I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m still appalled by reading, again, a completely out-of-reality polemic about a leader of the Free software community being called sexist (among other nice names), after an innocent and random word used in a talk.

Oh noes! Serving in the navy will hurt!

It’s often that you hear jokes or references picturing French as arrogant, Italians as womanizers, geeks as bearded and smelling under the arms, sailors as gay, et cætera. It’s called a cliché, and it helps people understand each other because it’s part of the collective imagination. If you insert a reference to an Italian in a speech about womanizers, it helps picturing the cliché of a guy in a black Armani suit, wearing sunglasses and using gomina. It doesn’t mean you think Italians are like this, and if it ever convinces someone that they are so, it means that someone really had trouble using the thing she calls brain to begin with.

The same goes for a talk about people not being familiar to computers, that is using women as a cliché. When you look for a picture in your mind of someone who has trouble with using computers, what do you find? A granny fighting with her keyboard which keys are not in alphabetical order, or a busty blonde following with her eyes each movement of the mouse cursor. It’s only natural to use these pictures as a ground for communication, and it doesn’t mean you think bad of grannies or busty blondes. And if, because of that or of anything else, some people end up thinking that women can’t use a computer, or that they are not equal to men in this regard, these people are the sexist ones. Not the guy who drew that picture in a magazine you read 10 years ago and forgot since, nor the one using it as a reference.

My intolerance is worth more than yours

And instead of actually focusing on educating or slapping those people, some of us are conducting a witch hunt, in which anyone implying the very existence of different categories of people, called men and women, regardless of his merits or opinions, is called a sexist and has stones thrown to him on several public fora. This is not acceptable. Do not let your speech be dictated by intolerance. If you apply the same reasoning to anyone that could be possibly hurt, in a completely literal and simplistic analysis of the speech, you can stop right now using any kind of metaphor, idiomatic expression or proverb. All that remains is a poor, sterilized speech. And when the speech is poor, the ideas get poorer as well.

Imagine what would a complete stranger reading those blogs understand. She would surely picture hackers as a completely misogynistic community in which people only talk about women (whether it is for sexist jokes or for rhetorical discussions about them) and never talk with them. Which would be utterly wrong, since hackers (and geeks in general) are on the contrary open-minded and friendly to feminism, compared to the rest of the population — of course, except for the “OMG OMG it’s a woman! We need to be nice!!!” kind.

And this is actually the reasoning that hides behind all this insane “RMS and Mark Shuttleworth are sexist” trolls. The picture they are giving of women are that of fragile little things that need to be protected against any attack of all these evil misogynist bearded geeks. Pretty ironical for people who claim fighting for gender equality, isn’t it?

Questioning the unquestionable

Frankly, RMS and Mark are among the people I trust the less in the community, but I don’t need to paint them as misogynists for that. Look at what they say instead of how they say it: one is an intolerant man who used to be a visionary but turned his principles into dogma; the other has seen the light and behaves as if he was the savior of Free software. I’d prefer if we questioned their vision and leadership based on their ideas and actions, not on distorted ways to interpret what they say based on a few people’s neuroses.

Or, to say it shorter: dudes, get a life.