Photo credit: hoyvinmayvin
The description says: Geeks Talk Sexy is back – bigger and better!
And it certainly will be bigger and much better.
So we’re kicking off with part 2 of the sexygeek series. Of course we always planned to do more. But I got a feeling part 2 might shock people because its quite distinct.
This time its all about the female geeks, except instead of the usual discussions about woman and men which we’ve all heard quite a few times. We’ll be digging down into the deep mystery of relationships between the two.
- How do girl geeks and guy geeks interact in the geek community?
- What happens when we go from techy hack day to romantic hack date?
- What are the problems we have to overcome?
- What can we do to make everyone feel comfortable in their role?
Yes the nitty gritty or you might prefer the nuts and bolts of male and female relationships within the scope of the geek culture.
Most discussions center around woman in the workforce, as entrepreneurs, in places which were along time ago though as only for men. But there is little talk about relationships of men and woman. In actual fact I’m kind of lying. There is quite a lot information but they tend to be buried deep down in places where most of us don’t go looking. So we’re uncovering and discussing it on Friday 4th Feb at Madlab. We may also have a very special guest stopping in, so what you waiting for? Sign up now at our event page.
Disclaimer
Now I have to add the very serious disclaimer because people are going to get very irate about the whole thing.
We are fully aware that this title and concept is only a vague approximation to reality and that gender is not just binary. We are in no way assuming that there are only straight, cis, monogamous, male or female geeks. For the purpose of the talk we picked the most obvious intersection for arising problems, which is the role of women in the geek community that is usually only discussed from a professional point of view.
We hope this decision does not offend anyone (although I got a feeling it will) and that people of all genders and orientations join us for the talk. Please do get in touch if you have got serious concerns.
The whole series
I said in my new years resolutions for 2011, a lot of things regarding Take Geek Culture to new heights. We (me, Samantha and Hwayoung) have worked hard on the series and have some cracking surprises to come. I really hope people bear with us, the first one was great and we learned a lot from that one but it was ultimately very difficult because we tried to cover a load of issues in one overview session. In this one we will stick to one subject, so it will be a lot more tighter. We’re also hoping to have a special guest join us for the event, who that will be will be revealed later. To get you all started, there is this Comfort-a-Crying-Woman
Next in the series we will be exploring Gay, Lesiban, Bi, Poly, Transexual and what ever else there is. I’m happy to say we have some help from Simon Carter who has stepped up to help us better represent section of geeks talk sexy. Me, Samantha and Hwayoung are not that familiar with most of these. So to do them any real justice we certainly need help.
Of course its all about part 2 right now, so what you waiting for? Sign up now!
Ian: “Simon Carter who has stepped up to help us better represent section of geeks talk sexy”. What section? I’m presuming that’s in reference to LGBT or whatnot.
And a big ‘hell yeah’ on some positive recognition and respect for LGBT people in geek culture. Just as geek women have raised people’s consciousness as to, you know, not being an arsehole (like, oh, not taking upskirt photos and having them syndicate out to Planet Fedora, not hosting geek dinners in Hooters, not selling ‘Della’ laptops and all the other crap you find on the Geek Feminism site), maybe next we can push people to not, oh, say shit like “Ubuntu is for queers” (because they prefer Gentoo or whatever) and always go for a sexual orientation or gender or “be a real man” type reference while on Xbox Live.
If geeks are talking sexy and getting sexually liberated and sexually educated, why not help some of our “gaymer” and gay geek friends and allies and speak out against homophobia?
One of the things I looked into a while back is how social networks and dating sites don’t seem able to cope with gender being a bit more complicated than an exclusive choice between male and female. FOAF got this right. The foaf:gender field is a string which has two enumerated values ‘male’ and ‘female’ (all lower case), but also accepts any other string you care to throw in there. There was a whole move on MySpace a while back by a group of ‘genderqueer’ kids who didn’t like the fact that MySpace forced them to choose being male or female or had such a narrow choice of sexual orientation choices so started hacking the metadata fields and putting their sexual orientation descriptions in the location field or other stuff like that.
Exactly Tom. I’m pretty crap at the LGBT thing being a straight guy with a few friends who are Gay. I was going to call the session “Alternative lifestyles” but got shouted at by a few people. Great those people stood up and told me straight, shame some were less interested in explaining why that just trolling me (he knows who he is…)
Anyway, yes I do think LGBT people should stickup for themselves in geek culture, in the same way woman stick up for themselves or different race’s stick up for themselves. Its 2011 for goodness sake, we should finally be over this small minded crap by now. But as you point out most sites push you into one or the other category. FOAF is actually well built in places and its this type of effort we need a lot more of. This will only really change when LGBT geeks stand up and point out the flaws in the way we categories people and other things. Just like how Simon Carter stood up and explained the flaw in “alternative lifestyles” to me and the others.
And of course we all need to be adult enough to encourage people to step forward
Hi Tom, thanks for the comment. Planning the sessions is a bit of a balance act for us to get the wording right and not offend anyone (as Ian said, we’re not even aware of some issues people might have, so we’re happy for everyone to point things out!) so I’m glad the disclaimer helped settings things straight (aaah, excellent pun here).
Regarding the social networking male/female problems, we’re planning a special event for the fifth and final session (ca April / May) that could have easily suffered from this issue. We’ve found a solution that we believe everyone is happy with and that we’re actually quite proud of – I can’t really say more because I’m sure Ian wants to keep it as a bit of a surprise
Hope to see you at the next event.
Cheers,
Sam (1/3 of the organisers team)
Ian: “Simon Carter who has stepped up to help us better represent section of geeks talk sexy”. What section? I’m presuming that’s in reference to LGBT or whatnot.
And a big ‘hell yeah’ on some positive recognition and respect for LGBT people in geek culture. Just as geek women have raised people’s consciousness as to, you know, not being an arsehole (like, oh, not taking upskirt photos and having them syndicate out to Planet Fedora, not hosting geek dinners in Hooters, not selling ‘Della’ laptops and all the other crap you find on the Geek Feminism site), maybe next we can push people to not, oh, say shit like “Ubuntu is for queers” (because they prefer Gentoo or whatever) and always go for a sexual orientation or gender or “be a real man” type reference while on Xbox Live.
If geeks are talking sexy and getting sexually liberated and sexually educated, why not help some of our “gaymer” and gay geek friends and allies and speak out against homophobia?
One of the things I looked into a while back is how social networks and dating sites don’t seem able to cope with gender being a bit more complicated than an exclusive choice between male and female. FOAF got this right. The foaf:gender field is a string which has two enumerated values ‘male’ and ‘female’ (all lower case), but also accepts any other string you care to throw in there. There was a whole move on MySpace a while back by a group of ‘genderqueer’ kids who didn’t like the fact that MySpace forced them to choose being male or female or had such a narrow choice of sexual orientation choices so started hacking the metadata fields and putting their sexual orientation descriptions in the location field or other stuff like that.
[...] course this will be in my folder for geeks talk sexy part 2: The other half of population. Its very easy to imagine all men are weird (some more that others of course) but in actual fact [...]