As an addendum to my previous post (Watch your nails on that keyboard, love) - well, I told you I’d written an e-mail to the Guardian. It got published in today’s Technology letters page.

Or, at least, some of it did.

I thought about letting this lie. I’d sent in my complaint, I’d blogged about the problem, I could ignore it and get over it, right? Well, wrong, because the editor of the Technology Guardian replied to my initial e-mail, and then several more times afterwards, and I ended up actually much more angry than I was initially. So let’s get this dirty washing out in the open, shall we?

Here’s the text of my initial e-mail:

Hiya,

I’m highly aware that I’m rapidly turning into my parents by writing letters to complain to newspapers, but what exactly was the thought process behind using the picture of the pink keyboard (see attached) on your article “How secure are your online passwords?”? ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/onlinepasswordssecurity)

There’s nothing gender-specific in the article itself, and the security concerns laid out are relevant to both genders. It’s not an article aimed particularly at women (apart from being written by one). So it’s completely incongruous. That’s before issues about gender stereotyping and sexism - women only use PINK technology, right? And of course the only thing they’d need to use the internet for would be to shop? - even enter the equation.

Seriously, what’s going on there?

Considering the Guardian has run articles on how there’s still sexism rampant in the IT industry (among other industries..), using that picture just … doesn’t make sense. It’s re-enforcing all sorts of negative attitudes towards women, which really isn’t what I’d expect from the Guardian, of all papers. The Daily Mail, maybe. But from the Guardian, that’s just disappointing.

On a more positive note, the article itself was great. It’s just a shame that you chose to present it like that.

I also saved the offending picture to my computer, for use both in a blog post here and to attach to my complaint e-mail, for clarity’s sake.

This is what I got in response:

Hi..

thanks for your email. Pink keyboard? Never noticed it, myself. Did the
hands have nail varnish on too? Nah. I think you’re reading too much into
it.

Anyhow, we’d like to use your letter, all or in part, as a letter; we’d
need a full name and post town, please.

We do try to put all the usable letters we receive online on the Technology
blog even if we cannot print them in the newspaper itself.

If you do not want your message published (we will not publish your email,
only a name and post town) please say so.

best
Charles Arthur, editor, Technology

“All or in part” registered - and you’ll notice it was only a part of the e-mail that was published. As did the incredibly dismissive “Nah” he threw in there. I considered refusing to allow the e-mail to be published, because … honestly, because I was a bit embarrassed about the first e-mail. I was angry when I wrote it, trying not to come off like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, but nonetheless furious about the use of that picture. In the end, though, I figured I’d take any platform I was given, and replied:

Morning,

Well, no, I don’t think I’m reading too much into it, though I do think that was a pretty rudely dismissive reply! Not had your coffee yet?

You’re welcome to use the letter if you like - Sarah Dobbs, London.

Again, notice the fact that, for whatever reason, I’m desperately trying not to sound as angry as I feel; I don’t want to make him defensive, and it’s entirely possible that the editor didn’t choose the picture anyway. But seriously - it’s not okay for an editor to reply to his readers like that, is it? Another response dropped into my inbox:

Hi Sarah..

As it happens, I had had my coffee. But now I’ve gone and looked at
the picture you’re complaining about. (I had thought you were
complaining about the printed picture, which hasn’t got a keyboard at
all, now I look again.)

OK, so - looking at the ALT text on that picture, it says
alt=”Teenager’s hands on computer keyboard” width=”460″ height=”276″
That is, someone chose the picture just based on a few keywords from
the article. It’s not thinking “let’s do something stereotypically
suggesting women can’t set up strong passwords” - which would be
atypical in the Guardian anyway - but instead “what image suggests
using a computer to do typing?”

So that’s how. But thanks for the location too.

best
Charles Arthur, Editor, Technology

So - he didn’t read my e-mail properly but sent me a rude reply anyway? It’s not getting any better, is it?

