Caveat Lector

Peter Sefton got a mite huffy at me for my contention that Word-template-based scholarly-article production systems invariably fail when they meet the author.

I don’t make this stuff up just to be annoying. Honestly and truly, I don’t.

Seems everything old is new again at Extreme Markup 2007 too:

I went to see David Lee of Epocrates on getting content authored in MS Word into appropriate XML. The core of this talk was an extended lament on how authors insist on using Word; even if you provide specialized authoring tools, they compose in Word and then cut and paste, more or less incorrectly, into the specialized tool. Epocrates has tried a variety of strategies: Word styles (authors won’t use them), tagged sections (authors screw them up), form fields (plaintext only, so authors delete them and type in rich text instead). In the end, they adopted Word tables as the safest and least corruptible approach. A few Word macros provide useful validations, and when the document is complete, a Word 2003 macro rewrites it using Word 2003 XML (unless it is already in that format). I pointed out that the approach of having authors use Word and saving in plain text was also viable, leaving all markup to be added by automated downstream procssing; David said that design was too simple for the complex documents his authors were creating.

My contentions in a nutshell. Thank you, Mr. Lee and Mr. Cowan.

I will add that testing such tools on a small, highly-selected author population (as Mr. Sefton’s blog post indicates that he has done) leads to tools that work very well for a small, highly-selected population of authors—and fail utterly once they move beyond that population.

I do not. DO. NOT. Make this stuff up. Been there, done that, don’t even have the T-shirt any more.

First there was ICE-RS, now there is Lemon8-XML.

I’ve asked to test both of them, and I’ll let y’all know what happens. I’m glad there’s more than one development effort going on; if the developers are as sensible as they seem to be, we’ll see some cross-fertilization, which can only be to the good.

Back in the day, CavLec was a nerve center for spine-tingling rants about markup and publishing workflows. (I think my favorite one is still this, perhaps because it’s less ranty, though for those who like rants this one’s good too.) Then I quit ranting about markup and publishing workflows in favor of all kinds of other fun things to rant about.

The circle does close, though. I left a shamefully snippy comment to this post about PDFs in repositories because snippy was the nicest I could manage, my eyes were rolling so hard. (I have pretty serious PDF-hater cred, but even I know PDF is way easier to deal with in workflows than HTML.) Then another blog post picked up my snippy comment, whereupon it winged its way to Peter Murray-Rust’s blog.

Ah, markup and publishing workflows. You are really only marginally better than no markup. Why? No tools. CavLec’s been ranting about “no tools” since 2002, folks, and there are still no tools.

There’s almost a tool, though, it appears. Peter Sefton is working on a project called ICE-RS, one of whose goals is to make such a tool.

I never, ever, ever rhapsodize over something like this before I get my hands on it. Ever. I’ve seen too many tools promise the moon and deliver a misshapen meteorite. But from what I can tell, it looks generally to be the right idea—word-processing templates that, if used properly, do the right thing. (The big caveat is “if used properly.” Authors do horrible things with word-processors. You really can’t imagine until you’ve seen it. Unless it sharply restricts the host program’s functionality, no template on this earth will get decent results from all or even most authors.) Plus, such templates tend to be designed by someone with all the design sense of an eight-year-old.

So we’ll see. But if it works as advertised, I’d use it—because I know how to use these things. Learned nearly a decade ago, working in a little typesetting house. Everything old, it is new again.

As for repositories and HTML—I always do website imports into the repository myself. Not only does that mean nobody (not even me) has to deal with DSpace’s nasty clicky-clicky file-at-a-time upload UI, it means I get a chance to fix links and grotty markup, something else I learned to do a decade ago.

So I promised colleagues a while back that I’d do up some marketing materials for the repository. And there’s nothing like a nice flyer, right?

I have no budget. Repository-rats never do. Hey, we work on open access, what do we need money for? So I can’t do spiffy four-color stuff; I run on a strictly grayscale basis. I mention this not to whinge, but to point out that it’s a pretty serious design constraint in a full-color world.

