This post was inspired by Matt Garrett’s blog post which was in turn inspired by John Scalzi’s essay “Straight White Male – the lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. Scalzi followed up his broadside with a number of related salvos, and got well over a thousand replies, many of which were more than just attaboys or whining apologism. If you’ve got bunches of time, go read the whole thing. But it’s not entirely necessary to read those posts in order to understand the question that I want to ask.
Garrett (who I read because I’m tracking his very interesting technical work with EFI) spoke less generally, writing specifically about misogyny in the Free Open Source Software subculture, both real and perceived, purposeful and inadvertent. There’s quite a bit of all the above, if you’re looking for it. But for some reason, it mostly goes ignored.
Now, whenever anybody talks about White Male Privilege In Capital Letters, the discussion always spins into tale-telling about the various unbelievably insensitive things otherwise reasonable people have said or done, or into condemnation of individuals and groups who have purposely done ludicrously inappropriate things, or recommendations for excommunication and chastisement of such people, or inane defenses of indefensible positions and/or unchangeable realities. I’m not interested in any of that, but you can probably find all you need in those departments over at the boing.
But I wanna talk about something else.
In limnology there’s the concept of “indicator species”. You can determine, by sampling the number and types of micro-organisms in a flowing stream, what damage that stream has suffered in the past. If there’s no brook trout, no margeritiferae, but lots of certain types of diatoms, then a paper mill had a concrete dam upstream in the 1930s. Usually the diagnosis is not so exact, I’m just giving a hypothetical example. (Sometimes, though, it’s even more exact.)
It’s been pointed out that although the Free Software community has plenty of straight white males, it’s also reasonably accepting to gay white males, and has not a few Christians, Zionists, and Wiccans. It’s not like there’s no diversity at all, but then again it’s got unusually few blacks and females. I’m sure there are many other weird demographic quirks that I’m not aware of (and I don’t mean to pretend I have studied the participation of any of the groups I mentioned – it’s just my personal perception).
I know it’s important, within a community, to prevent the growth of forces that discourage diversity. Diversity and inclusiveness bring strength and vigor. Group success is strongly influenced by altruism within the group – Friedman and Rand were wrong, sociopathy and greed aren’t actually virtues – and it seems fairly obvious that we can benefit our group by encouraging inclusive diversity and mutual altruism. So, we don’t need to focus on kicking people out because they are insensitive boors, we need to bring more people in, giving insensitive boors the opportunity to grow through personal interaction with the group as a whole, and decreasing the likelihood that group values will be dominated by the value systems of people with limited viewpoints (either privileged or unprivileged). And clearly that’s part of the argument here – some people want to solve the problem by kicking out anyone they identify as part of “the problem”. That makes no sense in the context of altruism towards group members; enlightenment is a better response than expulsion.
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Still not quite what I want to talk about. Because I have a question, not an answer.
When you attend a Unitarian Universalist church, or one of the more enlightened branches of Judaism, you find there are more gay members, proportionally, than in the local population. The cause of this is well understood – most other religions discriminate against gay, lesbian and transgendered people, and they quite naturally prefer to go where they can participate in religion without condemnation or deceit. Disproportionally high gay membership, in this case, turns out to be an indicator – something that tells you a great deal about what the religion does, and what the membership believes, and something about the forces that formed the church. So it comes as no surprise that such churches were heavily involved with the Underground Railroad before the US Civil War; their members will always refuse to countenance unethical social discrimination merely because it is a part of mainstream culture, and they are willing to suffer the condemnation of their neighbors for acting in accordance with their beliefs.
So now, finally, here’s what I want to ask: how did we get here? What does it say about the forces that formed our community – and by this, I mean the Free and Open Source Software community, although I am part of several others – that we can take gay white male participation in stride, and gay white males don’t generally have any major problems coping with the inevitable homophobes within the community, but we can’t seem to build a culture that makes women feel comfortable, able to deal with the inevitable misogynists, and able to make a contribution that will be valued? What the hell happened? What influenced and informed the creation of a club that can inspire women to feel despair or rage at the obliviousness and/or dismissiveness of the group as a whole towards misogyny?
I’ve often found that problems are insoluble without a deep understanding of their sources. Other people are trying to find solutions, or ways to avoid acknowledging any problem exists that can be solved. I want to know the roots of the problem, the reasons why we don’t seem to reflect the community from which we are drawn – the people educated enough to write good code and affluent enough to spend time doing it. What if, instead of saying the problem is this or that person, or this or that attitude, we figure out why the group is so strongly influenced by that sort of person or attitude?
Angry, marginalized women in our community are an indicator, not just of the existence of a problem, but of the problem’s source and dimensions. The disproportionately high numbers of males and whites are two more indicators. So what is that source? Why is it still influencing us, why haven’t we grown past it yet?
Nobody actually reads my blog (I flatter myself that this is because I haven’t told anyone it exists) so I don’t expect any problem dealing with moderation of replies. Be patient, imaginary reader! If you grace me with a useful insight, I will let your post be seen in the fullness of time.