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Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

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Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#381

Post by Lawtonfogle »

rayiner wrote: post #212
yason wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite different. She had an option to decline. Maybe it would've a very hard choice indeed, both socially and career-wise but she did have that choice. It might be convenient in some cases to broaden the definition of rape gradually but the bottom line is you can not be raped if you are simply able to walk away. It might be harassment. It might be blackmailing. It might be a lot of nasty, disgusting, and even…

If you threaten to punch someone in the face if she doesn't sleep with you, that's clearly rape. If you threaten to fire someone if she doesn't sleep with you, some people wouldn't call that rape (and the law wouldn't either). But I'd rather get punched in the face then lose a job I worked really hard to get. So why do we consider the latter not as bad? The belief that physical coercion is worse than economic coercio…

Drop the issue of sex for a second. Firing someone with no cause is legal in most states (at will employment). Punching someone is rarely legal outside of very specific situations where both sides agree, and never legal when one side does not agree. Yet many will agree there are easily constructed realistic scenarios where a punch in the face is far preferable.

I believe the issue here is far more rooted in classism and, if I may, class warfare.

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#382

Post by Lawtonfogle »

pekk wrote: post #262
abalone wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the term "slippery slope" is so common in the legal profession. If financial consequences = coercion = rape then there is a huge range of situations that can now be cast under the cloud of rape, such as relationships where one person is financially dependent on the other. Fortunately some states have laws that specifically define and criminalize sexual extortion. It's distinct from rape / sexual assault b…

"relationships where one person is financially dependent on the other." Suppose a couple lives together, and one tells the other: "let me sodomize you right now or I kick you out of the house and you can live on the street." What in the world would be the point of arguing that this is not rape? On the other hand, if there is no threat accompanying a demand for sexual access, it is obviously not rape and nobody is say…

Can they legally kick them out? If not, then there is a problem. But if they can legally kick them out and can legally engage in the sexual act with them (so ruling out cases where the other party is underage, intoxicated, ect.), aren't they just saying 'do this legal thing for me or I'll do this other legal thing that I think you won't like'.

My understanding is that you cannot just kick out someone who has been living their legally, so let's make it a legal action instead. "Start having sex with me or I'll start the eviction process." If that is rape, then should not "Start paying or I'll start the eviction process" would be theft?

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#383

Post by Lawtonfogle »

pekk wrote: post #344
abalone wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody argued that that isn't rape, but that's because you've folded in what sounds like a physical threat. "Kick you out right now and you can live on the street" sounds more violent than "have sex with me or I initiate divorce proceedings". The question is whether there's a distinction between economic coercion and rape. rayiner argues no, it's just as coercive as "pulling a knife", but most state laws (I believe)…

What I'm asking is: what is the point of trying to argue that certain kinds of coerced sex are not rape? I wonder why HN is so sensitive to this line of questioning that they want to censor it outright. Are people emotionally attached to using certain forms of coercion to get sex, while thinking that it's okay or "not rape" because they aren't holding a knife?

>what is the point of trying to argue that certain kinds of coerced sex are not rape?

Because if financial coercion counts the same as physical coercion, we will have to completely rebuild how our market functions or else say that financial coercion only equals physical coercion in certain situations, and then come up with a way to determine when it falls under each (at which point, we are back to arguing about if certain kinds of coercion are equal, including if all forms of coerced sex are equal).

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#384

Post by Lawtonfogle »

Dove wrote: post #315
golemotron wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that as a heterosexual man, regardless of my financial circumstances, no one could coerce me into giving blowjobs under the threat of losing my job. I'd quit and take my chances. What am I missing here?

As a heterosexual woman, I agree with the sentiment. No one could coerce me into giving blow jobs by threatening to fire me, either. In fact, MOST women would HEARTILY agree with that! I'd quit a job like that. You'd quit a job like that. Most people would quit a job like that. It's not being a man or woman, being straight or gay, being compatible or not with an abuser, that makes the difference here. Unwanted sex is…

>Someone for whom the job represented access to health insurance that was keeping their daughter alive, that they couldn't afford another way.

At which point we have to consider they are being coerced to work where they do and thus it should be considered slavery.

Imagine you walked up to some one (of the gender you prefer) who had a dying child that needed a life saving operation and you had enough free income to pay for the procedure.

If you walked past them, would you be guilty of contributing to their death?

If you asked them to trade possessions for the money, would you be guilty of theft?

If you asked the individual to do some non-sexual tasks for the money, would you be guilty of slavery?