I also don’t have Photoshop (see above about “no budget”), so I’m working with the GIMP.

The story I wanted to tell in this particular flyer is “Librarians have always cared for your books and your journals… now we take care of your digital works too!” (I dearly hope that’s both/and enough to be inoffensive. I’m never sure about these things.)

So I got the bottom half done fairly quickly. Screenshot, list of Things To Put In The IR with nice arrows pointing to the screenshot. (The GIMP doesn’t do auto-shapes such as arrows. Google kindly informed me that the way to do arrows is to use a wingdings font at a suitably-enlarged size. Worked a treat.) Logo, URL, and contact info at the bottom. No sweat. (Well, some sweat, because ever so not graphic designer. But it wasn’t bad.)

And then there was the top half…

My first thought was a photomontage of books and libraries and stuff. I zipped over to Flickr, searched materials marked with the Creative Commons Attribution license on the tags “books” and “library” and whomped one together with the results. It looked stupid and square and amateurish. I got rid of it, though I kept its individual components.

Going back to my search turned up these awesome old-book cutouts. I snagged one and got to work.

My first thought was to outline the book, cut the outline away from its background, and use the background as a border for photos. The way to do this is not by tracing with the mouse; I figured that one out in two seconds flat. Google to the rescue again—the way to do it is to blow up the picture a bit and use the Bezier path tool. This lets you select points all around the outline of your thing, turn that outline into a selection, and clear everything inside it. Once I grokked the concept, I had my outline pretty quickly.

So I slapped the outline back on the flyer and popped a few photos in behind it. And I printed it out. And it didn’t look too bad… people know what an open book looks like in outline, don’t they?… it’ll work, kinda… okay, okay, it looked like a squashed butterfly with ragged wings. No good. Try again, genius.

My next idea was to outline the top pages and the edges of a couple pages underneath—again, the Bezier tool lets you do this—and layer photos as though it were a book of photos. After a while, it became clear this wasn’t going to turn out well, so I abandoned it.

And then, finally, I did the right thing. Outline the open pages, recto and verso, clear the interior of the outline, pop the photos underneath, and leave the rest of the book image alone. This? Looked awesome after a bit of photo tweakage. Even in grayscale it looks good.

I had my husband critique it, and I’m going to fix a couple of layout and font issues tomorrow. But in the main, I am well content.

A graphic designer would have figured this out in much less time than I took. But I added a few tools to my amateur’s arsenal, so I consider it time reasonably well spent.

I reproduce this email, written in response to this CavLec post, with permission from its writer. At her request, I have changed her name where she references it, and elided or omitted parts that could be personally identifying. I have also added a few paragraph breaks for readability. I have not otherwise changed her words.

You don’t know me at all, but a friend pointed me at your “What some folks can do, if they choose” post, and it’s important to me. I’m a youngish woman (about to turn 27) in computers. I’m actually in the third generation of my family to program professionally: my grandmother was one of the first… programmers, back when it was a low status (and thus female) technician-type job. It’s clearly better for me than it was for her, or for my mother. I don’t have to fight to overturn an official policy that women will get less pension than men. It’s not assumed that I’ll go to a business meeting in a strip club.

Instead, there are subtle things. Every interviewer comments on my gender. Some coworkers have opened meetings with “Gentleman… and Mary”. More than once. I’ve had an interviewer ask me if I were married and if I had or planned to have kids. (Illegal, but not something I had sufficient energy/interest to pursue.)

I’m relatively butch-presenting, and I’m fairly sure that that’s helped me, that being [tall], stocky, and low-voiced has made me more acceptable to those around me. I know that not all of my gender presentation is natural — some of it is from early and extensive exposure to Golden Age science fiction, where men fixed machines and piloted rocket ships, and women came out of gumball machines…

Strangers will always have shallow gender-based conversations with me in professional settings. I will always end up in small talk conversations that boil down to “So you’re a woman, then. There are so few women in this field.” from people who aren’t interested in doing anything to fix that themselves.

