The sky is not evil 11
Joss Whedon writes strong female characters, he’s the mind behind some of my favourite TV ever and he a wise man. Here he is reacting to seeing camera phone footage of the murder of Dua Khalil Aswad on CNN almost alongside the trailer for Captivity:
The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.
“I’m sorry.”
What is wrong with women?
I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.
How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence—is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.
You should read the whole thing. Seriously.
Dress for success: wear a white penis
Sexual violence and intimidation isn’t an ‘over there’ thing, it’s not a muslim thing or a hindu thing or a christian thing. It appears to be a humanity thing. We live in a culture where ‘She was asking for it! She wore a short skirt!’ actually seems to carry weight in rape cases, where an intelligent, confident woman can be brought to the point where she feels it necessary to put herself into some kind of purdah because she fears for her life. And where she is castigated by some sections of the community for writing about it.
Not long ago, I blogged about the organizer of a professional programming conference who thought it was good business to advertise his conference by laying on an after show party with lovely girls pouring drinks that the delegates were encouraged to chat up. In response I had my sexuality brought into question1, got phoned up by the organizer and threatened with violence and, funniest of all, got called a sexist. Charming.
Closer to my current programming home, Audrey Eschright has blogged about the #railsconf backchannel and don’t get me started on some of the parties at OSCON.
The odds are depressingly good that, if you’re reading this, you’re a man. I’ve written before about the gender imbalance in open source communities (2% women, 98% men at the time I wrote it) and the poisonous nature of some of those communities. We’re so used to it that we hardly even see it any more, and when we do, there’s always someone ready to stand up and blame women for it.
We have met the enemy, and he is us
We geeks pride ourselves for our intelligence, so why do we have this huge blindspot about the fact that we are (consciously or unconsciously) excluding nearly half the population from our community for because… er… what is the reason?
There isn’t one. It’s irrationality, pure and simple: a Big Lie, and we bought it.
Yes, there are bigger fights than the cause of equality for women in the open source community, all of them worth fighting. But so what? This is something we can do something about simply by deciding to speak up when we see or hear abusive behaviour. We don’t have to put our bodies on the line, we just have to play fair; it shouldn’t be much to ask for.
Further reading
- Why geeks should study acting by Giles Bowkett
- The Male Privilege Checklist from Alas, a blog which is a source of thought provoking and occasionally discomforting articles for this white european male. It’s also my original source for the Joss Whedon article that inspired this entry.
1 Don’t get me started on the geek attitude to homosexuality…
I’m really never going to be an open source geek, but I always appreciate your stand on this, Piers.
The uhm pro/serious am photography community is stunningly similar. Can’t remember whether it was the M8 launch that provided the scantily clad ‘girls’ for the ‘guys’ to practise on, or was it the H1 tests a couple of years back? And Strobist is stiflingly blokey.
Thanks.
Ooh I love that animated style comments box!
I can’t remember which camera show I went to a few years back that left me cringing at the crassness of some of the exhibitors – the small ads in the back of Practical Photographer used to be pretty gruesome too. I don’t know if they still are – I stopped taking it once it dawned on me how vacuously repetitive it was.
Piers, thanks for the link. I also wrote a follow up post on what kinds of things I think the Rails community needs to do to address this problem: http://dyepot-teapot.com/2007/05/20/a-few-last-thoughts-on-railsconf/
Piers – the small ads in the back of PP (and several other photography mags) aren’t quite as bad as I remember from about ten years ago, when I was first buying them, but they’re not much improved, I must admit. Always annoys me, them.
I’m proud to say that the Austin Ruby meetup.com group regularly has 20%-30% female attendance. Then again, we’re young and small so 2 really manages to tilt the balance quickly :-D
It boggles me to see the booth babes at PMA – the big photo show in Vegas – though they’re gone at CES. And the excuse of something to photograph? Booth babes clogged up half a hall at 3GSM by doing a dance.
In IT it varies by job role; at the Oracle conference it was probably close to 50-50 on gender, when every other conference is 95-5 male. In the UK IT press I am no longer one of the only count-on-your-fingers women; but at the US events I go to it’s usually me and Mary Jo Foley. So it’s not just open source… But. I do love turning up in my full head of braids and looking very blonde and asking technical questions and it tends to be the marketing folk rather than the true geeks who are croggled by this. When I offer up a respectable technical view in person, I see respect. But backchannel and jokes on Spock about the men here are better looking than the women at company X and the rest; taking out the face to face aspect seems to let the locker room mentality back.
And it’s two interlinked issues; representation within an area and respect within a community. Chicken and egg issues too, for anyone without a thick skin.
No, I will get you started on it. What is wrong with the geek attitude towards homosexuality? From what I can see, it’s “yeah, so what?”, which is the way it should be.
I certainly see homophobia in many IRC channels. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive to the whole ‘gay meaning bad’ thing, but it rankles every time.
I honestly can’t think of any instances of it in recent years, in any of the online places I lurk apart from perhaps some of the pathetic creatures who live in Slashdolt.
Even people who are unfortunate enough to infected by religion seem to at least know that they should keep any homophobia to themselves in polite society these days. But perhaps I just hang out in the wrong IRC channels. The ones I use are mostly full of people I know in real life as well, so it’s hardly a fair sample.
Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work. Greetings