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It's possible for Julie to be oversensitive about such matters, and still have the abuse and sexism claimed to be rampant at Github be absolutely true.

The fact that she might not be perfect does not therefore invalidate her story about everything else.

I worked somewhere where a female co-worker hired a "stripper-gram" or something for another male co-worker's birthday in the office. I was single and not even dating at the time, but felt extremely uncomfortable with an actual stripper in the office, myself. So, even though they seemed to be consenting, I didn't appreciate having a stripper in the office, and neither did several of my (also male) coworkers.

I can imagine any amount of ogling would be uncomfortable, regardless of consent of the participants, to an observer.

Yeah, that's super inappropriate, whether the person who ordered the stripper was female or not.

> For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it.

Not at all true in a professional environment. And that statement doesn’t even correspond with the story. The specifics of the hula hooping anecdote are all but immaterial anyway. The men failing to acknowledge how it was problematic was just the point at which she saw the GitHub culture had not really changed. It won’t change without action by the leadership, which was questionable given all the other events.

This response from Chris Wanstrath is a step in the right direction, but, as he acknowledges, they still have work to do.

This is a hell of a response.

You take a quote from the end of the original article, some 200 words, and use it as a basis to tear down Julie's character ("seems like..." and "sounds like..."). I mean, seriously, it's marvelous: you jump from hula-hooping to identifying social angst in Julie's life in two sentences. Bravo!

We do not know Julie. Pretending otherwise, and using that as grounds for tearing down her claims, devalues their significance. I'm surprised, given that you understand what oppression means at a workplace, that you readily dismiss her serious claims on such flimsy grounds.

Completely agree. The outrage over hula hooping triggers a giant warning siren that this is a person who is working very hard to be angered and offended.

I don't know the proper way to watch someone hula hoop, but if anyone in my office decided to hula hoop, I would likely watch. Apparently this means I have a terrible attitude towards women, or something.

> For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it.

You may think so, but people are not allowed to have 'fun' however they please in an office environment, nor is 'Is this illegal' the end-all, be-all of being an incredibly toxic work environment.

So if I would watch two woman while they play table tennis it would be inappropriate? This is silly :). I don't see any difference between hula hooping and playing table tennis or darts. If someone wants to see how sexy is that they can do it with both.

People are so supportive of the CEO for a standup response, but some still dis Julie for coming forward and exposing the problems. Strange.

Sure, people can do what they want, but in a workplace there are (or should be) standards and codes of conduct that help inform employees how to behave in a way that doesn't poison the environment for others.

So sure, if people want to watch that at home, then I guess that is their prerogative, but doing so at work doesn't seem productive or healthy for their (or any company's) community and culture.

Sure, but how does hula-hooping poison the environment? As far as we can tell, the women doing the hula-hooping were doing it for fun/exercise with no sexual intent, and the men watching just thought it was entertaining and not sexual. Then Julie comes along and complains that it's like a strip joint!?

Now I wasn't there and I have nothing to do with github, but that is just my take on it. It just sounds like Julie has some very strange ideas about sexual harassment. It seems to be her that is causing sexual harassment in the workplace if anything.

The whole thing is very weird, and neither Julie nor the Github management look very good.

"Sure, but how does hula-hooping poison the environment? As far as we can tell, the women doing the hula-hooping were doing it for fun/exercise with no sexual intent, and the men watching just thought it was entertaining and not sexual."

Exactly. The intension is very important. Also if the hula hooping girls would of been bothered by the guys watching them I guess they should've let them know.

> For me, two adult individual can do whatever the hack they want to do, if it is legal and they are both consent of doing it.

Not if you want to have an effective workplace. There's a reason this would be called an HR violation at most places.

What I think you're missing is that we are only 20 or 30 years out of office environments in which women were primarily there to answer phones and to be looked at.

It's pretty odd for women to be hula hooping, I've never seen that, but Julia's reaction to is is bananas. How does that make her feel threatened? Can't she just ignore it, of course men are going to look, did the women think nobody would notice? To me this belittles any legitimate claim she might have, if she's this irrational about this event, then it clouds my view of other things she says.

