Thoughts on Gender and Sexual Assault Support Groups

Because the vast majority of sexual assaults involve women who have been assaulted by men, the associated support groups tend to be comprised of women who have been assaulted by men. These groups also tend to be considered as woman-only safespaces where people who do not "qualify" are asked to leave. I get where this is coming from, but there are some serious problems with this attitude and it needs to stop.

Men Get Raped Too

Men who have been sexually assaulted need support as well. They are often excluded from support groups with the excuse that the presence of a man will make the women uncomfortable. We, as women, need to get over this. A man who has been sexually assaulted by a man is in the same boat as everyone else in the room and needs a safe place just as much. On the other hand, a man who has been sexually assaulted by a woman and finds the courage to address that with a room full of women deserves to have their experience and courage respected. The same awareness of male socialization that makes women view men as people who cannot be trusted adds a big, awful bag of blech to what must be dealt with by a man who is the victim of a sexual assault. They need help too, and we need to stop turning them away.

Trans People Can't Get Support At All

A trans woman may be turned away from support groups because she is not a "real" woman. A trans man may be turned away from support groups because he identifies as a man. Unless he is allowed to stay because he is considered to not be a man due to the configuration of his genitals, requiring him to choose between support for his assault and maintaining his own gender. Either way, the trans person who has been sexually assaulted now also has to undergo a discussion of their genitals by a group of strangers and endure a judgement about their own gender identity before this group of people will offer what can now only be considered pretty badly damaged support. Imagine how a cis woman would feel if her attempt to join a sexual assault support group was greeted by questions about her genitals and a requirement to prove her womanhood.

The Strawperson

One of the common objections offered is that cis men and trans women (who, according to the argument, are "really" men) will pretend to have been sexually assaulted in order to gain access and victimize the women in the group.  This argument is of the same family as the equally unsupported "all trans women are actually male predators" that results in the bathroom panic that makes it so dangerous for trans people to use public restrooms. Cis women commit sexual assault too, but a cis woman is only barred from a sexual assault support group if she does something inappropriate. To assume that it is more likely that a man or a trans person seeking a sexual assault support group is a predator is cut from the same cloth as assuming that a cis woman who claims to have been raped is lying. It's unsubstantiated, based on false perceptions, and damaging to the people who need the support such groups exist to provide. This is not helped by the plethora of TV shows that seem unable to depict a support group meeting without it being scenery for somebody who is there under false pretenses.

All Kinds of People Experience Sexual Assault

When joining a sexual assault support group, a person of color and a racist may be in the same group. A gay person and a homophobe may be in the same group. A conservative and a liberal. A Muslim and a Jew and a Catholic. People with a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, levels of education, belief systems, etc. all come together in the room because they have one thing in common: they have experienced a sexual assault. They are expected to set their differences aside and focus on their shared experience. Gender needs to stop being an exception to this. We need to stop denying people support because of their gender, and we need to stop denying cis women the more well-rounded support that other perspectives can supply.

In Which I Discuss QR Codes

QR codes seems to be right up there with Comic Sans in the area of Stuff People Hate to a Oddly Inappropriate Degree or SPHOIDs. I've heard impassioned rants about how QR codes are destroying society and should never be used under any circumstances. ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!!!!

Well, not to invite disaster, but I disagree. It's true that I would never bother to scan the QR code on an ad, but that's mainly because the few times I did so, it took me nowhere of any interest. Sorry, ad people, but you blew it.

On the other hand, QR codes have some really practical and useful applications. There are a lot of places IRL where I'd really like to reach out and click the object in front of me to get more information or have something useful happen. It's not like we don't have a globally accessible network where information can be stored. For example, I did a job in one company where they had signs on the wall with a QR code to connect to their internal network. You walk in, scan the code, and boom! You've got net.

Some other useful real-world applications for QR codes:

• On a material or product to open its Material Safety Data Sheet
• On an E-Ticket to see gate assignment and flight status for the flight
• Next to a work of art to load information about the piece
• On a product to load the manual or an instructional video
• On a bus shelter to get a schedule for the routes that stop there
• Etc.

Heck, the thing can encode over 4K of plain text in a compact format. If you can't think of anything useful to do with that capability, you really aren't trying. Can you use them for things that are annoying or stupid? Sure! But that's your fault, not the QR code's fault.

If you want to play with creating and scanning QR Codes, try the free QR Code Generator at QRStuff.

Holy Grail? Really, CSS People?

I recently had a website to build where the desired layout was three columns - left sidebar, right sidebar, and center content. The sidebars needed to be fixed width and the center content area needed to be liquid and resize itself to use the remaining available space. Pretty standard stuff, right?

