Why I'm not laughing at C Plus Equality(blog.mollywhite.net) |
Why I'm not laughing at C Plus Equality(blog.mollywhite.net) |
That said, I personally thought her entry only ended up (unintentionally?) conforming to the very stereotypes the project served to satirize in the first place.
The C+= joke sucks. It's poorly executed. It's far too self-conscious and has way too many "wink-wink" moments to be effective satire. You either need to be clever and subtle, or absurd and outrageous. Instead, most of the jokes fell flaccidly in the middle: too obvious about its subject matter, but not even remotely clever. Making it a programming language doesn't make it clever joke, it just means you tried really hard to tell a joke.
And she fell for it. Which ironically validates its existence, poor joke execution be damned.
I think it's great the way Ms. White met their ugly speech with more speech of her own.
That's the remedy to ugly speech, more speech.
I disagree with Ms. White almost entirely, but I do approve of the way she has chosen to confront them.
In the past 36 hours, we've seen github censor this speech, and calls from feminists to have bitbucket censor this repo at bitbucket as well. On twitter there have been callouts where people who "star"ed the repo were listed and implicitly threatened and people tweeting in support of the parody were named and labeled.
That sort of behavior from github and from internet feminists trying to stifle speech and police speech is wrong.
That being said, maybe the best way to change the tone of the open source community - or any male-dominated community, for the matter - is to get involved with it?