Siding with the Bastards

Tags: , , , Posted 2009-09-25 21:39 20 Comments

Let me pref­ace this by stat­ing a few things: if you are going to tell me that girls are inher­ently bad at tech­nol­ogy, pro­gram­ming, or are get­ting their panties in a twist, please fuck the fuck off. I feel con­fi­dent in judg­ing you a waste of an oppor­tu­nity for a per­fectly good pair of ovary and sperm.

Secondly, I haven’t read a tran­script or seen a video, because the peo­ple rant­ing about this are seem­ingly unable to link to either, lest you judge it for yourself.

So all I have to go on is the quotes and snip­pets and attempts at con­text. It sounds like the obvi­ously poorly-delivered joke (I say so because it’s caus­ing a brou-ha-ha rather than a laugh) was meant to go some­thing like this:

  1. Have you ever tried to explain your mud­dled think­ing to some­one else?
  2. You know how it causes embar­rass­ment when the other per­son gives you that quiz­zled look, and you real­ize you’re an idiot?
  3. As a multi-millionaire and astro­naut, I find myself embar­rassed try­ing to explain how my soft­ware works to mem­bers of the gen­der to which I’m attracted, even though my soft­ware is awesome.
  4. If my soft­ware was easy to explain — thus sav­ing me the embar­rass­ment of mud­dled think­ing about design — it would also be easy for peo­ple to use.
  5. Mush the last few steps together: if my soft­ware is easy to use, it’s easy to explain how it works, and I can sell it (and by exten­sion, myself) to mem­bers of the gen­der to which I’m attracted in social situations.

This is a log­i­cal pro­gres­sion, and an attempt to appeal to evo­lu­tion­ary processes in order to make a bunch of mis­fit worka­holics socially useful.

Unfortunately for him, Mark Shuttleworth is a well-socialized het­ero­sex­ual gen­tle­men from some­where other than the sub­ur­ban United States, so he’s attracted to women, and appar­ently isn’t aware that in the US, it’s not OK in polite com­pany to refer to some­one he’s inter­ested in chat­ting up at the bar a girl. It hon­estly sounds like he’s try­ing to be cute with it, but falling on his face because some peo­ple are offended when they hear about promi­nent fig­ures talk­ing about women as girls. Either that or one advan­tage of being a astro­naut is that your world is post-gendered.

Yes, I’m jeal­ous of the money and space travel. I’m also young and ambi­tious, so not too ter­ri­bly wor­ried about it.

Regardless, part of the reac­tion is defense against the asser­tion of priv­i­lege and con­trol: dudes don’t get mad when women talk about boys in those terms in our pres­ence because the matri­archy hasn’t existed for thou­sands of years and we don’t have to worry about it. The reac­tion we (boys) have is either blush­ing or strut­ting a bit, because we rec­og­nize it as a sign of selec­tion and an asser­tion of power.

And, of course, bad-assed women are very attrac­tive to guys my age — so many video games, so lit­tle time… Our great-great-grandsons, how­ever, will curse us for our blind­ness. ;-)

Conversely, ladies may bris­tle when men talk about the girls, because it’s a term of endear­ment that is inex­orably tied back to when all women, in all cir­cum­stances, were con­sid­ered girls. There’s an extremely ugly legacy lurk­ing close enough to the col­lec­tive mem­o­ries of both women and men when it comes to a man assert­ing power and show­ing signs of selection.

That’s, I think, why Mark’s com­ments are com­pared to RMS’s. Even though — at least in my third-hand decon­struc­tion — they are log­i­cally to get the audi­ence to do the right thing because of a woman’s dom­i­nance in selec­tion sit­u­a­tions, the lan­guage he is using is loaded enough to tell a dif­fer­ent narrative.

Collective mem­o­ries!? Narrative!? Holy pre­ten­tious fuck. Fuck this, who’s play­ing at the club tonight? Yeesh!

Update: Thanks to Mackenzie for post­ing the link to the video and slides.

As noted by nukeedit, the release com­ment (in the first few min­utes), has a con­nec­tion to orgasm, but it was not gen­der spe­cific, and had no con­nec­tion to hook­ers at all. Now, I’ve read Emma Goldman, and claim to under­stand it, but iter­at­ing that pre­cise chain of logic to any­thing related to sex ends up with your pro­scrip­tions effec­tively indis­tin­guish­able from moral tra­di­tion­al­ists, and results mat­ter more than inten­tions. To put it another way: dark­mat­ter may be a tool, but sex is not the enemy.

On the “girls” com­ment… (at 36:00, slide starts at 35:00) ugh. He ends up elud­ing to the fact that he’s refer­ring to “girls” as “peo­ple who don’t care about free soft­ware.” In con­text, the com­ment is actu­ally worse than it is with­out con­text. Logically, there really isn’t a way to sal­vage his com­ments as some­how dif­fer­ent from the “teach it to your grandma”, even though I don’t think that was actu­ally what he was try­ing for.

