Re: Should the weboob package stay in Debian?
On Sun, 22 Jul 2018, Wookey wrote:
I think they're funny, which I think is what was intended by
upstream. I enjoy a gratuitous boob-or-handjob mention as much as the
next 14 year old.
As much as the next 14-year-old _boy_.
Even if Debian takes the position that the package name (and executable
names, personality, etc.) are acceptable, there's no corresponding way to
name a package that is similarly objectifying towards men. Our language
has a wealth of terms for women that convey "Whatever you do with your
mind, I will always see you for your body as a tool of my pleasure," but
no corresponding ones for men.
(You can say that this is is a fault of the English language or of
anglophone cultures, sure, but Debian operates primarily in the English
language, so even if there were some such term in another culture, it
would not be equivalent in impact.)
The closest is the homophobia - which only insults a subset of men, and
often insults them by insinuating they're women (implying they should be
subject to the usual disregard for women). "Soyboy" specifically refers to
a right-wing urban legend that soy contains an estrogen analogue that
cause men who consume too much soy to start turning into women. (I'd call
it transphobic, too.)
If there were a package in Debian that crudely objectified men, tying into
a cultural history of objectification of men as wide as this one ties into
a cultural history of objectification of women, and with an upstream whose
personality involved the female equivalent of "laddishness" - I think this
would be a rather different discussion. And at that point the rebuttals
of "Are we offended by words? Where will it end??" would make more sense,
but it seems to me the current question isn't actually about just words.
And, as far as I know, everyone who's replied on this thread (myself
included) is a man - so I think we should be particularly careful with "it
doesn't bother me."
--
Geoffrey Thomas
https://ldpreload.com
geofft@ldpreload.com
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