Remember Zed Shaw’s “Rails is a Ghetto”? All about how the Rails community is being taken over by boring, pretentious, corporate wanna-be suits with their prattle about “professionalism”, pretentious posturing, MBA peacocking and assorted other behaviours unwanted in the dynamic and creative Ruby community.
Well, these MSCE-having douchebags are out in full force today. You see, there was this little Ruby conference in San Fran, and a presenter there had the temerity to include – wait for it – references to porn in his talk. Plus some pictures of scantily clad girls.
OH NOES
Now, I thought the talk was fine, and very well made. The content may have been slightly risqué, in a US context anyway, but no big deal. Actually I appreciate the creativity – there’s nothing more boring than yet another “professional” presentation. I use Ruby because I hate acting “professional”.
But oh boy, the reaction.
Some commentors were frankly laughable – one woman in particular went so far to claim the presentation made her fear for her safety, as if the entire body of men in the audience were in danger of rising as one and assaulting her in some kind of insane porn-fueled gang rape:
To most of these men around me, I am, at best, an oddity, and at worst, a sexual target. I feel a little less safe.
I suggest this poor woman seek therapy for these delusions.
Other reactions include pathetic “I am being victimised” attention-seeking, lame attempts at demonstrating how much “I truly care about women” etc, hilarious “I am leaving the Ruby community and re-installing Visual Studio” threats (please do!), and every combination thereof. I cannot help but think that if Matt’s presentation has the effect of getting rid of these disingenuous wowsers then he should henceforth be invited, nay required, to present at every Rails conference.
Comments from the SlideShare page from sad Java programmers:
I’ve talked with two large IT shops who’ve said that there is no way they’ll ever let Ruby in their companies because of this horse shit.
Lol, good. The less “large IT shops” pissing in the Ruby pond the better. And if their management is so stupid as to choose technology because of “some presentation given by some guy at some conference” then no doubt they’ll be out of business soon anyway.
I think Matt just blew the image of the Ruby community by doing something like this.
WTF? Who even thinks like this? Whatever, I am glad they do:
I’ll avoid joining the Ruby/Rails community at all. So will many other engineers, given the remarkable and continual display of unprofessionalism from you, the community, and even its leaders
Uh, OK. Door’s that way. By the way, you’re not a real engineer, did you know?
Is this the ruby community , sexist and racist? I am going back to .net and FU all!
Lol, enjoy! Wait, racist?
And so on and so on. Pretty funny. Thanks for the GC patch, Matt, it’s proving very effective.
About the only person whose reaction to this I truly admire is . And he is the father of Rails, so if he doesn’t mind it, then all these “this is inappropriate for a professional conference blah blah” business-card-offering synergystic-opportunity-seeking suit-wearing jerks can go jump off a cliff, IMO.
Tags: rails
September 11th, 2009 at 1:30 am
This issue at its practical, reasonable root is not danger to we women who are there, nor is it prudishness. The issue is that women, in general, do not feel comfortable in a room full of men (almost exclusively) who are ogling women. Pictures of group sex and fellatio, even if no “naughty bits” are shown sexualize the environment.
Some understanding among the general public that 1/3 of all women in the US are rape victims, many of us grew up in households with incest and sexual abuse (myself included) have very strong, reasons for being uncomfortable in sexualized environments.
Out of respect to us, not because it’s over-the-top or offensive, it is fair for women to say that it is inappropriate and to request that conferences are not conducted like locker rooms.
A (female) Ruby Developer
September 11th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Margaret, do you seriously think this is an appropriate venue to disclose that you have been sexually abused? Go to the police. That is what they are for. Let me make it perfectly clear for you:
List of places it is appropriate to seek redress for past sexual abuse:
List of places it is not appropriate to seek redress for past sexual abuse:
Do we understand each other now?
November 16th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I get the impression that, if you’ll forgive the chatroom analogy, this Matt person stands accused of being a troll in the Rails community.
For the novices, a troll is a person who infiltrates an online community, pretending to have something in common with the extant members, then causes trouble by engaging in conduct detrimental to the group. Sho probably explains it better in the post right before this one.
