I originally posted this on KubuntuForums.net, but I felt that I put enough long winded effort and I have little enough overlap between there and here that I would repost this here in hopes of opening dialog with some of you who read my journal.
The last few days, I've been watching things pop up on the various syndication feeds and news sites I watch about Shuttleworth's sexist comments in his keynote at LinuxCon. Reading these things, I was concerned about it, but I elected to try to reserve my judgment until I could find a transcript of the keynote, or find a video to watch it.
For those of you who missed the hubbub, I'll link you to the blog post which finally pointed me to where I could see the keynote for myself: Mark Shuttleworth's Community Has No Women.
My first impression was some annoyance. As a female, and a geeky techy one at that, I have encountered a lot of the sexism that the various articles and blog entries I've seen are complaining about, so the idea that someone who is the spearhead of the distribution I use is supporting this steaming pile of dren did concern me, to make a minor understatement. The quote that seemed particularly condemning was this one:
"How many of you guys know Till [Kamppeter]... making sure that your printer, your mom's printer, my grandma's printer just work out of the box...if we can do the same with sound, if we can do the same with wi-fi, we can do the same for various other amazing subsystems that are going to come into the kernel...if we approach this from the perspective of saying "How do we make this just awesome for end users" then we'll have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do."
However, the other thing I've noticed a lot of commentary on is his choice of male pronouns and to use the word "guys" instead of people quite frequently. This irritated me greatly. I am not objecting to his speech ticks and I'll address those in a minute, but these complaints made me think of the women who have done such damage to the feminist cause by contorting it in the name of trying to further it. I'm sure everyone in this forum has encountered at least one of these women... the sort that instead of striving for equality, they speak down about men, they act like they're entitled to reparations for the abuses foisted upon our foremothers (as they always b*stardize "masculine" words into a more "feminine" form), and feel that equality should only apply where it is beneficial to them, not to pesky things like jail sentences, child custody, alimony payments or military service. My perspective on feminism is one of frustration because of women like this, and this mess that was sparked by Shuttleworth's keynote is only serving to bring to the forefront why I think my own gender is part of the reason I still make less than my male coworkers who I either out perform or are at least on par with. Before I go off on more of a tangent, I'll get back to my original point.
I did say I would address his speech ticks, so here's my take on them. I consider myself at least a little bit of a literary nerd. I grew up reading early and often, chewing through books like most kids would go through crayons and candy, and even dipping into my mother's extensive fantasy collection at a younger age than most people would have expected. My heroes are people like William Shakespeare, Neal Stephenson, Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, HG Wells, and Neil Gaiman. To say I am a little familiar with the English language, even if it is mostly the American b*stardized version of it, is probably a safe thing to say.
With these statements sitting out there as my credentials, I will say that I am not offended by Shuttleworth's use of male pronouns and frequent use of guys were the pseudo-feminists insist he should have used words like people or team instead. Talk to an English language nerd, talk to someone who does formal writing a lot, and they will tell you it is general convention to use the male pronoun when speaking of hypothetical people instead of using the casually accepted "gender neutral" them or they. If using the male pronoun offends your gender equal "sensibilities" it is then considered more correct to use the female pronouns in their place, instead of lapsing to them and they. Some of my role play books do this quite happily, White Wolf in particular uses entirely female pronouns when speaking of their hypothetical players in the character building and game play examples. So Shuttleworth using a lot of masculine pronouns didn't bother me in the least.
To address "guys" in particular, I will point out that in common casual conversation, particularly with those who are in their teens and twenties, it is normal for someone to use a word like guys or dude without care to what gender they are addressing. There are also lots of examples of other words that have both male and female forms where the male form is considered acceptable when addressing a mixed group or even when addressing the female alone. Watching the video, listening to him speaking, it sounded like Shuttleworth was simply trying to speak comfortably with a group of his peers. While one could debate the merits of that approach within a keynote speech at a conference, it is certainly a smaller crime than the attempts to use these speech patterns as evidence of his sexism. I'll even admit that these speech patterns are sexist, but they are not sufficient evidence of Shuttleworth's sexism, they are simply a symptom of long standing sexism within the English language.
I am angry about Shuttleworth's implication that women are inept enough at computer usage that they require things to be dumbed down significantly in order to just tell them about it. I am angry that everything I've heard so far tells me he does not care or does not understand what he said was so wrong. I can give him the benefit of the doubt, and guess that perhaps he's partially overwhelmed by the pseudo-feminists who are not only attacking his statements that were wrong, but are also attacking minor issues that are a symptom of the language reflecting its roots in people who were very sexist.
All that said, Shuttleworth is by far not the only sexist person within the open source community, he is probably far from the worst offender either. He just happened to have been the big money behind a project that is popular, and therefore in the focus of a large number of people. Such things get people lynched over minor things, where the raging idiot, who thinks all women should be barefoot pregnant in the kitchen, that happens to work on xyz section of the kernel, doesn't get noticed because he doesn't have any friends to start with.
I would like for Mark Shuttleworth to realize what he said was wrong, I would like for him to apologize and learn from his mistakes... but I'm not going to jump ship on my distribution of choice because of his poor choice of words in a keynote speech at a conference I didn't even attend and wouldn't have even watched if it weren't for the drama around his poor choice of words. The other things he said in the speech were actually interesting and some of them were even useful and helpful commentary on the open source community. A lot of it seemed to be pretty words to me, but sometimes it takes someone with money and pretty words to coordinate enough people to get things done.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}