Apparently, the time has come for me to invoke the Unicorn Law.

As a disclaimer, I think the Ubuntu community in particular has been doing a great job in raising gender awareness, and most Ubuntu members I talked to leave a very good impression in this regard. That being said, I only communicate online and don’t know how things go when Ubuntu members meet in person — perhaps things are different there, and ugly incidents may happen.

In general, these days, resources like the Geek Feminism Wiki can quickly name and shame major incidents regarding sexism — and make the problems harder to simply handwave away as systematic patterns are easily seen. At least in the English-speaking world, these issues are easily exposed.

Not so behind the barriers of communication known as “foreign languages”.

Within the Russian open source community, there is an atrocity. No, worse — an Atrocity with a capital A. When seeing the discissions (usually known by a less family-friendly word) on that site, a sane person would be disgusted or horrified, or at best, assume the detached attitude of an observer looking at monkeys throwing feces at each other in a zoo cage.

I’m not going to speak about their attitudes towards LGBT people (myself included) — that kind of tolerance would be, perhaps, too much to demand from this crowd of mostly imageboard-level users. That aside, the wild, untamed sexism in that place is too much to bear. This Russian Linux website linux.org.ru, or LOR for short, is almost completely male-dominated, with only two or so women remaining there who learned to stay detached; the rest are scared away by 1990s-era demands like “tits or gtfo”, talks about “chicks” and “females” (using the Russian biological term reserved for non-human species), and outright doubting their gender and accusing them of being bearded admins.

Even that aside, every news entry that somehow mentions women gathers metric tons of annoying, disgusting, repulsive sexist comments. For me, this one was the last straw. Starting now, I feel ashamed that I ever posted on that site, and withdraw from it. In fact, it almost makes me feel ashamed to be a Russian Linux user.

The thread is about the announcement of Amber Graner being elected. Elizabeth Krumbach had the misfortune of having her name attached to the original announcement, and that’s where the feces hit the rotating air cooler. For a few hours, the news entry (checked and approved by a moderator!) erroneously claimed that Elizabeth announced herself being elected, before eventually being corrected by another moderator. The comments are a whole other story. Ranging from accusations of a “transvestite conspiracy” to utterly off-topic discussions of art and photography, they fit the aforementioned monkeys metaphor to a T. Most of this (almost exclusively male) crowd started discussing and ridiculing Elizabeth’s appearance in a very derogatory way.

Let me cite some specific examples of the general mindset of those users — ones that do not insult a specific person just for appearing in the news.

• “To make it less scary for the fair sex to enter FOSS development, some men will have to pretend to be women to break stereotypes <…>”
• “Ooooooo how I miss a woman!!! I want to howl!!! <…> I’d screw them all, but nobody gives me sex…”
• “I’d do her.”
• “These ones can cook, and their brains are fine. And they give sex more often, which is important.”
• “This is what I’m talking about. These dames with negro homosexuals have eaten the baldness out of the normal man. Nobody left to screw.”
• “Do these chicks not have enough herdness? I don’t understand.”

I’ll stop here — there are much more, but the general mood is clear. This is far from a solitary case, too. The last such news comments, about Valerie Aurora, made one of the two remaining female users temporarily quit the site.