This is an open letter to the approx. 800 audience members subjected to Mads Christensen’s disgusting, unfunny misogyny at the Dell event in Copenhagen.

Dear friends,

I’m so sorry.

I can’t imagine how you feel right now. Personally, I have never in person witnessed that brazen bigotry as you have. Sure, we see it all the time on Reddit or Hacker News. But in real life? We know it happens, though not in such concentrated doses but in drips and drops as they filter on the Geek Feminist Wiki. But then I think about what it must be like, to be insulted and defamed en masse right to your face. The sensation of being doused in ice water comes to mind. Having never been in your position, I can’t speak to your experience. For how much longer it will elude me, I don’t rightly know. Thus far, I have been spared the privilege.

It’s for this reason, my freedom from your misery, that it pains me to say this to you:

Guys. Seriously. You could have done better.

I know, I know—believe me. I don’t pretend to know how difficult it was to hear that shit. I know how angry you are about it, how angry at Dell you are, at Christensen, at yourselves. You don’t need me angry at you, too. All of us have been in a position where we gave in. When we should have spoken up. It’s incredibly difficult to stand up to someone in that situation, in any situation. We all know that a standup comic has more power than a heckler. We know which one is bound to lose in a fight of words.

However, let’s set something straight in this case: you weren’t watching stand-up. Dell wasn’t there to make you laugh. Dell was there to represent you. When you’re at an industry event, it’s tempting to yield some authority to the speaker—after all, isn’t that why they’re picked? Well, it should be. But do you really believe everything you read, even if it’s in your favorite paper? Written by your favorite writer? When someone you trust employs a rhetorical device, or says something stupid, or hires someone to run an event whose behavior stands completely counter to what you hold dear as valuable and moral and good—well, you don’t just kneel down and swallow, do you?

That guy wasn’t just being an ass. He was bullying you. He was bullying all of us. And what did you do? You didn’t just hand over your lunch money. You forfeited your dignity.

Industries today could take a lesson from Vaudeville to avoid insulting the people filling the seats. The power of the stage is illusory. The performer who denigrates our culture with their base smallmindedness is should be treated to same honor in the greatest tradition of theater: a long cane, vigorously applied to the larynx. Problem is that no one’s waiting in the wings these days. But where there’s no cane, an overripe tomato will do nicely.

Problem is, you came empty-handed. No tomatoes were thrown today. And that’s your fault.

You may object that I’m blaming the victim here: yes, I am. I realize this. Don’t mistake my tough love with you as a sign that I don’t hold Dell fully accountable. But my issue here isn’t with Dell, or whatever boneheaded non-thought process it was that led to Mads Christensen’s nomination. Believe me, they will get their comeuppance. It’s neither surprising or unusual to be reminded that industry leaders are out of touch—it’s hard to hear the public’s objections through walls densely packed with piles of crumpled cash serving as heat insulation. You’d almost think they’re willingly ignoring us when we try to warn them that maybe, just maybe, though it seemed like a fun idea at the time, it really isn’t wise to celebrate your successes by pouring gasoline all over yourself.

But you know what disappoints to me? With the recent exception of the partial walkout on Matt Van Horn’s talk at SXSW, no one ever actually lights the match. Not when the asshole’s still dripping on stage, anyway. It’s only later, after the guests part and the theater closes, that news gets out on Twitter. Right on cue, the angry mob shows up with pitchforks and torches. As if igniting the puddle on the stage and setting the theater ablaze would discourage future crude displays! People, the gas-soaked asshole already left. All you have is a bonfire and a circle jerk.

And you know what all that outrage amounts to, to these douchebag sociopaths? A bad review. If you’re lucky, he might telegram later to say he’s sorry you were offended. Great job with the public shaming, guys. High five.

How about we do ourselves a favor? Let’s can the charade that this is some Broadway show where you get to go home and carefully plan your rebuttal. You’re not a theater reviewer, for Christ’s sake. Your job isn’t to purse your lips in disapproval and save all the vitriol for tomorrow morning’s column. You can do that for free. No, my friends. The job you have is harder, but it’s important. You have been given a gift.

