An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Micah Cowan]

There is a common theme to your last reply, and it is one with which I
agree; but I do not accept your conclusions. Here are the related
remarks you make:

Tristan Wibberley wrote:
> I suppose I was pointing out that sexism can be felt when sexism is not
> applied and that runs into the rest of my email (which I see now is
> quite badly written and quite inflamatory, sorry about that everyone).
> The core point being that social discourse is unpleasant for one group
> while normal for the other when the numbers are so skewed. With about 50
> men to each woman, each woman will received gender-comparative banter,
> attempts at flirting that go horribly wrong, and those occasional plain
> rotten remarks at a rate 50 times greater than what she would normally
> receive. That is bound to be unpleasant but you won't change the natural
> behaviour of each man just as you won't change the natural behaviour of
> each woman.

...

>> What I /have/ noticed, is that, in a chat-room with a high
>> male-to-female ratio, there is a tendency for a few assholes to
>> immediately start in with "a/s/l?" and the like.
>
> That is courtship and it's normal for single men to ask women that
> online, and I'm sure it *is* unpleasant when each woman receives it at
> fifty times the normal rate which is what women see when they compare
> forums full of geeks to other social forums. It's actually probably more
> than fifty times the normal rate because there are a lot more single men
> in geek circles than other communities.

...

>> There is often also a
>> more subtle variety of general chauvinism (usually just ignorance, not
>> willful harassment, but the effect is the same) or "gentle" teasing.
>> When teasing is a consistent experience whenever and wherever a girl
>> arrives online, it of course ceases to be "gentle".
> 
> But individuals are not doing it more than would normally be considered
> acceptable for them to do (except a percentage of people that always go
> too far, Open Source developers or not, men or women).

I absolutely agree with what your saying here: that the primary problem
is not necessarily sexism (I don't believe I ever called it that), and
that men making "courtship" plays at women is not sexism. Sexism is
_not_ the issue that has been raised by this open letter (though it is
part of the problem that was raised, an not an insignificant part). The
problem we are discussing is one of a culture in which women
consistently feel one or more of: harassed, threatened, or just
emotionally drained from having to deal with the same shit all the time,
without rest. You make the point that the individuals are not harassing,
and I agree: however, when you have (as you say) fifty-to-one
representation, the group as a _whole_ becomes very harassing.

The rest of your argument (which I haven't included), is essentially
they are just "boys being boys", and can't change. _That_ is the part I
take issue with. I would agree 100% with you that it is entirely likely
that the men/boys who perpetrate this are completely unaware that their
innocent little "playfulness" is one part of a greater deluge of the
same, and that they are therefore unaware that there is anything wrong
with what they are doing. This is absolutely why education, on a
large-scale level, is necessary. We need to stop people from being
ignorant of how their actions combine with everyone else's to make life
hard for women: when such people become _aware_ of how their actions
become a statistical figure, hopefully they can simply discontinue/be
more considerate in their approaches¹. The rest that don't, can be dealt
with as no longer being ignorant, and thus truly being "in the wrong".

¹ By considerate, I mostly mean that there wouldn't be anything wrong
with pursuing a relationship after having "earned the right" (built up
to it), which is what guys _should_ be doing anyway. Such things have
never offended anyone.

Where we basically disagree is that you are arguing that, because what
some of these men are doing would not be wrong in a gender-balanced
forum, they are therefore not wrong to do the same in a forum with a
critically severe gender imbalance. I disagree, for the simple fact that
no one is hurt in the former case, whereas it is abundantly clear that
people are being hurt in the present cultural conditions.

You state that the cure isn't to change the culture, but to even the
imbalance. I might agree; but how do you propose to do that, when we are
in the catch-22 of the very imbalance contributing to itself, when
coupled with this refusal to adjust our culture to compensate for this
deficiency?

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/

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