Results do mat­ter more than inten­tions. To me, as a native-born white male engi­neer in the US, the results are this: an oth­er­wise engag­ing talk on how to make FOSS not suck, which gives voice to my own thoughts from years ago about UX and code — par­tic­u­larly the inti­mate rela­tion­ship between the APIs you’re writ­ing and the UIs that can rest atop them — is com­pletely for­got­ten, and the only thing peo­ple are talk­ing about is what a com­plete cobag Mark was for jok­ing about girls.

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Comments

  • Mattew Jones says:
    2009-09-25 at 10:56 pm

    There is no freely avail­able video or tran­script. The video was made freely avail­able only while it streamed live from here: http://​www​.tech​cast​.com/​e​v​e​n​t​s​/​l​i​n​u​xcon/free/

    That is part of why this is such as huge mess. Most peo­ple are get­ting sec­ond or third hand information.

  • tretle says:
    2009-09-25 at 11:11 pm

    I don’t under­stand, if every­one under­stands what he meant then why is there this big issue sur­round­ing it.

  • James Cape says:
    2009-09-25 at 11:20 pm

    tre­tle: Some peo­ple were angry about his use of the term, some peo­ple were angry about their being angry, oth­ers were angry about the angry about the angry.

    I make up for return­ing it to a meta ^ 2 by being self-deprecating and referential.

  • tretletretle says:
    2009-09-25 at 11:40 pm

    I found an ironic com­ment on chris’s post.

    liz -> actual oppres­sion of men or attempts to cen­sor people’s thoughts.

    She was respond­ing to peo­ple who were ask­ing whether it was sex­ist or whether it was taken out of con­text.
    I replied with a com­ment try­ing to explain how we were not being oppres­sive and found it sex­ist that she would assume that men are oppress­ing her because some peo­ple in com­ments to a post dis­agree with her opin­ion or sim­ply do not want to read about sex­ism on an planet.gnome, some peo­ple want to read about gnome, that doesn’t make them oppres­sive all it means is they really like gnome :D

    hmmm.… maybe I should just shut up.. :( my opin­ion is worth nothing.

  • James Cape says:
    2009-09-25 at 11:43 pm

    What do you mean “we”, white man?

    I didn’t read any com­ments that claimed all men were oppress­ing any­one. I read com­ments by women defend­ing their point of view against men attack­ing it (and visa-versa). I also noticed there was more appre­ci­a­tion of the fact that the per­son you’re debat­ing against doesn’t have to agree with you just because you’re talk­ing among the fairer sex.

    Yes, that was intentional.

  • nukeedit Anonymous LinuxCon Attendee / LPC Speaker says:
    2009-09-25 at 11:56 pm

    I’m male. I was there, at the keynote, and I heard the com­ments. I found them both tacky, and I could tell that the women sit­ting next to me found them even more tacky.

    I agree with the com­ments on how Mark prob­a­bly meant the sec­ond remark about “explain­ing to girls what we do”, but any­one who gave it a mod­icum of thought could have real­ized that the com­ments would offend people.

    As for the remark on “happy end­ings”, it struck me as crass and inap­pro­pri­ate. I wouldn’t specif­i­cally call it sex­ist; as a man, I don’t par­tic­u­larly want to hear a sex­ual ref­er­ence in a tech­ni­cal pre­sen­ta­tion any more than a woman would.

  • Chris says:
    2009-09-26 at 12:49 am

    Hi James,

    Your post seems to be only refer­ring to the fact that Mark chose the word “girls” instead of the word “women”, but as I under­stand it, this is not the main rea­son that any­one is upset — I didn’t men­tion it in my post, and nei­ther did Kirrily in her open let­ter. To be clear, I con­sider the state­ment just as prob­lem­atic when you s/girls/women/ in it.

    - Chris.

  • tretle says:
    2009-09-26 at 1:50 am

    ok, well when I said “we” I was refer­ring to the peo­ple who dis­agreed on the com­ments of the other post that were being labeled “oppres­sive males”.
    Its kind of strange you didn’t spot it as that was a direct quote try search­ing for it on the page “actual oppres­sion of men or attempts to cen­sor people’s thoughts.” -> thats it word for word.

  • James Cape says:
    2009-09-26 at 3:28 am

    Chris,

    Pardon my naiveté, but why is the state­ment problematic?

    Update: What I mean is, how did you inter­pret it, and what about your imple­men­ta­tion is problematic?

  • tretle says:
    2009-09-26 at 4:30 am

    Because you cant label peo­ple who dis­agree with you as oppres­sive males and as for the sec­ond part of the state­ment the cen­sor­ing peo­ples thoughts bit.
    Nobody cen­sored any­ones thoughts until peo­ple started shout­ing evil oppres­sive male at any dis­agree­ment.
    Insinuating that every­one that dis­agrees is oppres­sive and in turn bad or even male is in itself not only wrong but also sex­ist.
    My mother and three sis­ters agree with me that Mark’s anal­ogy was mis­con­strued.
    Are they oppres­sive males cen­sor­ing peo­ples thoughts?
    The hypocrisy of some from some of these peo­ple is insane.

