I don’t advertise myself (“hang out a shingle”) as some expert on gender politics. I imagine the male-female polarity (a spectrum) shows up differently per subculture. As a geek, I had a front row seat on OSCONs, Pycons and like that, so I saw a sub sub section of a culture grappling with the issues, whether gender-related or not or, more likely, somewhat.
My thought this morning is that a female newly inducted into a hitherto male sanctum might feel singled out and teased, because female, and therefore at an unfair disadvantage. That may well be the case in some cases. In other scenarios, what the female hadn’t realized is how these males tease each other, as a part of their discipline around healing and thickening one another’s skins.
Friends sometimes inflict insults on one another to harden and desensitize in ways that add to (shape) ones version of professionalism. Nothing personal, one might add (after what sounds to be some personal attack). Think of a martial arts dojo. What else is there to do besides play fight all day, on a good day. On bad days, one fights (slays whatever dragons) for real. I’m pro dragon by the way; a figure of speech.
Why am I thinking about such matters on a Thanksgiving morning?
A pat answer might be that around holidays especially we tend to gravitate towards ritual roles, which in nuclear family terms in North America might mean it’s the dad that cuts the turkey while the mom probably did much of the preparation. Case in point: I’m planning to dress up in an Eurasian suit and tie, reflecting my breeding as an English gentleman at the Junior English School of Rome (just the one year there though — other times I was learning to be a savage).
Deviations from these stereotypes are not uncommon either though. Some dads really like cooking and do it all, with the mom having a signature dish responsibility. More recently, the nuclear family itself has permuted, permitting couples to be same-sex. Extended more molecular families are likewise hardly unknown.
However, I think a truer answer is I’ve been looking back on my own trajectory within the aforementioned geek culture, remembering Guido’s PyLadies campaign for example, and how we brushed with sexism many times in the conference world.
My own focus was to fork off Greek mythology with the Python escaping to Nashville narrative, something I talk more about in my Cultagory Theory: Revectoring Psyons.
Also: just this morning I watched a YouTube narrating the life of Felix Klein, a German mathematician who married the granddaughter of Friedrich Hegel. Although the pictures are largely AI-generated, what stands out, in the old techie movies too, is how few women there are, as in none. Klein saw this as a problem and devoted energy to altering this status quo.
