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.
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.
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.
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.
It's more productive not to muddy the waters though: it's not like there are only a handful of ways to insult someone.
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.
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
So a sincere question: Why would someone be offended to be described as a waitress?
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.
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.
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).