She also sounds confused, unless the women doing hula hooping were also taking off their clothes then I fail to see how she thinks this looks like anything at a strip club. If the hula women were stripping then she has a legitimate claim that this is inappropriate in the workplace, otherwise I don't see how this is any different to table tennis or air hockey etc.

Death by a thousand cuts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality

So, if you hula hoop in public you are asking to be ogled?

Was she asking for it? Was she asking nice? Yeah, she was asking for it Did she ask you twice? - "Asking For It" Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson

"We had just gotten off tour with Mudhoney, and I decided to stage-dive. I was wearing a dress and I didn't realize what I was engendering in the audience. It was a huge audience and they were kind of going ape-shit. So I just dove off the stage, and suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off of me, my underwear was being torn off of me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like "pussy-whore-cunt". When I got back onstage I was naked. I felt like Karen Finley. But the worst thing of all was that I saw a photograph of it later. Someone took a picture of me right when this was happening, and I had this big smile on my face like I was pretending it wasn't happening. So later I wrote a song called "Asking For It" based on the whole experience. I can't compare it to rape because it's not the same. But in a way it was. I was raped by an audience, figuratively, literally, and yet, was I asking for it?" - Courtney Love

What does a semi-gangrape at a metal concert has to do with an innocent silly act in a SF office? Nobody forced anything on anybody... If you are so much hatred just move your desk to the other side of the building or work from home your just freakin' get a life before start any interaction with other human beings...

If anyone starts hula hooping at my office they will surely attract a lot of attention because it's just not something people do at work (YMMV)

I didn't say she was asking for anything, I said her credibility is weakened by her reaction to this. Try it, get any two people at your workplace to hula hoop and see if people come and watch, gawk or whatever word you want to call it.

And why quote Courtney Love at me, that's about as ridiculous as quoting Germaine Greer in response. What did CL think would happen when she jumped off stage? She of all people understands human sexuality, and was exploiting it. She says the big smile was her pretending it was happening, however, there are a million other interpretations. If I jump into a hungry lion's den do I complain when I get eaten? Ask yourself why CL is says it wasn't rape and then it was, she's a very astute woman and knows exactly how to exploit the attention she garners, because she sure as hell is a lousy singer.

Hula hooping doesn't look like stripping, any which way you want to spin it, so given that she has her normality barometer so poorly calibrated, how can we believe much else she says without applying the same thought process?

Hula hoopers weren't compared to strippers, the gawkers were compared to how "customers" behave at the strip club. I know lots of women who do not enjoy being "gawked" at, including my wife and daughter.

I don't think it was expected for CL to be stripped of her clothing for stage diving, even if it maybe wasn't the best idea. However, if her gender wasn't female, she probably would have had no problems stage diving. I was insinuating that blaming the victim was your viewpoint, which it still seems to be.

I think we shouldn't read too much on her reaction to the hula hooping. As she said, it was the last straw, and in my experience the last straw usually isn't that significant by itself. Maybe, on any other day she would have been annoyed, as it was something that she didn't appreciate, but would have let it go. However, after all the trouble with the founder, his wife and the admirer, she saw the hola hooping as a sign that it was better for her to leave.

It makes a person feel threatened because it implies that your co-workers think of /you/ as eye candy too. And if that's all you are, then you can't trust others to take you and your needs seriously. You can't deal with it by ignoring it, because it's not the staring that's the problem, it's what it indicates about how the gawkers view their female coworkers. (How you're viewed matters because that affects whether anyone will listen and help you when you have a problem, and if they'll expect unreasonable things from you - like the coworker who removed a bunch of Julia's code after she turned him down for a date.)

Or at least, that's how I feel about it, when I try to put myself in the place of someone who saw this happening, and took it as a sexual sort of staring rather than a "what the heck are my silly coworkers doing" kind of staring. It's also possible that Julia misunderstood what was going on, or exaggerated - we don't have enough information to know.

But wasn't she dating someone that worked there? (was she already dating before joining GitHub or did they meet there?) This for me says that she think it is ok for there to be some kind of attraction between co-workers, so I don't see how men gawking to two women hula hooping is the last straw for her.

Of course, if they were screaming 'take it off' or similar, I would agree, but supposedly attractive women doing activities that make their bodies 'jiggle' in a public setting and expect men not to look or stare is ridiculous, and going from that to 'not feeling safe' is too much of a stretch. I understand maybe the previous issues colored her understanding of the situation, but it does leave a bad feeling in my gut that she may just be a drama queen which makes me question her reports on the other issues.