My husband is more extroverted and more well-known in a subfield I’m interested in, so I’ve gotten one or two comments implying I was at user groups for his sake, not for mine. I get to wonder how many similar comments don’t make it past the internal censors of more diplomatic people.

The Kathy Sierra thing also hit me hard. I was deeply interested in user interfaces and human-computer interaction at the end of college. The career she’s being driven out of is one that I once would have considered a dream job. She’s not being driven out of it because her ideas are bad, or because technology has shifted faster than she can keep up, but because she dared to be a public woman. I find that both abstractly depressing and deeply personally terrifying.

I’ve been trying to speak up about things that bother me. It’s depressing when, by and large, the result is shocked incomprehension. A few of my male friends get it, but an alarming number really don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the entire poker-game conversation be about how having sex with a penis-having person means you’re more worthless than pond scum. These weren’t cloistered men who hadn’t seen female people since they were in diapers — all but one of them were married to women. One of them now has a seven-month-old daughter, and still makes prison anal rape jokes over family dinners, except when I ask him to stop. One of them is my husband.

I’m doing my best to remember that hard work and persistence often do make things better, as generations roll by. Right now there are few technical women, and pretty much all of them (without false modesty) are the cream of the crop. There aren’t female equivalents to the good-enough-but-nothing-special men. I’m still a dancing bear as much as I am a kick-ass debugger, a process-improver, someone who can offhandedly make a temporary backup system that works. In my head, the latter qualities should be far more relevant to my employability than my being a Mary instead of a Timothy, even though all of them are on my resume. If I can’t have a world like that for myself, it’s comforting to think that maybe I can help build one for baby Kathy and baby Lillian, and for all the other kids that I don’t know.

One of the definitions of privilege is that those who have [x]-privilege have the choice of ignoring [x]. I’m white; I can ignore race, or read about it, or become an activist, as it suits me. I can change my decision from day to day. I can stop thinking about race if other stuff becomes more important to me. I will never be allowed to stop thinking about gender.

I’m sorry that this meandered so much. Thank you for writing the essay. Thank you for setting out, clearly and concisely, something that can be done. Thank you for pointing out the amount of effort that it takes to pit yourself against “just a joke”s and “just talk”. Thank you for telling me that it’s not trivial meaningless oversensitivity, and that it’s not all in my head.

Another thing that every techie regardless of gender can do is let women in tech tell their stories in their own words, and then listen to them. There really isn’t any excuse for “shocked incomprehension.” I’ve heard many such stories, because I am perceived as a sympathetic ear. Funny thing is, people think I’m angry on my own behalf, but on the whole I’ve had it pretty easy. The stories I’ve heard, though!

And the stories I’ve read. For more on women like “Mary”’s grandmother and the early history of computing, let me recommend the article “When Computers Were Women” by Jennifer S. Light (Technology and Culture 40:3, pp. 455–483). Project MUSE has it, so if your institution has a subscription, you’re golden.

My thanks and admiration to my correspondent for her sincerity, her eloquence, and her courage.

For those of us who (like me) are absolutely terrible at picking out color palettes for websites: an image-based palette generator. Give it an image, get back two palettes (built with web-safe colors, too; nice touch) that will work with that image.

I tried it with the Morris background to CavLec, and what I got back was so gorgeous as to make me ashamed of what’s here.

Strikes me as something that would work with presentation palettes, too. If I weren’t nearly done with the San Antonio presentation, I’d feed it a few bus photos and see what I got back.

Via Blogula Rasa.

Peripherally, I’ve been tracking Twitter-talk that’s crossed my radar. A lot of people have been decrying it as trivial time-wasting. This being what was said about blogging as well, I wasn’t convinced. So I signed up and gave it a whirl. (My username is eminently guessable; same one I use on LJ.) I was curious about the affordances, and the userbase, and the use of it.

