The Community of Words

“Strike three, you’re out,” they say. But strike three arrived and I’m still here. And that guy who’s lobbing curves balls at me–I’m not going to let him chase me away. I’m not going to budge; not one inch.

I keep hearing from one of the Flock engineers, “But I *like* our frat-boy culture!” Could it be that the boy’s club that is the open source community has just allowed into its midst one of the scariest of frat-boy-busting characters: a feminist?

Yes, it could.

In case one of my three readers doesn’t know what the third strike was, bear with me while I re-cap the whole ball game.

Strike one came when I realized, one caffeine-deprived afternoon, that I couldn’t finish a sentence during meetings at Flock, because I’m never quite loud enough to make myself heard over all the guys interrupting me. (I write much louder than I talk.)

Strike two came a few days later when I was poking around in some of Flock’s test blogs, and discovered that a couple of the “boys” had been testing Flock’s ability to put naughty pictures into blog posts.

I’ll pause while WordPress collapses from the rush to Flock’s test blog… no, wait, the pictures are gone now, so just stay here and let me tell you about strike three.

Strike three came when I was able to get my face out of my computer’s screen long enough to read my accumulated email. I found a conversation that curled my hair. On one of Flock’s lists, a poster characterized a software utility, one that modifies other software, as a rapist. The utility would “strip” the other software, “not caring” what the other software wanted. Poster number two chimed in with “I’m horny.” In other words, all that talk about rape was making him hot.

That was bad, but my hair was just a little wavy at that point. The real hair-curling came when the conversation continued, with another poster complimenting the first guy on his “way with words,” and a fourth — a teenager — finding the whole thing very funny.

Yes siree, we’re really setting an example for the youth.

Two other Flock staffers posted comments reminding the list that this sort of talk is not acceptable, and that it drives people away from a community that should be inclusive and welcoming. A storm of protests ensued, mostly defending the rape talk as harmless humor and excoriating the Flock staffers as unsmiling wonks who wanted to infringe on freedom of speech, comparing them to the people in the Middle East rioting over cartoons.

After watching from the wings for a while, and being acutely aware that by my silence I was giving tacit approval to the rape talk, I finally posted. I talked about the degree to which sexual violence is a part of our culture — a part of the world’s culture, really, though a significant portion of the world doesn’t even keep statistics on the frequency of rape. I talked about how repugnant it is, to someone who has been on the other side of sexual assault, to see people make light of it.

This was not quite the wake-up call I’d hoped it would be. I received some support, and to those posters I’m sending virtual roses every day (can you see them?). But most people, and that includes several Flock staffers, didn’t see the dirty little message inside this fracas: that the open source community is at times pretty offensive, and that many within it think that’s just fine.

During the brawl, one person contributed something that really stuck in my mind. He wrote, “One of the things that I think people will find irresistible is the outlaw nature” of our community.

Well, yes. That’s what I find irresistible. To put it another way: We are witnessing the birth of the Internet, which is creating a change so fundamental that the culture of the entire world is shifting under our feet. And we are seeing the old way of doing things — the way of big money, repressive government, and anti-competitive corporations — trying to assert itself and take over and control this change. Standing in opposition is an audacious group of people saying that they’ve got a new way, the open source way, where people cooperate and share. Irresistible? Damn right, I find it irresistible.

But violent language? No. Words communicate ideas, and violent words communicate violent ideas. If we really want to promote cooperation and sharing, we can’t do it while speaking the language of violence and domination.

There’s an old, tired idea that’s leaving the world now, in our own age and before our eyes. It’s an idea that has been universally accepted and has guided most of the world’s major religions, governments, enterprises, and forms of human organization.

The idea is patriarchy: organization by hierarchy, by power, by domination and submission, by haves over have-nots. It is what I call the dominator model.

The dominator model isn’t skulking away with its tail between its legs, and it’s not rushing the hell out of here like Wormtongue running away from Gandalf.

The dominator model won’t go quietly and it won’t go quickly. It goes kicking and screaming, hangs on as long as it can, and tries to raise as much hell as possible on the way out. It has got its tendrils in our souls and asks us to give voice to its beliefs. One of its beliefs is that it feels good to dominate others; that in fact it is only natural to want to dominate others, and it’s in the nature of men to want to dominate women.

Let’s not give voice to that lie.