So many words without contributing anything to the discussion. "These accusations seem a bit irrational." What are you even talking about they are factual coupled with her interpretations. This post hints strongly that github is disputing neither. Your read is tortured.

Focus on the story and the discussion and not on me please.

His (or hers?) comment was based on her story, not on the HR reactionary piece referenced here. Your read is skewed and angry.

Let's consider what it means for this GitHub hula hoop party to be "unsafe."

What is the dangerous thing that Horvath thought would happen?

Do we really consider the suggestion plausible that GitHub's allowance of hula-hooping-watching will result in a gang rape in its offices?

Quite the stretch you've outlined. But maybe "unsafe" could mean the exact things Horvath mentions happened to her like coworkers visiting her at her home to make advances.

Where are you reading that the coworker visited her at home? All I saw is, 'asked himself over to “talk"' in a context which implied to me that it took place at the office.

I guess that's a valid interpretation, but I'm still leaning toward the meaning that he was at her house.

That is a good point, I may have read too much into "asked himself over".

Is gang rape really only one step removed from hula hooping or is that the only meaning of "unsafe" behaviour you can think of? Having a safe work environment can simply mean being treated professionally and equally. I mean, sexual harassment has a wide scope from "she knew she wanted it," to "it was uncomfortable or rude," and unsafe should cover all of the above. Really, the unsafe refers to a perception that safety features aren't present -- in this case that there was no other avenue to report or discourage this behaviour before it became a cultural norm. Is it wrong or harmful? Maybe not physically, but obviously emotionally, to at least one person. This is why having a neutral second opinion and ... process, can sometimes be a good thing. At the very least, it provides distance to look at things more objectively.

Watching your co-workers playing hula hoop makes you feel unsafe? Even if it does, how would you present this to court? You think this is enough legal ground for sexual harassment? Come on... The world is the way how we shape it and I definitely don't want to live in a world when I can't do something silly with my co-workers without watching out for feminists or other frustrated hatred people around us.

Out of context, maybe the hula-hooping is harmless. Whatever, fine. Now consider the hula-hooping when

> a coworker hit on you and messed with your work after you shot him down, and

> a founder's wife -- someone with significant power at the company -- attempts to inject herself into your relationship and intimidates you

> you seemingly have nowhere to go to discuss these issues, after speaking with another founder does not change your working atmosphere

Again, as someone who supposedly understands oppression in the workplace, you're not empathizing with someone who claims to have experienced it.

>What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them.

and what would be an alternative? "A man mustn't look at a hula-hooping woman. " (what would be a punishment for the violation? - something from middle ages Arab world comes to mind, a definite cure for the desire to watch hula-hooping women :)

There's a difference between looking and turning into entertainment.

>Julie seems like really pissed that other people just can have fun the way she does not like.

Exactly - who's she to determine what is 'over the line'? Nobody likes a busybodies .

Getting mad at people having harmless fun isn't normal, but on feminism it is...

Yep. I think raging at people having fun does not support gender equality at all, it does the quite opposite.

Yeah, rage against feminism... the radical notion that women are people.

It's nice to see you can make use of stock quotes that are completely distant from reality.

That's a definition of feminism and exposes how the term is completely pointless to use to attack people because of how vague the definition is.

Feminism is a cultural Marxist ideology which tries to explain the world through the lens of class conflict - an overclass (male) which is oppressive and therefore evil and an underclass (female) which is oppressed and therefore good. This is why it is not considered oppression when men die young or go to prison more often than women and it is not a problem when men are underrepresented in higher ed - men can't be oppressed by definition.

In a perfectly fair world, men and women would behave differently due to comparative advantage and specialization based on sexual dimorphism. Feminism, in seeking an equal world, denies reality and quite a bit of science. Also, like most Marx-derived groups, feminists are humorless killjoys

The word "feminism" describes a lot more that just that one ideology. There are lots of feminist movements and "agendas" and the only thing they have in common is advocating equality for women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

This "feminism can be anything" stance is getting really old, is it really everything good and nothing bad?

