This post originally appeared at Holly Pervocracy’s blog.

Note from the GF mods: links from this post may lead to sexually explicit writing or images. In addition, Holly Pervocracy’s original entry has some anti-feminist comments, so ‘ware for that if you head over to her site. (Comments made here are expected to adhere to our comment policy.)

xkcd #592: Drama (by Randall Munroe, CC BY-NC)

With all apologies to the original, which all geeks should read…

I think geek sexuality is an awesome thing.  God knows it’s the only sexuality I’ve ever known.  Geeks are tinkerers who constantly try to improve and innovate, and geeks are not bound by many mainstream social rules, and these two things combine to create some fucking hot sex.  Also for some semi-mysterious reason the overlap between “geek” and “kinkster” is, like, 90% of both groups.

But geeks also are prone to weird social thinking, some of it a reaction to the ungeeky mainstream, some of it their very own invention.  Here’s some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex.

GSFS 1: People can voluntarily control their emotions about sex.

This manifests a couple different ways:

“We’ve agreed this is casual sex, so as long as we decide not to develop feelings, we won’t.”
“Sex is just a physical activity, so adding it to our dating/friendship won’t change our relationship.”
“My partner promised not to feel jealous because I’m not monogamous, but they’re betraying me by feeling jealousy anyway!”  (Note that in this example both partners are apparently carriers of this fallacy.)

Pretending you can just decide whether you’ll feel any emotions at all is a geek fallacy stemming from the idea that you should be able to optimize your own brain to not do anything unproductive or unintended.  But geeks ought to know better, because come on, you can’t even get a computer to do that.  This stuff comes on you, it gets you by the heart and the gut, and it doesn’t ask you “pardon me, I’m an emotion, are you okay with experiencing me?” first.

What you can and should voluntarily control is how you express your emotions.  It’s okay to feel strong emotions; it’s not okay to attack people or break promises and use “I was emotional” as an excuse.  This is when it’s time to tell your partner “hey, we need to talk, I’m feeling an emotion!”  Solving the problem may involve changing your relationship boundaries, it may just involve talking it out, or it may mean you have to end the relationship.  But the solution is never “that is an incorrect emotion, please stop experiencing it.”

GSFS 2: The weirder your sex, the more enlightened you are.

I’ve done a whole post on this, so go there if you want extended pontification.  The short of it is: geeks have a tendency to mistake “less mainstream” for “better,” and to conclude that sex that least resembles the mainstream is both the sexiest and the most virtuous.  So polyamory gets seen as more enlightened than monogamy, kink gets seen as sexier than vanilla, and monogamous vanilla geeks get a big steaming pile of “I guess you’re just not very open-minded.”

I think polyamory and kink have great things to offer geeks of all sorts, but “having sex with multiple people” and “having ouchy sex” aren’t those things.  Those are just neutral activities, things to do if you like and not if you don’t.  The real takeaways are conscious and explicit communication.  That’s what makes us cooler than the squares.

GSFS 3: Cool chicks don’t worry about sexism.

This isn’t exactly a sex thing but God does it plague some geek circles.  I know because I’ve been the cool chick.  I’ve played the “don’t worry, I’m not like those other girls, I’m not into gossip and drama” card; I’ve played the “well, you have my permission to objectify me, because I take it as a compliment” card; I’ve even played the “that mean lady was such an uptight no-funster for having boundaries” card.

Those cards are the fuck out of my deck now.  And I’ve paid the social price for that.  There’s definitely some people in my circles who’ve put me in their “uptight no-funster” mental box since then, or who deliberately bait me about “watch out, Holly, I’m going to patriarchally oppress you!” because ahahaha she’s an angry little lady isn’t that cute.

I don’t blame a woman who sees this go on, decides she wants friends more than she wants to start fights about some abstract problem that doesn’t seem to affect her personally, and starts telling her male friends not to worry, they can be sexist around her, she’s cool.  The problem isn’t her.  The problem is all the people who made it so much easier and more pleasant for her to be a “cool chick” than a woman who gives a damn how people think of her gender.

GSFS 4: Drama is always worse than the thing the drama is about.

I guess the xkcd comic has a little bit of this one.  Drama’s never fun, but it beats the fuck out of suppressing real issues.  In my time in geek circles, I’ve seen reports of sexual harassment and even outright assault silenced with “well, I don’t want to make drama” or “but whatever, that’s just drama.”  A woman in the group is a sexual predator? Gosh, I don’t spread gossip.  A man needs to be disinvited from parties because he’s repeatedly threatened people at them? No, kicking him out would make a scene, it would make drama.

In geek sexual communities, the illusion of smooth functioning and of everyone being bestest friends with everyone can supersede people’s needs for comfort and safety.  A lot of this has to do with the “Ostracizers are Evil” non-sex GSF, but it gets worse when you add sex to the mix, because defensiveness about our non-traditional sexuality suppresses important issues even further.  Like, if you admit that people violate boundaries in BDSM circles, then you’re admitting that BDSM isn’t a perfect haven of consent and negotiation, and that’s just going to play right into the mainstream idea that BDSM is abusive!  So we end up defending abusers to prove BDSM isn’t abusive.

“Drama” is a trivializing word.  Let’s try “conflict,” instead.  ”I don’t want to treat him any differently just because he gets a little handsy with women, that would cause conflict.”  It doesn’t sound so superior and level-headed now, does it?

GSFS 5: Sex should be no big deal.

This is related to GSFS 1, but even nastier.  This is the idea that since sex is just a super simple physical act–you rub some bits together, it feels good, the end–that there shouldn’t be anything complicated or difficult about sex.  That casual sex should be easy for everyone, that having multiple partners should be as simple as “it’s like having a sexual partner, but more than one of them,” that everyone who makes sex into a big complex issue is being dramatic (GSFS 4) or no-fun (GSFS 3) or narrow-minded (GSFS 2).