OTOH, it may be that the trolls were in the audience.
November 17th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Outmoded, I lurk on a few mailing lists with the Matt in question and while I can’t say I know him closely, I have never gotten the impression he is anything other than a well-meaning, sincere person. I think he just had what he thought was a cool idea, got a little carried away with it, and was leapt upon and burnt at the stake by a brainless mob of puritanical sexless wannabe-victim bitches and their fan club of equally repressed guys.
I don’t think the audience members who complained were trolling; I think they really believe what they do.
Margaret’s attempt to grab authority with her highly doubtful claims, above, are just another symptom of this idiocy.
November 17th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Margaret explained in a practical, reasonable way, why it might be appropriate to have porn in that environment. To help make her point, she revealed something quite personal.
I hope some readers took pause, re-read the comment, and re-considered their points of view.
Sho, instead, seems aggressively uninterested in understanding a different point of view.
November 17th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
_.sub /appropriate/, “inappropriate”
November 17th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
mc, I am not uninterested in understanding a different point of view. I understand it perfectly well. I just reject it and am sick to death of this kind of crap.
None of the women at that conference were in any danger. Their reactions were hysterical, over-the-top, politically correct attention seeking nonsense. Have you even seen the presentation? It was quite tame. I have seen raunchier billboards. And yet instead of calling out and criticising this irrationality, many in the community seem to be trying to encourage and pander to it.
Screaming that you are offended and that everything is “inappropriate” is so fucking easy. And listening to it becomes a race to the bottom and sooner or later you have the situation like it is today where it’s “sexual harrassment” to comment on a co-worker’s clothes. Where supposedly 1/3 of women have been “raped”, where “rape” is obviously some new definition which means basically nothing. That 1/3 includes people who said they regretted having sex after getting drunk, by the way. Hell, I guess that means I’ve been “raped” too! So I hope that you take pause, re-read my comment, and re-consider my points of view.
Seriously, it is only you Americans who are so afraid of sex and, oh no, bare skin, that this controversy would ever arise. I am completely on Matt’s side on this matter. It’s nothing but puritanical nonsense of the same level as the “wardrobe malfunction” farce. And frankly if I had to choose between the community having guys like Matt Aimonetti or girls like Whining Margaret above, I’d choose Matt any day.
Which brings us, does it not, to the elephant in the room – that females do not seem to be, or to want to be, programmers anyway. I struggle to think of any contribution a woman has made to the ruby community in any category apart from that of outraged complaints. So why are we supposed to be bending over backwards to accommodate them again?
November 17th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
And that’s part of the reason why there are so few women in programming.
November 17th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
mc, if you actually want to understand why there are so few women in elite level programming, the type of person who is likely to want to go to a programming conference, you might like to read this article. Long but worth it.
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
The fact that male reproductive success has higher variance doesn’t mean we shouldn’t critically examine the ways sexism works in our culture. Developing a little empathy for others isn’t a bad idea either.
December 6th, 2009 at 11:00 am
You’re a moron, Sho. Not because you don’t get it, which is clear enough, but because you proudly and angrily don’t get it.
December 6th, 2009 at 11:26 am
What a useless comment. I’m a moron, because “I don’t get it”. I presume “get” is a stand-in for “understand”? So what don’t I understand, Justin? I think I understand the issue perfectly well.
What I don’t actually do is accept it. So your comment should have actually been written as such:
Right. Well, guilty as charged .. I guess?
December 6th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
You guess wrong.
First, I quite clearly said that simply ‘not getting it’ is *not* the reason you’re a moron (though a demonstrated lack of reading comprehension skills casts doubt on my assertion). I said that you’re a moron because you proudly and angrily don’t get it.
You don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have stupidly treated Margaret as if she was seeking redress for past sexual abuse. She mentioned it to make a point, that you clearly missed.
Refusing to accept your own misunderstanding of the situation is not something to be defiant about. It just makes you look like a moron (c.f. My earlier comment about being a moron for being proudly and angrily ignorant).
