Category: Politics and society

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Anti-pseudonym bingo

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

People testing the Google+ social network are discussing increasing evidence that, terms of service requirement or not, Google+ wants people to use their legal names much as Facebook does. Skud shares a heads-up from a user banned for using his initials. Then, for example, see discussion around it on Mark Cuban’s stream, Skud’s stream and Sarah Stokely’s blog.

Let’s recap really quickly: wanting to and being able to use your legal name everywhere is associated with privilege. Non-exhaustive list of reasons you might not want to use it on social networks: everyone knows you by a nickname; you want everyone to know you by a nickname; you’re experimenting with changing some aspect of your identity online before you do it elsewhere; online circles are the only place it’s safe to express some aspect of your identity, ever; your legal name marks you as a member of a group disproportionately targeted for harassment; you want to say things or make connections that you don’t want to share with colleagues, family or bosses; you hate your legal name because it is shared with an abusive family member; your legal name doesn’t match your gender identity; you want to participate in a social network as a fictional character; the mere thought of your stalker seeing even your locked down profile makes you sick; you want to create a special-purpose account; you’re an activist wanting to share information but will be in danger if identified; your legal name is imposed by a legal system that doesn’t match your culture… you know, stuff that only affects a really teeny minority numerically, and only a little bit, you know? (For more on the issue in general, see On refusing to tell you my name and previous posts on this site.)

Anyway, in honour of round one million of forgetting about all of this totally, I bring you anti-pseudonymity bingo!
5x5 bingo card with anti-pseudonymity arguments
Text version at bottom of post.

What squares would you add? Continue reading “Anti-pseudonym bingo”

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Graeme Reeves received 2 to 3.5 year sentence

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Trigger warning for medical and sexual violence.

The case of deregistered and abusive obstetrician and gynaecologist Graeme Reeves was covered here several times (see the graeme reeves tag). There’s been a name publication ban associated with his trials this year that’s been lifted: throughout this year there have been reports of the trial of “a former doctor” reported in the NSW press.

In March, a jury found Reeves guilty of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm on [Carolyn] DeWaegeneire with intent to cause her grievous bodily harm in 2002.

In April, Judge Woods found him guilty of indecently assaulting two patients, while conducting internal pelvic examinations.

Reeves pleaded guilty in February to obtaining a financial advantage by deception, involving his breaching a ban by carrying out obstetric procedures.

Survivor Carolyn DeWaegeneire rejects the sentence:

Standing outside Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court where Reeves was sentenced by Justice Greg Woods this morning, Carolyn DeWaegeneire said she was “livid” that Reeves could be released as early as 2013.

“Until now I thought the law was to protect the public and the people. I have now learnt otherwise,” she said.

“I was hoping that a woman would be treated equal to a man.”

Asked what sentence Reeves should have been given, Ms DeWaegeneire said: “If your penis was cut off and your scrotum cut-off how long would you want the man to serve?”

She rejected Judge Woods’s decision to mitigate Reeves’s sentence on the grounds he is suffering from severe mental illness.

Quotes from Victim livid at Bega doctor’s sentence by Paul Bibby, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 Jul 2011.

Note on selection of front page image: the image is the photograph of Carolyn DeWaegeneire by Simon Alekna from the SMH article. I decided not to use Reeves as his face is rather stuck in my mind, and if anyone else is in the same boat I don’t want to trigger them on the Hoyden front page.

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A petty rant

See the title? Consider yourself warned.

OK, geek culture. I am ambivalent with claiming particular things as being geeky or not in the first place, because half the time I fall outside it. (I’m not a night person, I don’t especially identify with or even like cats, to give some trivial examples.) And if it excludes me, it must be wrong. Duh.

But perhaps we should claim being petty and pedantic. Here’s my line in the sand: you do not count discrete things starting at a zeroth thing. Well, if you do, I say it’s not geeky.

There’s a sort of a general understanding that “geeks count from zero”. Here’s where it comes from: in many programming languages, arrays begin at zero, so array[0] retrieves the first item in the array and array[1] the second and so on. This is actually somewhat confusing, and results in plenty of off-by-one errors (for example, if an array has length l, then one is tempted to ask for the last item as array[l] when it’s actually array[l-1], and forgetting that is not at all uncommon).

