5 ms·

Well Julie's story stinks. Let me just quote the last thigs she wrote and work backwards from that. "Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend

• sergiotapia 13y ago
  >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 .
• roflc0ptic 13y ago
  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.
  • leccine 13y ago
    Focus on the story and the discussion and not on me please.
  • microjesus 13y ago
    His (or hers?) comment was based on her story, not on the HR reactionary piece referenced here. Your read is skewed and angry.
• tw268 13y ago
  Getting mad at people having harmless fun isn't normal, but on feminism it is...
  • leccine 13y ago
    Yep. I think raging at people having fun does not support gender equality at all, it does the quite opposite.
  • comrh 13y ago
    Yeah, rage against feminism... the radical notion that women are people.
    • vezzy-fnord 13y ago
      It's nice to see you can make use of stock quotes that are completely distant from reality.
      • comrh 13y ago
        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.
    • tw268 13y ago
      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
      • 13y ago
• gruntmaster9000 13y ago
  > 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.
• pekk 13y ago
  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?
  • comrh 13y ago
    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.
    • cypherpunks01 13y ago
      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.
      • sp332 13y ago
        I guess that's a valid interpretation, but I'm still leaning toward the meaning that he was at her house.
      • comrh 13y ago
        That is a good point, I may have read too much into "asked himself over".
  • lstamour 13y ago
    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.
• jbranchaud 13y ago
  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.
  • cpncrunch 13y ago
    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.
    • gregmolnar 13y ago
      "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.
• trhway 13y ago
  >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 :)
  • mcv 13y ago
    There's a difference between looking and turning into entertainment.
• nsted 13y ago
  People are so supportive of the CEO for a standup response, but some still dis Julie for coming forward and exposing the problems. Strange.
• Fomite 13y ago
  > 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.
• Legion 13y ago
  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.
• hnriot 13y ago
  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.
  • gruntmaster9000 13y ago
    Death by a thousand cuts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality
  • qdog 13y ago
    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
    • leccine 13y ago
• qdog 13y ago
  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.
  • acjohnson55 13y ago
    Yeah, that's super inappropriate, whether the person who ordered the stripper was female or not.
• r00fus 13y ago
  > 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.
• balloot 13y ago
  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.
• dcre 13y ago
  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.
• gregmolnar 13y ago
  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.
• achompas 13y ago
  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.