Sun, 07 Aug 2011
Women, men, and accidentally being a jerk (at the Desktop Summit)
The first day of the Desktop Summit was yesterday, Saturday, August 6. I loved it and gave a presentation. There are two very different stories I can tell on the topic of gender equality in free software. I'll start with the bad.
It's pretty easy, in the U.S. at least, to get people of privilege to stop using terms that evoke centuries of oppression from slavery. It's harder to ask people to stop doing that to women. I'm writing this post to ask for that.
There were two different times that people I generally respect used words that historically have been used to hurt and minimize women.
"Cygnus Solutions is prostitutes." Dave Neary was delivering a talk (that I found impressively informative) called, "The cost of going it alone". When the talk covered the cost (in time and money) of getting your corporation's code into the community branch of an open-source project, he pointed out you could hire someone with the skills. Cygnus was the go-to company for that in the 1990s; to explain that Cygnus does not care who they work for, he said the sentence in bold.
"The OpenSuSE Build Service is a slut." I was at a party at a hackerspace last night. Someone who I admire for his work in free in free software, both technical and community, was joking with me about that no one should compile (or use) GTK. I riffed on the joke and remarked, "The OpenSuSE build service will build anything." He replied with the sentence in bold.
"Slut" and "prostitute" are terms that recall the objectification of women. They're terms that attempt to measure a woman's worth as a sex object.
It's not nice to the many women in attendance to bring that up.
You might not have thought this through. You might want to read one woman's take "On Sluts, Rape, and Fuckery". Give it a read.
Then, give it a rest.
The thing is, this matters all the time. That's why I have to call you two out on it.
Now for the happy story.
While watching the Desktop Summit's intern showcase, I was floored.
One hacker implemented Off-The-Record instant messaging for Telepathy. Another implemented pluggable back-ends for Getting Things GNOME, a task manager. I heard about overwhelming documentation and usability improvements to GNOME mainstays Cheese and Anjuta. In a short summer, these students made huge changes.
For most of them, this was the first time they delivered any sort of presentation. Every single talk was delivered in earnest and enthusiasm. They told us about the work they had done and what might happen in the future.
The other remarkable thing about the intern presentations was the demographics. I didn't keep count, but it seemed like as many women as men presented. We heard about hugely-important changes to documentation, code, and usability. People from central Europe, South Asia (yay), and Brazil took the stage.
I hope that is the future of free software.
There are two things I want to see for our community.
I want to know that people are respected and not reminded of centuries of oppression.
I also want to see our community grow in size and diversity.
I treat these issues as separate. We should choose respectful words when we speak not because we want more women to show up, but because it part of the expectation of decency that we should be able to expect from each other.
And I failed the community when I did not make it clear there and then that this kind of language is not okay with me. It took me a day to understand this failure, so here I am writing this blog post.
P.S. Thanks to Karen Rustad for her feedback while writing this post.
I am sorry that I offended you.
I assure you, my intention was not to objectify women at all. It simply did not occur to me that talking about Cygnus selling maintainership access in the '90s as prostituting their skills, in my mind it was a commonly used phrase for doing something for money you wouldn't otherwise want to do.
I'm very aware of the issue of human trafficking - my wife worked for a French non-profit which worked to help women who had been victims of prostitution to get their lives back.
I would be glad to have a chat with you during the conference. While I didn't intend any sexual context, I can of course see how that is how you interpreted it. Again, I apologise.
Dave.
Posted by Dave Neary at Sun Aug 7 11:12:25 2011
Obviously a prostitute, whether a man or a woman, is selling sex as a commodity, and for many the idea of exchanging sex for cash is demeaning the word itself is not. Prostitution is mostly viewed negatively because for many it encompasses coercion, trafficking, and drug dependency issues.
But prostitution, when entered into freely, and not negatively, is not always a bad thing. Australia, for example, has a well regarded, monitored, and safe sex industry - including both male and female "providers".
Posted by Steve Kemp at Sun Aug 7 11:44:15 2011
Posted by Pascal Bleser at Sun Aug 7 12:41:59 2011
Posted by Mika Pflüger at Sun Aug 7 13:38:23 2011
What I meant to say, although it is really difficult to explain using electronic media, and will be misunderstood and misrepresented at will anyway...
Yes, obviously, if anyone hasn't noticed by now that there are some issues at conferences (and everywhere else) in terms of sexism, they must have been living under a rock. Worse, there seem to be cases of physical harassment. So, yes, definitely, we have to do something about it, there is really no question about that (at least for me, and hopefully for pretty much everyone else).
But, on the other hand, crying wolf for things or words that could potentially be interpreted as having a sexual connotation (and why is a sexual connotation against women per se ?) and calling someone out like that, while the interpretation of using the word "prostitute" is sexist, well, that can lead to extremism. And that extremism causes the exact adverse effect of what should be achieved, and certainly also of what Asheesh tries to achieve.
