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May 17, 2013 10:58
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Open Source Is Not A Warzone. Not Every Man Is A Dick. | |
We are women of tech. We do Open Source. We are part of Open Source | |
communities. | |
We attend tech conferences, usergroups and hackathons along with our | |
fellow male developers. | |
And we like it. | |
We feel the overwhelming majority of men we have to deal with being | |
any variety of a sensible person - some are even nice guys we like. | |
Yes, we encountered dicks in our lives. Yes, we have been assaulted in | |
our lives, maybe in broad daylight, in public. Yes, we've been hit on | |
tastelessly and repeatedly and we have been disgusted and annoyed and | |
sometimes we have been near panic. Some of us have encountered | |
violence. We've gotten grabbed our asses, gotten felt up our boobs, | |
have been stared at, wolf whistles at us and had some drunken moron | |
hang in front of us. Yes, some of us have hit the proverbial glass | |
ceiling in our careers. | |
This is (a bad) part of our lives and yes, we judge social gathering and | |
human encounters by how comfortable we are and how safe we feel and by | |
their level of open or veiled dickishness. | |
But this is only ONE aspect of being a woman and we do not like to let | |
this aspect dominate how we live and behave within the tech | |
communities of our choice. | |
We feel the recent tendency of developing "codes of conducts" and | |
rules and regulations just for technology conferences and other | |
tech-related gatherings goes far beyond our reality we have | |
encountered so far. | |
We do not support the generalization of spreading guilt onto an entire | |
gender and we do not like to put each and every of our fellow | |
community attendees under general suspicion. | |
We also see a gathering of tech people as a professional event. | |
Therefore we expect all people to behave along the lines of what | |
Open Source communities regard as "professionalism". Recent events of | |
tasteless presentations for example created an level of outrage which | |
has been more than enough to make a point. | |
We also like to keep the vocabulary appropriate: An "assault" is an | |
act of violence, an agressive act to overpower a person. We do not | |
feel being hit on tastelessly being an assault. A blunt stare into | |
our cleavage is not an assault. Someone accidently touching us is not | |
an assault. The typical french pseudo-kiss-hug is a cultural thing | |
and not an assault. A hug might be a completely friendly act and not | |
an assault - even if it might not be welcome. | |
We also like to think logically and as women of tech, we might even | |
argue with statistics: Considering we're about 1% - 20% (which already | |
is a revolutionary high count of women) of any given community, | |
encountering 2 dicks at a 500 people conference are AMAZING odds - | |
nowhere else in our every day lives the odds are THAT good. | |
Let's also argue with legal issues: How is any code of conduct | |
actually help against assaults, rape or getting beaten up? All this is | |
illegal ANYWAYS in most places of the world. There already IS | |
a code of conduct in place - the law - as biased and weak it | |
sometimes might be. | |
And let's face it: No real dick will be put off by a code of conduct | |
helplessly condemning all kinds of unwelcome behavior - that's why | |
they're dicks - but a huge portion of men will keep to themselves | |
ridden by guilt because they're the ones actually thinking sensibly and | |
will ask themselves about their own dickishness. | |
We prefer taste, professionalism and behavior being created by living | |
a culture of taste, fun, substance and standards and not by writing a | |
long list of forbidden unpleasant things. We prefer to stand up | |
against dickish behavior when it happens. | |
But we also see Open Source gatherings as a social event and we're | |
going to actually say it in public: At a social event *gasp* | |
sexuality, friendship, teasing or flirting might happen. This is part | |
of humans living with each other. We consider the sexual liberation of | |
the 70ies as progress which gave us women new liberties to live as we | |
choose. We will not give up on that. | |
We see ourselves in the tradition of empowering feminism, of | |
emancipation by having learned to say No, by being able to defend | |
ourselves and we do not want to be indirectly victimized by | |
overarching acts of protection by condemning basically every social | |
behavior between men and women. | |
We are women of Perl and we're actually quite happy with our | |
community. | |
(You might be part of a completely different community and still agree | |
- let me know. :) | |
And so are others who shall remain unnamed. | |
Yours, truly - Su-Shee (Susanne Schmidt), castaway (Jess Robinson), | |
gshank (Gerda Shank), ether (Karen Etheridge), druthb (D Ruth | |
Bavousett), auggy (Augustina Ragwitz), Lady Aleena | |
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