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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."
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.
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.
"Screw you. Some people like lap dances so they got one, and we're not apologizing."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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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