Enough!
While this garbage, Blog death threats spark debate, regrettably exists in political blogtopia™, this case is around the bend an through the looking glass:
Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online.
[snip]
One of the issues raised is the question of how women bloggers are treated online.
Ms Sierra, author of popular blog Creating Passionate Users, began receiving death threats four weeks ago.
[snip]
Robert Scoble, author of popular technology blog Scobleizer, condemned the campaign against her.
“It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in my stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man,” he said
In response, he has decided to temporarily stop blogging and has turned off functionality that allows people to post anonymously.
This isn’t about politics, she writes about technology! While the Winnies and Macistas have argued for years and questioned each others intelligence and sanity, there is no way an individual’s sex, or sexual preferences, can be justified as relevant. You can either cut it, or not, and hormones don’t play a role. Being named Francis or Frances doesn’t make your code or logic better. The CPU couldn’t care less whether you sit down or stand up.
6 comments
Some men are just flat out threatened by women. It doesn’t matter the field, the circumstances, the details, etc. They are afraid of women and will hide that fear by blustering and denigrating and being an all around asshole. And the worst part is when the other men in the group don’t call him on that but are silent because they’re afraid of looking ‘weak’. Bah. Some days I definitely prefer dealing with the CPU.
The first programmer was Lady Ada Lovelace. The first business programming language, COBOL, was the work of Admiral “Amazing Grace” Hopper. Women have worked in the field, since it was a field, so these people need to get used to it, or get lost.
My experience has been that 99% of the time I’ve been judged on my programming capabilities; and the other 1% I dismiss with the disdain they deserve (after sticking pins in the voodoo dolls of course).
And thanks for the info on Ada Lovelace — I hadn’t heard of her before so for me it’s now off to wikipedia.
Well – and similar things happened to Shakes-Sis and Pandagon over the Edwards website issue.
That makes me happy to be a small-inconsequencial-voice that doesn’t attract the kind of notice and trolls as the more populous sites. Tis a hazard of blogging I can do without!
I want to know the history behind everything, Alice, so I learn about Lady Ada when I was reading about Charles Babbage, and was reminded of her when I learned the DoD programming language named in her honor.
Karen, in the political arena you can expect this, not accept it but expect it. Politics tends to be a “bare knuckles” fight. There are issues, rightly or wrongly, that are considered “women’s issues,” but the same cannot be said about programming. There are no “life or death” issues in computer science. This is way over the line. This doesn’t need to be nipped in the bud; it needs to be pulled out by the roots.
[…] At the end of last month I wrote a post, Enough!, about a female technology blogger who received death threats in her comments over a post. […]