Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

You're just mad cause your stroganoff is wack

stroganoff
to live without you

harder better faster stroganoff

idk I'm pretty proud of my stroganoff

I mean, what the hell

okay I can't believe this shit (signed, someone who married his college sweetheart)

http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/01/pf/princeton-mom-women/index.html?hpt=hp_t5

Patton’s parents, too, were unenthusiastic about her time in the Ivy League—something she previously wrote about in 2006 for the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Elaborating on the phone, Patton explained:

“My parents were both survivors of concentration camps, and all they wanted for me was to marry. Ideally they wanted me to marry a butcher, because then there would always be meat on the table. The thought of their unmarried daughter leaving home before marriage was a disgrace to them. So I applied to Princeton as an emancipated minor, I paid for it myself, and I went away to college against my parents’ wishes. And it cost me dearly and still does.

oy

huh, I wonder if perhaps her own experience isn't a good start to giving out generalized advice

Patton, who graduated from Princeton in 1977 and went on to run an executive coaching business in New York City, said she spent most of her twenties focused on her professional life. At 30, she married a man who did not go to Princeton.

She wrote that "ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn't as smart as you." The couple recently divorced.

Ouch.

everything about that article is headdesk material and by the end I genuinely feel like she has been punishing herself for things that sound like they weren't even under her control

seems like a lot of inadvertent airing of dirty laundry, frankly.

if you're frustrated because you think your partner isn't as smart as you i'd suggest you're not as smart as you think

Hardly a fair appraisal of the situation.

cap'n save-a-ivy

yeah no one needs to ever defend Princeton

agreed

more followup to the Adria Richards situation: http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/04/how_to_get_a_black_woman_fired_in_six_tired_steps.html

I liked this take a lot: http://plasticbag.org/archives/2013/03/on-being-grown-ups-about-childish-behaviour

I mean, to the point that the polarization of opinions is ridiculous. No judgment on the appropriateness of anything, these days, from my corner.

That post is six kinds of condescending bullshit. And I'm just gonna start with "a vanishingly small proportion of people under fifty who would be legitimately offended by a big dongle joke." Oh, excuse me? I'm in the wrong place then, I must have taken a wrong turn back on OPPOSITE DAY ON BIZARRO WORLD.

We seem to have approached a point where any actual sensible discussion of questions raised by this situation is borderline impossible.

Oh but thank goodness, here is someone to set us straight by taking the middle road. Because a slavish devotion to being the "reasonable center" has never led to anything bad, in fact it shows you take the issues seriously! Why get sucked into being mad about the issues when this nice high perch is available, and so comfortable!

These are both ridiculous positions! These are insane positions! These are totally irrational positions!

No, one of these is a completely reasonable position if you don't agree that dick jokes are or should be the common currency of adult humor in the public sphere, and the other one is misogyny.

yeah basically that dude sucks and, despite his protestations, is pulling a false equivalency that minimizes the severity of what happened to Adria Richards

whatever your opinion of Adria Richards' actions, the blowback that she got from it, including getting blamed for that dude's company firing him and receiving death/rape threats and getting fired, was wholly out of proportion from any perceived bad behavior on her part (pro-tip tho: there was no bad behavior on her part; someone being irritating to you doesn't automagically make them wrong)

I mean, how come no one went after the company of the dude who got fired? Presumably they're the ones who actually terminated his employment, not Adria, so why were Adria and her employer targeted and why are people still openly reveling in the schadenfreude that a braying racist, sexist mob bullied both her company into terminating her employment and the conference into changing their code of conduct explicitly to show disapproval of her?

I filed my paperwork and called the hospital and did 4 loads of laundry and cleaned house and took a nap and woke up to THIS? Why are you trying to ruin my day? Is my feeling.

Not you, Dan.

I think theirs is the comparison he is making between "two arguments"' although it may not be clear:

The arguments now appear to be that either Adria fucked up and for this reason she deserved to get rape threats, or that since she got rape threats she cannot possibly have fucked up.

His own opinion of overreaction isn't what I was really interested in, but sure, these can also be seen as strawmen and detract from the original situation's importance. But really, at this point, hearing from others or encouraging other people to share their experiences should be the focus, and not the micro-analyzing of this one situation, which really is a lot less polarizing than I think it's drawn into.

however casual your workplace is, it's still a place of business regardless of the industry, and really about the only industries I can think of that might be able to make a case for people not being offended by constant dick jokes are comedy and porn, and even there you've got a contextual component that can't be handwaved (you probably shouldn't expect the porn company's accountant to have to put up with sexual innuendo, for example)

the entire argument of "it wasn't sexist, it was sexual" is monumentally stupid because any sensible person is NOT GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT SEX AT WORK BECAUSE YOU COULD GET FIRED FOR THAT SHIT

But really, at this point, hearing from others or encouraging other people to share their experiences should be the focus, and not the micro-analyzing of this one situation, which really is a lot less polarizing than I think it's drawn into.

what exactly is the incentive for anyone to share their experiences with this type of thing beyond attracting the attention of a mob of sexist, racist dicks?

idk, I apologize, I briefly read it and Tom is generally a voice of some reason, but this apparently isn't his finest hour

something about this whole thing just feels so "SEE, I TOLD YOU WE SHOULDN'T LET GIRLS IN THE TREEHOUSE!"

