@velcrome and hearing that people got irritated and feel uneasy is not enough to just opt for a change?
without judging if the current name is good or bad, there is an opportunity to make it better than current.
@microdee: just because it’s nuanced and unimportant for us, doesn’t make it that way for others. no one of us can possibly claim to be truely objective and thus denying someone the right to see it as something important for themselves.
ok the japanese thing is actually a valid concern there
fine rename it to examples, and while we are at it also rename boygroup to “Networked Node Graph”
to streamline future debates like this let’s make vvvv 100% serious, kill all the jokes:
did I leave out something?
@microdee @veevee 's first arguement
“…sexism is not only about the Harvey Weinsteins of this world. It’s actually specifically about the small things, the everyday things, the subtle ones that have much more influence on our opinions and feelings.”
is actually another very important and more then valid point, that also sums up better then my initial post, what it’s all about and why we have a certain responsibility here.
This can be of course extended to much more important topics then only our girlpower folder, but luckily I will spare you that ;)
I totaly like your other proposals :D
Brings me to vux’s and your other realy good point, which has to taken into account. How much hassle would it realy be to change the folder (including packs)?
Some backwars compatibility problems would be hard to avoid I guess… but would it be a “nightmare”?
and woei answered already to @vux and @u7angle
I can just underline that and add that for me the discussion is more weighted towards the term “girlpower”, no matter if you see it as a general example folder (which I can aggree with) or a beginners folder.
The thing is, this is just a term that is problematic in verious ways and you can search the internet about it so I dont have to run into the pitfalls of writing an essay about it.
yeah its cute and all to call it girlpower, in the end it was done with good intentions, but it totally is awkward, and not really a place to try to be cute
Just name it what it is - examples, why not? Same discussion as with crack.exe imo
you have to do super olympic mental gymnastics to make the current name justifiable
I very much agree with the arguments of @tekcor here.
In my opinion a toolkit like vvvv should be based on a diverse and inclusive community. The underrepresentation of minorities and gender unequality is a very common phenomena in the tech scene and also present in the vvvv cosmos. I think it is in our responsibility as a community to create a welcoming, open environment for everyone. And eyebrow-raising, suggestive folder names are the opposite of that. I am sure that these names were chosen with nothing but good intentions, but I think it’s worth rethinking those 90s attitudes. No matter if the contents of the folder are beginner level stuff or very elaborate examples: Using the term “girlpower” is completely neglecting the complexity of the discussion around gender unequality, especially in the tech field. I cannot think of any good reason to keep the name, if it keeps even one person from opening that folder - no matter the reasons.
This thread showcases a lot of comments with strong opinions, presenting themselves as expert views, that are not easily challenged. This is not an environment in which someone who is offended would like to speak out and defend themselves against some very loud voices, I imagine.
Also those topics should be discussed from within the community, so I think it is great that @tekcor opened this up. People who are offended will never join a community and if we are ignoring these issues, vvvv town will get quite a lonely place with insider jokes and expert opinions.
Yes, this is absolutely the case. And I think we have the opportunity to counter that with a more people / user friendly community and environment. VVVV has always been toolkit for designers and artists, as well as, but not exclusively, for professional developers. There is a bunch of different user groups with different backgrounds and needs. We have the choice to open up.
“Spread the lovvvve”. Not “provide the lovvve for people with the adequate skill level”.
A lot of people are working hard in that direction, be it the NODE team, people in education or for example the LINK team. I think it is very healthy to reflect on how we look from the outside as a community, every once in a while.
Sorry for repeating myself a couple of times, but it’s quite hard to channel all my thoughts on this topic into a single post without spending the better part of the weekend.
i’m also curious if any devvvv has some opinion about this?
I just did a quick search. Some quotes from the first hits:
Girl power is a slogan that encourages and celebrates women’s empowerment, independence, and confidence. The slogan’s invention is credited to US punk band Bikini Kill, who published a zine called Girl Power in 1991.
Girl Power is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit prevention and intervention social change program that promotes positive behavior, enhances social skills and improves academic performance in at-risk girls 11 - 17. Established in 2000 by the World Literacy Crusade (WLC) of Florida - an international, non-profit, community literacy program - Girl Power encourages young girls to build confidence, competence and pride within themselves.
Global Girl Power is global movement committed to the empowerment of women, girls and youth through leadership training, mentorship. We support philanthropic projects locally and around the world and envision a world where positive change spreads globally from one person to another. Our aim is to inspire global change by bringing together communities of mindful leaders to initiate dialogue, participation and activism.
