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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Tits in slides make a sexist environments. Blonde jokes make sexist environments. Groping makes sexist environments. Light innuendo does not create sexist environments.

This woman publicly humiliated someone and lost them their job for doing absolutely nothing wrong. That is fucked up.

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(nit-pick) There's a difference between sexist and sexualized.

FWIW, I'm not sure where I fall on all of this – but my hunch says there's a bunch to be unhappy about all around. Having said that, I'll throw this out:

In my experience, men (I am one) tend to be more okay with a small amount of sexualization in conversation. Women tend not to be. (extreme generalization, but a real distinction, I believe).

Say what you will about which is right or wrong, but I think that the important point is the general difference between the way men and women see things. That difference is real, regardless what any one of us would want one side or the other to be.

So, the question becomes, how do we deal with it and how do we minimize conflict?

I believe your observation is correct. I'll also throw out a possible reason for women being less okay with sexualisation in conversation: We're the target or object of sexualisation far more often than men are, and sometimes in quite threatening contexts. If you keep getting exposed to something in a negative context, you stop liking even fairly mild occurrences of it. (I'm sure a black person hearing even quite mildly racist jokes will be more annoyed than a white person would, because they are usually the target of these jokes.)

"I'll also throw out a possible reason for women being less okay with sexualisation in conversation: We're the target or object of sexualisation far more often than men are"

Okay, but how does this apply to a "dongle" joke? If the joke referred to female anatomy rather than male, would it have been more offensive or less (to someone in Adria's position)?

I dunno if you're right about the difference between men and women. I do know that there's a difference between a professional and a non-professional environment. If you're talking about sexy stuff in a professional environment where you don't really know all the people within earshot, at the very least you're exhibiting some fairly poor judgment. And, at worst, you might be making some of the strangers around you very uncomfortable.

Nah fuck that I'm going to treat men and women exactly the same.

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