On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Laura Hale <la...@fanhistory.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 4:28 AM, Pete Forsyth <petefors...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I believe issues relating to pornography are germane to a list discussing >> the gender gap, and I'm happy to be informed about them (as with Andreas' >> initial post) on this list. It's one of the reasons I subscribe to this >> list. >> >> Laura, if there was consensus around a different point of view at your >> conference, that's fine; but it's not binding on anybody who wasn't part of >> that consensus. >> > > Pete, > > As a woman, can you tell me if you regularly find pornography on Wikipedia > and you are offended by it? > > This is not an issue of "my conference" but an issue of a group of women > involved in the global movement were together for several days and discussed > these issues almost all the time. This was the first WMF gender gap > conference. It was the first WMF women's only event. Do you realise how > offensive it is to dismiss us this way? Seriously, it is greatly offensive > to dismiss the conference and our outcomes and our conversations like you > just did. Can you please apologise for your incivility in dismissing us > this way? > > Do you know why the issue even came up to begin with? Because I saw the > conversation appear here so often that I thought "Surely pornography must be > an important global issue that makes it difficult for women to contribute." > I was point blank told: "This is a problem for women from the USA and is > used to derail important conversations." Beyond that, the issue of > pornography was so unimportant as not to be discussed.
I can understand the viewpoint that inappropriate pornography is only an important barrier to a subset of potential or current Wikipedia editors, and that it can be frustrating when people succeed in derailing a discussion about the worldwide gender gap by changing the topic to prudery. However, my personal approach is to work hard to combat derailing rather than avoid the topic that triggers derailing - that is, it's the people doing the derailing that is the problem, not the topic of discussion. For example, responding with "Please don't derail the conversation" and a link to the definition of derailing can help, as well as general education on the original topic. I'm not sure how to make progress on the gender gap while also avoiding topics that are targets for derailing. My personal approach to people using pornography in a manner that creates a hostile environment is to educate people on the effect of a sexualized environment on how women are perceived and treated: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment I find that most people simply don't realize that pornography produced for a certain specific audience doesn't produce the same feelings of happiness and pleasure in everyone who views it, or that it only does so in appropriate contexts. After all, even if a person enjoys this specific kind of pornography, many people aren't interested in becoming sexually aroused in, e.g., a public auditorium at a technical conference, or while doing research for a non-pornographic topic. -VAL -- Increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture http://adainitiative.org _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