What you don’t understand is simply that when you create a shitty environment for women, not a lot of women will show up:
Leading us to this unconsciously insightful observation:
Gee, I wonder why.
December 7th, 2009 at 12:08 am
You would do well to wonder why, Justin, because it’s got nothing to do with any of the reasons you mentioned. Many, if not most, of the male programmers I’ve met started programming by themselves, at home. The community comes later.
The simple fact is that almost no females even start that first self-directed learning. It has nothing to do with how welcome they feel at seminars. You might as well argue that the embroidery community needs to make profound changes, because men do not feel welcome in it, as evidenced by their lack of participation. You would be just as wrong.
The vast majority of women do not enjoy, and do not excel at, the abstract mental processes involved in computer programming. That is just the simple basic reality. I am not saying women are inferior. They have many positive traits compared to men, and there are indeed some notable outliers with impressive accomplishments in the field. But they are not, in general, attracted to programming as a hobby or career. There is nothing stopping any woman on the face of the earth buying a mac, buying a programming book, getting started and dropping the hot new shit on github. But, overwhelmingly, they do not. Why is that, Justin? Are they deterred by the chauvinistic github signup page? Oppressed by the phallocentric programming manual? Is the patriarchal paradigm of the male-oriented programming language holding them back? Of fucking course not.
The problem with people like you, Justin, is that you’re a little bit smart – just smart enough to have some confidence in your thoughts and theories, and to dismiss as “morons” people like myself who disagree. I mean, you’re smart, so what you think must be right, so anyone who disagrees must be dumb, right? But you’re not smart enough to critically examine those beliefs – most or all of which are merely some version or other of what you have absorbed as the consensus opinion.
But what you think is bullshit. You are, as so many of your ilk before you, mistaking correlation for causation. You have not a shred of evidence to support your theory that creating a more “woman-friendly” environment in the computing industry will lead to greater interest and participation by the female population. You just think it sounds reasonable. You think that because you’ve heard it so many times, and like the stupid fucking baby you are, you internalised it and now here you are calling people morons for not joining in your little consensus circle-jerk.
The historical contribution of women to the field of computer programming has been almost negligible. Imposing any friction whatsoever on the current programming workforce to accommodate this mythical horde of females just waiting in the wings to join in as soon as we outlaw risque slides at Rails conferences is likely to be a net loss. You might not like this conclusion, as it does not fit nicely with your happy little politically correct worldview, but it’s the plain reality as I see it. Whether or not we are then willing to make concessions anyway in pursuit of some broader social good is another question entirely, but the underlying facts are as I’ve described.
The simple fact of reality is, Justin, that if having dancing girls at programming events in Taiwan attracts even a single additional male participant then it is a win for that event and for the field. What about all the women that it’s keeping away? What women? There are no fucking women and it matters not a bit if there’s dancing girls or not. But you just can’t bring yourself to admit that. Oh no, it conflicts with your happy little politically correct affirmative action worldview, doesn’t it? Who needs facts or evidence or even just simple honesty when you have bullshit 70s theories about how things “should” be.
You accused me of being angry and in one sense you were right. I was really pissed off to see a star like Matt Aimonetti being beaten up like he was. He has contributed more to the Ruby community than all the outraged whiners at that conference put together, squared. To turn him into the whipping boy for some bullshit thought crime was fucking perverse. When it comes down to it, if I had to choose between keeping all the complainers there, or keeping him, I’d keep him. The name of the game is not maximising “fairness”, it is maximising utility and producing the best outcome. What is the best outcome of a programming conference, Justin – is it a whole bunch of bullshit rules about what you can and can’t say or show, just in case there happens to be some insecure audience members, or is it the free exchange of ideas?
What a joke. Anyway, that’s all the time I have for this ridiculous topic. Fuck you, and fuck your precious little orthodoxy. But feel free to show this thread to your local college’s Revolutionary Wymyn’s Action Committee – might even get you laid.
December 31st, 2009 at 5:47 am
The main issue I have with Margaret’s comment is this:
“1/3 of all women in the US are rape victims”
Bulls**t — plain and simple.