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Once upon a time there was a fellow who had a presentation to give at a tech conference. He planned to talk about code and databases. He thought it would be a good idea to make his presentation interesting, since his topics were a bit of a yawn. He decided it would grab attention and be funny if he interspersed images of women in pornographic poses among his slides of code and bullet points. It did grab attention. But it wasn't funny. That fellow was Matt Aimonetti. The tech conference was the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. The presentation opens with this image: 
Here's the full presentation: CouchDB: Perform like a pr0n star. I suggest you look through the slides and form an opinion of your own before reading on. It is enlightening to read the comments following the presentation, too. There weren't many women in the audience, but there were women in the audience. This was a national conference, not a gathering of teenager boys in a smelly upstairs bedroom. The women in the audience found the slides objectionable. Quite a few of the men in the audience did, too. The first comments about the presentation, naturally, appeared on Twitter. Use the hashtag #gogaruco if you'd like to read through them all. Notable among those tweets was this one by dhh: 
Who is dhh? The creator of Ruby on Rails! 
Yes, the creator of Ruby on Rails thought it was funny. He wasn't the only male who defended the presentation as edgy and funny and appropriate. Rails activist Mike Gunderloy didn't agree. In fact, in A Painful Decision, he said,
There has been some discussion in recent days in the Rails community about appropriate conference presentations, whether women feel welcome in the Rails community, and related issues. I don’t intend to review the entire mess here - you can find it if you want it. For what it’s worth, I think the original presentation was an inappropriate and regrettable mistake. However, far more disturbing to me are the reactions to the discussion on the part of some of the Rails community. . . . But unfortunately for me, in parallel to the public discussion there have been private ones. I can’t reveal details without breaking confidences, but suffice it to say that a significant number of Rails core contributors - with leadership (if that’s the right word) from DHH - apparently feel that being unwelcoming and “edgy” is not just acceptable, but laudable. The difference between their opinions and mine is so severe that I cannot in good conscience remain a public spokesman for Rails. So, effective immediately, I’m resigning my position with the Rails Activists.
Aimee, a Rails programmer herself, writes at A little place of calm. Here's part of her reaction in Distressing times for the Rails community.
Unexpected pornography at a professional conference surprises me, shocks me a little. I wonder whether Matt Aimonetti, at any point during the preparation of that presentation, thought "This is likely to offend some people", and if so, whether Matt decided not to care. The refusal of some Rails representatives to even acknowledge that there is a problem angers me.
Aimee's comments seem relevant to an article by Raina Kelley in Newsweek called Generation Me.
Perhaps, one day, we will say that the recession saved us from a parenting ethos that churns out ego-addled spoiled brats. And though it is too soon to tell if our economic free fall will cure America of its sense of economic privilege, it has made it much harder to get the money together to give our kids six-figure sweet-16 parties and plastic surgery for graduation presents, all in the name of "self esteem." And that's a good thing, because as Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell point out in their excellent book "The Narcissism Epidemic," released last week, we've built up the confidence of our kids, but in that process, we've created a generation of hot-house flowers puffed with a disproportionate sense of self-worth (the definition of narcissism) and without the resiliency skills they need when Mommy and Daddy can't fix something.
I extrapolate from this discussion of a narcissism disorder among a percentage of generation me to mean that perhaps a certain breed of geek thinks that his opinions are universal and no one could possibly be offended by what he finds funny. The Rails community
