Comment by benatkin

11 years ago

"Lighten up" doesn't solve anything. I'm not against jokes but the implying man in man pages means male and not an abbreviation of manual is exclusionary.

http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/

18 comments

benatkin

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BadCookie  11 years ago

On the other hand, taking everything so seriously can make the situation worse. I'm a woman in tech, and I don't want the men in tech to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells so as not to offend me. I think that the name "bro pages" is kind of funny, for what it's worth, and all of the protest against the name is the only thing making me uncomfortable.

  • tokenizer  11 years ago

    I thought it was short for "bro"chure anyway. I ctrl+f'ed brother on every page of that site, and I couldn't find any. If anything, people are placing the gender connotation into this command, like people do with "man"ual... why is it the creator and the people who aren't mentioning gender who are being insensitive? I find this entire argument sexist against myself as a man, as the equivalent of this would be creating something called sis and having everyone come down on your because of the name.

  • jacalata  11 years ago

    I'm a woman in tech, and I don't give a shit if men feel like they have to walk on eggshells around me - but as far as I know it's never happened anyway, so I kind of suspect that the whole problem of 'but I'm so scared of saying something wrong to a woman!' is mostly just something people say on the internet.

  • natch  11 years ago

    Just keep in mind, for every comfortable woman in tech, there are many uncomfortable women who stayed out of tech. because of the stuff that for whatever reason doesn't bother you, but does bother them. Their voices are not represented here.

    And the tech world is the poorer for it.

    • dreamfactory2  11 years ago

      > for every comfortable woman in tech, there are many uncomfortable women who stayed out of tech. because of the stuff that for whatever reason doesn't bother you, but does bother them.

      Any sources for this claim?

    • Myrmornis  11 years ago

      Woman are not in tech because we fail at the high school education phase: we need to do better at encouraging women to study STEM subjects at university. I don't believe the current environment at tech companies is the problem. If it is a rather male dominated culture that is the effect, not the cause.

      3 replies →

sharpneli  11 years ago

"Lighten up" might be her pet peeve. My personal pet peeve is "someone might get offended". Just as she is tired of being told "lighten up" I'm somewhat tired of always having to be careful lest someone gets offended.

I think it's fundamental difference in personalities. Some also want really heavy age limits of software and video. Some also want to censor the internet and some do not.

I'm actually tempted to name personal projects with similar names as the 'bro' project, not because I would actually endorse the culture, but because I dislike those that come barging in saying that someone might get offended even more.

I get pretty much as annoyed of offended persons as I do with those that would seriously dismiss anyone based on their gender.

res0nat0r  11 years ago

It is a play on words. Calm down.

Running 'brew install bro' on your Mac isn't going to cause all women in IT to worry they are being excluded.

anigbrowl  11 years ago

The entire Unix command line is exclusionary. If it wanted to be inclusive 'man' would be called 'help'. We're not using 300bps dumb terminals any more, I fail to see the value in forcing everyone to learn commands like cp and mv instead of copy and move.

  • sharpneli  11 years ago

    http://meyerweb.com/other/humor/pcunix.html

    Man pages are called person pages. Also history has been completely rewritten, and is now called herstory.

    The nice command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be nice. In System VI, the sue command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones

sroerick  11 years ago

Maybe most people's first reaction to the man command is that it refers to men. Maybe the man in manual is interpreted in early programmers heads as meaning men. Maybe it's part of the nomenclature that is the fabric of the current, male dominated programming scene.

Maybe naming this tool 'bro' is a satire of both bro culture and rtfm style exclusionary patriarchy. I dunno. Maybe not.