Am Donnerstag, 09.12.04 um 04:01 Uhr schrieb Erinn Clark:
I would say "feminist" is certainly a somewhat controversial term in theUS. Many people that actually identify with basic feminist ideology hesitate to identify themselves as feminists because of a few extreme cases. The term doesn't bother me, though.
Feminism is quite a bit different from forcing equality for all people, So I would not call me a feminist at all as real feminists would not call me either.
There are some strange among some feminists, but that real is a minority.
Our all objection is having real equality and that is common sense between me and others and most of the women - and even men - participating women's movement.
Beside that: making women more visible in Debian Project will attract more women and, maybe, in some years there will be not that many discussion why women have to be made visible, too, any longer.
Related to the discussion on newsforge I have a question to the audience: When I was young, I learned that english manuals use "you" (second person) instead of third person and something like "man" in German language. Now it seems that this is mostly reversed to using "he" instead of "you" and talking to directly to the user in a manual. Is that US specific? Why did that change? Couldn't we try to reverse the change? It is not only that using "you" is gender neutral, I think it is more user friendly at all talking to the reader directly in a manual.
"if you type 'ls' on the prompt you will get a list of all files in the current directory" sounds even more friendly as "If one types 'ls' on the prompt, there will be shown a list of all files in the current directory" or "If the user types 'ls' on the prompt, he/she will get a list of all files in the current directory". I think this simple example shows that the discussion about gender neutral manuals is not only women related. Insisting writing "he" seems to be a principle using gender biased wording even if it is not friendly to _any_ user. And that is sexism pure: Forcing usage of male gender, even if that ignores male's interests.
greetings Jutta -- http://www.witch.westfalen.de http://witch.muensterland.org