Well I finally have something to write about. I guess it takes some porn and a solid rift in the Ruby/Rails community to jostle me out of my mommy bubble. I’ve spent the last two days reading about Matt Aimonetti’s talk at GoGaRuCo and the reactions from Ruby developers and drama queens alike and I must say I’m underwhelmed at their reactions. It’s a good mix of the typical “Oh my god I’m a girl and I’m so offended, like, didn’t feminism cure us of this?” and, “Man, I’m a guy and that shit ain’t cool. I’m offended.”
I want to whine about two terms that are trolling around: “offended” and “professional”.
First of all, I have a hard time believing any man in that audience was offended at the sight of hot chicks. They might have been caught off guard, bemused, or confused at the boldness of the speaker, but they were not offended, not even chivalrously. And I’m sure most people there had a good chuckle at Matt’s attempt at humour.
Was it “professional?” “Professional” is one of those words that is thrown around by people in big empty suits that are afraid of lawyers, and by people that want to be wearing big empty suits and wish they were in a position to fear lawyers.
When you pack up for a weekend at a fringy Ruby event you expect to be getting comfy with a raw, fringy crowd. You expect to hack in hotel lobbies, play Werewolf in the hallways, drink lots of scotch and Bawls, check to see if there are any hot dev chicks around and eat some tasty treats.
You don’t go to a Ruby conference wearing a big black suit, carrying a briefcase. You don’t go expecting to be bored to tears by a talk on J2EE. You don’t meet for drinks after presentations with potential business partners. No. No. No. You fucking hack, talk shit, play games and eat.
So big fucking deal if Matt Aimonetti showed you some chicks in thongs to make a somewhat amusing point. YES, Matt’s slides gave me major douche chills. It was odd and I didn’t quite like it. But I was not offended, nor did I care how professional/unprofessional it was.
Also, I’m annoyed with all this banter about how Ruby & Rails will never be taken seriously if people put porn in their presentations. If anyone cared whether or not Rails would be taken seriously we would all be boycotting RailsConf Las Vegas. Anyone who goes to that sellout of a conference has no right reaming on Aimonetti for his porn. At least in his case, “the people voted for it.”
I definitely think Matt was misguided. Where I think he went wrong was in assuming that the audience would get something valuable out of his talk after he distracted them with hot bodies. Generally hot chicks and processing data on an intellectual level don’t really go together that well.
Using hot chicks to grab the attention of your audience is just elementary. It’s the cheap and easy way to draw an analogy and get a laugh. In this case, I can see the correlation between the images and the message he was trying to deliver, but he could have been more clever by being less transparent. The whole thing seems more like a risky high school presentation (teehee!) than a thoughtful Ruby presentation.
Besides, porn is something we watch when we are alone; when we can convince ourselves that we’re normal, as we’re watching hot, wet, slippery bodies bump each other. Porn isn’t something we like to share with other people, strangers notably.
But seriously, porn just doesn’t belong in a Ruby presentation. A Java presentation, maybe. They need something to invigorate and distract them from their tired reality. But Rubyists are already pretty damn happy people. We don’t need our presenter to try and make us feel good. Matz already has us covered.
Matt might have had a better chance at wowing his audience and drawing them in had he used gaming references for flavor instead of bare skin. Know your audience, Matt! Hackers are geeks! Maybe then you’d have earned some geek cred, instead of creep cred. Ouch.
I’ve done a little reworking of his slides to show you how his presentation could have gone better:
I don’t think the Ruby community needs to submit to supporting PC rhetoric. Leave that to folks that wear the suits. Matt was misguided and a bit trigger happy, but what’s really wrong with his slides is his inability to connect with developers in a meaningful and fun way. We don’t like to share sexual experiences with our peers, especially on large projector screens. We like code and video games, maybe even a good ol’ game of Fluxx. It’s not a matter of offensiveness or professionalism, it comes down to not being a douche bag.
Tuesday, 28. April 2009
> Besides, porn is something we watch when we are alone
It’s nice to watch it with others we’d like to reenact what we’re seeing with too. Just sayin’.
> Using hot chicks to grab the attention of your audience
> is just elementary
Spot-on. It’s cheap/easy vs. clever. It’s like the double-entendre/innuendo that’s so blatantly obvious that it’s cliche.
I did a presentation which had a couple of women in bikinis saying stuff like “I could talk about Dynamic IP Addressing all day” or the like in it when I was in college. It offended the hell out of the one woman in our class. I apologized and decided never to do it again though I felt it was a major overreaction. I figured “screw it… why bother if I can find something that’s more clever next time.”
At least I did made that “mistake” in front of a group of ~ 20 people vs. a much larger audience. Well, it’s not like anything I’d say would cause a hullabalub… I’m like Zeta geek-style I guess.
The “Leeeeeeeeeeeeroy: slide made me laugh out loud.
> even a good ol’ game of Fluxx
You are sooo my kind of geek. Damn.
