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OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be consideringOK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be consideringPosted Aug 25, 2009 14:54 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544)In reply to: OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering by njs Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software
First, calling someone else sexist because *you* can't imagine replacing "her" with "his" in a joke is just baffling.
Second, nobody mentioned rape or even hinted at it, until you did.
Folks, if you want to help gender inclusion, then dissecting a joke and making up stuff to feel offended about is not the way forward. How about organising a summit on the topic? Oh.
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OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 25, 2009 15:38 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Telling people that they're wrong to be offended is not the best way to engage in a constructive dialog about why they (in general) feel excluded from the community. People *were* offended. You may feel that they're misinterpreting what was said, but the helpful response to that is to try to understand why that misinterpretation occured and either help to avoid it in future or (perhaps) decide that they're not worth it and just ignore the issue entirely.
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 25, 2009 16:41 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
In your first sentence, grammatically, "people" refers to the "they" in "they (in general) feel excluded", which in the context is women.
If you read my comments in this thread, you'll see that I haven't said that any woman is/was wrong to feel offended.
In my comment, I pointed out some unfair accusations by njs. You've replied by launching unfair accusations at me :-) I'm sure you're well intentioned, but I think this topic is being approached in an unproductively hot headed manner. I expect the ladies will do a better job on Sept 19th, and then we can listen instead of discussing how offended we feel for them.
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 25, 2009 17:02 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
You said "Folks, if you want to help gender inclusion, then dissecting a joke and making up stuff to feel offended about is not the way forward". The obvious reading of that is that anyone offended by the virginity thing is making it up. If that's not the case then it'd be helpful to clarify what you did mean, because right now it sounds like you're claiming that it's fine for women to make these arguments but not for men. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, but still.
In any case, this isn't a situation that will magically get rectified by the existence of a summit. If there's a problem here then it doesn't get solved unless men (as well as women) are willing to do something about it. That includes calling people out on perceived poor or unhelpful behaviour, and it includes accepting that people might be offended for themselves rather than being offended on other people's behalf. RMS's behaviour offended me not because I think women are unable to stand up for themselves but because he managed to undo some quantity of the work many people have been doing to try to make the Linux community a welcoming and friendly place that doesn't marginalise anyone on the basis of biological differences they have no control over. I'm offended because he made us look bad. I'm offended because it was entirely unnecessary and could have been avoided with a straightforward apology, and the refusal to do so encourages the perception that our community leaders are all unwilling to accept that they may have made mistakes but we love them anyway.
By saying that people are merely being offended on behalf of women you imply that there's no rother reason for a man to have been offended by the case in question. You're writing off their concerns as an irrelevance. It'd be very easy for you to just put this down as another unfair accusation on my part, but at some level I'd hope that you'll put some time into considering why people feel this way about what you're writing instead of deflecting it without any obvious thought.
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 25, 2009 23:55 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
I was replying to someone who blatantly made stuff up. I thought I made the target of my "making stuff up" comment pretty clear, but you're putting it in a different context (it does apply to a wider context, but not as wide as where you put it).
Then you criticised me for "telling [women] that they're wrong to be offended", which I didn't say at all. Now, when I say the summit could be helpful, you complain that the issue won't "magically get rectified by the existence of a summit" - I never said it would!
Do you think misrepresenting people and making careless accusations is a way to make a gender inclusive forum? I don't think a vague joke by rms is the only problem here. Not by a long shot.
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 26, 2009 0:00 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
It's pretty straightforward. You're accusing someone of making stuff up. Do you believe that other people who say exactly the same thing are making stuff up? Do you believe that the women who said they were offended by RMS's statement were justified in being offended?
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 25, 2009 23:25 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> First, calling someone else sexist because *you* can't imagine replacing "her" with "his" in a joke is just baffling.
Uh. Then I suppose you're glad I didn't call anyone sexist...?
Bruce claimed that the reason RMS talked about women was a simple reflection of user statistics -- that it had nothing to do with the sexual/gendered overtones of "virginity", and indeed, that those overtones didn't even exist in context of the joke.
I'm skeptical. Note that this is not "I think Bruce is sexist", or even "I think RMS is sexist". It's "I'm skeptical of Bruce's claim that I was replying to". I think that's a pretty unremarkable sort of stance to take in LWN comments.
One way I tried to express that was by appealing to people's intuition for cultural rules about sex -- AFAICT, around here (here being America, more or less) it's much more okay for a guy to joke about taking a women's virginity than to joke about participating in homosexual sex. If you then try to imagine RMS taking guy's emacs virginity and your brain goes "whoa whoa what?", then that suggests that yeah, "emacs virginity" *is* pulling up all those sexual/gendered stereotypes. Sorry Bruce.
But maybe you don't share that intuition, and that's fine. Cultural rules are messy, variable, and hard to articulate; maybe you're coming from somewhere else, maybe I just got it wrong, it happens. But that doesn't mean they don't exist, or don't matter, or that "*I*" cannot talk about them on the basis of my own knowledge. I'd rather try and get it wrong occasionally that pretend they don't exist.
And as for hinting at rape... well. Here's the quote again: "we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act." Does that call on men to go out and rape women? Absolutely not. But when I take my lunch out of the fridge, the lunch doesn't have any say in the matter. I decide to take it, it doesn't make a decision. It's just some apples and lasagna and stuff, decision-making isn't what it does. I certainly wouldn't ask it if it minded being taken. That's the metaphor he chose to use; women are like my lunch. Whether women lose their virginity/learn emacs is something for a man to decide and implement, with no place for her to have an opinion on the matter.
One more time, before people rise up with pitchforks: I'm not saying that anyone who uses that sort of language is an evil misogynist who hates women and wants to rape them. This stuff is subconscious and out there in the culture; it's easy to miss. (Esp. for men, who don't spend their lives with the spectre of real rape hanging over them.) But you know, one could just as easily talk about helping women relieve their own virginity, or just offer to answer their questions about emacs. When we choose not to, then yeah, that has something to do with our nasty cultural models about power and sex and agency.
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 26, 2009 1:25 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
> Then I suppose you're glad I didn't call anyone sexist...?
Heh. I guess I'm also not immune to reading people's comments with tunnel vision. Sorry 'bout that.
(As for "taking someone's virginity", I think that's a pretty normal turn of phrase for two consensual partners where one or both is a virgin.)
OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering Posted Aug 26, 2009 2:08 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> Heh. I guess I'm also not immune to reading people's comments with tunnel vision. Sorry 'bout that.
np. Thanks for being willing to listen.
> (As for "taking someone's virginity", I think that's a pretty normal turn of phrase for two consensual partners where one or both is a virgin.)
Oh, it's definitely common. It's still just a bit icky. And of course context matters: when you're not talking about two consensual partners, but publicly exhorting a crowd of men to go out, find some women somewhere, and take away their virginity... yeah, it's a joke, but within that joke it's asking listeners to laugh at a really disturbing scenario.
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