Sex is complicated as fuck, and if you think understanding sex is easy, you don’t understand sex.  I’ve written 1300 posts on sex and I’ve already changed my mind about roughly half of them.  It amazes me that the same people who admit that games about rolling dice can hide deep complexity and meaning will go on and claim that sex is just some squishy bits coming together.  It’s not.  Sex is two (or more) people interacting in a huge diversity of ways, and while it can be great, it’s never simple.

I love geek sex.  I love the way we’re endlessly willing to rethink and improve and break stereotypes about sex.  But we gotta stop buying into this crap.  We’re geeks; we oughta be smarter than that.

The next day, I visited Forbidden Planet south of Union Square, and the staff seemed far more helpful and sympathetic. When I got up the nerve to ask, “What comics have people who look like me?” they were actually interested in figuring it out and loading up my arms.  “OMG you haven’t read Love And Rockets?!”

(Doesn’t it suck that so much of the Virgin India line is just crap?)

So, since it’s on my mind, some comics that feature women of color as interesting characters:

• Amar Chitra Katha series — the comics I grew up with, telling Indian history, myths, legends, and fables. Draupadi! Savitri! Parvati! Sati! And so on.  (That panel is the image on this post, photo taken by Satish Krishnamurthy.)
  

  Amar Chitra Katha panel:
  The Rakshasi opened her mouth wide as Hanuman
  was drawn into her jaws by a mysterious force.

• Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. I read the whole thing, I loved it, it’s what got me back into comics a decade ago. Most of the characters are women, and I’m thinking especially of 355 (African-American), Dr. Mann (American of Chinese and Japanese ancestry), and You (Japanese).
• DMZ by Brian Wood, which I read avidly. Volunteer medic Zee Hernandez isn’t the main character but she’s in there and important.
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, her autobiography about a childhood in Iran. A modern classic, and can you believe I’m only reading this now?
• Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. Ditto. (I’m a Philistine!)
• Ayaseries by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, about a family in the Ivory Coast. I haven’t read it yet but it’s come recommended.
• Lots of stuff by Lynda Barry. I like her stories (but find her art style a little overwhelming).
• Patrick Farley’s The Spiders stars the African-American soldier Lt. Celicia Miller, and The Jain’s Death is about Anuradha, a South Asian woman.
• I hear very good things about Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder but haven’t started it yet.

I don’t much care about superhero comics so I’m leaving out Storm from X-Men, etc. Should I read Frank Miller’s Martha Washington stuff? I should also sweep through my household’s shelves, especially our three binders of indie stuff we’ve bought at MoCCA, to find more recommendation-worthy books and one-offs, especially by women and people of color.

(Random shout-out: Mel Chua’s engineering education comics “What is Engineering?” and “What is Education?”)

If you are having similar problems (fear of being exposed, feeling like a fraud, lack of self-confidence), you’re not alone! Please read about Impostor Syndrome on the Geek Feminism wiki. If you have any tips on overcoming it, please edit the wiki page!

I don’t recall how I first came across the Wikipedia entry for Impostor Syndrome (IS). I do however clearly recall the massive lightbulb that went off and the feeling of finally having a name to describe this ‘weirdness’ I’d always felt. There were other identifiers for various kinds of weirdness I’d always possessed. Gifted kid. Asperger’s Syndrome. A nameless combination of both with a variety of checklist characteristics.

IS was something else entirely. The more I read about it, the more I realised it was exactly why I’d felt so afraid and self conscious to further my career, to ‘do more’. I’d say it pretty much ruined my career prospects and further debilitated me.

My love for computers began when I was nine. I’m almost forty now and from the time I got my first computer I knew I was going to work in that field. I eventually earned a bachelors degree in a computing discipline and I was set to make that my path in life. I felt my degree was a waste of time and I only scored highly in the subjects that interested me. I walked out of there being mostly self taught.

During my university studies I worked on the help desk in the campus computer labs. I was one of a few females and I soon earned a reputation for being both the friendliest and most knowledgeable. Students and academic staff would specially request I assist them. Strangely, I didn’t take that as a compliment. I just believed they were mistaken, for the work I was doing was just standard help desk stuff. I felt uncomfortable that I was seen as the go-to person for technical problems. And I thought they were all just being nice because they felt guilty saying the nice friendly girl was actually quite clueless.

After graduating, I got a job as a junior network administrator. My employer wanted more females in the technical departments so I could not accept that I was hired for my technical skill, despite my supportive boss telling me how well I performed in the interview and how good I was in the job. Within a week, I was given more senior duties and earned the reputation for being the new go-to person. I found this stressful– I had to prove myself not only as a new employee, but also as one who quickly gained the reputation for knowing my stuff and sharing that knowledge with others. My co-workers in the tech offices had a reputation for being a little abrupt so I told myself I was only the new go-to person because I was approachable and liked to help people.

I learned a lot during my time at this organisation and earned a good reputation with many of the clients who would specifically ask for me when they had technical enquiries. I wrote a lot of documentation so that our help desk staff could become a little more self sufficient as they were frustrated that they didn’t have the knowledge to deal with some of the more technical queries. One day, they asked me to conduct a workshop to help them deal with the more difficult technical problems. I was hit with a feeling of dread and that I would be exposed as a charlatan. I gave the workshop and then I was asked a question I couldn’t answer. In hindsight, it was no big deal, I just didn’t have enough information to give a concrete answer. Back then though, I felt incredibly small and stupid and like everyone had just seen that I wasn’t worthy of the praise they had given me for my good work.

