On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 02:42, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > I'm sure you have a hundred ready rationalisations for why a joke that > has “girlfriend” as a fungible object, together with “car” and “house” > as things to mechanically import into one's life, is somehow not > objectifying women. > > But, while those rationalisations may satisfy you, I'm not interested in > hearing them. If you don't see that the joke objectifies women, that > tells me quite a lot about how blinkered you are to the problem. > > For what it's worth, I'm very familiar with such rationalisations, > having employed them many times myself. Fortunately there are women who > will speak up against it and encourage men to do the same > <URL:http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x168.html>. > > Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: >> Since you can't or won't persuade me (and anyone else reading) that >> this sort of joke is harmful, does that mean that you will stop >> claiming that it is harmful? > > I have no idea what it would take to persuade you in particular. I do > know that the combined privileges of being white, male, not-poor, and > English-fluent (and many more privileges, I'm sure) grant both of us the > luxury of barely even perceiving the harm done by a pervasive atmosphere > of even low-level prejudice against any given group of people. > > Women (to return to the people in question), on the other hand, do not > have that luxury. In this community they have no option but to be aware > of the privileges we males have here. > > We have very effective cognitive blinders, merely because we have never > needed to know what it's like being a woman in this prevalently-male > field. The onus is on us to try hard to see, despite those blinders and > easy rationalisations, that there is a lot we allow from our fellows > which is perpetuating a hostile environment. > > I'm not making a fuss about one sexist joke, which has already been > retracted by its author. I'm making a fuss about allowing and, worse, > defending such jokes as a tacitly-accepted norm of our community. And I > hope those of us who prefer to think of ourselves as not-sexist will act > to clean up our house more.
A hearty +1 to this! -- Rami Chowdhury "A mind all logic is like a knife all blade - it makes the hand bleed that uses it." -- Rabindranath Tagore +44-7581-430-517 / +1-408-597-7068 / +88-0189-245544 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