Because even sexist, racist dicks might eventually catch on that this is a common experience and can't be written off as one person's opinion?

i think the hysteria in response to Richards is interesting since it's basically a response to the fact by tweeting the photo she effectively re-contextualized what was happening--or put differently she made manifest the implicit misogyny of such jokes.

this freaks people out because it raises the possibility of being held accountable to contexts that they didn't choose for themselves. it would be not unlike putting pictures of war atrocities in the middle east on the handles of gas pumps, or approaching every person with a macbook and describing the working conditions of the chinese workers who made them.

the idea that you, yes even you, are complicit in forms of oppression is one most people will instinctively and even quite violently reject.

Now that it's a week later, I can't find it, but there was a twitter hashtag going of anecdotes that was excellent, and while there was some noise from the idiot crowd, it was overall a positive thing. I mean, as positive as people sharing bad experiences can be.

Ryan, you're right in that making the jump from a sexist comment labeling an individual a sexist (which is usually less than useful in the purposes of conversation) is something that gets violent rejection. I think the knee-jerk thing here is that the original incident had sexual comments, but not necessarily sexist comments. The problem is that there's a group that refuses to acknowledge that this was a female-hostile space, or at least one in which women would very obviously feel their minority status in the room, and any sexualized comment, even if not obliquely sexist, would affirm the majority's standing.

Acknowledging social or institutional sexism is something I struggle at some days, and I'd guess a fair portion of the most idiotic-sounding people haven't even heard of the concept.

Their outrage is somewhat along the same lines as the complaints of racists/sexists/homophobes who feel that any moves legal or otherwise that limit discrimination are somehow also limiting liberty because it's no longer socially or legally acceptable to act in an offensive manner.

xp I don't know that's quite right - you can't really argue that atrocities and terrible working conditions aren't happening, you can just argue your distance from them / they would happen anyway. Whereas with this you can go straight for "lol she can't take a joke" and carry on with your day.

even just saying "i am offended by that" will get an eye-roll usually at best. in a utopian society these sorts of exchanges would go both ways (in that both people have to take account of both subjective experiences of the situation) but in what orbit calls the "public sphere" and more generally the historical, structural, and institutional prevalence of sexism the context is there before either of the conversants are. that has to be continually accounted for and certainly requires a great deal of humility for those in positions of privilege. but it's not that hard in the end: just listen, be accommodating, and generously take account of the unaccountability of another person's subjective experience and you'll be in the clear 99% of the time.

you're right andrew--not an exact equivalent.

judging from a presentation I attended last week, "a great deal of humility" is still in short supply in the developer community, regardless of topic. urgh.

what was the makeup like at pycon vs. say other conferences?

i also think behind some of this there's a bit of mourning of the old boy's club ideal in which common ground (and thus inclusion) is founded things that are rather superficial (having a penis, being heterosexual, being white, being rich)--in place of the ease of such interactions we are forced to account for others in a way that seems to be approaching radical individuality (hence the continued subdivisions of personal identity and concomitant things to take offense at, even the emerging "subjecthood" of animals). this can be precarious since language and group identity are often founded on logics of implicit exclusion.

language is a system of difference iirc, words are defined by their unlikeness from other words.

yep--and we're approaching (or have arrived at) a point at which we become "accountable" for the distinctions or differences we can't help but employ.

language is a system of difference iirc, words are defined by their unlikeness from other words.

nah, we changed our minds about that like 20 years ago. now we define words by how funny they sound.

pro-tip tho: there was no bad behavior on her part

I still don't think it's okay to take a deliberate and direct photograph of someone without their permission.

the possibility of being held accountable to contexts that they didn't choose for themselves is a very disturbing thing, you're right. This can mean several different things, of course.

I wonder if people got as upset about having their picture taken back before everybody had a goddamn camera they were walking around with.

and said cameras couldn't beam pictures they'd just taken across the globe wirelessly and without cost or hassle

It's really only "disturbing" when the message is taken from a context in which the speaker is powerful, and put into a context in which they are less powerful or more equal to others, because it shows what assumptions they were making for and about their audience.

You could, I guess, argue the logical but unpleasant scenario of taking a pic of a woman in a place where she was comfortable and showing it to a bunch of ppl who would then be able to judge her and disempower her but uh that's pretty much every day irl just so you know.

I still don't think it's okay to take a deliberate and direct photograph of someone without their permission.

this is still and will remain an entirely bullshit argument whose only practical effect is to explicitly or implicitly advance the idea that she deserved the response she got, which included rape threats, death threats, name-calling (including racist slurs) and receiving sole blame/credit for some other company that she has no direct connection to deciding to fire an employee who was being an unprofessional jackass while wearing their logo.

agreed

esp since taking photos of ppl without their permission is, like, how journalism happens.

"I still think it's wrong to get caught in the act of doing something wrong".

I still think it's wrong to get caught in the act of doing something dongle.