Donglegate: Why the Tech Community Hates Feminists
wired.com
wired.com
People were NOT pissed because a feminist spoke up. Nor were they pissed that someone was punished for making a sexist joke. People were pissed because the joke was NOT sexist, in any way shape or form, and the guys who made the jokes were unnecessarily shamed in public.
The articles premise is that the joke was sexist, and it simply wasn't.
Worse yet, it talks about HN as if there was all of this sexism going on in the comments for the articles that were posted here. There really wasn't. There was a lot of valid discussion on the subject that I don't think was particularly sexist. And Reddit? Reddit has SRS. These two websites are not some bastion for sexist pigs. They were not responsible for the death threats and abuse that she got.
This article is a perfect example of how overreacting to trivial things will take attention away from legitimate sexism. All it does is slow down the move towards equality.
But where was the outrage to Playhaven for actually firing the developer? Any rational person would recognize that Richards wasn't directly responsible for the actual firing of the developer. The fact that Playhaven escaped any sort of consequence for firing the guy based on a single tweet to me is telling.
In short, it requires geeks to re-examine their own revenge fantasies of being outsiders who now rule the world and admit that they might, themselves, be actively excluding others.
Right, sure.. there couldn't be any other reason than some type of strange 'revenge'. And I'm sure feminists are all about just getting 'revenge' for when some guy dumped them.
This is why seemingly tiny, individual acts of sexism — like innocent dongle jokes – matter. Such “microaggressions” combine to reinforce structural sexism.
There is probably sexism in the tech industry (and in every other industry too), but making a dongle or fork joke is in no way sexist. It is immature, but there is definitely nothing sexist about it. It's akin to Shakespeare having his characters make a joke or two about needles. Or is Shakespeare now sexist too? (Let me guess, he is?)
I think it's important to realize that there is nothing unique here about the tech industry. The same types of jokes are made every day in schools across the world - and the most sexist areas I have ever been in have been the mining and physical labour industries in Africa. The pre-school industry is most developed countries is equally sexist, with every male teacher viewed as a sexual predator. The tech industry is amazingly non-sexist compared to that.
If you want to convince people with your points (I was fairly convinced up till around half way through your article) - you need to stick more to actionable reality.
If she hadn't conducted a massively public shaming exercise, rather than saying "Shut up, I'm trying to watch a conference and listening to your dick jokes isn't helping." and then escalated to the conference organisers if that hadn't helped, and _then_ escalated to a public name/shame if _that_ hadn't helped, then I think people would be much happier with the situation.
Because in this context, it's irrelevant. Let's say Richards was completely and indisputably in the wrong (eg the guys were just sitting there minding their own business and had not made any response) - would that have justified the rape and death threats?
If the identities of the people making these threats was known they would likely be facing criminal charges and held in public contempt. Problem is that we don't know their identities because they are anonymous trolls hiding behind tor or proxies so any attempts to identify them as members of a particular group is speculation.
So that makes it difficult to condemn these people in better terms than "internet trolls are assholes" which everybody already thinks.
All the threads had vile posts that were an embarrassment to the community.
Luckily the very worst (which also tended to be from very new accounts) tended to be downvoted to hellban status, but there were some deeply unpleasant comments that got voted up.
You are trying to make the issue about you. How a member of your majority and in power group was wronged by a member of the minority.
To be clear: You are trying to change the debate from "How do we solve gender issues in our community?" to "I don't like how someone tried to solve an issue one time. BLAH BLAH BLAH the larger picture BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH"
I think the larger context is important (and the way that Adriana was attacked was vile). But that does not make her original behaviour ok.
We cannot do both? We cannot discuss gender inequalities in tech AND say that the way Adria Richards handled the situation was not correct? And you're basically saying that we can't criticize a woman's behavior without taking attention away from the sexism debate.
That said, there are clearly, in the "tech community" at large, a fair number of misogynistic cowards, which find it a lot easier to issue death threats from behind their keyboards. This does translate into "most of the tech community hates feminists", especially given how PyCon was actually trying to encourage women to get into tech.
Women feel threatened because there is this wellspring of misogyny that gets drawn on regardless of whether what they say is right or wrong if they call someone/something out on it. It would be a lot different if the reaction to Richard's was less extreme and less misogynous in character.
Painting the everyone in the technical field with a broad brush doesn't fix any problems. Especially insulting the people who are professional, respectful and trying to fix some of the problems.
Anyone who claims to not have a "biased agenda" is probably even less trustworthy in this case.
I have never heard of Men's Rights Activism - and suddenly HN is a active example of such misanthropy?
Is this a different HN to this one? Or am I missing something?
I have been very surprised at the discrepancy between the level of dialogue.
When the discussion on HN is around almost anything, I find myself often learning, and surrounded by comments that are smarter, and more informed than any I would find in the real world.
When it comes to gender issues though, I think we as a community in general tend to be pretty behind.
