Fork My Dongle

So a bunch of guys then making fun of the whole thing with a shirt seems mean-spirited. Like, your gender won (well, common sense won, but) let it go.

We made this shirt because we believe that it's okay to laugh at potty humor and support women in tech at the same time.

Also I do want to make it clear that we are not affiliated with Girls Who Code, we just support their cause.

Part of being a mature adult in 2013 is having the ability to not be offended by silly, immature humor. The childish response is to cry and tattle.

You just told somebody who complained of getting death threats because of his comments here to watch how he comments so "his life might get a bit easier?"

I can't imagine anything more cowardly that you could have possibly posted.

I don't have a problem with the joke being made. I don't have a problem Richards being offended and reporting it to the convention staff, and, as a matter of fact, I applaud her decision to do something about it. And PyCon's staff, from all reports, handled themselves very well in this situation. Could the two guys in the photo been a little more sensitive to those around them? Sure. Could Richards have followed the advice she wrote in her own blog post and talked to the two men or alerted the staff privately? Absolutely. Would this entire clusterfuck have been avoided if one of those two things happened? Yes.

But both of those things happened, and it spiraled out of control. Because of one somewhat insensitive joke, and a really bad twitter post. Everything that's happened after: the twitter posts, the blog posts, the firings, the harrasment, the DDOS', it all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, and I don't see anything funny about this at all.

Because nobody involved here came out looking sympathetic. Richards used her soapbox to publicly shame two men who really didn't deserve much more than maybe a simple talking to. The two men who made the joke could have shown some restraint, but did not. Both of the companies probably made the wrong decision to fire the two, though in Play Haven's case, there could be other things we don't know about, and Richards dragged in her company into the conversation probably without their approval.

Because it's been twisted into everyone's pet racism/sexism/ism trigger topic. Bigots are using Adria's behavior as an example of why women can't be trusted. People sensitive to issues of gender, sex, and race are using it as an example for why the entire industry's a cesspool of bigotry and sexism. For those of us who know that the truth is neither of those, it's incredibly disheartening, because you can choose your belief, and there's something here that will validate it.

So yes, this just feels meanspirited.