Gender Divide Podcast

Picture from KATU.  We got about six inches of snow today.  It’s very cold.

We did our big gender divide podcast last night.  Participants were the Antisocial Ladder, the Minority Militant, the Alpha-Asian, Winnovative, Larry, Jason, urB4N, and me.  You can download it here or listen to it below (though we tried to create two different podcasts, it came out as ONE big audio file, a whopping hour and 34 minutes, 30-something megabytes big):

It was our worst podcast to date. It was so raw that I don’t even know if I’d recommend downloading or listening to it. The audio was bad (though not as bad as we had originally thought), our organization got messed up several times, and of course, we have no music.  It was also bad because there were six guys and only two gals, and guys kept talking about guy issues.  After Winnovation, who was on a train because of the weather, got dropped by phone problems, the Antisocial Ladder, the lone remaining female representative, wondered if we were making any progress at all.  Part I was less bad than Part II; Part II went downhill, and we spent the last remaining minutes talking about what we should have done and what we should do for the future.  It was one big train wreck.

That being said, even though this podcast was a giant fail, I hope it was a giant fail forward.  I hope that it will set the stage for an improved dialogue, one which is more focused and more balanced in terms of gender representation.  I personally learned something from this: “gender divide” means two different things to the two different genders.  For most Asian men, “gender divide” refers to the huge amounts of Asian women dating White.  For most Asian women, it refers to sexism.  One of the big problems with this podcast was that we we came into the discussion without a clear understanding of what the term meant.  Now that we know, maybe we can do better next time.

We talked at the end about how to improve our organization.  So next time, we’ll do two, maybe three, recordings:

1. Women and the Gender Divide.  Women will spend most of the time talking about the gender divide.  We’ll have a few questions at the end from men.

2. Men and the Gender Divide.  Men will spend most of the time talking about the gender divide.  We’ll have a few questions at the end from women.

3. After these two, I’d like to talk about the solution I proposed for the Asian male problem.  I think it would help the female problem too.  This is probably the way we should’ve addressed the issue to begin with–propose a solution and then examine.  But could’ve, should’ve, would’ve.  We’ll just do better next time.

Thanks to everyone who participated in last night’s podcast, and I hope we can do it again soon. Next time it will be more gender balanced, will NOT take place on a Friday night, and hopefully will have better sound quality and (hopefully) music.

Let me close on a philosophical note:

This podcast was so bad that we considered not posting it.  However, we decided to post it because you hardcore activists and thinkers can probably pull some golden needles from this messy haystack.  The reason I blog and podcast is to create community and to disseminate thought.  If we can help even one person through anything we say or do, even when we make mistakes or fail, I think it’s worth publishing it as a resource.