I truly love HN. More than any other place on the interweb, this one has impacted my life in very real ways. I do however, cringe when the topic veers towards sexism. I think we can do better.
I haven't been. Without doubt there are some brilliant minds on HN, but even this populace is not immune from "believing first, proving second". The group writ large tends to fall into that trap on different topics than most people, but it falls eventually. Not just regarding sexism in tech either; there are others.
Well, we see a very different subset of comments, apparently.
Look at the top comments in this very thread, for example...
The last one before that got flagged off the front page after one commenter declared that he was flagging it because programs that help women are sexist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5353136). The story was highly upvoted, but it only takes a handful of flags to relegate a story to oblivion. Pg commented that it was an abuse of flagging, and it was restored, but pg usually doesn't show up, and most of these stories get buried, even when they're upvoted.
This story is a perfect example. With "19 points, 3 hours ago", it is ranked 151, right next two stories with "3 points, 14 hours ago".
Try this one on; "Feminism Hates Technology".
Sounds dumb, doesn't it? Because it's not a useful rhetorical approach to having a constructive debate - which, I am guessing by the hue of your comment, we would both strongly agree needs to happen. We need feminism in tech, for a lot of reasons - but not this "sensationalism at the cost of progress" flavor of it.
In any case, the sentiment in the article resonates with me, because it matches my anecdotal experience outside of online communities. I haven't seen the converse in the feminist community, but that's also anecdotal.
We post awesome women engineers and developers for people to follow and be aware of. Let the rest of the internet wallow in its poisonous vat of sensationalist vitriol. Here, in our little corner of the internet, we will move the chain forward a few inches by enumerating incredible women in tech, the rest of the web be damned. Maybe no one will see it or care. But maybe - just maybe, some young lady will stumble across it and think "Hey, that could be me, too." and in that small chance will our entire effort henceforth be vindicated.
Allow me to begin: (others feel free to contribute as well).
Rebecca Murphey ( @rmurphey / http://rmurphey.com/ ) : I owe her so much for writing her infamous Jquery/Javascript training guide. She is certainly one of the most pivotal figures in the Javascript renaissance. Her writing hits the sweet-spot of technical depth and approchability. I firmly believe that she is the kind of innovator that whatever she is doing now, the rest of us will be doing in 5 yrs.
If you don't know who this is, you are already being left behind in the new landscape of physical computing. Easily one of the top 5 most infulential people in the "New Hardware" movement.
The hacker's hacker. Major thought leader in modern electronics/hardware hacking.
Yes, every message put on every blog was done by a full time developer working in our industry and not by thousands of children and teenagers and adults who have nothing to do with us but joined the bandwagon as it rolled along.
But hey, all nerdy men are all the same, right?
The (valid part of the) men's right movement is mostly concerned with men who:
* have been raped or faced domestic abuse, but are met with ridicule when filing charges
* have lost custody of their children to unstable / irresponsible mothers
I fully agree that women's rights is several orders of magnitude more important / severe, but that doesn't make these men's plight inconsequential either. This is not an either-or situation.
What is a problem though, and what was raised in the article, is the large mass of mysoginists that are essentially hiding behind that same men's right banner.
My experience has been that the Men's Rights Movement's good parts are often what is basically non-radical feminist activism repackaged, and its bad parts are reprehensible. (Note: radical feminism is things like the SCUM manifesto; most feminism isn't particularly radical)
The article does make the important point that there aren't a lot of places for (straight) men to discuss cultural ideas of masculinity and its possible ill effects. (In my experience, gay men often have a better understanding of male dynamics than straight men, and there's more of a cultural discourse about masculinity in some parts of gay culture.)
As far as your last comment is concerned; my support for women's rights comes out of having been gay and now being somewhere on the bi/genderqueer continuum so I can definitely relate to that.
If you're interested, this speech by Gary Carter captures it more beautifully than I've ever been able to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P...
And attacking women for both of these is folly. That's why MRAs are not taken seriously, because they misdirect their (legitimate in the aformentioned context) concerns.
There are certainly strange expectations that guys have to deal with. The problem here is that they aren't challenging the norms because they're too "pussy" or "gay" and as far as I've seen, the MRAs are too wrapped up in their warm cloak of machismo and self-defeating. There are crazy women, as there are crazy men.
Systemically, guys are holding themselves back, and the way established law and custom are has more to do with irresponsible and/or overbearing guys in power in the past than it does some sort of gynocracy.
> One reason for this is the growing popularity of “Men’s Rights Activism” (MRA) — groups of men who refer to feminism as “misandry” and advocate vociferously that men face more discrimination than women.
It is a misrepresentation of MRA. Discussing about discrimination practices against men does not make all feminists automatically the enemy. MRA is about real issues that need attention, affecting boys, fathers, husbands and men in general.
