[Buddha-l] Re: An experiment (Gender on Buddha-l)

[Andrew Skilton]

12 Oct 2005  "Andrew Skilton" wrote:

>My conclusion: Buddha-l is habitually populated by folks who like a particular
type of question or exchange. Personally, I might contribute more often to a
list with a slightly different 'style'.

Well, if I may be permitted to dialogue with myself.... That's really not quite
enough Andrew! What about where we started, with Joanna's email about responses
to her mails?

I do not feel it a duty to listen to women as a group (which group, voice, etc
etc?), although I should add that I have undoubtedly learnt, partly through
listening to some women, that women are often not heard in a number of
circumstances in our society.  As a result I have become able occasionally to
recognise situations in which a woman is saying something that is not being
heard.

Big deal!  And anyway it is the nature of things that we all occasionally do not
get listened to and I could even try to construct a case for saying that it
occasionally does us good not to be listened to.  This is all obvious. 

But there are circumstances where I think (and feel) that I do have a duty to
try to listen to others (women or otherwise) and these are usually connected
with some form of direct or personal communication - perhaps best to say, when I
am being addressed by someone who is a member of my 'community'. I guess we all
probably participate in a range of different, more or less overlapping
communities.

Buddha-l is a virtual community that has a kind of 'hard core' of habitual
contributors, and a only slightly less 'hard' band of people who regularly
contribute, and then a more diffuse membership of people who lurk.  I guess I am
one of the latter.  From my perspective Joanna looks like a member of the 'hard
core' - Richard's statistic seems to confirm this - over a period of eight days
she was one of the half dozen most frequent contributors.

I don't think it matters much if I ignore Joanna (bear with me, J) since I do
not really count myself a very active member of the virtual community of which
she is such a committed member, and hence she and I do not owe each other a very
high degree of attention.  But it is significant if the others who are equally
committed as her do appear to ignore her contributions. That begins to mean
something and seem odd.  Its all very well for someone (I cannot recall whom) at
one point to suggest her contributions are just not as interesting to the others
as their own are (!), but her contributions help constitute the mainstream of
this list from where I sit. This sounds like, "we'll only take notice of you
while you recite our dialogue, think our thoughts, show an interest in our
fancies - yours don't count".

This, Franz, is the nearest I can get to a case for saying that JK should
perhaps have had a better response to her mails than she did - I personally
cannot resort to grand ideological strategies, like the bodhisattva path, in a
context which is secular, non-academic and voluntary.

Andrew