The problem here isn't misogyny. The problem is the impact that the unreality of the Internet has on people's psychology, and what happens when Internet psychology crashes into cold, hard reality.

There are two events being "discussed" here: the alleged incident of sexual battery at ApacheCon, and the Internet's reaction to the report of the incident. Both are, to my eyes, shot through with Internet-thinking.

I can give you a pie-eyed exegesis of how the rapid-fire 140-character "we're all Interfriends" no-harm no-foul if - it's - easy - to - and - nobody - catches - fire - it - must - be - ok mentality might have led to some idiot allegedly assaulting a peer at a conference, but you can probably see those arguments coming a mile away.

But this article isn't mostly about the actual incident; it's motivated more by how the Internet responded to the incident. And the Internet handled this incident the same way the Internet handles everything else: the same way it handles an iPhone bug. So you've got people talking about "innocent until proven guilty full stop" (note: you are not in the real world trustworthy until proven untrustworthy), and other people saying "she wasn't actually injured so what's the big deal" (note: of the places I would not want to be locked up for sexual battery, Georgia tops the list).

But they're not really talking about gender politics. They're nerds, trying to fit a complicated event into their mental models, which models demand consistency and transparency and rigidity. It's just difficult for the nerdal cortex to process the idea that rather than laying out an irrefutable case in front of a court of law, the victim of sexual aggression can use other tools available to them to retaliate, deter future offenders, and reestablish a zone of control over themselves.

You saw exactly the same mentality over the Reiser trial. "How can you be convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence?!" (answer: very easily). "Juries just don't understand Aspergers!" "His best friend is a serial killer!" The nerdal cortex tries to absorb these stimuli and turn it into a graph structure that can be traversed for answers, but no matter what the model is, at the end of the day, Reiser led the police to the body and confessed to the crime. Reality is inescapable, even when the graph isn't fully connected.

I wouldn't read this most recent story as an example of how geeks discriminate against women (though: they do), but I would look at it as another cautionary tale about how reliable the conventional wisdom of geekery is.