Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.
So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.
Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.
But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.
Also as a not-a-feminist, it really behooves not-a-feminists to acknowledge and centre the work being done within feminism to make it better, rather than engaging in formulaic dunking. Again, though, what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.
It’s my fervent hope that there will come a time when I feel welcome in feminism and I love working in solidarity with feminists who are trying to address these systemic issues. Part of that work involves following the movement and criticisms from both within and without closely.
Because it would be profoundly disrespectful to erase the work of people pushing for change.

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I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.

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