

Sexism and PHP - choult
http://blog.calevans.com/2013/02/22/sexism-and-php/

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Tehnix
So what? It's a penis joke? What is so bad about that if it's the case?
Honestly, the only thing this (the article) accomplishes is making it appear
that women have no humor...

If people are offended by this, I simply would not care. I mean, there is
nothing more I'd love than to have more women in the programming world, but
having people with no humor? Nah, I'd rather pass that then.

(If this comes off as sexist or anything, it isn't, it's not a thing against
gender, it's a thing against peoples attitude)

~~~
nigelsampson
I must be getting old, or it's late here but I didn't get the "penis" joke
till you mentioned it.

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Tehnix
Well, considering the phrasing is a bit like what you might see in a viagra
add, and the fact that if you say it out loud the Pness part in PHPness is
almost literally pronounced penis.

Either way, I would have given it any second thought if it weren't for the
article, so I know what you mean.

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onemorepassword
If this mildly juvenile t-shirt is the worst to come out of the PHP community,
then I would say it's not doing too badly. The t-shirts themselves are not
that bad, they just shouldn't have been distributed by a sponsor at a
conference.

I am surprised however it hasn't been dealt with on the spot. It's not like
PHP hasn't had it's share of incidents similar to other communities before,
but the prominent role of women in PHP usually ensures that for instance
speakers using sexist imagery in slides will be torn a new one on the spot
instead of it becoming a blogosphere and twitter drama afterwards.

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saurik
I tried to find a picture, and came up with something that was clearly some
previous t-shirt; an additional five minutes of scavaging around, and I'm
still not finding it (although webandphp.com seems to have some iPhone-
specific website which may be blocking me). Given that the premise of "Google
juice" is flawed (what happened to rel="nofollow"?), would someone mind
providing the context for this (as in, the shirt)?

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mobweb
I think this is the shirt the OP is talking about:
<https://twitter.com/webandphp/status/261241003204300801>

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PeterisP
I didn't get any relation at all between this pic and the article until
reading some comments.. Ok, some juveniles might interpret it in a funny way,
but I mean, in the same manner half of real surnames can be made into crude
puns.

~~~
viraptor
Could someone explain it, please? I don't know if I should read "PHPness" in a
different way, or is there some context missing? I just don't get what's wrong
with that text.

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kirualex
I'm pretty sure this is the kind of article that is doing a lot more harm than
good to the female gender by shifting the focus from real issues (pay
inequality, harassment and such) to trivial and harmless puns.

I sometime wonder if these people (like the author) are just trolls waiting
for a good useless polemic to arise in order to shove down our throat how well
behaved they are. Pathetic.

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tuturu
TIL making a joke about a male body part is misogyny.

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captoffendo
The t-shirt is neither sexist or offensive, nor particularly funny. People,
please spend your moral outrage on real issues. Honestly, PHP as a language is
way more offensive than the shirt is.

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antihero
This is utterly ridiculous. In reality there is street harassment FGM, pay
gap, domestic violence, rape, politicians attacking bodily autonomy...but god
forbid someone makes a dick joke.

It's bullshit like this that means more and more people are a) not taking
feminism seriously any more (women included), and b) leaving the damn movement
(my girlfriend and I used to be fairly hardcore feminist activists, but we're
so sick of all this shit that our interest is waning. Which is awful, as we
genuinely care about equality and smashing the gender divide, but the movement
is so plagued by pointless bickering and crap like this, it's an uphill
battle).

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lmm
If you're interested in constructively changing things rather than just
looking good for yourself, it's worth contacting people directly before you
shout to the internet at large.

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tanepiper
Storm in a teacup IMHO

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rooshdi
Oh hey look, another dick joke on a t-shirt promoting programming to the
masses. How funny, right? Hur, hur, hur.

At this point, I don't know what's more of a joke, this type of marketing or
the joke itself.

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vilda
It's fair so say that those girls are authors of that t-shirt. It was they
idea. And they are not dumb at all - they are editors of Webandphp.

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drivebyacct2
Would it be more acceptable if there was a "female version" of this shirt? I'm
glad we're examining this at a meta level more often, and I can see how this
is exclusive, certainly. Would it become (more) inclusive or even _"ok"_ if
there was some other jokey concept for women as well?

