I am not sure if I should write about this or not.
Reading the Ubuntu Planet today I noticed a post about sexism written by Melissa Drapper.
Interestingly, she points as a subtle sign of sexism a post by Emgent, where he made her grandma try to crack a wireless network with the last version of a Python tool.
I read it again. And again. Really ?
It’s not that sexism isn’t a problem, but are you sure of what you’re claiming, there ? I find the crying wolves tale to apply pretty well here:
The Boy Who Cried Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable attributed to Aesop (210 in Perry’s numbering system[1]). The protagonist of the fable is a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by calling out “Wolf!”. Nearby villagers who came to his rescue found that the alarms were false and that they had wasted their time. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and the wolf ate the flock (and in some versions the boy). The moral is stated at the end of the fable as:
Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed. The liar will lie once, twice, and then perish when he tells the truth. [wikipedia]
While obviously, nobody is lying here, screaming out at non issues will just make you go unnoticed when a worthy issue happens.
I also find her post dis-respectful to Emanuele in a number of ways.
- Who told you Emanuele’s grandpa is still alive ?
- Are you claiming he is subtly sexist ?
Not to say that if I were emgent’s granpa and he came to me with that black thing asking me to “crack a wireless” I would just have just ran after him with a baseball bat and threatening him to stick the black thing where the sun – well he knows where. 
So, why not doing some real work ?
Another matter I find interesting is the post title “Starting somewhere’.
Since sexism is out there (and I’m not certainly talking about Ubuntu grandmas) , and there are some sensitive places to monitor, such as the forums and IRC channels, why not starting the work from there, and tackling some real issues ? For more real I mean issues that raise sexism concerns in a less contestable way.
Also kindly asking people who don’t agree with you to shut up is not really an option (see the comments linked from such post).
Since sexism is a real issue, tackle it in the approriate places and then report your findings and results on the planet. False positives don’t help the cause.
That’s to say
I really think Melissa should apologize to Emgent.
Stefan.
Since I have absolutely no grandparents alive, should I have used that to derail? I could have, but I did not, because that is simply not rational or fair.
I am not claiming that Emanuele as a person is sexist. I’ve seen him around enough to know that he as a person is not. I am however saying that what he did made me uncomfortable in my gender — that somehow l am going to be classified into an ability group based on my ovaries, rather than my actual ability — and especially alienated since I’ve already spoken up about it once before with the same medium.
Edited: link corrected by the admin
Good post. I too think that an apology is due.
The wolf thing might be appropriate if Ms. Draper were filling your own inbox with e-mails asking you to take some sort of action. The shepherd boy literally rallied the town to action to defend his sheep against the non-existent wolves, to the point that people were no longer willing to rally to his cry.
However, that isn’t the case here. She posts her own thoughts to her blog, and people are allowed to take them or leave them — and in this case, many of the people who read them get a positive impression. I, for one, agree that the grandma post has an element of sexism to it. It isn’t a hateful sexism, but the very fact that an elderly woman is assumed to be lacking tech savvy in our society speaks directly towards the attitudes we’re trying to change.
If we are successful, and call out sexism enough times, then in another 50 years when our current computer users are great-grandparents, it won’t be funny to post pictures of the elderly using high-tech gadgets. I will give you any odds that when Melissa Draper is 90 years old, it will still be in her capacity to geek out over the latest gadgetry.
So, the real problem here is that you feel like your patience is being tried. Signs of sexism which aren’t sufficiently overt and obvious for your tastes strike you as being quite unworthy of attention. Fine. As a male member of the community, you have the privilege of tuning those voices out and not sweating the lightweight prejudice.
But just because you close your eyes doesn’t mean you to get to tell the people who are feeling oppressed, what is and is not oppression. It is not your place, it is not your experience, and it is not your expertise, so when you don’t feel like engaging with those thoughts, please just busy yourself with something else.