Current mood:

quixotic

Okay. What's next?
A bunch of us who wanted to do something to show SixApart how we felt, discussed, off livejournal, what we could do - what we could ask others to do - and what we wanted to ask SixApart to do. (A necessary part of any strike action is to figure out first what you're asking for...)

But my reasons when - after discussion - I finally wrote the "this is what we want" post for focussing on the breastfeeding issue were threefold:

1. Changing the patriarchal assumption that women's bodies are sexual and men's bodies are neutral is an awfully, awfully big fight, and one that I didn't think we'd win in this one battle, whereas I was quite hopeful that we could win the specific fight about breastfeeding icons.

2. There are all sorts of good reasons why everyone (even the happily childfree, which includes me) ought to support women feeling comfortable about breastfeeding in public, and why even tiny steps backwards - such as SixApart's decision that you can't have breastfeeding pics as default icons - should be opposed. (See Bohemiancoast's post quoted on Making Light.) This applies whether you normally oppose public nudity or you are an ardent campaigner for shame-free nudity for everyone - breastmilk is usually the best milk for babies, and discouragement of public breastfeeding is generally discouragement of breastfeeding, end of story.

3. Breastfeeding icons were plainly and obviously OK as default icons under the pre-May 20th version of FAQ 111 amplifying the TOS, and FAQ 111 was evidently rewritten specifically so that LJ Abuse could get away with banning breastfeeding icons. It's a nice, clear-cut case, and when campaigning, nice clear-cut cases are good.

I'm a feminist. Ultimately, I want to destroy the patriarchy. But, to avoid being a choked-up feminist, I accept that I can only try to destroy the patriarchy in small, manageable bites.

Grr'rr.

Stats for 6/6/6:
Total accounts: 10385229
... active in some way: 1854616
... that have ever updated: 6980683
... updating in last 30 days: 1196909
... updating in last 7 days: 723059
... updating in past 24 hours: 262802

Stats for 31st May (previous Tuesday):
Total accounts: 10336342
... active in some way: 1853118
... that have ever updated: 6953213
... updating in last 30 days: 1197567
... updating in last 7 days: 710839
... updating in past 24 hours: 257041

Which means that the one-day strike didn't work as far as putting a dent in the statistics went. As far as getting people to talk about the issue (unfortunately, as far as I can tell, mostly on Livejournal!) it seems to have worked pretty well.

So: what do we do next?