A pop culture motto used to stitch feminism into young girls/teenagers. Supposed to promote sexual equality, even though it suggests that females have superior rights to males. Frequently used by females to annoy egalitarian males who try to keep everyone’s voice and rights at an equal. My opinion: EVERYONE is equal, so Girl Power and Men’s Health BOTH go to hell.
Kraft, Stärke und besonders stark ausgeprägtes Selbstbewusstsein junger Frauen
…
So how is this term derogatory?
This thread shows the reason is why I’ve definitively settled that I will never talk again with clients directly.
Anyway, I suffer (~daily, TBH most of the time really mild) racist acts, because I was born in southern Italy. From Italian people, let me be clear, uh.
So there are these ignorant idiots that are offended by the place I’ve been born and somehow they think that offending me back (?!) it’s the right thing to do.
So I got to get my shit together since I was very young and fight this bullshit (on a ~daily basis).
So let that be known, crystal clear: I AM OFFENDED BY THIS THREAD, yes, I’m offended by people getting offended ON NOTHING.
I stated elsewhere that girlpower is not the best name for that folder, because there is not any relation between the name and its use (unless you know a byte about vvvv culture).
Let’s change it, right away. But for real reasons. Not because there are lots and lots and lots of very very special snowfleks, each of them with the same icy pattern.
In addendum, to transversely offend a lot of people
to hopefully bring back the thread to a less emotionally overloaded discussion:
@tekcor wrote ‘may be interpreted in an offensive way’
i wrote: ‘frowns and questions’
so no need to be upset, or even offended, about people maybe being offended by the name.
‘girlpower’ was for sure chosen with best intentions. and while it was a good term in the 90s as @bjoern posted, conventions about inclusion and empowering have evolved. since quite some also agreed on that there way better names in terms of usability i ask, what the reason against it are.
if the problem should be the work behind the rename, i voluteer to do it. there shouldn’t be any breaking dependencies into girlpower anyways.
@h99 i’ve got my share of experiences from subtle notions to physical attacks. i respect people feeling uncomfortable with words or actions which seem irrelevantly small to me, since i mostly don’t know the story behind it. guess everyone’s got an individual strategy coping with these issues…
Thanks @bjoern for researching and posting these definitions, I have to admit I dind’t do that myself this thoroughly.
I think the “problem” with the term is not that it is derogatory in any way.
But what your excerpts clearly show is, that “girlpower” is a politically and emotionally charged term, that touch topics like gender, equality, feminism, empowering people etc.
What makes it weird or “eyebrow-rasing” is probably only, that it is unclear why this term is used in this totally unrelated context.
Is it a political statement, a joke or something completely else? I guess that’s what makes people stumble over this term. This should probably be made clear and if there is no real intention or good reason behind the name it should - in my opinion - be changed, or at least openly addressed.
I also hope to keep this conversation constructive and positive.
When I said in my first post:
I really meant, that it is good to discuss these difficult topics, even if we are offended a little by each other when not only talking about programming issues. Because a community doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but has to somehow also deal with the real world. No need to agree to this - just my two cents.
ok, we (especially bjoern) found out there is nothing wrong with the term girlpower. and as microdee stated, the criticism could be continued to node naming. i’d say after all these years, the naming belongs to vvvv’s identity. so i’d say keep it, even if it’s not super intuitve.
now comes the big “but”
putting examples not into the software itself but hiding them along with program folders is the real problem. talking to joreg, he made me aware that the girlpower folder is linked in vvvv’s leaf menu.pretty obvious why i never seen it. it has a different name and to be fair, the menu is overcrowded to actually find it. why is it there named “Tutorials & Demos”. seems like devs are not so sure themselves regarding the naming.
i would like to see integrated, easy to find examples from within the program. and not like just linking a folder. more like arduino or processing does it.
erm, and call it girlpower examples :)
Can you please point me/us to an article that supports that “fact”?
So far I’ve only heard the opinions of self proclaimed (male) experts.
Admittedly my research wasn’t that extensive but everything I came up with seems to suggest that the term is still widely used in its original meaning.
I really don’t see why this is necessarily a bad thing. It makes people think, may lead to discussion and might even help to broaden one’s horizon.
^^this
You cannot conform to everyone’s norms and trying to appease everybody preemptively leads to self-censorship.
