Gender and the Internet

June 10, 2006 · Posted in Rants · Comment 

I have noticed that I spend a lot of time on the internet commenting on gender issues, following links to articles about feminism, adding them to my del.icio.us bookmarks in the hopes that they will get wider online coverage, and so on. It's funny, because I seldom talk about stuff like this in real life. So where does this sudden interest come from?

Well, you see, in real life I am not surrounded by ignorant, sexist jerks. Most of my friends and acquaintances are part of a loosely connected, fairly egalitarian community of gamers, and I do not feel a constant need to convince them that women are people too, and do not all fit the same insulting mainstream stereotype.

The internet, however, is a different story. Tech-oriented sites like Slashdot and Digg are populated mostly by men, and most of these men were born and brought up in a culture which — for all its protestations of liberal enlightenment — has deeply ingrained conservative perceptions about gender and sexuality.

Many of them have also come to imagine — for various reasons, one of which is probably that they are surrounded both online and offline by so many people just like them — that their culture is the only culture in the world.

This makes it difficult for them to believe that people elsewhere in the world can be very different, and that upbringing can actually have a massive impact on the way human beings think and behave.

This, in turn, creates an environment in which people routinely extrapolate from their personal observations of small, homogenous sample sets of (for example) women, and make sweeping generalisations about all women in the entire world — and from there claim that obviously there must be a biological, evolutionary reason why all women in the world display the particular characteristics under discussion. And of course there is always at least one statistically dubious psychological study which they can cherry-pick to support their theory.

Whenever one person does this, there are plenty of like-minded posters who jump on the bandwagon, offering their own anecdotal data as backup, and pulling out the same hoary old sexist jokes – the kind that that are only funny if you think they're true.

(Being a woman in places like this is like being a person with an amusing name. Every now and then, a completely new person points out the obvious pun – which you must find absolutely hilarious, because you can't possibly have heard it a million times before! If you don't think it's funny, you must not have a sense of humour.)

It pisses me off when people who consider themselves to be intelligent, logical thinkers post cascades of this crap without noticing at any point that they are not actually being very logical, and often acting as if they were twelve. It pisses me off when a woman calls them on it, and is told that as a woman who posts on a tech site she is a freakish outlier who does not count as a “normal woman”, and is thus not a valid counter-example — or is semi-seriously accused of being a man posing as a woman.

So, inevitably, I end up commenting, if I can find a post that makes some concrete points that I can respond to. And whenever I find a well-written article which articulates something that I think needs to be said about gender or sexuality, I bookmark it — and hope that some of the people who really, really need to read it are exposed to its ideas.

I keep threatening to write a satirical article on the evolutionary drive behind men's wearing of pants. It would include a brusque dismissal of pants-wearing women as an unimportant statistical anomaly, and disclaim in the afterword that while the study was restricted to a small sample of Western men, it is sensible to assume that there is no significant difference between the clothing choices of men worldwide. I am probably too lazy ever to actually write the whole thing.

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Cool software: amaroK

June 7, 2006 · Posted in Reviews · 2 Comments 

If you're using Linux (or BSD), throw out your smelly old XMMS and check out amaroK, a music player that is actually doing cool new things instead of cloning prehistoric Windows software.

I've only been using it for about half an hour, and I love it already. It automatically scans folders you specify for music to include. It has full unicode support, so my small selection of j-rock is being displayed in kanji, not gibberish (and all the heavy metal umlauts aren't being mangled). It has various smart playlist options based on your music collection, like 50 random songs, your favourite songs, never-played songs, etc. It interfaces with various databases on the internet: the last.fm website, which keeps track of what music you listen to and makes recommendations; Wikipedia for artist information; and a lyrics database (unfortunately not very complete). It also has options for internet radio (which I'm not using because my connection isn't that good). It also lets you edit tags, but for that I already use the online MusicBrainz database and the Picard client (because it has dialogs that say “Make it so!” instead of “OK”).

I'm still looking for the cat-feeding and toast-making functionality; I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

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