Violet Blue: What happened with my Security BSides talk | Hacker News Reader

Violet Blue: What happened with my Security BSides talk

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28 pointsrdl18 comments

I originally was 100% pitchfork-of-Ada-Initiative (which I in theory support; selfishly I'd really like there to be more women in technology, since that would make hiring people in technology easier by increasing the supply.)

I didn't realize her talk title/abstract hadn't been published until an hour before the event. I assumed Valerie Aurora (Henson) (who is one of the directors of Ada, and was attending the conference) chose to wait until the last minute to make the complaint, for maximal lulz, but I guess that didn't happen.

I sat through this talk (at least one which was 90% similar) at BSidesLV; it was great, and educational, and pretty focused on harm reduction.

I think a key element is that BSides isn't a "tech conference"; it's specifically a hacker conference for all the talks which are inappropriate for the main conference going on at the time (i.e. RSA, a very corporate event) -- basically the same as Defcon Skytalks. It was way more drug focused than sex focused, too, and essentially a medical/safety talk about behavior people have, how to deal with it, etc. I mean, I've never shot up heroin and had gay sex, and have zero plans to do so, but it's useful to know why (for instance) needle exchange programs are helpful, and why outreach to some of these communities should be done in different ways than to the general population.

I wouldn't consider this an appropriate talk for RSA or even for the main track at a local security con, but BSides is different.

I agree it wasn't government censorship, but it was someone using an organization with an overall mission I support (involving women in technology) to push another more personal agenda, so now I don't support that organization.

It looks like some people are forming alternative organizations to focus on the inclusive parts of what I thought was Ada Initiative's mission (dealing harassment at cons, educational outreach, etc.), so I guess I (and presumably sponsors) will shift toward those. I don't think I'd speak at an event which was as beholden to Ada Initiative as BSidesSF appears to be, though.

It would be nice if all the parties involved would talk to each other directly to get a better understanding of the miscommunication. It would help for a better outcome of future situations like this.

I don't know all the background, and I don't want to end up victim blaming, but often I've found these things to be red flags:

I do remember there was some drama involving her and BoingBoing a few years back. I do not remember all the details at the moment, but I do remember feeling as if it seemed like the situation was twisted to put herself in the spotlight. So with that in mind, when I saw "I reported on corruption at Wikipedia, so be sure to read the unbiased and accurate Violet Blue bio here." little alarm bells went off.

I'm admitting I don't know the whole situation, and I'm not saying Wikipedia is an infallibly unbiased source, but the fact that the main tag on one's blog has to point seems really odd to me.

The article came off as reasonable and well written, as I feel her other blog posts were back when I do vaguely remember the BoingBoing drama, but I'm glad the other comment is on here, to get both sides of the story. It does portray the talk organizer in a negative and reactionary light that I don't know is reasonable.

I think it's clear in this case Violet Blue isn't a cause or direct antecedent of drama, regardless of her history.

Her post above, to me, sounds like she was basically talking to a middleman who didn't convey the message from the Ada Initiative in a manner as nuanced as they would. I really really don't think they meant to say as simplistic "is there any rape we can't have rape". But the "drama" around this started before she made the post above showing the details of her side of the situation.

Yeah, I do agree, and I hope my first post tried to make that clear - I just have seen a trend with some dramatic bloggers in the past, so it often clouds my view when reading an unrelated/less biased post.

It is reasonable for her to be upset about it, and it does seem as if it was handled poorly, but I guess ultimately it was the conference's call.

The conference is getting pilloried within the security community (and other organizers of BSides conferences), it seems, although that may just be that the loudest voices are the most opposed to what happened. BSidesLV extended an open invitation for her to speak (again), and made it clear they'd never bar someone for a talk like this.

At the same time it would also suck if the response to censorship were hostile to women or whatever.

I think the people actually running this event decided it was a threat they had to cave to, but the organization they're part of put a pretty face on it. Why would people organizing a hacker conference be ideologically okay with censorship of thoughtcrime?

From the Ada Initiative response[1]:

"Simply put, even the world’s most pro-woman, sex-positive, pro-consent talk about sex is likely to have negative effects on women at a technical conference."

This seems like an incredibly accurate, well-reasoned, and thoroughly consequentialist view of the situation. It's supported by an overwhelming majority of objective evidence[2][3][4][5][6].

