Comment by georgeorwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgeorwell | Hacker News Reader

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What is indecent is that Adria Richards completely invented the bit about forking being a sexual reference ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681 ), escalated her discomfort to the level of internet drama, got her employer SendGrid to support her, and didn't exactly go out of her way to petition PlayHaven to unfire one of the two guys involved. And she's now sticking to her guns even after profusive apologies from the offenders. All she had to do was turn around and ask the guys to stop making sex jokes.

This will blow over, the guy will get a new job, but my god, it's a pretty serious defect if an immature joke about penises overheard in public can get you fired.

The best thing to do is let SendGrid and PlayHaven know your thoughts:

http://sendgrid.com/contact.html

http://www.playhaven.com/contact

The only hope I have for a positive outcome here is for either company to step in and try to clean up the mess. If they don't, I'd recommend avoiding both of them. Someone that stands up for public humiliation is not somebody you want to work with.

Related submissions about this story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399065

The outcome I'd want to see is for both companies and Adria Richards to apologize.

I would want him to be offered his job back (but I hope he gets better offers and I wouldn't be shocked if he hasn't already. I would certainly call him up for an interview).

If public humiliation is the new modus operandi, then it seems it is a double edged sword. I think her reputation is forever tarnished.

Maybe she had good intentions (but the more I look at the situation, and her penis reference later, less likely it seems) but her execution and decision making cost a father of 3 kids to lose his job, and his face is all over Twitter.

She was a no-name before this. I had never heard of her. Have you? Now she at the top of everyone's lips. She does talking engagements and advocacy. Well you connect the dots yourself.

My impression is that Adria Richards is not that kind of a person to apologize.

mine to, i also get the impression she is one to overreact and then justify her actions later.

Come on, she's a women... it is in her nature to overreact :-)

This, unlike the statements made by the two gentlemen at PyCon, is plainly sexism...

Well, to be honest, I hope that the fight for feminism hasn't gone so far as to mandate that "there are no psychological and behavioral differences between men and women at all" be taught as The One Truth.

You have to appreciate the irony of punishing my sexist joke in this specific thread.

(I do anyway)

Its not irony because the incident discussed here isn't sexism, its attention whoring. What you said was blatant.

Agreed, I flagged it.

This remark is unacceptable and harmful

This isn't reddit.

Agreed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5414269

I'm waiting for the T-shirts about Forking and dongles to come out. This is going to be a meme now.

Also, April 1st is around the corner. It would be classic if github removed the "fork" button in response to it being offensive.

The repo they use for demos at GitHub says something like "fork? fork you!"

You write:

> All she had to do was turn around and ask the guys to stop making sex jokes.

But I think one of the important points here is that women should not NEED to turn around and ask the guys to stop making sex jokes. The need to ask (or resign oneself to putting up with the hostile environment) is itself a burden. Would it be acceptable to make "dumb nigger" jokes as long as anytime an African American asks you to stop you stop making the jokes while they're in the room?

I am not arguing that they WERE making sex jokes, or that it rose to the level of a firing offense, just that "she could have asked us to stop" is not a good argument. In fact, they WERE asked to stop (or rather, not to start), by the organizers of PyCon before the conference ever started. That is exactly what PyCon's non-harassment policy is about.

Can't we please advance women's rights without criminalizing sexuality by likening it to a racist hate crime? And also can we stop advocating this notion that women are delicate flowers whose fragile ears need to be protected from any mention of sex whatsoever?

As stated by others, sex jokes are not necessarily sexist jokes.

> I am not arguing that they WERE making sex jokes, or that it rose to the level of a firing offense, just that "she could have asked us to stop" is not a good argument.

What was the appropriate response, then? I honestly think assertive and honest feedback is often the most effective way to curb unwanted behavior.

> But I think one of the important points here is that women should not NEED to turn around and ask the guys to stop making sex jokes.

Most of the time they don't. We're talking about exception handling, here. Just because a situation is less than ideal (i.e. two guys making phallic jokes at a conference) does not automatically validate a DEFCON 4 response.

Tweeting a picture isn't a DEFCON 4 response. I don't really think that it's that problematic- they were breaking the rules of the conference that they had agreed to, and calling someone out publicly is a very common method of enforcing social norms. It's not necessarily the most nuanced or feel-good method, but it's not like they had an expectation of privacy while in a crowded convention room. The overreaction here came from the guy's company, and we really don't know the whole story there.

>Tweeting a picture isn't a DEFCON 4 response.

Agree to disagree. Short of legal action or physical violence, extra-public shaming (Twitter) is about as escalated a response as I can think of.

Sex jokes are not hate speech.

How do you not recognize you're conflating two entirely different things here?

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