Looks like he made a response.
https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085?s=...
My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
451–460 of 779 posts
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#452Not to discount her story or what happened to her, but I’d be interested to hear his side of the story. I know nothing about this other than this one article, but I do know someone who committed suicide after a false rape accusation that stuck even after the accuser admitted to making it all up.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#453There is a lot about the sexual events in this post that, to me, highlights something I feel is important which is: we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex. This girl was feeling uncomfortable and crying but at the same time "didn't think those behaviors were problematic". I can't help but wonder if her parents never sat her down and discussed situations like this and, I ge…
we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex. I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence. I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespe…
Thank you for sharing this!
We've also taught a similar one in "your body, your choice." I can confirm some folks look at us sideways when we agree with our kids choice to not hug or kiss.
If there is one thing I'd want my kids to know it is how to establish and confidently hold a boundary.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bummed I had to scroll this far into the thread to see some reason. This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of either. It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our capacity for assessment of a situation to individual anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 ye…
When these things happen, it's often impossible to provide evidence. There is nothing could be proven in the court of law. So we have victims, and no justice in that case, so what are we supposed to tell the victim? Don't get raped? And if they are, and resort to the only form of vindication they have left (openly sharing it), we're supposed to tell them to shut up? Sharing these things often feels like (and IS) the…
> There is nothing could be proven in the court of law.
In a court of law it is certainly more straight forward and less risky than on social media: go to the police, make a statement and get a lawyer, then get those people who sent out tweets in support and also came out with similar stories or to coroborate go on record. In this specific case the damage she could (and still can) do to him and get real justice is pretty massive.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Central Park five voluntarily confessed and were almost certainly guilty. The only issue was that there was a sixth perpetrator who had raped the victim after and wasn’t caught at the time.
If you did a little research you will find they got paid $41,000,000 by the City of New York! You think the City just handed over tens of millions of dollars because settling would be cheaper then going to trial?
The criteria for such a civil suit is whether the defendants' civil rights were violated, not whether the defendants are guilty.
And cities often settle lawsuits regardless of guilt to avoid the costs of going to trial as well as the risks of public backlash. Notably in this specific case, the decision to settle was a political decision after DeBlasio was elected mayor.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bummed I had to scroll this far into the thread to see some reason. This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of either. It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our capacity for assessment of a situation to individual anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 ye…
When these things happen, it's often impossible to provide evidence. There is nothing could be proven in the court of law. So we have victims, and no justice in that case, so what are we supposed to tell the victim? Don't get raped? And if they are, and resort to the only form of vindication they have left (openly sharing it), we're supposed to tell them to shut up? Sharing these things often feels like (and IS) the…
What we're certainly not supposed to tell the victim is "hey, you'll love this, I've gotten hundreds of HN commenters to argue about the veracity of your story". I don't see how signal-boosting these kind of accusations on a news aggregator is helpful to anyone in any way.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contact law enforcement.
A relative ran an online community. It was small, but not tiny There was some cyber-bullying (for lack of a better word) going on. My relative called law-enforcement, then was referred to the FBI. A case was filed and was told they would circle back on it to collect details. They never called back. My relative was never able to make contact with them about it again. Completely ignored. I can't remember the details, b…
The difference between posts like the one Yifan made about the sexual assault/rape and your news article you linked is that in one, neither person talked about what happened, and in the other, one of them is being _extremely_ clear and explicit about what happened. Don't pretend that Yifan's article is anything like that photo of the man grabbing the woman.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this remove agency from women? If two adults get together, fly together, get a room together, drink wine together, have relations... Then we're supposed to say that consent can't be given because the woman is drunk. But they're both drunk. Isn't it essentially the patriarchy to say that a woman can't make that choice? Like if they're equals and they're both drunk, why do we blame the men? Because they aren't…
No, why on earth would it?
It seems like everyone is equal, until everyone is drunk, then the women need to be treated like children and protected.
Which is the very thing feminism was fighting AGAINST - having men make decisions for you. Then we blame men, say they need to do better.
That seems ridiculous.
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her. She suggests, strongly, that he's a shitty person. She wants other people to know this. Courts don't adjudicate such matters, unless they have further consequences.
"Insist[ing] on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to" is rape.
I very carefully chose the phrasing of:
>The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her
That is quite different from the question of whether what happened was rape. (EDIT: To make it clear, if it did happen as the author writes, then I totally agree that it was rape. This is completely distinct from the question of the author's intent to make the claim that she was raped. The word does not occur in her piece.)
Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Insist[ing] on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to" is rape.
"Insisting" on sex does not mean sex happened. If you're a shitty person and ask another person "come on have sex with me", and the other person says "no", and then you don't have sex, are you now a rapist?
That's not insisting, that's asking, or suggesting.
The construction used by the author indicates that it happened. That's how the term is used.