Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

...what? How much effort do you put in to finding everything sexist?

This ladybug mounting another ladybug outside my window? Sexually oppressive. The female ladybug should be capable of choosing which position is preferable for her. This pencil in my hand? It's long. Hence a phallic object. Hence sexually intimidating. I am forced to involuntarily hold penises as I write on paper. This mouse under my palm is being raped as it has no matter of choice by which I guide it and its wheel (symbolic of the empowering clitoris, which I voluntarily scroll with) to accomplish my task. It has no say in when I click it or how I click it. Hence I am depriving it of free choice. Hence I am raping it.

Women in tech often are exposed to a culture of subtle denigration. A single incident may not seem like a big deal (and, in fact, isn't), but when it's the eighth one that day...

And she REALLY hurts other women when they have legitimate causes of concern.

Also, she makes ALL men uncomfortable.

And yeah, Adria is what I consider a bad person. Could be male, female, whatever. So, you don't have to apologize either.

Frankly, I think mr-hank should file criminal charges, under VAWA section 2261A on stalking, which states that an individual is guilty of stalking if, with intent to harass or intimidate another person, uses the mail, any interactive computer service or electronic communication service or electronic communication system of interstate commerce, or any other facility of interstate or foreign commerce to engage in a course of conduct that causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to that person.

I think it can be reasonably stated that public shaming is intended to cause emotional distress, and mr-hank suffered damages (job loss) as a result, affecting not just himself but the welfare of his family.

With the addition of the much-touted nondiscrimination clause, the law should apply equally to his situation as it would to a woman under similar circumstances.

http://lovefromkelly.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/life-as-female-d...

It's classy to apologize when you think you've upset someone. And if that's how you're going to sleep at night, apologize.

What's awful at this point is the amount of hatred going around in regards to this situation. Here we have a sane response to an immature situation. Sine then, there is an army of commenters attacking Adria with hate on your behalf (something I know isn't your fault). People are sending Adria pictures of chopped up bodies with threats that she's next. They're asking for her to be raped, or threatening to do it themselves. She's been called every word in the book, with the worst intentions ever.

Seems Adria got her feminist conversation, but not in the way she had intended. There are some really really horrible people out there in internet land.

It's an unfortunate fact that speaking up often has far more downside than upside for women professionally. It's only recently I think that women have had enough status in the tech community to speak up and not be a) blacklisted or b) harassed by whoever they spoke up to. Clearly, this thread demonstrates that lots of people still feel that their ability to say whatever they want, whenever they want, trumps all. It makes me sad, to say the least.

This is a big community, and I hope you find a new job soon. If there's something I can do to help, you can ping me on twitter or gmail.

Sounds like she might get some commercial value of it since she is doing talking engagements. A wave of publicity will surely benefit her.

I suspect you might have a job offer pretty soon as the larger community realized that this was terribly unfair and it was someone taking advantage of a situation to create controversy.

I'm glad you take the time to re-educate those around you. It's probably the hardest thing to do, but ultimately the best way forward for everyone. Maybe I'm overly optimistic on the ability of education though.

What I find really suspect is her feeling like and calling herself a hero. Her reference to herself as "Joan of Arc". Also going public immediately.

I have been, more than once in my previous career, in a situation where a female engineer was actually in a real, abusive situation. I handled these situations "by the book". At one point I was asked by HR if I wanted to know the outcome. Of course I said "NO, but please let me know when she is doing better." I can't imagine feeling like a "hero". These were absolutely terrible experiences for me. I never sought out back slapping. I did seek out re-assurance from my father (also one of these god-awful male engineer chauvinistic pigs), and he was supportive. I can't even imagine going public with something like this. Something just strikes me as completely wrong.

And if you're going to complain about offensive public comments, don't post publicly offensive pictures with racial overtones. Sorry, it is relevant. It demonstrates a double standard.

Perhaps you should try being less insufferable.

The reason why no one should ever give in to this women in tech nonsense is that because the complaints are mostly just a projection of the complainer's own social awkwardness -it is easier to blame other people, and to join causes that attribute your (social) difficulties to things other than yourself. If one complaint is resolved, they will just dream up another -because the content of the complaint is not important to them, it is the act of complaining that sustains them.

At the time the complaint was that they hadn't applied quotas to the presenters which is not the same thing as discrimination.

You mean that they received an insufficiently broad (or overlapping) range of presentation submissions?

Honestly, I wish they were off the table regardless of who is in attendance. They're rarely funny, and they add nothing to the conversation.

I'd say so - but that doesn't answer the harder question: What is a sexual joke? That matter is open to interpretation and that's where public shaming becomes a problem: The individual that's the most easily offended gets to lay the blame.

