Geek Feminism Wiki

A form letter response inspired by the anti-spam form letter.

Your communication requests a free feminist review of your (check all that apply):

  • creative
  • educational
  • research
  • social
  • community
  • technical

personal or commercial project. Your request for a review is refused. Here are the reasons why it is refused.

On trivial inspection, your project suffers from the following flaws (select all that apply):

  • this is obviously your homework assignment
  • you have clearly skipped your institution's ethics review process
  • you have no idea how to bring this project to market
  • you used the word "crowdsourcing"
  • your entire project is predicated on having women work on your project for free and then selling their work for lots and lots of money
  • your project is large-scale-only: effort spent on your project will be wasted if not every Internet user/child/woman/living person in the whole world signs up to it
  • your project is closely related to one or more existing successful woman-led feminist projects, of which you seem unaware
    • in addition, I personally run one of these projects of which you seem unaware
  • just your project prospectus is sexist or even misogynist
  • you seem to be doing this largely to expand your social circle because you have no female friends
    • and the way you went on to repeatedly tell me about your lack of female friends was not as enticing as you thought
  • you seem to be doing this largely to expand your dating circle
  • your project is very uncompelling
  • your project is absolute crap

In addition, your request suffers in these respects (select all that apply):

  • you regard me as pretty much interchangable with any other woman and have contacted me on the sole grounds that I can represent the woman point of view
  • I am very clearly the only woman you know of
  • you have seemingly spammed every woman on the planet with this request
  • you have an enormous sense of entitlement to my time and attention on no other grounds than that I am a woman
  • you're developing a commercial project and asking for many hours of free consulting
  • you are asking for help at the last possible moment, after months or years of apparently no consideration of women
  • you appear to be making this request in order to figleaf an otherwise sexist or even misogynist project
  • you make passive-aggressive implications that refusal to help you will prove that feminists are reverse-sexist
  • you describe women as "females"
  • you describe adult women as "girls"
  • you imply that adult women are a complete write-off as far as social change goes and that focussing on girls is not only one option, but the only option for change
  • you are asking privileged women to speak on behalf of other women

Also, on a quick glance, your project description fails to account for:

  • the ill-advisability of attempting to create the One True Women's Resource as your very first substantial project
  • the ill-advisability of having an all-male team tell women and girls what they want
  • women possessing agency even in the presence of enticing advertisements for lipstick
  • the existence of people who are both women and members of another oppressed class
  • the existence of people who have a non-binary gender id
  • asshats
  • the patriarchy
  • the kyriarchy

The following philosophical objections may also apply:

  • speaking on behalf of all women everywhere is impossible
  • not all women are interested in babies, crafts, makeup, shoes, weddings or celebrity gossip
  • women who are interested in any or all of babies, crafts, makeup, shoes, weddings or celebrity gossip are not unspeakably contemptible
  • not all women are mothers or intending mothers
  • mothers and intending mothers are not unspeakably contemptible
  • not all women are heterosexual
  • not all women have vaginas, uteruses and/or menstrual cycles

Hope this helps! Have a nice day!

See also[]