By now I was looking after the servers and networks in a second-in-command capacity. The senior system administrator was my mentor and friend. He was extremely supportive and we once attended a conference together where I heard him telling delegates (some ‘celebrities’ in the FOSS world) that “she’s my co-sysadmin and she’s damn good at what she does”. But instead of feeling proud, I had a complete ‘weird moment’ where I could not understand why he would say such a thing. I convinced myself he was only being nice and singing my praises because we were friends. I wanted to hide under the table in case I was about to be bombarded with technical questions.

After the conference I was head hunted by some well known names. I declined every offer (some were very attractive, even double the salary I was on). I remained convinced I had just bluffed my way through.

I eventually left the organisation to move overseas with my partner during the dot com boom. I found a job a few days after arriving. I’d been a nervous wreck since being called in for an interview. Interviews, like exams, are terrifying for me. Having to prove what I know, when I’m convinced I don’t much creates these mental blanks where I can’t seem to retrieve information that is ordinarily quite easy for me. I was hit with the feelings of “I made myself look too good on paper, I’m one of those lamers who puts crap on a CV but can’t perform on the job, they’ll see right through me”. The people who interviewed me were friendly and down to earth so I relaxed a little. Then they pulled out a laptop so I could show them my stuff.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a computer with such fear and nervousness before.

I don’t recall the questions I was asked. Something about filesystems. I mostly remember my shaking hands and wanting to run before they found out I knew nothing after all. I tapped out a few things and the boss said “wow, how did you do that?” After I got the job he told me “I thought I was pretty good, looks like you’ll be teaching the rest of us a few things!” This filled me with despair. This time I convinced myself I’d only been hired as the token office bimbo in a department of eight middle aged males. They’d all been in the telco industry for a very long time and although they were all nice to be around, I felt intimidated and like I was about to be caught out as the office bimbo after all. I thought it pure dumb luck that in the interview, I was asked questions about the few things I knew.

I resigned from this job a few months later. The company had merged with another company and the new company made it clear that although they would not terminate our contracts, their own technical staff would do our work until our six month contract period was up. We pretty much sat there doing nothing all day. In the first week, I didn’t have a problem with getting paid a lot of money to check email and play around with powerful machines. Soon after, I hated going to work and the mental toll of sitting there with no work to do became too much.

I found another job right away where a friend was employed. I was part of a team of system and network administrators of a major ISP. Once again, I was the only female. This never bothered me, my co-workers soon became my friends but I told myself I’d only been hired because I was female and the manager had a daughter so naturally that must have made him more likely to hire a female.

The job was fairly easy and nothing really challenged me so I decided to move a couple of servers across to more powerful machines and switch from Solaris to Linux. By this time, another female had been hired but I found her to be quite competitive and not part of a ‘sisterhood’ I’d hoped for. At one point she commented negatively on how I was moving files across. I had felt it was the best way to do it, now I had been exposed as a lamer who had no clue what they were doing. I went home down in the dumps and vented to my partner (linux guru). He told me I had chosen the correct path and her suggestion was incorrect and could lead to certain problems, which he went on to describe. Although I knew he was correct and I had chosen the correct course of action, I felt humiliated as the comment had been made in front of the entire team. With that single comment, I believed everyone finally saw I had no idea and I was just relying on luck and a chatty demeanour to charm my way through.

Shortly after this incident, my senior co-worker and I had to do some work in the server room. His hands were full so he asked me to do the work at the console. I instantly felt that debilitating fear, the kind I’d probably feel if I was about to jump out of a plane for the first time. He was there, watching what I was doing and waiting for me to finish so he could start doing hardware stuff. He asked me a simple question and when I went to type in a command to get the answer, my mind went blank. I was thinking “oh my God he’s going to see I can’t do anything”. He told me what command to use. Of course, it was one I’d use one hundred times in a day but in that moment I could not focus. I typed the command and parameters in but I made a typo, typing in a o instead of 0. My co-worker pointed it out after I’d hit enter. It was just a typo, a genuine mistake, experts do it all the time. In this case however, I felt that was it, I’m done for, he’s seen I’m a total charlatan and rely too much on others to do the real work.

When my contract expired soon after, I was offered a permanent position. By now I was crippled with the fear of being exposed (and feeling like I had been exposed) and that now my co-worker had seen right through me. I couldn’t bear to work with him anymore, let alone face him. My partner told me this was crap, that I’d managed all the on-call work fine on my own, that I was very good at what I did. All I could say was “you’re only saying that to make me feel better”.

My partner and I eventually moved back home and we freelanced for the same companies. Sometimes I’d pass on the more difficult questions to him, as he had far more experience in those areas than I did. He had no problem with and it was the right call. However for me, it was all more proof that I couldn’t cut it in the real world, I was too hesitant to try things in case I stuffed up but more so because a stuff up show people I was rubbish.

I wrote some technical documentation for an area considered extremely difficult. I got lots of email thanking me and asking me to write more articles. Most of the comments were along the lines of “thank you so much, this is fantastic work and helped me understand it so much better. Please publish more”. I couldn’t bring myself to accept these kind words. My partner had proof read my docs and had made suggestions and minor corrections. When I published the articles I wanted to put his name as co-author. He refused, saying he hadn’t done any of the work and that it should be my name only. Except to me, he had done the technical work by answering my questions, all I had done was the filler work.

It had been put to me that because of my good work documenting this area, I should give presentations and workshops. I thought this would good in helping me get over my fear of speaking to large groups. Then I started stressing over “what happens if someone asks a question I can’t answer? They’ll see I know nothing and I’m just parroting information”. And so I withdrew from doing anything further. I’d had a child and now did not have the time to do computer stuff.