See, I tend to think that we don’t use stuff that’s useless to us. So what is the use of Twitter? Is it a game? A social tool? If the latter, what sort? Is there social status to be gained or lost, or gamed? Is it communicative? Of what?

(danah boyd would be much better at this kind of analysis than I am—and now that I look, she’s said her piece already. But I guess there’s room on the ’net for rank amateurs.)

My first impression, which I haven’t quite managed to decide whether I still agree with or not, stirred me to go look up a bit from Tehanu:

“Will you be about the house?” she asked him, across some distance. “Therru’s asleep. I want to walk a little.”

“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man to the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must not be far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking…

(A moment of silence for the appreciation of remarkable beauty in writing. Right. Onward.)

It’s definitely nowhere near as simple as “Twitter is a woman’s tool for maintaining social connection.” Of the ten Twitter “followers” I picked up yesterday, three are men, and I haven’t seen anything anywhere indicating that Twitter has an anomalous gender breakdown compared to the rest of the ’net. But something is lurking in that, something that indeed concerns the care and feeding—and just plain awareness—of where our social connections are… in time, in space, in mental-space, in okay-space.

I, for example, pay a lot of attention to where my husband is. He mentioned shortly before the move that he needs new glasses, so when our HMO’s provider booklet finally got here, I found out where they’d moved their optometry center and what bus lines go there and gave him the information. It’s just a thing that I do. Pay attention. He, on the other hand, had to be reminded last night that I’m in San Antonio most of next week. Without value-judging here—he doesn’t pay attention to where the people around him are, it’s just the way he is. And he’s not alone in that. A lot of people don’t, and to them, Twitter is indeed noisy mindless trivia; how could it be anything else?

For those of us, like Tenar, who do or must pay attention, Twitter (something like RSS, and I’m not sure it’s coincidence that Twitter put in RSS feeds by popular request) simplifies the task of maintaining that awareness. Who’s up, who’s down, who needs help, who can give it, who’s traveling, who’s bored at home, who’s in crisis, who’s out to lunch. I was thinking yesterday that it’d be nice to get my husband on Twitter, so that I wouldn’t feel a need to chase after him wondering what he does all day… but the flip side of that coin is Ged: because my husband, like Ged, doesn’t see importance in paying attention to others’ cues, he doesn’t see the need to emit cues of his own, so he wouldn’t use Twitter, any more than he’ll blog (and I’ve tried to introduce him to blogging; it didn’t take).

I suspect without proof that Twitter would confuse and perhaps overwhelm my husband, actually. Much more information than he’s got the mental-social interface to process. For me (though I suspect I am not typical owing to general social deafness), building and maintaining that interface involves guesstimating where the normal range is for the people I know and care about, and a steady process of scan-and-forget for most of the information that passes by indicating that they’re still in that range. When they’re not, I can see it and react.

I occasionally see people withdrawing from the blogosphere or from other social-software interactions on the grounds of “too little brainspace!” Well, yes. Tracking all this stuff does take brainspace; for me it frankly takes practice, because I’m like my husband in not being born to it. I’m not surprised all the detail gets to be too much to take in or react to. It’s all in the importance one places on this particular style of maintaining connection—and if that importance is not much, Twitter must be a hellpit indeed.

The problem with Twitter as a tool in the sense that I have outlined is the reciprocity assumption that danah boyd talks about a lot. If there’s an implicit obligation for me to friend all my followers (which I have not in fact done), then suddenly the presence information I do want to track is mixed in with a lot that I don’t, and utility vanishes into the maw of diminishing returns.

I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one. Invisibly following someone (so that they would not have to reciprocate) is much too close to stalking to seem tenable. Getting rid of public Twitter friendslists eviscerates the tool’s discovery system. Perhaps a LiveJournal-like system of allowing a user to split friends into groups without the awareness of those friends, such that the user can track one group of “real friends” while still being able to save face and friend all followers, would do the trick. Twitter would have to be careful to let all @ messages to a given user through in all that user’s group views, though (even @ messages from someone who doesn’t belong in a given group view), or the jig could be up.

