If someone speaks up to tell another human being that what they are saying is offending them, they're going out of the comfort zone of a shared public space to express their opinion. It's not an easy thing to do, and it should carry some weight. If this guy continues telling sexually offensive jokes after being asked not to, it doesn't make him a misogynist, in the same way that continuing to tell uncomfortable chicken jokes in the presence of the chicken-adverse doesn't make him anti-poultry. It just makes him an _asshole_. Public spaces are about trying to find a common ground among a diverse group of people, and it's the reason we as strangers usually just fidget and talk about the weather to one another.

I see this case as two people and two companies who acted like children and both lost their jobs and look bad in the community, respectively. Some unfunny man made a joke to his co-worker because he thought it might have eased the social tension that comes from traveling, lodging, and attending a conference with another person over so many hours. An overzealous woman took offense to an overhead comment and saw it more constructive to bring attention to the public conversation that happens on twitter rather than the public conversation happening in that room because it was a more comfortable way to make sense of how she felt.

We're humans and we naturally want to surround ourselves with people who think, act, joke, argue with, and support other people like we do. It's pretty easy to never have to deal with groups we don't agree with on the internet. It's the reason swarms of misogynists got together on the internet to hate Adria and say she represented all the other women that they hate, and to call her awful names and issue a DDOS attack against her parent company.

Both of these companies looked past the human error in all of this, and enforced their zero-tolerance policies, and just fired both of them. This whole thing is a big deal because the other people we align ourselves with and allow to represent us (be it as employees, or pythonistas, or dirtbag misogynists) are making it really hard to connect on personal levels, and really easy to generalize and dehumanize issues into meaningless black or white distinctions.