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Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

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Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#471

Post by mymulti »

afraidofsexism wrote: post #432
bobwaycott wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for the compliment and kind words. I appreciate that. However, I must emphatically and proudly express that I do not support the negation and devaluing of women's (as well as ethnic, [other] cultural, LGBT, etc.) rights by way of reactionary countering with a "men's rights" movement. One of the most pressing reasons is that such a movement would likely result in a majority of white, heterosexual male adhe…

Whether or not Adria overreacted is irrelevant. If the problem is these guys got fired, then be mad at the company NOT someone who likely has to deal with sexist bullshit day in and day out in a male dominated and sexualized industry.Okay, so she overreacted, big deal, people overreact every day. On the other hand, look at the response - thousands of comments here and at reddit and on twitter posting her real life ad…

> Whether or not Adria overreacted is irrelevant

How is it? Is attempting to publicly humiliate someone and get them fired now preferred over politely asking them to stop?

> NOT someone who likely has to deal with sexist bullshit day in and day out in a male dominated and sexualized industry.

"Society is male dominated, therefore it's acceptable to publicly humiliate someone and get them fired over dongle jokes".

> thousands of comments here and at reddit and on twitter posting her real life address, calling for her to be raped or cut, etc. Extreme and vicious misogyny.

I haven't personally seen any of this; it's mostly just people disagreeing with her behavior.

Rule #1 of the internet: there are trolls.

> The original incident may have been a "false positive" as you say

Wait, do you seriously think that publicly humiliating someone and getting them fired over a dongle joke is not a problem?

> the response has been 100% vicious and violent misogyny.

You mean "100% of the troll posts I looked at were troll posts".

By the way, misogyny is the hatred of women in general. A hateful post is not necessarily misogyny just because it's directed at a woman. Eg. I can hate Sarah Palin and post about how I hope she gets eaten by a grue, but that's not misogyny.

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#472

Post by dahauns »

adriarichards wrote: post #27
mr-hank wrote: post #23

Hi, I'm the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I'd like to say I'm sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes…

Hey, Thanks for speaking up, contributing your viewpoint on HN and not attacking me. I'm sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively. For context, I'm a developer evangelist. That means I'm an advocate for developers, male and female. While I hear abou demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launch…

> I decided instead to accept it bothered me and took action based on the PyCon Code of Conduct.

Weeell, except you didn't. Or did you miss the part about how PyCon doesn't condone public shaming?

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#473

Post by sp332 »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #421
adriarichards wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Thanks for speaking up, contributing your viewpoint on HN and not attacking me. I'm sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively. For context, I'm a developer evangelist. That means I'm an advocate for developers, male and female. While I hear abou demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launch…

Why can't you just turn around and say one of the following: Shhhhh. Take it outside. You're not funny, and I can't hear the talk. I'm going to call the conference police if you don't quiet yourselves. Or something to that effect? If somebody persists after you ask them to quit, fine, blast away.

The guy apologized, and everyone was satisfied at that point. No idea why PlayHaven fired him but that wasn't something she asked for.

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#474

Post by sp332 »

jonhendry wrote: post #447
antihero wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly are forking and dongle innuendos offensive to women? What right do you have to be offended by them other than that you have ears?

You've never heard of a double entendre? How many terrible jokes have been made along the lines of "I'd like to put my hard drive in her RAM slot". Jokes like that were old and corny 20 years ago. HINT: though it uses the terms "hard drive" and "RAM slot", as used, they don't actually refer to a hard drive or a RAM slot. It's entirely reasonable to know what forking and dongles mean in the normal sense, yet to hear c…

First, the "forking" joke was not sexual. It referred to actually forking a repo on github. Second, is the fact that guys have "dongles" offensive to women?

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#475

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

okamiueru wrote: post #459
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that an observer should find those to be different? Bear in mind that at least one observer didn't experience them as different, and went into detail as why.

You cannot take into consideration erroneous assumptions or false knowledge. Based on what words mean, and the definition of terms (see the comment you replied to), it doesn't matter if someone interpreted it wrong. Anyone can always interpret something wrong and find themselves offended. But that's all on them. It's not productive to go around worrying about that.

"wrong", "erroneous", "false" are strong terms (IMHO, far too strong) for someone having a different perspective and history of dealing with such comments. And IMHO it is productive to try to understand these perspectives.

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#476

Post by chris_wot »

fosap wrote: post #112
mr-hank wrote: post #23

Hi, I'm the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I'd like to say I'm sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes…

>I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. Boldly speaking, you are a moron. She might feel offended, but i don't think she has any right to be upset. https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425 >@skwashd you should put something in your pants next time...like a bunch of socks inside one...large...sock. TSA agent faint

> Boldly speaking, you are a moron.

Please take your boldness elsewhere. This is HN, name calling is frowned at here.

