CSB time: A while ago, I had lunch with a group of friends from university and a (male) professor we'd all had.
I thought it was pleasant, but soon after we were done with lunch, I got a text from a female friend of mine who was also there: "Prof. So-and-so is a sexist bastard, I am so mad."
I was taken aback, because I'd been sitting right next to both of them, and...what had happened that I'd noticed nothing?
Turns out the professor had ignored my friend the whole time, even though he'd spoken to everyone else there.
Does this make him sexist? He's very liberal, and I'm sure he'd take the side of the women in this thread. Maybe he just didn't remember my friend. There was another woman there he spoke to, at least some. There are a lot of "maybe"s.
But after talking to my friend, what she concluded is, she gets treated differently than the men around her all the time. Any one instance is usually something she can brush off as due to something other than sexism. But taken as a whole, the evidence of being her disproves the null hypothesis that the reason she's being treated differently isn't because of her gender.
And so I think that when you're responding to a particular instance, like this, or like my friend at lunch -- and particularly if you're a man responding to such an instance -- you should try to take a step back. It is perhaps plausible in a particular instance that what happened had nothing to do with anyone's gender. We can imagine all kinds of explanations. And it's likely that whatever happened was not the result of active malice and hatred of women or a particular woman. But that doesn't mean that sexism doesn't exist, or that this is not a datum pointing strongly in the direction of, women are treated differently than men.
So when TFA says, "the sexism is beyond blatant", understand that this is coming from her perspective, which is more valid than that of someone like me who doesn't experience discrimination on the basis of my gender (or anything else, for that matter) on a daily basis. And clearly many people in the audience shared her perspective.
If you don't share her perspective, that's OK. But I think you'd do the women in the world a big favor if you'd just...let it go. "I see it differently." OK. nbd. There's no need to be "infuriated". You will never know what it's like to be another person, so it's expected that you're going to see things differently. WAI, let's move on.
Or, if you don't want to move on, maybe spend some time considering what it might be like to be her.