Que peut-on dire? Les garçons seront des garçons. Et peut-être les jeunes filles doivent désormais participer à la française DrupalCon code vestimentaire (ou leur absence)?

Nice balanced write up Liza. Some things certainly benefit from more than 140 characters.

Despite my initial counsel that we should wait for an explanation, the continuing silence isn't inspiring much confidence. I've given up any hope I had that there was some clever message here that we were all missing.

My hope is that once @malvese and the other DC Paris people do break cover, the conversation can carry on in this constructive manner.

Hey liza - great you taking you concern up about the whole male / female thing.
This is a thing we have to work on in our growing community - we take a pride in how cool (and clever) we are, so this should not take another 100 years to get in order.

In my experience with these kind of debates are that we sometimes can analyze and find elements that isnt there - or were only finding them because we wanna find things that can fuel own opinions. The "our special guest" sucks ass no doubt about that.
But the drop has been given a mustache, and hes a man... hmm In this case I see it as a parody of how we look at the french & paris, and that is something with beautiful women, men with bourgeoisie mustaches etc.

Im not saying that we should not shout "hey Im feel fucking offended by ...." when we feel offended, and take action on it - my point is that its not everytime we see something thats gender based that it is ment sexist.

Personaly I dont see this as a problem in the drupal community, but offcourse when we see tendencies, or feel put down we need to correct it, if its possible

But that misses the point. The very tone of this is quite honestly something that needs to be stopped in the community until we all learn to behave ourselves. Most recently, some dude at the 'bot party at Drupalcon out of the blue, at the beginning of the night came up to me and said, "What are you, some kind of sorority girl?"

Women should feel welcomed to Drupal functions, not estranged by implications that they're going to be seen as sex objects. That's the bottom line.

Woah! Indeed.
Liza, I am one of the co-lead of the DC paris Team.

When I read you blog I must say that I have mixed feelings. The first one is to be angry against me : "why didn't I spot that this could be subversive". The second is sadness : "woah, we are working hard, so hard on this event, and people start thinking we are archaic sexist french men?". And the third one is shock : "This is unfair, why this sudden attack, why not just a question, why not a direct message and try to work on an official proactive correction with the guys?".

So, very early in the morning all that I can say is that there is no hidden sexist meaning in this illustration. I am sorry that some of you feel a sexist attack with our design but at the end it was not our intention at all.

Tomorrow I will work with the other guys on that matter. Meanwhile please trust us, we don't deserve being treated like archaic and sexist men.

PS : you can dm me via twitter if you want to

Alexandre Eisenchteter
http://www.twitter.com/ineation

Ok Liza, Please be aware that in Paris it was evening then night and this is why I was so late to spot the debate.

Drupalcon as well as the Drupal community is most certainly meant to be an inclusive event. Drupalcon related questions, comments, suggestions of any level can always be directed to the Drupal Association at http://association.drupal.org/contact. The request will be forwarded to the correct person.

As a community we all work together to ensure that we wholly inclusive and supportive.

I'm sad that Louise is considered sexist.

We brainstormed on a design.
We wanted it not to clash with the DC design.
We thought hard on the image Paris evokes.

We dug into cultural icons, trends and traits of the last 50 years and came up with a romanticized image of Paris. The current design is only a tip of the iceberg in that respect.

Tongue-in-cheek, enforcing the very stereotypes we're tired of ourselves (hover over the eiffel tower please) we wanted to evoke the 50's/60'/ 70's Paris of Brigite Bardot, smoky cafés, gray roof-tops, peeling painted ads. With that era go totally unreasonable silhouettes, yes.

We want this Drupalcon to be more than a conference. We are going to immerse everyone who is interested into French/Parisian history, culture, customs and culinary delights. This design is the starting point, 1950's, where our journey begins. She's called Louise because she is set to be a guide for everyone willing to follow her.

I respect and second your opinions on sexism in the industry, however, this very debate about an artistic choice evoking a specific era, should not have happened.

We have no intention to get caught in the mostly North-American maze of political correctness which grinds productivity and common sense to a halt. If we want to depict a smoky café, we're going to draw people smoking cigarettes and we're not going to be drawn into a debate on how Drupal encourages smoking.

That said, I'll restate Alexandre's answer: we'll certainly discuss this with the DCParis team and see how we can take your remarks into account without destroying out work.

Joeri

Typed a reply, decided not to post it. Going to do some work instead.

I do not believe sexisme is about intent. So I do not think the Paris team can use this argument to our defense. The question is simply whether the image is hurtful. And I would even posit : how much hurtful it is.

I can not imagine for a second anyone would accuse the design team of knowingly, and willfully planning to debase the many women that belong to the Drupal community.

