Melissa Gira Grant left a comment at Geek Feminism Blog about proposed guidelines to mitigate the seriously painful practice of men in tech “sexing up” dull presentations with… um… call it sexual-assumption-laden references or images of women. The problem being, as is often the case, the difficulty of distinguishing twittery vs. substance. Melissa lays it out nicely, and hits exactly the crux of the problem (emphasis mine.)

I think I get the thinking around these guidelines — and the totally male-dominated conference circuit that needs to hear this sort of guidance — but I just am stuck on this:

How do we keep guys (or anyone) from non-sensically using sexual or sexualized imagery and language in their presentations and preserve the right of people to use that information when it’s actually really, really what the presentation concerns?

This might be beyond the scope of these guidelines, but I am thinking back to the first BlogHer, during a “Birds of a Feather” session organized by self-identified mommybloggers, who were irritated that when they discussed the biological particulars of childbirth and childrearing, they were told they were being unprofessional, NSFW, or “overshare-y” — or, obscene.

It’s hard to address intent in this stuff. And I don’t want to sit through anymore stuffed-shirted dude “presos” on boring web marketing that just have some naked women sprinkled throughout to “sex things up” — because usually, those are the same dudes who don’t actually want to hear women talk honestly about sex, either.

Read the quote and follow links to the original sources here.

I think that’s about right. The problem isn’t the guidelines themselves. Or perhaps more accurately the problem isn’t insufficiently fine-grained guidelines. The problem is subsets of participants for whom the notion of the objects of their desire as biological human beings is both figuratively and literally TMI.

I’m emphasizing the notion of alienation from biological reality because, as this FAQ from Gender Shouldn’t Matter (also via Geek Feminism) demonstrates by reference that men are actually perfectly capable of acknowledging women as intellectual peers… under, um, certain conditions.

[Q] Free Software communities are meritocracies. Aren’t your recommendations purely discriminative?

[A] Everyone likes a true meritocracy. A community fails to achieve it, however, whenever female members resort to hiding behind male usernames.

I found the FAQ here.

The conditions being, um, when they don’t realize the intellectual peers they’re interacting with are biological women. Which, again, makes it a twits vs. substance issue — twittish sexual ideals (“it’s just harmless fun,” “we’re all men here,” “eww, you’re feeding babies with those things?!?!?!”) vs the corporeal, biological substance of those peers.

And, sigh, the problem in this case isn’t solvable by the standard 1st Amendment “the answer to bad images is more bad images.” (Although one imagines the rhetorical impact of PowerPointing a Wikipedia-derived photos of micro-penises into the graph at Gender Shouldn’t Matter as “just a light-hearted illustration” of the small face-to-face participation of women in Free/Open-Source Software venues as a response to the highly influential developers who angrily deny the women’s breasts they present in their own graphs might be objectionable.)

Instead it’s going to take something closer to confrontation. And possibly intervention. And it’s going to be a tricky intervention not so much because you have to overcome resistance (though there’s plenty of that) but because you also have to overcome this conception of the role of women in tech as not only things-not-people but as unapproachable/unachievable things.

Which, sad to say, is just an exaggerated version of the mainstream vision of women. Which is yet another consequence, of course, of the vision of sex as transactional.