Repost from theimpossiblegirl.co.uk April 2009

This guy doesn’t get it. Brief background: At The Golden Gate Ruby Conference Matt Aimonetti gave a talk on “CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star”. There’s more about it here and some perspectives from women here.

Now Matt’s post tries to explain why he’s, basically, not at fault. Example:

It genuinely was not my intention to cause offense. People may be driven by personal choice or cultural background to take offense at any number of things, of course, but I think there is always a clear difference between trying to offend people vs people choosing to take offense.

My view is that offending someone is walking up to them and saying: “You suck, your code sucks and your partner’s code sucks!”.

This is the classic “it’s more offensive for you to say I’m a sexist than for me to actually be sexist!” response. People with an agenda (usually those sneaky feminists) choose to find something offensive so they can have a whine and call someone mean names, like “sexist”. But what’s at stake here isn’t that the presentation was offensive per se, but that the context was inappropriate and potentially alienating to women developers, in an environment that’s already default male by dint of numbers.

There’s also the classic “you could just ignore it if you don’t like it” defence:

In the case of my talk, people knew what to expect, they *picked* the talk, and were warned by the organizers before I started that I would be using imagery potentially offensive to some. The topic of my talk was obvious, and I would have hoped that people who were likely to be offended would have simply chosen not to attend my talk or read my slides on the internet. It’s like complaining that television has too much material unsuitable for children, yet not taking steps to limit their viewing of it. You can’t have it both ways.

This presumes that people who don’t like pictures of naked women went along just so they could complain. But even if everyone who thought they might not like the talk didn’t go, it’ll still be wrong to show it; the very presence of such a slideshow at the event creates an atmosphere where women are “them”, where some content is made solely for men, but as if “male” is “default”.

I’m coming at this from the angle of someone who enjoys in-jokes and geekiness, and as a feminist with a strong anti-censorship line on pornography (you can read some of my previous writing on the subject for Solidarity here). I can see it’s not squeamishness about quirky talks or adult images that’s motivating a lot of the anger about this in the blogosphere (again, easy to paint women who object as stereotypical screeching conservatives right?). It’s the fact the talk created an atmosphere of macho-posturing.

And it doesn’t matter if it was intentional – no one really thinks Matt sat down and schemed to offend women in advance, and by refocusing on intention Matt is able to get away with all that “poor little me” stuff in his post, as if his whole character has been impugned.

Newsflash: there’s a difference between saying “you’re a sexist/racist/homophobe” and “some of the stuff you just did/said contributed to the sexist/racist/homophobic culture around X”.

Message to Ruby developers who think this is out of control/proportion/just a bit silly: all your rights to nod sympathetically/join in when someone bemoans the lack of women developers are entirely removed (for ever) if when women do speak up, you pull this self-pitying, I’m-a-nice-guy-really, its-not-my-fault, thats-just-the-way-I-roll, stop-complaining bullshit. And if those who complained then get painted as moralistic, shrill and angry for the sake of it.

There are various posts up and around about why this has become a blame game, and that it’s counter-productive. It wouldn’t be a blame game if there had been less bombastic denial and more listening on the part of the speaker in the first place. Blame games stop when someone puts their hands up and scrutinises their behaviour. So get on with it.

(For anyone who’s spent time around the feminist blogosphere, maybe 2-3 years ago, this topic reminds me of “where are all the women bloggers”…)