Sexism is not funny, let's stop laughing

Logical fallacies are perfectly fine in some contexts. I "appeal to authority" every time I listen to my doctor instead of my friend's intuition without even checking what my friend said. Given insufficient time, you pretty much have too. You cannot check everything by yourself. Authority itself was established as a means of offloading some fact checking to the other's expertise. A doctor's degree DOES provide some assurance, it's not just an empty title.

That digression aside, the same thing applies here. What you call "false dilemma", I call a priority. In every situation, given limited resources, you get to make choices and compromises. If your house is on fire you don't stop to mow the lawn. You put the fire off.

>2. It is not clear how to fix the problem about discrimination based on names on CVs/résumés, whereas the solution to bikinis in powerpoint slides is much simpler (delete the pictures from the slides, smartass). To use a much abused phrase, this is low-hanging fruit.

The problem with low-hanging fruit is that they give you a false sense of accomplishment. In optimising code, the easy 1% fix doesn't mean anything if there is a slow function taking 60% of the call times.

Plus, there's an assumption that bikini slides are a problem. Unequal pay is a real problem with real consequences. Bikini slides is merely something that offends some prudes and that some people don't like, not the real issue with sexism. We see naked and half-naked men and women everyday, in TV, in the Movies, on the net, in ads, everywhere. Suddenly it's too much in a presentation? I think this is more about the separation between work/life (a protestant ideological remnant) than anything else. A notion that the workplace should not be sexy/playful/political/etc.

>3. You also assume that the issues are unrelated or isolated, and that (for example) showing inappropriate pictures of women at tech conferences does not cause people to discriminate against women on CVs/résumés, when it is very plausible that the pictures of women in bikinis normalize / contribute to the measurable acts of discrimination.

Very plausible? That is as far fetched idea as any I've ever heard. At the very least, citation needed.

>Would anyone raise even an eyebrow if a woman sliped a sexy male model photo in a slide? >>You think this is a clever argument, but it is not. Let me illustrate for you a better analogy.

So my argument (with exactly the same situation as the one complained about) is not good, because I couldn't (theoretically) stand an entirely different situation that you describe?

Let's see your analogy for a moment. For one thing: I AM constantly bombarded by pictures of men who "made it". Especially in HN, it's all too easy to see people bragging about acquisitions and 6-figure salaries. And there ARE women that are attracted to that kind of thing, and wouldn't give a poor guy the eye. Just as you describe.

Now, what does this has to do with the situation? Is a bikini slide meant to mean "lose 50 pounds"? Or "women in the audience should look like these"?

If I showed a picture of Simon Peyton Jones would that equally imply "programmers in the audience have to be as smart as him else you are losers"? If I show Marc Zuckenberg or some other successful enterpreneur does that mean "Less than 1 billion net worth is for suckers"? Would anyone even think of it that way?

>Sexism is not a simple problem and you do not help anything by imagining what it would by like if a woman put sexy pictures of a man on a powerpoint slide. Fact is, men are not generally worried about getting raped.

Where's the equality then? Or is having different arbitrary demands for each gender acceptable?

Oh, and using the "western world" as a sign of some "superiority" moral or otherwise, is extremely racist. The majority of the world doesn't think the "western world" as that advanced or superior anyway. Not to mention that the majority of the world still has deep scars and mourns its people because of the "western world" colonisation and treating them as slaves.

Not to mention that people living in a country where a young girl dies giving birth because she was denied an abortion don't get to say what the "western world" does.

(Nor do people living in a country that still has the death penalty and had black/white segregation until 40 years ago).

Sure, I apologise for implying this was your personal opinion, however the strength of my tone is based on the fact that some will use your observation as an excuse.

> I'm afraid you're getting confused between explanations and justifications; that's probably one of the causes for your depressed feelings.

Actually I feel fine, a figure of speech :-) the problem is that many will use these explanations as a justification, the gap between the two isn't very far.

He says something like: "After I started in FitnessDK i got so popular, that the only way I got get some alone-time is to take a fish-shower".

As long as you don't put a specific gender in a certain role or use them to show that the other gender is superior, I don't think showing a human body is sexism.

How could you possibly come to the conclusion that "jokes which reinforce the current power structure" are equivalent to jokes about dead babies, torture or genocide? Especially after I opened my comment explaining that yes, in fact, you can make a joke about any subject matter. It's like you didn't even read my comment at all, you just glanced a keyword signifying a binary position and then you decided to dump your preconceived opinion here.