Don’t Bring An iPhone To A Gunfight

This is a post about sex, gender and tech – but it sadly has no hot sex in it. Skip this post if you hang out here on TinyNibbles for the porn; it’ll be back after this intermission.

Last week, I went to events for Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, a very expensive and exclusive event for developers of hardware and applications for Apple platforms. I was invited to parties and even considered a VIP at times. At two specific times, however, I felt like I ran head-on into the issue of gender-bias within the Apple community. In my post on CBSi/ZDNet, WWDC 2011: No Innovation, Developer Discontent, published last Sunday night, I related my experience of being “profiled” for my gender by two guys at the truly fantastic Ars Technica and Idea Flight party. Short version? I and my production/personal assistant Juliette were considered hot, so we were treated like ditzy girls who did not belong there. Juliette reminded me later that their opening line was, in fact, “So, how did you two girls get in here?”

This attitude was evident from the get-go in the guys attempting, however badly, to flirt with us, so Juliette deviated from SOP and told a little white lie that wasn’t a little white lie. She told the guys we were models. We are both models, but she left out the probably more important fact that Juliette is a coder and led the launch of my first app, and I’m a tech writer, blogger, and podcaster. The guys too-easily clocked us as stupid on matters technical…and by our allowing them to lead the conversation, they ended up doing a lot of mansplaining, which was both hilarious and insulting.

Another guy also very rudely (and very loudly) insulted me for having an Android phone – and then later denied he’d done anything of the sort, making up a fairy tale to explain his publicly rude antics, rather than simply apologizing. Could it be he’s not so sure where the future is headed in terms of app development… and doesn’t want to burn any bridges by having his bad behavior toward Androids made public? Or is it more likely that I was imagining things he did – in front of witnesses?

I saw these encounters as examples of the growing monoculture in the Apple community. They represent the crushing sense I have that Apple has entered a new era. After Apple felt entitled to purge their developer community after building a market off their backs – in the interest of making “innovation” an externality, maybe because it’s cheaper than health benefits – fratty white males of a certain age have come to symbolize the hostility to the “outsider” that will limit Apple in the years to come.

For a company that’s always aimed to celebrate the outsider, that’s more than just disappointing. It’s the deepest betrayal of their customer base. My experiences illustrate Apple’s now-institutionalized disconnect with the people who built their products, their loyal fans, and the customers they claim to serve.

I put it this way:

WWDC 2011 lacked innovation and exemplified a monoculture that casts the closing of Apple’s Jobs-era legacy in a light of exclusivity, hostility, and heartfelt angst among those who felt that Apple’s core strength was in its elevation of outsider thought.

From the response to my article, you would have thought that I’d just burned the flag. The guy who ridiculed me for having an Android phone didn’t get why it might have been fine to do that to “one of the guys” – at a party full of guys. He laughed it off, and then called me a liar.

An editor of a prominent local blog – a woman – emailed me saying, “When I got up Monday morning, read your article, Googled him, and found him on Twitter, he was just all “heh heh” about it. If an article lied about me/made an error, my *first* reaction would be to say so. Instead, it took him HOURS to make the accusation.”

I never claimed, as some have said, that he insulted my phone because I am a girl; that was clear in my article. That’s not the point. The point is that public ridicule of someone obviously in the minority at an Apple developer’s conference – an Android user – creates an awkward, hurtful and embarrassing situation for someone who is already the odd man out (female). So much for thinking different.

He may not have ridiculed me for being female, sure. I never said, or wrote, that he did. But insulting someone with an Android phone (as many Twitter users also felt comfortable doing) is even more pointed, since it takes gender out of the mix. The Android comment wasn’t about making a girl feel uncomfortable. It was about making anyone different feel uncomfortable. I’m not saying that’s the explicit intention – I’m sure nobody thought this through, because people with privilege generally don’t need to. What I’m saying is that male privilege translates to “always being right.” Rudeness is rudeness and exclusionary behavior is exclusionary behavior, whatever minority it’s aimed at.

