Dominator Tentacles

The recent hacker attacks on radical feminist websites is an example of the dominator model growing a new tentacle.

A few weeks ago, a group of anonymous hackers mounted attacks on several feminist blogs and websites. The attack was nothing new: women’s voices in general, and feminist voices in particular, are silenced daily by violence, threats, and shaming, on the Internet and in real life.

As a result of the recent attack, there are fewer radical voices on the web. A few radical feminists have taken down their blogs; some will not be reopened. Others have made their Flickr photostreams private. At least one blog and one forum are now private; a muting of voices if not an outright silencing. Going private, having to hide: the parts of the radfem community that are still intact are no longer fully open, and no longer fully a part of the human conversation on the web. 

The hackers exchange communications at some notorious sites which I have visited. (I had to shower myself and sage my computer afterwards.) They appear to be a group of sociopathic personalities whose discourse is trite, tired, and boring. A single comment from one “Anonymous” caught my attention, though, and has stuck in my mind:

“Remember, we are not political. We are not Republicans. We are not Democrats.”

I’ve been mulling this over. After all, these same hackers have also taken down gay websites. Attacking gays, attacking feminists; hmmm, seems like a political agenda to me.

But let’s suppose that Anon’s actions are motivated, as Anon seems to say, by a sort of juvenile nihilist philosophy; not by politics, and not by any desire to support big government, big corporations, and the status quo. Because Anon is a rebel kind of guy. An anarchist, perhaps. He’d never carry water for, well, anybody.

Interestingly, however, Anon never seems to take down the big sites. Walmart.com and the Pentagon are safe from his attentions. It’s not that Anon is a big fan of Walmart or the government. It’s just so much easier to attack the vulnerable. Big business and big government aren’t vulnerable on the Internet. They can afford not to be.

Small discussion boards and blogs, particularly ones that advocate unpopular points of view, are often run by individuals who put up their own funds, if they can scrape them together, and who must be their own IT departments. They can’t afford the type of security that requires the big bucks. And since they have jobs (unlike Anon, apparently), they have to put their desire to maintain an Internet presence in the balance with supporting themselves and their families. When the crunch comes and time pressures set in, it’s not the Internet presence that wins out.

So the actions of these “apolitical” hackers do have a political end: they remove unpopular, radical, fringe viewpoints from the web. Big government doesn’t have to eliminate the subversive websites; Anon will do it.

Sorry, Anon, it looks like you do carry water for the dominators. And you didn’t even realize it, you putz!

Wouldn’t it be great to have an open web, where even the most marginalized groups can be heard? The dominator model, which dictates how human organizations should operate, doesn’t like open. It doesn’t like consciousness, community, or cooperation. Like Anon, the dominator model believes in establishing “cred” by bullying others. And the dominator model extends its tentacles just about everywhere, including inside our own minds, so sometimes we don’t even know how to live by any other model.

As a feminist blogger once put it, “many ghouls of the patriarchy have slimed our brains.”Those ghouls have certainly slimed Anon’s brain.

Anon is just another tentacle that the dominator model has extruded.

So I’m wondering: how much do we want an open web? Enough to recognize a tentacle when we see one? Enough to support free access to free software, including the expensive technology and services that make sites secure? Enough to get the slime out of our own brains, and stop giving a pass to dominator-style web discourse, such as bullying and building cred?

I don’t like it that radical voices, however unpopular, are being expelled from the human conversation by online thugs. I like it even less that it’s happening with hardly any notice, and without comment by more mainstream writers.

Here’s a story about the incident at a news site. I’m not linking to any of the feminist sites that were attacked, because one of the ways Anon decides who to target next is by following links. I guess that means my voice has been muted a bit, too.

Misogyny bares its teeth on the Internet

The latest take on a very old theme

I’ve been mulling over this post by Tara Hunt, and though it is a week old, I want to draw attention to it.

Here’s the story: Tara takes the lead in organizing a tech conference, and in the main stream press story about it, Tara is ignored and unnamed while top billing goes to co-organizer Chris Messina. Most women in technical professions can tell any number of similar tales. This is one of the great mysteries of high tech: journalists periodically comment on (and even lament) the absence of women in tech, while simultaneously acting as if the prominent tech women in the near vicinity have all donned cloaks of invisibility.

All I can say is that this is just the latest version of a very old story. It is a well-honored tradition for those who record events to ignore the contributions of activist women. Were this not so, we’d be celebrating Alice Paul Day every January 11th.

Transparency

I just watched a great story of web transparency unfold. It goes like this:

A recently-minted MD–I’ll call him AsshatMD–decides he wants to blog. AsshatMD wants to blog anonymously, because he likes to insult people. In particular, he likes to bad-mouth nurses. A sampling:

Most of the Hispanic girls came from community centers managed by certified nurse midwives (CNMs), nursing “specialists” perhaps even more incompetent than CRNAs (how OB-GYNs tolerate them I do not know; they’re acerbic, ignorant and foolhardy and generally built like linebackers).

