It's not just Open Source conferences

Posted Dec 2, 2010 17:53 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872)
In reply to: It's not just Open Source conferences by vaurora
Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences

Of course, there are many women who become exotic dancers or adult models solely for the paycheck, but you could say that about nearly any field. How many little girls (or boys) dream of their ultimate career as a housekeeper or telemarketer?

On the other hand, it is a gross generalization to suggest that no woman ever chooses to be an exotic dancer. I have several friends and acquaintances--women I met through typical social channels--who have willingly chosen exotic dancing and other sex-related work as a career and truly enjoy what they do. To insist that no woman should take a job displaying or exploiting their body is its own form of sexism.

It's probably fair to say that nobody dreams about being a booth babe for a switch company. But that's how the service industry works: unless you have more inquiries than you can handle, you don't really get to pick and choose your customers. Sometimes the work is fun, sometimes it just pays the bills. I'm sure the caterer who was backstage refilling the warming tray with hot dogs wasn't living their "dream career" at the moment either.

It's not just Open Source conferences

Posted Dec 3, 2010 4:57 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

It's interesting how there are all these people jumping to defend women against... Valerie's comments. And yet I just searched this thread, and despite their deep concern about women's rights, those same people haven't felt the need to similarly condemn any of the events described in the original post. On the contrary, they're much more worried about how rude it is to call people out for misogyny, and discounting the special problems that women encounter in FOSS groups, and talking about how hard it would be to enforce these things.

Val suggested that none of the dancers were motivated by the desire to hurt other women, and that the reason they were up on stage at a tech conference (of all things) probably had more to do with the paycheck than anything else. She probably could have been more nuanced in her analogies, but as far as I can tell, you all specifically *agree* with these points. So is this just about scoring points or what?

It's not just Open Source conferences

Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:09 UTC (Fri) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (1 responses)

For the record, I fully support Val's goals of raising awareness of sexual harassment at tech conferences and calling for pressure to make the atmosphere at such events more supportive of female attendees. I didn't mean for my debate with her in this sub-thread, which is only tangentially related to the original issue, to suggest otherwise.

It's not just Open Source conferences

Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:44 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Thank you, I'm glad to hear it.