It has meaning: it’s fairly obvious why this is done in C, it’s because elements in a C array are stored in contiguous memory and the name “array” is already a pointer to the first memory address. Say the array starts at memory address 7, then to access the items of the array you would do:

  • array[0], which is an alias for *(array + 0) or *array, ie, find out what is at memory address 7 (the dereference operator * means “look up what is at this memory address”)
  • array[1] or *(array + 1), ie, find out what is at memory address 7 + 1 = 8
  • array[2] or *(array + 2), ie find out what is at memory address 7 + 2 = 9

And so on.

Dennis Ritchie’s The Development of the C Language shows that this notation is inherited from C’s precursor B.

And it’s not a silly way to count some things. It’s the same way we count age in the Western world: at the beginning of your first year, you are age 0 and at the beginning of your second year, age 1, and so on. The first year of someone’s life begins at birth[0] as it were.

But it’s a silly way to count objects. It is not more geeky to count, say, two apples as a zero/zeroth apple and a first apple. You could perhaps refer to the zeroth apple offset, ie, the point just before the beginning of the first apple, if you had reason to refer to that point (I never have).

Try as I might, this has always bugged me about the history of linux.conf.au: CALU was not the “zeroth because it’s geeky!” linux.conf.au. It’s like someone made that up specifically to annoy me personally. I will find you, whoever you are, and I will take your zeroth apple away from you and unlike you, I will have my first apple. And I will enjoy it.

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Breastfeeding anti-discrimination changes passed at the Federal level

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Via the Australian Breastfeeding Association on Twitter, this press release from the Federal Attorney-General:

A pale skinned woman reads 'Breastfeeding: A Parent's Guide' while nursing a baby

Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Minister for the Status of Women Kate Ellis today welcomed the passage through Parliament of the Sex and Age Discrimination Legislation Amendment Bill 2010.

The new law will provide greater protections by… establishing breastfeeding as a separate ground of discrimination, and allowing measures to be taken to accommodate the needs of breastfeeding mothers…

Here’s the text of a Senate review of the Bill as regards breastfeeding:

Creating a separate ground of discrimination for breastfeeding

2.9 Item 17 of Schedule 1 of the Bill would insert a separate ground of discrimination in relation to breastfeeding into the Sex Discrimination Act, to implement Recommendation 12 of the Senate Report. The Senate Report recommended that a separate ground be created because:

…the intent of the Act is to protect women from discrimination based upon them breastfeeding. This is achieved by providing in subsection 5(1A) that breastfeeding is a characteristic that appertains generally to women. This seems a somewhat circuitous path. It would be desirable for the Act to provide for specific protection against discrimination on the ground of breastfeeding.[17]

2.10 The separate ground of discrimination, provided for in proposed new section 7AA, only applies to women who are breastfeeding. ‘Breastfeeding’ would be defined as ‘the act of expressing milk’; ‘an act of breastfeeding’; and ‘breastfeeding over a period of time’. The inclusion of a reference to ‘breastfeeding over a period of time’ would ensure that a respondent cannot claim that a discriminatory act was lawful because the complainant was not actually breastfeeding at the time the act occurred.

2.11 The protections against discrimination on the ground of breastfeeding would be extended to both direct discrimination and indirect discrimination, under proposed subsections 7AA(1) and (2) respectively. Under subsection 7AA(1), direct discrimination would occur if a person treats a woman less favourably than someone else, ‘in circumstances that are the same or not materially different’, by reason of:

…the woman’s breastfeeding; or

…a characteristic that appertains generally to women who are breastfeeding; or…that is generally imputed to women who are breastfeeding.

2.12 The EM also provides an example of both direct and indirect discrimination in relation to breastfeeding:

  • direct discrimination would occur where an employer refuses to hire any woman who is breastfeeding, or a restaurateur declined to serve a breastfeeding patron; and
  • indirect discrimination would occur where an employer imposes a requirement on employees that they ‘must not take any breaks for set periods during the day under any circumstances’, which would have the effect of disadvantaging women who ‘need to express milk’.

