Categories
Connecting Weblogging

Eight million stories in the naked city

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m moving on from current discussions, but to what I’m not sure. I don’t regret yesterday’s anger, but I do regret the circumstances behind it because though the anger is gone, the circumstances remain.

So many stories in the naked city. “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” Does anyone remember that? Anyway, this small story in this new naked city is only of interest to a few, and I’m not sure I’m one of them.

Yesterday’s angry outburst sounded too close to another similar outburst that went something like, “If you’re my friend, you’ll support me. Publicly.” While I welcome support from friends, public or private, when I’m down or even when I’m not, much of yesterday’s anger, and yes hurt, was directed at myself as much as anyone else. It’s difficult to come to terms with a realization that people have stopped listening to me because I shout too much.

It’s also difficult to accept the fact that there are some circles where I won’t be heard, even if I whisper: because of my sex, because of my past, because of who I do or do not work for, my age, whether I own the perfect little black dress, or any number of factors I may or may not have control over.

Bother it, their loss.

It’s summer here in this hemisphere and Winter elsewhere and we all have better things to talk about, including the first commercial aircraft into space. I used to want to visit Australia, but to hell with that – I want the moon, now.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

And the proof is

I am so angry right now. I am so mad at the supposed male-dominated tech community with it’s obvious implications of brotherhood.

I expected one, one of the community to push back at Dave Winer and his outrageous statement about the critics being primarily women bitching about the weblogs.com shutdown, and how it must be because we hate men for some reason. I expected them to be outraged on my behalf because they know me, and know that regardless of my reasons, it would not be because of that.

After all, I have been involved with many discussions on RSS and RDF and Atom and other technologies–they must surely think that I have, at least, some root of technical ability to know that what Winer was saying made no sense from a tech perspective.

I thought of the times when they’ve been wrongly accused of things, usually by Winer, and I’ve spoken out. I’ve been proud of that – perhaps too proud. Perhaps what I should have done is just be silent.

Maybe it’s that I’ve been critical of too many things. Does this make me seem superior? And therefore should I be “taken down” a peg or two for “speaking out”? That’s what a certain anonymous commenter from Amsterdam (who seems to have forgotten how easily it is for a tech person to discover someone’s identity from a specific IP address) said – that I was too superior.

Is that it? Uppity woman not only intruding her butt in tech circles, but also daring to disagree with the alpha males? Women in tech are okay, as long as we write about sex and how much we admire the guys?

I never expected anyone to agree with me when I was critical of Winer and his shut down of weblogs.com. I thought each of us must fight this battle on their own. But when he reduced what some of us have said – what I said – to being nothing more than a woman being cranky at men, what he did was to discredit what I, a fellow technologist, said based on my sex.

Winer was critical of men in comments, and I watched other guys rally around those men–but not the women. Not us women.

I could chalk this up to Dave Winer being Dave Winer but not one of you men disagreed!

And you wonder why women aren’t heard; why more women don’t speak out, or get involved.

My brothers in technology. Ha! Right.

Not one of you said a thing.

Not one.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

What was interesting

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

…about the aftermath of the weblogs.com incident last week, is that for the most part, male bloggers rallied around Dave Winer or the male bloggers that he bashed in comments here and there. I figure either these other folks agree with Winer’s take on us uppity women; or they feel we’re strong enough to provide our own support, and prefer to reserve theirs for the weaker sex.

Either way, welcome to the fraternity that is weblogging.

(Now, why was it again there are no women involved with the RSS or Atom discussions?)

Categories
Weblogging

Neighborhood news

As much fun as it is to spend time with my homegirls, taking bad boys into back alleys and beating the metaphorical crap out of them, I do have other things to write about.

Today is a link day to friends.

Congratulations to Sheila Lennon for getting Honorable Mention for online reporting at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists recent gathering. She also goes on to mention how all of the online award winners were bloggers – maybe the mainstream press has reason to think we’re all an uppity bunch!

