Wrong planet error

[perlmonger]

[ anybody who’s come to this post late might want to read my next entry as well ]

Looks like it’s the time for it: having recently participated in a discussion on racism, privilege and entitlement chez perigee, and one on sexism in the programming community flocked elsewhere, a friend pointed me at the website of an upcoming ColdFusion Dev Conference.

I was sufficiently angered by the implications (on all sorts of levels) of a “FREE CFDeveloper party with entertainment in the form of a private bar, music provided by a Live DJ and Tequila slammer girls” (who I might want to “chat up” up after they gave me “free tequila shots”) that I mailed the organisers:

Quoting the front page of www.cfdevcon.com:

| In the evening will a FREE CFDeveloper party with entertainment in
| the form of a private bar, music provided by a Live DJ and Tequila
| slammer girls.
|
| [...]
|
| We look forward to seeing you there.

Well, I’m one ColdFusion developer you won’t be seeing.

The perpetuation of patriarchal attitudes and concomitant implicit
marginalisation, if not actual exclusion, of developers who don’t
present themselves as male and heterosexual is something our industry
has a bad reputation for.

I had hoped, after recent discussion in the Perl and Linux communities,
that this was starting to be recognised as something important; clearly
there’s a Neanderthal component to the CF dev community that’s in need
of application of a cluebat.

Pete,

If it was a tequila slammer guy I’m sure you wouldn’t mind, but that would
be of no interest to other 99.9% of delegates.
There is no place at this conference for discrimination, so it would
certainly be best that you did not come if that is your attitude.

Russ Michaels wrote:

| If it was a tequila slammer guy I’m sure you wouldn’t mind, but that would
| be of no interest to other 99.9% of delegates.

:)

»whoosh!« there goes my point, thataway... Your conference will of course be self-selecting in its attendance.

I’m left wondering if you think that any man who objects to gross sexism is necessarily gay, or whether you actually thought that to make that implication was insulting.

| There is no place at this conference for discrimination, so it would
| certainly be best that you did not come if that is your attitude.

It’s extraordinary how beneficiaries of privilege, safe in their sense of entitlement, can reframe any contrary voice as discrimination. But you’re right, I can’t imagine many environments I’d less like to be in than your conference: I’ll get back to coding.

I do not think anything of sort, but that is what you implied.
Why you have chosen me as the target for your hetrosexual bashing I have no
idea, but I’m afraid I am the wrong person to be speaking to as I have no
problems with gay men/women at all, although you should consider how your
attitude toward straight people is no different than how people used to
react towards homosexuals before it became socially acceptible.
If you cannot understand the common sense of catering for the majority, then
I cannot help you with that, it is simply common buisness sense. If I had
organised a gay developer conference there would probably have been like 2
registrations, although if I thought there was a market for such a thing I
would certainly do it.

And there I’ve chosen to leave it, at least for now; I don’t think there’s any point in fighting further against such a spectacular misinterpretation of what I tried to say, whether willful or no.

ETA1: remove the flockedness - on consideration, there’s nowt there I don’t want public.
ETA2: here’s ramtops‘ post on the same subject (and yes, she did mail him first :)
ETA3: pdcawley adds his comments on his blog.

Comments

[budleysalterton.livejournal.com]

Now what I want to know is if there are only 100 people booked, who is the 0.1%, the 10% of a person that would be interested in the tequila slammer guy ?