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#477

Post by hopeless_case »

tylerhwillis wrote: post #388
nawitus wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However, you are very selectively choosing facts to draw a picture in which men "have the same amount of gender equality issues (maybe even more) than women"." I'm not, really. Feminist discourse is based on the claim that women have more gender issues. They never really argue for that position. I've linked a list of gender equality issues (though my primary source is unfortunately not in English). Here's a book on…

>do women get raped more than men (not in USA) This is very wrong. The link you provide in the original comment is for violent crimes (including rape), not for rape alone. There is little doubt that women are more likely to be raped in the US than men. Here's a relevant study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics: http://bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1146 "Overall, an estimated 91% of the victims of rape and sexu…

Women are 50% of rape victims, and 40% of rapists. That is in the general population and excludes prison rape. If you included that, men would be the majority of victims.

These figures are from the CDC's 2010 NISVS (National Intimiate Partner Sexual Violence Survey), although you won't find it in the executive summary. You have to look at the data tables. Here is a link to the NISVS: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/specialreports.h...

The executive summary tells the usual story of rape being a male on female crime. There are 2 problems here. One is that they define rape as being penetrated against your will, and not being forced to penetrate (what a female rapist would do to a man). This erases female on male rape.

However, they did ask men if they had been forced to penetrate in the prior 12 months, and 1.1% of men surveyed reported that they had, and 80% of those had been attacked by a woman. 1.1% of women reported that they had been penetrated against their will in the prior 12 months, and 98% of those reported a male attacker.

So we have 50% of victims are male and 50% female. Of the 50% of male victims, 80%, or 40% of total victims, were raped by a woman.

So women are 40% of rapists. Here is a image of the data tables from the NISVS, with the relevant figured circled: http://imgur.com/a/aw0eU

And here is a link to show the number crunching on the CDC's data tables in more detail: http://www.genderratic.com/p/836/manufacturing-female-victim...

Earlier I said there were 2 problems with the executive summary. The second one is that the CDC looked at lifetime victimization, and prior 12 months victimization. Their figures for men as victims of rape (when you include being made to penetrate) are much lower than for women. In the executive summary, they use the lifetime stats to show women as the overwhelming majority of victims, and don't mention the prior 12 month numbers.

Why the disparity between lifetime victimization and prior 12 month? Lifetime stats will tend to underestimate the problem, because, over time, people tend to erase their memory of traumatic events as a survival mechanism.

From the analysis I linked above:

>Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence.

> For men this effect is even more pronounced.

>

> 16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997).

>

>Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women.

>

>That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men.

>

>Is it any wonder that the CDC’s 2010 survey (correcting for their mis-categorization of female-on-male rape) found that 18.3% of women and 6.2% of men were victimized over their lifetimes?

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#478

Post by flaviusb »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #382
selenamarie wrote: post #211

I hope people here realize how far some people will go when they feel they are given permission to harass others: https://twitter.com/jessenoller/status/314417532842950656 This is just awful. And the people who are taking part in the harassment are responsible, not anyone else.

Being that you "thanked" Adria for her deplorable behavior, I'm not sure that you're in a position to speak out against harassment on this issue.

Adria's behaviour wasn't deplorable - it was fine. The response of the two men involved's workplaces (ie firing them for essentially bad PR) was less than fine, but not deplorable. The response of the hordes of screaming shitbags making death threats has been deplorable. Fucking deplore the actually deplorable, not the fine.

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#479

Post by flaviusb »

ninjatron wrote: post #332
bobwaycott wrote: post #206

Seriously, Adria (and all of you who are defending her actions)--you got this one wrong; it was a false positive on your sexism scale. As a philosophical Marxist, I count myself among those who not only inherently support gender equality, but are from the thought tradition that started the damn movement. In graduate school, my thesis focused on the Southeast US from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

> And to be perfectly transparent, I usually ignore it all. I'm one who pretty much defaults to giving women a pass because of all the stupid shit they've dealt with over a long history of men being complete assholes. I mean, really. A woman could make the most sexist comment I've ever heard and I'd just give it a shrug; but I'd say shit to a man if he was even obliquely offensive. I don't disagree with most of what…

Not a double standard, because the situations are not symmetrical.

Re: Inappropriate comments at pycon 2013 called out

#480

Post by pythonuser »

bobwaycott wrote: post #431
chrisfs59 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an amazing amount of splitting hairs and diversions in this post. Trying to say that it's an anatomical vs sexist joke, as if that made a difference, that's ridiculous. A big dongle refers to size of the male organ, big male organs refer to sex, (not your prowess at the urinal...) The issue that they might have been homosexuals and how that gives them a pass is baseless as well. For someone who has spent yea…

Thank you for the critique. I encourage you to read my comment a bit more thoroughly. Maybe read the others I've left here that expound on the issues. There is far more complexity and nuance to my statements than you appear to have absorbed. I'm neither splitting hairs nor offering diversions. I am also not going out of my way to argue that this was anything other than inappropriate, or to offer some lame, idiotic, d…

I completely agree with you. In my opinion, she came across as a cyberbully. And its not the first time, apparently. In 2009, she was accused of hacking someone's website who was running for political office. She apparently discovered that by looking at the cached version of the site, she obtained the ip address of the site and was able to look through the directory and found a database file. While she did not repost that database file to the public, she was able to take a screenshot of it and post that to the public. She apparently likes to be pro-active and not let things go through the proper channels. Once again, I say she is a cyberbully.
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