I won’t ever get back in to the field again. IS has pretty much ruined that for me. Sure, there’s cognitive behavioural therapy and positive affirmations I can chant every morning but I have different interests now where thankfully, IS has not made an appearance. My experience with IS has made me all the more determined not to succumb to it in a new life-career path. It doesn’t, however, stop the feelings of having wasted my life, having never amounted to anything in the IT world, having never done anything worthwhile in my eyes. I feel like I spent my whole career just fluking it.

Interestingly, my sister believes she’s a perfect IS candidate in her profession (not IT). Her stress shows itself physically, such as vomiting and stomach cramps the night before she has to conduct training or attend meetings, for fear of people showing her up to be a phoney. She too does not believe her accomplishments are anything much, despite being highly regarded by every colleague she has worked with.

For me personally, I do not believe my IS started when I was first employed or in male dominated fields. I never felt uncomfortable being the only female and I was fortunate to have people take me under their wing and act as mentors. Rather, this all started from a very young age. I was always different in school, targeted for being the smart kid and wondering how I came to be on this planet. My efforts to fit in, particularly in high school, were often met with ridicule by the more popular sets. So I dumbed myself down and tried to fake it through. It didn’t work at school and I spent all my years there miserable and bored. The words fake, try-hard, phoney, bullshit artist were thrown in my direction when all I was trying to do was be like everyone else (until I decided that was a waste of time and effort).

There has been a lot of research conducted in to underachieving children of high intellect. More research is now being undertaken relating to gifted girls who do not receive the appropriate support in their schooling years. I have read about some negative outcomes of such girls and I believe I tick the boxes and the loss of my self esteem early on certainly set the stage for my future IS. Throw Asperger’s in to the mix and you’ll quickly see just how much more support these children need. Whilst I strongly believe that women need to be supported and encouraged in male dominated fields for example, for me I believe it crucial to go way back and support girls in early childhood. My school experience absolutely shaped who I became and this is a negative thing. It was not just the bullying for being the odd kid, it was also the way I was forced to learn. I was quite visual and school had a bad habit of stamping that out of me and forcing me to learn in a more auditory based way (although these days with technology being a common fixture in classrooms, there are more visual approaches). One of the characteristics of above-average intellect girls is perfectionism. This, and my resistance to appearing stupid, was something of a mental health issue when I failed to achieve the marks I knew I was capable of. In hindsight, the method of instruction was the cause as I could not retain nor regurgitate the information in the way school or university, and their exams, required. This was a blow to my confidence, I felt stupid and angry that here I was, a supposedly highly intelligent person and I was failing subjects or receiving crap results. This is where I began to believe that people thought I was much smarter than I really was. Eventually, it formed part of my IS and my belief that I was fooling people. Even today, I am too nervous to post questions to technical lists I’m on, and I ask my partner to proof read everything in case I sound like I have no clue.

One of the worst aspects of my IS is that I really feel I let down women in IT. That by giving in to this fear, I was disappointing a minority group I should have advocated for. The truth is I am very uncomfortable with being in the spotlight, I have always preferred to fly under the radar and I figured that other women were doing such a fine job raising awareness and I would look dumb in comparison. This again is due to a fear of being exposed, not necessarily as a charlatan, but having been bullied made me want to run from any possible situation where I would be in the limelight.

I guess some people would read a story like this and think I should have received some kind of therapy. Sure, if I’d known at the time what was going on I would have done something about it. I was in my mid 30s when I began to investigate my own history, after my child had been assessed as having ‘very superior intellect’ and also diagnosed with Asperger’s.

Had support structures been in place when I was a kid, I’m sure my life would have turned out quite differently. I did have dreams to do amazing things in the IT world but I was crippled by IS. In my new found passion, I’m determined not to let it better me again.

Marita Cheng is the Young Australian of the Year winner this year. She’s been involved in volunteering since she was a high school student, and in 2008, early in her undergraduate studies (mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Melbourne) she founded Robogals, which is an engineering and computing outreach group, in which women university students run robotics workshops for high school age girls.

Marita, while still in the final year of her undergraduate degree, is also an entrepreneur and has been previously awarded for her work as founder of Robogals, including winning the Anita Borg Change Agent award in 2011.

While I have heard of Robogals (there’s talk of a chapter starting at my university), I hadn’t heard of Marita specifically before she became Young Australian of the Year. One of the fascinating things about starting the Ada Initiative is slowly discovering all the other amazing women who work in technology career outreach and related endeavours. But it’s a little embarrassing, judging from her bio, to have not heard Marita Cheng’s name before last week.

Congratulations Marita.

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I always thought my friend Sarah summed up the appeal of My Little Pony the best:

Once you believe in rainbow-coloured ponies who can talk, there isn’t much limit to your imagination.

My Little Pony group shot, artist unknown

I was the sort of little girl who had over a hundred My Little Ponies, largely due to my mother’s uncanny ability to find them incredibly cheap at garage sales. With so many, we could put on pony musicals where we wrote or adapted all the music and made costumes out of whatever scraps our parents were willing to lend us. My childhood best friend and I built an entire “computer game” for my little sister to play using ponies as the characters (Gameplay was inspired by our favourite adventure game for PC, Monkey Island. Nowadays, I’d call it a roleplaying game but I didn’t know the terminology then.) We had ponies on the bridge of the Enterprise, and ponies going camping on the very conveniently green-carpeted stairs in my house, and ponies ponies ponies.

So when I heard that the new series was being spearheaded by the woman who brought us Powerpuff Girls, I was intrigued. And then I started hearing stuff about how it was really good. In fact, it was so good that it was garnering adult fans, including men who were really not in the target demographic at all. “Bronies.”

