Ein Einblick in Adria Richards Denkweise

Etwa im März 2013 hatte Adria Richards einen großen Skandal aus einem mitgehörten Witz und einer Bemerkung über Dongles gemacht , der zunächst dazu führte, dass die entsprechenden Männer aus dem Konferenzsaal entfernt worden sind und zumindest einer seinen Job verlor. Im Folgenden verlor dann Adria Richards selbst ihren Job.

Zehn Monate später hat ein Reporter sowohl den entsprechenden Mann als auch Adria Richards interviewt. (via Vox Populi, wo der hier interessante Teil herausgenommen ist)

Dem Mann, der als erfahrener Programmierer umgehend wieder einen Job gefunden hat, tut das ganze schrecklich leid. Er bedauert auch, dass es für  Adria Richards solche Konsequenzen hatte und das sie danach von vielen blöd angemacht worden ist.

Die Auswirkungen auf sein Verhalten schildert er wie folgt:

I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life? “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”

“Give me an example,” I said. “So you’re in your new workplace [Hank was offered another job right away] and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?’

“Well,” Hank said, “we don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”

Von einer ähnliche Zurückhaltung von Männern hatte auch Breakpoint berichtet. Die Verschärfung des Klimas trägt nicht unbedingt dazu bei, dass Frauen es besser haben. Eher dazu, dass man ihnen gegenüber reservierter ist.

Interessanter als sein Verhalten fand ich jedoch Adrias Gedanken zu den damaligen Vorfällen:

Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”

“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”

‚He’s a white male,‘ Adria said. ‚I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me‘

I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.

“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”

“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.”

“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

Man wundert sich, warum sie keiner mehr einstellt. Sie fühlte sich also bedroht, in einem Raum mit 2.000 Leuten, weil diese weiß waren und weil es Männer waren. Es wäre vollkommen offensichtlich, dass es sich hier um einen irrationalen Rassismus handeln würde, wenn eine Frau sagen würde „es waren schwarze Männer und ich eine weiße Frau, natürlich war ich in Gefahr“. Warum die gleiche Irrationalität, die typisch für den intersektionalen Feminismus ist, dagegen so wenig auffällt ist eigentlich erstaunlich.