Because I just don’t know when to quit, I replied:

Hiya,

I’m sure no-one did set out to be offensive, but the thing is, it was offensive. I’m happy to believe that picture was used entirely out of thoughtlessness, but that doesn’t really make it any better. And in fairness, I attached the picture in question to my initial e-mail as well as including the link to the online article.

And again:

Hi..

not to belabour this too much, but..

On 10 Dec 2007, at 15:35, Sarah Dobbs wrote:
>
> I’m sure no-one did set out to be offensive, but the thing is, it
> was offensive.

I disagree. You perceived it as offensive. If it had shown a blonde
woman with a finger to her mouth looking dopey, now, that would have
been obviously offensive (though the dictionary defines that word as
“causing someone to feel deeply hurt or angry”), because it would have
made a target where none existed in the copy.

This really doesn’t fall into that category, I don’t think. There are
people who do have nails like that, and there was *absolutely nothing*
in the story to suggest that women are more prone to having weak
passwords than men, or vice versa.

If it had been a picture of big builder’s sausage fingers, should
every man have felt it was pointing at them as somehow being dim over
passwords? The article didn’t even suggest that people (men or women)
do passwords badly; only that there are now really good ways to break
those you think are good (such as using the word “abstruse” or
“onomatopeia” as a password, which would get broken pretty fast
despite seeming good enough).

> I’m happy to believe that picture was used entirely out of
> thoughtlessness, but that doesn’t really make it any better.

My (female) chief sub this week says “it was naff” - with which I
think I’d agree. But no more than that. Else we’re getting into
teddybear territory.

> And in fairness, I attached the picture in question to my initial e-
> mail as well as including the link to the online article.

You did, and I apologise. In clemency, I plead webmail - the picture
doesn’t show inline, so viewing it would have meant another click, and
I was trying to do it at speed.
best
Charles Arthur, Editor, Technology

I don’t know where to start. Dictionary definitions? (And ones that prove my point, at that?) Getting in a member of the supposedly offended group to prove that obviously no-one could be offended coz my friend says so? It’s such a standard, obvious response to any complaint of offence that it’s exhausting to contemplate going over all the same old, tired arguments all over again. Here’s my response:

I think you’re still missing the point, though. The woman in the picture’s not typing, she’s using a keyboard with only one labelled key - with a shopping trolley on it.

Notice that’s what was edited out of the letter they printed. We’ve been through all of this before. I like pink. But I don’t like being condescended to, and I don’t like the assumption that women will only use technology if and because it’s pink, and I don’t like being treated like I’m stupid. All those boxes got ticked, didn’t they? Mr Arthur’s counterexample actually isn’t a parallel; the equivalent would be printing a picture of a man using a blue keyboard with only one button - a button with a football on it, or maybe a pint of beer. That’s sexist, as is the pink keyboard picture.

And that’s the bottom line here.

Photograph: Meredith Parmelee/Getty - taken from the Technology Guardian

It’s not just me, is it? That picture - it is absolutely hideous, right? I actually like the colour pink, and I find it offensive on the eyeballs. It’s actually quite difficult to look at, even before the red haze of rage covers my vision because yes, that hand, with its horribly over-manicured nails, is clearly meant to belong to a woman who is using a hot pink keyboard that appears to have no functional keys whatsoever except a shopping button. I barely know where to start, or how to structure a rant about it.

I know what you’re thinking, though. “So what? Why don’t you just ignore it?” Well, if it had just turned up on a stock photograph website, I would. I’d just scroll straight past. But it was used this week by the Guardian to illustrate a story on its website entitled How secure are your online passwords?

Now, in fairness, the article does talk quite a bit about shopping online. But it’s also, more generally, about how to create and remember a good, uncrackable password that can’t be guessed by random visitors to your MySpace page. It’s a really good article, actually, and it doesn’t seem to be aimed at readers of either gender, particularly - it’s just about encouraging the average Internet user to be more careful with their security online. Considering the Government is busy flinging all of our personal details to the wind, it’s quite important that we’re not leaving ourselves wide open here. But that picture is just so offputting that I almost clicked away from the page as soon as it loaded. It’s hideous, and it’s also completely unsuited to the article. The only link that I can see, the only reason I can find for including that picture with that article, is that the article was written by a woman.