Then there’s the matter of Juliette’s “little white lie” – which, again, isn’t a white lie, since I’ve done quite a bit of modeling and Juliette does a whole lot, professionally. I didn’t initiate the conversation “as a bimbo.” I did not try to persuade them that I was a bimbo. I didn’t induce them to do anything they weren’t already doing. Ignoring my point about the hostility toward the minority (women being not a minority population overall – but definitely a minority at WWDC), Juliette and I were accused of “tricking” men. I was also accused of attacking both Apple culture and “male” culture – when the opposite is true. I love the innovation Apple has always – up ’till recently – brought to its ingenious products, and guys who aren’t rude assholes are top-notch in my book. But when Apple shows itself to be (in my opinion) uncharacteristically un-innovative, and guys show themselves to be assholes, I’ll fucking well say it, and loud.

The response surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. The abuse, harassment and trolling I have received this past week on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and in podcasts – almost exclusively by very angry men, especially John Welch – is reminiscent of the abuse and threats I regularly got while writing for the Chronicle for four years. There, I regularly got death threats and the same kind of abuse, harassment and trolling for suggesting that certain aspects of American culture overall were not as “open to innovation” as I would have liked. Abuse, harassment and trolling, incidentally, tend to indicate that the person behaving in a consistent, aggressively threatening manner is not “open to innovation.” They’re also rarely a hallmark of a female-friendly culture.

Before you follow me any further down, please do go read No Innovation and decide for yourself if accusing Juliette and me of being cock-teases is a good way to argue that I’m wrong about monoculture inbreeding and stifling innovation. Then read the response interview with me No Violet, We’re ALL a bunch of Socially Awkward Dorks, and decide if you agree with me that there’s a connection between crappy male social behavior being tolerated, and a lack of tech innovation.

But many “commentators” never made it that far; they got hung up on the sexual politics and started showing their diversity and innovation by calling me names. One of the Angry Mac Bastards (John Welch), on his personal site, called me a “sex-positive New Media Douchebag” (“New Media?” As opposed to…what, exactly, at WWDC?) and my column a “steaming turd.” He then trotted out a token female to write a “response” to me in the form of a guest post.

This token female was consultant Pam Lefkowitz, and I feel obligated to respond to it directly. Her post was supposed to be a presentation of the “real” female tech zeitgeist in response to my article. What it is, in fact, is a rant filled with careless inaccuracies that could have been remedied by about twenty keystrokes on Google and forty-five seconds reading Wikipedia (for example, about my name – as usual). What’s not out-and-out ignorance and anti-male sexism in Lefkowitz’s post is mostly a series of insults directed at me.

Just indulge me for a minute, Angry Mac Bastard. Is this really the iPhone you wanna bring to this gunfight? That’s seriously the best you can do? Did you even make it to the end of my article, or did you stop when you found out that Juliette and I had allowed a couple of guys to mislead themselves as to whether they had a chance with us “stupid bimbos”? Did that just outrage you so much that you couldn’t even address the issue of whether Apple has stalled in its innovation? Or did you just have to start speed-dialing every woman you knew in hopes of finding one who would berate me by way of “proving” that not all women think men who behave badly should be called on it?

Is having a female Apple consultant call me an ungrateful hooker and spew prejudice in the name of gender equality really your most killer response, or the response “women in tech” want assigned to them?

The most egregious claim in Lefkowitz’s article – and there are many – is that I harmed women in tech with my behavior:

That post alone has set the world of women and technology back 10 years at least. Violet has, effectively, made it so that tech-men are going to hesitate talking to women any more. If they don’t talk to us, they can’t possibly include us. Without including us, they *surely* can’t learn to respect us. So thanks for moving the Women’s Movement backwards with a flip of your hair and a bat of your eyelashes.

According to Lefkowitz’s dates in her post, her “movement” is about 40 years old – she’s stuck in Feminism, circa 1970, when women couldn’t be sexy and smart at the same time. Not only that, but she’s stuck in the fantasy world where if I’m a woman, and you’re a woman, and I’m sexier than you, I am your enemy in the boardroom.

How much further do you need to go to find a textbook example of a catfight staged for the entertainment of cheering frat boys about three inches below the glass ceiling?

As for all that hard work Lefkowitz has done for “women and technology” (thanks for that, by the way), I guess, in Pam’s view, I just undid it. Wow, OMG – the power. I haz it.

And if Lefkowitz, who feels she furthered the cause of women in tech just by being there – but has neither a Wikipedia page nor a blog, thinks I have it easier now as a woman in the tech world…?

