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Yahoo Offered Lap Dances At Hack Event
Fotograf writes "Yahoo's latest embarrassment seems like a sign that the company is just trying too hard to be cool. The latest debacle is earning the company some additional publicity. After Yahoo hosted Taiwan Open Hack Day, a special event for engineers and developers that was held last weekend, a series of photos found their way onto the internet — as ill-thought out decisions often do. Yahoo offered lap dances to the attendees of the hack event. Since the pictures have come out the company has decided to apologize."
Awesome. Wish I was there.
Get the popcorn... this is going to be an epic thread. We've already had the "Wish I was there" post, it's time for the feminist wing to turn up. Oh the objectification!
Moral of the story: NEVER apologize for sex.
Why?
Who the hell would want a lap dance on a stage in front of tons of people. That would be awkward and unpleasant even if you liked lap dances from strangers (rubbing their diseases all over you, heh).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Maybe I'm a bit jaded or detached, but I fail to see how offering lap dances is fundamentally different from offering free beer. It's cheap fun, and some people may find it morally objectionable, but in the end not a single attendee is going to end up bumping uglies with one of the dancing girls. Had the cheerleaders for an NFL team been there in tight shirts and tiny skirts waving pompoms nobody would have said a word.
Sorry for what? Sexuality is natural, this is a secular country. The creative people who made the internet what it is are mostly secular, agnostic, or atheist.
Why can I watch someone get his head blown off on broadcast television, but adults have to say "Sorry" to other adults for offering them probably the best thing in the world, which is attractive females hovering above the crotch?
If anything, forbid taking of pictures, but if everyone in attendance is over 18, who gives a shit?
Let the fucking fundamentalists build their own internet. This one was built by punks, goths, rakes, rogues, and geeks, who all LOVE PORN!
This Puritan country needs an enema, expatriation to the sexually normal and unrepressed EU is looking better and better.
This is all especially hypocritical because so many male I.T. sales reps take their male clients to strip clubs anyway.
DOOFUSES! FIGHT THE FUCKING MORALITY DRONES! SPEAK UP! THEY ARE NOT THE MAJORITY IN THIS COUNTRY AND THEY NEVER WERE!
Underclass? Pfff.... Most of them probably earn more than I do.
... There it is considered positively old fashioned and prudish to stop with just lap dances. The competition is sure to be offering a lot more.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
in the Information Technology field? This might go some way to explain it.
Did Yahoo not think that women engineers would be present at this event? They make up roughly ten percent of engineers as a whole. Furthermore, did they think that there was some way that women attendees would be perfectly comfortable watching other women objectified on a stage?
It's not that I mind women being objectified for money -- the women involved are handsomely rewarded for their parts in this business deal. I do mind people in my field saying that they do everything they can to make women comfortable in our field, then turning around and saying that they don't understand why anyone would be offended by this.
Per the article, which I know no one reads, the guy that made the remarks has a blog at http://simonwillison.net/
He may not have been there, but his point is that for an industry that's always trying to attract women, this is the wrong thing to do. Not to mention that even if it is culturally accepted in Taiwan, some developers may be morally opposed to this.
So we shouldn't be surprised when women don't want to enter the IT and Computer Science fields because they see it as a male dominated field. Images like these reinforce that perception. If you want more women in the field, do things that attract them. Don't trot out booth babes like it's an anime/gaming convention or a car show.
Why should they have minded? Because, in your opinion, sexuality is to there to be enjoyed not sold? Why should their sense of shame or morality have any relation to your opinion? What makes you so special?
I'm not a big fan of strip clubs, and I personally find the whole concept of selling sex as off-putting, but I'm not going to go around saying people who do it should feel ashamed of themselves. You assume they are relaxing their own principles or boundaries in exchange for money, when in fact in many cases their principles and boundaries are simply more permissive than yours. I accept that some people have more liberal boundaries than my own. However, when they're doing things that, ultimately, don't hurt anyone, I can't justify getting offended by it, and I certainly can't justify trying to get anyone to feel bad about it.
Oh boohoo, I get tons of cash doing what I moderately enjoy.
We're not talking about crackwhores or sexual slavery here.
"Screw you. Some people like lap dances so they got one, and we're not apologizing."
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Mod parent up.
The old, Andrea Dworkin, men-hating, anti-pornography lesbian feminism is over. As it turns out, the philosophy really was driven by the psychology of angry lesbians who could only find empowerment by striking at heterosexual women capable of controlling their sexual destiny.
Diablo Cody, screenwriter of "Juno" is the exact personification of the new feminism. Stripper, writer, she's "in control" of her sexuality and is fine with using it for *her* own ends, even if on the surface it appears to be just furthering the old stereotypes. That doesn't matter because the men are really the manipulated victims (paying for sexual titillation) and the women are in charge.
