Ladies on twitter explain to @atlassian that men can not be "pretty"

THIS JUST IN: MEN CAN NOT BE "PRETTY" - so I have been fooled all these years when I've longingly let my eyes linger on the pretty men I've seen. Where did I learn this fact that men can not be pretty? In this here tweet from @atlassian which caused ladies all over twitter to frown at them for using the word "pretty" to describe a server.

I am confused now. Men can't be pretty. David Letterman shouldn't have called Sandra Bullock a handsome woman either then I suppose, but he did and she is a handsome woman.
Synonyms to "pretty", the adjective, are all non-gendered terms: nice - handsome - beautiful - fine - lovely - fair - but this matters not as the tweet-fight rages on. It's official, this old lady over here is confused. If you want my feminist cred come get it, I'll leave it out on the porch together with my badge. I thought we should worry about topless body painted booth babes at tech-meetups, not the word pretty. I suddenly feel really bad for all the writers out there. Watch your steps.

The problem isn't so much the word pretty, as the prom-date suggestion. If you build a server that looks good, apparently you will want to show it off at the prom. You can't be seen at the prom with something (or someone) that doesn't look good. My servers were ugly as sin but they had nice CPU's inside. I'd take them to the prom.

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kidsleepy's picture

I wonder, what do ladies think of, say, the French, Spanish, Portuguese languages which attach feminine and masculine aspects to inanimate objects. In French, un stylo for "a pen," is masculine, while une table for "a table," is feminine. How dare all these languages apply their arbitrary gender roles to such objects??!

Out of all the shit you could be complaining about, out of everything wrong with the world, this is what they complain about.

Dabitch's picture

Remember Geeklist? The Geeklist demo on how to destroy a budding startup brand image in just a few tweets.. That was different from calling a server ("it") pretty. I've seen some damn pretty code in my day, and by that I mean what the word means, attractive in a delicate way without being beautiful. I''ve also seen some bastard ugly code and beautiful code and some very handsome shortcuts in code. ;)

AnonymousCoward's picture

"Misplaced twitter outrage causes storm in teacup on twitter" should have been the headline.

AndyMcDowell's picture

@Shanley has "pretty" in her domain, describing a machine prettylittlestatemachine.com. Is this like when rappers get to use the N-word but nobody else should?

Adland's picture

THIS JUST IN: Servers now have sexual orientation.

[View the story "responses to \u200f@atlassian" on Storify]