Tag: feminism

Posted on

Women and men, across the ocean, and the vessel runs aground

I’m occasionally asked what it’s like being a "woman in Linux". It’s not such an easy question for me to answer: what’s it like being a man doing the shopping? what’s it like being an elderly person drinking Scotch? You can say lots of things about the shopping and the Scotch, but not a lot about the maleness or agedness of the experience.

I suspect most of my "woman in Linux" (in the user sense, I’m not a developer) experiences are pretty subtle: some of my unease in combative situations is undoubtedly socialised, and some of that socialisation is probably related to being a woman. But which bits? How much? Who knows. Questions about being a woman in Linux always leave me floundering.

Raven, a "woman in security", has an answer though. For her, the "woman in X" question is all about being hit on. Relentlessly.

I don’t get hit on relentlessly. I get hit on about as much as most men seem to: hardly ever. If I was going to draw parallels with Raven’s experience, I would draw them not with experiences of fending off the horny masses, but of fending off the hordes of people who’ve never met a woman as tall as I am.

At 190cm, I’m willing to believe I’m one of, if not the, tallest woman most people have seen, or at least spoken to. (I have, in the course of my life, seen about four women who are taller than I am, and I keep an eye out, trust me.) And I hear about it a lot. I’ve heard all the jokes. I’ve heard all the compliments. And I’d like to think I’ve heard all the insults, but I have my doubts.

I’ve even well and truly had enough of the empathetic tongue-in-cheek responses ("I bet people say that all the time, hey?") but I try to take them in the spirit they were meant: more empathy is more better, as a general principle. I don’t want to discourage people from walking a mile in someone’s shoes, especially if they’re someone who stocks shoe stores and can order in size 11s for once.

But there are a number of parallels with being hit on, and one of them is that not everyone is a well-meaning bumbling fool with a propensity to innocently hit on women or call tall women "lanky bitches" if they run into them around a corner. (I have never heard the word lanky unattached to bitch. What quirk of humanity spawned that meme?) A number of people dealing out this stuff are out to hurt people. In fact, a solid majority of people commenting on my height are complete strangers commenting with the intention of hurting or embarrassing me.

One of the most common responses to "I get hit on all the time&quot rants, after "wow cool what the hell is wrong with you, whinger?" anyway, is "I can see how that’s a little annoying, but you know, they mean well. It’s a compliment. Whinger."

That’s crap. Sure, some of them mean well, in so far as wanting to have sex with someone is meaning well (I think it’s neither a virtue nor a vice in and of itself, but some of the people who want to gift Raven with the spawn of their geek genes prove that Stephen Pinker’s gentle "good for your genes isn’t the same thing as morally good" warnings could be hammered into his books with a chisel and they wouldn’t be clear enough). But the reason people who get hit on a lot find it creepy isn’t because they’re weirdly hostile to the compliment of someone’s flattering and harmless attraction, but because being hit on can be genuinely creepy. And is. A lot of the time, it is.

A lot of the sexual attention I get is decidedly negative: it’s more or less suggestions of sexual violence from passing strangers (usually driving past, but occasionally they’re brave enough to mutter threats as they pass me on foot). I didn’t count that in the "I don’t get hit on" count: if I counted people who yell "suck my cock, lanky bitch" out of cars, I get hit on any time I’m out walking after dark.

I won’t pretend to speak for all women here: some women do consider the vast majority (or possibly all) come-ons as a compliment. I try to take them as they come. But I’m sick of the ‘compliment’ defence in general, it’s as bad as the joke defence. Sexual attention is neutral: when you get it a lot like Raven does, it’s as annoying as being asked about your height all the time, and it also is sometimes used as a way to hurt people, making them scared, or embarrassed, or leaving them feeling like shit the rest of the day. Some other times, it’s a compliment, or mutual, or otherwise wonderful.

And you know, most people can tell the difference. The people on the receiving end know the difference, and the people dealing it out damn well know the difference too.

The height analogy glosses over the fact that being constantly reminded of your gender (not always by being hit on) destroys the "we’re all geeks/friends/partners/collegues here" feeling. I’m lucky to escape that, and if I was offered the trade of being constantly reminded that I’m female — and therefore different — in a group of men against being reminded that I’m really tall — to some people, unattractive — I’ll keep taking the latter.

But in either case I can’t stand the stupidity of the "it’s a compliment!" defense. Nothing’s automatically a compliment.

Some things are meant to be a compliment, or friendly, or whatever, and are taken badly because the recipient has had a bad day, doesn’t like the same things about themself that you like, or has heard your complimentary little joke fifteen times that morning, and fifty times yesterday, thanks. Some people are cranky (OK, I confess).

But some things are never meant to be a compliment in the first place. Come-ons regularly fall into one of those categories. If you want to compliment someone, see if you can figure out what makes them happy, rather than deciding on their behalf what should make them happy, doing it, and then giving them a lecture when they complain.

Comments

I, too, get hit on virtually never, and I wonder about the difference between Raven’s and my experiences on that issue. Is it a matter of the network security field being a whole lot worse than the embedded software development field I’m in? Mine is probably equally male-dominated, but I have the impression there’s a much lower percentage in my field of the jerks Raven describes. Or perhaps it’s that I’m not as immersed in my field as Raven is in hers. I feel like I’m still a fledgling in my field; my employer doesn’t pay for me to go to conferences (as I don’t have anything about which to speak there), for instance.

Posted by katie on March 19, 2004 01:13 AM

At LUV (linux users victoria), I’ve not seen anything adverse to the one or two women we have. Nothing on the mailing list either – or at least, the posts I have read.

But I did hear about that big SLUG stupidity. I think SLUG is a lot bigger than LUV, but no idea really.

