If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Kill Yourself

Allow me to respond to your points:

A) she doesn't pretend to speak as a programmer

B) her stuff is not generic PR & marketing, it's about user engagement and results in concrete recommendations about the business of building software, AND

C) she cites psychological research, not marketing handbooks (she's pretty damn current too, the lady does her homework)

D) she doesn't name drop or publicity whore, podcast, screencast, chum up to people for photos or videos, or write product reviews (unlike Scobl

E) she actually made her career with the invention of the redonkulously succcessful Head First book series, and that is why she is paid to speak -- tech books sell like ass... except hers (and Missing Manual, another O'Reilly line)

F) Her talks are a bit repetitive, but I wasn't aware that giving the same talk (slightly updated) a few different times was reason for death threats to be acceptable.

Would I have reacted in the same manner?

No, but then again, I'm not Kathy Sierra, I am a 24-year-old girl who grew up online, and don't even have a hamster to worry about much less a teenaged daughter.

I simply cannot fathom the ridiculousness of accusing Kathy of "vapid self-promotion" (totally unfounded) and basically suggesting that she was asking for it.

It has "socially disabled adolescent boy" written all over it. Just like the original "griefing" and threats.

I think a lot of the nastiness will fade away, and we'll have a lot more pragmatic disagreements, and fewer mean-spirited, petty ones.

Disagreement over bailout plans and solutions to economic problems is healthy. Impeaching a president over personal behavior (as caddish and comdemnable as that personal behavior was) is not good for the country.

I don't drink, don't party, most likely will never like casual sex. But I know people who do, and they like it well enough.

I upvoted you here, since you're not being inflammatory and you're contributing to a discussion, but I also think you're wrong. Society is changing. Social attitudes towards sex never stay the same from generation to generation. It's each individual's choice to participate, though, and that individual freedom matters.

(1) What does that have to do with casual sex?

(2) Why do you think that that is new?

I'm willing to believe that you do think that. One of my points is that it doesn't actually happen. (Another is that your "since 1980s" claims are completely wrong.) Self-delusion is one of the most important human impulses and I'm not suggesting that you should change yours.

You do know that the 100th monkey story was just that, a story, right? That thing about Tinkerbelle also doesn't happen.

That's something every movement has done. Thinking musically, there've been "fake rockers" and "fake punkers" and "fake rappers". In high school society there are the poser cheerleaders and the poser emo kids and the poser writers and on and on.

Hipsters mock everything. For every hipster I know, there's a great deal of cutting conversations. When I first met the group of hipsters I eventually friended, in sophomore year, I got insulted constantly and told to shut the fuck up after essentially everything I said, because I wasn't "saying the right things." Hipsters tend to always have the most comfortable niche of friends. The group I'm referring to has remained the exact same since 8th grade, adding a few people and losing practically nobody. I became "part of the group" my senior year; now I'm sitting in class next to one of those kids, and I'll likely keep in touch for a long, long time. Hipsterism is founded on diversity of interest and wit, and once those people find each other it's hard to separate them. On the flip side of that, it means they're very unwilling to expand their group, because it takes a very particular sort of person. And because their method of conversation is constantly nitpicking and criticizing, it comes across as mockery pretty easily.

"Doing what you want to do" has limitations, as does everything. It's okay to say that you cried when you read the diary of Anne Frank. It's not okay to be against homosexuality; that implies a closed mind. It's okay to be religious, not okay to be preachy about it. You can't be boring; you can't be tasteless. Taste is the tricky thing. You're allowed to be awkward, or act different from what's expected - you can cry, for instance - but you can't like bands that demonstrate tastelessness in music. (Pachebel and Nickleback are both bad.) You can't like bad movies (Plan 9 is allowed, because it's fun to watch, Mac & Me is great, but Epic Movie is a no). And while in a lot of groups taste is semi-required, in hipsterism it's all that matters.

That kinda rambled, so a summary: any hipster group is going to be closed to most outsiders, but the hipster scene is allowed to be nice and sensitive, which is a good thing.

The problem is that a lot of fakester hipsters exist, too, and it's kind of hard to tell which is which. A former friend of mine falls into the latter scene: he deliberately avoids popular music to seem edgy, insults people just to sound insulting, and wears odd clothing for no reason. The general rule of law is that if you call yourself hipster, you aren't. The people I'd call hipsters are all defined by how unhipster they are. They avoid the cliché of hipsterism. That's the point of the whole movement: you're supposed to just be yourself and do what you want, and the minute you start following trends just to be hip, you aren't. So there's where some of the mockery comes from. It's kind of like how the punks were all passionate, but their music all sounded very different. The "punk" sound really isn't. It's a washed-up, generic rip-off that ignores the rule of "be yourself." Hipsterism works the same way: the more generic it sounds, the less hip it is; the movement is about avoiding a generic center.

Seriously though, your observation is totally cultural and most certainly doesn't apply in the Bay Area. There's no real stigma against casual sex here and since there is a 10:1 male to female ratio, the women are totally in control. Women here have the luxury of figuring out exactly what combination of dick size, personality, paycheck and hairdo they like. The men, rather than being predatory cads, are reduced to fretting over whether or not they should get a tattoo or an $80 t-shirt in hopes of maybe possibly (probably not) attracting the attention of a google PM.

It destroys a lot of men emotionally, as well. It's just not healthy for anyone. The detached "alpha male" is an anachronism in civilized society, and the terms for those with strong alpha tendencies are "psychopath", "narcissist", and (for women) "nymphomaniac". Psychopaths (of both genders) can do it without emotional harm to themselves, and there's a much wider pool of people who are in denial about the emotional consequences... but the rest of us aren't built for that type of "relationship".

So, in truth, there are people who can have casual sex without being "destroyed", but they're rare and usually not very likeable. Most men I know who have had one-night stands regret them.

The broader issue with casual sex has nothing to do with the immediate emotional effects, but with the long-term consequences. It establishes bad emotional and physical habits, but it also makes people less desirable as marriage partners, and most people want the option, at least, to get settle down and get married one day. Most people are fine with "premarital" sex, given that we're a generation that tends to marry very late, but casual sex is an unspoken divide among young people today. We have about 40% of the population-- a relatively stable proportion across levels of socioeconomic status and education-- going off and doing this in their teens and 20s, expecting there to be no consequences because birth control "solved that". (Riiight.) Then we have a "silent majority" of about 60% who have never had casual sex, see no reason to respect it, and consider such experiences distasteful and extremely undesirable in future marriage partners. My observation is that nearly all of the marriageable women are in the latter category, and that men who have lots of casual sex in their 20s end up settling down with second-rate women when they're looking to get married. True ladies don't want to have anything to do with them. (Sorry, but it has to be said.) These are the later-in-life consequences for men who have casual sex; for women, they're probably worse.