~bma / journal / tags / sexism

It’s not often you see something that manages to perpetuate stupid beliefs about gender at the same time as demonstrating yet another way to invade someone’s privacy with Javascript, but this article manages it. Apparently, it looks at your browser history and guesses whether you’re male or female based on the sites you’ve visited. Now, I’m not convinced that there’s a significant gender bias for most sites, and looking at the results it looks like a sizable proportion of them were wrong ("oh noes ur site thinkz im a gurl!!!!111"). It bugs me that people even bother, though.

What’s more concerning, as Simon points out, is that apparently any site that can use javascript (i.e., any site you don’t disable it for) can find out what sites you’ve been to just by creating a link and checking whether the CSS style is :visited. I think I’m going to have to install NoScript again, despite having to use Javascript for work…

Wow, what an astonishing lot of bollocks this Cardinal Rouco has come out with. Typically for a Catholic spokesman [1], he manages to make a lot of claims (about how wonderful and perfect "God’s law" is) without even a shred of evidence – after all, why would he need evidence? He’s speaking on behalf of God!

I especially love the nonsense he’s spouting about "biological limits". Though he’s far from clear, I think he’s trying to make two points: a) that legal rights for gay people have come about because of "gender ideology" – feminism? – and b) that "gender ideology" is somehow opposed to human biology. I can’t be bothered commenting any further on this bigot.

Ellen Degeneres interviews Sen. John McCain; he’s completely unable to give a reason why gay people should be allowed to marry other than "it’s my belief! you can’t argue with my belief! lalalalala!". (To be fair, he does support civil unions and opposes the banning of same-sex partnerships, but that’s sort of the point – he supports everything except calling it marriage, with no readily-apparent reason).

The F-Word talks about why viability shouldn’t matter. It’s argued that forcing a woman to carry an unwanted child to term is exactly like forcing someone to donate an organ against their will – no matter how worthy the recipient, the donor always has the right to refuse to use their body to support another person’s life.

Some whisky company came out with adverts promoting stone-age gender roles, and this was the response, including things like "your mom built fighter jets", "your mom played sports", and "your mom was a pilot".

So, some guy has decided that by going to conventions with a group of his mates and asking random women if he can grope their breasts, he’s somehow being feminist and sexually liberating.

I cannot even begin to express how completely and disgustingly moronic and sexist that is. Fortunately, other people have expressed it much more eloquently than I can; I don’t really have much to add to the discussion.

Seriously, what kind of stupid fuck is he? I found this sentence, right at the beginning, particularly moronic:

"…I wish this was the kind of world where say, ‘Wow, I’d like to touch your breasts,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful."

The problem there is simple: you might say that the mind is at least as important as the body, but the fact that you could even make (or agree with) the above statement says exactly the opposite – that the body is more important, so much so that you’re more interested in copping a feel of a woman than you are in getting to know her first. It’s not so much disturbing that this guy could think like this as mind-numbingly, frustratingly stupid.

Another one that was just disturbing was:

By the end of the evening, women were coming up to us. "My breasts," they asked shyly, having heard about the project. "Are they… are they good enough to be touched?" And lo, we showed them how beautiful their bodies were without turning it into something tawdry.

As some of the commenters on the original article have pointed out, there’s a whole load of judgemental bullshit about body image and so on tied up in that, like these guys are being generous enough to show women how beautiful their breasts are (because obviously that’s the only part of a woman that matters), and the women are lucky enough to have participated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for anything that’ll encourage women – and men – to stop worrying about their appearance, but this is really not the way.

There’s another cringingly moronic discussion on Matthew Garrett’s blog, where some other guy actually attempts to argue that by criticising this "project", people are disadvantaging the (vanishingly small minority of) women who don’t mind being groped by strangers; the obvious argument being that if a woman wants to be groped by strangers, she has many opportunities, whereas the women who don’t tend not to get the option – especially, apparently, at conventions.

Another thing that puzzles me – that again, several people have already pointed out – is, why would you want to grope some random stranger? It kind of devalues the whole thing; there’s no intimacy or whatever there, which I’d always assumed was the whole point of sexual interaction. It comes back to the whole mind-versus-body thing: if the person you’re groping is a stranger, you don’t know their mind, so they’re just a body to you – why would you even want to? Being sexually liberated doesn’t mean that you have to grope strangers, or allow yourself to be groped by strangers; again, other people make this point better than I can. I don’t think I’m expressing this very well, really.

Finally, a comparatively minor point, but what the bloody hell does it have to do with open-source? For a start, I’d rather not be associated with your moronic schemes to get your hands on a pair of breasts, ta very much, and I doubt many other people in the free software community would either. Geeks have a bad enough reputation as it is for being a bunch of guys (I use the word "guys" intentionally, because that’s certainly how geeks are seen by a lot of people) with no social skills and an overwhelming desire to get laid, without people going around and demonstrating that the stereotype is occasionally accurate. Quite aside from that, the term just makes no sense when applied to something that’s not software.

Update: via isako, two entries from his blog that suggest he’s not so much naïve, as I’d assumed, as typically sexist: arguing that if women dress provocatively, they’re "asking for" male attention. Hurray patriarchy!

It’s a little disturbing to see people–especially Debian developers–expressing opinions like this, this, or this. Thankfully, there are also people expressing opinions like this, this, this, and this to counter it.

It’s bad enough trying to argue that opposition to sexism is "censorship", but just claiming that "Of course we are sexists…Love it or get the fuck out of there." is just idiotic. And saying that lesbians "are compared to a threesome quite favorably" isn’t sexism is just ridiculous–unless you actually believe that lesbians exist for your own pleasure (I’ll leave you to decide just how ridiculous this is); likewise, it’s not "talking about sex" that’s offensive but treating women as if they exist only for the benefit of men.

Debian is meant to be for everybody–regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or anything else at all. However, if your behaviour makes it more difficult for other groups to contribute (i.e., because you’re a sexist arse), then that’s just not acceptable, and if you don’t like it then that’s tough.

(I’m not on Planet Debian, where the argument was taking place, but I am on Planet Debian Community; maybe people to whom this applies will see this, maybe not, but I felt the need to rant anyway.)

An email I just sent to the University’s Equality and Diversity Office (intranet link, sorry):

I’d like to express my concern tha, although posters around the campus warn that racism and homophobia will not be tolerated, they make no mention of sexism. Does the University believe that sexism is not a problem any more, or that it’s less important than racism or homophobia?

While racism and homophobia are, of course, serious issues, and the University’s policy towards them is admirable, sexism is also a serious issue and should be taken just as seriously.

Let’s see what they say.