This line from the article throws blame without any justification, discredits a movement similar to feminism as mere slander against feminism and frames the issue as a contest "who's suffering the most, women or men?". What if both suffer?
> Men’s Rights Activism sort of makes sense in a culture where masculinity places just as many limitations on men as femininity does on women.
So, men can't complain as long as the total suffering of women is greater than the total suffering of men. It's one or the other, not both, according to OP. Only one group is entitles to complain.
I'd comment more but I'm too angry after finishing the article. She just dismisses men's issues wholesale.
However, I do think there was a great deal of misogyny associated with one aspect of this entire debacle: the DDOS on SendGrid.
It's one thing to unleash outrage against Richards via social media (although posts threatening her with violence are disgusting and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law). But to take it to several levels of indirection and to target her employer with a DDOS to me is misogyny.
Where was the outrage and the DDOS on Playhaven for originally firing the developer? The Internet Mob completely forgot about Playhaven's role in this entire thing, and clearly focused on Richards and wanted her and everyone associated with her to pay on every level they could. If I remember correctly, there was a petition that was asking Playhaven to reinstate the fired developer. There were no violent tweets to Playhaven or the CEO, from my understanding. There was no such petition to fire or reprimand Richards, there was only threats of violence and a complete shutdown of her employer.
Why would we admit such a thing? There is no evidence presented in the article to support the idea that there are structural barriers or that there is a culture that actively discourages participation. A lower level of participation in itself isn't evidence that either of these exist.
The incident name (by consensus) is not "Female activist is exposed to techies' hate" but "Grandstanding blogger doxxes fellow developer, falls on own sword." Shifting focus and sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug is not going to make them go away.
> to a more inclusive one where penis jokes and booth babes are no longer acceptable
I'm on board with no booth babes, but what's wrong with penis jokes? It's not like women never make jokes about bodily functions/parts.
By removing the various factors that have in the past led up to eventual sexism or sexual harrassment at a professional function you improve the odds that participants will be able to go through the conference experience without suffering from sexual harrassment.
Like any filter it suffers from filtering out behavior which is possibly legitimate, but is eliminating sexual-themed jokes (however innocuous) really that bad if it actually helps with reducing sexual harrassment (or alternately, identifying those who are actually sexist)?
That's the balance that has to be determined; is the acceptable behavior you would wrongly exclude by a rule more valuable than the wrong behavior you would permit without that rule?
I can make penis jokes almost anywhere else, so if banning them at a conference would actually contribute to a more pleasant experience for everyone else attending then I just don't see that as harmful.
I have great sympathy for the feminist cause, I really do, but even in war there is diplomacy.
Meh, you could still do so within a group of friends even at a conference I would think, as long as it's in between sessions or otherwise at a break in the action. But when you're sitting in an audience surrounded by strangers and attending to whatever professional topic brought you there, it's probably not as good of an idea.
I come from a community that is rather famous for being "not very formal", but we have a very clear distinction between when it's appropriate to be jovial and when formality is called for, and when formality is called for we go way above and beyond. Not because of sexism, but the neutrality of tone is definitely a nice side effect.
This situation touches on subjects that are very emotionally charged and, whatever side one is on, we'll have visceral reactions confounding us. I propose a mental exercise, hoping it would clear the air, if that is possible. Reverse everything having to do with gender and sex about the situation. Eg, two women at a stereotypically women-dominated career conference make a cringe worthy vagina joke. Male activist overhearing them takes offense and goes on public shaming offensive via social media. Is this mirror situation the functional equivalent ? Would it get the same public reaction ? Would the same two people lose their jobs and their reputations ? If no, why not ? If yes, why ? Cui bono ?
PS: not disputing anything about the trolls sending threats to Adria Richards. They are the lowest of the low, and their reactions were surely sexist.
""When considering the dismal numbers of women (as well as African-American and Latino men) in tech, the meritocratic presumption is that these minorities aren’t good at or interested in technology; otherwise, there would be more of them.""
She has a point in that minorities are also heavily under-represented in tech. I want to put aside the gender politics for now because that's not where I feel the author is strongest. I feel that she's making a good point by pointing out essentially: okay, you guys claim you aren't sexist. That you treated Adria poorly because she was an attention whore and not just a woman.
But what explains the under-representation of other minorities in tech? Why aren't there as many African America n or Latino American programmers?
I feel like she's right in saying the tech world isn't truly meritocratic.
Public shaming is a method of cyber-bullying, and in this scenario, I think that label fits Adria's actions. While cyber-bullying is also a hot topic these days, it seems to be completely overlooked in this matter.
I'd hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but I can't help but think Adria got her friends in the media to write some fluff pieces.
"If we admit there are structural barriers to entry, and a culture that actively discourages and women and men of color from participating, then it logically follows that technology is not a meritocracy."
However, she fails to demonstrate/prove this fact. So if one doesn't admit it, the whole opus is hard to take seriously.