I fully support her in calling them out publicly. Quietly informing the authorities does little.

It's frustrating to see people justify that context though. I.E.'of course it's different coming from a man' Why? Do we really expect the most equal minded generation of men in history to take the blame for every other generation who wasn't?

Maybe because you're a visitor from reddit.

While I agree with the original commenter that this case is overblown and shouldn't be called out as sexism, it flows from error and a reaction to a real problem. To suggest that we need a "men's rights movement" to counter this sort of error seems absurd. If this is the level of "hardship" that men are facing, they have little to complain about. Men should be more concerned about helping women, who continue to face significant sexism (and harassment) in the workplace at levels far in excess of what is faced by men.

However, I must emphatically and proudly express that I do not support the negation and devaluing of women's (as well as ethnic, [other] cultural, LGBT, etc.) rights by way of reactionary countering with a "men's rights" movement.

One of the most pressing reasons is that such a movement would likely result in a majority of white, heterosexual male adherents (at least here in the US). From a historical perspective alone, males of nearly all notable ethnicity have dominated the world stage in terms of rights, privileges, and power--and white, heterosexual males in particular. This undeniably central component of human history (especially as it leads to Western modernity) is a primary motivator on my part to refrain from supporting an ideological, social, or economic (read: material) crusade that would pose a serious threat to the hard-won and valiantly fought-for progress that has been made in the human condition over the past century+. It could be possible that a notable minority male demographic would join such a movement, but at least in the US, such calls for "men's rights" are typically laden with reactionary white men who feel somewhat despondent at figuring out how to navigate in a world that, at least in words, tries very hard to no longer privilege that genetic inheritance.

More abstractly, a "men's rights" movement would, I think, offer very little gain to humanity as a whole, and would threaten to destabilize and retard the advancement of human rights and greater gender and sexual equality in social relations. This would be a terrible regression to allow to happen. Even when people like Adria raise the red flag in a moment of haste that, I think, will later be reflected on as regrettable, it is still done (I hope) from a position of sincere concern for protecting those who are actual victims of bigoted, discriminatory behaviors.

On this particular issue, I am disheartened to see the fallout from her overreaction, especially as her actions have affected three children, their father, and (assuming she is present) their mother. One woman's dislike of a comment that she mistook for sexist antagonism (or some emotional reaction in the same vein (also: I'm not using 'emotional' in a pejorative sense here)) has now affected five lives. Moreover, in reading her blog post on the subject, it threads through a story of a person who has been hyper-traveling from conference to conference, is exhausted, has already dealt with a person on the same day making a completely inappropriate and objectifying joke/comment that is absolutely inexcusable, and then she basically takes it out on a couple of guys who said something which, given their own statements and the available evidence, bears every indication that she basically went in, guns blazing, to the wrong fight. What is most important is this: the guy who made a comment directly to her about looking under a [table] skirt and finding it "bare, just the way [he] liked it" DID NOT have a picture posted to Twitter and a massive call-to-the-carpet moment. She talked to him. She even told him the comment could be funny in a different venue (her own admission).

The evidence available leaves the distinctly bad taste that the punishment did not fit this crime, while a much more serious issue in which she actually spoke to the offender directly was apparently cause for discussing the comedic appropriateness of a shaved vulva at a tech conference.

Moreover, to go back toward the philosophical end of things, this brief quote from Wikipedia provides a decent enough look at exactly what is meant by the Marxist understanding of gendered disparities in social equality:

>Marxist feminism's foundation is laid by Friedrich Engels in his analysis of gender oppression ... a woman's subordination is not a result of her biological disposition but of social relations, and that men's efforts to achieve their demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties have gradually solidified and become institutionalized in the nuclear family. Through a Marxist historical perspective, Engels analyzes the widespread social phenomena associated with female sexual morality, such as fixation on virginity and sexual purity, incrimination and violent punishment of women who commit adultery, and demands that women be submissive to their husbands. Ultimately, Engels traces these phenomena to the recent development of exclusive male control of private property and the attendant desire to ensure that their inheritance is passed only to their own offspring: chastity and fidelity are rewarded, says Engels, because they guarantee exclusive access to the sexual and reproductive faculty of women possessed by men from the property-owning class.[1]

We are, on even our worst days as a society, nowhere near a state of affairs in which that synopsis can swap the gendered pronouns and hold true.

I hope that provides a bit more context, as well as a decent enough grappling with why, given how much social inequality actually still exists to be eradicated, a "men's rights" movement is nothing that needs to be on the table.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_feminism

Your green name suggests that you're attempting to provoke a response, now you have one. Take your thinly veiled ad hominem attack back to reddit.

what does that giveaway?

how did you unpack "an especially sharp hatred of feminists" from that statement?