But I was busy, so I held off ’till after my first big academic job talk when finally the juxtaposition between this latest transition to adulthood and my inner child was too funny to pass up. I loaded up a couple of episodes on youtube from my room at the bed and breakfast where I was staying. They were fun! So then, through the gruelling months of finishing my thesis, I’d use ponies as a treat for finishing a round of revisions. By now, I’ve almost learned all the words to the song in my favourite episode. I learned that Brony could mean any adult fan, not just the boys. I learned that the brown pony with the hourglass “cutie mark” on his butt had been fan-named “Dr. Whooves” for his resemblance to a certain timelord. I found myself hitting up Equestria Daily for a daily dose of cute fanart. I started making a pony crochet pattern while my internet was slow. I am most definitely hooked. (*groan* … crochet pun.)

Young Dash by Arcum89

Creator Lauren Faust says, “I used to say that my own inner eight-year-old was my personal focus group.” and she’s certainly channelled the sorts of adventures that my little ponies were having too. Most importantly, it doesn’t rely on the offensive “girly” stereotypes that irk me so much as an adult woman. Consider the “mane” six: Geeky Twilight Sparkle loves books and learning and isn’t afraid to show it. Honest Applejack is self-reliant even to a fault! Rainbow Dash is competitive (the way people keep telling us women aren’t supposed to be). Fluttershy is the timid animal lover, but with a core of strength especially when it comes to protecting her friends. Even Rarity, the most stereotypically girly debutante pony and fashion designer, is also a dedicated small-business owner. And Pinkie Pie is just soooo random. These gals aren’t always breaking into tears when life gets hard: they’re trying novel solutions and finding a lot of inner strength.

There’s an excellent interview with Lauren Faust up at Equestria Daily which I think will appeal to many geek feminists, even if you’re not fans of the show. Here’s a quote (edited slightly for ableist language):

My specific dreams are still to make great entertainment for girls. I just don’t think there’s enough truly good stuff out there for them, but I also have kind of selfish reasons. When I think of something I want to say or an experience I want to share, my ideas are usually innately feminine because I’m female – and I refuse to believe that something being feminine by nature automatically means it isn’t worthwhile. If I can put the tiniest dent in the perception that “girly” equals “[bad]” or “for girls” equals “crappy,” I’ll be very satisfied.

I think Friendship is Magic has really got something special going here. Not only does it show the kind of role models I wish I’d had on TV as a little girl, but it’s also show that flies in the face of the common wisdom that boys (and even full-grown men) won’t watch anything where women or girls are the primary characters. You know, maybe the problem was just that we needed more good stuff for girls? So here we are with the bronies, eagerly anticipating the second season (which starts tomorrow!), planning meetups, and buying toys. Maybe, just maybe, this breakaway success will cause publishers to realize that if you make great TV for girls, it’s going to attract more than a narrow audience. This could be the beginning of evolution in girls’ programming. Heck, it could be the beginning of a change in the entire entertainment industry! But I know you’re going to tell me all I’m dreaming.

It’s okay, I’m willing to believe in rainbow-coloured ponies who can talk; I can imagine anything.

Esther Orozco is a Mexican cell biologist, winner of the 1997 Pasteur medal, and a 2006 laureate of the L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.

Esther Orozco was born and raised in a small rural town in northern Mexico, where she became a school teacher. I admire her because she overcame all the social expectations for women that exist in such conservative environments and became a successful scientist. She also found time to raise 2 kids. In 1998 she ran for governor of Chihuahua state, Mexico. Last year she became president of the Autonomous University of Mexico City.

The UNESCO/Pasteur medal is awarded by UNESCO and the Paster Institute for “outstanding research contributing to a beneficial impact on human health and to the advancement of scientific knowledge in related fields such as medicine, fermentations, agriculture and food.”

Orozco received the L’Oréal-UNESCO award for her discovery of the mechanisms and control of infections by amoebas in the tropics.

• Orozco’s wikipedia entry
• Her own blog (in Spanish).
• UNESCO/Institut Pasteur medal.
• L’Oreal/UNESCO award.
• Article in Mexican newspaper about 5 internationally-known Mexican women scientists (in Spanish). It shows Orozco’s picture.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Trigger warning for discussion of and graphic examples of threatening online harassment.

The other day Mary posted Online harassment as a daily hazard, linking to s.e. smith’s On blogging, threats, and silence. I thought I might take the opportunity to talk about my experiences since starting the Geek Feminism blog in 2009, if only as another example to add to the long list we already have.

In early 2009 I wrote a series of blog posts on my personal blog, celebrating the achievements of Dreamwidth and the Organization for Transformative Works’ Archive Of Our Own (AO3), two open source projects that launched into beta around that time, and that had large, majority-female developer communities. Someone at O’Reilly saw them, and in May ’09 I got an email from the organisers of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) asking if I’d like to give a keynote presentation about the subject.

At first I declined, asking whether, instead, they could find me a regular slot in the schedule. I wanted to talk about the projects and about what we could learn from them with regard to building inclusive, supportive developer communities, but I was uncomfortable with the degree of exposure I was likely to get by doing so in one of the morning keynote slots.

(I remember talking to my boss about it at work the next day, telling him I was flattered but didn’t much relish the negative attention it would get me. He was surprised, and didn’t get it. Later, he would admit that he’d read the ensuing comment threads around the web and was stunned not only by the content of them, but that such responses were expected.)

Anyway, at the end of May I went off to WisCon and talked to a bunch of supportive, inspiring feminists, and when I came back I agreed to give the OSCON keynote. I spent the next two months trying to figure out how to talk about the experiences of women in open source while keeping the message positive — something O’Reilly’s conference organisers had specifically requested.

