31–37 of 37 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You assume a company should be all serious. Except nothing about this is funny, and if you think it is, it only shows how detached you are from reality and humanity. It's like casual racism.
You could say that for most TV, cinema and youtube. We don't all agree on what's funny and what's offensive.
Susan Fowler tweeted that Chris Sacca has been DMing her on Twitter, tring to "manipulate" her to stop tweeting about him. This after his blog post claiming to be changing his ways. https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/881198112923987968
// //
I find myself playing a contrarian on these forums much more than I'd like to but this topic tends to have people dropping all semblance of nuance, and fairness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could say that for most TV, cinema and youtube. We don't all agree on what's funny and what's offensive.
Usually you should let those being offended decide wether or not it's offensive by definition though.
The biggest issue here is not that Dave is a creep and that he has been let go. The biggest issue is that the leaders of this 500 Startups organization let this go on for years without taking action. Who are the people who let their organization's logo and name appear in this guy's slides together with the words "GET YOU LAID (=SEX)"? https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-... It does not matter…
The fact that a backlash against self-evidently disgusting behavior needs to 'build' is disturbing.
There are many facets to this backlash (if indeed there is one). At the most fundamental level nobody disputes that women have a right to the same kind of respect that men receive (including not being harassed), or that women have a right to the same opportunities as men do. But the devil is in the details. For example, there are a lot of insane ideas thrown around as to how to fix the problem. There are people who a…
There are other unintended consequences that are also worrying. I'm a bisexual/pansexual man and software engineer and the climate has become so antagonistic between the sexes in the past few years that I personally feel a massive relief whenever a professional setting is devoid of attractive women. I feel no such concern with attractive men or unattractive people of any gender. Even the most innocent interactions these days are liable be construed as harassment, especially by those with a socialized victimhood-mentality.
The fact that accusations based on perceptions/interpretations of the accuser involving situations and circumstances that are often highly ambiguous are accepted as unassailable fact is highly troubling. There is no room for nuance and misunderstanding anymore. The fear of public reprisal through shaming over misunderstanding and ambiguity is very palpable and meets the criteria for a hostile work environment.
Personally, I have the luck of being relatively attractive, but I have concerns for less attractive male colleagues whose innocent interactions will almost invariably be taken as creepy simply by virtue of being less attractive. The precariousness of their situation is made worse when some of these colleagues are on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum and are often wholly unaware of how their interactions may be misinterpreted. Engineering used to be a safe haven for those on that end of the spectrum, where they didn't have to worry about their inability to pick up on nuanced social cues they don't possess the psychological skills to readily perceive in realtime so they are aware of a potential transgression before they commit it.
Work environments designed and curated by neurotypicals is actively hostile to those that are not neurotypical and we're witnessing the colonization of one of few professional areas where those who are not-neurotypical could safely operate. For all the talk of the value of diversity, cognitive diversity is never ever considered or even a topic of conversation.
To be clear, I'm not excusing overt and unambiguous sexual harassment. I'm merely making the point that human sexuality and human socialization are very messy affairs and that most situations are hardly ever free of ambiguity and misunderstanding. If we don't acknowledge that there often is a grey area, we risk creating very hostile social spaces for those who don't have neurotypical privilege and have little to no sexual capital to mitigate their interactions from being considered "creepy" by default.
> “Some men have the feeling that the conversation has turned into a witch hunt,” said Aileen Lee, a founder of Cowboy Ventures. “They’re asking when people will stop being outed.”
Now, when I think about being outed, it's definitely in an LGBT sense. But in general, I feel when you are "outed" it's about something that might be bad, but you can't change, and shouldn't really matter anyway. Some examples would be being gay, previously being convicted with an unrelated crime, etc. Being outed is usually bad, as it usually means that you're divulging information that reflects poorly on the person who to a group who doesn't know it.
So what's the difference between being "outed" and being "called out"/"reported"/etc? I'd say it's bad purpose/intent or harm to others. I don't say I outed that meth dealer to the cops right?
I also recently saw this in a reply to a comment I made here on HN, about how the commenter hopes people won't "out" those managers who don't feel it's appropriate for members of the opposite sex to have 1:1's alone.
It's an interesting choice of words, and it does get the point across. But to me, this sticks in my throat, because it seems like people are implicitly saying it's okay to do these things, as long as nobody knows. Which seems to be and have been the status quo.
I'd love it if someone with the skills could do a sentiment analysis of all the comments under SV sexism/sexual harassment articles posted to HN, and quantify the amount of denialism versus recognition there is, as well as graph whether there is at least a downward trend in denialism, whether the tipping point mentioned in the article is happening. On this topic I've been disappointed in HN more often than not. HN us…
Can't you just approximate the result by finding the most upvoted comments?