Why it matters
“All I did was tell a mud-wrestling joke,” says a man, astonished that a woman has taken offense. “I just quoted Frank Miller, or noted the flaming hawtness of the chick on his latest cover. I just tossed off a reference to the megabytes of pr0n I supposedly (but not really) have on my hard drive.” (Real-life examples have been modified to protect the guilty. Not modified very much, mind you.) “I didn’t mean anything by it. What’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that however innocent this stuff may be on its own (and I would actually argue that it isn’t, but right now I’m not going to), it is commonly wielded as a weapon by open misogynists. Go read some Slashdot if you don’t believe me; or check out Bess Sadler’s dreadful but true tale. I guaran-damn-tee you the guys who straight-facedly argue that women are ruining IT, or get so defensive at the least objection to their behavior as to respond with pure white-hot hatred—these guys toss off blonde jokes, booth-babe jokes, and PMS jokes right and left.
The world has improved enough that professional women can sometimes avoid these creeps, and most creeps have gotten the message that open misogyny on the job will get them fired. This does not, I am told, stop them from exchanging misogyny where women—especially female bosses—can’t hear them. This points to another part of the problem: eliminating overt misogyny isn’t enough. Women aren’t stupid. We know it’s out there (doesn’t the Internet constantly shove it in our faces, after all?), and we know dumb jokes are its most common manifestation.
So when you crack such jokes, or when you argue that they’re no big deal, or when you react with belittling disbelief to someone objecting to them, you immediately lose my trust. I have to assume you’re a creep and you’ve been hiding it, because if I give you the benefit of the doubt and I’m wrong to, you can find all sorts of clever and interesting ways to poison my professional life, or even worse.
Leaving aside, of course, that creeps are creeps and who actually wants to be around them except other creeps? Sure, that’s guilt by association, but a bunch of creeps is many times nastier and more dangerous than an individual creep. Ask yourself about the men who emailed Bess; isn’t it hard to believe they weren’t egging each other on?
At the very least, the best of them, even if he said nothing whatever to Bess, was complicit in a community that turned viciously on a female member. The first sexist joke in a community, particularly the first unchallenged one, raises the possibility of just such another savage pile-on. The thought of that happening in a community of practice that I belong to sickens me.
When I was younger, I was dead easy to intimidate, and I had my antennae up looking for reason to be afraid. Although PubStruct’s unfailing decency gave me some confidence, I lost some when Neurotic Ex-Boss took against me, because part of the explanation for that was that I was a woman and Neurotic Ex-Boss lashed out at competent women. (Nor was that all he did, but that’s telling tales out of school; suffice to say that he was the archetypal sexist creep and I hope I never see him again.)
I don’t get scared as much now. I get angry, and these days I get out. To the man who’s said one stupid thing, doubtless that seems excessive. But, damn, I have had my fill and more of sexist attitudes, and I never wanted to believe men who thought and behaved like that existed in the first place! There’s no such thing any more as “just one joke,” just one instance of cluelessness, just one time being overlooked. As was pointed out in Karen’s comments, Ellen Spertus wrote about this fifteen years ago. Fifteen. Years. Ago. And none of what she wrote reads to me as outdated. So, yeah, explain to me why the hell I shouldn’t be angry?
Bess Sadler wrote the other half of this post for me. Driving women out of casual conversations about computer systems and systems librarianship means more than mere incourtesy. It cuts off a key source of learning. Some men I know could doubtless have solved last week’s CVS problems in ten minutes flat. I don’t trust those men (and I am not alone; I heard “I’d never [go to them] unless I was desperate” from another female systems librarian last week), so I didn’t ask them.
Sure, I figured it out myself. But consider the time-spent differential, and consider that I now look less effective than someone who can comfortably ask—even though I’ve no fewer wits, no less ability.
It matters. It matters a lot.