This is Vaudeville, bitches. Asshole on stage? Tomatoes get thrown.

All metaphors aside, I know what I’m asking of you isn’t trivial. This isn’t a cafeteria food fight. Risking face or being told to “lighten up” is not my idea of fun. Retribution is real and reputations have been damaged when people, especially women, have chosen the hard path and spoke out. I wish for no one to invite hardship on themselves. This isn’t a fight I want, for you or any of us. But I don’t think it’s a fight we can avoid any longer. I’m sick and tired of it, and I don’t think I can take it anymore. But I wasn’t in that room with you. I couldn’t encourage you to stand up and tell Christensen to shut his fucking mouth. I think I know how alone and helpless you felt. You didn’t want this.

At the risk of comparing apples with napalm, let me illustrate something. Whatever your thoughts are on anti-terrorism or Homeland Security or TSA, we all can agree on one thing: airline passengers will never let another 9/11 happen. We learned a painful lesson from those events, not to let fear stop us from protecting our ourselves and each other.

In 2012, a man actually told a group of 800 people that women have no place in IT, and how awesome that is. Disagree? “Shut up, bitch!” Haha. Great joke, Mads.

Why do we have any patience left for this bullshit?

It always takes us by surprise when the opportunity to rise up presents itself. It won’t be fair. The timing will be terrible. And not just the first time—the first five, ten, twenty, fifty! times you’ll fail. You’ll fail, and it will suck. Your mind will go blank. Your face will freeze. Your feet will become possessed and remove you to higher ground. You’ll maybe even get halfway there before the air escapes your lungs. It will be scary. It won’t be worth the trouble. You’ll go home bitter. You may even be too embarrassed to tweet about it.

But you know what? Whatever you do, you won’t forget that you’re not alone. This is my responsibility as well as yours. All of us are in this. We’ll be there for you. You will remember that when you suck in your breath and hope to god you can muster the energy to speak.

So you’ll keep trying. All of us will.

And one day, some asshole will run their mouth, and you’ll smell gasoline. Without even thinking it will happen. You’ll clench your jaw and snap to attention. You’ll quietly beg your legs to hold you steady and your voice not to shake too much. You’ll pull your tomato out, ripe and ready, and hold it high. You’ll look the ugly sonuvabitch square in the eye.

And you will throw that goddamn tomato and hit him right in his motherfucking eye.

And when they’ve had enough vegetables tossed at them to make a city-sized pizza pie, maybe those punks’ll quit their bullying and get some goddamn therapy and leave us alone.

Til then, put down your torches and grow a pair of tomatoes.

Cori J.

I have an androgynous name. People are frequently surprised when they meet me in person. I’ve embraced it. I enjoy telling people that my name sounds like that of a black college football player. It usually gets a laugh.

So I don’t have a problem with Google thinking I’m a gender I’m not. I don’t really see it as a potential detriment. Google sees what I like, so it’s going to show me more things like it. No complaints there. I have nothing but appreciation their using whatever data they’re collecting on me being used to rule out stuff I don’t care about, like fly-fishing¹ and landscape photography. Design blogs and anti-procrastination potions, however? Bring it.

What I do have a problem with, and believe everyone should have a problem with, is that Google is operating under an assumption that Hollywood has been peddling since inception: chicks don’t like that nerdy shit. If you like nerdy shit, you must be a dude.

But like most things Hollywood would like us to believe, a lot of chicks do like nerdy shit. Most people discover this by the time they graduate middle school. The year being 2012, this should not be so surprising. Yet the gaming industry, STEM fields and majority of popular media act as if this is crazy talk.

“Women programmers?! Girls don’t code. Plus, it would be a bad idea to hire them anyway because BABIES.”

Look, I know it’s complicated. The geek world is often perceived as a refuge for awkward young boys. A lot of guys formed their first friendships in basements and garages filled with dusty screens and rickety tables cluttered with half-finished D&D campaigns. They hung out in comic book shops, and somewhere under the bed or up in the closet they still have a few unopened booster packs of Magic cards. Girls were a nonentity in the formation of their cultural consciousness. They were a far-off thing, fantastical and alien. What girls did on their own time, that wasn’t a concern.