2.13 The Bill provides that discrimination on the grounds of breastfeeding is also prohibited in the following areas of public life (subject to certain exemptions in Division 4 of the Sex Discrimination Act):

  • education;
  • goods, services and facilities;
  • accommodation;
  • land;
  • clubs; and
  • the administration of Commonwealth laws and programs.

2.14 Item 60 of Schedule 1 would prevent a man from bringing a complaint of unlawful sexual discrimination on the basis that a person grants to a woman rights or privileges related to the fact that they are breastfeeding. This amendment recognises that breastfeeding may ‘give rise to special needs, such as for private areas for breastfeeding, or hygienic areas for storage of expressed milk’, which should not be subject to complaints of discrimination.

I am assuming that the wording that regards all people lactating and feeding a baby as women is a pretty pervasive problem in this area? Otherwise this seems like very good news on a number of fronts.

The bill also has provisions about discrimination on the basis of family responsibilities, and increased protection for students who are harassed, including provisions about the harassment of a student by others from a different institution (I’m recalling now the University of Sydney strengthening their internal provisions regarding their residential colleges), and harassment of students under the age of 16.

Image credit: the image of the woman nursing and reading is Breastfeeding on a park bench by space-man on Flickr, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Non Commercial.
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Harassing photography and recording; ethics and policies

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

We’re starting to collect some examples of photography/recording harassment experiences (still open , and some of the kinds of problems people mention there and elsewhere are:

  • photography/recording conducted in a way that is designed to hide the fact of the photography/recording from the subject both before and after the shot/recording happens
  • photography/recording that is indifferent to or careless of the subject’s feelings about being photographed/recorded
  • photography/recording that is othering: “wow, women! *click click*” or “hey, babe, smile for the camera!” or later posted with othering, sexist or creepy commentary
  • failing or refusing to stop photographing/recording on an explicit request or appearance of discomfort (eg turning away or frowning or covering one’s face, etc)
  • publishing photographs without the subject’s consent, or after the subject’s explicit refusal of consent
  • use of photographs to implicitly or explicitly endorse an event or community, eg, using pics of smiling participants from the previous year in publicity materials, without consent

Now most of these things are legal in my region (see NSW Photographer’s Rights, which as you will guess from the title is not focussed on subject’s concerns, but which is informative) and in many others. I believe the only exception (in NSW) may be the last, because the use of someone’s image to promote a product requires a model release, that is, consent from the subject. Whether/when using someone’s photo on a website is considered promotion I don’t know but that’s a side point.

For that matter, I’m not even arguing that they should be illegal or actionable (in this piece anyway, perhaps some of them are arguable). I’m sympathetic to many of the uses of non-consensual photography, even (art, journalism, historical documentation). I’m arguing more narrowly that in the context of geek events, which are usually private and which can therefore impose additional restrictions on behaviour as a condition of entry, that restrictions on photography could prevent some harassment. (As a short and possibly sloppy definition for people who haven’t seen many harassment discussions, I would define harassment as “unwelcome interpersonal interactions, which either a reasonable person would know are unwelcome, or which were stated to be unwelcome but continued after that.”)

I’m arguing that this collection of behaviours around photographs makes geek events hostile to some participants, especially women. After all, even though it’s (I think) legal to sneak-photograph a woman’s face, write a little essay about how attractive you find her and try and get it on Flickr Explore even as she emails you to say that she’s upset and repeatedly request that you take it down, that doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

Now, obviously it would be nice not to have to spell ethical behaviour out to people, but the need for anti-harassment policies (and, for that matter, law) makes it clear that geek events do need to do so.

