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My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

yifanxing.medium.com

651–660 of 779 posts

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#651
post #124
post #27

Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this account, a predator. That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author?…

I only kind of agree. In this case a Chinese woman living in the USA apparently got raped in Germany 3 years ago. To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city. What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report? I hate the court…

I wonder if Pretty specifically chose this modus operandi (taking a woman to a third country before moving on her) to get himself a layer of legal protection. It’s a well-established practice in abuse communities after all (e.g. people traveling to Asia).

It’s also interesting that this scenario would have probably been more unlikely in the past. Before the “sexual revolution”, an educated woman would never sleep alone in the same house as an unmarried man, for fear of her “honour” being maligned. That set of cultural values had its (massive) problems, but in some scenarios it actually worked better than the current one, effectively forcing women to avoid dangerous situations.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#652
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero. None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase). He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, pr…

>Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero. >None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase). >He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow,…

Unless you’re arguing that emacs has “a modest userbase”, you’re way off-base, mate. And GNU definitely “happened”.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 but especially our boys. Girls and women already learn so much about how to avoid being harmed by men. It’s time for our boys to learn how to become kind men - and for those of us who are men to model that for them.

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…

Pretty much, yes. Women are held to the same standard as children in situations like. Sharing a room with a male stranger? How could she possibly know something was wrong. Poor, sweet, innocent woman.

The man is expected to be the adult.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#654
post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She should have agency to have her complaint heard, not an obligation to deal with police. Aside, she has claimed that he took advantage of her and that he harassed her - not that he assaulted her.

In the United States, sexual assault includes coercion: Sexual assault covers a wide range of unwanted behaviors—up to but not including penetration—that are attempted or completed against a victim's will or when a victim cannot consent because of age, disability, or the influence of alcohol or drugs. Sexual assault may involve actual or threatened physical force, use of weapons, coercion, intimidation, or pressure a…

Your second link puts forth some very dubious examples of coercion. In reality, laws vary by state. While some of the examples it lists (such as threatening physical violence) unambiguously invalidate consent, others almost certainly do not (such as ending a relationship if there is no sex). This is a more in-depth review of non-physical coercion: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/25544/4-...

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#655
post #280

There 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…

I know it's probably not your intention, but you are shifting the blame from Jon to Yifan's parents. I hope this doesn't stay as the first comment in this thread.

This is not about blame, it's about protecting people.

There will always be Jon's and worse than Jon's out there in the world. They are to blame indeed. But what are you going to do about it? How are you going to protect yourself and others?

Taking measures for protection does not mean you are to blame.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#656
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn’t the only person who told me that. Even though my experience in Berlin was awful, it was difficult for me to accept that someone, who seemed like a good friend, mentor, and ally, could be so selfish, manipulative, and cruel. It sounds like people kne…

> It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse. well around 2017-2019 I was active in scala aswell (more on the playframework side tough) and I dind't even knew about him until I read the blog. you know just because there are members from scalacenter and lightbend does not mean that…

I've felt for a while now that the way the tech world talks about "the $foo community" is just fundamentally wrong. You can only have real communities as long as the number of people is small enough. Once you cross Dunbar's number, it's no longer really a community but rather a cluster of partially overlapping communities. Maybe the more accurate term would be "society" instead of "community".

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#657
post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you or anyone else can share more detail or some examples regarding cross-cultural differences in societal expectations. I've got some guesses about what this might mean, but I haven't studied this, and don't have any personal experience here.

A fairly obvious one: If you are from a culture where sex before marriage is permissible and you are a woman, men from cultures where women are expected to remain virgins until the wedding night may see you as "a loose woman." In such cases, they may even feel entitled to have you and get very mad if you try to tell them no. People from very conservative cultures tend to wildly misinterpret the actions of women from…

You just forgot to call them backward societies.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#658
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been in an abusive relationship? Or seen one firsthand? People can be made to believe all sorts of things that aren't true by charismatic or powerful people. It may take them some time to realize they are being tricked or abused. You absolutely can be told you consented, and trust that person's word, and realize later that no, actually you had not. It's just convenient for the abuser for you to believe…

Maybe that's true and some Rasputin-like figure could manipulate you into believing you thought things that you didn't, but that doesn't seem to be what is alleged here. She wasn't living in this guy's cult, he helped her professionally and with conferences, and she agreed to share a room with him on a trip. That strikes me as less mind-control and more just a situation that people get into sometimes. She is and was…

She is and was an adult woman. Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not consent to sex?

Women often feel confused about the detail of their own consent after date rape or acquaintance rape. This is true in part because most people imagine rape is some kind of violent assault by a total stranger conking them on the head and dragging them into an alleyway.

They don't expect to have to ask themselves how much alcohol is too much alcohol for me to have been consenting? Did he or did he not intentionally get me drunk for the purpose of impairing my judgement?

Did he or did he not lie to me and maneuver me into staying alone with him in an Airbnb in the name of "helping" me? Since he did, in fact, help me get to this conference, does that somehow negate his bad actions or something?

Etc.

People expect rape to be some obvious, easily identifiable crime and it's often not.

I once saw a question posted to the internet where the woman was like "I know I need to drink less..." when a colleague plied her with alcohol until she couldn't stand up anymore and then took her to his hotel room. She felt she had been unfaithful to her boyfriend and internet strangers had to tell her "Girl, you were raped, not unfaithful."

Hopefully women are clearer than that "in the typical case." Presumably, "the typical case" isn't actually rape.

But what she described is very normal for anyone who has been treated abusively not by some random stranger at gun point but by someone insinuating themselves into their lives and claiming to be a friend who just wants to help, etc. Even without the detail of sex, people often agonize over what they did wrong, whether or not they "owe" someone who intentionally shafted them etc when they were supposed to be friends, business partners, etc.

People who know ahead of time how this works are much less vulnerable to such predators and can still get shafted. Predators typically seek to place themselves in a position of trust and to operate under a cloak of plausible deniability. They actively seek to obfuscate their real intentions and then act all hurt if you question their intentions, etc.

It's very hard to sort something like that out.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#659
post #27

Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this account, a predator. That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author?…

Being a manipulative jerk and creep is not a crime.

I think it's very brave of this woman to write such an article, and warn future victims about this person. So in that sense, such articles NEED to be written. Who knows how many young girls she saved from the same experience.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#660
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The redress for a false accusation that results in serious harm to your career is a slander lawsuit. Sounds like all the ducks are in a row, evidence wise, so just figure out how much damage she caused, and sue her for it. I know it's not quite the same, and an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure- but there's this narrative that a person who is falsely accused is utterly powerless before the power of a…

My brother was suicidal at one time due to the accusations, and more importantly, the fact that everyone immediately believed them. When his wife got the idea to call the daycare and ask if they had video footage, he thought for sure he'd be saved. (His employer also had his company cell phone location data which further corroborated his alibi). He literally proved himself innocent to his HR department. But if you've…

> his coworkers had warned him "not to cross" because she was "a total sociopath" according to his other team members.

This is exactly what the author of the blog post is doing: warning other people about this person.

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