I can't wait until the PHP world starts talking about PHP again.
— Jarrod Nettles (@hayvok) February 26, 2013
So says those that are comfortable in the status quo, and don't need to see their environment, their industry, change. Perhaps I'm being unfair, perhaps it is just that those (and there are plenty more), like Jarrod here, feel that PHP developers are above such pervasive parasitic behaviours that culminate in cultural divide.
It seems that this last couple of days a bit of a hoo-ha has been stirred up by the "75% women" staffed Web & PHP magazine, and their choice at drumming up views for their publication (congratulations on a job well done, I imagine). Sorry if I do "name names" here, by the way, it just makes it a whole lot easier for people to follow what's happened than making them do all the searching for themselves. I'm only aware of this now because perennial sexism-sniffer-outer, Aral Balkan, was making a bit of a fuss of it all this evening (see the earlier link).
Unfortunately the responses since have focused largely on the largely irrelevant and anecdotal .
Some may see the defense by Web & PHP magazine's staffers as its own form of feminism, others as Uncle Tom syndrome. Either way, it was off the mark as it took one criticism ("Your schtick is too male orientated") and decided to argue against it, as others so defensively did on Twitter it would seem, as some form of censorship alone. I don't doubt that some were thinking that, that perhaps it shouldn't have gone ahead, but is that really the only answer? Of course not. It's also highly curious to me to see the response to "we shouldn't pretend women are wallflowers" is to say "women should get used to 21st century male orientated sexual banter". Aren't they essentially the same limiting action, but in different directions?
Similarly the article makes the logical misstep of assuming because people involved are perfectly non-sexist and decent human beings, that this somehow makes it the problem of those that may feel barriers to their involvement if they don't feel comfortable. Yet the authors had the audacity, or perhaps just lack of an irony detector, to go on a diatribe about "slut shaming".
If there is one thing that happens every time this subject comes up it is the belittlement of the views of the minority of people that don't feel that their own industry (or the industry they would professionally like to be a part of) isn't a "safe space" for them. Perhaps it's not intentional, but clumsily these irrelevancies of how nice, decent, female or well meaning people are while they are creating divisive atmosphere, only say one thing... if you're too far from what we consider normal, we don't really care if you want to join the party or not. It's so very cliquey. Given the tone of the humour, it's 6th-form common-room standards of behaviour.
This last month has seen a landmark victory for civil rights in the UK, with same sex couples getting a vital step closer to being legally recognised as spouses if they go through a legal union of marriage. Yet there were many that claimed that they didn't need marriage, that they had something *like* marriage, surely that's enough? The attitude was very "learn to live with it". Internationally the issue has even seen some homosexual people themselves standing up shoulder to shoulder with the type of people that tried to deny them the right to an equal age of consent.
Another example of the kind of issue we're facing is university sports initiations. You may have seen some stuff on the news in the past, there have been incidents where people have died because of them. Yet despite this those who rely on them to weed out the weak of stomach and of resolve, would very passionately demand that no-one take away their right to run initiations as they wish. The result? People who cared about the sport, wanted to take it on from college, but didn't want to drink a pint of urine then be humiliated around town for a night, lost out.
The people who ran the initiations didn't lose out, those who joined in didn't lose out, only those that decided that their own sense of self-worth meant this avenue was closed to them. It was a pleasure to work with those during my time at UWESU who worked tirelessly to engage with the sport clubs to run initiations in a manner befitting of a safe-space organisation, not removing all elements of "risque"-ness or hierarchies and power structures...but to make it so that no-one who was of a "team sport is awesome" mentality would feel reasonably put off by the initiations.
This industry, and I mean our broad industry, not just in PHP, not just front-end developers, nor designers...but web and technology workers all over, needs to get past its own "same sex marriage" moment and embrace what the world needs it to be. Conferences, especially, are our "initiations" for those who want to enter the community as well as the profession, and everyone has the right to feel comfortable entering that arena.
I'm not sure that the original joke was even really about male anatomy. The "Enhance your PHPness" line is actually about the spam "Enhance your..." (don't want this comment to be flagged as spam) emails which everyone on the internet receives regardless of their anatomy. This is, effectively, part of internet culture now and belongs equally to everyone.
ReplyDeleteI can appreciate the argument that maybe we just "shouldn't go there", but I don't find it convincing. Given a choice between a world in which everyone can make bad jokes about male-anatomy-enhancing spam emails, and a world in which nobody can, I'd prefer the former on basic liberal grounds. This stands in contrast to, say, a choice between worlds in which everyone can be sexually assaulted and nobody can, in which the latter is clearly preferable. To confuse the two is to undermine the very real action needed to combat serious sexual discrimination that still goes on in many places, the technology industry very much included.
