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.

Deathworm, whatever issues Dittany has with me and/or men in general is something I have decided to leave alone from now on.

You yourself made the point "I wasn't at all just saying that some users/websites are inegalitarian. I was saying that the internet is." I'm arguing otherwise - I believe the Internet as a whole (and excluding the users/content) is egalitarian. Some bits of the content and some of the users are sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. We can split hairs forever more how big those "some"s are, of course.

And by egalitarian I mean that access is open to all (ok, there are some socio-economic barriers, but none that affect us on this site). Anyone can set up a site, anyone can say what they want on that site within the relevant laws, and anyone can choose whose comments they allow on their own sites. Yes, the majority of Internet users are male, although that disparity is slowly evening out. Yes, there are some sexist idiots out there (of both genders, but males are more vocal about it and there are more of them due to the gender gap) but I don't think they say much about the majority.

I also seriously disagree that the technological and business development of the Internet is "largely porn-led". The Internet itself came from a military/scientific background and the Web from a purely scientific one. Most of the protocol-development stuff I've seen either comes from a big company such as IBM, Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, AT&T etc, or the Internet Engineering Task Force (an independent body of experts). Check the sources of the RFCs (the standards for Internet protocols) if you don't believe me.

I'll admit I'm no expert on porn, Internet or otherwise, but I'd be gob-smacked if their technology is anything special - it's just streaming video, isn't it? Maybe they tweaked a few codecs for maximum compression or rewrote a socket streaming module or two but I really don't think it's accurate to say that porn has been a major driver for Internet technologies. I know the Internet technologies and I know where they're going; porn doesn't come into it. The business models are nothing special either - I'm guessing they'll either be subs-based or supported by ad revenue. Neither of those is unique to, or even done first by, porn sites. Where's the innovation?

snorbs - if tinternet came largely from a mil/sci background, do you stick with your assertion that it is an egalitarian concept?

sorry because I only read the OP and that was enough

dh told me that at a training course the trainer kept referring to 'the girls' 'the birds' and saying that his teen son is dating 'a lovely bird like a page 3 model' PHOWAR

I had been sheltered in the public sector

madwomanintheattic, if I'm wrong about the technology then I'll hold my hands up and admit it. Can you point me in the direction of some info about what technology the porn industry has driven the development of?

The origins of the Internet came from a background of "how do we build a resilient computer network?" If I recall correctly, the US DoD, through its Advanced Research Projects Agency, funded a lot of it but the work itself was largely done in universities. The military quickly hived itself off into its own little MILnet away from the largely university-run ARPAnet which was being built and developed by all the hippies, long-hairs and assorted radical libertarians in MIT, UCLA, Berkeley and similar US universities - this was the early 70s, remember, and a lot of the work was happening in California.

The Internet as we know it today grew out of the ARPAnet side (ie, the radical libertarian ex-hippies) rather than the MILnet side. If you ever go along to an IETF conference, as I have, you'll still see an awful lot of old hippies wandering about

I think the basic concept of a global computer network that's usable for many different things and by many different people is fundamentally an egalitarian one. TCP/IP doesn't care who you are. Yes, there is a socio-economic barrier to entry due to cost of computer equipment and net access but those barriers are reducing all the time. In some countries there are political issues, eg China, North Korea, Iran etc blocking access to many sites, but as the old saying goes "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it" and such barriers can be circumvented.

Yes, the initial up-take of Internet use was predominantly male but that's not a fault of the technology or the original concept. And as every year passes, the balance gets more and more even.

To be fair to Snorbs, he said right from the start that the conference situation was awful and he hoped that the organiser had learned his lesson. It certainly doesn't read to me that he's supporting misogyny!

I also find myself agreeing with a lot of his comments about the internet. I have been online since ... erm ... '92? And it's always been fairly equal opportunity to get a website up and do whatever the hell you like (which is probably why porn does have such a foothold - it's an anarchy out there ... or at least used to be in the good ol' days).

In all my years as a blogger I have NEVER had anything nasty or anti-women put on my blog (other than random spam which all gets deleted anyway). I have always been openly female on the net. Yes there will be individuals who have abhorrent views (and not just relating to sexism) but they are individuals. I feel freer on the 'net to be me and feel far less limited in opportunity by merely being female than I ever would be in real life.

Compare and contrast: I can get info and chat on message boards on topics such as science, skepticism, martial arts, computer gaming, programming, car mechanics (okay, maybe not the latter two as I know bugger all about them, but I could if I did know anything ) but drive into a local garage as a woman on your own and watch the patronising crap start before you even reveal how much you know about cars.

I do think the IT industry is one sector which is still VERY male dominated and does have issues. However, there are many male programmers just as outraged at these conference talks mentioned in this thread which I find encouraging for the future.

