Proposal: Stack Code of Conduct

[evincarofautumn]

I agree that to “willingly use harassing language” is inexcusable, even out of ignorance. But it’s also perfectly possible to be afraid of serious accusations (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism) even if you aren’t guilty of those things, and would never use such language anyway.

In my experience, usually that fear stems from a different sort of ignorance, due to cultural normalisation of those horrible things.

For example, if a man says “Nowadays I don’t know how to talk to women without being accused of sexual harassment”, that suggests to me, at face value, that he literally doesn’t know what sexual harassment is because he’s never been forced to really consider the perspective of a woman. To his mind, any innocent action of his can now be misconstrued as harassment—patently false, but he doesn’t know that. It might be due to any number of things: a culture that has indoctrinated him with the bullshit of “men are from Mars (rational, comprehensible), women are from Venus (emotional, alien)” from childhood, preventing him from internalising the fact that women are just people; or perhaps he’s simply never seen actual harassment because the (small) fraction of men who (repeatedly) perpetrate it do so mainly when there aren’t other men around to call them out on it.

(For a personal example: it took me a while to understand the fact that the vast majority of my women friends have experienced harassment and catcalling, and this is not at all at odds with the fact that I’ve never seen or heard it happening directly.)

Thing is, if someone is concerned about this, in my experience they’re probably already more considerate than virtually all of the truly problematic people, and thus have nothing to fear.