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Comment by arien | Hacker News Reader

This is slowly getting out of hand. I would even dare to speak of censorship.

Who cares what a random girl in a video is doing? Was she forced to appear in there? Then what's the problem? It's not even "fucking gross", it's just a couple of people giggling around being silly!

I'm a girl and never felt objectified by bosses/colleagues in the tech world, nor suffered any kind of sexism. But maybe it's because I never cared for it. I did my job and was respected for it, just like everybody else. In this century YOU are responsible for the way you present yourself to others and that's how you will be judged. They will respect you (or not) because of what you do, how you do it, how professional you are, what you accomplish.... regardless of what you are.

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How do you dare speak in such a sensible and understanding manner? Why don't you talk about the times where you met a jerk at your workplace and he was a jerk, and you were offended, so now every workplace ought to be filled with men full of lust because they are geeks so they have poor social skills (funny, cliches about geeks in the office are OK !). Anyway this is, of course, a joke and some of the things I have found in previous threads.

But seriously thank you for saying what other women in the office where I have been working in the past have said: there is generally no problem. I don't know where the people I have read were working, but seriously, if it's that horrible, switch jobs.

And about the thing getting out of hand, this is the internet, people circle jerk problems ad nauseum, and Hacker News is not an exception.

Sexism is a subset of stupidity and a great deal of the latter is shown here.

"I'm a girl and never felt objectified by bosses/colleagues in the tech world, nor suffered any kind of sexism."

I can tell. How sad that you should use you lucky position to blast those who have, rather than showing women that it doesn't have to be that way.

Nice insinuation that those of us unlucky enough to have been on the receiving end of sexism are not working hard enough to earn respect... sigh. Sisterhood, eh?

A customer or random stranger saying they think your content is inappropriate does not even begin to approach censorship. Censorship is a related topic of discussion, but nothing resembling it is happening here.

She is asking the video to be taken down, not merely pointing that it's inappropriate -> "I don't like it, take it down".

I'm just talking censorship because it's the nth thing of this kind I've seen this week alone and I'm starting to see a dangerous trend. Apologies if it looked a bit out of place, should have added a better explanation of what I meant.

> I'm a girl and never felt objectified by bosses/colleagues in the tech world, nor suffered any kind of sexism.

Many others have, though, and you shouldn't dismiss their experiences because you were fairly lucky.

I don't think you have a good working definition of censorship. There is no authority figure here, and no one is being silenced; what's happening is people speaking up about things that make them feel hurt, threatened, and alienated. This is how things work in a free society.

It's great for that you've never felt subject to sexism. (Says in your profile you're in the UK, might have something to do with it-- I don't know if you've read anything about the political climate here in the States, it's a little actively hostile towards women right now.) But I'm afraid what you're saying is wishful thinking. The fact of the matter is some people are assholes, and it's quite possible to do your job well and still not be respected, and in our industry that falls much, much heavier on women.

There are fewer women in tech today than thirty years ago. We have a real problem, and ignoring it isn't helping anything.

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