Whew. That’s a lot for a first impression. Sorry.

My second impression, which I spent a lot of the day fishing for, was that Twitter has a very IRC-ish feel—short messages, informal register, many-to-many communication, even down to lack of capitalization. Some of the complaints I’ve seen about Twitter being too much information too fast, or about seeing only half a conversation, hint that some Twitter users are making it into an ersatz group-chat mechanism. (Not my group, incidentally. Such use of Twitter is not universal.)

But where IRC is divided quite sternly and inescapably into well-defined groups on the basis of shared interest, Twitter is an atomized web of friendship-clouds (ugh, horrid mixed metaphor, but I hope you see what I mean) that may or may not overlap much. It’s divided by individual affinities, not by group interest.

And that’s interesting. No, hang with me a second while I explain. An oft-leveled criticism of the blogosphere is that it’s a bunch of echo chambers, like-minded people loudly agreeing with each other while ignoring or antagonizing dissent. Removing the political overtones from that assessment (because I think they’re unnecessary and overblown) leaves us with “a bunch of largely non-overlapping interest groups.” Which I think is a fair description of IRC, or Usenet for that matter.

I’ve never thought that a fair description of the blogosphere, though, and I don’t think it’s what Twitter is, either: both are built around individual affinities, which span interests and interest groups alike. I admit my current Twitter follower/friend groups don’t support my own assertion, being mostly librarians. Still, I do overlap with my friend Rana’s group too, and if I stay with Twitter, there will doubtless be more such overlaps, because I myself am such a miscellany. And what’s more, I found myself surfing Twitter through a trail of other people’s friendslists into areas without a single known face, something that’s impossible to do in IRC without the abrupt discontinuity of actually changing rooms and subjects.

So I find Twitter intriguing and yes, even useful. I can imagine it being useful organizationally, even, as an internal tool for tracking interruptibility and busy-ness and the flow of work—if (and this is a big, huge, colossal if) the individuals in the organization all place value on both tracking and being tracked. It only takes one recalcitrant to break such a system, and I would think that imposing it from above would be a complete non-starter.

As an informal grassroots tool, though… maybe. Perhaps. In some organizations, especially geographically-dispersed ones.

I don’t know whether Twitter is a fad or a stayer, either. Right now I’m not even sure that one’s callable. I don’t even know whether I’ll stay; I have my own fairly stark limits on social-interaction brainspace, and plenty of other ways to keep up with folks who matter to me.

I’ll be watching, though, because I’m still curious about interest-delineated versus affinity-delineated tools. My vague, sloppy, unverifiable impression is that the social internet has been slowly tilting toward the latter, while retaining a healthy share of the former. Time will tell whether there’s anything in that.

So I’m working on the layout for Open Access Research in Microsoft Word, fully cognizant that I promised I’d deliver HTML as well as PDF.

I know better than to try getting at HTML through Microsoft Word. Been there, done that, would rather chew my left leg off at the hip than try it again. Next stop? OpenOffice.org.

Download, double-click, install, hm, this isn’t as bad as I remember it being back around version 1.2. Open up the test doc. Wow. Looks pretty good! Lost a line underneath the logo, but that’s no big deal. Everything else translated perfectly.

File menu, Export would seem the logical choice. Choose XHTML from the drop-down. Type a filename (odd UI problem there; I shouldn’t actually have to do this). Save. Take a deep breath. Open the result in my text editor.

Whoa.

I boggled for a good ten minutes, scrolling back and forth. Because, the markup produced? Conspicuously fails to suck. Conspicuously.

