"For any woman at that level of visibility...

[drwex]

...I can be pretty sure she did [get death threats and had stalkers]"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toap7iPpTbs&feature=em-uploademail

I cannot ever before remember crying at a Vi Hart video. The problem, gentlemen is us. Pogo is right.

I look at my boys and wonder if, once they are out of our supervision, will they make the same stupid mistakes I made, be the same problem I was? I was commiserating last night with another parent whose child was also misbehaving and she noted that if she had done or said any of the things her child was doing and saying she would've been beaten soundly for it. Me, too. But she and her husband - like me and Pygment - have vowed to raise our children differently. She has five boys, we have two. If we've done something right, there might be seven fewer problems, seven more allies. And if we've done something REALLY right then we might just produce seven examples who have the position and possibility to influence their peers.

And maybe if enough of us do that enough times there will be a future history class that teaches videos like this one the way we teach at photos of last century's cholera, typhus, or influenza epidemics and both sympathize and be grateful the world is no longer like that.

Comments

[fidgetmonster.livejournal.com]

Her video didn't make me cry, but your post did. I am having such a hard time with the world right now, the way it is. It's hard to be optimistic that the future will be better.

[drwex]

I am sorry that my post made you cry. I am fumbling along trying to figure out what sort of ally I can be, to whom and when and like so many things hoping the next generation will fix some of this. I know that my parents' generation didn't even ask these questions, and their parents' generation would not have even thought it was a question to raise. So the arc is there.