Man Up, and Walk Out

There have been two significant controversies recently regarding pornographic presentations at programmer’s conferences. The two presentations — one at GoGaRuCo titled “CouchDB: Perform Like a Pron Star” and an afternoon keynote at Flashbelt — were on programming subjects; it’s not like these were aimed at Web pornographers or anything. Both the speakers are good programmers, and I’m not out to lynch them, but they were both way over the line.

I don’t have anything to say to the speakers that hasn’t been said. I hope they learn from their mistakes, admit that they were mistakes, and find a way to present their ideas without relying on the crutch of showing genitalia to a crowd of programmers.

What I think I can contribute to the discussion is to talk to the audience, especially to the men in the audience. Obviously, in any crowd, there are going to be a few who laugh at the “jokes,” who join right in the sexualization and objectification, and they’re not going to listen to me anyway. But the reasonable men, the men who were made uncomfortable but just sat silently through the presentation? You’re the ones I’m talking to.

At GoGaRuCo, arguably the less offensive of the two presentations, here is what it felt like for women in the audience:

Only six women at the conference… it explains everything, of course the majority liked it!

Denise

In any case, this is a good example of how insular the software development environment is. It is a boy’s club, where locker-room behavior is overlooked, and indeed, not even acknowledged.

Julia Evans

We don’t yet live in a nudist paradise where people don’t have hang-ups about sex issues. It doesn’t matter if you think other people should stop being “prudes”, it was obvious that the images would make some people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. If the conference wasn’t intended to make everyone feel welcome, then what was it? A club.

Renai Fox

The key is the right to complain safely. When complaints are predictably met with accusations of “overreacting”, “political correctness”, and “intolerance”, the resulting message is: Be like us, be silent, or leave.

Catherine Devlin

I’m a minority in this community. I know that, and generally I can ignore it and go along thinking it’s a meritocracy of ideas and code. Then I encounter a woman’s thonged rear on the screen at a conference, 20 feet tall, and I remember, oh yeah, people like me don’t belong here. To most of these men around me, I am, at best, an oddity, and at worst, a sexual target.

Sarah Mei

What might have been a short, juvenille, eye-rolling bit of humor continued throughout the talk to become increasingly disturbing. Amidst this normally warm, welcoming community, I spent an uncomfortable half hour wondering if I had somehow found myself in 1975.… This technique was distracting and disrespectful to an audience who, frankly, is turned on by code. This crowd had just watch hour upon hour of code slide shows and live irb sessions, often on the edge of their seats

Sarah Allen

Here’s the best sum of the problem I’ve read, from catamorphism on reddit: “It’s a question of whether you as a speaker want to remind women, explicitly, that you see them as sex objects first and as professional colleagues second.” I don’t care how edgy and hip you are, it’s not appropriate to do that in the context of programming, and if DHH (and, it seems, the larger Rails community) doesn’t get that? Rails is still a ghetto.

Sarah Mei

As reasonable men, what do we learn from this? Let’s talk about the damage done to the things we love.

If we allow these incidents to pass by unchallenged, we damage the reputation of our communities on several levels: Ruby, Rails, Flash, programmers, geeks. We damage the reputation of men in general, by reinforcing the idea that we’re all in tacit agreement with the speakers and their techniques. We damage women who code by making them unwelcome in the fields they want to contribute to. We damage girls who might get into coding, by making them unwilling to enter the field. We damage the strength of our communities (again, the whole stack: Ruby, Rails, Flash, programmers and geeks), because we are denying the contribution of the women we turn away.

Now obviously, not every man in the audience was comfortable with the content. But understand how much damage is done. I argue that waiting until the end, shaking your head, and moving on to the next talk is not enough. If you are in this situation, the right thing to do — the manly thing to do — is to walk out. Pointedly walk out. Stand up, say “this isn’t what I came for” loud enough for others to hear, and make your way to the door, not in that slinking don’t-look-at-me way we head for the door when our cell phone rings, but with the confidence of someone who is Walking Out.

Because what happens when we don’t? What happens when we let it slide? We become part of the crowd, and we are perceived as being unified with the folks who approve of the content:

I was shocked that this was considered appropriate material for a conference about innovative developments in the world of flash and the greater creative field. And that I’d paid to see this. And that a number of people laughed at his jokes — perhaps because probably 90-95% of the people there were male.

Geek Girls Guide

So that’s my plea. If you’re a man in the audience and this sort of thing happens, don’t let it slide. Man up, and walk the hell out. Maybe someone else will follow you, or maybe it’ll just be you. But there’s a world of difference between ‘all the men in the room laughed’ and ‘even one of the men in the audience walked out.’ Be that difference, and maybe the next generation of Ruby (or Flash, or Java, or PHP) programmers won’t be 95% male, and our communities will be healthier for having a little diversity.

I’m going to close with a few more quotes, that do not come directly from responses to these talks, but are about feminism in general. I think reasonable men need to be reminded, every now and then, of just what women are up against, still.

You, dear male reader, are totally not one of those men. I know this, and I appreciate it. I really do. But here’s where all this victimy girl shit concerns you: …You are missing an opportunity to help stop the bad guys. [You] and the guys you hang out with may not really mean anything by it when you talk about crazy bitches and dumb sluts and heh-heh-I’d-hit-that and… I get that you don’t really mean that shit. I get that you’re just talking out your ass.

But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side. As long as we live in a culture where the good guys sometimes sound just like the misogynists, the misogynists are never going to get the message….

On Being a No-Name Blogger Using Her Real Name

It’s hard. I get it. I don’t speak up every time I should, I stew in silence when I should be speaking out, I understand. No one, especially not someone who loves you, is going to hate you for not speaking up.

But consider carefully what you are saying when you don’t say anything at all. Silence is speech.

Anna

It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in geekland. There’s [a] positive correlation between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland. It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that”… So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, “Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.”

What Some Folks Can Do, If They Choose

…You are never going to eliminate all of the unconscious assumptions that your privilege — whatever that privilege might be — has programmed you with. You do not have to devote your entire life to crusading against sexism or racism or ableism any other kind of -ism there is. What makes you not That Guy is recognizing that you have that privilege, that your experience is not everyone’s experience, and — this is the critical part — not assuming or behaving as though your perspective is the only perspective and anyone who doesn’t match it is wrong.

Don’t Be That Guy

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Permalink | June 12th, 2009

Posted by Dan Hallock | Filed under Computer Stuff, Politics