I can't argue whether porn drives the technology revolutions or not, I simply don't know enough to comment. However, avoiding porn on the internet if you're not interested is easy enough.

I've waffled on lots, but what I was trying to get at was that really you are both on the same side here, you just arguing and getting very het up about the details. It's probably worth reserving the ire for the tossers who really deserve it like that twunt Hoss.

Largely porn-led: in the dot.com bust the only sector of internet industry to remain profitable was porn. Many of the currently used technologies apparently had their debut in areas of porn, and many ways of enacting busines online apparently too were first modelled in porn transactions. Of course they are used generically now, but it is still the case that the shaping, the pioneering of large parts of the internet has been performed by an industry that is abhorrent to women and that most women feel they can't and don't wish to participate in on equal terms.

As to all the other areas that you point to as being egalitarian, they are no more or less egalitarian than the societies that have shaped them: I haven't got time now to look back through thread, but you mention 'major western corporations.' I'm not aware that these have transcended gender inequality, or that the governments that regulate them now have equal participation by men and women. I suppose I just want to say that the internet is a cultural/legal/economic entity whose gender equality is as imperfect as the society it is embedded in -- that is the case even before you take into account end-user content, but in any case since the content does to a large extent mimic the inequalities of the societies that have given rise to it, we have the same sort of inequality whether we define the internet with or without content.

So long as you retain the notion of the internet as a cultural entity it is just implausible to assert that it is somehow free of the gender bias of our cultures. And if you define it in pared-down technological terms then the equality you are able to claim for it is not a social or economic or practical kind of equality but only a base-line techno-equality that no-one in their right mind would have disputed in any case. Of course the fibre-whatever things don't discriminate on the basis of gender. Neither do the microphones in the House of Commons. Neither did the laptop on which the IT prick produced his PowerPenisPoint humiliation of the IT women at the conference. No-one claimed the base-line technology was perpetrating any wrongdoing.

I've spent way to much time on this so have to leave it now. I don't care if you are a man or woman (assume man) and I think that the most valuable reason for not dissing men's posts is that it gives men a bit of a get-out clause in that it enables them to say 'see, I am being treated badly here so it is All The Same -- all the difficulties women face are faced by me too.'

As I said on the 'thread about the Men-on-MN thread' the ad hominen stuff can be a distraction.

lol snorbs, i wasn't questioning your historical knowledge of development of tinternet, i just found it mildly amusing that you were using the mil/sci start point to contradict the porn angle in a argument centred around misogyny... the military being the last bastion of all things gender-neutral lol...

i haven't the foggiest tbh, but the articles cited on this thread are v interesting

my only current interest in gender and the internet concerns usage tbh, although the historical implications are worthy of more of my time...

"Of course they are used generically now, but it is still the case that the shaping, the pioneering of large parts of the internet has been performed by an industry that is abhorrent to women and that most women feel they can't and don't wish to participate in on equal terms."

Really? I don't give a thought to it when I buy stuff on Amazon! When talking at the school gate and there are women saying they don't go on the internet much, I have NEVER ONCE heard it be because it was built on porn. Mostly, they don't have the confidence because our culture seems to push science/computers/maths/anything techy as male - this is perpetuated by other women too, to be interested in computers (as I am) isn't considered very 'feminine' - which is a major issue in itself.

I thought the point that Snorbs was trying to make was that the content is created by the users. If the content you want isn't out there, there is nothing stopping you from creating it. After all, that's how Mumsnet was born, wasn't it

RubberDuck I was thinking more about the fact that the business development of the internet in that phase is likely to have been an area which many businesswomen and girl-geeks might have felt unwilling to participate, and therefore that the internet has been historically shaped more by men than by women. Of course there was its prior history in the notoriously female American-military-industrial complex

Ah, sorry... got the wrong end of the stick

"I thought the point that Snorbs was trying to make was that the content is created by the users"

I'm not sure that was snorbs point. Surely we all know that

Anyway, I MUST leave this alone now and do stuff.

"Anyway, I MUST leave this alone now and do stuff."

Hehe... suddenly I'm reminded of this xkcd cartoon:

Duty Calls

Kinell.

I'm just skimming bcs making fish soup and talking to childers but kinell.

I don't count spam in any way the same as targeted vile abuse that Kathy Sierra experienced and I think it would be totally insulting to what she suffered to class it in the same category. And it is also extremely misleading to imply that every female blogger is going to get that kind of abuse - I have a fairly wide blogging circle, a large amount of which are female bloggers. There has been nothing like that for them, or for their circle that they have reported. I will check with dh to see if the PHP women's group have had attacks like that, but given how vocal their blogs have been about the conference issues, I would have thought I'd have come across something like that if it was common.