So the question would be whether or not this image and the associated text convey a message that is really hurtful and that might be damaging to the community.

Not a long time ago I got a message demanding me to replace my avatar on drupal.org because it reminded someone of the Nazi flag. I would certainly not want anyone to think I endorse these kind of ideas or to ever taint anything remotely connected to Drupal. But then again I decided to keep it. I asked some people around me and no one seemed to be specifically shocked though them (as well as I) did understand why that person pointed this out. There is a white oval in a red backdrop on a flag with some black lines towards the middle.. it was simply not enough for me. I have no wish to shock anyone but if I were to try to lead a life with no asperities : where nothing I do can be construed by anyone as hurtful... I can stop doing anything right away.

Naturally if I got more then one remark, and I really felt there is significant harm here I would'nt be stubborn, I'll just change the damned picture; it is simply not important enough for anyone to get on his high horses...

Getting back to Louise. I do not believe this image is in anyway hurtful or sexist; I believe the subtext extracted from this page is stemming from overanalysis : Drupal is a Guy, Women are just guests - is not in the image. You do have streotypes in this image representing parisians. Most french people do not have facial hair. This was a fun poke.

Now again, if people are really feeling hurt. If this is a big deal let's change the image. Let's put a cat in the window and hope it will offend no one.

Now just to be totally totally clear : personally (and I believe I can say this about Joeri) I consider myself an active feminist. I think sexism is a very big deal. I do not minimize the importance of being inclusive to all genders, beliefs, sexual orientations and races. I just think specifically here the gun was jumped. The reaction is much too emphatic.

It would be cool if we could keep Louise. Maybe change the rollover text so the implication of "guest" can not be misconstrued?

The most striking thing to me about this conversation is the strength of the reactions to your opinion more than anything else. This all started with a fairly benign observation, and the subsequent reactions were far stronger than the initial statement. I don't think there was an attack here (or at least I missed it), but the reactions suggest that there was. To start a conversation about something that bothers you is in no way an attack.

That said, I have to say that I am not personally offended per se, but I do see some very loaded imagery. My lack of offense should in no way diminish the rights of others to be offended, and I can certainly see where people might at the very least be uncomfortable with the design. I believe 100% that there was zero intent to depict anything other than a fun, if anachronistic, view of Paris. However, I think what bears discussing is the underlying thought process that leads one to the conclusion that the obvious occupant of a dark attic is a busty babe in a corset. There is something about the image that is a little naughty, and the rollover text drew attention to it in a way that made everyone think twice about what they were looking at.

The thing is, I am all for a little naughty imagery here and there. I have a pretty tongue-in-cheek avatar after all, which by the way I will defend until my last breath as an empowered, whip-wielding techno-goddess, so there. ;) However, there is just a little something about the corseted Louise that gives some a little bit of pause. Perhaps it is the implied demureness of the silhouette, or the slight allusion to a "professional" waiting to greet you at the entrance of a brothel? I feel like the subtlety may actually accentuate the problem. If the image were more overtly inspired by a burlesque Moulin Rouge sort of thing, perhaps Louise might not seem so out of place?

My point is not so much to critique the design as to point out the many ways in which it might be misconstrued, which it clearly has been by more than a few. Those few have valuable input, and should be included in the discussion. They should not be reacted to defensively or dismissed as overly-sensitive Americans, or in any way diminished for their opinions. As long as the discussion is relevant and respectful, let's just do it. This is a conversation that must happen sometime, so why not now?

I think your comment about this particular gentleman's "pick up technique" only goes to show one persons level at which they relate to women. I prefer using much more subtle lines like "Do you have a quarter? I told my mom I would call her when I found the women of my dreams." This tends to be much more effective.

All joking aside I don't think this relates so much to sexism but someone's personal inability to communicate and socialize in a group, especially with the opposite sex. So one man's #fail is not the over all opinion of many. Ultimately, "What are you, some kind of sorority girl?"... WTF? on that one. Women depicted in the very raw design that probably shouldn't be up on a live site yet, Opps and Bad Idea.

I think everyone here is right in the idea of opening the lines of communication, looking at culture and starting a dialog. Pointing fingers this way and that way will never solve anything. Just remember timezones and working hours and peoples overall schedule. I agree with morten.dk on this in many respects.

Personally I would like to see a man and a women silhouettes. They could be cutting up comp's, Cracking some core issues (in D7) and add in a French cafe. Yet here someone could say that this is a generalization that all French hang out at cafes. They could be offended by it. Not to say it would be on the same level of sexism, just trying to say this is sometimes a little harder to figure out, I think the community as a whole is open to all ideas and suggestions of everyone.

