Great. Now sexism rears its ugly backside.
Strange thing is, it's sexism from both sides. Both sides (and note how I call them "sides;" guess I'm not as unbiased as I'd hoped) seem to be simultaneously over-sensitive and under-sensitive.
I'd always imagined the "geek culture" (whatever that is) would be both rational and pragmatic. I mean, I know I get worked up over some issues, but they are usually technical in nature. Societally, I get worked up about discrimination. (Lately it seems that gender discrimination is getting to be my hot topic. That, and ethnic roles.) But that's because it's just not rational to assume one gender is different from another.
Note I say "gender." Gender is different from "sex," in that "sex" indicates the distribution of Y chromosomes, and "gender" refers to the role a person chooses.
I've spent my entire geek life (starting in '76, when our school got an Apple ][) in relative isolation. And though I've been on the 'net for over 10 years now, and seen all kinds of flamefests, I'd assumed that, at heart, the geek culture was as close to unbiased (in terms of people) as humanity could get.
I really didn't mean to get caught up in it, but it seemed that no-one involved was listening to anyone else.
Geez, now I'm sounding like a sappy new-age greeting card. Can't we all just get along? But I am sincere. This seems like such a trivial issue, and yet it shows how close to the surface history really is, like 25k years of male-dominated society is just waiting to gut us open like the chest-burster from Alien.