It takes a constitution of steel, or a principled rejection of relentless input from outside, for a woman to survive and thrive in yesterday's hacker culture.
You are claiming that women are feeble persons with no means of standing up and saying their voice in `yesterdays culture' and need your help in todays, you are also assuming that women are some perfect beings that never make equally crude, and funny jokes. How is that not offensive? The US, and Americans, in general, are overly sterialized when it comes to interaction with other people that have different values. And we can see this by this dicussion. They have lived in a society where they way to "empower" someone is to diminish their value by becoming an over protective bully and assuming that because someone is a woman, or whatever, they cannot handle themselves and need help. The reality is that women can handle themselves just fine if everyone (women included!) behaves like normal people. There are already legal instruments to reach for when someone is sexually molested, harassed, etc. But we are not talking about the extremes. We are talking about basic crude humour, jokes, and pictures! It is NOT normal is to "protect" people from jokes that can be construed as tad offensive because someone has had humour sterilization at some point... The mere fact that we are having this discussion means that the policy is having an effect, and probably a positive one. It has a direct negative effect, people are afraid of giving speeches and attending the conference, or wasting time writing treaties about John Locke and freedom of form, US income tax, and the French Revolution. PS: As this discussion has noted, perhaps the GNU project should revise some of the sexist jokes on the website, too. No it shouldn't. They are jokes are funny, nor offensive.
