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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.
Now that's a nice company issued laptop. ZING!
Why wasn't I invited?
Just goes to show you that you can read all of the documentation you want, but experience is what really matters.
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!
The one IT related conference I DON'T go to... AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENS!
Not really a big deal.. they offer blow jobs to congressmen all the time..
Company sponsored AT the actual event - yeah, that's a bit over the top. But it's pretty common for guys to head to a strip club after a business meeting. Heck in any large-ish town there will be several clubs with varying reputations (almost a caste system of sorts). Invariably there is almost always one that caters to the business crowd where you walk in and it's pretty much universally guys in suits.
Yahoo took the next awkward step, but the idea overall ain't that far-fetched.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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
ya-HOOO-WOOO-OOO
http://yodelstudio.yahoo.com/us/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Personally, I always prefer a lap dance when the stripper is crying.
No penetration testing in the champagne room!!
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
.stripper(): slowly removes the HTML elements of your page, revealing something naughty underneath.
.poleDance(): automatically adds a vertical navigation bar to your site, then teases you when you want to click on something
.Titillate(): a replacement for .Console(), to make sure the programmer is, um, "properly aware" of script feedback
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Because I read the headline as some hick/yahoo stumbling onto a hack event and being offered a lap dance by... someone. It was dredging up some incredibly disturbing images that were half Deliverance and half cosplay gone horribly horribly wrong.
Pictures or it didn't happ... Oh, wait...
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
the new feminism is about self-empowerment
such that grad students who work in strip clubs are seen as feminist icons: its all about exploiting silly weak men for lots of their cash by doing nothing but shimmying around
and no, that doesn't mean the new feminism is the same as pre-feminism. because the feminist who strips is CHOOSING to strip for fun and titillation (pun intended), rather than being FORCED to do it for economic difficulties
not that women aren't forced into exploitation for economic difficulties anymore, i'm not describing reality. i'm describing philosophical trends in feminist thinking. in feminist thinking, porn actresses are the new pioneers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... 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."
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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?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think you'd be -very- surprised by how wrong you are.
You equate selling sex to letting someone punch you for money. I see it the same as a construction job, where you sweat and work hard to deliver on your contract. Selling sex isn't the same as selling violence. Most sex work isn't violent.
I've dated a sex worker, and lived with another. Both enjoyed their jobs and made GOBS of loot.
One was a single 'cougar' who managed to pay off her house in three years, she was a nurse making $40K before, and she returned afterwards.
She said that it was great because you set your own hours and limits, there's security to make sure you're safe, and you get a hell of a workout dancing, etc.
I'm in a state where we're about to make indoor prostitution illegal (it's been legal here for 30 years), and my extensive research into the field has led me to believe that this whole notion of 'it's bad for you' is just not true. We have massage parlor workers testifying to keep their jobs at legislative hearings, we caught the Craigslist killer because the sex workers can call the police when they're abused or robbed, and we have virtually no street (read: crackwhore) prostitution.
Selling sex, for most of the people in the legal industry is a steppingstone between coming to this country poor and not knowing the language, to home ownership, and paying to raise your kids right or meeting a nice American to get married to.
Check out our site on the issue: http://citizensagainstcriminalization.org/
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I too think the lap dancing is distasteful, but this is a fine example how corporate culture is heavily distorted by the country's own culture as well. I think Yahoo! Taiwan organized the event autonomously without any collaboration with the US head quarter, and that the US head quarter really has nothing to do with this.
In Taiwan, hiring scanty show girls for any event like trade show, religious celebration, new year, and funeral is very common. You even see that in weddings (especially in the country-side). Imagine how the bride feels about that!
I once had a signature.
If you want more women in the field, do things that attract them.
The female programmers I know can't get laid either, so I assume your suggestion is to just start bringing in some male strippers as well.
Cry me a river. Everyone morally objects to something someone else does, get over it. No one was harmed. No one did anything against their will. There were no guns to heads.
Anyone who has a problem with this event is the exact kind of uncultured intolerant person that I personally have no need to work with, male OR female.
I'm not changing my ways to appease someone else because they 'dont like' some aspect of the culture of the field. If they want to be in IT they can adjust to the IT field. As they join the IT field will change based on the ratios of what people prefer.
Real women (just like real men) have no problem entering a hostile field without whining and bitching. What you are doing is attempting to change a field, to encourage more people to join it, but the people you are encouraging don't WANT to join it. You want to change the field to get what YOU want, not what women want.
Not EVERYTHING has to have a perfect balance based on sex or race. Differences between sex and race AND CULTURE will ALWAYS result in less than a perfect balance. Thats not a bad thing, thats reality and you need to check it out.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Dear lord - I'm a woman, in IT, and it being male dominated (seriously, sorry if it hurts your egos, but most IT guys really aren't intimidating) just isn't the reason. A few half naked girls are far more awkward to be around for the guys than me (I see more female flesh than that on display in the gym changing rooms every day)
Most girls just aren't interested in this kind of job, I'm normally the only female dev, and any other females in the office are in admin and happy with it.
In taiwan, pretty girls dressed in very little really are culturally acceptable. In my office in Malaysia one of the guys would have phone calls discussing what he was getting up to at the weekend (or had got up to), invited my boyfriend to a 'spa' once, and there were no complaints. My Caucasian boyfriend however had numerous compaints against him, despite being a total sweetheart because they found his face scary (it's a normal face, just very expressive compared to an asian guy)