  • Leigh Honeywell says:
    2009-09-26 at 6:07 am

    Hey Tretle,

    I think you’re mis­read­ing Liz’s com­ment. She was describ­ing the back­lash against folks crit­icz­ing Mark’s com­ment. Let me try rephras­ing for clar­ity. Liz said: “Kirrily said basi­cally, “Hey, that was kind of annoy­ing, how about not doing that”.”

    She then said:

    “Then, a bunch of back­lash which describes the above as:”

    And then, re-read the bul­let point: “actual oppres­sion of men or attempts to cen­sor people’s thoughts.”

    She was not describ­ing men oppress­ing women, but rather accu­sa­tions in the com­ments that those of us who are crit­i­cal of Mark’s com­ments are oppress­ing men and attempt­ing to cen­sor men. There’s def­i­nitely a lot of that kind of back­lash both in the com­ments and in other blogs on this issue.

    Does that make a bit more sense?

    Because yeah, some folks — myself included — found Mark’s com­ments prob­lem­atic. Asking him to con­sider their impact on the women who are involved in Ubuntu, and the women who could be, is not the same thing as oppres­sion or censorship.

    –Leigh

  • Figaro says:
    2009-09-26 at 9:16 am

    The only real prob­lem I see, from what I’ve read, is that he said some­thing akin to “we could explain our work to girls” instead of “*I* could explain our work to girls”, prac­ti­cally short-circuiting some brains in the audi­ence that aren’t attracted to girls and failed to inter­pret this as a per­sonal expe­ri­ence to be changed to fit each one’s cir­cum­stances. And please, con­sider the con­text where you’re bound to talk to non-tech savvy peo­ple (for me as a straight male it’s every pub I walk into).

    Add Mark’s fame as a com­mu­nity leader and polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness rad­i­cal­ism into the mix, and you have a big non-issue being dis­cussed left and right.

  • Jean Azzopardi says:
    2009-09-26 at 9:48 am

    In my opin­ion, this is a typ­i­cal mak­ing a moun­tain out of a mole­hill speech.

    I am a het­ero­sex­ual 20 year old male, and I have trou­ble even descend­ing into the mind­set that inter­prets Mark’s state­ment as offensive.

    From the way I see it, Mark was mak­ing a joke, period, and the state­ment should be inter­preted that way. This isn’t even an issue worth so many blogs and flames.

    Whether the joke was in good/bad taste is another thing, per­son­ally I have no prob­lems with it. But I highly doubt Mark intended to slur women.

  • Andre says:
    2009-09-26 at 12:13 pm

    Ohh ‘Voldemort’, ‘Voldemort’.… ;-)

  • darkermatter says:
    2009-09-27 at 2:10 pm

    Well, I like shag­ging my “girl” and she likes shag­ging her “boy”. Oh, I guess we’re both sexist!

    If you’re try­ing to impress a girl (oops, I said it again) by show­ing her how much you get women, then don’t bother wast­ing any more time, she already thinks you’re a pussy.

  • Boyo says:
    2009-09-27 at 2:30 pm

    Women want it both ways, don’t they. They get offended when they’re not treated as tech­no­log­i­cal equals to their male coun­ter­parts, but then they run off and form groups like GNOME Women, BSDChix (would you have pre­ferred Shufflebottom to call you “chicks”?) etc. to com­part­men­tal­ize them­selves based on noth­ing other than their sex.

    No doubt you’d still com­plain if we went off to cre­ate Ubuntu Boiz or the Red Had Private Gentleman’s Club, though.

  • James Cape says:
    2009-09-27 at 7:24 pm

    Oh geez. I swear to god, you give these fuck­ers an inch of car­pet to roll around on and thirty sec­onds later they’re shit­ting all over it.

    dark­er­mat­ter, Boyo, I mean you.

  • Greg K Nicholson says:
    2009-09-27 at 9:00 pm

    Jean: you’re free to not care about this issue. You have that priv­i­lege. Please don’t try to con­vince us that there­fore *no-one* should care.

    We have no short­age of pixels.

    Anyway, doesn’t this look stu­pid?:
    —Women: “Hey, men! You’re oppress­ing us!”
    —Men: “No, we’re not. Stop complaining.”

  • Adam Williamson says:
    2009-09-28 at 12:21 am

    What’s the strange whoosh­ing sound?

    Why, it’s the sound of a bunch of peo­ple com­pletely miss­ing the freak­ing point.

    It’s kind of ironic that every­one who com­plains about Kirrily not hav­ing watched a video of the talk (which is quite hard since there isn’t one) has appar­ently not read her post, which both explains exactly why the remark is prob­lem­atic, and is about as far from any kind of attempt to cen­sor any­one as it is con­ceiv­ably pos­si­ble to get.

    Really, this isn’t a hard one, guys.

  • Mackenzie says:
    2009-09-29 at 6:43 pm

    Hey guess, what? The video’s avail­able, and *gasp* Kirrily’s sources weren’t lying!

    http://​www​.lin​ux​pro​magazine​.com/​l​i​n​u​x​c​o​n​/​s​h​uttleworth

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