But you know what’s crazy? There are girls who hung out in comic book stores too! And played video games! And went to school for engineering! And work as software engineers! That person you’re interviewing for the sysadmin job in your startup? Those are boobs under her shirt, not tumors.

Lest I overstate the absurdity of these situations, I insist that this isn’t some grade school gender panic. Being mistaken for the opposite gender happens, and that in and of itself is not a problem.

The problem is, and has always been, that women’s nerdy traits are over and over again, being misappropriated as something that conflicts with their gender role, when likes and dislikes should have absolutely no bearing on gender identity at all. Women use power tools, men wear pink, little girls can play with trucks, boys with dolls, etc. But according to Google: women in tech? Ha! Go ahead, tell another one.

Even if women are the minority in a community, activity or profession (playing Magic, writing software, drinking Dr. Pepper Ten), that does not give you license to label such an activity as “a guy thing,” because you are discounting the many women who are into that “guy thing.” The same holds true for men interested in “feminine pursuits.” It is alienating, othering, exclusionary, insert sexist term here. It props up the walls we want to tear down.

You know Rule 34, right? If it exists, someone has made a porno of it. Let’s try a new rule: if the gender ratio of something isn’t 50/50, you don’t get to round up to 100/0. The minority is not zero. They exist. Stop pretending they don’t.

Author’s Note: Months before this blog was even a twinkle in my eye, Bygone Bureau contributor BJ Fischer wrote a much better version of this essay an eerily similar article called The Four People You Meet On Earth, complete with a helpful graph. It perfectly reflects my own misgivings about the Myers-Briggs standard of personality evaluation. I highly recommend you read it.

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There are two basic types of designers: ones who care about other people, and ones either who don’t understand what actually that means, or just don’t give a shit.

This is just my interpretation, of course. Every designer I have encountered simply strikes me immediately as one or the other. In most cases, you can also incorporate their relative intelligence to add two subtypes to each, making four types total. I’ve even given them helpful Rands in Repose-esque names. They are:

• The designer who is kind and smart. These are kind designers.
• The designer who is nice and seems smart but is only a little dumb, which is forgivable. These are nice designers.

These make the two that care, and thankfully they make up the vast majority. Then there are the two who don’t:

• The designer who is smart and doesn’t bother with being nice. These are jackasses.
• The designer who is dumb and thinks they’re the shit. These are dumbasses.¹

Now, I should qualify what I mean by “kind.” Being kind isn’t the same as being nice. It’s a subtle distinction. Being nice is about being pleasant, or civil; being kind is an intentional act of generosity and empathy. For example, sometimes Erik Spiekermann (German type designer of Helvetica fame) doesn’t seem very nice. He can be…well, kind of a jackass. He calls people on their bullshit. Of course, once you really get what he’s talking about it’s obvious that he’s not just being mean: he’s expressing that unique brand of frustration found in normally nice, brilliant people who have been forced to endlessly tolerate the asinine tomfoolery and criminality of the worst people in the design world until they burst into a frothy rage. (In Spiekermann’s case, it’s an inimitably articulate, searing, poignant and at times uproariously funny rage, and not one you should ever miss.) He can be terribly sarcastic, but he is unmistakably a kind designer because while he hates those who do the bad and the ugly and the downright evil, he cares about doing good even more.

Designers who are kind, regardless of how smart they are, genuinely care about the good of others. They care to see others succeed; they care to see people do great things, but they also care to see others enjoy their accomplishments. They derive pleasure from the passion of others, even if it’s passion for ideas or careers they don’t share or understand. The smarter designers generally recognize the better ideas, and this proves incredibly important, but I’ll come back to that. All kind designers value creativity, and cherish it where it exists precisely because they know how precious and fragile that thing is.

