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Titstare App

I get that this app was a joke. I’m just tired of jokes being made at women’s (and their tits') expense.

It was a quiet Sunday night in my apartment, relaxing even, until my newsfeed suddenly erupted in a deluge of reactions to this idiotic “Titstare” app presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt.

In an industry routinely accused of being inhospitable to women—where the “booth babe” phenomenon has been hotly contested and where the ratio of men to women is depressingly high—it’s disheartening, to say the least, to see this duo given a stage on which to give a one-minute joke presentation on staring at women’s tits.

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You know how dudes always get caught staring at tits? And how women get so mad when they catch men staring at their tits? This, in “app” form, is the crux of the joke. The two presenters are so smitten with their little ingenious joke app that they are literally choking back laughter as they speak.

I remember chatting with some developer friends a couple years ago, back when the “Brogrammer” trope was getting lots of press, about how valid the pushback against the industry was. One guy said there was a female programmer where he worked, and she had mentioned how she had personally felt excluded from the male-dominated industry. His response? I remember it so clearly: “If women want to be accepted into the culture, they should just make something cool.”

Well, first off, they can and they do. But beyond that obvious divergence from fact lies an attitude that hints at broader bias in the community.

It’s the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach. The, “There are no—substitute underrepresented group here—because they haven’t earned their place.” And while this seems like a skill-based selection process, I don’t need to belabor why that doesn’t always work in practice. It neglects the very real effect of, well, things exactly like this titstare situation. And the booth babe situation. And the very real experience of discrimination that many women in tech experience.

Now this boob app joke was by no means sophisticated. In a way, it made men seem dumb and terrible, and that was part of the humor. But even if the joke is, in a way, positioned as being at the expense of men, it never really is. Because it’s men talking to men about their shared experience. I’m not going to go on a stage to make a joke about a period app. One, because that’s weird. But, importantly, because I know that half of the people I’m speaking to won’t get it. At a very basic level, they will understand that my joke wasn’t for them and that, by extension, perhaps the space isn’t for them either.

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Covering cleavage makes these boys very sad.

Humor has a unique way of cementing group dynamics, and whether it takes place in a schoolyard or a hackathon, it acts in similar ways. As humans, humor provides us with important social cues as to who’s really got the power. Jokes establish hierarchies: If I can make a joke about how you don’t like it when I stare at your tits, and that is an accepted “thing” to joke about, then I’ve got power over you.

Here, I’m acknowledging that I do something sexualized to you that you don’t want me to do, and that I can admit to it without fear of repercussion (it’s just a funny joke). On multiple levels, this denies women agency and sets up female desire as secondary to male desire.

Beyond establishing “who’s in charge,” jokes also normalize behaviors. Sexist jokes normalize—surprise—sexist behavior. In a research study where men were exposed to sexist jokes and then to fictional date-rape scenarios, they were more likely than men who weren’t exposed to sexist jokes to blame the victim of acquaintance rape for being raped. They were also more likely to say that they would behave similarly to the man in the fictional scenario—a measure known as “rape proclivity.”

A culture that’s often chastised for being inhospitable to an entire gender might do well to take basic steps—say, evaluate speaker messages before giving them the stage—to ensure that women don’t feel discriminated against and unwelcome. (TechCrunch has apologized and promised they'll screen speakers in the future.) I get that this app was a joke. I’m just tired of jokes being made at women’s (and their tits') expense.

@kellybourdet