There’s quite a range of possible policies that could be adopted around photography:

  • the status quo, obviously, which at many geek events is that any photography/recording that would be legally allowed in public spaces is allowed there;
  • photography/recording should be treated like other potentially harassing interpersonal interactions at an event, that is, when one person in the interaction says “stop” or “leave me alone” (etc), the interaction must end;
  • photography/recording shouldn’t be done in such a way as to hide from the subject that it’s happening, and upon the subject’s request the photo/footage/etc must be deleted;
  • subjects cannot be photographed/recorded without prior explicit consent; and/or
  • the above combined with some kind of explicit opt-in or opt-out marking so that one doesn’t need to necessarily ask every time if one can see the marking (in various conversations on this I have to say my main concern tends to be the need to peer closely at people’s chests to see their “PHOTOS/VIDEOS OK” or “NO PHOTOS/VIDEOS” marking on their badge, however, Skud says it works well at Wiscon).

There might be certain additional freedoms or restrictions regarding crowd photography/recording and/or photography/recording of organisers, scheduled speakers and people actively highlighted in similar formal events.

What do you think? Whether a photographer/videographer/recorder or subject of same, what do you think appropriate ethics are when photographing/recording at private geek events, and what do you think could/should be codified as policy?

Note to commenters: there are a couple of things that tend to come up a lot in these sorts of discussions, which are:

  1. “but this is perfectly legal [in my jurisdiction]”
  2. some geeks, including geek photographers, are shy and asking strangers for permission to photograph them is a confronting interaction, and thus very hard on shy people

I’m not saying that you need to totally avoid discussion of these points in comments here, but you can safely assume that everyone knows these points and has to some degree taken them into account and go from there. (My own perspective on the last one is that it’s odd at best to pay an enormous amount of heed to the social comfort of photographers at the expense of their subjects. You could, of course, consider both together.) Also if talking about legal aspects, do specify which jurisdiction(s) you are talking about: this is an area where laws vary substantially.

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Confession: I’ve been a girlfriend

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

True story! I’m a wife now. I’ve moved up in the WAG acronym.

There’s been a lot of pushback on Cate’s guest post and with good reason, because it can be easily read as positing that geek woman are mutually exclusive from women who have a geek partner dichotomy:

  • She’s not a techie, she’s a girlfriend
  • the girlfriend… the lead user… the commenter
  • a girlfriend… rather than a genuine tech woman
  • the girlfriend, or another woman near tech
  • Sorry girlfriend, you’re not a geek.

Here’s another thing: there’s a lot of geek my then-boyfriend-now-husband introduced me to. Linux was a big one. A great deal of the C programming language. Digital music, both ripping and listening. Actual other living geeks, as opposed to Eric Raymond’s J Random Hacker. Suffice to say that his influence on the nature of my geekdom has been substantial (and vice versa, which needs to be said).

And frankly while a lot of people are introduced to geekdom or new geekdoms by partners, it’s considered rather a shameful thing in my experience, especially if it was a male partner. If a man taught a woman to do something, or a man remains better at that thing than the woman he taught is at it, it’s as if the woman doesn’t have that interest or skill at all. She is assumed to be the man’s puppet.

There is something real, in my experience, about less involved women being asked to give “the woman’s perspective” on geekdom, as if their experience is “more woman” than that of heavily involved geek women, as if very geeky women have forfeited “the woman’s perspective”. But there’s also equally difficult experiences:

  1. the assumption by geeks that a woman geek with a partner, especially a male one, is not geeky, or only geeky because of internal relationship dynamics, rather than being ‘really’ geeky (whatever that means)
  2. the experience some non-geek women or newly geek women report, of experiencing hostility from geek women for “making them look bad” and from geeks in general for being too mainstream or feminine (and hence boring or thoughtless)

We’re not going to get anywhere with the above by talking about girlfriends as if they aren’t us, or as if they can’t become us or we them. I think that adopting girlfriend as a metaphor is harmful: the primary meaning is (some subset of) women who have a partner. Anything said about metaphorical girlfriends will quickly be taken to apply to literal girlfriends, as in women who have partners, and used against them, even if it was supposed to be a metaphor for women who are granted some credibility as more woman because they are less geek (which is, I think, what Cate is using the term “girlfriend” to mean, although it isn’t totally clear to me).

We have to not feed the “femininity is mainstream and therefore not geek” beast.

