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Comment by bitops | Hacker News Reader

49 pointsbitops23 comments

I agree with everything Khadijah says, and I agree with all the people who thought TitStare was offensive and that Pax Dickinson is a bit of an asshole. But I just can't agree with the wording.

> Pax: "’misogyny’ is ‘hatred of women’. It is not misogyny to tell a sexist joke, or to fail to take a woman seriously, or to enjoy boobies."

> Khadijah: "This did not jibe with the definition of misogyny I have lived with for my adult life. Sexist jokes, not taking women seriously and making an app to surreptitiously stare at my “boobies” all fall squarely within that definition."

I'm sorry, but that just means that you've been living with the wrong definition of misogyny for all your adult life. It is not a synonym for sexism and it never was.

It worries me that so many people feel the need to not just denounce events like this, but also seem to be in a competition to denounce them with the strongest moral disapprobation possible. If you strip away the context, you'd be excused for thinking people are talking about the holocaust. In the end, what words will we have left to describe to describe actual misogynists, racists and other pathological characters?

I kind of had the same thought when I read his comments. Crude, rude and crass, but not misogyny by the dictionary definition and I think his detractors weaken their argument that by using it. Unfortunately the word has evolved in meaning for certain people (as words do).

Now when words like "literally" evolve to mean "figuratively" (I literally died!) it is relatively unimportant but when such emotional trigger words have different meanings for people then it gets complicated.

I agree sexist jokes(they are jokes FFS not meant to be taken seriously) and enjoying boobs does not constitute misogyny if that were true all men who ever stared at a woman breasts would be misogynists.

Ignoring people on the other hand is a bit rude and in the gray area.

Sexist jokes and ignoring your co workers is not appropriate for a work environment however.

Staring at breast on the other hand... We're men FFS we can't help it get use to it already.

I know I sound like a broken record, and I don't want to derail discussion of what is a great post... but just watch this post disappear from the front page.

Every time gender is so much as mentioned on Hacker News, it is immediately flagged off the site. The community's lack of courage to even discuss these issues is pretty depressing.

A recurring problem with these articles is how emotionally charged they usually are. Indeed, this very story starts with calling the guy in question a 'dick'. Sure, he's a dick, but at least don't start out like that... just don't say the word 'dick', it's highly unprofessional. IT has a subset of men who feel they were unfairly treated by women when they were younger, when they approach the problems of women not being fully welcome in the IT industry, they approach it with the baggage they've been carrying for a long time. So it's best to approach these incidents with great care and delicacy, to avoid having these stories inevitably be oriented in a men-vs.-women frame. This article is not written with any considerable thought or care to solve problems, that's why I flagged it.

Lack of courage to even discuss? An article about gender or sexism in tech is on the front page of HN every day or two, and always results in over a hundred comments.

If anything, writing an article about gender-based discrimination seems to be one of the easiest ways to get an item to get noticed on HN. Only privacy issues seem to be more discussed lately.

The community's lack of courage to even discuss these issues is pretty depressing.

I agree that this topic merits discussion and shouldn't be flagged, but you're just wrong when you say the community lacks the courage to discuss these topics.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=sexism...

edit: Three of the four articles you link in your reply to this post have well over 100 comments each, so you're only supporting my position that the community is very much willing to discuss this topic, and in fact, does so pretty regularly. Any topic that hits the front page over and over again (in this case, discussion regarding TitStare) gets flagged as people get fatigued by the same repetitive discussion. This happened with SOPA, and Snowden and every other issue that reached maximum saturation in the community.

The following articles were all flagged off the front page of the site, just in this last week:

"'Titstare' app at TechCrunch: women in tech deserve better": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352595

"Tit Stare – We wish to apologise": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6357607

"Business Insider CTO Forced to Resign Following Twitter Firestorm": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360328

"NPR: Sexism In The Tech Industry Takes Center Stage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6374508

Sadly, HNSearch does not show the lifespan of articles on the front page of the site.

Oh, and we can now add this thread to that list:

http://i.imgur.com/GhU3mRV.png

EDIT: All those threads do have plenty of comments, because people went out of their way to link to threads that were flagged off the home page. It presents a huge visibility problem - there were responses in the Business Insider thread asking "What happened at TC Disrupt", because they never found out about it.

The fact that we both have to edit our posts because this thread has been killed within minutes of posting ought to indicate to you that flagging is real, and does happen.

Well, it is also a clickbait headline and a link to medium.com which for me and probably others has become an instant turnoff. Not something to flag, but definitely something not ignore.

