> "Oh my god. what you said was the most important thing that was said all day. Thank you. Thank you."
> most important thing that was said
> most important
How big headed is this person that she thinks her input was more important than that of the person she's claiming to uplift.
However, in reality, I don't think her words empowered the expert speaker at all but simply served as a check on the moderator's exuberance.
Those who actually benefitted were the audience---and we the public who get to see the video afterward. The moderator was handling the situation poorly and needed to allow the expert to speak which is what the audience paid for, and everyone is more interested in hearing.
I think the best panels are where the experts talk amongst themselves, and moderators only serve to derail heated arguments that are consuming the allotted time.
I hate what this PC culture has become. You have to watch yourself so carefully or you will get publicly shamed like this. And if someone over reacts there is no consequence. Its a race to the bottom.
I thought it was pleasant, but soon after we were done with lunch, I got a text from a female friend of mine who was also there: "Prof. So-and-so is a sexist bastard, I am so mad."
I was taken aback, because I'd been sitting right next to both of them, and...what had happened that I'd noticed nothing?
Turns out the professor had ignored my friend the whole time, even though he'd spoken to everyone else there.
Does this make him sexist? He's very liberal, and I'm sure he'd take the side of the women in this thread. Maybe he just didn't remember my friend. There was another woman there he spoke to, at least some. There are a lot of "maybe"s.
But after talking to my friend, what she concluded is, she gets treated differently than the men around her all the time. Any one instance is usually something she can brush off as due to something other than sexism. But taken as a whole, the evidence of being her disproves the null hypothesis that the reason she's being treated differently isn't because of her gender.
And so I think that when you're responding to a particular instance, like this, or like my friend at lunch -- and particularly if you're a man responding to such an instance -- you should try to take a step back. It is perhaps plausible in a particular instance that what happened had nothing to do with anyone's gender. We can imagine all kinds of explanations. And it's likely that whatever happened was not the result of active malice and hatred of women or a particular woman. But that doesn't mean that sexism doesn't exist, or that this is not a datum pointing strongly in the direction of, women are treated differently than men.
So when TFA says, "the sexism is beyond blatant", understand that this is coming from her perspective, which is more valid than that of someone like me who doesn't experience discrimination on the basis of my gender (or anything else, for that matter) on a daily basis. And clearly many people in the audience shared her perspective.
If you don't share her perspective, that's OK. But I think you'd do the women in the world a big favor if you'd just...let it go. "I see it differently." OK. nbd. There's no need to be "infuriated". You will never know what it's like to be another person, so it's expected that you're going to see things differently. WAI, let's move on.
Or, if you don't want to move on, maybe spend some time considering what it might be like to be her.
I think I've probably done this myself many times, and I imagine others do it a lot too.