Don’t get me wrong, I’m most certainly not against emancipation, but this whole affair looks like someone wanted to see a sexist joke in it.

No, it really isn’t “discriminating” to believe that people should not be sexist because women find it unpleasant. Believing that doesn’t mean you believe women are too weak to “handle” sexism; it means you believe people shouldn’t, as a general rule, behave like assholes towards one another.

The connotations of the joke would not be the same if the genders were flipped, because sexism in our society is not symmetrical. Apparently in most previous incarnations of this joke Stallman didn’t mention gender at all; I don’t know why he opted to put it in this time.

But seriously, I’m not that pissed off with Stallman himself. I think he made a joke which was supposed to be about something unrelated to gender, and it came out sounding a lot more creepy than he had intended because he included gender. I would be happy if he simply acknowledged that; I don’t expect an epic sackcloth-and-ashes apology. What disturbs me a lot more is the hysterical and misogynistic anti-feminist backlash from his fanboys all over the internet.

A large segment of the population seems to parse “you said something which came across as sexist” as “you are a baby-eater”, and thus can’t seem to respond to this kind of criticism with anything other than vitriol and outrage.

I don’t see the problem with the remarks made by Stallman. I wouldn’t be offended if you’d replace female with male.
Isn’t it much more an encouragement to get more women involved in FOSS?

Regarding the original post and AJ’s responses here:

* I don’t buy your retroactive “it’s satire!” defence. Sorry.

* Distributing tired cliches about women, regardless of how much you personally claim to disbelieve in them (afterwards), helps to perpetuate an environment which is hostile and belittling to women. If you had entitled the post “My girlfriend is crazy”, I would not have cared. The problem is, once again, the lazy and insulting suggestion that something one person does is indicative of the mindset of half the human population — a trope which is apparently still *hilarious* to some people.

* You don’t get the magical stamp of non-sexist approval just because some women liked what you wrote / didn’t think it was sexist.

* Your personal blog is no longer just your personal blog when it is aggregated on a community blog. It reflects badly on the community when you post sexist jokes on it. If they don’t do anything about it, they are implicitly condoning your behaviour. I appreciate that Jonathan responded critically to your post in the same forum in which it appeared, and he was perfectly entitled to do so *because* both your blogs are aggregated on CLUG Park and thus implicitly associated with each other. Perhaps you should only have part of your blog aggregated, or start another blog which is really just personal.

* Criticism =/= censorship, and a request that you don’t post things that are an embarrassment to the Linux community in a forum which represents the Linux community is not the same as a demand for the government to arrest you for what you said. Nobody can stop you from reposting your post in a variety of places. This is not a freedom of speech issue.

* Accusing someone of not honestly representing their opinion on an issue, and getting “offended on behalf of other people”, is obnoxious. Do you think only women can be offended by sexism?

In regards to male virgins, it would not have had the same effect as the butt of the joke would have applied to the majority of the audience including the speaker himself. (I kid!) As a male *emacs* virgin, I would have passed off the idea as the rantings of a lunatic, which seems to be what many in the FLOSS community thinks of RMS anyway.