Dykes do Web standards

I’ve been sitting on this one for ages.

While it is true that scarcely any homosexualists are involved in Web standards, or are even barely competent Web developers, or work as developers anywhere other than Yahoo, meaning I have absolutely no one to talk to at the various gatherings, perhaps it is all because HTML is too linear and structured for these pampered, artistique darlings, who all had such unhappy childhoods that they had to immerse themselves in Art and Fashion to compensate. (Such wonderful sweaters. And such sharply articulated sibilants, detectable with your back turned.)

Fine. It’s hopeless.

But then there’s the dykes! The other white meat!

I know the kids these days are, in my phrase, “all post-queer ’n’ shit,” but dykes who are old enough to hold a driver’s licence really do have a lot of things in common. Sure, go ahead, line up a bunch of exceptions to the rule, but I find them tough-as-nails, unsentimental, unafraid of machinery. They realize the computer does not know they are girls. Neither does the shaft-drive motorcycle.

True to form, staying organized is almost the most important thing in their lives. (Buddy Cole: A lesbian without a project is a menace to society.) They’re like Windows tinkerer-geeks, who secretly cherish the user-hostility of Windows because it gives them something to do on Saturday nights, only with postgraduate degrees and a mouldering resentment of Camille Paglia that they haven’t updated in years. (She’s a mom now, just like you!) I see dykes as an improbably efficient genre of Windows users, battling the operating system as if it were the patriarchy and the revolution were nigh. (I’m sitting here trying to combine the concepts of “Macintosh” and “lesbian,” but I’m not getting any pictures.)

So get these girls building Web sites already!

What are you waiting for, a singing telegram?

• They understand the importance of following rules – exactly the right rules, approved by consensus – and of doing and saying exactly the right thing. Just as you must wait for the facilitatrix to recognize you before you address the support-group meeting, so too must p wait its turn until h1 has closed.
• They want the Web to be inclusive of everyone – the poor, the disabled, even, if need be, non–womyn-born womyn, though that remains controversial within our diverse LGBTTQQI2S* communities.
• Project orientation means they relish the division of tasks in Web development. Think of the role-playing that personas can offer in usability testing. Why, I’ve never wanted to be a man before, but in this case, it really is fun!
• Since Web developers are straight guys most of the time, a dyke development team is a perfect occasion to stick it to the Man. More often than not, he deserves it.

You know how developing countries just skipped landline telephones altogether and went straight to cellular? Let’s just skip the fags altogether (demonstrably inept and too sensitive by half) and sign up a few dykes.

Sisterhood is powerful, and it validates.