> it will take a complete tear-down and rebuild to make the tech world the kind of place we’d want to be

Rebuilding the world to fit the whims of people who are horrified by tweets or apps is not a good idea.

In these situations, you're really only afforded two options: join the mob or shut up. Even questioning whether or not someone should be terminated from employment for being an idiot is treated as supporting rape culture.

making peeping tom apps, that post sexually interpreted images of women without their consent, is a worse idea.

Well the app was in very bad taste in my opinion. Women have the ability pretty much wholly under their control as to whether people want to take sexy pics of them in public, it is called clothing choice. There is absolutely no restriction on a woman wearing more and looser clothing so that this never happens to them. The exact same thing can be said about makeup and how they style their hair. And if you seriously dress like you do not want attention men will not notice you and not take pictures of your boobs.

Aargh, another smug and not-helpful discussion of these things. The relevant tweets:

  “IMO accusing someone of “misogyny” over some low-grade sexism means you owe another apology.” —Pax Dickinson, September 9, 2013

  “’misogyny’ is ‘hatred of women’. It is not misogyny to tell a sexist joke, or to fail to take a woman seriously, or to enjoy boobies.” — Pax Dickinson, September 9, 2013

  “Tech managers spend as much time worrying about how to hire talented female developers as they do worrying about how to hire a unicorn.” — Pax Dickinson, May 14, 2012

The author seems to deliberately choose the most offensive reading possible in a few cases; for example in response to the second quote above she writes "Sexist jokes, not taking women seriously and making an app to surreptitiously stare at my “boobies” all fall squarely within that definition."

Now, the tweet didn't say "taking women seriously", it said "take a woman seriously"--a seemingly minor difference but one that allows for the situation where a woman (as opposed to a man, a parrot, or a 59 Chevy) makes a claim (such as "The sky is green) and is dismissed. It is easily read as suggesting that not taking a particular woman making a particular statement for any reason whatsoever is not misogyny. The rewritten phrase which the author condemns, however, is different in content--it implies a state of not taking women as a group seriously, because they're women.

While I don't disagree with the author, her source material does not support her claim as much as she'd like it to.

The only thing I am confused about is why he was fired for this tweet and not fired when he posted a string of tweets using the N-word and other homophobic and racist slurs[1]. In comparison to his past behavior, these latest tweets seem rather mild.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/10/pax-dickinson-fired...

At the time, he had only a thousand or so followers and there was not yet a major outcry.

As I said in an earlier comment:

  I can remember reading quite a few [of his tweets] and
  thinking "wow, this guy's gonna get called out one of
  these days". Guess it finally happened, and by someone
  with a big enough megaphone to really make it go viral.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6364769

edit: Especially since he had his professional title in his twitter bio.

Because no-one noticed them, it would seem. I imagine someone did a Twitter search for 'Titstare' and stumbled across his feed.

I'm glad to see this here, even though it will doubtless bring the HN gender inequality apologists out in droves. It is my hope that each additional exposure to the argument that it's not okay for men in a male-dominated industry to continue acting in such a way as to keep that industry hostile toward women will in some small move us toward the point at which most people will no longer be able to accept the persistent sexism.

Followed this post to two related ones on medium.

Pax Dickinson's former cofounder: https://medium.com/glimpse-labs/131e9cd05852

Pax's Response: https://medium.com/glimpse-labs/4aa5b6a6a665

It is frequently thrown around without any supporting evidence that sexism/misogyny is the reason there are so few women in technology. Does anyone have any proof, or even any good argument that this is actually the case?

Is the same argument true as to why there are so few women in construction, mining, and auto body repair?

I took an introduction to computer programming course in 7th grade, and there were 29 males and 1 female in my class room. So I guess the sexism/misogyny starts before 7th grade?

This is going to be yet another archetypal Hacker News semantics comment, but as tone-deaf and out-of-touch as Pax Dickinson may be, I have to agree with him on the use of the word "misogyny." Misogyny is what ultimately results from casual sexism: By laughing off things like Titstare, we reinforce a culture of simplifying, infantilizing, and objectifying women. This is then fertile ground for the repugnant last step, contempt for women, which is misogyny.

As a man, I'm encouraged that there are others commenting on this link, indicating that they don't want to see it flagged/removed, and that they'd like to have a more frank and open discussion about sexism.

Guys, if we keep trying, eventually it will happen. It takes courage as a man to say you're against sexism and misogyny, there are so many easy outs provided by our culture and community.

That's all well and good, and I agree with a lot of this, but why is the content category a play on the word "vagina"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com