To think that women 'people' - shouldn't be subjected to porn at a professional conference

[onebatmother]

Sweet Jeezum, would you have a look at this description of a mainstream, non-adult-industry tech developers conference in the states.

Porn (as it has always done) is powering tech development.

This guy's attitude speaks volumes both about what porn says about imaginary, abstract women, and - crucially - the real women who had paid to attend the conference.

Dittany, yes, small incidences can sometimes illustrate larger trends. But they can also simply be one person doing something immature, offensive and downright dumb. Sometimes a floating chip of ice is just that - there isn't always an iceberg underneath it.

This isn't the first instance in an IT conference. Earlier this year, there was a similar incident during a Ruby on Rails conference: Ruby and Porn at GoGaRuCo

The difference being in that earlier case, the community leaders sided with the speaker.

Hopefully though, the widely spoken outrage sparked by these two conferences will encourage more people to speak out and challenge these speakers at the time, and make more conference organisers reluctant to hire speakers known to be crude and offensive.

Deathworm, fair enough. I'm a network engineer by trade so when I see the words "the Internet" my immediate mental image is genuinely one of fibre optics, high-speed routers, TCP/IP handshakes and protocol stacks.

So when people say things like "the Internet is not egalitarian", I get a spot of cognitive dissonance as that just doesn't fit within my mental model of what "the Internet" really is. I would, instead, express that sentiment more as "Some people, on some websites, on the Internet, are sexist". Because they are. But some websites do not make up the Internet as a whole.

Dittany, why are the contents of my underwear of such great importance to you?

See, I understand your first paragraph snorbs. But then you completely miss the thing about the internet being so much more than "fibre optics, high-speed routers, TCP/IP handshakes and protocol stacks" (as I now know the pipe thingies to be called) even before individual websites and users come into the picture.

I wasn't at all just saying that some users/websites are inegalitarian. I was saying that the internet is.

To be fair, I should state that dh is a speaker in PHP conferences and has been to a fair few now.

He's never seen anything like that in any of the talks he's listened to (and goes without saying that he wouldn't pull that crap in one of his either).

It does appear to be the very rare exception rather than the rule - at least in such an overt way.

DeathWorm, yes, there are a lot of other things besides the low-level plumbing on the one hand, and the end-users on the other.

Internet regulation is, as far as I have seen in the Western world, gender-neutral. I'm not sure what you mean by "platforms", though - for me, a web platform is a content management system sitting on top of a webserver on top of an OS, a collection of entities that I'd see as gender-neutral.

Ownership of the plumbing is (in the West) mainly big private corporations who don't care about content being delivered over those pipes provided they don't take up too much bandwidth or cause significant legal issues.

Ownership of the sites is, obviously, more varied but predominantly male. But there's nothing stopping women from owning and creating their own sites therefore, at first glance, I'd call that egalitarian - at least in concept.

Business models? There's a huge variety of business models on the web; the vast majority will happily take money from anyone (eg FaceBook, eBay, Google) and will spread as wide a net as possible in an effort to get at least some revenue. Some sites are specifically aimed at men and some others are specifically aimed at women.

I must admit, having gone through this list I come back to the thought that inequalities and inequities on the Internet are primarily seen in the content and/or the users, though. I don't see anything inherent in the Internet itself (ie, the Internet minus the websites and users), or the supporting laws, business models etc, that have a significant impact on equality.

I'm really not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it here - you seem to be saying that even if you exclude the websites and the punters, the Internet as a whole is not egalitarian. How so?

lol. this reminds me of that 'men on mn' thread. snorbs, either you are being deliberately disingenuous and you are a woman who thinks they are proving the thread was wrong, or you are a bloke proving it was right.
i actually don't care either way (or about your underwear) but the discussion was about IT culture, which generally means a bit more than a few bits of plastci and metal welded together with some electricity and wiggly comms stuff i don't understand.

on an interesting note, i'm reading 'virtual masculinity: hanging out at the online pub' at the mo.
a timely thread lol.

I don't see what difference my gender makes to this particular discussion - if I say I'm a bloke, dittany may well just automatically dismiss all my opinions and leave me feeling silenced

Dittany, please stop bullying me and dismissing my posts as "bullshit". Agree or disagree with what I say at your own choice, but please leave the ad hominem attacks out of it.

Leave you feeling silenced???? I don't like any ad hominem stuff at all snorbs (talking in general terms here, not esp about the dittany/snorbs exchange, which I haven't folllowed) but I really find it hard that you can put a sad face against your account of one poster making you feel slightly marginalised in your chat here, and yet manitain that the 1000x marginalisation of women in IT?internet realms eg in political blogs as I mentioned, and in the fairly-rare but not freakishly so pieces on industry sexism, and in the predominently male ownership of internet entities and in the fact that technological and business dev of the internet is largley porn-led is wholly compatible with an egalitarian internet and not, presumably, worthy of a sad face.

This is one tiny cornerr of the internet in which women predominate. One. Tiny. Corner.