I had long thought that Sexism was a thing of the past; that women
would have the ability to do what they wanted, and would mostly not be
discriminated against. And while I was not
so naive to think
that there was no discrimination at all, I was under the impression that
any such discrimination would mostly be something the discriminator did
not think of consciously. That things like people being rejected
outright for a job because they were women, and, well, "women can't work
as well as men", were stories of the past. At least if I did ever
discriminate against women, it never was intentional.
Little did I realize how far away from the truth that was. As some
troll's
recent
mails
show, there are actually people out there who do thinkn that the influx
of Women into Debian should be stopped, and that Debian should be a men
only club. Our coward is too afraid to post under his real name, instead
relying on tor and throwaway yahoo accounts to mask his identity. So
let's call him 'Anonymous coward'. Occasionally, this is the main reason
why I don't like tor; full anonymity should not be allowed, one should
be able to have people stand up for what they say, and face the
consequences. Anyway, that's a different story, for another time.
What puzzles me is how anyone would think that there could possibly
be a correlation between orphaned packages and the existance of
Debian-Women. Personally, I've been
happy that there is a
Debian-Women which strives to make our community more complete; the lack
of women (or any considerable part of the world population, for that
matter) is a serious disadvantage for any community that tries to do
something for the "greater good".
Personally, I'm disgusted and offended by the mails this moron is
sending; and even though I realize that there probably still is some
(unconscious) discrimination against women, I can hope to safely say
that Debian is tolerant regarding people that represent a minority
amongst its community members. Even Jonathan Walther, whom we kicked out
for (amongst other reasons) trolling on the debian-women mailinglist,
never (to the best of my knowledge) said anything which implied that he
thought Debian-Women should be disbanded (although he, err, had a
"different" idea of what they should be doing).
I guess all this only means we don't live in a utopia, and that
Debian is not free of the plagues that will hit any sufficiently large
community. But that doesn't negate the fact that I'm still offended by
this lunatic.
Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and
can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of
candidates in each year's DPL elections.