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"Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" Pulled From Amazon
New submitter clcto writes Back in 2010, Computer Engineer Barbie was released. Now, with the attention brought to the Frozen themed programming game from Disney and Code.org, unwanted attention has been given to the surprisingly real book "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer". So much so, that Mattel has pulled the book from Amazon. The book shows Barbie attempting to write a computer game. However, instead of writing the code, she enlists two boys to write the code as she just does the design. She then proceeds to infect her computer and her sister's computer with a virus and must enlist the boys to fix that for her as well. In the end she takes all the credit, and proclaims "I guess I can be a computer engineer!" A blog post commenting on the book (as well as giving pictures of the book and its text) has been moved to Gizmodo due to high demand.
Who does Mattel have in charge of Barbie these days?
Because whoever it is, has stepped in it so many times it's not even funny.
Are they being punked from inside? Or are people actually thinking this shit is a good idea?
Absolutely mind boggling.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
To be fair to that scene, it actually takes a bit of awareness to realize that fucked up 3d UI was a filesystem wrapper.
Like, "Oooooooooooooooh, there's /usr/, I get it now" was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
http://www.themarysue.com/barb... is much better done. If only that had been the actual book!
I don't know. It sounds hilarious to me. I don't understand how anyone can take the book seriously.
In fact, this is a valuable learning tool for your child. It's a great introduction to satire, context, and critical thinking. Barbie is a complete and total twatwaddle bimbo; she's an idiot, probably a rich idiot (we never hear about that), who apparently gets to do whatever the fuck she wants. Obviously, if you took a rich valley girl and got the idea in her head to be a computer engineer, THIS IS WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
In context, it's not Barbie being women; it's Barbie being Barbie, and this is a valuable lesson for your child. The fact that Barbie has so many roles--Barbie as a mother, Barbie on vacation, Barbie as a computer engineer, Barbie as an astronaut, Barbie as a black chick, Barbie on ice, Baker Babe Barbie--allows us to readily frame Barbie as both a character and a representation of fantastic ideals not directly tied to reality. It also arms us with the valuable tool of meaningful assessment: sometimes you meet a woman who has the vast intellect of a Barbie doll, and that's a thing you can use to effectively delineate her from other women.
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Yea, honestly the lesson I would want a child to take away from this book is that life isn't fair. Barbie is a bimbo she hasn't got to neurons to rub together but she is pretty and charismatic, she will be able find other people like boys in this book to sponge off and carry her anywhere she wants to go.
This isn't a gender thing either. Pretty boys gave the same advantage although it might show up a little later in life. I have worked lots of places and seen one male manager who is near totally incompetent leading a vastly less successful and productive team than his counter part and their team get selected for promotion to some role like director or CIO/CTO over and over again. Why because that guy was taller and better looking and maybe if he possessed any skills at all its knowing how to tell others what they want to hear.
People need to understand that they may come up against the Barbies and Kens out there and depending on the situation it might not be a fair fight. They might need to recognize they are Barbie or Ken and learn to lever that too.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And the problem isn’t even that Barbie isn’t a “real” computer scientist because she isn’t coding. (I am one of those mostly-non-coding computer scientists myself, though now I’m tempted to make a game about robot puppies shooting lasers anyway.) The problem is the assumption that she is a designer, not a coder, and the coders are boys. (There are also problems with nonsense explanations for computer viruses, taking credit for other people’s work, and inexplicable pillow fights.) I happen to study remix, so one of my first thoughts upon seeing this was: someone is obviously going to remix this. I figured, why wait? I also have at my disposal my roommate Miranda Parker, a student of Mark Guzdial, who studies computing education and broadening participation in STEM. So with her input, I rewrote the book with a slightly different spin. (I also kept her as a “computer engineer” even though she’s really more of a computer scientist, software developer, etc.) I hope you like this new narrative better, too!
mfwright@batnet.com
Mention the "left": Check
Massive "but": Check
That's two, not bad. No-one is asking for special treatment to make women "more" than men, just to restore the balance, which by practically every metric shows that women are at a disadvantage in society, and especially the workplace, and double-especially in IT. We (feminists) want everyone to be equal, as we are equal, and that means highlighting these oft-overlooked degrading behaviours and circumstances which conspire to keep this gender difference around,
Have whatever opinion you want, but if it comes down to judging someone based on their gender, you will be called out on it. Loud and frequently. It doesn't matter if you are a gamer or a doctor or a deep-sea diver - if you spot misogyny or misandry or racism or any pathetic behaviour, bring attention to it.
