Why I have stopped reading The Register
Oct. 28th, 2013 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sesquipedalityBack in the late '90s/early 2000's, The Register popped up as a breath of fresh air, with its irreverent reporting of IT and technology news. Today, after 15 years of using it a as a news source, I have removed it from my feed reader. I don't think it's likely to return, unless there is a major change of culture.
I'd been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with El Reg's approach to news stories for a while. I found their inexplicable fascination with amateur rocketry to be dull, but I'm not going to be interested in everything published on a news site, so that's OK. What was less than OK was that they named their rocket project LOHAN, and every headline became a stupid sneering sexual innuendo about Lindsay Lohan.
Then there was the fact that as an IT news site, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to report on a women getting out her breasts on Italian TV.
Today, finally, they posted an article about the difficulties of women having a career in IT, and illustrated it with this.
Yes, that's a picture of a woman in a very tight T-shirt, cropped so that only her breasts are visible.
Let's just let that sink home for a moment. They illustrated an article about the difficulties of being a woman in IT with an image that reduces a woman to a pair of breasts.
I no longer have any hope that El Reg is even capable of understanding what the problem is. I'm no longer a woman in IT, but I still retain an interest in the field. But I won't condone, even tangentially, this kind of chauvinist bullshit any longer. So I'm no longer reading El Reg either.
I'd been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with El Reg's approach to news stories for a while. I found their inexplicable fascination with amateur rocketry to be dull, but I'm not going to be interested in everything published on a news site, so that's OK. What was less than OK was that they named their rocket project LOHAN, and every headline became a stupid sneering sexual innuendo about Lindsay Lohan.
Then there was the fact that as an IT news site, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to report on a women getting out her breasts on Italian TV.
Today, finally, they posted an article about the difficulties of women having a career in IT, and illustrated it with this.
Yes, that's a picture of a woman in a very tight T-shirt, cropped so that only her breasts are visible.
Let's just let that sink home for a moment. They illustrated an article about the difficulties of being a woman in IT with an image that reduces a woman to a pair of breasts.
I no longer have any hope that El Reg is even capable of understanding what the problem is. I'm no longer a woman in IT, but I still retain an interest in the field. But I won't condone, even tangentially, this kind of chauvinist bullshit any longer. So I'm no longer reading El Reg either.
