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Comment by samiur1204 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Even though I'm sure Adria has been putting up with tons of real sexism over the years in the tech industry, and that this may have been the figurative straw on the camel's back, this is definitely the wrong thing to focus on. Sex jokes are definitely not necessarily sexist. These guys were perhaps a little crude, and their puns maybe horrible, but they were essentially harmless and at worst, just annoying.

What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria. There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry. Let's focus on that and denigrate those comments, not some random crude comments a couple guys said in private.

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> What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria.

I still believe (hope?) that those horrible things posted are not from the tech community but rather from a few random trolls and groups like militant mens right people.

Not puns - just one pun.

The repo forking was, though informal, a thoroughly unpurient and non-sexual comment that she read meaning into.

She's allowed to be offended with those comments (or single pun), but the method of communicating her offense was definitely not called for.

And honestly, even if it were sexual, it isn't sexist. I think that's a distinction that certainly needs to be made. Calling Adria a c*nt and other horrible things online definitely is sexist though.

Is she?

She published this joke about sexual humiliation from the same conference:

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425

And the company she was envangelising for on that twitter feed thinks that a visual joke about photocopying your genitals is not inappropriate for their jobs pages:

http://i.imgur.com/uWc8P39.png

I understand that speaker and context make all the difference, but she made a joke about sexual humiliation to thousands, and then, at the same conference, got offended by overhearing joke conflating dongles to genitals.

I agree with you that resorting to sexual slurs is immensely counterproductive and makes one look stupid, but I can also understand why angry people would reach for them, since this is in the line of the discussion. Understand, but not excuse.

Still the point stays - you don't make penis jokes and then get offended by penis jokes.

I'm not saying that getting offended is the right response, I'm just saying she has the right to be offended. I get offended by people walking slowly in front of me. They're not doing anything horribly wrong, I'm just annoyed. Again, I understand her being offended, but do not excuse it, as you say.

I'm questioning whether she was offended at all. She certainly has the right, but her actions before and since (ie at previous speaking events, comments on her twitter feed, mishearing an innocent comment as a sexual one) beg the question.

And yes, sadly this is relevant, because, as much as we all have the right to decide when we are offended and not, there will always be people, consciously or not, who will game the system.

And you aren't offended by people who walk slowly in front of you - you are annoyed.

When someone walks too slowly in front of you, they are annoying, not "offensive". You are perfectly with in your rights to be _annoyed_ at them -- but you are _not_ "offended". In order to be offend-ED, some would have to actually _offend_ you, not just annoy you.

Similarly, in this context, I'd disagree: No, saying "dongle" in earshot of someone who tweets about "enhancing" the contents of one's shorts by stuffing socks down them does not give the over-hearer any "right" to be offend-ED, since it obviously isn't anything that this worthy regards as particularly offens-IVE. She obviously claimed the right to _maintain_ that she was offended, but by any sensible definition of the word she actually wasn't.

[Edit:] Duh, that's what I get for replying in a browser tab I opened ages ago -- I see someone said most of that already.

I am offended by the "c*nt" word. I don't mean cunt. I mean literally "c-star-n-t". Louis C.K. explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuLrBLxbLxw

Is insulting a female inherently sexist? I wouldn't call someone a sexist if they called me a dck or a son of a btch. Obviously the response here is sexist, but calling somebody bad names is not sexist, regardless of their gender.

IMHO, sexualized epithets are sexual.

It's more productive not to muddy the waters though: it's not like there are only a handful of ways to insult someone.

I don't know. Some words are just attached to each sex, and that's just a part of language. We don't say waitperson over waiter or waitress. Something that is both attached to a gender and insulting is by no means insulting someone for their gender or insulting a gender overall.

English is definitely one of the least sexualizing languages of the Romance Languages. In French or Spanish, everything would be attached to a gender, but that doesn't mean that the words define the gender themselves. Nobody in Spain thinks that chairs are 'where women belong' or anything like that.

Well, no, we say server, because server is gender-neutral. Compare steward/stewardess with flight attendant. And some servers will get mighty angry if you call them a waitress.

I don't necessarily think that response is justified when no offense is actually meant. But the point is that there has been an identifiable trend in our language towards moving away from gender-specific terms for roles that shouldn't otherwise have a relevance to gender.

I'd argue this movement is overdue for epithets. I think "asshole," "asshat," "assclown," really anything in the venerable ass family, makes for an ideal gender-neutral epithet. We should use these more often!