Now, CSS has a lot of good points, and I try to be a good girl and drink the Kool-Aid when it makes sense, so I sat down and started making divs. And failed. And failed And failed. CSS just would not produce the result I wanted. So, I said to myself, "Self, there are people out there better than you are with CSS. Surely one of them have solved this!" To Google I went! Where I discovered that the CSS crowd considers this layout to be a "holy grail".

I read dozens of complicated methods for achieving this. I gave some of them a try, but most simply didn't work, or only worked for certain content. That's not such a big deal. All tools have their strengths and weaknesses. What did make me facepalm is the lengths these people are willing to go in order to avoid using the tool that is sitting right in front of them and achieves this effortlessly.

I've got your holy grail right here. It's called a table.

<table style="width:100%">
    <tr>
        <td style="width:200px">Left Sidebar</td>
        <td>Center Content</td>
        <td style="width:200px">Right Sidebar</td>
    </tr>
</table>

There. Grail found.

Proper Gift Etiquette

Dear Abby,

I work for this amazing guy. I'll call him G. I love working for him, and I really feel like I owe him everything, but he did something kind of strange the other day and I'm not sure what to do.

G sent one of my colleagues to my house to have sex with me. I said I didn't want to, but he hit me several times  and then had sex with me anyway. The whole business hurt a lot and was very upsetting. I talked to a friend about this, but since I got pregnant from the event, my friend says that I must have wanted to have sex with my colleague after all or I wouldn't have gotten pregnant.

I asked why G did this and was told by someone who says they were at the meeting that G thought I was doing a good job and he wanted to do something really nice for me, so he got me a baby.

The thing is, I already have two young children with my husband. We weren't planning on having any more just yet, so this gift is a bit ill-timed. Also, if G wanted me to have another baby, I don't understand why he didn't send my husband to have sex with me, since I do that willingly.

I don't want to be ungrateful after everything that G has done for me.  He has given me a number of gifts over the years, but this is the first one that landed me in the hospital. Honestly, it really doesn't sound like him at all, but this other person claims to know all about it.

What do you think, Abby? Did G really send this person to forcibly impregnate me against my wishes as a gift, or is the person who told me that just trying to make themselves look important? 

When Good Analogies Go Bad

This is what happened to a recent Facebook post I made on the subject of gay marriage. I think it speaks for itself.

No, Really, I Don't Want to Remarry

It happened again yesterday. This time, it was the woman cutting my hair.

Her: Are you married?
Me: Divorced.
Her: Oh, well that's ok. You're young. You'll get married again.
Me: No, I don't think I will.
Her: What?! You're so cute though. Of course you will.
Me: No, I don't mean I couldn't get married again. I just don't want to.
Her: Well, you just feel that way now. You'll get married again.
Me: *sigh* OK.

For the love of Pete, lady! You're cutting my hair, and you only even do that about once a year. It's not like you know a damn thing about me! People - strangers - keep insisting that I must get married again and giving me these pitying looks when I tell them I'm not planning to do that. Even if I still happen to be "cute" enough that I could land another man.

I was with my ex for 20 years. For about 19 of those years, I was really happy. I would have been happy to stay married to him. It's not like I don't know what I'm missing.  I don't hate men; I like men. I've thought about it. I've considered my feelings and my priorities. I've looked at the quality of my life. And I've decided that the whole dating/romance/marriage thing is not something I want to do again. I've done that and now I want to do something else. I suppose I may change my mind at some point, but it won't be because I've finally emerged from my choking cloud of denial, or whatever these people seem to think I'm living in.

I'm happy. My life is good. I'm not alone and I'm not lonely. The only thing I've really given up is sex. I've had a lot of sex with a lot of people over the course of my life and, honestly, I don't have a problem with that. It's nice and all, but it's worth a lot less to me than what I've gained by just taking a pass on the whole business.

So, it would be good if people could stop treating me like not being interesting in remarrying is some sort of terminal illness, ok? As it turns out, while there are indeed other fish in the sea, there are also other seas.

Choosing a Webmaster

Everybody seems to have figured out that they really need to have a website for their business these days.

Excellent.

So they go out and throw thousands of dollars at the first person they don't understand. Because that means that person really knows what they're doing, right? RIGHT?

Not so excellent.

Then they figure out that they've made a mistake and are genuinely eager to correct it. To do that, they need another webmaster.  But they still have no idea how to choose one and they don't want to make the same mistake again. Plus they blew their budget on the first webmaster. So they decide that they're trapped and live with whatever mess they're original webmaster made.

Very not excellent.

If you choose a doctor, you know this person has, at a minimum, graduated from medical school and received a license. If you choose a lawyer, you know this person has, at a minimum, graduated from law school and passed the bar. Webmasters don't have any minimum requirements. Anyone can announce that they are one. So, how do you choose?

You Are Not Stupid

New clients often tell me how stupid they are because they don't know anything about how websites work. As if I could do their jobs!

