Beyond Thunderdome" with this remark:

It's harder for women to make friends, okay? Women are competitive and catty and just generally unkind to each other.

...which is frankly untrue. I made at least two new friends on the weekend who were women, without trying very hard at all.

Then there was the hoo-ha that happens yearly at comedy festival time where it was said that women aren't funny. Ben McKenzie responded in an article on Crikey, "Angry Angry – Female Comedians can be Funny Funny", and you just need to read the comments to get an idea of the vitriol that gets hurled against women. I've lost count of the number of times when I've seen it explicitly or implicitly stated that a woman's job in her social group is to shut up, and put up with and laugh at the jokes of men. Some of those times have come from women's and girl's magazines on how to be popular or survive a first date. Some of those have been on sitcoms, where the female protagonists have been advised to do the same (and then usually mocked for complying poorly).

A quote from Ben in the comments of his article:

[T]o generalise that to “women aren’t funny” – even in an off-hand comment – is a symptom of a larger problem. This isn’t about women being funny; it’s about that opinion being part of the larger problem of sexism in our society. I think the only real reason people think “chicks aren’t funny” is the last one, that it’s a deeply ingrained understanding of how women are allowed to present to the world that leads to that opinion, so deep it takes some work to expose it.

The final point was made in the article "The Female Body", which makes very good points about the use of dead women in art and fiction for a whole bunch of purposes, and how this reflects our societal attitudes to women (and isn't as dry as it sounds from my summary). What struck me was this quote that was given:

Men and women don’t like each other very much. —Dame Rebecca West

So if you're a woman, we're told, no-one will like you. Other women don't like you (they view you as competition for their men and/or women), men sure as hell don't like you (this one still seems to be more true than the previous, unfortunately; the best you can hope for with some men is a sort of genial contempt, as if you were an amusing dog that had managed to walk on its hind legs), the media certainly don't like you, and advertising executives see you as some sort of magical money funnel without critical thinking skills (My three favourite words! It's on Sale! "thanks" for that, Diet Coke) or, alternately, sexual and passive set dressing to sell things to men.

It sure sucks to be a girl.