Thanks Liza for the summary.
First of all: I do find it sexist. Especially in combination with the drupalcon a stylized man's face. As a woman who might end wearing a bagde from/at the drupalcon in Paris, it leaves me with the question whom I supposed to be when I go to the drupalcon in Paris: pretending to be a man in a male-geek world? A women who's just there for the looks?
It's a silhouette of a woman with the kind of body shape that you can only get by having some rips operated out (and I'm not going into the issue how the idealized image of women's body run havoc with so many women's self esteem and health) and in the position and pose you can find in any red light district.
It might be a design choice to reduce an image to clear lines, but then it still begs the question why the designer choose the body shape and pose as those characteristics that s/he wanted to highlight as most important point.
But what disturbs me more is the reaction to somebody pointing out that they find it sexist.
On the one hand, there's a vote on it. Does that mean people only consider any kind of discrimination only relevant if a majority says so? Especially in a community where the group in question is already/still in a minority to start with.
But its simple: It's discrimination if somebody feels discriminated.
On the other hand there is discussion about that maybe the people who made this didn't intend it to be discriminatory. Fine. But the problem of sexism and other discrimination is just the fact that it is kind often not deliberately intended, it's the problem that it's so often just the simple underlying assumptions.
On comment in the tweet vote describes that perfectly for me: "when i think of paris, i think of beautiful women. how is this any different or even sexist?" Actually all.
Paris equals beautiful women, software developers are men...
It's those stereotypes that make discrimination. It's the not-thinking that stereotypical pictures are continuously re-enforcing inequalities.
So it simply doesn't matter whether it was intended as sexist. What matters is that it is perceived as such.

"I didn't know how to contact you" seems like a pretty poor excuse for not trying to do so in any fashion (e.g. through the association or the like). It looks to me more like you wanted to make a public example out of this and succeeded in doing so.

Contacting the designers or the association directly would have resolved your issue without making an example out of the hard working and unpaid conference organizers in Paris. I'm in the process of proposing Austin as a candidate city for DrupalCon 2010 and I shudder to think of this type of criticism being leveled in my direction. More importantly it makes me not want ot participate for fear of insulting someone. This is a bad thing.

Sexism IS a real problem worthy of serious discourse and consideration. Twitter messages dont qualify as either. If you intent was to have a discussion about sexism in opensource or in our project perhaps a better tone could be struck for a more compelling dialogue.

Both of the characters on the site were stylized and characterized version of stereotypes common in french culture (glasses and a moustache?). I lived in paris for a while and i can tell you Parisian culture has a much better track record with regards to equality of the sexes than we do here in the US.

I personally think that your harsh criticism is probably unwarranted but that you are also entitled to it. I'm sure the designers would have welcomed your input and your assistance had it been offered. Whats more im sure it would still be welcomed after this "Great DrupalCon Debacle".

We are dealing with different cultural norms stacked on top of language translation. I find it best to have a degree of tolerance when we ask people (especially unpaid adhoc volunteers) to step outside of their comfort zone and address a global audience.

We are a community and we don't need malice or divisiveness we need patience, support, mutual understanding and hard work. -mf

I think we can all agree that sexism is wrong, even when we can't always agree WHAT is sexist. At the same time, most of us can appreciate a good cultural jab. If we want to keep a sense of comedy in this situation, while continuing to poke fun at the American perception of french culture, let's make it even. We can add an equally out-of-proportion male figure to the window. After all, Paris IS supposed to be the capital of romance. We might as well mis-represent both sexes in the process.

I think a lot of people, myself included, found the image to be innocent at first. When I first saw the 'reading' of the image as sexist and "insinuating that woman are to be sampled ..." I didn't quite agree.

I actually tweeted "Interesting reading of the DCparis image. Concrete insinuations: Paris has smog, birds talk. Sampling may or maynot be verifiable".

I then asked my partner how she felt about the image. We talked about it and both felt it was innocent enough (Just a graphic design decision or a stylized Parisian skyline that 'happened to have' a voluptuous woman). It wasn't until we started analyzing the site itself that we discovered the mouse-over.

All of a sudden it changed from being innocent to being something out of place and indeed overtly sexist. The iconography no longer 'happened to be there'. It was no longer just a part of the design. She had a name. She had something to say. She had a role: to be inviting.

That spawned the tweet pictured at the top of this post.

But, was that the intention?

I didn't want to believe that it was. There is a lot that gets lost in literal translation and cultural translation. There had to be some of that in play here.

