Carol said:

I do think there are structural things that can be imposed by the Wikimedia Foundation to make reforms happen. (Whether they'll choose the right reforms and the right people to make them happen is a whole 'nother story.) But the purpose of this thread is not to discuss specific reforms, but to focus on the issue of male dominated Wikipedia cliques intent on keeping Wikipedia a place where dominant males don't have to put up with these damned women (or "radical feminist c*nts/tw*ats" in their minds) who keep yammering about making Wikipedia a nice (or even safe!) place to edit. Discussion of some womens' complicity in all this obviously is relevant too.

I'm not certain you've got it right here, Carol. I think the cliques (which, given the overall makeup of the project, are almost always male-dominated) don't want to put up with *anyone*, male or female, that opposes their view. I've seen female-dominated cliques on the project (rare as they are) behave equally appallingly. There are corners of the project where any interloper, regardless of gender, is treated with the back of the hand by the "regulars", whether those regulars are male or female.

A friend of mine recently reminded me of the language of "southern ladies" and how they often use perfectly normal sounding phrases to cut people to the core. (A classic example would be "bless his heart" or, more emphatically, "bless his dear little heart" - which to all the world reads like a slight eye-roll, but is actually properly decoded as "that idiot" or (more emphatically) "that *frickin* idiot".) I've seen a lot of examples of that on Wikipedia, where it's been so obvious that the written word *reads* civilly but is intended as a cutting insult - in my experience, women editors use this method out of proportion to the percentage of women on the project - and in some ways it is an even greater insult because it's hard to persuade others that what look like civil words are being used to convey quite the opposite meaning.

Risker/Anne