Rosa Parks was not a bus driver, so I guess by your logic she should have shut up and moved to the back, right?
Even if "the woman" said gamers were werewolf pedophiles from Mars, the backlash from the community demonstrated that what she said was true. People targeted other women who spoke out for simply being women or for simply calling attention to the sexism which has been brewing in the gamer world since its inception.
Not understanding the issues, as you so clearly don't (judging by your first complaint), isn't helping you discuss them, and won't help you figure out that misogyny is alive and well, and a danger to us all.
You want equality? When may men have the right to bodily integrity? Or are you suggesting women should enjoy living with mutilated genitals as well for equality?
I do not think you want equality. I think you want something good, but you first have to be honest about what you're requesting.
Furthermore, why is it that a womyn-born-womyn is responsible for the mess in TFS?
Are you going to tell a womyn-born-womyn to knock off her sexism, or is your strategy going to be to hold all of us assigned the male gender at birth accountable because you're the One Good Man?
It doesn't matter if you are a gamer or a doctor or a deep-sea diver - if you spot misogyny or misandry or racism or any pathetic behaviour, bring attention to it.
Allow me to quote myself:
You want equality? When may men have the right to bodily integrity? Or are you suggesting women should enjoy living with mutilated genitals as well for equality?
I have suffered every symptom associated with female genital mutilation. I will never have children. I'm supposed to accept that I'm just collateral damage in the fight against cervical cancer.
Why do so many of you hold double-standards?
Even if "the woman" said gamers were werewolf pedophiles from Mars, the backlash from the community demonstrated that what she said was true. People targeted other women who spoke out for simply being women or for simply calling attention to the sexism which has been brewing in the gamer world since its inception.
Right. Because I was assigned the male gender at birth and I happen to play a few games, I'm an evil misogynist.
You know, once when I was playing Diablo 3 (yes, I know, that was my original error, hurr durr) I had to turn the main chat off because somebody who claimed to be a woman (probably cisgendered) and a Blizzard employee wouldn't shut up about her sex life. I have never had these problems with men (trans or cis) or trans women. My gamertag is clearly female. I have yet to receive a single threat.
But, since I was assigned the male gender at birth, I have no voice. Either I'm one of those evil gamers who just hate all women and can't get laid, or I'm a pinko communist socialist feminist because I'm trans. And still an evil gamer who hates women because she dates men and is clearly sexually frustrated because she's never gotten in bed with a cisgendered woman!
tl;dr equality: you keep using that word but I do not think it means what you think it means.
The best female programmer that I've know, and I thought she was quite good, was a programmer for almost a decade, then quit to become a stay-at-home-mom, but then became a pseudo-part-time programmer who does remote work for a company, since she can do that from home. She's still salaried, but gets paid a lot less.
Take it how you want, but I don't know any male programmers who quit to be a stay-at-home-dad with a pay hit. Doing this would probably be grounds for divorce for most wives and losing custody of your children, for a man. I assume this kind of stuff can affect the average.
Waay back in the day when my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by an odd fluke the sysadmins and programmers of the Vax/VMS systems they used for scientific data processing were women. Possibly their inability to grow beards disqualified them from Unix jobs. Anyhow, the nickname for them was "data dollies".
Of course there was a long, long history of women in scientific computing. The mom of one of my high school friends graduated from Wellsley during WW2 and worked programming the Harvard Mark 1 -- which meant (although I didn't realize it at the time) she must have worked with Grace Hopper. And of course there were the female code breakers of Bletchley Park. There were a lot of opportunities for smart women to do innovative things in WW2 while many of their equally brainy male counterparts were being fed into the war effort like scraps into a meatgrinder.
Anyhow, I don't think "data dolly" was meant to be as patronizing it sounds to us today. It was a cultural anachronism, like the drinking and smoking on the TV show Mad Men, which appears to us gauche but strangely fascinating. The common assumption back then was that even an intelligent, highly trained woman would quit her job when she got married to raise some man's children. My generation was the first to view automatically assuming that as patronizing. This new attitude was in its day called "radical feminism" -- which was a not too subtle way of associating us with Communists. But of course insensitivity is a two way street. A lot of older women felt insulted by the implication that they'd thrown their lives away.
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It is also worth pointing out that the role of the boy and girl were reversed in the movie. In Crichton's book the boy was the Unix nerd and the girl was just a tomboy with no leet skillz.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.