If the above are no, why would asking for sex in exchange make one guilty of rape?

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#385

Post by Lawtonfogle »

pron wrote: post #172
eveningcoffee wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A second colleague at a different institution held me against a wall against my objections and struggles and hit me with objects for his own amusement." Now this sounds rather as an assault, a sick power play, but I would accept it called rape when it involved was sexual amusement but probably sexual assault would be a better term as it would not dilute the meanings confusingly. Nonetheless this kind of behaviour is…

> I think that it would be much easier to fight with such behaviour by calling it by actual names. No, it won't, and let me explain why. One of the well known forms of sexism is what I like to call (I wonder if there's an academic name for this) "everyone's a lawyer". You'll find that often when men report wrongdoings, there's a simple expression of outrage, but when women do, everyone's a lawyer who says "of course…

You point out that this is sexism against a woman, yet a recent (2010) study purposefully defined forced sex where the victim was forced to penetrate as not being rape (a definition that almost exclusively impacted male victims). Not just any study, but a study by the CDC. This study has been quoted numerous times, often by people looking only at what the study officially defines as rape, leading to a massive misunderstanding of the problem by subsets of society.

So I doubt your notion that for men we just express outrage when large institutions are able to wrongly redefine things in a way to dismiss male victims.

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#386

Post by drostie »

jobposter1234 wrote: post #231
drostie wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a much simpler definition of "rape" as "being coerced into having sex that you do not want to have." It, of course, is not the present legal definition of rape. But it's something that's easy to talk about and to use in conversation. In other words, the point is that sex is put into a separate sphere of activity from other ordinarily-pleasant experiences and given a dignity which is not special to those other…

Is sex somehow fundamentally different than every* other act that it should be treated so differently? * Every. If I used my power at work to make you eat a literal lunch of feces, is that more or less egregious? I know what my gut would say, but why? Isn't the core bad behavior the concept of abrogating another human's free will? Why is sex in this other classification? Edit: put another way, why is it that being co…

Is sex somehow fundamentally different than every other act that it should be treated so differently?

Yes, sex is different from other things. That was the point of the post you're replying to.

If I used my power at work to make you eat a literal lunch of feces, is that more or less egregious?

I mean, I'd say "more egregious", but that's because it strikes me as unrestrained cruelty. A rapist at least has clear selfish motives with a disregard for human decency; someone who's power-tripping and saying "you're going to do this thing just because I know you don't like it and want to make you suffer" is far scarier.

But it doesn't matter which one is more egregious. The point is that you can call the one thing "rape." That is a valid word to use to describe it.

Isn't the core bad behavior the concept of abrogating another human's free will? Why is sex in this other classification?

You're looking at a two-dimensional figure edge-on so that it looks one dimensional, which causes you to think that these two questions are related, but they are not clearly -- they are about different things.

There are lots of things that are scary about rape. It's not just that someone has "abrogated your free will" -- they're using you as an object and thereby dehumanizing you. This means that certain other questions emerge naturally, like "where exactly does that stop?". And that's a matter of fear for your life (which in law is the crime of assault). It's as if an axiom of our logic has been violated: If someone disregards the basic standards of human decency, we lose all proofs/guarantees that they won't, say, kill us for fun.

If you don't understand where this fear comes from, rape will be an academic question for you, and you will miss the real need for social change.

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#387

Post by foldr »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #375
foldr wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jrochkind1 correctly pointed out that divorce doesn't involve sexual coercion, which seems a good reason not to regard it as an instance of rape.

The issue is not whether the label "rape" should be applied. The issue is whether this line of reasoning is a valid argument for why something should be a crime: "If you $X that's clearly $CRIME. If you $Y, some people wouldn't call that $CRIME (and the law wouldn't either). But I'd rather get $X then $Y. So why do we consider the latter not as bad?"

I don't think jrochkind1 was appealing to any kind of universal principle, he was just pointing out that there are many ways of coercing people to have sex, and some of the violent ways of doing it aren't obviously worse than some of the non-violent ones. That certainly raises the question of whether we'd want to make a sharp legal distinction between violent and non-violent coercion in the specific case of rape. As some other people have pointed out, it's important to distinguish times when it is and isn't useful to go into a philosophical discussion. If you want to figure out some kind of moral axiom system that makes it possible to "prove" that one form of forced sex is or isn't as bad as another, then that's best saved for a philosophy seminar. In practical terms, it's obvious that there's a danger of minimizing the significance of non-violent forms of sexual coercion due to the view that these don't count as rape.

