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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

He called one business partner a "rich girl", he called another one a "poor girl" and seemed exasperated that his company has to keep buying gifts for its "brides". He continued with ridiculous and derisive statements that insult nearly everyone in the industry, especially key customers. This is not about "honesty" - it's about not being the most mean-spirited, bitter, vapid, hateful VP you could imagine.

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It is about honesty. This is the language that people use at the bar discussing this stuff. This happens in all verticals, and all fields.

It just never gets recorded.

Honestly displaying misogyny seems like it should be discouraged.

I don't see the misogyny, and if I would have heard that at the bar I would have clearly understood what his analogy was meaning.

I wouldn't have even noticed it. I'd never have used the terms he used, but I don't have any real issue with the way it was framed.

I find it odd that would be the thing to pick out within the statements, but perhaps I'm not as sensitive to the language as I should be?

Edit: I can't seem to reply to a level deep, so I will put some remarks here.

Re: over - In my view it was just an analogy, and had no deep insight into the views of marriage. Just my impressions

Re: th0ma5 - Boys doesn't have any negative connotation, but I understand the point you're making. I don't have much to add except that I didn't read it as anything other than an analogy.

Re: zepto - I keep saying bar because that's often where you'll hear this sort of language, but it isn't limited there. I respect your views that it isn't appropriate, and again, I would never use that language to explain it.

But I don't take offense to it. Again, perhaps I should. I may not be as enlightened as I should be.

I think the misogyny claim is because the analogy portrays the choice between a rich woman and poor woman as obviously being in favor of the rich woman, and on top of that it characterizes the poor woman as needy and annoying. Further, he says girl instead of woman. And so basically he ridicules the entire point of marriage which is to commit to your equal life partner, not end up with the best deal, the best girl/wife-object to be purchased. And in doing this he's also denigrating the two competing companies.

But then again, it does reflect a lot of marriage decisions, particularly in high society, so it's probably appropriate. This is actually what happens when personal life starts to look like business life. So probably... better not to be so brazen about it because it's a bit chauvinistic. Honesty isn't always the best policy, sometimes you have to consider people's feelings and reactions.

No, it may be a common thing for boys to not be sensitive to language, sure, and all kinds of boys in business will simply not see misogyny hardly at all.

If you flip the genders, is it misandry?

You keep saying that it would be ok to speak this way at a bar, as if anything that is said at a bar is automatically to be encouraged. That seems like a strange attitude. All kinds of demeaning attitudes are expressed at bars.

Sure. But I think the distinction in view is that, in a bar, what's said is always off the record.

The problem comes when an executive is speaking on the record in the way he would speak off the record.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

yeah but, airing your dirty laundry in front of an audience? i and most non-sociopaths wouldn't even do that on an inter-personal level, i don't know why people here are lamenting that you shouldn't do it for business relationships.

IMO, the only questionable statement he made is the following:

“The government was not happy with us not bidding that, because they bent over backwards to lean the field to our advantage,”

This is a serious accusation (corruption) and shouldn't be taken lightly and the upper management has every right to fire him for that. Other than that, it's just a harmless case of "drunk words/sober thoughts".

> This is not about "honesty" - it's about not being the most mean-spirited, bitter, vapid, hateful VP you could imagine.

I think the point is that they're all like that, or at least a lot of them. This guy isn't any more of an asshole than anyone else in his position is likely to be. He's not more honest, either--laudable honesty lies in telling the truth even when you know it could hurt you, and it sounds like he somehow honestly hadn't realized that. He's just stupider, or at least more tone-deaf. (Or possibly drunk/high/otherwise impaired. It's hard to imagine a man getting as far as he did without developing a solid understanding of when you're expected to lie.)

Is that you Tony Bruno? Should we fetch you some smelling salts as you fell on to your fainting chair?

Reading the neo-Puritan hypocrite comments here is entertaining.

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