Tag Archives: english

Feminism

Tag Clouds: How NOT to do it

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Erste Bank is the oldest still existing commercial bank in Austria (wikipedia article, not available in English). Obviously, the marketing’s gender role models are just as old as their bank:

solid, family friendly, uncomplicated, informed, calm, transparent, consistent, stable, professionell, simple, accessible, flexible, modern
female role model

active, self-determined, modern, fast, professionell, dynamic, flexible, unattached, target oriented, informed, simple, transparent
male role model

So in Erste Bank marketing’s eyes, women are solid, family friendly, uncomplicated, informed, calm, transparent, consistent, stable, professionell, simple, accessible, flexible and modern.

And men? They are active, self-determined, modern, fast, professionell, dynamic, flexible, unattached, target oriented, informed, simple and transparent.

Those are serious gender stereotypes that should not be used by one of the biggest commercial banks in Austria. I hope they reconsider their marketing strategies.

P.S. Yes, I did take a closer look at that 2nd picture. Those extremely old-fashioned stereotypes seem not to be about how the person on the poster is, but what they want their investment fonds to be like. Still, those are stupid stereo types. I’m sure there are women who do like to experiment with new ways of investing their money in order to get a nice interest rate, just like I’m also sure there’s a lot of men who want to make sure their money is secure and will be available once they need it.

Family, Outdoors

Bavarian Kitsch: Garmisch-Partenkirchen

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One day out of the 10 or such that I spent at my parents’ place during the holidays, we took a train to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a town in Bavaria. We had a nice afternoon walking through the old town, taking a closer look at some of the buildings (including the incredibly old library, and the newly renovated church), and had coffee and cake that could have been a full meal.

The initial plan also included to search for some geocaches, but as my Dad wasn’t too excited about watching me look for tiny containers “for nothing”, I decided to rather have a nice afternoon with my parents 🙂

And of course, I took a couple pictures, so you get something out of it, too!

The poem on the wall reads:

Dreifach ist der Schritt der Zeit,
zögernd kommt die Zukunft hergezogen,
Pfeilschnell ist das Jetzt verflogen,
Ewig still steht die Vergangenheit.

Keine Ungeduld beflügelt
Ihren Schritt, wenn sie verweilt.
Keine Furcht, kein Zweifel zügelt
Ihren Lauf, wenn sie enteilt.
Keine Reu, kein Zaubersegen
kann die stehende bewegen.

Möchtest du beglückt und weise
Endigen des Lebens Reise
Nimm die zögernde zum Rat
Nicht zum Werkzeug deiner Tat.
Wähle nicht die fliehende zum Freund,
nicht die bleibende zum Feind.

In short, it says that time has in 3 different velocities: Future arrives hesitantly, Present flies by fast as an arrow, and Past stays ever the same. There is no way to speed up the lingering, no way to slow down the rushing, and no way to move the stagnant. So if you want to be happy at the end of your life, don’t make the Future your tool, but rather your advisor, don’t be too fond of the Present, and don’t make an enemy of the Past.

Family, Feminism

Feminism for kids: Frozen

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When I visited home these past holidays, my brother and I, his wife and son, plus some of her family, went to the movies and watched “Frozen”. The German title is “The Snow Queen”, as if it was just a movie version of the fairy tale, and what I had heard about it before had only referred to the movie NOT being true to the fairy tale. Also some of the comments I had read led me to believe it would only be a nice kids’ movie, but not as girl-power-y as, e.g., “Merida”.

But, oh wow, how wrong I was 🙂

I won’t be spoiling it all for the readers who haven’t seen the movie yet. To you, I say: go, watch it. It was good fun, also in German (well, I had to watch it in German, due to my company 😉 ), even with some unexpected turns and all.

So, to let you know what I LOVED about this movie, let me quote the short conversation I had with my nephew on our way home:

Me: See, in most movies, the girls need a boy to help them get out of trouble. But that’s not true. You saw in this movie, that girls indeed CAN get themselves out of trouble, right?

Him: Yes, right. There is this one girl in school, she never needs help when fighting with the boys. She is a pretty good fighter!

Cute. Next time I’m home, I hope I’ll have time to watch some more movies like that with him 🙂  Any recommendations from your side?