Naturally, he doesn’t want real-life nurses (or, as he calls them, “bulldogs disguised as nurses”) to read this stuff. After all, he may have to face them in person at his hospital.

In his most recent blog, AsshatMD takes to task pregnant women who have the temerity to hold opinions differing from his, particularly on the subject of how they should give birth. He makes observations such as this one: “I’m tired of having to manage precarious medical situations because New Age mothers prefer to be irresponsible [...]” by “clamoring” for natural childbirth and declining offers of anesthesia.

It follows that AsshatMD’s blog comes to the attention of a feminist blogger, who offers it as an example of, well, asshattery. AsshatMD promptly comments on the feminist blogger’s site: “This is apparently a blog which caters to rabid (and exceedingly retarded) lesbian manhaters.”

Not surprisingly, other people visiting the feminist blog begin to speculate about what might happen if AsshatMD were outed. Suppose his supervisor got wind of Asshat’s misogynistic writings? People take note of Asshat’s self-proclaimed credentials: his alma mater, the hospital where he claims to have done his residency, and so forth.

But wait! Dr. Asshat’s credentials begin to change. At 2PM he’s a physician living in Northern California who attended Cornell; by 4PM he’s a “District of Columbia” doctor from UCLA.

By 5PM, his site is down; closed for business. By 6PM, a webpage that had previously linked to his site has disappeared. AsshatMD is trying to erase his anonymous existence.

Too late, though. By this time my curiosity was piqued. I’m not sure what came over me; I’m a technical writer, not a private detective. I guess I wanted to see what I could do with Google and a laptop. So I did it–I tracked him down.

I’m not going to out AsshatMD. But it’s interesting to know that even after he had taken down his site, it took me less than an hour to find his name, including middle initial, as well as his religion, academic history, part of the country he calls home, and more. I read a short article he authored about a fraudulent “cancer curing” juice. I even found a photo of him. Oh, and by the way, I have no special technical skills in this area. I’m sure others would have had him in minutes.

To all the Asshats out there: For the sake of the reading public, please assume that anything you post on the web leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that leads, inexorably, back to sweet little old you. Maybe if the Asshats of the world understood this one truth, there would be less asshattery on the web.

We can only hope.

Shrill?

I hear tell that Chris Matthews of MSNBC thinks women leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, have a problem because when we women raise our voices we sound “shrill” and it’s most unpleasant.

I just thought I’d point out that we’ve been listening to fatuous egotistical male morons for the past six years — I’m sure I don’t have to mention names — and it has been nearly unbearable.

I’m eager for Nancy Pelosi to raise her voice. Counting on it, in fact.

Phase Shift

Time for a reorg!

Yesterday was my last day as a regular Flock employee; possibly the last day as a regular employee of anybody. I'm re-defining myself as a consultant. Depending on business, and my sense of discipline, I should have plenty of time to spend writing my anti-dominator model rants into this blog. Hurray! And I'll also get more exercise, eat healthy food, do yoga, organize my closets, floss my teeth, and rotate my tires.

Accordingly, my blog's title has changed. I hope y'all like it.

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.

Cederick the Turtle

When I started writing “Vera’s Flock Blog,” I decided to write about a particular topic: how it feels to re-join the high-tech, open source community after a hiatus of four and a half years. In particular, what it’s like to work at Flock–to be the only female technical professional there. To be the only woman in most meetings.

There’s something I’ve been wanting to say about how it feels, but I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to write about it. I’ve written around the subject. My post about having trouble getting a word in edgewise is an example. My personal blog, where I wrote about past work experiences, is another. But yesterday something happened at Flock HQ. No need to go into details, but it was a sexist thing. It hurt my feelings, and made me question whether I really want to be in the high tech world anymore.

(Hear that? It’s my quilting and gardening calling me back to retirement.)

Here’s the part that really, really hurts: I’m beginning to realize that as difficult as it is to be a woman in a predominantly male profession, it’s even harder to be in the open source community. In companies like Apple and Google people have to follow the HR rules. But in the open source community, there seems to be little to reign in people’s, er, off-base impulses.

The thing is, I don’t want to throw blame around. I love going to work at Flock every day, because I really enjoy being with my colleagues there. It’s the most interesting place I can imagine being. I want to be there, with the smart, funny people. I feel like I’m with my tribe, when I’m at Flock. (Okay, so I have an ego!)

How do I explain why sexism hurts so much, without making someone feel blamed? Up till now, I haven’t tried, because it seemed impossible.

But at home today, in self-imposed exile, as I sat watching my daughter’s two aquatic turtles, an analogy occurred to me.