It's also a matter of tone. Would it be possible for this guy to have been any more condescending? : http://storify.com/aral/dear-php-community-yes-you-have-a-sexism-problem-w . The way he starts out with "You have a problem", addressing everyone as though he's in any position to judge, is perhaps the best way to get people's backs up and make people even more dismissive of genuine complaints in the future. The way he brushes aside the women who actually disagree with him is a sign of someone who is enjoying the moral high ground too much to actually consider the desires of the people he's claiming to represent. This kind of "white knighting" is horribly counter-productive.
I think that there definitely *is* something that needs to be done to encourage greater female participation in the PHP community. There definitely *are* people whose behaviour is off-putting to women in very clear and unarguable ways, and they need to be told where to go in no uncertain terms. But this isn't it. A confident, inclusive and diverse community would have no problem with the 'PHPness' joke beyond the fact that it's just not a particularly great joke, and if we're not aiming to be that kind of community then we're getting something wrong.
Hi Rob, thanks for your comment.
DeleteI think you may have missed part of my post:
" Either way, it was off the mark as it took one criticism ("Your schtick is too male orientated") and decided to argue against it, as others so defensively did on Twitter it would seem, as some form of censorship alone. I don't doubt that some were thinking that, that perhaps it shouldn't have gone ahead, but is that really the only answer? Of course not."
It's a logical fallacy to pretend the discussion here has to be about no dick jokes or some/a lot of dick jokes. In particular, in this case, it's coming up with a sexual innuendo laden campaign that doesn't set it's stall to say "Hey, we're focusing this at a male orientated market, sorry women!"
It isn't enough to say that clearly some women enjoyed it and felt it spoke to them too, as that ignores those who may feel excluded. It's tyranny of the majority in action.
Given a choice between a place where no one can tell bad dick jokes, and no-one feels uncomfortable entering the arena, or people can make bad dick jokes but put people off of joining our community, I would take the former every time, but then I'm glad that we'll never, ever, be in a situation where two such choices are the only ones. I don't think we need to debase the conversation with debating techniques that attempt to belittle genuine contextually significant concerns because they appear to be less important or obvious as sexual assault.
I also think you meant "the only acceptable version" rather than "preferable". Or are you going to accept a world where everyone can be sexually assaulted if it's the only option? ;)
As for Aral, he's no more or less condescending than those that spurred him to storify the situation, that insist and imply (as the top tweet in the post does) that there isn't a problem here, as if your annecdotal opinion will over-ride the actual experiences and evidence from women that are made to feel like they can't fully participate in these environments. It may not be helpful the way he phrased that particular title, I'll agree there.
"This kind of "white knighting" is horribly counter-productive."
I find this argument keeps cropping up. I mean this in the nicest possible way, and not as any personal attack so please don't take it as such. Is this a jealousy thing? Envy? What is the counter-productive about someone who is part of the majority that causes a minority to feel shut out speaking up about it and pointing out where privilege and discrimination is happening?
He rightfully "brushes aside" women that disagree with him for the same reasons I detail in my post above...just because you have an anecdotal view that your experience should be how everyone else experiences the world doesn't make it so. Just because these women have been perhaps lucky enough to only enjoy the fun side of bad puns, doesn't mean the same can be said for all women. As I said, tyranny of the majority.
"A confident, inclusive and diverse community would have no problem with the 'PHPness' joke beyond the fact that it's just not a particularly great joke"
A confident, inclusive and diverse community would have made an inclusive and diverse joke, given this was at an event where all kinds of people and views were congregating to socialise, expand their networks and their knowledge. It can't really get much simpler than that.
"It's a logical fallacy to pretend the discussion here has to be about no dick jokes or some/a lot of dick jokes. In particular, in this case, it's coming up with a sexual innuendo laden campaign that doesn't set it's stall to say "Hey, we're focusing this at a male orientated market, sorry women!""
DeleteOK, maybe this is going to come down to a matter of taste and opinion about the joke concerned. I think it's legitimate to make a joke about email spam that everyone, male and female alike, receives. I don't think it's particularly different from making jokes about "one tip for a flat belly" advert that every crap website seems to have on it. The penis is incidental, and if all you see in the joke is the penis then, well, [insert bullshit Freudian comment here].
OK, I shouldn't have said it's a binary choice between jokes/no jokes. I can think of several broad responses to the joke (doubtless there are more nuances):
1) To make a joke which contains a homonym for 'penis' in an industry which traditionally suffers from a gender balance problem is irresponsible. Don't do it.
2) To make a joke which contains a homonym for 'penis' at any point is irresponsible. Don't do it.
3) To make a joke which contains a homonym for 'penis' is fine, because the joke isn't actually about the penis and it's not gender-exclusive.
4) To make a joke which contains a homonym for 'penis' is fine because it's just a piece of anatomy. What are we, puritans?
5) The knob gag has a fine and upstanding tradition in comedy. Get your feminist hands off my knob gag!