Perfect it ain’t. There’s all sorts of CSS in there that I don’t want or need (and boy, are those CSS bulleted lists ever fugly), and it didn’t pick up on my ArticleTitle style for some reason, and it didn’t manage to figure out that the Heading The First style was actually an <h1> despite a hint to that effect in the style definition, and it didn’t get rid of the footer (but then, I didn’t have any way to tell it to).

But it’s about as far from the you-know-what soup that Microsloth Turd spews out as it is possible to imagine. I can clean it up just the way I want in a few easily-scriptable regexes or SAX calls. It’s easy. Did I mention easy?

My hat’s off to the OpenOffice people. They most truly and sincerely rock.

It’s CSS Naked Day again. CavLec is a proud participant, in part because its owner is aware of the difficulty of making anything “naked” on the ’net halfway tasteful, and is deeply impressed that the organizer does actually manage it.

Also to remind herself that a markover for CavLec is well overdue.

I said my say, rather obliquely, on what happened to Kathy Sierra, and I’d planned to leave it there, because this sort of thing raises my blood pressure. (If it had happened to a friend, instead of someone whose blog I occasionally look in on, I’d be leading the perps to my personal private guillotine right about now, because I overreact that way. As it is, I don’t have any kind of status to pull stunts, so I’m trying not to.)

Over at Meredith’s, a couple-three men are saying how much the episode sickens them, and how helpless they feel to do anything about it. This post is for them, and folks like them. I don’t actually think there’s nothing they can do. I do think that what they can do is non-obvious, difficult, slow, laborious, frustrating, and courage-sapping, though.

My sense of what can be done to stop specifically misogynistic bullying depends on what I hinted at in my earlier post: it’s a broken-windows problem. (Yes, I know the sociologists debunked the broken-windows hypothesis long ago. I still find it a convenient analogy.) I don’t think the hateful language or the rape ’shop jobs or the threats could go nearly as far as they have (and still do) were it not for a widespread and unchallenged culture on the internet that insults, demeans, and irrelevantly sexualizes women millions of times on millions of websites every single day.

It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in geekland. There’s a strong (but by no means 1.0) positive correlation between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland. (It’s not just the computer geeks, either, which is why I use the vague term “geekland.” Gaming of various sorts, comics, science-fiction fandom—same story. Also, my remarks may extend to homophobia, which is likewise endemic in geekland, but I welcome refutation from people closer to that problem than I am.)

It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that” (hit, equating sex to aggression, that, reducing a human being to a thing), the “I bet she’s hot,” the “I bet she’s a fat whore,” the “I did your mom” one-offs. Everything about a woman, any woman, reduces to sex and sexual attractiveness. Even compliments are invariably phrased in terms of sexual attractiveness; geekland doesn’t know how else to compliment a woman.

All this is deeply ingrained in geekland culture, so deeply that if your connections to geekland are strong enough, it is inescapable… so inescapable that perhaps you’re already accustomed to it. Me, I have never gotten accustomed to it—call me sheltered, but I honestly didn’t ever run into people who thought and talked that way until I joined geekland, sometime after graduate school—and so I get angry about it and people hate and fear my anger, and try to delegitimize it.

It’s out of this earth that attacks like the one against Kathy Sierra grow. I firmly believe this. If you don’t, then click away; there’s not much point in reading further.

I can’t do anything about these particular broken windows. I’ve proven that the hard way—by trying repeatedly and failing repeatedly—and believe me, I hate my helplessness. My sense is that geekland culture only listens to women when they behave like honorary guys, which means silently accepting the prevailing misogyny (because after all, the guys do). Long ago, I tried to fix a broken window in my corner of the blogosphere. I failed, failed abjectly, and I came within an inch of leaving blogging because of it; if you want the gory details, hop all the way back to the beginning of my “Grunchy stuff” category. More recently, I tried to fix a broken window in the code4lib IRC channel. I failed, failed abjectly, though I hear others have picked up tools and are perhaps making progress with them.

