Richard Stallman (RMS) gave a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in July 2009 in which he described "EMACS virgins" as "women who have never used EMACS" and said that it was a sacred duty to "relieve them of their virginity". This was one in a run of Sexualized presentations that have plagued Technical conferences throughout the year. It is also an example of negative assumptions on women's sexuality, and the idea that virginity is something to be ashamed of.

RMS emailed the GNOME Foundation and GNOME Women mailing lists on Nov 15, 2009 acknowledging that the incident had occurred, that people were discontented with the reference to women, but insisting that it was a just a misunderstanding. The email stated that since August, the skit has been altered:

Misunderstanding is not a good outcome. To help avoid misunderstandings of this kind in the future, since August I have changed the joke so that the Virgin of Emacs can be of either sex.

Initial criticism and supporting documentation

David Lefty Schlesinger posted about this in a blog entry A Good GCDS Beginning (with a significant disappointment):

[Stallman defined] "EMACS virgins" as "women who had not been introduced to EMACS" along with the advice that "relieving them of their virginity" was some sort of sacred duty for members of "The Church of EMACS".

One commenter noted that the routine is a regular part of Stallman's talks but that the singling out of women as 'EMACS virgins' was new. Matthew Garrett has provided a transcript of a previous similar presentation by Richard at RMS and virgins:

"Then if you become a hacker you can celebrate that by having a foobar mitzvah, a ceremony in which the new hacker stands in front of the assembled congregation of hackers and chants through the lines of the system source code. And we also have the cult of the virgin of emacs. The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act."

A few days later Lefty emailed Richard expressing his concerns, and blogged the ensuing conversation. His original email included:

"Your remarks gave the distinct impression that you view women as being in particular need of technical assistance (presumably by men, since there's apparently no such thing as a _male_ "EMACS virgin"); additionally, women are quite capable of making their own decisions about who might relieve them of whatever sort of “virginity”. I (and many others) viewed these remarks as denigrating and demeaning to women, as well as completely out of place at what is, in essence, a technical conference."

The response claimed that the comments about women were intended as humour, and that the complainant was misunderstanding the joke. Richard refused to offer an apology.

"I do not believe I owe anyone an apology. I did not insult or attack them, but it is clear some people are attacking me. I think I am being criticized unjustly criticized, and I feel I have been wronged."

However, most of the response was about the Church of St IGNUtius and its potential offensiveness to religious people, which was just one of the issues Lefty was trying to raise. Lefty emailed again, reiterating the other points. Richard's response was that he had already dealt with them -- which he had not.

Responses to this blog post have focused on Richard's right to email privacy -- an example of Derailment -- rather than the original issue:

"Does RMS think all source code should be free, or his private e-mails as well??"

"Have exactly the same question. Any further discussion of political correctness is pointless before this question is answered, as you cannot seriously request polical correctness without respecting it yourself. Sounds fishy."

Video recordings of many of the talks at the summit are available at http://www.geeksoc.org/gcds/, but as of 24 July 2009, Richard's keynote is not available.

Stallman's statement

In November 2009, Richard posted a non-apology to the GNOME Foundation and GNOME Women mailing lists, "For avoidance of misunderstandings", which read in part:

"Some of the people in the audience in my speech in the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit thought that my joke about the Virgin of Emacs was intended to make some kind of statement about women... it was a misunderstanding: the only intended meaning of the Cult of the Virgin of Emacs is to parody another Cult of the Virgin... To be abundantly clear, my views about women in connection with free software are simply that they deserve freedom in using computers, just as men do..."

Excuses

Discussion of the incident became heated both in Lefty's blog comments and on other blogs. Many people tried to excuse RMS's behaviour. Some of the excuses include:

Silencing tactics

Some silencing tactics have also been tried against his critics that don't so much excuse RMS as suggest that his critics should shut up:

Responses