Of these, #5 is pretty disagreeable. My own position falls somewhere between #3 and #4 - when I imagine the world I want to live in, it's a world where we can make jokes which contain homonyms for 'penis' and nobody minds. I can respect position #2 although I disagree with it, and I find #1 persuasive. However, my approach to #1 would be to say that it's the gender imbalance that's the problem, not the joke. I suppose you could say that I want to make a world in which it's safe to make bad jokes, and I reject the notion that we have to choose between bad jokes vs. gender equality. It's possible that I'm being utopian here, and in the real world we do have to choose, and if I were forced to change my mind then I'd rather have the gender equality than the bad jokes, but I'd like to aim for the best possible world if I can. I'd be intrigued to know if my best possible world resembles yours, or if we actually fundamentally disagree here.
"It isn't enough to say that clearly some women enjoyed it and felt it spoke to them too, as that ignores those who may feel excluded. It's tyranny of the majority in action."
There's no way of arguing with this. If I say we can only go by the evidence of those who have told us what they think, you'll invoke those who felt excluded in silence.
If people are feeling excluded because of this joke, I'd rather ask "why do they feel excluded?", and I suspect that the answer is not "because this joke is inherently offensive and hurtful" but "this joke carries bad connotations because it refers obliquely to male anatomy in a situation where gender balance is problematic". My solution is to tackle the big, all-encompassing problem in the belief that the small, specific problem simply ceases to be a problem at that point.
(Apologies for the absurd comment length)
Delete"I find this argument keeps cropping up. I mean this in the nicest possible way, and not as any personal attack so please don't take it as such. Is this a jealousy thing? Envy? What is the counter-productive about someone who is part of the majority that causes a minority to feel shut out speaking up about it and pointing out where privilege and discrimination is happening?"
(I'm assuming that the person doing the speaking out in your description is Aral).
I find it annoying because it's so ham-fisted! It's not at all persuasive, it contains blanket attacks on an entire community, confuses issues of wildly varying levels of severity and prevalence, and is delivered in such a way that the author appears like someone who wants everyone to know how very enlightened he is in comparison to everyone else. The very worst thing is that I agree entirely that there's a massive gender balance problem, and I'm starting to think that people like Aral are doing more harm than good in the way that they address it. Aral comes out of this as "that guy who berates those two women for daring to make a knob joke, then claimed he was trying to teach everyone a lesson about sexism", which just isn't a good way of persuading people to take sexism more seriously as a problem.
I think there's an alternative argument to be made. Women in the tech community suffer a kind of double discrimination (if I were more confident with the terminology I'd probably mention 'intersectionality' here). They suffer discrimination by default from within the community because of their minority status, and they suffer discrimination from outside the community because, frankly, the world has only grudgingly admitted that men should be allowed to be geeky and still finds it unseemly for women. I think if you want to rally the tech community, you want to talk about how *everyone* has a right to be a geek/techie/whatever, how women are being denied this, and give people a positive vision of a future in which we can basically all be freewheeling geeks together. That means addressing those within the community who harass women, and also give a broad and robust defence of women's rights to freely choose and shape the culture that they want to be a part of. I just don't get that vibe from people like Aral, who seem, to me, to be overly negative and focused on telling people how (not) to behave rather than encouraging people to believe in a better world and trusting them to find the best ways there.
Now, I humbly submit that bad puns are, if not exactly a *fundamental* part of geek culture, at least a characteristic of it, and that deserves some consideration (I vaguely recall Gabriella Coleman argues that punning and wordplay are essential characteristics of geek humour in 'Coding Freedom'). I think that makes the argument that there's a fundamental incompatibility between female participation and bad knob puns problematic. If you end up arguing that women shouldn't be exposed to that kind of thing, and certainly shouldn't be enjoying it, you're making an argument that I don't recognise as being a pro-freedom one.
"He rightfully "brushes aside" women that disagree with him for the same reasons I detail in my post above...just because you have an anecdotal view that your experience should be how everyone else experiences the world doesn't make it so. Just because these women have been perhaps lucky enough to only enjoy the fun side of bad puns, doesn't mean the same can be said for all women. As I said, tyranny of the majority."
Geek women who like knob jokes are the majority of what, now? Seriously, do their opinions count for nothing? Going back to my previous paragraph, I think it's quite dangerous to assume that you know what's good for women rather than letting them determine that for themselves.
"I think it's quite dangerous to assume that you know what's good for women rather than letting them determine that for themselves."
ReplyDeleteThis is the crux of the issue...I don't presume to know what's best for women. If they enjoy knob gags that's fine. If they don't enjoy knob gags and laddish behaviour, overtly sexualised environments and being treated like someone that isn't the primary focus of those that are organising things, then that is also fine.
What's "good for women" is that none of them feel excluded from something because it goes beyond their (reasonable) personal boundaries or self-worth. In that sense those, like yourself, defending what's gone on are indeed presuming you know what's good for women...which is that if you want to be involved in the social side, you have to change to be happy with being one of the guys.