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Comment by badclient | Hacker News Reader

It saddens me to know there are people who think the presence of women infringes on their right to make sexist remarks. And that making sexist remarks is such a vital part of their everyday life that hiring women is the unacceptable route.

It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life.

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There's this thing called the reasonable person standard. You should read about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

If you find yourself so embattled with the courts, perhaps you should try and understand the behavior of reasonable people. I have to agree with rayiner -- this sounds like typical male-tech resentment for being called creepy one too many times.

You don't have to be so embattled in courts to be concerned about it. Your comment is equivalent to telling someone concerned about getting raped that getting raped is their fault.

No, it's not.

How is "typical male-tech resentment for being called creepy" functionally any different for the female job candidate?

"No, he's not sexist, he just doesn't like women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just can't talk to women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just has seizures when he sees the color pink, and women are more likely to wear pink."

Who cares? The woman still doesn't get the job.

The excuses are equivalent to a student saying they deserve an A for trying hard and having extenuating circumstances though they can't actually do what they're graded on.

People take "sexist" and "racist" to describe intent. I don't give a s(*& about your intent. It's the effect that's relevant.

Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court). It sounds like you have a problem trusting women not to take you to court rather than a problem with the court system. Which sounds an awful lot like misogyny.

With the way things are going, it is not an irrational or unreasonable fear that something you (as a man or a woman) do/say is going to offend someone (man or woman) and land you in trouble. This has nothing to do with man vs woman. Badclient said nothing of men or women... just "sexist remark". Nor was there any mention of anything that would fall under any reasonable definition of misogyny. Your response only furthers badclient's concern over vague definitions (and to some degree overuse/misuse of words as a means to an end).

To be fair he wrote one line which in the context of the thread could easily be perceived as defending sexist hiring practices. He may not have said "man or woman" but he responded to a comment I made where I described a manager of mine who was fond of making sexist jokes and refused to take women seriously as job candidates.

In his position if I wanted to make a more general point about the court system I would have burned a few more sentences clarifying my point.

It would be really awesome if when people read/hear stuff that can easily be perceived in more than one way... they went with the better choice than the worst one. Not everyone perceives things the same way.. so why always assume they meant it the bad way you perceived it rather than finding out what they meant first? I think a lot of this trouble would go away.

Also, badclient wrote exactly one sentence: It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life. This is a true concern that does not infer anything about which sex did which sexist thing... only that the definition of "sexist" is dangerously vague. If you think that translates to a "hate of all women", you have projected that upon badclient.

If he wasn't responding to my comment then a general comment about the court system is off topic. I didn't bring up the court system. It would be strange for me to assume he is veering off topic rather than commenting on the situation I described.

The comment appears to be in response to you using the phrase "sexist remark"... and it appears that badclient believes there is a problem with that phrase being too vague. In the context of your comment, it was pretty clear to me that this vagueness is of some concern to badclient because that could land a person in trouble one day for doing something that was not an issue the week before. I think the difference that might be tripping you up is that you were speaking of a specific "man violates rights of woman" situation but badclient was talking of a more general "person violates rights of person" situation. Some people like to pretend that this is only a "man violates woman" topic... when really it goes both ways. Of course it is entirely possible that you don't believe it goes both ways... but then you and I would have a totally different issue... one that I'd opt out of discussing.

EDIT: "both ways" should probably be "all ways" since all parties involved could be the same gender.

I included exactly what I was responding to in my original comment in italics.

Wow, you just walked the conversion right into jerk territory.

One shouldn't have to rely excessively on trust or luck just to keep himself/herself out of legal trouble.

> Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court)

Americans seem to like having things escalate. Going to court is the first reaction to everything in stead of asking someone to apologize or talking things out. The incentive for going to court also seems to be very high, you can get large sums of money for small things. Money is the biggest reason people work in the first place.

Is this based on actual court proceedings you've encountered, or the "OMG saying 'hi' will be treated as a sexual advance!" boogyman?

Well, here's a false dichotomy.

I don't know why hiring decisions would be based on gender at all, though, so I don't know why badclient seems to argue for it here. Both men and women can be frivolously litigative.

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