Absolutely not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5410463

Please forgive my apparent failure at explaining clearly enough that I was not attempting to draw some sort of straw man argument that "women do it, so it can't be sexist". That's an inherently faulty and pointless line of argumentation (a case of tu quoque, I believe).

My specific contention was this particular case, and only used the examples I did with regard to women as further examples of things that are said "at times and in places that are not appropriate", but are not sexist. They are simply examples of impolite female conversation in certain places/times that shouldn't happen--just as much as similar conversations should not be had by men in inappropriate times/places. That is all.

Wrong.

"Don't be fooled. The Men's Rights subreddit is just thinly veiled misogyny, often with some white supremacy thrown in the mix."

Wrong.

That was the point of the preface (on being transparent)--to make it clear that I, too, fail and trend toward auto-acceptance of charges of sexism (or other discrimination) based on the assumption that if someone is actually offended, there must be something to it and it would be best to be mindful of one's actions (including my own).

I don't intend to foster a double standard, and I don't often experience women being sexist (except when they, too, objectify other men or women in homologous fashion as that for which men are derided).

However, this particular case struck me as having too many exigent circumstances (many of which are recounted by Adria in her blog post) that provide very strong evidence that this was the wrong fight, and the consequences of her actions are both regrettable and deplorable.

I encourage you to read my comment a bit more thoroughly. Maybe read the others I've left here that expound on the issues. There is far more complexity and nuance to my statements than you appear to have absorbed.

I'm neither splitting hairs nor offering diversions. I am also not going out of my way to argue that this was anything other than inappropriate, or to offer some lame, idiotic, dismissive criticism of a woman speaking out against sexism. My specific contention is that this is not an example of sexism. Inappropriate, yes. Sexism, no. I make a big deal about it because it is very valuable to actually be able to differentiate between inappropriate, unprofessional comments and actual sexism.

Pointing out the distinction between an anatomical vs. sexist joke is anything but ridiculous. A sexist joke seeks to find humor in the degradation of a person's gender, be it male, female, or transgendered. Just as a racist joke seeks to poke fun at a person's ethnicity, whatever it may be. Same for homophobic jokes, etc. But a childish comment about a dongle, despite its sexual content, does not equal sexism. Sexism requires the propagation or promotion of bigotry and discriminatory behaviors that increase the gendered inequalities in social relations. Immature comments about phalluses (no matter what gendered person makes them) don't do that. They are but an adult's version of the potty humor that kids exchange about bodily functions and noises. They most certainly are inappropriate in professional settings like conferences, no matter what. But I don't think anyone has even debated that point.

Additionally, I do not offer the "women are sexist, too" tu quoque argument. And my comments on homosexuality were not at all about giving someone a pass. I was, instead, offering the very real possibility that one could overhear a comment between two guys and that it could have a completely different meaning and intention than that which Adria automatically ascribed to the situation, as puerile as the dongle comment was. Still inappropriate for the setting, but I'd bet my gay friends and I would be rightly confused if a man or woman overheard a sexual comment (outside of a professional setting) and tried to allege there was anti-female sexism happening. Context is just as important as content.

I'm not calling Adria out because she spoke up about the inappropriateness of the comments. I'm calling her out because of the way in which she handled the situation, accused the parties involved, and allowed it to become framed as a sexism issue. Beyond that, I am also calling her out for using the CoC to get the issue addressed, while presuming herself to be above the CoC. She draws on it as a way to get immediate response to the issue, but doesn't follow it herself. The CoC has four phone numbers that could have been used to call or send a text for 'especially urgent' issues. I've met and interacted with both Jesse and Jacob at PyCon and other venues, and would bet a large sum that Jacob and the other two people with contact numbers on the CoC would have immediately responded to Adria while Jesse was on stage. Adria chose instead to go the route of making a very public display of the issue, ignoring the CoC completely. The PyCon organizers acted exactly as they promised. The men who offended Adria respected the CoC after violating it and left voluntarily. Only Adria felt compelled to reserve a different course of action for herself.

I encourage you to read my comments further, as well as Adria's own blog post on the matter--in which she describes how she (apparently very calmly) interacted with a guy who made a comment to her about shaved vulvas, and they apparently discussed the comedic appropriateness of that kind of comment at a tech conference. Then she uses that as some sort of lead-up and excuse for why the dongle comment was just too much.

