Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

are we no longer allowed to make jokes about uranus?!?

uranus maybe, not mine

get real, there has never been a planet called 'mine'

myanus

lol wait did she fp them from their jobs

in essence yeah, for the dude who was being dumb

so there is a story about cathy o'neil giving a talk where she's talking about the p-ness of numbers and sort of enjoying the puns a great deal and somebody asks her if she can change the notation, so she says 'how about we replace the p with an a'.

sorry for gumming up the thread with terrible puns.

haha amazing

uranus maybe, not mine

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Wednesday, March 20, 2013 11:39 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But if there were a fur involved, you could joke about uranus ermine

"she reacted the wrong way" is incredibly patronizing argument right

Hm. I guess so. Trying to work out if I have any reason other than hypocrisy to see men policing her emotional response as derailing but still (as a woman and within the same industry fwiw) feel that she should've lodged a complaint some other way.

I mean I do see that without the public tweet and the photo this would not be a viral/teachable moment and maybe those quiet unteachable moments I am apparently so keen on happen every day without me even knowing and what does that even help, etc.

I have to admit my unease in this is partly that there are so many really obvious gender imbalances in IT that making a fuss about a dongle joke will make the stereotypical male coder less interested, not more, in conversation about equality. But I do know there are many things wrong with this thought: 1. who made me, or anyone, universal arbiter of what should or shouldn't be talked about? 2. if anyone takes away from this "bitches can't take a joke", well, fuck them forever anyway; 3. shouldn't people see the little papercuts we get a thousand of every day as well as the big - uh - this sentence is heading dangerously close to a vulval innuendo, reverse, reverse

tl;dr still conflicted, taking everyone's points that my reservations are inherently narcissistic and entitled, but also wondering whether it's OK to express any doubts about anything within that framework

taking everyone's points that my reservations are inherently narcissistic and entitled, but also wondering whether it's OK to express any doubts about anything within that framework

absolutely because the beauty of that framework is that, since you are the most important person in the universe, your doubts have Meaning

i hope ppl can understand how "she should have confronted them directly first / she reacted the wrong way" is incredibly patronizing argument right

― open the blood gates (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, March 20, 2013 11:15 AM (44 minutes ago)

so...she turned around, said something to them, and snapped a picture, all with them knowing. i'd say she confronted them

i mean they were sitting BEHIND her. i think physically turning around and taking their picture counts as a 'confrontation'

she turned around to engage one dude in a conversation related to the conference and the dude who got fired chimed in with gross dick jokes, which led to her taking the picture if I'm reading the order of events correctly

i'm sort of lost as to whether she told them to shut up first or just went straight to picture-taking, but my question is if you're going to gather the (considerable!) courage to take the idiot's picture and post it to twitter, why not just turn around and tell him to shut up first? i mean if i were in the audience near them and she told them to grow up or shut up or whatever, i'd be like "otm", but if she just turned around and snapped a picture i'd be more like "huh, that just happened"

xp

right, i just think there's this unjustified assumption that if she said e.g. "excuse me but your jokes are crude and distracting and are making me uncomfortable, please stop" that the dude would have actually stopped, and further that she was somehow *obliged* to do this first before any other response

right maybe not "obliged" in the formal sense but more, you're an adult, come on

and again the details of what actually happened are a little hazy so who knows

like i am fairly confident in assuming certain that she AT LEAST gave him the stink eye

ha yeah

but more, you're an adult, come on

This is exactly the patronizing part. Why is it on an affected bystander to tell someone who is supposed to be "an adult" in a professional environ to stop being unprofessional/offensive/puerile in the "right" way? Even before starting to unpack the part where she's a woman confronting a man in public.

her account of what happened is here: http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/

afaict the dude who got fired is not disputing this order of events, so right now I believe that she was having a conversation with one dude who made a comment that dumbass then used to make a sexual joke off the phrase "forking the repo"; she broke off the conversation and dude continued making dick jokes about dongles while the speaker onstage was talking about reaching out to young women to get them interested in coding at a young age

not only by telling her to just confront him directly are we making an assumption that it'd do anything, we're ignoring the fact that maybe she's done this in the past, or she wanted to make this a situation more about the tone of the conference than about a particular individual's mediocre judgment. One guy making a comment isn't really an issue, but bringing it to the attention of the conference makes it their call, not her's.

fwiw he claims that "I'd fork his repo" or whatever was not a directly sexual joke but rather a slangy approval, but otoh admits to the dongle thing

and doing it publicly, like I mentioned before, allows others to see how the conference organizers react and keeps the whole thing above the table

fwiw he claims that "I'd fork his repo" or whatever was not a directly sexual joke but rather a slangy approval

it's worth nothing because that is an inherently stupid argument along the lines of saying "*random person or thing* sucks" has nothing to do with oral sex or that saying something is "gay" is unrelated to homosexuality