Here’s the talk I gave. Don’t read the comments. Well, not unless you really need to raise your blood pressure. There were another 250 comments on the O’Reilly Radar post about my talk, and yet more on other tech blogs that linked to it. When I got back to work the week after OSCON, my boss had read them all and said, “Wow, I had no idea.”

What you’ll see there, if you brave the comment threads, are lots of attempts at derailing and 101 style conversations. For the most part, I deleted the particularly vile stuff, but you can bet there was some. After dealing with those comment threads, and those on subsequent related blog posts, I decided to create the GF blog. I wanted a group blog where, when I was exhausted by it all, I could get help from my co-bloggers.

Over the following six months, as my OSCON talk was linked all over the place, and as GF took off, I started to get more nasty email. In September of that year, GF became the target of a guy who goes by the name of MikeeUSA, who had previously targetted the Debian Women and LinuxChix communities. He started commenting here on GF, and sending email to GF bloggers, commenters, and people who linked to GF from their own blogs.

The women of the “geek feminism” movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser’s life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.

(Nina Reiser was murdered by her husband in 2006; see yatima’s post in memory of her.)

We deleted his comments here, of course. At first we did so quietly, not wanting to “feed the troll” But I was dubious of that traditional wisdom, and worried about other people getting messages from him and perhaps being less able to deal with it. I decided to write publicly about MikeeUSA so that everyone would know what was happening. In October ’09 I posted PSA: MikeeUSA’s hate speech and harassment.

As I was drafting that post — literally, I had the WordPress UI open in another tab — I got an email from a young woman in the open source community saying, “I just got a comment on my blog from this death-to-women’s-rights guy, and I’m not sure what to do about it.” I forwarded her a copy of my draft post, which included the following tips (summarised, but I do suggest you read the full post):

• Moderate comments on your blog. Your blog is your space, and like your own living room or workplace, you have the right and the responsibility to make it a safe environment for those who gather there.
• Save copies of all correspondence. Keep a copy of any blog comments, emails, or other correspondence you get from [anyone] who threatens or harasses you. Even if it starts out mild, it never hurts to have a paper trail.
• Report threats to law enforcement. Threats of violence are illegal, and should be reported to law enforcement. Your first step is to contact your local police, wherever you are. You can call 911 (or local equivalent), or visit your local police station in person.

I would probably write that final point differently these days. Less prescriptively, for starters. Law enforcement is seldom willing or able to do anything about online harassment, and the process of dealing with them can, in itself, be pretty traumatic. That said, if you’re willing and able to do so, it might help, if only by contributing to aggregate data.

In any case, once we had the MikeeUSA thing out in the open, it changed the whole tone of things. The PSA got passed around various women-in-tech communities, and the GF wiki and blog became the top Google hits for his name. Soon, I started seeing him show up in people’s comments and get responses like, “Woohoo, I must have made it to the big time now Mikee’s come to visit!” Rather than each individual woman feeling singled out and alone, privately deleting blog comments or email messages, we started to work on it together. We encouraged people to send copies of their emails to a central repository, and forwarded them all to the feds (who, of course, did nothing with them — *sigh*). Eventually, the whole thing came to a head with Eric S. Raymond supporting MikeeUSA and his “right” to have his hate speech hosted on Sourceforge.net, and, after a weekend’s hacking, this lulzy, pony-filled denouement.

What you don’t see from the blog posts are the effect this had on people’s mental and physical health. I can’t speak for the other women targetted by Mikee, but I know that it affected my ability to concentrate, sleep, work, and socialise. Apologies for the TMI, but my gastro-intestinal system is also fairly sensitive to stress, so I was physically ill as well. I took several days of sick leave and went to the beach for an extended weekend, completely offline, to try and regain some equilibrium.

So far so bad, but I was at least managing to muddle through my day to day work as a technical community manager at a dotcom startup. That is, until I got a second particularly nasty stalker. This one, a Wikipedia troll, had found his way to my employer’s online database and tried to fill it with rubbish. As part of my job, I’d removed it and blocked his account, then mentioned on our public mailing list that I’d done so. The troll was annoyed, and presumably Googled my name, whereupon he found my OSCON talk.

The first I knew about this was when I got an email from a well known technologist asking whether I had any idea why a post on his blog, linking to my OSCON talk, had suddenly attracted a dozen commenters all posting abuse directed at me. I checked it out, and found comments on my professionalism, appearance, fuckability, and so forth. “Fat dyke slut” was pretty typical of the sort of language used, along with criticisms of my work and calls for me to be fired from my job. The IPs matched the guy I’d blocked at work.

The comments also linked to other blogs where similar abuse had been posted. I followed the links and found that it was spread all around the web, and all of it was on third-party sites where I had no control over the comment moderation. I had to contact each of these websites individually and ask them to remove the comments. Luckily most of them did so.

Because this was work-related, I also had to tell my boss. I was, after all, being harassed in relation to something I had done in the course of my professional duties, and my company had a responsibility to prevent that. I also informed the rest of my team, as they were likely to catch some of the side-splatter. Have you ever had to show your male colleagues a webpage that calls you a fat dyke slut? I don’t recommend it. However, my boss — the same one who’d been surprised by the comments straight after the OSCON talk — was extremely supportive, and the company did everything it should have. I spoke to lawyers and we determined a plan of action if the abuse continued. Fortunately, it didn’t. However, the negative side-effects of my “hobby” — feminist blogging — had now followed me to the office, and I could no longer keep the two separate. My chances of being able to relax and do my work without worrying about that stuff had gone out the window.