There is an incredible gulf between calmly discussing the inappropriateness and questionable humor of women having hairless pubic areas with a guy in a hallway, and overhearing another guy comment on a dongle in the ballroom and standing up to take 3 pictures, then posting to Twitter. It is also of no help that she greatly exaggerated the forking comment--this from the guy who commented here about making the dongle comment, but denies the forking comment was at all what Adria took it to mean. There is even debate ongoing regarding the veracity of her allegation that there were "sexual" forking comments at all.

The point in all of this is not to dismiss the inappropriateness--hell, I go to great lengths in my comment to actually admit it and call attention to the fact that we all are guilty of inappropriately timed conversation. The problem here is that Adria specifically frames this entire debacle in a sexist frame of reference, in which she applauds herself as the heroine, the Joan of Arc.

It's not a serious issue that causes discomfort at all. At least not for me.

The comments were couched in an over-the-top tone to mirror the over-the-top nature of Adria's response--particularly from the point that she began employing an appeal to emotion in her explanations, and characterizing herself as a Joan of Arc. I staunchly defend everyone's right to be free of actual sexism, be it a man, woman, or transgendered person. And one doesn't need an appeal to emotion if one can properly identify sexism. One only needs to present the facts. The facts here do not warrant the sexism overtones Adria gave to the situation, or the over-the-top reaction.

I was using bra-adjusting (and all the conversational topics) as examples of utterly harmless actions that occur at a time and place that may not be appropriate, comparing them to a similar body-related action--say, me adjusting within view of women, above the table--that, given the situation we're discussing, could potentially result in a trumped up charge of it being more than just an innocuous action that is (or may be) situation-inappropriate. More likely is the fact that it's just stuff that happens because people aren't thinking that someone is analyzing their behaviors that closely and making it a big fucking deal.

I was implying that junk-adjusting is an action we've been socialized into considering inappropriate, whereas bra-adjusting is very similar. It doesn't actually bother anyone. It's just shit people do, that may or may not be appropriate, and nobody needs to be overreacting to that kind of stuff.

Again, I apologize for failing to communicate all that properly without causing confusion and misunderstanding. Honestly, if I'd known that some of those comments were going to incite the "men's rights" derailment--I now know of the existence of r/mensrights, or whatever it is--I'd have been a bit more explicit in mocking the over-the-top tone. Regrettably, I figured that part out after my edit window expired.

Her behaviour - tweeting a photo of a bunch of people and accusing some of those people of sexual harassment - is unacceptable, but let's not make ridiculous comments comparing it to false rape allegations.

The CoC was pretty clear to refrain from offensive language, swearing, and the like. Thus, it was inappropriate by the conference's standards.

[1]: https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/

The reason I opened with a philosophical disclaimer was to make it plain where I was coming from, and that my comments were actually meant to tackle the nuances of the subtler problems with this situation. I wanted people to know my angle and be able to respond, disagree, etc. directly to the philosophical implications. I see it was too much to hope for, but that's what I get for bringing philosophical-historical criticism to a hate fight. It doesn't lessen the importance of actually discussing the point for the wider tech community and society at large.

Being aware of what you're doing in public, particularly at a tech conference that asked you to do otherwise, is an inescapable personal responsibility. What the guys did was wrong--not in an ultimately social or moral sense, but specifically at this venue because of the Code of Conduct.

If we are going to be able to do anything about improving gender disparities in social relations, we must actually understand what that is on a fundamental level.

> A lot of people still associate sexuality with a male/female power imbalance...

When a lot of people make an inaccurate association, it is a signal that a wider discussion needs to be had to educate people on correcting their false associations and improving rationality and understanding. There is a great body of literature both within and outside of philosophy that digs into human relations and power imbalances/struggles. It is a material issue. But the manifestations of interpersonal power struggles in human sexuality are but a symptom, and cannot be viewed through the simplistic and exclusionary lens of being male v. female, because it completely leaves out the parts where sexuality reflects power imbalances like this: male->male, male->female, male->transgender, female->male, female->female, female->transgender, transgender->male, transgender->female, transgender->transgender.

> ...to force your joke on them -- which is exactly what you're doing when you say it loudly -- echoes that imbalance.

You really have to be careful here, because this is just far too wide a net to cast. Overhearing other people's conversations is a part of every day life. When I overhear someone telling a racist joke in the Southeast US, I experience an emotional response somewhere between annoyed and really pissed off. I find it ignorant, bigoted, assholish, and unnecessary, at least. The problem is they are entitled to speak as they please. My reaction is my responsibility. I don't possess a fundamental right to not hear things I don't like. If I did, I'd be constantly telling people not to discuss religion in public.

