Scene report. Contains swearing and ironic hashtags. As if there were any other sort.

[hirez]

[ This was inspired by a report on the Facebooks. Rather than make someone else's grim time All About Me and my Manfeels, I shall perform my tangenteering here. ]

I am becoming really quite narked with the obvious inability of, oh, pretty much all[1] the 'men'[2] in IT to act like fucking adults.

Perhaps it's just me and my terrible Guardian-reading ways, but there's a process in the back of my head that runs most of the time[3] and spends its time going 'Is what you are about to say going to sound creepy/racist/ableist/patronising/sexist? Because if it is think of some other way of expressing yourself. You're a fucking writer for fuck's sake. You're good enough to get paid cash-money for making the language work in positive and interesting ways. And. You actually like the people you work with and you do not wish them to regard you as some lurching troglodyte quasi-human (or 'generic man in IT') but as someone with dreams and fears of their own.'

Perhaps it is just me.

A couple of years ago, I spent a morning in the company of a handful of late-teen and early twentysomething males. They all knew each other and were quite happy to ignore the weird old post-punk and jabber amongst themselves. It was pretty horrible. Fucken this and fucken that and fuck that bird over there with knockers i'd give 'er a portion out down the bierkeller last week doing shots some dirty slapper you could see her bra an' everything puke my fucken ring...

... And I don't recall what I was like at that age. I'd like to think not as bad, but y'know...

[Shrug]

I dunno. It's pish. I hate it. Do better you horrible little gobshites.

(Last time I wrote something like this I was variously accused of White Knighting and only doing it to cop off with feminist birds.)

[1] #notalltehmenz. #eyeroll.
[2] Fucking assume good-faith fucking definitions here, ok? We all know who the problem-space is.
[3] Because I am human and I fuck up or am tired[4] or something so egregiously batshit is going on that I get lost in the moment[4].
[4] Far too much of that going on right now.

Comments

[hsb.livejournal.com]

I hung around a lot of IT studenty types back in the early 90s, which is as close to a reasonable proxy of social norms in that kind of group as I'm going to get. The attitude to actual women tended far more to the "we watch the magic alien from afar, and if she talks to us, we are amazed and pleased" end of the scale than the current attitude, which seems to be more on the "the sextoys are over there, we don't talk to them" end of the scale.

My theory is that The Game and the development of the brogrammer has spoiled geek culture. Once, male geeks were mostly harmless, and restful to be around, because they didn't presume to know what you knew until you told them, and most listened to you*. That type of geek grows up to have nice healthy relationships, in my experience. The other type, not sure they will make it.

H
*NB I cannot speak for what they were like to girl programmers back then. I was an SF geek who was presumed to know stuff about my area of geekdom.