Joseph Duemer has moved his site to Textpattern, completed a lovely re-design, and is hosted now at Textdrive. Currently, Textdrive is offering an unusual lifetime hosting deal, and the offer specifically mentions how the site is geared towards open source weblogging tools such as Textpattern and WordPress.

(And I’m thankful that Joe has provided an explanation of ’sharp sand’.)

Farrago, our dear penguin and cat loving friend from South Africa, has taken over a Blogger-based weblog called Golgi’s. She’ll be re-designing the site and changing the name, but if you’ve linked to Farrago in the past, you’ll probably want to update your links.

And I miss voices too long silent – and I’m in the mood to turn my writing to cooking, huckleberry margaritas, technology (that’s helpful but won’t make me a saint), and how I wish I had a potato patch.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Deference

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In my last essay Erik wrote about the post that it …it takes the small and relates it to the large, takes the specific and relates it to the general. I appreciated his notice of this, which I had attempted to carefully craft. I wasn’t sure if it would be lost because I used certain keywords, such as “Dave Winer” and that tends to obfuscate the rest of what I’m saying.

The only reason I continue to discuss the incident with the weblogs being shut down and the subsequent behavior is because I am seeing, in a microcosm, much of what bothers me about weblogging; and since the American perspective dominates weblogging, I am seeing much that concerns me about the country as a whole. It’s not so much that I’m taking from the small and extrapolating to the large, as this small, focused, self-contained event helps me better refine and understand what I feel about the larger forces surrounding me. Us.

Winer writes today:

I’m a big, strong, intelligent, self-reliant male. Our culture acts as if such people never need help. “Be a man,” they say. Enough of that bullshit. Inside every strong self-reliant male is a scared kid, who doesn’t think he’s going to get out of this alive. The attackers are dispropotionately women. Do you think maybe they’re using me to get even for how someone treated them? A father, a brother, an uncle, an ex? Does our culture let them be abusers, assuming the man is always wrong, guilty until proven innocent? I’ve been in this big strong body for a long time, and I gotta tell you, it’s a rare thing when people consider your feelings in how they deal with you. I think some people take advantage of that too.

(Emphasis mine.)

(Of course, one could respond to this with, which is it to be, Dave? Camille? Or Hercules?)

Personally I believe that neither sex should be allowed to get away with abuse – mental or physical. But then, I don’t equate disagreement with abuse, either.

It does seem as if more women have been critical of Winer’s actions than supporting of them and him, and I’m including my writings, as well as those of: Jeneane SessumHalley SuittDori SmithMedleyMicheleElisabeth, and others. But then, my own view is critical and my viewpoint of others will be biased because of it.

My reasons for being critical of Winer are more complicated than he gives me credit, and since, yes, I am a woman, this must be included in the equation. However, unlike Winer’s assertion that it must be because I’m trying to get back at some big, strong, intelligent, self-reliant male who he metaphorically represents, it has more to do with loss of self-determination, and watching people being forced into a role of helplessness.

When Winer pulled the weblogging pages, and gave those who were so affected no option other than to ask for them back, one by one, it forced these people into being deliberately dependent on him. He put them into a role, intentional or not, of having to be subservient to him in order to get their writing back. More than that, when he wrote in the very first comment to the thread attached to the post the following:

Groundrules: Personal comments, ad hominems, will be deleted. And no negotiating or whining. Just post the url of your site.

He established a implication, whether directly stated or not, that people would have to ask, pretty please, in order to be allowed to keep their writing.

For someone with a sense of fairplay and honoring one’s commitments, this act could be considered inappropriate; they might even think it would be ‘indefensible’. To anyone who has been bullied in the past, or put upon by those who have power over them, this action would be distasteful. But perhaps for women, many of us who have been told to ‘ask nicely’ when we want to be treated fairly and equitably, who have been put into positions of dependence and helplessness by culture, marriage, and even law–this act is all too familiar: the stronger holding that which is needed or wanted out of arm’s reach from the weaker.

