Re: Welcome Christine! And the "woman" issue. WAS: lunatic survey

Sally wrote:
>
>I guess what I'm interested in is knowing why conlanging in particular
>should draw fewer women than men; I realize that there are probably a
lot
>more women out there who conlang...
>Once I opined, and I may have been wrong, that women on average are
trained
>in American (and perhaps European) society to be practical minded, and
that
>there is something inherently "uncool" in exposing excessive
enthusiasm, or
>involving themselves in pursuits that don't immediately yield some kind
of
>profitable endeavor--such as competing to get into college, graduate
>school,
>or at the very least, being "taken seriously as a professional."  These
are
>potent concerns for women these days.  And this essentially
"unprofitable"
>aspect of conlanging, of course, furnished a number of questions on my
>survey--its privacy, its seeming inutility, its difficulty as an art
form
>to
>attract "consumers," or to be sold--which seems to be a vital part of
any
>visible craft: poetry, music, painting, model-building; knitting: these
>activities produce things that can be viewed, put in books, put on your
>wall, played on CDs, bought in craft shops.  Consumers of conlangs
can't do
>that unless they learn it.  The only paying outlet seems to be for film
or
>television, an enviable feat that some conlangers have accomplished!
If
>they appear in novels, it's the novel, usually, not the conlang, that
>sells.
>
>Now I know that things have changed considerably since the sixties, but
I
>wonder if some of these assumptions about female decorum are still in
place
>to a vast extent. Note how many more professional male comedians there
are
>than women
I don't feel as if that ever took place in my life(but then, I'm
oblivious to many social conventions)--there's a big push for females to
take part in the sciences nowadays (hurrah Harvard President), and
thanks to the Bill Gates phenomenon, being a geek is becoming more and
more socially accepted.

As to some of your other statements, it is also worthy to point out the
market studies on video/computer games. I'm no expert on this(I'll have
to go check the facts), but I recall reading some articles on what kind
of games appeal to girls and to boys.
Girls prefer, among other things, games that one doesn't have to learn
by immersion, while boys prefer games that take hours and hours of
practice in order to be played optimally, or reach competence.
Conlanging is definitely a boy-type game, according to these
observations. How many hours have I spent merely looking up the
definitions for the terms used on a discussion on this list, just so
that I could understand what was going on, and how many hours learning
about various other languages!

What female-majority LiveJournals
>out there would attract discussion about conlanging?
Livejournal gives me the shudders, but it is about 2/3 female from what
I remember, so I was wondering about the demographics of
http://www.livejournal.com/community/conlangs

>So what does Tsemol mean? :)
I took it from the Hebrew se'mol, and added a "t", because semol was
taken as an AIM screenname, now it is my name.

--Cristina Tsemol