A young friend has taken to wearing horns in protest. Some people in San Francisco heard about this and someone made her a very nice set of horns (which she is wearing) … it is her reaction to chrome fish and W stickers on cars.

http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2005/05/robyn_wears_her.html

She just wants people to know…

This is the intersection of privilege and discrimination.

I recently quit job because the environment, however “normal” for the other people there, was incredibly toxic. A place where every joke and conversation begins with presumed prejudices (social, economic, sexual, racial and otherwise) and conspiratorial winks and smiles. On the sexual side there’s the constant talk of husbands/wives/kids. Even though my partner is male they assume I’m not in a serious relationship because we’re neither engaged or married. In order to assess our seriousness they often ask “are you going to have kids” (an INCREDIBLY personal question that they have no business even asking but is perfectly NORMAL…). It’s not until I say “yeah, we’d like to have *a* kid at some point” that they know we are “serious”. I find this whole scenario revolting because it measures my love and respect for my partner according to a bunch of centrist default settings. Now imagine if I told them I had a girlfriend. How do they establish how “serious” we are without the standard heterosexist benchmarks (i.e., engagement, marriage, breeding).

You can’t simply opt-out of these conversations. Most of the people in these environments don’t seem to have very sophisticated boundaries – it’s normal to barge into somebody else’s space and ask certain kinds of questions “so what does your husband do?” Questions that are loaded with presumption. This is centrist culture and it’s corporate culture. What happened to danah at the airport is part of that. Corporate culture is intimately connected with centrist/consumer ideology. They reinforce and compliment each other.

Unlike universities or cultural occupations, corporate culture rewards centrist social and cultural identities/values. If you don’t have a paint-by-numbers, made-for-TV life you’re a freak. It’s a little easier for centrist gays and lesbians to *fit in* to this kind of atmosphere but it’s still all about conformit. You’re A-OK-GAY if you’re otherwise the same as they are. That’s not any kind of equality as far as I’m concerned – that’s assimilation.

Corporate culture has got to change. The whole script. All of it.