I’m dubious that women can fix these windows on their own, in fact. It’d be nice, but geekland culture has got a cozy little cycle going: demean women, then accuse them of overreacting (I’m being kind here; the accusations are generally much nastier than that) if they protest it, then demean the protesters, who are after all women, until they are driven off. Then demean women some more; who will be left to protest? And who will be left to protest should merely demeaning women escalate to threatening them? Threatening them sexually? Threatening their lives?

No, a Kathy Sierra debacle won’t happen in every community whose norms allow sex jokes. But I will venture to say that every community with those norms has driven women out of it, mostly but not always silently. Argue with me about that. I dare you. I’ve been that woman too often.

But the cycle can be broken. It just has to be broken by men. And, I believe, it needs to be broken as early as possible in the cycle, while the norms of a particular community are still forming. Once they’ve crystallized such that pr0n jokes and “I’d hit that” are acceptable, the battle is lost. That community is inevitably going to drive away some woman sometime, and probably a lot of them. Moreover, I have yet to see such a community reform itself.

So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, “Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.” You say, “Hey, could we not use that phrase? I don’t like it.” You say to the main perpetrators, in IRC whispers or private email or whatever, “Hey, would you mind toning down the jokes? That kind of talk really bothers me.”

The key here is to express that the demeaning of women bothers you, you personally. Don’t appeal to nebulous higher causes; geekland scoffs at that stuff. Don’t even say the words “sexist” or “sexism,” much less “feminism,” and avoid “woman” and “women” whenever you can. If you say “that kind of talk,” trust me, they’ll know what you mean; whereas if you invoke the loaded words, they’ll shut down like a portcullis before an invading army.

And don’t say that you want the talk to stop because you want a comfortable environment for women, or even for a specific woman (your significant other, your sister, your daughter, your boss, your employee). Geekland doesn’t care. You can’t even say that you want more women to join the community. Some geeks will openly say “Why?” (Or, less openly, they will say that women aren’t there because they don’t want to be—without answering the question begged—or aren’t smart enough or good enough or “tough enough” to be. The last-mentioned, of course, is code for “honorary guy.”) The rest will simply assume that you want women for sex, because that’s all that women are for in geekland.

In fact, don’t get drawn into discussing why sexist talk irks you; doing so has probably been my major mistake. Geekland is very, very good at attacking feminist arguments, and dismissing and besieging the arguers. If they ask you why you’re bothered, just ask “Shouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it bother you? Uh, isn’t it wrong?” and like that—let them defend. (They will, don’t mistake me. But at least they have to.)

I reiterate: You must say that “that kind of talk” bothers you personally, and you must not get drawn into fruitless arguments about why you are bothered. That’s the only thing that breaks the cycle.

Sounds easy. Isn’t. It’s no good to do this in safe spaces, like the comment section of a female (much less feminist) blogger. You have to do it in spaces where you will not feel welcome or possibly even safe in saying it. And you will have to repeat yourself until you are blue in the face, this happens so often. Welcome to my world.

You will be told you’re overreacting. You will be told nobody means any harm. You will be ordered to lay off. You will be asked why you care, why you don’t have anything more important to worry about, why you’re ruining the great social environment. You will be shunned. You will be hassled. You may even be told to get the hell out. You will be called a feminazi, very possibly to your face. You will be told you’re pussywhipped, because in geekland, women are properly subordinate to men and nobody better damn well forget it. You will even be called a pussy or a cunt, because in geekland, nothing is worse than being compared to a woman, and her genitalia specifically.

Not easy. Not easy at all. It will take astonishing amounts of courage and persistence, in fact. But aside from getting in early and setting norms up front, nothing else works that I’ve ever seen. Think you’ve got the guts? Step up and prove it. Sing with the chorus.

And for those of you who already do—thank you. Thank you, Walt and Roy and Brad and Kevin, just to name four. Thank you very much.

This is my contribution to Stop Cyberbullying Day. I don’t do tags on CavLec (no philosophical objection, just haven’t bothered), but this post can be appropriately tagged on del.icio.us or elsewhere.