It is already being attacked as "against hacker culture," because apparently "hacker culture" is synonymous with "propagate any and all information regardless of the social consequences." Sharing information openly and freely is generally a good thing, because it generally leads to good results. But that's no reason to continue to senselessly spread information that will almost certainly lead to bad things.

To head off the inevitable argument about "censorship" and "freedom of speech," I'll note that nobody here was censored, nor denied freedom of speech. One group used their freedom of speech to convince another group hosting a conference to exercise its freedom of speech and not endorse a talk they were apparently convinced was harmful. Freedom of speech doesn't permit you the use of any platform as your own. My freedom of speech doesn't entitle me to writing the Washington Post's front page headline (or getting any space in the paper at all).

It looks like the organizers were right not to allow this talk to be given at their conference, and I for one applaud them for that, even though they'll inevitably be subject to backlash.

[1] http://adainitiative.org/2013/02/keeping-it-on-topic-the-pro...

[2] http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/30/1/59.short

[3] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-006-9140-x....

[4] That swimsuit becomes you: sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of personality and social psychology [0022-3514] Fredrickson yr:1998 vol:75 iss:1 pg:269

[5] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FB%3ASERS.00000323....

[6] http://www.sanchezlab.com/pdfs/FredricksonRoberts.pdf

Still a dick move.

Thanks for linking to the Ada Initiative reply. After reading that, I agree with you (and them) that this talk was likely to result in more sexual objectification and technology-skill-dismissing of the female attendees, in today's society.

It would be better if we lived in the society where you could talk about sex at technical conferences without making the women there feel threatened or objectified because no-one would threaten or objectify them as a result of the talk, but we aren't in that world yet.

Does anyone know if it's normal to keep the title/content of talks TBD until that soon before the talk? That stood out as odd to me.

I think it is just that she's procrastinating a lot (which I'm also doing for a conference tomorrow). It wasn't intentional.

She has a few talks on slightly edgy topics which she gives at different venues. The "hackers and suicide" one from CCC was probably more interesting, but that was just delivered 2 months ago to a largely overlapping audience.

I wonder what would have happened if that was the talk to be cancelled? That's a triggery topic regardless of gender.

IMO it should be about cost/benefit.

I'd never put a Bond Girl in my talk (I might have at one point, but now I'm convinced it's slightly offensive); there's no reason. A Lena photo for an image processing talk, maybe, because that's essentially the standard.

However, I'd be fine with a talk about sex, drugs, rape, suicide, etc., if it served a purpose. It has to be in the right venue, and I think BSides actually is a good venue for a lot of those topics (or CCC, or HAL/HIP/etc., or parts of Defcon, or Hope, but not RSA). It should be disclosed up front, and ideally way in advance.

It doesn't make anybody feel singled out though. People affected by suicide and depression are much less visible of a population, and I think they'd be a lot less likely to have negative experiences at the conference as a direct consequence of the talk. If anything, that's a topic that doesn't get enough exposure. Sex does.

I agree that this is odd, and I think it is the reason this thing was a problem in the first place. It was decided months ago that she would speak at this conference, according to Violet Blue's blog post. They are both aware of the focus of her work and it makes sense that an organizer of this conference would want to know the specifics her talk in advance. It seems like a mistake for them to have not settled it sooner.

> It's supported by an overwhelming majority of objective evidence[2][3][4][5][6].

Can you summarize the evidence more verbosely? Only 1 of those 5 references could be easily followed (1 broken, 2 for-pay, 1 no link). I couldn't find evidence for your claim in the one working publication and it kind of goes against common sense.

It should be pretty easy to figure out my email address, email me and I can send you the pdfs if you want.

In a nutshell, internalized objectification is a cognitive process (like everything else), and it consumes mental resources. When these cognitions are made accessible by dressing participants in revealing clothing (swimsuits in most of these studies), those participants perform reliably worse on a wide array of cognitive tasks (arithmetic, simple logic, various other tasks that have been previously used in cognitive psychology literature) than participants in less revealing clothing (usually sweaters).

Basically, if a woman is thinking "I look fat in this swimsuit," she is taking mental resources away from every other process.

Common sense is not a reliable indicator of reality. Many things (general relativity, quantum physics, Milgram's obedience experiments, the representativeness heuristic, the conjunction fallacy, etc.) contradict common sense. If you prefer common sense to empirical science you will be reliably wrong on a wide array of things. I would urge you to banish the phrase "common sense" from your mind if possible.

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