[Techtalk] Politeness and the purpose of Techtalk

[Piglet]

Hmmm, it seems to me that every time this discussion comes up, it's about
the list having gone thru a bit of time where the answers have started to be
either *mostly* by men or *mostly* by one man.

I don't think anyone's said squat about a serious proposal of "men are not
allowed to answer questions."

Let me put it this way: there is a social pattern in the world outside Chix
that's been around for hundreds and thousands of years:

"you dumb little women can ask questions and we big strong men will answer
them for you."

Since that's the antithesis of what Chix is about, I'm not sure why anyone
would get upset with any of the women (or men, for that matter) here calling
"Whoa, time out" when she sees that a list is falling into exactly that
pattern.

The two primary points I've heard have been "guys, please don't rush to
pounce on every question first; let's have some time for answers-by-women"
and "hmm, can we have more *questions* by guys"--- instead of guys appearing
as 'I'm here to help you because I know all the answers", how about a more
egalitarian level of "I don't know everything, you don't know everything,
let's help each other."

The only two really productive responses to those points are "Hmm, I'll try
to watch for that" or "No, that sucks, I'm outta here."

Responses of "I did too ask a question, in October of 2001" or getting
snarky because "how dare you say "guys" when not *every* guy here is a
problem" aren't productive.  If nobody's said to you, on or off list "Hey,
you're the problem", then there's no point in taking it as a personal shot:
it's a "hey, we all need to work on this a bit", not guy-bashing or
you-personally-bashing.

It's a two part issue being brought up: not only a "hey, guys, back off a
bit" but "hey, women, speak up a bit."  If you get huffy about half of that,
you never even see the other half.


--pig


On 10/30/04 4:56 AM, "gebhard dettmar"
<gebhard.dettmar at student.hu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Hmm. I don't know if this was a good solution. It would mean something
> like: We're not complete Neanderthals (we're still allowed to post
> questions)
> but we're not fully civilized human beings (we're not allowed to answer
> questions). If females on this list wouldn't appreciate receiving answers
> from males the only proper solution was IMHO making it women-only.