In fact, it reminded me this week of some of the news stories circulating about lost prisoners from the early Iraqi fights, and how our own Justice Department has been ‘re-interpreting’ the rules of both national and internation law when it comes to the growingly tiresome ‘war against terror’. By any standards, even those who supported our entering Iraq, re-writing international law in how to deal with prisoners humanely has to give pause–but what is the world, or any of us to do?

After all, the US is the strongest country in the world. There is no one country, or even several combined countries that can militarily contain us. Even if they could, they wouldn’t; the world is too dependent on us economically. We literally hold all the cards.

In this country, we in the streets feel powerless to hold our government accountable to national and international law when it comes to the treatment of prisoners, and those being held on ’suspicion’. Back in a moment of outrage we passed laws that have given too much power to our current administration, and now we’re paying the price as we watch our own beliefs and integrity and justice subjugated to the twistings of a small group of people who genuinely think they are doing the right thing, but have lost much of their perspective about the true dangers facing us today.

All we can do now is stand on the ground and look at this thing towering above us holding that which we value, our sense of fairplay, dangling above our heads, just out of reach. It is frustrating. More, it makes one angry to be helpless and under someone else’s control.

But to return to this single incident in this small microcosm, I did not necessarily want to bring gender into this discussion because I had done so in the past to no real benefit. Several months ago I decided that I would do more for my sex by pointing out strong women than weak men.

But gender was introduced, and even though I had been counseled by some smart women that this latest from Winer was nothing more than a deliberate ploy to generate more attention –after all negative attention is better than no attention at all–it also highlighted something else I noticed yesterday that disturbed me more. Something that was only born out when I received an email related to it today from other weblogging women.

If it seems like more women are critical of Winer than supportive, we have also noticed that the most virulent attacks directed against those who have been critical about Dave Winer have been made by men against the women who have responded negatively.

This could be that there are a bunch of misogynist guys who use the cover of anonymity to take pot shots at any women who dare to question a male. It could also be because women have made the stronger statements, though I have seen some fairly strong statements made by men who have have had relatively mild responses in return.

I think, though, that this might be because this is one of those few blogging incidents that made it into the press that featured more statements by weblogging women than is usual. Consequently, these ladies attracted more of the gnats that frequent the Internet, landing to feed quickly when they scent blood, and just as quickly move on.

In fact, by precipitating this act as he did, Dave Winer has actually helped women in weblogging, even while he disparages our contribution. I just wish I could drop this sneaking suspician that aside from the obvious strength and passion and sincerity of many of the comments contributed by the ladies, the press also enjoyed tweaking the mighty utopian world of weblogging by subtly re-casting this into a battle of the sexes.

(In fact, I bet that’s why more than a few people would like this whole thing to just go away. How droll –airing our dirty laundry in public like this. Personally I think it’s good for the ‘mighty utopian weblogging world’ to get caught picking its nose in public.)

After all, Dave Winer has done so, saying in comments in another weblog:

Next time Powers or Suitt or Sessum try to insert hysterics, we can swarm them with love, ask them to stand back until the problem is clear, to stop meddling and when there’s an outage, please please don’t get us Slashdotted.

Curious – why no mention of any of the men who have been vocal and critical? By turning this into an issue of gender, does this somehow make what we say that much less credible? And swarm us with love, eh? That sounds remarkably like having your herd of followers overwhelm us to suppress any further outburts from the uppity ‘broads’ again.

(It reminds me of when I counseled women while working at the Women’s Center in my early 20’s and listening to the ladies talk about how their men would hold them down and beat them, but it was all done out of love, and all that.)

All I can say is, “Thank you Dave, not only for effectively demonstrating most of what I’ve been saying this week–scratch that, the last couple of years–but also for grouping me with such fine ladies as Halley and Jeneane.”