Edit: typo

That's always seemed an odd quirk of the restaurant industry to me. Server to refer to a person sounds stilted to my ear; a server is a computer to me, but a waiter or a waitress is a person.

So a sincere question: Why would someone be offended to be described as a waitress?

Server is a US thing (maybe AU, NZ too?), we don't use it in the UK.

I find server to refer to a waitress and waiter a really odd term, almost de-humanising but that might just be a cultural difference.

To be entirely honest, I've never heard server used in the US, and a few of my friends are waiters and waitresses.

English is not a romance language. It acquired quite a lot of French words and a few grammar patterns after an unfortunate event in 1066 but remains a distinctly Germanic-family language.

Most of the French grammar bits have been discarded in quotidian speech long ago; how often do you hear the subjunctive voice used in English?

English is distinct from other Germanic languages, though, in the same way. Most European languages of any stripe are gender-heavy while English mostly applies grammatical gender mostly only to vehicles and individual sexually dimorphic animals.

Well, it's not inherently sexist, but in Adria's case we can expect that some of those insults were motivated by misogyny.

As is much of the defence of her behaviour are quite clearly double standards driven by misandry.

>Calling Adria a cnt and other horrible things online definitely is sexist though.*

I'm not sure. We call other people names, "a dick", "a cunt" etc, all the time, including people of our own sex, if we think they deserve it.

So, if Adria deserves the verbal abuse --and judging by what she did, one can easily think she does-- then there's nothing sexist about it (even if the swear words concern sex. Just as when we call a guy a "jerk-off" there's nothing sexist about it).

Or, to be more straightforward, she sexualised the comment.

Repo forking is kid stuff. Back in my day, we fscked and we meant it.

I'm curious - did you consider whether mentioning the name of that filesystem check utility in a public forum might be considered inappropriate? I'm really (honestly) not judging either way, I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?

I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?

Between the anti-authoritarian and cynical writing, the 2002-10 trolling habit (long story; kids, don't fucking troll), the leak of Google's "calibration score" mess, the liberal use of profanity, the knowledge of altered consciousness (looked into doing a startup helping treat addictions w/ binaural beats), the blog post that cost VC-funded startups millions, and the fact that the CEO of a prominent startup made a personal campaign out of ruining my reputation (for, one year ago tomorrow, refusing to perjure myself on his behalf)... I don't think Michael O. Church is worried about saying fsck on the Internet.

Chaotic good FTW. Except for the trolling, which was halfway between chaotic neutral and chaotic stupid.

not to mention piping those tty's...

(I just had to, I'm sorry guys)

You are fired and please leave. Don't tweet about it.

" There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry."

Exactly. Which is why I'm happy this is playing out now, because I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time.

FWIW, PyCon and the PSF have really tried over the last five years or so to consider gender issues and I think they've had a good start – I believe I heard PyCon had women accounting for around 20% (edit: corrected thanks) of total attendance. That's pretty cool considering how much lower the numbers were a decade ago.

It was 20%.

https://twitter.com/doughellmann/status/313319682943905793

thanks for the correction. fixed to reflect your more accurate numbers/not my clearly horked brain's recollection.

I don't think people understand what "sexist" means. There is no prejudice or discrimination based on gender here. Sexist joke would be someone making a joke implying women were inferior programers or belong in the kitchen not at the computer etc. Saying you would like to fuck the hot blonde sitting in front of you is not sexist (just obscene). What the guys at the PyCon said is so out of category of sexist that it's ridiculous.

Besides the larger issue here is should freedom of speech (in the public sphere) include the freedom to offend. One could make a compelling argument that it should.

I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time

I value industry introspection as much as the next person, but these last 24 hours have been actively painful to me.

"these last 24 hours have been actively painful to me."

That's a sign you are doing it right

I don't know if i'm missing something, but I've seen very little introspection in the responses to the situation. The guy who was called out's apology notwithstanding, out seems like there's just been a mass venting of anti-feminist attitudes all around.

I've seen a lot of posts reflecting on the situation, including of course this page on reddit. Certainly it hasn't just been a "mass venting of anti-feminist attitudes", although that's certainly been present too.

Yes. This is what I find horrifying and humiliating. The person experiencing this kind of thing is the best judge of appropriate escalation, but if you think she over-escalated, then stop escalating even further!

And much of the resulting furor has been way, way worse than that. It would have been nice to see the original apology/explanation without any firings involved anywhere.

It'll take someone cleverer than me to think how to bring where we are now to a better place. I'm discouraged about how awfully my colleagues are behaving.

> There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours,

So long those posts get down voted, the community is actually dealing with the bad comments.

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