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Comment by tracedddd | Hacker News Reader

Behavior like this is extremely common in the security community, and not even just towards women. Unfortunately many people in the industry are essentially socially maligned outcasts and fail to see how inappropriate it is to use this same behavior towards strangers, especially women, at a conference. It’s not a hacker IRC channel with people you’ve known for a decade who appreciate low effort dark humor, it’s sexual harassment.

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In aforementioned hacker IRC channel there is probably at least context or knowledge that they're just screwing around with the double meaning of pentesting. I see it pretty commonly with any combination of genders, including m/m anal-related somewhat tasteless jokes.

In this case it was led with something akin to aww are you lost? where is your boyfriend?, which already provides really shitty harassment context. There's also a pretty large difference when you're in a chill groupchat compared to _representing your employer at a conference_

> context or knowledge that they're just screwing around with the double meaning of pentesting.

Can we just like - stop that though? We're not in middle school anymore and it's not particularly funny of a joke.

Statements made to break the ice and provide a more social environment are fine for easing technical discussions - especially when introverts are so common in our field - but there are legions of other topics in the security research field that can yield rich soil for merriment.

I do not know how extremely common it is.

I am in the industry for 25 years and have participated (and in the vast majority of cases - spoken) at many conferences. I have never seen it happening.

I am an average man and met other average men and women at the conferences and it was like any other meetings: sometimes interesting, lots of chit-chat, lots of boring people etc.

I never saw anyone harass others - my experience is in Europe, the US and a bunch of conferences in Asia.

I have also regrettably not witnessed the executive orgies everyone talks about, despite having been at all the right after parties.

This DOES NOT mean that it does not exist - the case in the article is an example of assholes who statistically exist in all populations who should have been told to fuck off by someone around. And shove their sense of humor in a dark place of their body.

I am just kindly challenging the extremely common part.

From your side, you are right, and hearing it spoken of when you do not see it could make a person question the narrative.

Just to say though, it seems probable to me that 99% of twenty-something women in the industry will have a misogynistic experience to recount. Perspective is relative.

I do not question the narrative, I hope I made it clear in my comment.

What I question is how common it is in the security world (compared, say, to the filmmaking industry, or rugby, or mining). Being for a variety of reasons quite sensitive to this topic, I just said that I have not witnessed it so far.

I think these sorts of groups tend to pretty naturally self-censor and filter when not dealing with victims. If we were at a conference and you were talking about some intrusion and described it as a "piercing attack" - I might crack a joke about it being a shame you didn't have any huscarls around on defense... that joke would probably not land that well so I'd just shift my communication to a different domain to suit the audience. I'd imagine clumps of folks that enjoy bawdy jokes will occasionally test the waters with a light one on what they view as their peers (i.e. men) and if they get a poor response they'll shift tactics - only if you feed into their reference will they open up and start being horrible around you.

The person in question, for reasons unknown to us (perhaps peer pressure), also decided to perpetuate this kind of comedy with clothing that read "When was the last time you were penetrated?" It seems quite unfair to expect to dish out this kind of comedy without taking some of it back.

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