Cederick and Hubert live in a beautiful tank with a nice floating island and a filter that creates a bubbly area where they play. They swim around wildly doing backflips and looking very free and happy. There’s just one problem: Hubert is bigger. He’s dominant. And, from time to time, he lets Cederick know it, by biting off Cederick’s tail.

Now I’m sure there’s no place Cederick would rather be than in that tank with Hubert. To leave that tank he’d have to live in the small, cramped temporary container. He’d be alone, and there would be no floating island or bubbly fountain.

But to stay in the tank, he has to put up with having his tail bitten off once a week or so.

Tough choice, isn’t it? I’ll bet Cederick is a lot more anxious than Hubert.

So, my male colleagues, close your eyes for a minute and pretend that you’re Cederick. You love that tank, don’t you? The tank is where you get to hang around with others of your kind, doing the things you love (coding and backflips). Don’t you wish you could be there without getting bitten every so often?

Me, too.

May I Finish?

My husband, who is Japanese-American, once commented that the Japanese spoken by women is so different from that spoken by men, it’s as if Japanese is really two different languages. I asked my mother-in-law about it, and her comment was succinct: “Ladies must be very polite.”

This comes to mind because I’m thinking about a phenomenon that’s familiar to many (if not most) women: being interrupted while speaking. I was interrupted — ignored, really — during a meeting yesterday. I was asked to do a bit of essential writing (informing our brave friends who downloaded 0.4.10 that they must throw away their profiles before downloading 0.6). I needed to figure out where this tidbit should be put — in the Release Notes, on the website, or both — and I said, “I need more information…” One of the engineers began talking about something else, and my query was left twisting in the wind.

I suppose I could have objected, and on another day I might have. But I was tired, and wishing for coffee, and so angry over being ignored that I simply left the room. (And went out for coffee.)

Sociologists have been researching male/female conversation patterns for a few decades. And there’s pretty good evidence that men interrupt women a lot.

In fact, men often interrupt outright, and they do this far more frequently than women do, several studies have shown. Candace West and Don Zimmerman, sociologists at the University of California, recorded a number of two-party conversations. When men spoke with men or women with women, there were relatively few interruptions, and those that did occur were balanced between the two speakers. When men conversed with women, however, not only did more interruptions occur, but 96 percent of them involved men interrupting women.

Psychology Today: Girl talk, guy talk: do men and women really have distinctive conversational styles?

But what can be done about it? Stomping out of the room and going for coffee is not really a solution. Legislation won’t help.

Should I interrupt more? Talk louder? Frankly, I don’t want to do that. I WANNA BE ME! And I’m a person who listens to others, and takes turns, and doesn’t shout. Which isn’t to say I’m not assertive and persistent — my co-workers can attest that I am both of those.

Here’s my proposal. In any meeting, there surely must be men who notice when someone is being interrupted. So guys, here’s what you do: object to the interruption. Say, “Excuse me, but _____ didn’t finish what she was saying.” I am asking for this because I must, on a daily basis, attend meetings where I am the only woman in the room. Frankly, it is tiring and discouraging to keep trying to get a word in edgewise. Help me out here, guys. It’s the manly thing to do.

On Being a Female Flockstar

Several days ago Daryl called for the women of Flock to speak up. There aren’t many of us, but I am one of that rare species.

The reason there are few female flockstars is, of course, that few women go into technical professions, period. And I don’t know why that’s the case. Lots of people have speculated on this, but such speculation has always been along very conventional lines.

My reaction to the comments by Lawrence Summers — that innate differences between men and women might be the reason women are underrepresented in math and science — was surprise that he didn’t carry his line of thought to its logical conclusion. After all, I reasoned, if he’s saying that women’s brains are so different from men’s that our understanding of mathematics is affected, then the world may be missing out on entire branches of math, yet to be discovered! Perhaps chaos theory is really a “female” type of math (sorry, I can’t resist), and there are other, even more chaotic types of mathematics just waiting to be discovered by a future generation of women mathematicians.

To heck with Lawrence Summers. If our brains are different, then we women clearly bring to the party a new viewpoint that will help steer high tech to new, previously unimagined places. This is one of those win-win things.

Before I joined Flock I was retired. If an open source project hadn’t come along, I probably would have stayed retired. Maybe my preference for open source, and my abhorrence for big, hierarchically managed, dominator-model corporations has something to do with being female. Or maybe it has more to do with being a feminist, or being, at heart, deeply radical. I dunno. I just like to go where things are interesting, and that’s why I’m here.

So, you women out there — and you non-women out there — I can attest that Flock is an interesting place to be. Join the Flock community. It’s safe here, especially now that the demolition project is completed and all the sharp objects have been put away. And if you want to tear down walls — metaphorical ones, or literal ones — girl or a boy, you’re welcome to pitch in.