(Presumably, she has a better keyboard than the one in the photo, or she wouldn’t have got very far with her article.)

Maybe it shouldn’t matter, and maybe I shouldn’t care, but quite frankly, I’m feeling pretty offended right now. I’m sure writing angry letters to newspapers is one of the universally recognised signals of getting old and past it (so I sent the Guardian an e-mail instead) but seriously, this is the Guardian we’re talking about. It’s supposed to be one of the more respectable UK newspapers - liberal, progressive, arty, and all that. It’s not the kind of paper you’d expect to be busy propagating sexism. And, okay, it’s only one picture, but the kind of thing is insidious. Sexism is widespread - you only have to cast an eye over the adverts on Tube platforms, or in the paper, or on television, to realise that we’re not living in a state of gender equality. Particularly when you’re talking about the IT industry: the Guardian itself has run stories this year about how women working in IT are paid less than their male counterparts, and that there are far fewer of them to begin with.

Maybe one picture accompanying one article isn’t going to set feminism back by several decades, but it really doesn’t help matters. The idea that women are all pink-loving girlies who do nothing more strenuous or challenging online than buying themselves something pretty (of course, they couldn’t do much more without breaking their nails) is not one that I’d be happy to see propagated anywhere. Let alone in the Guardian.

Oh dear. LiveJournal’s done it again. The original blogging site generates stacks of controversy whenever it makes any changes to the site, and the recent alteration is attracting plenty of new comments and irate blog posts even as I write this.

The change I’m talking about must have seemed like a good idea at the time - but then most things do, before you try to implement them in the real world. What LiveJournal has done is to introduce new filters: “Adult Concepts” and “Explicit Adult Content”. Users can flag their own content as inappropriate for children to either degree, or, if they read a post they believe to be adult in theme or content, can flag it up to LiveJournal’s admin. When posts are marked as containing adult content, they’ll be hidden under a cut tag, and only users whose profiles indicate that they’re over 18 will be able to view them.

All very well in principle, until you consider a couple of things. One, that there’s no way of verifying the age of a LiveJournal user, so underage bloggers may well just claim to be older than they are in order to access the adult content. Two, there are a lot of people who may well want to abuse the system by flagging content they don’t like as inappropriate for underage readers.

The latter is the one that seems to have generated the most problems. That, and the fact that adult users generally don’t want to have to click on a cut-tag to read a post when they’re browsing their LiveJournal friends list (basically, the friends list is an RSS feed of posts from users that have been added as “friends”, i.e. subscribed to).

Users can already lock their own posts so that they are accessible only to their friends, or to select groups of their friends if they’ve set up filters, so the ability to hide some potentially offensive content from the delicate eyes of child isn’t new. But allowing other users to chip in and claim that another LiveJournaller is posting inappropriate content — just by clicking a button, rather than having to fire off an e-mail — is new, and worrying. LiveJournal’s staff has assured its users that content will only be investigated if it’s been flagged by numerous users, but that policy is decidedly questionable. What if a little-known blogger is posting something inappropriate, and only a couple of people have found the content? It wouldn’t get flagged many times, but would be available for children. The flipside is that posts by popular and/or controversial bloggers are liable to be flagged many, many times over. The content will still have to be reviewed by LiveJournal staff, but that sounds like a potential headache, and a massive waste of time, in the making.

And then there’s the problem of defining what, exactly, constitutes adult content.

It’s all a big mess, really. An understandable one, when you consider how often social networking sites (and sites which rely on user generated content) are criticised for not protecting younger members of the Internet community adequately. But exactly how any site is supposed to do that, short of employing thousands of new members of staff solely to scan the site for anything that might be objectionable and remove it, is still a problem that remains unsolved.