I think I just sprained something from rolling my eyes so hard

[tim]

Why I want to set the entire open-source community on fire sometimes: the comments on this post and this post. (The latter of which is from one of my ex-bosses although I ran into it randomly, w00.)

Apparently, if you suggest that using a picture of a woman's bare ass on the title slide of a technical talk might not be the best idea if you want to make women feel welcome in CS, that is ~censorship~. I also can't decide whether it's those comments are the most special, or the ones asking whether also including pictures of naked men in the slides would have made it OK. Also see: examples of more or less every tactic mentioned in the link to "Derailing for Dummies" I posted before this.

I guess it's another entry for the Male Programmer Privilege Checklist. Also, I feel like I need to burn some more reddit karma, brb.

Comments

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

"What does this have to do with your topic?"
"I wanted to keep people's attention."
"We came here to see technical presentations. What does this have to do with your topic?"

Next time someone should put a bunch of baboon asses on their slides, just because.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

> 1. Code doesn’t care what gender you are, and code is what matters.

A challenge for language designers, there.

[ssaiscps.livejournal.com]

Oh man. What is wrong with some people?

Also, shouldn't the privilege list include things that are not blatantly awful? This is like one of the example at a sexual harassment training workshop that seems too outrageous to actually happen nowadays. (I'm sure my thinking this kind of thing is quite rare is some kind of male privilege...)

bllllll

[tgies.livejournal.com]

what i have generally found is that the open source community is a misogynist cesspool of anarcho-capitalist manchildren.

[kake]

Here, borrow my lighter.

[ivy]

Yep. Talking about running a women in security conference last night, we spent a depressing amount of time thinking about all the sucktastic things that we could possibly have to deal with. Bonus fun: schooling a couple of my well meaning male friends as to why something like that might be appealing to women, as opposed to being arrant elitist sexist meaniehood.

[sethg]

Whatever happened to attracting the audience's attention by showing pictures of cute happy babies?

[sammka.livejournal.com]

ZOMG I actually clicked through the presentation and I'm pretty sure I'd have either walked out or punched someone if I had to sit through it. It's so beyond just a picture of an ass... my "favorite" is the picture of the fat woman (haha, she's not sexy!) as an illustration of how scaling is problematic.

Lately when people try the formal gender equality arguments (what about if we showed some scantily clad men?) I have responded with the recent study showing that if you show sexist men pictures of scantily clad women, they become even less able than usual to use the social centers of their brains when dealing with women. Women, even "sexist, anti-male" feminists like me, who see scantily clad men don't have this problem. What's that common line I hear from sexist guys? It's not sexist if it's based on reality? Yeah, that! Surely they understand that this same principle has to apply even when instead of meaning that women can't code/do math/be competitive/have a frigging career, it means that they can't look at naked women in a professional environment because they (or at least some of them) can't handle it. So sad.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I "enjoyed" the comment from the original presenter, where he said that maybe he should have added some gay porn (hello, male gaze), and that he was not neither sexist, how dare you say such a thing!