Additional concerns about Cate’s post that were raised in her comments and which I share:

  • the geekiness hierarchy in which people who build things trump people who comment, use, or analyse in geekiness. If nothing else, I personally spend a lot of time writing feminist stuff on the Internet, as well as coding, and I’m not accustomed to thinking of one as the less geeky activity than the other
  • the conflation of “geek” with “programmer” or “computer geek”, which as several commenters noted we’re rightly committed to not doing around here

By the way, a little bit of background on our process: guest posts here tend to be selected by one author and put up here, we all have access to the “Guest Poster” account. So that accounts for the appearance of a guest post with a message/metaphor that I at least don’t especially like, if you are wondering! There’s no cabal, etc.

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On feeling less safe

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Over at Hoyden About Town, Wildly Parenthetical considers Tackling Misogyny: Procedures or Social Sanctions?:

But more interesting has been the discussion about formal and informal mechanisms for dealing with sexual harassment. There are lots of reasons that formal mechanisms don’t work for lots of people… So we have the suggestion of informal “shunning’. Some have, with more and less hyperbole, suggested that without the formality of systems of justice and the “certainty’ they’re meant to bring, individuals could wind up excluded on heresay; this is the “OMG WITCHHUNT!’ objection. And others have pointed out that social sanctions are applied to all kinds of behaviours that are disapproved of in our society, and why should this particular behaviour be any different? I am pretty much with the latter group, although I understand those who think that we should be putting our energies towards fixing the formal systems rather than developing shun-lists…

I left a comment that I want to re-post here, since it captures neatly a lot of my more negative feelings about discussions around anti-harassment policies and such, which a lot of people in the geek community consider informal since geeks themselves will enforce them.

My response (very slightly edited here) was as follows:

I am a fan of social sanctions in an ideal world. There tend to be two problems with introducing it in practice:

  1. Some people at either the level of instinct or the level of rational analysis find it almost impossible to distinguish from bullying (see the Geek Social Fallacies, especially ) and refuse to participate or actively attempt to defend the person sanctioned or decide to sanction the sanctioners, causing a lot of internal community conflict.
  2. It often turns out (at least in communities that I’m a part of) that not as many people are opposed to sexual harassment as one might hope. So a substantial fraction of participants oppose social sanctions or vow to not enforce them because it turns out they like sexual harassment just fine.

Option 2 is always a really distressing conversation to have in a community you felt safe in; you seldom feel safe after it turns out that a loud minority feel that sexual harassment is the effective/normal/desirable (at least, but not exclusively) heterosexual mating strategy.

How is everyone else feeling about the geek community after whatever their latest local round of feminist discussion was? I’m far from entirely negative, but there are definitely whole new places I don’t feel safe from harassment and indeed assault now.

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More on the Lib/Nat coalition and the CDP

As per my previous post, the Christian Democratic Party, headed by Fred Nile, did rather well in the State election for the Legislative Council (the upper house, for which this was a half election, ie, half the seats vacant).

Per Jo Tamar at Hoyden About Town, the Lib/Nats nominated the CDP as their Second Preference Group, meaning that in a situation where someone had to be removed from the Lib/Nat ballot due to death or disqualification, all Lib/Nat preferences would flow to the CDP unless the voter had specifically directed otherwise.

In addition, and with, I think (I’d have to remind myself how preferences flow in that counting system from a successful party, but I believe they do flow) considerably more influence on the result, per Tally Room, the Lib/Nats also directed their voters to actively (ie, not just in case of emergency) direct preferences to the CDP, per for example these election leaflets: How to Vote Liberal for Goulburn, How to vote Liberal for Strathfield. Under “Step 2 (larger ballot paper)” these leaflets show a large “1” against GROUP A LIBERALS/NATIONALS and a smaller “2” against GROUP F CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY (FRED NILE GROUP).

In at least some seats, see Shellharbour for an example, the CDP directed both lower and upper house preferences to the Liberals/Nationals.

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Election commentary: the day after the mega-wipeout

I find elections immensely stressful: the outcome seems high stakes (likely to impact dramatically on me in all sorts of ways), and yet both impenetrable and unalterable. Erg. And I’m also wary of armchair campaigning on the Internet. Everyone speaks so confidently! Everyone gets stuff wrong so much!