I would certainly like to think that this wouldn’t happen in Linux – most people seem mature enough. Perhaps the security thing might have been from script-kiddies?

Astronomy is way too petty and political, so its hardly surprising that women would be treated bad, and consequently lose interest after honours (we’ve got 4 out of 30 – despite there being lots of female summer students coming through).

Nice article, BTW.

Posted by TimC on March 19, 2004 01:33 AM

Librarianship is a fairly non-grunchy profession, as these things go… of course, the way this works is that the entire bloody profession has been grunched—our pay reeks and our image is worse. Nonetheless. Librarianship is blessedly grunch-…

Trackback from Caveat Lector on March 19, 2004 01:10 PM.

Posted on

Broken windows

There’s been some fun and games in LinuxChix lately with a particularly violent sounding poster calling himself MikeeUSA posting variations on the phrase “Death to women’s rights” interspersed with some obscenity laden mails.

He’s been posting to Debian Women for a while longer and a bit more extensively. From what I gather from them and from Google his purported beef with women’s rights is that either:

  • increasing rights for women reduces the pool of submissive women suitable to be his mate; or
  • horrible controlling women not suitable to be his mate are invading every aspect of his life including his Free Software hobby and are actively attempting to steal all the credit for them, eg by claiming that women built Debian or something.

Some random places to look include the bug he filed against Daniel Stone for being a “a woman disrespectful of men” (Daniel claims to be neither a woman nor the Debian xorg maintainer, but has not yet to my knowledge stated in public that he respects men, so I consider this case open) and the by now rather well linked post to debian-women. With some small ingenuity with Google you can find him getting banned from games forums and Wikipedia for similar activities. It all gets a bit nastier later on with him posting fantasies about the violent deaths of the women reading, and harassing people’s teenage daughters off-list and stuff. Suffice to say that I disagree with his purported premises really quite a lot (if nothing else, he doesn’t strike me as being that attractive pre-feminism either: just because women earned less doesn’t mean that they didn’t know stark raving madness when they saw it) and with his methods so strongly that I can’t think of a good way to express it.

What I have been considering is the correct response to this.

Conventional wisdom about trolls says “don’t feed them.” Ignore them and deny them the precious coin of attention, and take especial care to avoid actually engaging with their arguments even as an antagonist. This has some merits, although it’s actually quite difficult to accomplish: the work of 499 people in ignoring the troll is more or less undone by the one person who responds. It’s pretty rare that I’ve seen all 500 people respond with silence.

The initial Debian Women post got a response that I (and Anarchogeek) considered quite bizarre: someone attempted to engage with whatever sanity lurks beneath the madness and honoured MikeeUSA’s need for recognition as a software developer. The only reasoning for this I’ve seen was in the Anarchogeek thread, in which commenter Jeevan argued that it was an appropriate decision because “Don’t you think the reason one person on the mailing list thanked him for the software is because it’s a Debian mailing list and not a human rights (or something equivalent) mailing list.” I appreciate that some members of the Debian community have different social norms to me, but I don’t quite understand how the mere mention of doing FOSS development entitles you to a free ride on such matters as making death threats against a group of Debian community members. However, Jeevan seems to think so, and therefore the option of “giving them the respect that they so manifestly deny you” is placed before me. Let’s move on from that one without further comment.

I may be missing a thread, but as the mails from this nut job continued I believe the next response from Debian Women was a month later, and here it is. It’s much closer to what I did on LinuxChix.

My decision on LinuxChix was to do the following: wherever this guy appeared, I would respond with a post directed at the list saying that this blatant violation of the “be polite, be helpful” list rules was being responded to by banning. After a few more episodes I posted a warning to people about avoiding direct interaction with him where possible. (Given the reported incident of harassing someone’s family together with the hysterically violent emails, I think it’s possible that he may pose a danger to people, if only by upsetting their family. I’m shocked not to have gotten a direct contact from him yet.)

My reasoning for doing so was as follows:

  1. it’s not acceptable behaviour on our lists, and we generally call people on considerably less outrageous nonsense than this;
  2. LinuxChix is a community which is always partly composed of people new to online forums and new to the related forms of bad behaviour; and
  3. some of these newcomers, in addition to possibly finding the nastiness frightening, would interpret silence as implying that that behaviour was either unremarkable or acceptable (as might readers of the archives).

Hence I wanted to show clearly that that behaviour was not acceptable.

I later thought of a further point, which is the Broken Windows theory.

In its standard formulation, this theory goes that minor signs of urban decay such as broken windows that are not quickly repaired lead very quickly to other decay and then to a failing of any kind of civic feeling.

My particular variant of this for this case is that by not clearly having someone with some notional authority about to state clearly that violent harassment is unacceptable has two negative consequences:

  1. it encourages a feeling that violent harassment may in fact be acceptable; and
  2. it encourages a feeling that whatever we might say is unacceptable doesn’t matter, because we’re not around to stomp on unacceptable crap when it happens.

In other words, nastiness that’s not publicly identified by someone with authority (in this case, I chose to use the authority conferred by my list admin status) who asserts community norms, is like a broken window in a community.

In many ways I imagine this matters more on LinuxChix, where blatant trolls are now rare, than on Debian Women which is still waging the odd flamefest with some Debian developers who have only slightly more moderate opinions than MikeeUSA’s, and which probably has a different position on trolls. (LinuxChix is not as ban happy as this post might imply, but people who the list admins consider purely disruptive will be booted: this happens once a year or so). I think following the standard prescription on trolls, while useful when individually targeted or when you realise that you’ve got into a discussion with one, is a potential broken windows disaster from a community’s point of view. The troll doesn’t care, but the rest of the community is likely to be pleased and reassured to see agreed standards fairly enforced.