I didn't make the connection btwn "sucks" and oral sex for a long, long time

sexual innuendo is built into the foundation and structure of the joke, otherwise there wouldn't actually be a joke there but rather someone saying something entirely nonsensical and meaningless

which I mean slang like that does occur but my experience with it has been in the form of taking words like "futon" and making them into general exclamations rather than taking a joke formation explicitly known for having sexual connotations and claiming that your usage of it has none, particularly when the verb you're using sounds like "fuck"

it's like the conversation we (meaning the 8 black students) had to have with another one of my choir directors about how he really needed to stop telling the group that we were being niggardly with dynamics during rehearsals; we're all at Harvard, we all know what the word means and where it came from, but we all also have vocabularies big enough to avoid the appearance of evil and we're undergrads and he was working on a PhD so what was his excuse

See I agree that you can't just expect women as a minority-in-tech to have the confidence (in themselves, or in the frankly unlikely chances of the encounter having the desired result) to turn round and explain their dissatisfaction, so I didn't say or think she should have done that

bringing it to the attention of the conference makes it their call, not hers

OK, this makes sense, because that was all I was thinking of! It would be not just more "polite", which I agree is patronising bullshit policing, but also more accessible to confrontation-averse women who might also think they risked physical escalation if they got their camera out, or that Twitter might not be an instant source of yea-sayers for them

I guess I allowed myself to think that because the men were called up for contravening the harrassment rules the conference's call was already the same as hers, but it would have been too easy to ignore before she made it public

and yes I do prefer this to the argument that expressing any doubts about anyone else's actions is entitled and patronising (which it is, and I would do well to remember that more, but it's also what we're all doing here, whichever "side" anyone's on)

Having doubts about anyone's actions in any scenario ever is not nec patronizing. Making it an ish that a person in a non-priviliged group didn't do a thing the same way a privileged person would have, or thinks they would have, is the problem.

fwiw here's the conference's official statement regarding the matter:

http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappropriate.html

Lol at the comment

i don't understand why 'don't be an asshole' is such a difficult rule for tech bros to follow. YET IT SEEMS TO BE.

Growing up developing electronics rather than social skills, a computer won't tell you you are being an asshole. You need to hear that stuff.

I'm glad I was raised by ILX and not some other message board. who knows what sort of jackassery I'd be committing right now.

btw I got off on the wrong foot w/this because whatever I read first made me think two guys were having a private moronic conversation between friends, not that tweeter + guy 1 were having a perfectly civil conversation when guy 2 started his "huh huh, dicks" routine at both of them and then wouldn't shut up when she signalled her dissatisfaction. when I read this later I was like "well that changes things a bit" when I should actually have thought "well that changes things completely"

also DJP's comment re egos was totally OTM but it pushed a button re something unrelated I've been thinking abt lately plus the implied "unlike some other people here" before "I try very hard not to let my ego make me into a raging dick" rubbed me the wrong way so I apologise for going off on that conflated w/ elmo's "patronising" comment

going to sign up for lessons on not letting my ego make me into a raging dick in future

our jackassery is cheeky and witty xp

btw spacecadet, it's not that it was "harassment" as much as talking like that is inappropriate and contributes to a hostile environment. No one was specifically targeted, as far as I can tell nobody made any comments specifically because they were sitting near someone who might be offended.

haha I am so sorry, I was going for an implied "despite what my behavior would lead you to believe"!

can we please stop saying "raging dick"

haha

DJP don't be sorry, that and your post about expectations of privacy were useful new perspectives on things which had been bothering me lately (or, how I began to realise that howling daily on the IA thread about other people's behaviour is a sign that I need to check my own ego and also calm the hell down)

mh, it's not that after 15 years as an ugly shy woman in the IT industry I have never felt fucking sick of the all-lads-together banter and the big "you don't belong here" flags it puts up but unable to say so: I do totally get that nobody needs to be specifically targeted to feel excluded by that stuff. but I also think you probably don't need to spend very long at a programming conference to hear something worse than dongle jokes, and while it would be great if even the dongle jokes didn't exist, if it had been a private conversation (which it wasn't) I think that would have been a completely different case, yes

obviously there are levels, like of course a "private conversation" of rape jokes behind a woman should still be called out, and no I don't know where I'd draw the line

^ otm font

firing them is obv total overreaction.

The correct pronunciation is "AWESOME overreaction", I think you'll find.

*checks*

no

but dmac a guy who wasn't an internet feminist lost his job

sorry that was dickish. anyway the weight of the evidence seems to support my original assumption that taking a picture of the idiot was kind of weird

thanks for not putting me on this thread everyone

Wait til you see how much fun the ones about gender politics are.

or the ones where white straighties offer us their moral rubric on hiv disclosure

We have all of the fun here on the internet.