Disclaimer: I’m not used to writing personal stuff on Debian channels. However, there is nothing new here for those who know me from other public channels.


Yesterday, I received the weirdest email from well-known troll MikeeUSA. He thought I shared his views of a horrible world full of bloodthirsty feminists using systemd in their quest for domination over poor white male heterosexuals. The most nauseating paragraph was probably the one where he showed signs of the mentality of a pedocriminal.

At first, I shrugged it off and sent him an email explaining I didn’t want anything with his stinky white male supremacist theories, assorted with a bit of taunting. But after discovering all that stuff was actually sent to public mailing lists, I took the time for a second look and started a bit of introspection.

MikeeUSA thought I was a white male supremacist because of the so-called SmellyWerewolf incident, 6 years ago.
Oh boy, people change in six years. Upon re-reading that, I had trouble admitting I was the one to write it. Memory is selective, and with time, you tend not to remember some gruesome details, especially the ones that conflict most with your moral values.

I can assure every reader that the only people I intended to mock then were those who mistook Debian mailing lists for advertising channels; but I understand now that my message must have caused pain to a lot more people than that. So, it may come late, but let me take this opportunity to offer my sincerest apologies to anyone I may have hurt at that time.


It may seem strange for someone with deeply-rooted values of equality to have written that. To have considered that it was okay to stereotype people. And I think I found this okay because to me, those people were given equal rights, and were therefore equal. But the fight for equality is not over when everyone is given the same rights. Not until they are given the same opportunities to exert those rights. Which does not happen when they live in a society that likes to fit them in little archetypal peg holes, never giving you the chance to question where those stereotypes come from.

For me, that chance came from an unusual direction: the fight against prostitution. This goes way back for me. Since when I was a teenager, I have always been ticked off at the idea of nonconsensual sex that somehow evades criminal responsibility because of money compensation. I never understood why it wasn’t considered as rape. Yet it sounded weird that a male heterosexual would hold such opinions; after all, male heterosexuals should go to prostitutes as a kind of social ritual, right?

It was only three years ago that an organization of men against prostitution was founded in France. Not only did I find out that I was not alone with my progressive ideas, I was given the opportunity to exchange with many men and women who had studied prostitution: its effects on victims, its relationship to rape culture and more generally to the place men and women hold in society. Because eventually, it all boils down to little peg holes in which we expect people to fit: the virile man or the faggot, the whore or the mother. For me, it was liberating. I could finally get rid of the discomfort of being a white male heterosexual that didn’t enter the little peg holes that were made for me.

And now, after Sweden 15 years ago, a new group of countries are finally adopting laws to criminalize the act of paying for sex. Including France. That’s too bad for MikeeUSA, but this country is no longer the eldorado for white male supremacists. And I’m proud that our lobbying made a contribution, however small, to that change.