There is no reason to expect that you should somehow simply have an understanding of website design. It's a skill like any other. The people who know how to do it sat down and learned it, just like you learned the skills necessary for your job. Your webmaster should be able and willing to explain what they are doing and why in terms you can understand. You are not required to blindly accept anything they say and sign anything they hand you. You don't need to understand all the technical details of how everything works, but they should be able to clearly explain what a domain name is and help you choose a good one. They should also be able to explain the benefit their choices have for you, not just for them.

When you ask questions of your webmaster, you should get answers, not technical obfuscations. Say you ask: Will I have to check another email address?

Bad Webmaster: Gobbledygook flux capacitor temporal shift tardis YOU MUST GIVE ME $500 MORE DOLLARS TO SAVE YOU FROM THE EMAILS gobbledygook blarg.

Good Webmaster: Not if you don't want to. I can set you up a professional email address, but forward the messages to your GMail account so you only have to look in one place.

Retain Control

Not owning your website address (domain name) is like not owning your business name. Do not sign on with a webmaster who does not give you complete control and ownership over your domain name and your hosting account. In the best case, even the most professional and qualified webmaster can get hit by a bus. In the worst case, your webmaster may turn out to be both incompetent and vindictive. If your webmaster wants to create a hostage situation, walk away. Period. Before committing to a webmaster and/or a hosting service, make sure of the following:

1. Your domain is registered in your name, not the webmaster's.
2. The email address for the domain admin contact is yours, not the webmaster's.
3. You have the login and password to access a domain management area where you can change nameservers and/or transfer the domain. You don't need to know what to do with this information, but you must have it available if you want someone else to be able to help you.
4. Your hosting account is in your name, uses your email address, and is on your credit card, not in the webmaster's name or on their reseller account. This is crucial if you ever need to get account information from the hosting company. I recommend not using a webmaster that hosts sites on their own server.
5. You have the login and password to access your hosting account. You don't need to know what to do with this information, but you must have it available if you want someone else to be able to help you.

In general, websites follow the money and the primary email address. make sure that both are yours.

Your website should also be yours. Webmaster will often put a small credit for themselves on sites they build. This is okay, but you should be able to remove it if you wish. The webmaster should also not claim copyright for any content you've written yourself or any artwork created for you. If content or artwork has been licensed from elsewhere, you should have a copy of those licenses for reference if needed.

Get What You Pay For

Certain large companies have taken to sending salespeople out to small businesses to pressure the owners into paying hundreds of dollars per month for a poorly designed web page. They claim that they are doing huge amounts of search engine optimization (SEO) work and suchlike for this money.

This is ridiculous. They are doing no such thing. They are certainly not doing hundreds of dollars per month worth of work. A well-made website with good SEO work built into it will do just as well or better.

For most small businesses, shared hosting is fine, comes with all the tools you need, and costs about $10 per month or less.  If you are paying more than that per month, something is wrong.

In general, your webmaster should not be collecting monthly maintenance fees from you unless there are some very specific tasks they perform on your site every month. For example, if they update your calendar of events each month, then a reasonable monthly fee is fine. Otherwise, you shouldn't be billed unless you ask them to do something for you.

Competence Counts

Websites aren't just pretty. They need to work. It can be difficult to tell if a webmaster is technically competent from the outside, but there are some clues you can look for. Ask them for links to sites they've built.  When you look at them, don't concentrate so much on whether you like blue or not.  Look for signs that this person knows what they are doing.

• Do things line up and appear to be the same size?
• Are the fonts consistent,or do they change at random?
• Are images scaled correctly, or do they look stretchy or distorted?
• Are there typos?
• Do links go to the right places, or are they broken?

Even people who don't know anything about websites know they want to show up on Google. Determining if your potential webmaster knows about good SEO is trickier, but there are some clues you can look for.

• Check the page titles by hovering your mouse over the browser tab. They should all be different and contain reasonable search terms for the site.
• If you have a browser that will show image properties, make sure that the images have alt tags that contain reasonable search keywords.

•  Look for large blocks of text that are actually pictures of text. Search engines can't read these and a good webmaster will avoid them in favor of actual text unless the client insists on them for some reason.

You should also ask your webmaster if they speak any web development programming or scripting languages. You're looking for answers like: Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, AJAX, ASP, etc. You don't need to know what these are, but it's tough to build a good website these days without getting into at least a little bit of coding, so your webmaster should have some experience in this area.

Providing Guidance

Ultimately, the decisions about your website will be yours, but a good webmaster will let you know if you are making a choice that will cost you in terms of usability or search engine rankings. As a test, tell your potential webmaster that you want the name of your business to be in very large text on every page and that you want it to blink. If they don't at least suggest that you rethink that decision, you need to talk to someone else.

There's more, of course, but it's hard to check for unless you already know what you're doing. Hopefully, this information will help you choose the right person to get your business online.