Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software was originally written as an invited contribution to the Human to Human issue of XRDS: Crossroads, the Association of Computing Machinery’s student magazine. After a series of presentations on diversity-friendly software, it seemed like an exciting opportunity to bring broaden awareness among budding computer scientists of important topics that are generally overlooked both in university courses and the industry.
Alas, things didn’t work out that way.
Overriding the objections of the student editors, and despite agreeing that the quality of the work was high and the ideas were interesting, the ACM refused to publish the article. The ACM employees involved were all professional and respectful, and agreed on the importance of diversity. Still, due to concerns about discussions of sex and sexuality offending ACM subscribers and members, they would not even consider publishing a revised version.
The CHI paper What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing (authored by Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and me) explores some of the underlying institutional and sociopolitical problems this episode and others involved in editing the Human to Human issue highlights, and proposes starting points for future action for HCI-related research and academic publishing practices.
This revised version of Sex pleasure, and diversity-friendly software is written as a companion piece to What’s at Issue. After a brief background section, it includes extended (and lightly-edited) excerpts from the earlier version of the article, and my reflections on the experience and the opportunities it highlights for software engineering. An appendix includes a brief overview of diversity-friendly software along with links to more detailed discussions.