Not long after, another harasser was causing trouble for the Dreamwidth developer community (which, as I mentioned above, is predominantly female). Among other creepy behaviour, he phoned various people’s workplaces and accused them of distributing child pornography. I had to go to our office manager and tell him that if anyone called claiming to be a minister of religion and accusing me of that sort of thing, to ignore it. Awkward.

That was about nine months after my OSCON talk, and I’d had three separate cases where abuse related to it had negatively affected my professional life. Other women have talked about cutting back on their blogging out of concern for their personal safety, or to protect their children, but I wonder how many other female bloggers have had work-related problems like I did, and cut back on their blogging to avoid having abuse and harassment leak over into their professional lives?

The most recent outcome of this whole process occurred in March of this year. The startup I was working for in 2009 had been acquired by Google, and I’d submitted a talk to Google I/O (their big annual conference) to showcase our APIs. A couple of months before the event, I attended a kick-off meeting in Mountain View, where I sat in a lecture-theatre style room along with all the other presenters.

The senior exec in charge of the whole thing came to give us a pep talk. He told us how big and important the conference was, and what an honour it was to be speaking there. He told us that it was a great opportunity, because we would be speaking not only to a huge crowd in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, but our talks would also be filmed and put on Youtube, where they could potentially get hundreds of thousands of views (and, presumably, a commensurate number of comments).

I had a panic attack. My ears were ringing, my heart was beating fast, and I was shaking. I couldn’t hear what was being said from the front of the lecture theatre, and I just wanted to escape. I managed to get up and leave the room, and once I had found myself a safe corner outside, I got online and talked it through with a friend, then contacted a colleague and asked them to speak at Google I/O in my place.

I presume that most of the people in that room, including the exec who was speaking from the podium, had never had the experience of 6-12 months of very personal abuse after giving a conference talk. If they had, they might realise that the opportunity to have a video of oneself on Youtube, with hundreds of thousands of views and unmoderated comments, is not something everyone would want. (See also: Mary’s excellent series on conference recordings and harassment, accounts of people’s experiences, thoughts on ethics and policy.)

By the time this happened, I’d already decided — like many women before me — to drop out of the tech industry, so it was no big deal for me to turn down a high profile speaking opportunity. In fact, I hadn’t spoken at any major conferences in a year or so, preferring small events and unconferences where I could focus on teaching people about our technology, rather than on any potential harassment.

I’m fairly conflicted about my choice to quit the tech industry. I don’t want to be part of some statistic about retention rates, but on the other hand, I need to do something that feels rewarding and fun, and the work I was doing — which involved lots of speaking at conferences — wasn’t giving me that any more.

I didn’t quit because I couldn’t handle the technology, or because I had a baby, but because I had become fundamentally disenchanted with a “community” (please imagine me doing sarcastic air quotes) that supports the kind of abuse I’ve experienced and treats most human-related problems — from harassment to accessibility to the infinite variety of names people use (ahem ahem Google Plus) — as “too hard”.

That said, I’m still a techie at heart, and I plan to keep working with and on technology in whatever career I have ahead of me. I’m particularly interested in using open tech to preserve and promote independent music, so you’ll continue to see me around in many of my usual tech haunts.

Which brings me to a couple of weeks ago, when I got an email that read:

Hey slut, take your left wing socialist idealogy and go fuck off from ubuntu.

It came from someone calling himself “Markus G”, with email address grandrhino at hotmail, and IP address 110.174.202.115 — a static IP address with the ISP TPG, and a traceroute indicating that he’s probably in Brisbane, Australia.

Luckily, I know I’m not alone. I contacted the GF bloggers through one of our backchannels and asked if anyone else had heard of this guy. Turns out Mary had heard that “Markus” had previously sent similar filth to another woman in the Australian Linux community (she alluded to this in comments on her previous post). In that case, it was related to the Mark Pesce keynote at LCA 2010 and the subsequent discussion on the Linux Australia mailing list.

So, here’s our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can’t readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won’t hand out information about him without a court order, his abuse doesn’t present the kind of imminent threat to physical safety that might interest law enforcement, and despite Linux Australia’s diversity statement and Linux.conf.au’s anti-harassment policies, it’s not clear that there’s any practical thing that either of those groups can do about him.

I have a talk about a tech/music/community project I founded scheduled at Linux.conf.au in January. If I attend — and I’ll freely admit that I’ve been reconsidering it — I’m going to be attending with this on my mind. That is, of course, what “Markus G” wants: for me, and the other women he’s targetted (and I don’t doubt there are more than just the two I know about) to attend LCA in a state of fear and discomfort, knowing that there are people there who hate us and want us to fuck off out of “their” community. And this is one of the better conferences, with an anti-harassment policy and at least one known case where they’ve enforced it.

What are we going to do about it?

I’d like to tell you about four women who have inspired me to no end with their work, insight, and community outreach. Every interaction with them has motivated me in my work. Essentially, by being as dedicated as they are, they bring out the best in other people. I’m lucky to have met all of them and to have worked with them on community outreach efforts.

Joanmarie Diggs has worked for the Carroll Center for the Blind for the last 14 years, helping visually impaired people learn to use assistive technology. She decided to teach herself programming in order to contribute to Orca, GNOME’s screen reader. She eventually became the maintainer of Orca. Exactly a month ago, she was hired to work on GNOME accessibility at Igalia within 4 hours of posting on Twitter that her grant-funded position at the Carroll Center had been cut.

Joanie’s tweets are always infused with a great deal of humor. She says “Random thought: I wonder if I’ll ever shovel snow again….” in the wake of her move from New Hemisphere to Spain. Joanie has been a very caring mentor for one of the participants in the recent round of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. She is the best role model I know for any woman getting involved in GNOME development.

