Jessamyn Smith: Fighting sexist jokes with a Python bot

What a BRILLIANT social hack. Jessamyn Smith, I am thoroughly impressed.

> 1. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles [...] devaluation based on a person's sex

Here're the categories you could argue the bot falls into. The point of the "that's what she said" is to point out when phrases sound like something a woman might have said in bed or during some sort of sexual activity, furthering the already staggeringly vast perception our society has of women as primarily sexual objects. It's not what I'd call "grossly" sexist, but if somebody's objecting to it, she absolutely has a reason to feel uncomfortable about it.

I disagree that the supervisor is necessary here. First off, that's making an appeal to authority and such appeals can be pretty irritating; second off, that's trying to solve the problem privately rather than in public space. By making this bot, Jessamyn says that her voice is as valuable as anybody else's voice. If somebody else wants to make a bot that makes crude sex jokes, she can make a bot that quotes notable women. And rather than making a bot that's irritating or one-note, it sounds like she made a bot that has a variety of colorful responses, to the point where one of her coworkers told her how much he appreciates it.

Remember that sexism is about the reinforcement of cultural stereotypes, rather than being just about gross bigotry or discrimination. What's sexist is that people assume, in a workplace, that jokes about what women say in bed are acceptable. Those jokes make me a little uncomfortable even in a casual environment; it's kind of gross that people are okay with them at work. The sexism isn't one person consciously thinking "Oh man let's women the butt of jokes about sex!", it's that women-as-sex-objects is such a pervasive trope that we don't notice it unless somebody like Jessamyn points it out to us.

Depends on what you mean by a developoment server. You probably don't want to run something like that on a build server, or test environment. On the other hand some places have a general-purpose hosts too. For example at one of my previous places we had a host which basically was just an optional ssh hop (if you needed to run some batch process, it had much lower connection latency) / ad-hoc reporting node / whatever you needed at that point.

I don't see anything wrong with running chat bots at that host - at least for internal services. It's a bit different if you wanted to connect to public IRC servers, but it's not obvious from the post whether it was internal-only service or not.

She SPECIFICALLY says that she's frustrated with how gendered the TWSS joke is:

> I took it for granted that everyone was familiar with the “That’s what she said,” joke, but a recent conversation with a consultant friend made me realize some industries don’t feature it on a daily basis. For those who haven’t heard it a million times, the idea is that when somebody says something that could remotely be turned into a sexual joke, e.g. “I’m trying to solve this problem but it’s really hard!” you say “That’s what SHE said,” in a lascivious tone.

And describing why she's satisfied with the bot's reaction:

> In any case, I feel that I have succeeded in constructively disrupting an aspect of my work culture that made me uncomfortable.

"Uncomfortable". Not "annoying".

You know that "ignoring what women say and explaining that they're really bothered by something else" is one of the most common responses that feminists have to deal with, right? And that it's disrespectful to suggest that there's a more "rational" explanation for why a woman's upset than that they feel uncomfortable about a sexist environment?

I mean, she says close to the beginning:

> I asked a number of times to have that bot function turned off, but got the usual combination of being ignored, being told it’s funny, and being told I should lighten up.

Emphasis mine. We just had a big ole conversation about that phrase like a week ago. Remember it?

I agree. And if that was the first bot to respond to a bot, I think it is irritating that men hate equality was the first conclusion.

Maybe those guys do hate equality, but from my perspective I would have been irritated by TWSS and then more irritated by the responder, I might then decide to complain before anyone else gets the bright idea to make another bot talking to a bot.