Let's take that as a nice touchy enough subject that people can get upset over. I'm not religious, and really hate it when I overhear people in a public place--say, a café, bar, or somewhere like that where I'm actually spending a long enough period of time in proximity, trying to do my own thing, while overhearing the content of their conversation. The religion discussion is not being forced on me by virtue of it being loud enough for me to hear. It's only forced on me when, despite my attempts to halt it or escape or whatever, a person is literally talking directly to me about religion as if I wasn't objecting, not allowing me to escape the conversation or physical space.

The same is true for any sort of speech with sexual content. I hear couples, men, women, and transgendered persons discuss sexual matters in public on the regular. It's not forced on me until the point that someone is literally in my space, talking to me about the subject, and ignoring my obvious signals and vocal appeals to stop.

> If you give yourself permission, as a man, to behave in a manner that is insensitive and disrespectful to women, that reflects a certain sense of male privilege -- and that's sexist.

No, that is not sexism, and this is the crux of the issue. Being insensitive and disrespectful to anyone is just being an asshole. Now, it's possible that one's colossal assholery is a product of one actually being sexist, but being an asshole to a woman or a man or a transgendered person is not automagically sexism.

Even 'reflecting a certain sense of male privilege' is not automatic sexism, and primarily because there is not much of a way to objectively determine if an action is indeed a reflection of a sense of male privilege. That is simply a far too amorphous classifier and will just spiral into a series of subjective attacks and defenses.

Sexism is action and speech that inculcates bigotry and discriminatory behaviors, based on a person's gender, seeking to increase gender disparities in social relations. A sexual joke can be insensitive, inappropriate, assholish, or just stupid--but it is not sexism.

The reason this is so important is because we must be able to, as a tech community and society at large, differentiate between the assholes and the sexists. The assholes can and should be ignored. The sexists should not--be they male, female, or transgendered.

More importantly, as I've seen in the whole explosion of vitriol across the internet in the last couple of days, it seems that nobody even knows how to tell the difference. We cannot improve the plight of everyone in tech, including women and transgendered persons, if we cannot tell the difference between an inappropriate sexual comment, and a person perpetrating sexism, misogyny, hate speech, etc. I've read so many tweets and comments from both men and women I would otherwise respect who have essentially participated in a Twitter-based version of that old 'telephone' game, where now this whole debacle is believed by some to be caused by Adria 'speaking up against misogynistic comments at a tech conference'. Why is this a big deal? Because if we can't appropriately communicate what's really at issue, we're never going to solve gender inequalities. We're going to make the workplace a shitty place for all genders, creating a culture of fear, reprisal, and retribution--instead of one that is built on uniting in opposition to bigotry and discrimination when it occurs, and the marginalization of assholes when it does not.

As it is, this is madness. We have a tech community that is now split between a camp who are blindly associating Adria to be a persecuted Joan of Arc, and others who no doubt are very supportive of preventing sexism, misogyny, etc.--but are being vilified as such because they dared to call Adria out for the way she handled the situation, and the way she has improperly contextualized it as a sexism issue. The issue has now been swallowed by a bunch of fucking trolls who are making threats, harrassing people, and should have never gotten involved.

We just lost an excellent opportunity to have a constructive and civil, even if heated, discourse.

Very often with bad behavior, the offender is anonymous and intentional, and the subtext is: "what are you going to do about it?"

Was this so bad? Should she have called out these people in this case? That question misses a larger point.

So many such incidents (and much worse) go unchallenged that I'm happy Adria felt comfortable calling it out and asking the community to stand for the ideals it claims to hold.

There's work left to be done, but we're heading in the right direction.

I just feel in hindsight it would have been better if she gave the PyCon staff a chance to address the matter before posting pictures of people on twitter. It was her right to take a picture of those guys, its the posting before doing anything else that I humbly disagree with.

> Yes, they had an opportunity to defend themselves.

That is to say, they had an opportunity to defend themselves to the PyCon organizers. Who, subsequently, did not kick them out. From what I understand, after discussing the situation and hearing both sides (and, presumably, their apologies), PyCon issued them a warning. At least one individual then left of his own accord.

Where they had no opportunity to defend themselves was against the public shaming (and subsequent outcry) brought about by Adria's twitter post. At least not immediately, and by then the damage was done (I see that later one posted a comment on HN).

Regardless of what the law may or may not say, or whether or not they crossed any lines (and I believe they must have, to at least some degree, for Adria to have felt so strongly about it), Adria really did not give them any opportunity to even apologize, let alone present their side of the story.

Perhaps their jokes were truly indefensible somehow. But it hurts the community when, instead of affording each other some form of due process and making an effort to raise awareness and education, we choose arbitrary scapegoats and pursue vigilante justice.

Please refrain from racist comments.