I am not very intelligent, nor very eloquent, so bear with me, here. I know you're feeling defensive, but humor me for a moment, and let's assume I'm right, and Gina Trapani is right, and all the people who have retweeted this pair of essays are right.

If we're right, and you're wrong, then that discomfort and defensiveness you're feeling right now is fear. You're afraid I might be talking about you. You're realizing you've never examined your opinions about this issue, you've just assumed you're smart enough to not be sexist, or racist, or bigoted in any substantial way, and this bothers you quite a bit, to perhaps not be as smart as you thought.

You're also afraid that I'm talking about your community, the one that gives you a strong sense of identity, and no-one else in your community has ever talked about this, so it must not be an issue, right? This outsider! How dare she!

Maybe you're even afraid because it's a girl calling you out. A girl emasculating you, just like all the others who have called you out for one reason or another. They're all the same! Fucking bitches, man! Perhaps this is pushing it. Perhaps this resonates with someone.

Except, hi, I'm Vitorio. I'm a guy. I've worked with Linux for fifteen years. I grew up on IRC. I've contributed code patches to open source projects. I've released open source software. I've written documentation and helped with design and done support for open source software. I'm part of your community, too. Which means I'm saying this is a problem in our community.

I believe this is a serious, cultural problem. No-one talks about it in our community because everyone believes they're too smart to be sexist. And, yet, there's a long list of well-documented sexism-related incidents in open source, including sexual assault at the most recent ApacheCon: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Timeline_of_in...

Do you know how I know it's a long list? Because it exists at all.

Obviously, we're not all too smart. But I don't just believe it's a few bad apples. I think we're mostly bad apples in this regard. Why?

I believe part of the sexism is cultural from how you were brought up: as a male in most cultures you are raised inherently sexist and the culture itself encourages sexist gender roles and a rape culture and such.

I believe part of the sexism is cultural from the people you associate with: it's like that xkcd comic, sometimes it's "you're bad at math" and sometimes it's "girls are bad at math," and both are culturally damaging, but the latter is much worse and drives a ton of people away and any tolerance for it is a gateway for worse behavior.

You've probably recently been involved with a sexist, racist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted joke. Maybe you made one. Maybe you laughed at one. Maybe you read Slashleen on Twitter. I made one at dinner tonight, for example. Everyone laughed, including the overweight, homosexual black man who was with us. It doesn't make it funny, and it doesn't make it okay. It's still bigotry, and it's still wrong. I also called out a coworker for calling something "gay" yesterday. One doesn't make up for the other.

That's why I'm not going to read your mailing lists to pass judgment on whether your communities are sexist or not. It's possible for them to all be and for you to be unqualified to judge. It's not all or nothing, it's not one or the other. IRC is worse than mailing lists are, in my experience. IRL is both better and has the potential to be much worse.

That's also why the Penny Arcade "Dickwolves" issue was so important: they made a rape joke. It was considered to be promoting rape culture. I agree that it was. Jokes about rape perpetuate the idea that rape is somehow okay or normal. You don't encourage anything that seems to promote a negative behavior. For me, it was less that the comic promoted rape culture and more that their response, their not understanding why it could possibly be an issue since they didn't "mean it that way," was totally wrong, and that incomprehension was completely representative of gamers and OSS developers alike.

I also wish I had bought a Dickwolves tee. That makes me part of the problem. But, I heard once that a sign of intelligence is being able to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time. I can believe the OSS community is generally sexist, perhaps even misogynistic, and be both disappointed and unsurprised by the HN reaction to these essays, and still comment here. It's not really my place to judge you, or even teach you, because that means teaching self-awareness.

I believe your defensiveness reflects your lack of cultural self-awareness to understand that not only might your community be inherently sexist, but that you might also be.

I understand that I am. It's not that you're not allowed to have an opinion, you are, but "I feel like this is a personal attack" is a feeling. I am intentionally writing antagonistically to provoke you into thinking about this constructively.

Now, you can go back to your original feeling. Thanks so much for humoring me. Whatever opinion you end up holding, I hope it's a strong opinion, loosely held, and I hope you actually have reasons for holding it.