Also NSW State politics, so discouraging. At least at the Federal level there’s been one major party who I would only mildly dislike in government, in elections to date. For the last two NSW elections that hasn’t been so.

However, I found a few comments interesting in the followup to the NSW State election yesterday, in which the conservative Liberal/National coalition nearly wiped the unions-and-left-or-centrists-depending-on-where-you-stand ALP off the map. Note again when I say “interesting” I have no idea if they are actually correct.

First Liam at Hoyden About Town:

The bad bad news of the morning is the high Christian Democrat vote in the [Legislative Council]; that’s potentially very frightening indeed.

Indeed.

Fran Barlow at Larvatus Prodeo on the under-performance of the Greens (who received very little of the disaffected ALP vote after much expectation):

Just up the road from us was a Liberal sign which read “Make NSW Number 1″ but which, partially obscured by a shrub, read “Make NSW Numb”. That’s certainly how those voters who weren’t viscerally angry seemed. Standing on a polling booth yesterday, lots of voters didn’t even bother taking [how to vote cards]. They’d made up their minds as to for whom they weren’t voting and couldn’t give a proverbial over what else people were saying.

If we Greens were seen as a credible chance of forming, or even supporting, a new government, our issues would have been moderately useful. In any election where there are no issues beyond the integrity of the existing government itself, our brand and our issues are of almost no marginal use at all. Accordingly, much of our mediocre performance was a consequence of this election being in practice more like a plebiscite.

Kim at Larvatus Prodeo, also on the Greens:

It may be that the concentration of resources and energy on winning lower house seats comes at the expense of a state wide strategy designed to increase the vote incrementally everywhere, and have a better shot at winning more upper house seats. And it may be that The Greens’ lower house vote has reached a plateau in inner city suburbs. Now that the Liberals have eschewed preferencing Greens, lower house representation in single member electoral systems may be a bridge too far. (Adam Bandt will have a mighty fight on his hands in Melbourne, Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese can sleep more soundly.)

Liberals drink lattes too. In Sydney, as in Brisbane, demographic change and changes to land use have made the Tories competitive in the inner city.

I have no idea if these are more right than anyone else (well, aside from Liam, I’m willing to go with that) but so far they’re what I’ve found interesting.

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Polling place accessibility and the NSW state election

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

I get the impression that the NSW election sees a slight improvement over the Federal election in polling place accessibility information.

Here’s some sample information provided from my electorate:

A— Public School: “Fully Wheelchair Accessible”
B— Public School: “Assisted Access: Building has lips and/or steps, No designated disabled parking spot, No disabled toilet, Path of travel from car park may be difficult”
C— Public School: “Assisted Access: No designated disabled parking spot, No disabled toilet”

You can find out this for any electorate by going to Polling Places and finding the electorate. Note that information comes up in a pop-up page, and it is embedded in a Google Map by default, unless you select the link that reads “Text” next to the name of the electorate.

In addition to wheelchair information the main accessibility page has some information for provisions for vision impaired people:

Luminance contrast design on election furniture

Certain cardboard furniture, such as the ballot box, used at State and Local Government elections have luminous contrast markings to assist electors with depth perception.

Hand held magnifiers and user friendly pencils

All polling places and pre-poll voting centres have hand held magnifiers and maxi pencils and voting instructions in large print, available to assist electors who may have difficulty reading the ballot paper or marking the squares. If you require either of these items, please ask an election offical [sic].

Information off the top of my head that isn’t provided:

  • information about provision of seats in waiting/queuing areas
  • information about distances from parking or entrances to the voting area
  • information about non-wheelchair mobility aids

In my state electorate, I count 26 polling places (including Sydney Town Hall, which is located away from my electorate and is a polling place for every electorate in the state). Of these 7 are listed as fully wheelchair accessible (including Town Hall), and another 10 as assisted access. My nearest polling place is 200m away, assisted access 500m away and fully wheelchair accessible about 1km away, although as I live very close to the local business district we have a high density of nearby polling places.

How does your electorate look? How many fully wheelchair accessible polling places, how many assisted access, and how close are they to you? What information is missing from the descriptions?

For more on polling accessibility check: