the slashdot effect

Jess from feministing sent me a link to Annalee Newitz’s story The Down Side of Slashdot. The story itself seems sort of obvious to me: yeah, posters on Slashdot can be immature and sexist. Newitz does a nice job of pointing out that there are plenty of non-sexist and anti-sexist voices on the site as well, complicates the issue, etc. I read it, shrugged, and then scrolled down. Comment please:

What is the point of this male-bashing drivel appearing on a site like this one? No one wants to listen to someone wallow in their own self-proclaimed Victimhood.

Thousands and thousands of people read, post, flame, and get flammed on Slashdot and other forums on the Net every day. And they manage to cope just fine.

They’re called grown-ups Annalee…

This is a very typical narrative that comes up when someone analyzes any form of oppression. Have you guys seen that show Black/White on FX? The white guy in blackface spends a couple days walking around, and concludes that there is no such thing as racism (as in something that’s structural and institutional), just the way people treat each other, and that if you are nice to people, they’ll be nice to you. He discredits the experience of the black guy completely, basically telling him that he’s misinterpreting things as racist. In other words, pointing out racism/sexism/homophobia etc. is just being overly sensitive, is playing “the race [gender/sexuality] card”, and is basically contributing to divisiveness and fragmentation. Can’t we all just get along?

I’m not interested in debating whether sexism exists. We live in a patriarchy. Sexism is a dominant force. I am not going to engage in any dialogue to the contrary, because it’s not productive. I’ve been studying gender politics for more than a decade, and I want to talk about feminist issues on a fairly high level, which is not possible when you are constantly having to repeat yourself to men who don’t see sexism because of male privilege. (One of the privileges of male [white, straight] privilege is not having to see sexism [racism, homophobia].)

That’s the problem with trying to analyze sexism in the tech industry. (Obviously it’s not all sexist. Blogs like BoingBoing and Wonderland are explicitly feminist and really awesome.) But very, very frequently, if you try to point out sexism, you are told that it doesn’t exist, that you are imagining things, that you are trying to create trouble and piss people off, and that there is no subject position in the industry because it is based on merit (skills, whatever criteria you use). I am not interested in this discussion. Let’s accept that sexism does exist in the tech industry, like it exists everywhere else, and move on to how to change that.

Newitz’s discussion of alternative voices in these spaces is really important! I am a slashdot member, as, I suspect, are most of my readers. Let’s speak out against sexist or homophobic comments whenever we see them on any tech-related site. They may get modded down (unlikely, if they’re half-way articulate or include a particularly hilarious anti-Micro$oft/pro-Linux joke), they may get ignored, but if the diversity of the readership becomes reflected in the diversity of the participants, eventually sexism will be considered unacceptable on the site. Even if it’s just for being tacky or off-topic. Which achieves our goal, which is not “Make all people on earth agree with me on sexism” but “Make people of all genders feel comfortable in spaces devoted to discussing technical issues.”