Tag Archives for misogyny

Here it is! Anita Sarkeesian: “Damsel in Distress: Part 1 – Tropes vs Women in Video Games”

Anita Sarkeesian’s first piece investigating representations of women in video games is here at last!

This is just the first in what should be an excellent (and well-backed – one nice ramification of the trauma) series. If you don’t know the background, visit the links Sarkeesian provides at the YouTube page (or watch her talk at TED, also embedded below).

So far I find this work to be compelling, educational, and essential. Leanne says we should share this with our daughter, who is virtually growing up online. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you Anita!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q%5D [youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q%5D

The Perverting of The Technically Women

In 2010 I was honored to be asked to join a group of women I greatly admired at a blog about and by women in technology called technicallywomen.com. Don’t go there yet — wait till I explain…

I had known many of the awesome women behind this beautiful site with kickass technical commentary, particularly via Twitter, and perhaps you do too:

… and several more that I got to know after becoming involved.

I wrote about my first post here and contributed a couple more pieces as time continued its hectic pace.

Back in 2010, the fantastically designed site (thanks @yojibee) looked like this:

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Courtesy of Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20110201210327/http://technicallywomen.com/

Unfortunately, many of us straddle a big crisis of time between jobs, families, community activism, and life and beyond (for women, they call this “work/life ‘balance'”), so the blog, and the domain, eventually lapsed from our hands. Thanks to a tip from co-technically-woman-blogger Susan Scrupski, I went to check it out again today.

Because of our lapse, today, the site at technicallywomen.com looks like this:

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When I looked up the domain registration, I was sadly unsurprised to find that Go Daddy is involved in hosting the “redesign.” But while we’re at it, check out these “helpful” alternates provided by whois – which would let us branch out beyond technical topics into the wild and feminine domains of fashion, hair, health, and just being good ladies:

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Finding the actual registrant will seem to be a little more problematic, since the site is now registered through DomainsByProxy, proudly flaunting that “Your identity is nobody’s business but ours,” right alongside links to complaints, concerns, and law enforcement:

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It obviously behooves us in general to keep on top of domain registrations to protect them and our content, but did it really behoove some anonymous creep to co-opt a domain about technical women and turn it into site purporting to sell soiled panties?

And is it a right, in this case, for that creep’s identity, assisted by DomainsByProxy and hosted by Go Daddy, to be ‘nobody’s business but ours”?

In this case, you may say the “harm” caused is negligible “if any,” and anonymity in general is obviously key to a free Internet. Should anonymity, however, leave us with no recourse should the harms be greater?

The awesome @yojibee is working on next steps, and though no doubt we’ll all continue to be busier than ever and some things will continue to slip through our hands.  But with countless stories and more every day of the systematic shaming of women away from technical careers, with more women scared into hiding offline for fear of identity theft, porn, cyberbullying, suicide, and worse (thanks Sarah Parmenter, Anita Sarkeesian, Amanda Todd), who and what do we really need to protect?

I don’t have an answer, but it seems like we as a whole, as citizens of the Internet and the world, need to be better than this.

Aaron Swartz on Misogyny: “I despair of it ever getting fixed”

I didn’t know too much about Aaron Swartz in 2007, when Philipp Lenssen published this refreshingly candid chat with him, nor do I know too much more about him now beyond the major tributes he’s received since his death on Friday, but the things he said nearly six years ago in that interview affected me so poignantly that I published an internal piece pointing to it and will always have a great impression of him because of it:

If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse.

I really noticed this when I was at foo camp once, Tim O’Reilly’s exclusive gathering for the elite of the tech community. The executive guys there, when they thought nobody else was around, talked about how they always held important business meetings at strip clubs and the deficiencies of programmers from various countries.

Meanwhile, foo camp itself had a session on discrimination in which it was explained to us that the real problem was not racism or sexism, but simply the fact that people like to hang out with others who are like themselves.

The denial about this in the tech community is so great that sometimes I despair of it ever getting fixed. And I should be clear, it’s not that there are just some bad people out there who are being prejudiced and offensive. Many of these people that I’m thinking of are some of my best friends in the community. It’s an institutional problem, not a personal one.

It’s enough of a despair to think that we haven’t moved very far on the “misogyny in tech” topic in these six years, much less to live with the idea that we can never do anything about it.  What is clear is that we’ve lost an ally and a man of brilliance. Thanks for your words, Aaron.