I wanted to wait for a response from the dcparis team before I said anything. Now that they have responded by pleading innocence and being willing to openly discuss the topic I'm not going to beat on them. BUT - I hope everyone can see why there is a need for a discussion on the topic. The design team doesn't get a complete free pass, nor should they be vilified (not that I feel they have been).

andre

This is a very emotional discussion and I am trying to be a bit more analytic ;-)
Sexism is the discrimination of people because of their sex.
Sexism against women appears mostly in two forms: well-intentioned and openly hostile.
It is easy to recognize open hostility, but the well-intentioned one (or the subtile-as you wrote) is probably the most widespread.
And putting a women under the roof in a garret is for sure a very subtile form of sexism.
You should give women a space in your middle and respect them as any other human being.

this will most likely result in designers being scared to put any female forms in their designs, so from now on all design are only allowed to contain men...

grats liza, job well done!

Hi,
I can't speak for the designers, but when i saw the silly druplicon face with a moustache, it made think of Maigret ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret or probably some other literature link ?). I think it is far from trying to say that drupal means men or somethnig like that ...

I'd guess most of the trouble really is an over-ocean misundersting, in europe generally people dont double check everything (especially not what they consider art :-) for "correctness".

Another thing is that they are making fun of a stereotype, while not "living it" ... A czech artist had a BIG problem recently while portraying Bulgaria as a series of turkish toilets (on an "official EU" "art piece") ... everybody started looking for meanings it didnt have (some were really funny, with Bulgarians yelling they are not turks and so on). OK, they might have figured that with international public there may be some people vexed, that not everyone will laugh ... but on the other hand, PLEASE before you start yelling you are not turks ... try to realize they live elsewhere, they are not mean, not even sexist ... (not that discussing stuff isnt good, just probably one can start off realizing things can have different meanings, too)

BTW, isnt louise from the opera ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_(opera)
now, where is the pigeon from ? :-)

It was never an issue until you made it one - because you don't have anything better todo ? grow up. I bet you have a history of looking out for your own special brand of 'sexism' if I google deep enough.

Theres no photos of people in wheelchairs either - even tho they make up some single digit "statistics-show" percentage, Yet, I don't see these people complaining, they just get on with life and do their best to contribute.

As a mental experiment, how would this play if the design were so:

1) Q: Silhouette of man in window, Druplicon a woman in fancy "French" lingerie ...

A: SEXISM! How dare you put women's underwear on display??

2) Q: Silhouette of man in window, Druplicon clearly male ...

A: SEXISM! There are no women on the site!

3) Q: Silhouette of woman in window, Druplicon clearly female in some "neutral" way ...

A: No one would say anything, but I call SEXISM! Where are the men?

4) Q: Cat in window, Druplicon wearing beret ...

A: No sexism, but let's face it, where are the people? Doesn't anyone live in Paris?

QUESTIONS:

• Roughly 51% of people in the world are women, 49% men, can't we put identifiably gendered images of people in our designs? Or does "gender" now equal "sexist"?
• If a silhouette were "ugly" as opposed to "sexy" would it then be "non-sexist"?
• What makes one figure sexist and another not?
• Is depicting women per se sexist?
• Isn't not depicting women at all even more sexist?
• Or should we just avoid the whole mess by banning all graven images like the Bible and Koran tell us to?
• Is "sex" sexist?

You have the right to your feelings, but: Airing all this out in public before any behind-the-scenes diplomacy has taken place, you reinforce stereotypes of Americans steamrollering foreigners with your presumptions of cultural superiority and your God-given right to force the rest of the world into your vision of right, wrong and PC. Respect goes both ways, openness goes both ways, give a little get a little, celebrate diversity, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Dear Louise, you forgot that you're in the country of Simone de Beauvoir (Deuxieme Sexe, do u know ?) and of the "gaulois". So, i will be pleased to talk with you about Toulouse Lautrec (who painted women in window or on stage with flyin jupons) and feminism.

Wow, it was a drastic change in the end. I wonder if the issue would have run so hot if the waist wasn't so unrealistic in the first place. Still the silhouette would have looked just as shady.

liza - I am horrified that an image is considered sexist purely because it depicts a woman - and that connotations about the personal integrity and intentions of the artists are built up purely because of this. Does that mean the organisers are racist purely because most (all?) of the speakers are white? Are they ageist purely because the speakers are all relatively young? What are the organisers supposed to replace the offensive image with? A hunchback, old, black man from Tibet in a wheelchair? I despair of ever contributing anything to any social enterprise because guaranteed something I say, or produce will be considered offensive to someone somewhere. This is probably a bit of a rant but it really gets me because of personal experience.

lol, it's a guy now. I call sexist, no women in the design, redo please! is it just me or is it impossible to get proper line-breaks in these comments?

And dare we mention the poor judgment of Salon.com in placing a Viarga ad on the second page of this article. Can anyone forward this to Joan Walsh at Salon.com?