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#388

Post by xtrumanx »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #349
xtrumanx wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, by "I don't think I can safely ignore the rest of your comment" I meant I shouldn't let a comment like your stand unanswered. You're accusatory tone set me in a light that made me look like The Bad Guy™. I don't like looking like The Bad Guy™ so and having already been downvoted, for the "safety" of my reputation, I felt the need to respond to your comment.

I'm not sure what was more accusatory about my tone than yours; I asked a question "Are you saying..." just the same as you did. Do you think your post I was replying to had an accusatory tone? Please quote the section of my comment that gave you the idea I had an accusatory tone, and explain how it differed from your comment I was replying to. You've made a baseless assumption of my tone, and gone on a tirade. (Yeah…

> Please quote the section of my comment that gave you the idea I had an accusatory tone, and explain how it differed from your comment I was replying to.

Someone is downvoting every comment I leave in this thread but I'm going to go out on a limb and explain myself in case you truly care why I believe your post was accusatory and mine wasn't.

pron (the user I originally replied to) said:

> Leave the precise naming of offenses to the courts; these are legal definitions, after all, and we are not judges and not bound by the rules of evidence. The best way to fight it is to express outrage, period.

It seemed to me pron's argument was essentially even if someone was not raped and was instead sexually harrassed they should call it rape as to express outrage. That argument seemed so absurd to me that I felt I needed confirmation that was in fact the argument being made and so I replied to them with the comment:

> Are you saying even if it wasn't a rape by whatever your very own definition of rape, you would rather call it rape to express outrage?

That's it. I was not attempting to be accusatory but just seeking clarification.

You on the other hand asked me:

> Are you saying that it's important to argue about whether the word 'rape' is the right word or not?

Which came straight out of left field for me and thus your comment felt accusatory to me. I didn't feel I did something and but felt I was accused of doing it and thus described your comment as accusatory.

You seem to dislike me. I don't know why. You seem like you care about gender equality. That makes you sound like a nice person. But that way you talk to me is so off-putting and I don't know why you feel the need to be so venomous to someone asking a question. This is not unique to you and not the first time I encountered someone like this on HN. Maybe if we weren't communicating via text and instead speaking to one another face to face we'd treat each other differently. I hope that's what it would be like.

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#389

Post by yummyfajitas »

foldr wrote: post #387
yummyfajitas wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not whether the label "rape" should be applied. The issue is whether this line of reasoning is a valid argument for why something should be a crime: "If you $X that's clearly $CRIME. If you $Y, some people wouldn't call that $CRIME (and the law wouldn't either). But I'd rather get $X then $Y. So why do we consider the latter not as bad?"

I don't think jrochkind1 was appealing to any kind of universal principle, he was just pointing out that there are many ways of coercing people to have sex, and some of the violent ways of doing it aren't obviously worse than some of the non-violent ones. That certainly raises the question of whether we'd want to make a sharp legal distinction between violent and non-violent coercion in the specific case of rape. As…

That certainly raises the question of whether we'd want to make a sharp legal distinction between violent and non-violent coercion in the specific case of rape...times when it is and isn't useful to go into a philosophical discussion.

Take it up with rayiner then. Once you stop discussing what the law says in favor of what it should say, you've already gotten into moralizing. But when it's pointed out that the moralizing is probably flawed, it's no longer the time for moral philosophy?

I.e., I need to turn off my mind the minute it goes against your emotional conclusions. "Won't someone think of the children/women?"

Re: Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower

#390

Post by MrScruff »

exodust wrote: post #379
MrScruff wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, you're responding to the OP. And whatever your thoughts on her article, perhaps you should just keep them to yourself on the off chance that, you know, you might be wrong. She mentioned she can produce evidence for the DEFCON story elsewhere in this thread so you might want to get that $500 ready.

> you might want to get that $500 ready She said the cameras weren't rolling. And I said I wanted recorded evidence, so my $500 is safe. The reason it's safe is not because the cameras weren't rolling but because 24 men never chanted "show us your tits". Who knows, maybe one idiot in the crowd did... but 24 didn't. I just watched some of her talk on youtube, and she has the crowd in her hand. She owns the topic and g…

I'm not a prude, nor particularly feminist (other than the usual 'I couldn't give a fuck who you are as long as you can code' etc). But I'm still struggling to see any context where chanting 'show us your tits' isn't a completely unacceptable thing to say to another human outside of a strip bar.

And I really can't see how you can argue it's anything other than sexist, unless women start shouting 'show us your cock' at the next RMS lecture.

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