Tuesday, 28. April 2009
Srsly, you really nailed it, Renae. Controversy, shmonsaversy. His slides didn’t make for a good presentation, whereas your fake slides would have brought the house down.
So, uh… When are you going to present @MERuby.org?
Wednesday, 29. April 2009
Haha, that reworking is *awesome*.
Personally, I’m far more disturbed by the “LALALALA I CANT HEAR YOU IM TOO BUSY BEING EDGY” reaction by certain leadership than I was by the slides themselves. I thought the presentation was both clever and inappropriate (it *might* have been more appropriate at an explicitly “edge” event like RubyFringe. Maybe.) But the the willingness of DHH et. al. to just dismiss anyone who had trouble with it as a pack of censoring prudes was profoundly insensitive.
Thursday, 30. April 2009
Nice post, made me laugh with the reworked slides.
Too bad more people can’t be so reasonable.
Thursday, 30. April 2009
@avdi I agree with you on some points, for sure. Here is a comment I made on @mikeG1’s blog about the issue, which I think exemplifies how I agree with you about the leadership aspect:
As for how this problem relates to the slides: If men were all of a sudden showing interest in a profession/hobby that for decades had only been a female area of expertise/interest, you can be sure that females wouldn’t change their way of doing things to accommodate the general comfort level of men. In this case, I think Matt is used to acting a certain way and presenting a certain way and didn’t give more than a quick thought as to how a female might perceive his joke. I think this could have happened to anyone.
I do think that the leaders of the community should be making an effort to do some damage control by making statements about how they encourage women to be a part of the community and that they hope this won’t turn them away.
Thursday, 30. April 2009
@CLR thanks! I’ll be sure to present at the MeRug as soon as I’m a better dev
Thursday, 30. April 2009
@Dan haha I wasn’t sure how many people would get the Leeeeeeeeeroy!!! slide or the Fluxx comment. Delighted that you found it amusing!
Thursday, 30. April 2009
“So big fucking deal if Matt Aimonetti showed you some chicks in thongs to make a somewhat amusing point. YES, Matt’s slides gave me major douche chills. … But I was not offended, nor did I care how professional/unprofessional it was.”
right, but if you were there, surrounded by a sea of men that you don’t know and that suddenly become very aware of your presence because of the sexual jokes of the presenter, then you would have had a completely different experience. ok, perhaps you are the type of woman that can take anything, but why not consider also those who are more sensitive and vulnerable than you?
Thursday, 30. April 2009
“First of all, I have a hard time believing any man in that audience was offended at the sight of hot chicks.” I wasn’t there, but I would have been. I tend toward the hot dudes, myself, but I can’t say having them up there would stop it from being problematic.
Definitely the idea of Rails not being taken seriously doesn’t matter much to me, but that can be separated from the weirdness of using such charged imagery.
Friday, 1. May 2009
It’d be wonderful to get our hands on the original slides. The slides on slideshare at least seemed PG-13 to me…
Saturday, 2. May 2009
Awesome post in every way.
I encountered this in Martin Fowler’s blog and followed it, bemused, through the blogosphere.
First of all, the content is classic conference crap. Why would I sit in a room bored out of my mind when instead I can think of a problem I’d like to solve, download a sample and hack the solution. If I actually want to learn about CouchDB, that is what I’d do.
Now, the sheer, un-adulterated GENIUS of this presentation is that I’ve never thought Ruby had anything that spectacular - or at least I’d rather master C and assembler (honestly, repetitive programming isn’t, if you know regexes) - but now I see something that is interesting.
The presentation throws around labels for some very basic ideas every data-driven application developer has thought about.
As I peruse through trying to find the joke, and/or the source of controversy/check out the porn, I discover these and want to do some actual learning on the subject.
It’s effective viral (or would it be, “kamikaze”) marketing.
It also makes me want to stop being such a lurker and blog myself.
An interesting angle you touched on that I haven’t seen elsewhere is that the presentation is as much a statement about the presenter as it is about how he might judge the members of the audience (perhaps the source of the uncomfortable exposure conference goers may have experienced).
He is also presenting a package solution (pun not intended, but not entirely maligned either) - I want an evolving set of tools with a competent facility for communicating problem archetypes and potential solutions. Essentially I want a community defined by it’s ideas.
As I try and juxtapose this presentation into the idea of a community, I basically get, “use couchDB and get laid.” A compelling message indeed. ‘Twere only it not so laughable.
But then again, I grew up with VCR, saw my first hardcore porno at age 9 (later than some of my peers) and have been bombasted with the irony of popular feminism all my life.
This whole argument is very tired and old school.
Yet here I am posting. Dunno why, thar be keeps to raid.
Wednesday, 27. May 2009
Thats certainly food for thought, where can I get more information on this?
Sunday, 10. January 2010
“But the the willingness of DHH et. al. to just dismiss anyone who had trouble with it as a pack of censoring prudes was profoundly insensitive.”
I find you offensive, you flaming douchebag. So please apologize for existing. And don’t find any trouble with what I just said because if you do it just proves your profoundly insensitive. Asshole.