[pp.int.general] Women Pirates project

[Eric Priezkalns]

I feel this is a mistaken way to deal with a symptom, not a root cause.

Yes, there are too few women in the pirate movement.  There are also  
too few older people, too few poor, too few ethnic minorities.

These people are not in the pirate movement not because of a failure  
to 'mainstream' or 'empower' or any other jargon words that might be  
spoken by a New York Professor of Sociology.  They are not in the  
pirate movement because the pirate movement makes too little effort to  
appeal to them.  In short, we do not try to explain our policies in  
ways that appeal beyond a audience that is predominantly young, male,  
white and reasonably privileged.

The worst thing we could take is to take women, or any other group,  
and place them in a 'special interest' faction.  Instead of modifying  
the policy message to make it more appealing to a wider audience, they  
will just be pushed into creating 'special interest' policies.  I  
dislike the idea of that intrinsically, but more importantly, that  
approach never seems to work in politics.  Voters can see through it  
and it does not appeal to them.  In short, if you cannot come up with  
a political philosophy with a core message that is appealing to women  
or any other subset of society, you cannot address that by creating  
specialist policies around the edges.  People can innately see the  
special interest policies do not fit with the philosophy and so become  
sceptical about them, and rightly so.

If we want more women etc in the movement, the right place to begin is  
not by creating a ghetto for them.  The right place is to look at  
ourselves and ask what is in our behaviour that is a barrier to  
inclusion.  It is not hard for me to see examples of behaviour that  
leads to exclusion from the pirate movement.

When you talk to fellow pirates, it is extraordinary how often the  
conversation ends up in narrow techno-jargon.  Well, there is nothing  
wrong with that in itself.  Young white men from a certain kind of  
background like talking about that kind of thing.  Problem is, it  
probably does not appeal to others so much.  If you do not understand  
what somebody is talking about, chances are you will lost interest in  
listening to that person.  Similarly, pirates often explain their  
motives using analogies that once again draw on narrow knowledge that  
not everyone would appreciate or understand.  I'm a man, and I can  
hold my own in debates where phrases from formal logic crop up, or  
where people talk about an aspect of Microsoft's business model, or  
concerning the merits of STV versus AV, or where someone uses internet  
slang.  But not everybody will want to participate in such a  
conversation.  Some will just run from it as fast as they can.

The real challenge here is to recognize that people like to be around  
and to form communities with other people with a similar outlook.   
There is nothing wrong with, say, young people wanting to canvass the  
support of other young people, and being proud when they win their  
support.  But this is the kind of behaviour that can so easily limit  
the horizons of who the party talks to and appeals to.  So if we want  
to help the party to appeal to and engage more women supporters, we  
should not push them into a special faction where they disconnect from  
the rest of the party, or are given enhanced 'visibility' because of  
their gender instead of merit.  If we want to help the party to appeal  
and engage more women, and any other group in society we fail to  
reach, then we should sit back and think for a while about our own  
behaviour, and how aspects of it might exclude others.  We should  
listen to the concerns of people who are not like us, and think about  
what we say that is of relevance to those concerns.  If we can all  
learn to modify our language when appropriate, think more of others,  
put ourselves in their shoes, and engage with their concerns in terms  
they relate to, then we really will reach out to more people and help  
both them and us.  That needs every pirate to be more open to engaging  
the support of every person on this planet, whatever their gender,  
race, class or whatever.  I would rather see every pirate moderating  
their own behaviour and engaging more widely, than the creation of a  
special interest faction with the movement.

Best regards,

Eric

>
> From: "Bogomil \"Bogo\" Shopov" <bogo at piratskapartia.bg>
> Date: 2 May 2010 12:26:34 BST
> To: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net 
> >
> Subject: [pp.int.general] Women Pirates project
> Reply-To: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net 
> >
>
>
> Hey again,
> Here is some ideas and tasks for a project called WOPI. I am looking  
> forward to see you participating.
> http://int.piratenpartei.de/User:Bogomil/Projects/WOPI

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