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I in fact agree with you and think you are 100% right but I think you are parsing the situation incorrectly. In fact it seems to be Ms. Richards who will cause

I in fact agree with you and think you are 100% right but I think you are parsing the situation incorrectly. In fact it seems to be Ms. Richards who will cause women to be reluctant to report real sexual harassment. Let me draw from a past experience of mine involving a female colleague who was sexually harassed. She related the situation to me and I had absolutely no doubt that what was said to her was inappropriate and needed to be reported to HR. I in fact encouraged her to bring the issue to HR. She told me she was highly reluctant to say anything because she was afraid it would affect the perception of her in the office. This is a real and legitimate concern for women in the workplace today. But the fact is, the person she, and women like her, do not want to be seen as is Ms. Richards. My female colleague had experienced a real threat in her workplace that was truly hostile. Ms. Richards demeans very real threats to gender equality in the workplace by using a penis joke told in a private conversation to deal real, public damage senselessly. I am greatly concerned for my female colleagues who are lumped into the same "team" as Ms. Richards, particularly in the inevitable case that they do experience truly awful sexual harassment or threat.

doktrin 14y ago
This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of this whole debacle. It has simultaneously trivialized sexism & discrimination while promoting the paranoid fear that any minor innocuous comment could end up as a shitpile trainwreck on Twitter. By calling out a non-thing as a wolf, she has effectively raised the bar on real harassment being reported. Likewise, otherwise well intentioned men will be looking over their shoulder when making even harmless comments, promoting a gender division in the workplace.
- devilshaircut 14y ago
  I absolutely agree with you that this is potentially the greatest travesty and that the whole thing is a debacle. I reposted this story on my Facebook and literally the only people who commented on it were my female friends/colleagues in the technology industry. Needless to say their reaction was a collective groan. It is so unfortunate because - as we agree - sexism is such a huge problem that we are certainly not exempt from. And situations like this dilute the real struggles women face in a male-dominated industry.
anigbrowl 14y ago
I have no problem with Adria richards reporting this to the PyCon organizaers - even if the joke was silly, even if it was not really sexual but anatomical or crude, even if it caused a bit of embarrassment to the joker and his friends to be verbally admonished. It's a fact that people's sensitivities and thresholds of offense vary significantly, and even an impersonal, non-specific utterance like 'ah, shit' could cause offense in the wrong context. Sometimes the smart and decent thing to do is excuse yourself and tone down your personality a bit for the sake of social harmony. Nobody should ever feel afraid to challenge or report what seems like obnoxious behavior, no matter what the basis of offense. There may be no guarantee of a remedy, but there should be no penalty for expressing one's dislike of what others are saying. The difference in this episode is doing it a) via an audience of thousands of Twitter followers, b) with pictures identifying specific people, c) some of whom were not involved, but whose names are now inextricably connected to this whole fracas, and whose images will continue to appear in related internet searches for some indefinite future period.
- devilshaircut 14y ago
  I didn't mean to indicate that I had a problem with her reporting conduct that is in violation of an event's attendance agreement. What I intended to express is precisely the other part of what you said - that the joke was not sexual, but anatomical in nature, and did not target her in as a female (Read the blog post if you haven't already - it clearly illustrates her position on the matter.). This is what I take issue with. That in framing it as an instance of gender discrimination or sexual harassment is a dilution of those terms that is damaging to these problems which absolutely do exist in the modern workplace.

doktrin 14y ago

This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of this whole debacle. It has simultaneously trivialized sexism & discrimination while promoting the paranoid fear that any minor innocuous comment could end up as a shitpile trainwreck on Twitter. By calling out a non-thing as a wolf, she has effectively raised the bar on real harassment being reported. Likewise, otherwise well intentioned men will be looking over their shoulder when making even harmless comments, promoting a gender division in the workplace.

devilshaircut 14y ago
I absolutely agree with you that this is potentially the greatest travesty and that the whole thing is a debacle. I reposted this story on my Facebook and literally the only people who commented on it were my female friends/colleagues in the technology industry. Needless to say their reaction was a collective groan. It is so unfortunate because - as we agree - sexism is such a huge problem that we are certainly not exempt from. And situations like this dilute the real struggles women face in a male-dominated industry.

anigbrowl 14y ago

I have no problem with Adria richards reporting this to the PyCon organizaers - even if the joke was silly, even if it was not really sexual but anatomical or crude, even if it caused a bit of embarrassment to the joker and his friends to be verbally admonished. It's a fact that people's sensitivities and thresholds of offense vary significantly, and even an impersonal, non-specific utterance like 'ah, shit' could cause offense in the wrong context. Sometimes the smart and decent thing to do is excuse yourself and tone down your personality a bit for the sake of social harmony. Nobody should ever feel afraid to challenge or report what seems like obnoxious behavior, no matter what the basis of offense. There may be no guarantee of a remedy, but there should be no penalty for expressing one's dislike of what others are saying. The difference in this episode is doing it a) via an audience of thousands of Twitter followers, b) with pictures identifying specific people, c) some of whom were not involved, but whose names are now inextricably connected to this whole fracas, and whose images will continue to appear in related internet searches for some indefinite future period.

devilshaircut 14y ago
I didn't mean to indicate that I had a problem with her reporting conduct that is in violation of an event's attendance agreement. What I intended to express is precisely the other part of what you said - that the joke was not sexual, but anatomical in nature, and did not target her in as a female (Read the blog post if you haven't already - it clearly illustrates her position on the matter.). This is what I take issue with. That in framing it as an instance of gender discrimination or sexual harassment is a dilution of those terms that is damaging to these problems which absolutely do exist in the modern workplace.