A lot of offensive or marginalising incidents in geek communities are, supposedly, intended as Humor. These jokes, aimed at a presumed-male audience, exclude women even when they do not explicitly insult them.
Women who complain about such jokes are usually accused of not having a sense of humor, or of being prudes.
Examples
The FLOSSPOLS survey on gender and Open Source Software provides several examples, such as:
- "At a large F/LOSS conference, for instance, somebody tried to motivate people to take part in a competition for a particular project by announcing the winning prize would be a date out with a beautiful, blonde girl. When a woman who attended the conference because she was interested in the topic of F/LOSS and wanted to get involved in it objected, she was misinterpreted. As a reply she only received: “Oh, this is just a joke.” However, it is this type of joke which make women feel uncomfortable in the community."
Responses
- emjaybee, a commenter on a MetaFilter about Geek Feminism, responded to another commenter who said "Things that were previously OK (sex jokes, e.g.) are suddenly offensive" with:
- Well, what kinda sex jokes are we talking? Assuming that all the males and females in the group do not have religious hangups about sex jokes in general, there's no reason for this to be true.
- However, if sex jokes=rape jokes, you have a problem. If sex jokes=dumb bitch gets humiliated jokes...same thing.
- Many men seem to assume that women find sex offensive. Absent religious hangups, we don't. Rape is offensive, women portrayed as targets/objects of violence/universally dumb or vicious is offensive. In the same way that racist jokes are offensive.
- It may be that most sex jokes are also misogynistic (I have no data on this one), but women didn't set it up that way, you know.
- "But I Was Just Joking!" Humor as a Shield describes how humor is sometimes used to mask or excuse bigotry.