From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Jun 24 2006 - 12:29:58 PDT
Thanks, Freya. Obviously since it was written as a private email and not
a public posting they didn't feel the need to explain. But I note that
it raises an issue without asking questions about the number of women
versus men who submitted.
The reason I replied the way I did is that gender bias, which is
certainly what their letter implies, is one of those accusations that
once it's out there tends to to be hard to shake, and here I think it
was completely wrong and very unfair. Somewhere someone who skims only
some posts here has in her or his head that Onion City is biased against
women, and I think that's just wrong. Usually I enjoy the "mistaken"
posts here that were intended as private emails. Indeed, my single
favorite post ever was a kind of chaste love letter, just aglow with
appreciation, from one person to another, that so embarrassed the person
who posted it that he quit the list just after.
But this incident should remind us that posting something intended as a
private email to 600 people all over the world and to a Web archive
(where it has presumably been captured forever by wayback or some other
archiving site so that even if it's removed from the archive it will
keep popping up -- and without the replies) can have unpleasant, and
very unfair, consequences. This should be a good reminder to all of us
to look carefully at the address line before ever sending another emamil.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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