Oh, I’m so very sorry that you have to do a tiny bit more work and find out specifically what someone stands for before you can coherently argue against them instead of slapping the feminist label on it and being done with it.

First, I would suggest that when you attack feminism in the abstract, you attack views that are actually currently and widely held by feminists. It’s a diverse movement, but there are actual mainstream views. Frequently even that will not be very helpful, so you will have to find out specifically which group of people you are addressing with your criticism.

If feminists can and do frequently criticise feminist views then so can you.

In that regard feminism is kind of like, say, conservatism or liberalism or socialism or nationalism.

Now, I myself do not have a problem with chucking even big and complex concepts like that on the trash heap of history if they actually do have a consistently disastrous history. You won’t find me putting much work into arguing against fascism or royalism or racism or antisemitism. I’m willing to dismiss those wholesale.

Feminism, whatever its faults may be in your view, is about a million miles away from clearing that, however. It’s absurd to even think it could approach that same standard of wholesale dismissal. It has no history of harm at all.

Based on this belief system you have detailed how do you feel about MRM's?

It’s an extremely narrow, extremely small ideology with little diversity. It doesn’t have much history or historical importance and the specific views I’ve encountered were firstly nearly always the same or similar and secondly not very convincing or just blatant untruths. As such to me many proponents of MRM views often felt like a tight knit group with a very specific worldview without much subtlety in their argument.

I.e. if feminism were the concept of atheism, the MRM would be the Westboro Baptist Church and not Christianity or belief in some deity as a whole. (That’s a slightly shitty metaphor since the frequent conflict MRM activists dream up between them and feminism is pretty absurd. Men getting harsher prison sentences? Men being disadvantaged during divorces? That’s often based on strict and old-fashioned gender roles, something many feminists abhor.)

Funny you just described my experience with feminism.

I don't see Horvath, or anyone else in this conversation, using tw268's definition of feminism. That's why it's misleading for this conversation. Horvath is criticizing her own feminist framework, so obviously it's not all good.

You're such a killjoy; how is tw268 gonna be able to make sweeping generalizations about those damn feminists now?

You have not the faintest trace of an idea what feminism or Marxism are. This is the most idiotic thing I have read all week. OK, it's Monday morning, but I give it a good chance to stand...

"Cultural Marxism" is an academic offshoot possibly inspired by Marxism. Though I'm not quite sure why it's called "cultural".

As for feminism, what's your definition, and do you think other people are practicing that definition in particular? Look at tumblr posts discussing patriarchy theory sometime; somewhere amidst the paranoid depressed teenagers is a pretty well-defined belief system, and it's not yours anymore.

While technically true, today "Cultural Marxism" is mostly a label that the extreme far right use to try to brush centrist and moderate leftists with associations of Stalinism.

Beware whenever the term is brought up - it's usually used as an ad hominem.

> which is oppressive and therefore evil and an underclass (female) which is oppressed and therefore good

If you think Marxism considers classes to be evil and good, you have already demonstrated that you don't know Marxism. Marx was very clear that he saw the members of the different classes as effective slaves of circumstance, who acted out their roles in history out of necessity.

The capitalist, to Marx, not only is not evil, but is seen as a historical necessity that drives progress: Only through the development of advanced capitalist economies does production reach sufficient levels to be able to eradicate common wants, thus making socialism possible.

I'll not disagree with you that there are some feminist groups that follow the same twisted idea of what marxism is that you describe above, but they're by no means the only feminists out there, nor does their views have much of anything to do with marxism.

> If you think Marxism considers classes to be evil and good, you have already demonstrated that you don't know Marxism. Marx was very clear that he saw the members of the different classes as effective slaves of circumstance, who acted out their roles in history out of necessity.

Marx clearly did describe things that way but the movements that called themselves Marxist (particularly Leninism and those Marxist groups influenced by Leninism, which given the influence of the USSR were pretty common among "Marxists") did tend to take the capitalist = evil approach (which fits more in with Leninism than Marxism, since Leninism major point of divergence was adapting Marxism to justify "socialist" revolution in pre-capitalist societies, thus rendering capitalism unnecessary.)

Fun fact: White Nationalists define themselves as a movement to end the genocide of white people. Therefore, if you oppose White Nationalism, you support the genocide of white people. That's how definitions work, right?