GeoCaching, Outdoors, Work / University

Small plans instead of big resolutions

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Most people have one big New Year’s Resolution, and struggle with it. A way better idea that I heard during my stay at my parent’s place, in a Sunday morning interview with one of my favourite authors, Thomas Brezina (wikipedia), is the following:

Don’t make one big resolution. Try to think of a couple of things that you’d like to do during the upcoming year. Write them down, and during 2014, check every once in a while how you are doing on completing those plans.

So here are my plans for 2014:

  • find about 170 geocaches, so my total will be at least 500 by the end of 2014
  • walk another 2 parts of Lechweg with my mum
  • hike up Säuling, a mountain near my hometown, also with my mum
  • finally complete the trail that goes all around Vienna (“Rundumadum”)
  • make use of my Niederösterreich Card
  • complete courses worth 30 ECTS per semester, so I’ll finish my Bachelor’s degree within 8 semester in sum

and of course, the classic thing: restart going to Yoga and Gymnastics classes on a weekly basis.

Did you make a resolution? Or do you have plans, like I do?

Enjoying Vienna, GeoCaching, Outdoors

Geocaching Frenzy

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Last week, I realized that my current number of found Geocaches was nearing 290, so I decided that it could not be that this year would end without my at least finding another 10 Geocaches and thus hitting 300 found and logged Geocaches.

For this purpose, I started a thread on the Vienna Group in bewelcome, asking for people to join me. Lo and Behold, some people actually replied to it (either in the thread or via direct message), and asking some more friends in person, I ended up with a group of 4 other women who would join me on a Saturday in the late morning to go and hunt some Geocaches in the outskirts of Vienna, and at least 2 who would join me on Sunday, too.

The hike on Saturday in the Nussdorf area was about 5 km long, and we found all the Geocaches along the route, scoring a total of 16 found Geocaches in one day. That means that I not only achieved my goal of reaching 300 before New Year’s, but I even managed to surpass my to-date best Geocaching day 🙂

On Sunday, only 2 of the group were left: me and Anna whom I met at the WienTut. We met up at Schwarzenbergpark and logged one earthcache and 6 traditionals. Of the 6 traditionals, 4 had a Terrain rating of 2 or higher – because they were hidden in trees and I had to climb up to get them. It was great fun 🙂

So my current score is 320 found Geocaches – and I’m already looking for people who will join me on some short trips to cities in the area surrounding my home town around Christmas 🙂

Feminism

Mixed feelings, mixed contents

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Ever since I started writing about Feminism (here, here, and here), I feel like what I wrote before on this blog is now of no importance.

But damnit, I don’t want this blog to be a grumpy list of what I see in the world that I don’t like. Because that’s not who I am. I prefer seeing myself as a positive person, enjoying life wherever possible, and in general just doing my thing without letting myself being dragged down by stupid people who sometimes cross my path.

So consider yourself warned. In future, grumpy posts will keep showing up, because I think that talking about problems is the first step to getting rid of them. But fear not, I’ll still go on about how much I love Vienna and all 😉

Feminism, Work / University

Sexism: Visibility vs Existence

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This is a post that I’ve been thinking about since … well, 2 months. The title tells it all, it’s again about my post on what I have encountered at TU Wien that I regard as sexist. For the sake of completeness, here’s also the link to my addendum to that post (in case you missed it).

So, that blog post of mine seems to have made it as far as to the Austrian Students’ Parliament – yay! Also, it seems to have made quite an impression wherever it went.

Apparently the message heard by some people was that there is “a lot of sexism over there at Informatics”. It seems to me there are people out there who think what they don’t see doesn’t happen, as in “if nobody says there’s sexism at MY department, there is no sexism here”.

Maybe you’re not paying enough attention. Maybe your “sexism radar” hasn’t been fine-tuned yet. Maybe you’re just a hell of a lucky person who happens to be at a department where there are no sexist persons.

I’m a nice person, so I hope for you that it’s number 3. On the other hand, if you ever happen to be thrown into another environment, with less nice and less feminist persons, you’ll have a pretty tough time either getting accustomed to it, or – which I hope you’re already doing – changing it.

Making sexism visible as what it is – prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s gender and the stupid belief that one gender is overall superior to the other, thus making it alright to dominate the seemingly weaker gender – is the first step of making it go away.

