I'll be happy to call cousin_it a sexist boy. Statistically, he probably is. And worse, he probably thinks he's too smart to be sexist, and hangs out with mostly males who also feel that way, so their sexism goes uncorrected.
To be clear, in my original post that Trapani was responding to, I called most open source projects "sexist boy's clubs with no facility for mentoring, no respect for design, and mailing lists that are 50% dick-measuring contests."
I also call programmers abnormal, by definition of their being programmers.
Thanks to cousin_it for his defensiveness, which happens all the time, and is an excellent illustration of the problem.
Wow. Thank you too! I even upvoted your comment because it's such a beautiful illustration of my original point. If rauljara still wonders what's there for me to be offended about, let him wonder no more.
Seriously though. If your ultimate goal is to make others stop being offensive, I'm not sure offensiveness is the best tool for the job.
As someone who has actively tried to make the Linux community more inclusive, it really hurts when someone who is on the same team makes a blanket attack that includes you.
Just because it_boy and I are male and in software, we automatically aren't allowed to have opinions? You can throw out the word "statistically" and dismiss us just like that? Wait, remind me again what the definition of sexism is?
I will happily agree with you that most FOSS projects "have no facility for mentoring or respect for design". (You're surprised that a community created by developers is going to value developers over designers? Really?) I really don't understand the "sexist boy's clubs" or "50% dick-measuring contests" comments.
If I'm being unfairly defensive, then help me out here. Here's the archives for several FOSS mailing lists I'm on:
You could probably argue that the BLFS mailer has a certain amount of dick-waving going on, but I truly fail to see how any of them are "sexist boy's clubs". If I'm wrong, can you point out where we are being unconsciously sexist? I can see lots of ways that the above mailers are intimidating to outsiders in of both sexes, but that's hardly sexism, is it?
If and when I see sexism, I'm happy to call it out--I don't pretend that it doesn't exist, but I really don't see that it's as prevalent as you claim.
I am not very intelligent, nor very eloquent, so bear with me, here. I know you're feeling defensive, but humor me for a moment, and let's assume I'm right, and Gina Trapani is right, and all the people who have retweeted this pair of essays are right.
If we're right, and you're wrong, then that discomfort and defensiveness you're feeling right now is fear. You're afraid I might be talking about you. You're realizing you've never examined your opinions about this issue, you've just assumed you're smart enough to not be sexist, or racist, or bigoted in any substantial way, and this bothers you quite a bit, to perhaps not be as smart as you thought.
You're also afraid that I'm talking about your community, the one that gives you a strong sense of identity, and no-one else in your community has ever talked about this, so it must not be an issue, right? This outsider! How dare she!
Maybe you're even afraid because it's a girl calling you out. A girl emasculating you, just like all the others who have called you out for one reason or another. They're all the same! Fucking bitches, man! Perhaps this is pushing it. Perhaps this resonates with someone.
Except, hi, I'm Vitorio. I'm a guy. I've worked with Linux for fifteen years. I grew up on IRC. I've contributed code patches to open source projects. I've released open source software. I've written documentation and helped with design and done support for open source software. I'm part of your community, too. Which means I'm saying this is a problem in our community.
I believe this is a serious, cultural problem. No-one talks about it in our community because everyone believes they're too smart to be sexist. And, yet, there's a long list of well-documented sexism-related incidents in open source, including sexual assault at the most recent ApacheCon: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Timeline_of_in...
Do you know how I know it's a long list? Because it exists at all.
Obviously, we're not all too smart. But I don't just believe it's a few bad apples. I think we're mostly bad apples in this regard. Why?
I believe part of the sexism is cultural from how you were brought up: as a male in most cultures you are raised inherently sexist and the culture itself encourages sexist gender roles and a rape culture and such.
I believe part of the sexism is cultural from the people you associate with: it's like that xkcd comic, sometimes it's "you're bad at math" and sometimes it's "girls are bad at math," and both are culturally damaging, but the latter is much worse and drives a ton of people away and any tolerance for it is a gateway for worse behavior.