Back to spam: it's not targeted at me personally, and I don't even see it - it's highly annoying, and we've sorted out a pretty good spam filter system for it - i don't even get to read it any more, just delete 500s in one go.

Don't get me wrong, spam is the scourge of the internet. But there is a large community dedicated to fighting spam/dealing with it. It's not being ignored.

I think there's a real danger here also of focusing on the rare and giving it an importance way above its station, generating more fear along the way (which is why I called out the female bloggers get abuse statement), and ignoring the millions of interactions which are not abusive and, of course, not reported. It creates a very skewed picture which is not the reality for most people.

It's not dangerous to focus on abuse, for goodness sake - and I'm really GLAD that these conferences have been highlighted and that there is outrage in the programming communities about them. That is entirely the way that we are going to get attitudes changed. I don't think there is a single person on this thread who have said otherwise!

And of course there are groups fighting misogynistic stuff everywhere - you only have to look at all the feminist blogs/groups on the net to start with. There's an excellent one I've recently subscribed to (in fact, I thought it was you who linked to it on another thread, could be wrong about that though as I don't keep track of usernames very well - www.thefword.org.uk/ - there was a fabulous article on women and martial arts on there a little while back)

Implying that it's endemic and that women bloggers are having to delete that kind of abuse all the time just isn't representative of my experience of the internet, or many others experience of the internet and might actively DISCOURAGE more women to get involved, which would be completely contrary to progress, surely?

"groups fighting misogynistic stuff everywhere" - to clarify (that sentence structure wasn't the best) I mean groups on the net fighting misogynistic instances where ever they occur, off and online.

sorry, OT but I REALLY want to read the men-on-mn thread - not the suggested compromise one in Chat but whatever is behind it. Please will someone take pity on me and post a link?

Yes, some women suffer misogynistic abuse on the internet, but the more women use the internet, the less hassle there will be. And, really, if you get nasty posts on your blog, you can either delete them or run them complete with derisive comments underneath (and I write as someone who has been 'threatened' with various unpleasantnesses in online discussions, from rape to boiling alive. I do not find this worrying - partly because, if morons and loons get agitated enough to post this kind of stuff it always makes me feel I must be doing something right...). It's not the same as being verbally -or physically - abused in your workplace or in your home.

And one of the good things about porn on the internet is that the general lowering of production costs and possibility of doing one's own thing actually makes more room for women (and men) to make a wider variety of sexually-explicit material in words or pictures. Porn doesn't have to be ugly, crappy and 'woman-hating', after all.

Deathworm, I'll take your word for it that the Internet porn industry was the only one that remained profitable in the early 90s. I seem to recall there were quite a few other survivors but I'm too lazy to look them up

The thing is, the claims that porn is driving technological development on the Internet, and also claims such as yours that "many of the currently used technologies apparently had their debut in areas of porn" have come up here and other places several times. But I've yet to hear of a single actual technology that this clearly applies to, or seen a single RFC that doesn't have either an old hippy or some big IT corporate as the author - bigandbouncy.com and its ilk are notable by their absence.

The IETF is the driving force behind the evolution of the Internet, and that is traditionally a fiercely-policed meritocracy albeit one more recently tainted by the influence of big IT corporations such as Microsoft, Cisco et al. IPv6, the next major "upgrade" for the Internet that the IETF is rolling out, has nothing in its design goals or foundation technologies that I've seen that have got anything even tangentially to do with porn sites.

Sure, most major western corporations such as those that own the backbone links are likely to have mainly men on the board of directors. That's not equality, I know, and it's flat-out not good enough. However, their internal HR practises don't, I contend, have an observable influence on their policies regarding the traffic those backbone links carry. To imply otherwise would be akin to suggesting that the telephone network is sexist because BT only has three or four female board members.

I'm not arguing that all the content or all the users of the Internet is sexism, or any unpleasant -ism, free. It's obviously not. And in that respect it undoubtedly does mirror society; I don't believe I've claimed otherwise.

You can find sexist idiots on the net just as easily as you can find religious bigots or ranting gun-nuts. Kooks of all flavours like the Internet because it gives them a stage from which to proclaim their kookiness. On the plus side, the Internet makes it just as easy to denounce those ridiculous ideas and show others just how nuts these kooks are. It's that equality of access that I see as the key.

RubberDuck, that is indeed one of the points that I've been trying (badly) to make. Thanks for making it so succinctly

There's nothing about the Internet to stop sexist idiots being sexist idiots if they want to be. But the same freedoms allows everyone else the opportunity to denounce those sexist idiots for their unpleasant beliefs. That seems pretty equal to me.