Photo of Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Fragile Technologists

· 7 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~693 times.

Picture the scene. You're in a pub and order, say, a cider or a cocktail. The local pub bore pipes up "What are you drinking that for? Real men drink..." and then names a brand of generic, piss-weak lager that is his substitute for a personality.

He's the same guy who insists that "real men" watch football, and can't quite believe that you have no opinion on last night's cup final.

This sort of behaviour is sometimes terms "fragile masculinity". It isn't that masculinity itself is a weak and feeble proposition - but that some people feel that masculinity needs defending because it is a brittle and narrow concept.

Think of it like this. I like X. I am a Real Man. Therefore Real Men like X. Therefore masculinity depends on X. If there is a man who doesn't like X, either he is not a man, or masculinity doesn't require X. If masculinity doesn't require X, and I like X, that would imply I am not a real man.

It isn't logical, of course, but it is a powerful idea.

This isn't solely an issue with concepts of masculinity. Gatekeeping happens everywhere. A real Star Trek fan hates all that gay stuff in the new season. Oh, you like Shakespeare? Recite your top ten sonnets! You claim to be aligned with this political party, but your stance on metrification reveals you to be a dirty traitor! And on and on it goes.

The same thing, sadly, happens in computing. Real programmers know a language intimately and never need to look up the docs. Real technologists never admit their ignorance. Real developers can recite Knuth.

I don't get it. If you're a man, you're a man. There's no "real" about it. What you drink and how you drink it has no bearing on your masculinity and - even if it did - it would have no bearing on my masculinity.

Same with technology. If you've made a computer do something - anything - in a logical fashion, you're a programmer. Scratch? Programmer! CSS? Programmer? Conditional formatting in Excel? Programmer!

Asking for help? Damn straight you're a programmer.

We have to find a way to help these people caught up in the trap of Fragile Technologism to see that there is a better, more inclusive way forward.

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7 thoughts on “Fragile Technologists”

  1. said on mastodon.me.uk:

    @Edent I think it's a little more fundamental than that. These people cannot conceive that anyone could be a man (coder/SF fan/whatever) in a different way than they do it. "I am a man, and I like football, therefore all men should like football" isn't just a category error. It's a failure to recognise that other people ARE people in the same way that they are.
    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.me.uk

  3. says:

    Fully agreed. I’ve made the same point about programming including Excel, CSS, and so on. Can I quote you on this?
    Reply

  4. said on fosstodon.org:

    @fishidwardrobe @Edent To peel back one more layer of the onion: it may well be that they only learnt to enjoy football or drink lager because it's what they believed real men do, and they wanted to become (or appear to be) real men. The stereotype perpetuates itself.I agree with Terence's point that a helpful answer to "how do I do X in Python" seldom begins with the words "Don't use Python." It can do, but it's rare.
    Reply | Reply to original comment on fosstodon.org

  5. zerogrip says:

    There is a psychology scale for measuring this personality trait called "authoritarian", first developed by Bob Altemeyer. One of the markers for this trait is that they insist everyone else follow their rules. Altemeyer has written and published a free book "The Authoritarians" which introduces his scale and theory for non-scholars at (https://theauthoritarians.org). Because the scale is developed with right-wing cultural vernacular, Altemeyer calls the scale "right-wing authoritarian" (RWA). Altemeyer thinks authoritarian cuts through different culture circles, such as left-wing and others, but those are not his expertise. Much research has followed, but like most personality traits, we know little about how to change them. Altemeyer's own longitudinal (meaning tracking a group through their life, in his case his alumni) studies have found stable but small effect reducing RWA by higher education, and stable but smaller effect increasing RWA by becoming a parent. All in all not much change is observed.
    Reply

  7. nanu-nanu says:

    Yep good first article of the year. I'm also thinking about other examples likes: "Real programmer only used git command not GUI", "Real programmer don't use PHP"…
    Reply

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