You've probably recently been involved with a sexist, racist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted joke. Maybe you made one. Maybe you laughed at one. Maybe you read Slashleen on Twitter. I made one at dinner tonight, for example. Everyone laughed, including the overweight, homosexual black man who was with us. It doesn't make it funny, and it doesn't make it okay. It's still bigotry, and it's still wrong. I also called out a coworker for calling something "gay" yesterday. One doesn't make up for the other.
That's why I'm not going to read your mailing lists to pass judgment on whether your communities are sexist or not. It's possible for them to all be and for you to be unqualified to judge. It's not all or nothing, it's not one or the other. IRC is worse than mailing lists are, in my experience. IRL is both better and has the potential to be much worse.
That's also why the Penny Arcade "Dickwolves" issue was so important: they made a rape joke. It was considered to be promoting rape culture. I agree that it was. Jokes about rape perpetuate the idea that rape is somehow okay or normal. You don't encourage anything that seems to promote a negative behavior. For me, it was less that the comic promoted rape culture and more that their response, their not understanding why it could possibly be an issue since they didn't "mean it that way," was totally wrong, and that incomprehension was completely representative of gamers and OSS developers alike.
I also wish I had bought a Dickwolves tee. That makes me part of the problem. But, I heard once that a sign of intelligence is being able to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time. I can believe the OSS community is generally sexist, perhaps even misogynistic, and be both disappointed and unsurprised by the HN reaction to these essays, and still comment here. It's not really my place to judge you, or even teach you, because that means teaching self-awareness.
I believe your defensiveness reflects your lack of cultural self-awareness to understand that not only might your community be inherently sexist, but that you might also be.
I understand that I am. It's not that you're not allowed to have an opinion, you are, but "I feel like this is a personal attack" is a feeling. I am intentionally writing antagonistically to provoke you into thinking about this constructively.
Now, you can go back to your original feeling. Thanks so much for humoring me. Whatever opinion you end up holding, I hope it's a strong opinion, loosely held, and I hope you actually have reasons for holding it.
If there is a long list, please produce it. One incident is just that, one incident. Are there sexist developers in OS? Very likely. That doesn't imply that they are a majority, or so dominant that it is impossible to find OS projects without sexism.
You can find events to prove anything. There was even an Open Source murderer (I suppose, not sure how the Reiser murder mystery was resolved), yet not all OS developers are murderers.
You can also find lots of events where men were discriminated, or whatever. It is irrelevant, because in OS you are free to pick your projects, nobody forces you to put up with abuse.
(I only read half of your last post before I got bored - ever considered that you might be too self-absorbed? People retweeting your musings does not prove their merit, either. remember, 3% of Twitter is just Justin Bieber).
If you are so interested in psychology, maybe you should study some more. There has to be a reason why this subject bothers you so much - maybe the same reason people retweet your stuff. But it might not be what you think it is. Think about it: you clam you can not even detect sexism, yet you feel you have to accuse everybody of being sexist. What is driving you (except a trollish desire for retweets)?
yeah, but you're presupposing that sexism is wrong. If it is wrong, why has it survived for so long? The problem is inherent in the human condition - we align ourselves with people who are like us, and build a community around our likeness - that guarantees that there will always be someone on the outside.
Why do you feel that it's okay to stereotype and demean the OP simply based on the fact that he's a man? You know nothing about him, but you're willing to draw conclusions about him based upon your own predisposition to misandry. I honestly wish I could downvote your comment more than once.
I find your attitude uncannily ironic, given your blog post. So essentially, what you're saying is that sexism is only bad when it happens to women?
To be clear, in my original post that Trapani was responding to, I called most open source projects "sexist boy's clubs with no facility for mentoring, no respect for design, and mailing lists that are 50% dick-measuring contests."
I also call programmers abnormal, by definition of their being programmers.
Thanks to cousin_it for his defensiveness, which happens all the time, and is an excellent illustration of the problem.