Máirín Duffy, by Ramakrishna Reddy y, CC BY-SA

Máirín Duffy is an interaction designer at Red Hat. She has a strong commitment to graphic design with free software. She has been using 100% free software to create her designs for many years now and has created many resources and opportunities for others to learn free software graphic design tools.

Máirín created the Fedora Design Bounty project to provide people interested in contributing to Fedora design with well-defined tasks suitable for beginners. She created some great flyers and art work to promote the Fedora Design Suite spin at SXSW. She ran Gimp and Inkscape classes for local middle school students and for Girl Scouts, creating great resources for both. Helping Máirín with the Girl Scout classes and going over these resources was actually how I learned do useful things in Gimp and Inkscape.

Máirín has showcased 17 open fonts in an “Unpackaged Font of the Week” series in her blog. There is always some fun and inviting project she talks about in her blog, accompanied by great pictures, designs, and educational resources.

Jessica McKellar is a recent MIT graduate who works at Ksplice. She organizes Boston Python Workshops for women and their friends. These workshops assume no prior knowledge of programming and walk the attendees through the installation steps, basic Python constructs, interactive programming exercises, and small projects during a 1.5 day event. Jessica explains programming in an engaging way and she and other volunteers help the attendees with any stumbling blocks throughout the event. These workshops get filled up within days of being announced and, in response, have grown in the number of attendees they accommodate. Being able to learn how to program in a supportive environment where any setback is resolved within minutes is tremendously empowering to the attendees. Jessica has found a great approach for helping more women feel confident about learning to program and the detailed materials she has created are now used for similar workshops in other cities.

Jessica is one of the maintainers of OpenHatch, a community website that provides the information and teaches the necessary skills for getting involved in free software. Open Source Workshop is another event Jessica recently organized together with Asheesh Laroia, who is the creator of OpenHatch. This workshop walked the attendees through the basics of free software contributing and gave them hands-on experience with using IRC, working with patches, and triaging bugs. Participating in such events gives the attendees the necessary confidence to make their next steps in the free software world. The first step is often the hardest and the community events Jessica puts together help many people make it.

Stormy Peters by Ross Burton, CC BY-SA

Stormy Peters is the Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla. Before that she was the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. After leaving that position, she ran for the 7 person GNOME board as soon as she had a chance, coming in first with the largest number of top votes. Stormy is also the founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in schools where kids have no other access to technology. Her leadership and ability to connect people is a great gift for all the organizations she is involved with.

Stormy has been my go-to person for the last two years in which we have been working on the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. She championed the need to revive the women outreach initiative in GNOME and has helped with everything from getting sponsorship to answering applicant inquiries. It’s a great luxury to know that I can get sound and helpful advice from her about anything related to the program. When not bouncing ideas off of Stormy, I like reading her blog posts. They are just as insightful, both on matters related to free software and on other things in life.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Want to highlight a geek woman? Submissions are currently open for Wednesday Geek Woman posts.

Nannan reminds us that just like any other Lego kits, it’s only a matter of time before the kids take it apart and build something way cooler. Read the review of the new sets that goes with this picture on The Brothers Brick, or check out more photos of the creation.

I knew that someone posted on this blog discussing what requirements a feminist-informed social network would have. Turns out it was me. A year on, and due to discussions around Google+, I think I have some positive requirements. (I recommend reading the old comments thread too.)

Control over identifying information. Name, gender, age, who you are friends with, what you talk about, what events you are in, and what you look like: this is all varyingly sensitive information and should be able to be hidden.

As few restrictions as possible on identity. Allowing use of pseudonyms, not assuming that everyone has two, or two ‘important’, names, free specification of gender if specified at all. As little structured compulsory information as possible. Unstructured, free-form, and non-compulsory are key things here.

Accessibility. State of the art accessibility design including testing with screen readers, colour palettes suited to as many variants of vision as possible, collaborative transcripting and captioning of images, no flashing ads or autoplaying video.

You own your space and control entry. This means you should be able to moderate things. Being able to ignore people is good but is not enough: you likely don’t want to subject your friends to the conversation of a person who you dislike enough to ignore.

Rigorous site-level attention to spam and harassment. No one (much) wants spam, enough said. But harassment—continued interactions or attempts to interact after being told to stop, including ban evasion—should be a terms of service level violation, as should any threats (whether or not the person has been told to stop). Use of threats or hate speech in user names and default icons or other things that appear in directory listings or search results may also need to be considered. This all requires staffing and a complaints system.

Consistent access control. If you set something private, or it was private by default at the time, it should stay that way, probably to the extent where if it can’t remain private for technical reasons, it should be deleted/hidden by the site rather than made public.

Access to your work and ability to export it. The correct thing to do here is a little tricky (are other people’s comments in your space yours to export and republish, or not? what about co-owned spaces?) The autonomo.us community has had some inconclusive discussions.

Fine-grained access control. I don’t think something along the lines of that which Livejournal and its forks have had for years and which Facebook and Google+ have implemented to varying degrees, is required (public blogs have a strong presence in activist discussions) but it’s useful for more universal participation. Some people need it.

Clear limits on sharing. This is something that Google+ early testers are coming up against again and again: ‘Limited’ posts are or were shareable, a commenter using someone’s name with the + sign (eg ‘+Mary’) does or did actually invite them into private comment threads without the original poster’s input. If you offer access control, the software must make it clear what controls apply to any space, and if you have influence over that or not, so that you can control your own revelations in that space. Substantial user testing to make sure that people understand what your interface is trying to say is required.

No advertising. I guess it might be possible to show people ads in a way that has neither the problem of offensive or upsetting ads (“lose weight for your wedding today!”) nor the problem of the advertisers doing dodgy malware ads to harvest your info or worse. Maybe.

What else? How do your favourite sites do on these?