@woei Ok I get it, but I’m from the “tough up” school.
Mainly because arguing over the name of a folder is no where near being reviled on your ethnicity\birth place - giving space to anger\inequality\whatever about a folder’s name humiliates and demeans the real issues of marginalization: people beaten up, degraded and ostracized.
Sorry, not sorry: I don’t care if you a have a trigger word, really.
I rather keep this post short ))
I agree with @andresc4, who agrees with @velcrome @vux @sebl and @microdee.
Always had fun about girlpower folder with @ain when doing workshops together
ps @h99 's video is hilarious
@bjoern the wiki article you linked has a criticism section. and the ‘evolvement’ i was referring to can be found in the same article see also section here. in very short it’s (amongst other things) about getting rid of gender binary and roles.
may lead to discussion and might even help to broaden one’s horizon
since this has been mentioned a couple of times. yes, of course, discussions like we have here. on the other hand, i really didn’t feel in a position to be able discuss this when eyebrows were raised giving a workshop in a muslim country, me kind of being the ‘priviledged white male’ workshop host. @h99 honestly, would you tell those people in the face to just toughen up a bit?
i really like how lively this thread has turned out. and while i can completely understand the arguments, that the term is already empowering and the dispute whether it could even be perceived as offensive or not. what really strikes me is this:
when it comes to progress in technology the consensus is, yay, we wan’t that! no one is like, well, directx 8 (around 2000) is just fine, let’s stick with it, because it has been there and it serves us well. @tekcor and @mburk also argued, that there simply is something better nowadays than a maybe misleading or maybe empowering term from nearly 20 years ago. why the nostalgia here? it doesn’t really affect anyone already working with vvvv seriously at all if would change. the users mostly affected are probably the teachers and workshop hosts.
edit:
so let me rephrase:
the majority of the scientific papers of the last decade consent that ‘girlpower’ might fall into the legacy category. While compatibility remains until further notice, the usage results in compiler warning C4996 (‘function or variable that is marked deprecated’). Please consider upgrading to naming convention 4.0 (w3c 2015) which reduces the misinterpretation error, surfacing under certain socio-cultural configurations, by 10%.
Hi all and thanks again for the vivid debate.
It was expected that when opening this topics, two directions would clash a little bit and I also think thats important.
@bjoern : I can see your point. Maybe it’s not enough to do a quick search then, especially with personalised search results you will probably just end up in with a majority of pop-culture related search results if you are not so much into the topic.
So maybe google scholar is actually better for this!
Anyway, I will at least post one link that I found, the article discusses the different streams behind the term “girlpower”.
In this article we can see that “girlpower” has its root in the description we can find in the Wikipedia article, posted by you,
but
“the discourse of Girl Power had also been deployed by various elements of popular culture and the mainstream media in a way that constructed a version of girlhood that excludes girls` political selves.”
Furthermore the author discusses Girl Power under the following four aspects: Anti-Feminism, Postfeminism, Individual Power and Consumer Power. And I highly recommend reading through that a little bit to understand the bigger picture.
In another book by Susan J. Douglas we can find the following citation:
"
These were the new, revised, incredibly contradictory images of girl power at the turn of the twenty-first century: real power came from having a slim, youg, hot body but to get it you might have to be anything but powerful - prostrate on a gurney - which was, in a nice twist, sold as a new technology of power for women"
The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild
So, probably that should give us a bit of scientific background.
It seams strangly odd to write about gender studies in the vvvv forum but since you asked :)
@woei haha thank you for this
This is when it got into leaf menu: Girlpower in Leaf Menu
You’ll see also that I expressed my doubts about the folder’s name, and you’ll see why it got a different name into leaf menu, and why devvvvs are not privileged white men, as they choose, IMHO, function over form (a clear string to point to tutorials).
It express my point in a very clear way.
Sorry, I honestly don’t understand the context of your question, I think it gone lost with edits and formatting.
so, so much this
@h99
totally cool this has been dicussed already. just saying this is not optimal presented. going for the leaf menu is a bit of a footy shooty design with so many options. but there is hope since VL has a dropdown which can have a better structure.
the goal should be that noobs find the examples themselves, without someone pointing them to it or having to read a manual, right ?
like this
i’d call it ‘flowerpower’ then
no feminist men or women would suffer, an occasional pacifist would smile -
but nice to keep a quaint name for curious minds
