[einhverfr]

I thought there were some interesting things that he missed in his assessment of comic books, presumably because of a specific cultural lens he was looking at.

The commic book male figures he mentioned fell into two types: The deadly serious, strong, sexy Batman and two not particularly sexed supervillains. In other words, while the women are all about sex, for men, only the good guys-- the superheroes-- are. This may still make a case for male privilege but it's not as clear-cut I think as he wants to think.

The second thing is that men tend to stare at boobs. This is not unique to geek culture.

This being said, I do think that it is important not to dismiss people's views because of gender. Some of the most talented programmers I have ever met were women. In fact I would take that further and say the most talented programmer I have ever worked with is a woman. I learned a heck of a lot about security audits, programming secure code, and also general algorithms and good software design, development, and engineering practices from her (including her starting IRC dialogs to call me on the carpet for mistakes on my part). To the extent women's views are ignored because of gender that's pretty bad.

But another thing I have heard from women in open source is that one of the most annoying aspects of gender in open source is to be asked over and over "so what do you think we need to do to get women involved in open source?" I have seen plenty of replies of "Do you have ANY idea how annoying it is to be constantly asked that?"