And that’s what I was hoping for. Raising awareness that there’s still much to do at TU Wien. Finding allies. Maybe even starting something that might end up in changing my University.

Enjoying Vienna, GeoCaching, Outdoors, Work / University

Vienna 101, continued

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Showing the city I love to people who are new to it or want to discover new places – I LOVE it 🙂

As everybody at the first meeting liked the idea, we visited Zentralfriedhof on our second trip. I changed my usual tour a little, so we would see different parts of the cemetery, including the old Jewish cemetery where I don’t go that often. We also checked off some Geocaches that had been placed at the cemetery after my last visit.

Our third visit to Places You’d Usually Don’t See Or Visit In Vienna was to Lainzer Tiergarten. Unfortunately, most of the park is closed in Winter, due to all the game living there and their need of having a quiet time during the cold season. So instead of having a rather long hike starting in the North of the park, and having a great view over the city, we spent most of the Tutorium on the tramway and waiting for it – but the small part of the park that was open was definitely worth it! That part is called Hermesvillapark, and that Villa is a lovely piece of bavarian Kitsch in the middle of a lovely area –  built by Emperor Franz Joseph for his beloved Sisi.

We tried solving a multi stage geocache, but didn’t succeed. Obviously 3 informatics students can’t count letters as good as a 7 year old girl (we met a geocaching family along the way, and they had a different outcome, and logged the cache … ). Later on, we DID log a traditional geocache, so bringing the GPS device wasn’t totally futile 🙂

Last but not least, trip number 4 took us to Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (HGM, Museum of Military History). Every year, usually on the first weekend of advent, there’s a medieval market happening outside the museum, and the entrance to the museum is free of charge. This time, only 2 of our usual participants came, and even Boki didn’t have time to come. I decided to also invite some other friends and acquaintances, but still we only were 4 people 🙂  We learned some things about Austria’s wars from 17th to 19th century, about fencing in the 14th century, fashion in the 13th century, and about the area where HGM is located (called “Arsenal”). Of course we also tasted a couple of punch variations and logged a geocache. I sure am happy that people don’t mind, or even enjoy, my hijacking the Tutorium for finding geocaches 🙂

Work / University

Vienna 101, lesson 1

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As I mentioned before, I’ll be a tourist guide for students who just moved to Vienna, or would like to (re)discover Vienna, this semester.

Unit 1 of the “Wien-Tut” was an easy walk from our University’s main building at Karlsplatz to Stephansplatz (aka, the city center) and then we had a coffee and talked a bit about what they wanted to see in the next unit.

Well, that’s the extra-short version of it. Along the way, Boki and I showed them the Opera, the Albertina museum, the Crypt of the Habsburgs, Stock-im-Eisen-Platz, and my personal favourite in the first district: Blutgasse. The unanimous feedback was that the students want to see more of the unusual sights, sites and sides of Vienna, just like Blutgasse – so we decided we’d go see Zentralfriedhof cemetery next.

It’ll be great 🙂

Other

Addendum to “TU Wien needs feminism”

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This post is related to the one I published two days ago, especially the first paragraph.

I received a lot of feedback regarding the whole post, mainly “WTF are they thinking?”. But also, especially regarding the first paragraph, I got a lot of stories that told the same thing: The question “Are you sure you want to study Informatics? There’s a lot of maths courses to be passed during those studies.” had been asked a lot of people, and seemingly male future students, too.

So I guess this is the right time to talk about communication.

The issue here is that what was said might have been meant as a piece of advice, or a possibility of filtering out people who thought Informatics was about MS Word.

But the magic of communication is in how to send a message, how to make sure that the person adressed does understand the meaning.

And that’s the problem.

Let’s say you bring me chocolate cake. I like cake, so that’s a good start. I taste it, and I think you made a good cake, though my boyfriend’s chocolate cake is even better. Yes, indeed, my boyfriend makes cake!

Now, I could tell you “Wow, that’s a great cake you made, though my boyfriend’s is better.”. Or I tell you “My boyfriend makes better cake”. Or I tell you “That’s a great cake!”

So, I’ll give TU Wien this: Putting this question into the obligatory interview that basically kicks off your time at University is pretty uncool. And not giving a fuck about how this might be interpreted by students is rather stupid.