It's a thin red line between effectively raising awareness of the serious issues that exist in terms of sexism, specifically at conferences in this case, and going all gestapo on everything just based on personal interpretation, lecturing people on how bad they are. And don't call out Godwin on me on this one, because: "That's why I have to call you two out on it.", that's reference enough already.
Anyways, point is: it's a matter of balance. "Prostitution" is in no way sexist. Why would it? Because it's a reference to sex? And that is systematically sexist? It is Asheesh's personal interpretation that using the term "prostitution" means sexism. And that it requires a public call out. How wonderful is that.
Posted by Pascal Bleser at Sun Aug 7 14:29:01 2011
No one (as far as I know), has (for example) ever chosen to critique the validity of the input of people employed by a FOSS project's corporate sponsor (who appear to support a decision by that sponsor affecting the project that "the community" disagrees with) by calling their position that of a "house nigger", or referred to that division within the community in terms of decision-making power as "apartheid".
No one in FOSS (again, AFAIK) has called a particularly thorny, hard-to-stop-obsessing over bug in their code a "tar baby."
In neither of these hypothetical examples, the person using the language in question is using it in an "instrumental" sense--they don't mean to invoke the history behind either term. The people and buts they are applying them to are (probably) not black, or any other racial minority.
But in the US (and I suspect most places), such language is nonetheless considered hurtful and completely inappropriate. Because, irrespective of the user's instrumental intent in using them, words have baggage. And the legacy of African slavery in the US (and apartheid in South Africa) matters. It invades our thoughts, our prejudices, and our vocabulary, even when we don't want it to.
We in the US aren't as careful about language that invokes a history of minimizing and oppressing women as language that invokes slavery. Maybe we should be. That's why I'm glad Asheesh wrote this post. :)
Posted by Karen at Sun Aug 7 14:38:28 2011
But the question is still what you make of it.
If I said "I'm a slave to my job", would you see "slave" as a loaded term there too ? Would you call me out publicly as if I was supportive of slavery ?
The public callout thing is what bothers me most. As said: it is a matter of balance, and pointing fingers and implicitly calling people sexists or racists isn't all that great, isn't it. At least when it is a matter of interpretation and language.
Quoting Asheesh:
While I would certainly agree to that on the term "slut", I do not on "prostitute". Or do you believe Dave had that in mind? Don't you think he meant "doing whatever it takes for money"? And I don't think that it is an equal comparison to saying, "nigger", which is quite obviously a much more loaded term. The comparison would be more appropriate with saying "slave" or "slavery". Dave didn't say "whore", did he now (even though "whoring" is used to describe exactly the same thing as Dave did, quite a lot these days, without any of those using it being supportive of the sexual exploitation of women.)
What I'm trying to say, badly I guess, is that I believe that you are overreacting, and publicly pointing fingers in this case is equally bad as using actual sexist words (or imagery or intent or ...). And I also believe that it does not serve the cause of fighting sexism to overreact like that. Hence "extremism" (indeed a better term in this case than "integrism", as Mika kinda pointed out).
Mind you, and just to make this clear: I'm totally on your or Asheesh or hopefully as many people as possible's page on this, as an initiative we must all take, to eradicate sexism, harassment, or any other sort of discrimination, especially against minorities (which women are, in IT, unfortunately, as of today). But overdoing it and self appointing into a thought police that publicly points fingers (and names) when there is room for quite a lot of interpretation simply isn't serving that cause.
Please apply common sense. And sorry if I come around a bit harsh on this, no hard feelings. Believe it or not, we are on the same side on this.
Posted by Pascal Bleser at Sun Aug 7 17:23:58 2011
Dave seems to agree that his phrasing was harmful in a way he hadn't thought about, and has apologized. Why is it important for you to keep arguing about whether the offense Asheesh perceived was legitimate?
You seem to agree that some words should not be used in technical talks, and that "slut" is one of them; that's a fine base to agree with each other from. You don't think "prostitute" is one of them, but Asheesh isn't so sure. It seems pretty reasonable to me that someone might think that "prostitute" has an implication towards women; the vast majority of prostitutes are women (looks like around 80% in the US, at least going on arrest reports), so it's entirely reasonable that someone criticizing prostitutes could be considered to be referring to women more than men, such that when someone imagines a prostitute, by default they're imagining a woman, not a man. The fact that the word itself isn't gendered isn't the point.
But even that's an aside, really. You don't have to fully empathize with the thought process that made Asheesh feel uncomfortable. You are never going to be able to understand exactly how words that offended someone made them feel, because they have life experiences that you don't. We should simply keep an open mind and apologize when we do inadvertently hurt someone; my kudos to Dave for doing exactly that.
Posted by Chris at Sun Aug 7 19:56:54 2011