Excuse me, gotta run, I have an English Lit class.
Especially consider the massage business. A person is paid to perform a service in which they physically interact with you to provide relief of muscle tension and physical enjoyment. Tell me again how this is so different from prostitution?
Well, sexual activity tends to have more negative consequences than getting a massage, especially for the prostitute. It's usually difficult to get pregnant or catch HIV from giving a massage. Of course there are ways to reduce those risks, but they're a relatively recent development, so it may take a generation or two for the idea that pregnancy and disease can be reliably prevented to embed itself in the social consciousness. I'm certainly not trying to be Puritanical about it, I'm just pointing out that the negative consequences of sex require that you be a bit more careful about it than you would be with other, more mundane services.
Please, that;s stupid.
A) No one was forced to
B) Anyone could ahve gotten one
C) It's socially acceptable there.
Seriously, people need to grow up an realize that if it doesn't impact them they need to ignore it.
What next? no one can eat meaat at work because it might offend a vegan?
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Say it to me, i prefered to go to a Windows 7 party instead :(
It's a very, very risky industry, but at the end of the day there are still people willing to accept those risks and do the job. Society shouldn't be stepping in the way of that. Regulating safety precautions (as they do with OSHA), but not declaring that a willing worker should be legally unable to perform a job for which there is certainly a demand.
No disagreement here. When it comes to construction, the precautions you can take, such as tying yourself to some part of the structure to prevent falling to the ground, have been fairly well understood for a long time. Reliable prevention of pregnancy and disease is relatively new (something on the order of 50 years or so?), so for a lot of people it hasn't quite sunken in yet. Hopefully attitudes will change as it slowly becomes an accepted fact through the entire population.
Eh, who am I kidding. There will always be nutters that insist that if it feels good, you have to stop.
This was the creepiest fucking thread I've seen on Slashdot. I like the way you keep replying to yourself. As if you think, "Oh, hey, here's a creepy fact about college-age strippers and drugs the Slashdot community is dying to learn from me."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
This is disgusting. Imagine someone treating your daughter like that.
Ummm I would prefer people to treat my daughter honestly and with respect. Giving someone something they want in exchange for hanging out and maybe having sex is not wrong. The fact that they would even want to take drugs might be morally wrong and the fact that someone might provide them equally so but it's really not any different than someone wanting cash money or nice new shoes or a rich Dr Husband or even a free dinner...
I haven't said anything in this thread other than college age girls who strip or wait tables like drugs and do stupid shit to get them. That is simply a fact. I have not told anyone to lie or try and slip anything into anyone's drink.
I think the problem here is you just can't image that your daughter might be doing stuff like this. I can understand that but it's your job as a parent to teach your daughter about drugs, sex and everything else. When you don't is when they go off and become strippers just to piss daddy off...
What I don't understand is....why is yahoo now apologizing for this?!?!?
Should be obvious: they don't want to get bad PR, get targeted for an idiotic protest/boycott/letter writing campaign, lose advertisers... money.
I heard about this elsewhere, with quotes by a father who was at the event with his young daughter. I can understand not wanting his daughter to see that. There are, however, people who were -not- there who could hear about this and might be persuaded to go on some campaign against yahoo, for lacking morals or something like that. Why might someone object to this even though they weren't anywhere near taiwan? I don't fully understand their mindset, people who honestly believe the world is becoming more immoral. They seem to ignore the fact that we're no longer burning women at the stake for being witches, we no longer have slavery, we no longer go on crusades (er... as overtly anyway.) To these people, Walmart switching to saying "Happy holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" is evidence enough that we are becoming corrupt. To combat that decline, they've gotten it in their heads that they must fight what they deem to be immoral behavior whenever they notice it.
If this story were to be picked up by, say, a certain extremely unbalanced cable news network, Yahoo could very easily have a large protest on their hands. "Sex! Sponsored by an american company! Outrageous! Call pastor bill, we need to boycott this company, whatever 'Yahoo' is selling." And that would be annoying.
Fortunately, these people are almost as easily pacified as they are riled up. A semi-sincere sounding apology will shut those people up, they say "oh, they learned their lesson."
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I don't fully understand their mindset, people who honestly believe the world is becoming more immoral. They seem to ignore the fact that we're no longer burning women at the stake for being witches,
No. But you do torture people in Guatanamo. You also make people write TPS reports in small cubicles.
we no longer have slavery, we no longer go on crusades (er... as overtly anyway.)
But you do kill people in Iraq. Wars in the past was fairly small scale compared to industrialized death and destruction.
And this idiotic diatribe was thought to be insightful? When morality has to be legislated, the people are already immoral.