[clug] Being polite on the list - or: Geek Feminism 101

[Jack Kelly]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 12:56 AM, David Tulloh<david at tulloh.id.au> wrote:
> Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
>> n.b. What is the 'male' equivalent of 'feminism'? menimism? minism?
> chauvinism
I'm offended by that*. Saying "offence is in the eye of the beholder"
isn't logically sound, because it permits people getting offended by
"hello". If I walk up to you, let fly with a barrage of insults, then
I shouldn't be surprised when you're offended. Alternatively, if I use
language and tone that has not appeared to cause offence in previous
discussions, I have a much better chance of a: not offending people,
and b: being taken seriously.

Where do we learn what language patterns are acceptable? By prior
experience, and here is the problem. The use of language will then end
up describing the set of people there, and possibly excluding people
outside that set. Because we don't have visitors from
somewhere-in-the-vicinity-of-Betelgeuse or non-sentient blobs of
protoplasm in our groups very often, we don't bother expanding our
language to include them (sorry Zoogrek), which is probably OK until
SETI come up with something. However, it's extremely difficult to
dispute the fact that women exist, which means that environments that
exclude or discriminate (linguistically or otherwise) on that axis are
a problem.

Then we have a chicken/egg problem, because the environment's
standards are unlikely to unconsciously change while the people making
up the environment have largely the same composition. The composition
is unlikely to change while people are being offended or excluded by
the group's environment.

The key word is unconsciously. Once an environmental bug-report has
been filed, it's probably worth acting on, especially if the patch
isn't too large (language tweaks, etc.,). It's easy to do and it makes
people feel better. (I'm not trying to exclude large-scale changes by
default, but this post is already in TL;DR territory.)

How then do we know what's a request worth honouring? The "offence is
in the eye of the beholder" line of thought falls apart here. If we
honoured all of the bizarre requests that turned up in this thread,
we'd have to be careful not to offend tents (and their guy ropes),
protoplasm (sorry again, Zoogrek) and
somewhere-in-the-vicinity-of-Betelgeusians. That's obviously not a
good outcome for the reasons above.

I'm of the opinion that a better "metric" is to consider two factors:
1. How big is the set of people who could be offended?
2. Would a reasonable person from this set be offended?
(Yes, "reasonable person" is horribly slippery. Benefit of the doubt, people.)

Guy ropes, protoplasm and somewhere-in-the-vicinity-of-Betelgeusians
all fail the test at (1) above. Complaining that recklessly using the
term `guys' is annoying to existing and prospective female members
passes this metric, so I'd say it's a reasonable request.

Back to Eyal's question. I interpret it as: supposing the pendulum has
swung back the other way, and it was men who by and large had to deal
with glass ceilings, having their commitment to work questioned when
they take time off to look after a kid and so on and so forth, what
would the movement to set things right be called?

Apparently, it's called masculism and maybe there isn't a one-way
imbalance, but there's different skews in different parts of society?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculism . I've had a family member
royally pwned** by the courts with regards to his daughter. Social
inequalities where there shouldn't be any are serious problems that
need to be corrected.

-- Jack

*Tongue is very firmly in cheek here.
** I was going to write "screwed", but that doesn't work so well in
the context of the discussion. Anyone got a word that doesn't make me
sound like a 13-year-old counterstrike player?