She’s crazy. Of all the people you can accuse of having it easy, I’m not the one you want to pick on, sister. You’re yet another person bringing an iPhone to a gunfight. I’ve got it “easy,” do I, Pam, because of the hard work people like you did by dressing dowdy and defending male privilege by accusing other women in tech of being whores? I’ve gotten death threats and had my home address published on Wikipedia. I’ve gotten threatening packages in the mail featuring the bodily fluids of completely insane people. I’ve gone up against the country of Libya over female freedoms and the .ly TLD. I’ve told Leo LaPorte and Dvorak to fuck off for making fun of the women in tech, and even got an apology. I was the first female podcaster (and had a man hijack my feed for its high traffic), the second blogger – and first female blogger – pulled from the blogosphere to write for an Old Media outlet (Hearst) in America (not only was there nothing “easy” about it, I got the job because I was doing breaking news coverage on local blogs). I’ve had the Library Association of America fight to keep at few of my 30+ published (award-winning) books in libraries when a man decided to enlist Focus On The Family in a campaign against me, I fought Apple to keep sex ed podcasts in iTunes and succeeded and then got a red carpet tour of the Mothership for my troubles.

Incidentally, I’ve also spoken about sex, women and technology (and privacy, trolling, harassing and stalking) twice at Google Inc., multiple times on stages large and small for SXSWi, at ETech, LeWeb, Gnomedex and other technology conferences – on the main stages. I was not invited to do these things because I batted my eyelashes or flipped my hair, or as you have accused me – being a sex worker.

How easy, exactly, do I have it, Pam?

But Lefkowitz believes not only should women like me allow men’s bad social behavior; we should correct it. In short, it’s the”mommy complex” – it’s the responsibility of the person discriminated against to correct bad behavior that’s encouraged by the monoculture. Hey, women’s studies people… Any of you recognize this crap from Blame the Victim Bingo? When a man treats me as an inferior because of my gender, I’m supposed to correct him in my “mommy” voice? That’s what Lefkowitz says:

Do I try to trick them just so I’ll have an article to write about gender bias? No. In my very adult voice, I tell them how I expect to be treated. If that doesn’t do the trick, I take my toys and move to another sandbox – their loss.

There aren’t any other sandboxes, Pam, and women shouldn’t have to move to other sandboxes because of men behaving like assholes. Just because I look attractive to a guy doesn’t mean he gets to treat me like my ideas are less important. In the short term, if what he wants is sex with me, a guy like that is barking up the wrong tree. And in the long term, that kind of behavior helps keep innovation out of technology and away from Apple. Monoculture is not challenged by the women like Pam who claim that they further the cause of women’s rights by not dressing sexy, or by mommying boys when they’re bad.

There’s no magic button to solve the issue of women in tech being treated with monolithic sexism – sexism itself is too ingrained in male culture. But the miserable thing is that Apple, which has always been the company of the outsider, is now growing a monoculture so overwhelming that it’s about to threaten the very innovation that made Apple in the first place. Pulling the rug out from under thousands of developers in 2010 was one thing, Apple – that was a betrayal not just of your dev culture, but of your customers. Lack of transparency with developers, plus in your orgy of being ‘back-on-top’, the Apple community has started to take on some of the nastiest things about the frat-boy culture of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and puts your the motives of innovation into question – that’s simply undignified.

And I see the growing sexism in the Apple community as a symptom of innovation crisis. But I take a harm-reduction approach to sexism. There’s no shame in sexualizing or being sexy. Some people – very often men – are going to behave badly in response to it. We need to acknowledge both and do what we can to reduce the negative impact of the inappropriate behavior on communities we care about.

But Lefkowitz is not on board with this. Instead, right before she calls me a “dick” (way to debate!) she argues we were “asking for it.” Remember that the first question to us was, “How did you girls get in here?”

Lefkowitz:

Do I lead them on with sexual innuendo and language that implies “I’m just a stupid little girl”? Of course, when women such as yourself and Juliette, play like stupid little bimbos how can the guys possibly respect us.

As if I’m a tech PR chick on the Idiot Float Parade cockteasing for clients.

At least I showed up to WWDC, Ms. Lefkowitz.