Conversely, jackasses don’t care much for the accomplishments of others. Or rather, they don’t care if it doesn’t precisely suit their values. That’s fine. It isn’t doing anyone harm to hold your own ideas as more valuable than others if it helps you remain passionate and creative, so long as you don’t cling so tightly to the consistency of your values that your mind stagnates. I prefer not to associate or work with these types, because I don’t imagine it would be terribly pleasant. However, there is certainly something to be said for jackasses: they are our warrior class. They don’t suffer fools and they don’t fuck around. They inspire great numbers and can weild immense power. They can be wrongheaded in the pursuit of winning arguments, but they choose their enemies with purpose, pick fights that are worthwhile with real stupid people. And the best part? They win. (Designed any Flash websites lately? QED.) In these cases it’s best to be thankful and then back away, slowly and quietly. And if you disagree? Become one. It’s harder than you think, but probably worth it. Obnoxious as jackasses can be, we need them.

And so we arrive at the dumbasses, the ones who think they’re the shit.

I should probably define what “the shit” is.

Thinking you’re the shit isn’t the same as narcissism. There’s many a self-loathing dumbass designer out there. Indeed, we’ve all had moments in our lives when we were that dumbass - shouting from a soapbox, only to be blown back onto our asses by the force of our own hot air. But there are designers out there who do worse than preach an impossible ideal: they expect perfection - literal, spontaneous perfection. They choose to criticize and belittle a designer for innocent or rookie mistakes. Where a kind designer will see the learning process taking place and may choose to shepherd the student toward improvement, dumbass designers only see failure - and mock it relentlessly. What the kind designer sees as potentially good, the dumbasses see as hopeless.

Another facet of this problem is that dumbasses don’t value what’s good, but what’s “cool.” Of course, what is “cool” probably started out as good, but only got there through trial and error, countless iterations, experimentation and mistakes that the very dumbasses it appeals to would have crucified. “Cool” doesn’t happen without good, and unless you’re impossibly lucky, good doesn’t happen without some bad along the way, but dumbasses will fail to acknowledge that. To dumbasses, “cool” just happens through mystical inspiration and a very short, invisible iterative process. And of course, “cool” leads to fads.

As it is in any creative field, there are trends in design. An idea will barrel through the masses, pulling well-intentioned, nice designers into its wake. A fever will catch on. Suddenly it’s what’s slick or grungy or austere or ‘lickable’ that’s happening and people think, “Man, that’s so awesome! I’m totally using that in my next design.” And then: “Sheesh, why doesn’t every website/ brochure/ poster/ UI/ back end look/act like this? Everything else is so ugly.” This question seems rather benign but with enough repetition it can be rendered quite painful on the ears. As such, it’s still kinder not to reply. ² This marks the difference between kind designers and nice designers: the kind designers will be, for the most part, impervious to popularity or newness. Kind designers, by virtue of their value of what is good, if not complete, can distinguish between good ideas and great. Fads encourage designers to apply an otherwise good answer to the wrong questions.

Then there’s another complicating factor: the great majority of designers, whether they want to admit it or not, are artists first and problem solvers second. Their penchant for taste overpowers their obligation to scrutiny. Tragically, the designers who are problem solvers first are often disregarded as having poor taste or none at all. (Or they are confused with developers - and trust me, that doesn’t make anyone happy.) The artistic sensibilities of a large group form the fad; the problem solvers who ignore the fad have to deal with being uncool. And that would be perfectly fine, except not everyone is at the point in their career that they might be able to shake off that feeling so easily. Because most of us are young and, resist though we might, popularity is important to us. Because thanks to the internet, the subtext of criticism has become too negative.

Because it’s important to understand how:

“They shouldn’t even try. They should just give up.”

quickly becomes:

“I shouldn’t even try. I should just give up.”

Hopefully you see my point.

Contempt is the enemy of creativity. And because of the nebulousness of our own confidence as designers, it is doubly toxic to introduce it into a conversation about design.

And so I implore you: Avoid people who show contempt for others. Learn to recognize when you are being treated with contempt, and remove yourself from the situation. Above all, avoid treating others with contempt, no matter how deeply and urgently and sincerely they might deserve it. Kindness is an undervalued asset. Be a kinder designer: cultivate it, and help others grow. Design will only be the better for it.