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Is Sexual Harassment Part of Hacker Culture?
owenferguson writes "Valerie Aurora, Linux kernel file systems expert, takes DEFCON to task for poor sexual harassment policing. A nice followup piece to the recent Readercon fiasco."
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I'm an average geek. I have to say that when I find myself surrounded by really hardcore geeks, I feel put off. It's like they are in a feeding frenzy, looking for a chance to be king of the hill. I am not surprised at all that they'd act in totally horrible ways towards women. Clearly, part of the game there was to do so (to get the hole punched).
I think in the general area of business software, the stereotype of the hardcore geek is mostly gone. People who write business applications are generally pretty mainstream by geek standards. Perhaps such a concentration of extremely tech-focused geeks like at the conference in question is the last place we see this kind of stereotype, and possibly, for that reason they are all the more poorly behaved.
(Aside from needing to look up that link about all articles that end with question mark)
.. its a part of immature people who associate with hacker culture .. hmm .. so maybe that should be a yes?
Sexual harassment is just plain old immature behavior. It isn't a part of Hack Culture
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This commentary on this article will undoubtedly be similar to that of a troll festival.
Ooops, *looks above post*, too late.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Or the experience of one of my friends, who prefers to remain anonymous. At a recent DEFCON, while leaning over to get her drink at the bar, someone slid his hand up all the way between her legs and grabbed her crotch.
I cannot believe someone could even remotely think that doing something like this would be a good idea. Someone else's body is not just an object. Jesus Christ people, get a fucking clue - this sort of attitude makes for a very poor environment all around.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Is this real sexual harassment or just one of the insanely vocal parish that categorise "rape" as "some guy glancing askance at my bubs", who in the process harm actual rape victims by trivialising it?
Grabbing a woman by the crotch in a crowded room and running away definitely counts as "sexual harassment". Except, oh wait. It's ASSAULT. Much better.
Maybe a better question is WHY is this harassment occurring? Is this specific to certain types of conferences?
Adopting a clear policy on the matter is completely sensible. But how does one come to believe that such creepy behavior would be tolerable in the first place?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
One man was apparently out of order, it wasn't a group effort by an entire community. The creep didn't do anything bad enough to get himself arrested and was banned for life for his actions, can't that be an end to it?
Or are we still running with the assumption that all white males are fundamentally evil and everything they do is sexist and/or racist.
FTFA:
Or the experience of one of my friends, who prefers to remain anonymous. At a recent DEFCON, while leaning over to get her drink at the bar, someone slid his hand up all the way between her legs and grabbed her crotch.
I cannot believe someone could even remotely think that doing something like this would be a good idea. Someone else's body is not just an object. Jesus Christ people, get a fucking clue - this sort of attitude makes for a very poor environment all around.
There are many stupid blokes in the world. I'm sure this actually happened. We also have to consider that any time you put a large amount of politically radical individuals in one place, a portion of them will be falsely accused because it's just politically convenient. The next Julian Assange very well could be at Defcon, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if this situation gets exploited by both sides.
We need to educate both men and women about safety. We need technology in place which is gender neutral, which protects both the accused and the accuser. The last thing we want is for something horrible like a sexual assault to happen but being falsely accused of a sexual assault is as horrible as being sexually assaulted. So we have to consider all potential risks and scenarios in security policy.
Yes it is assault. It would only be harassment if said female was told "let me grab your crotch, otherwise I won't promote you/keep you hired/give you a raise like all your co-workers", etc. Of course I've mentioned this before, and immediately was modded to oblivion because in kindergar^H^H^H USA sexual harassment means staring too long/at all at a female coworker or speaking to her.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Seriously, someone who cannot differentiate between sexual harassment and sexual assault should not be writing articles.
Coming from a woman's perspective: agreed, to an extent.
It's not that most of these guys are necessarily bad people, but hackers (in the DEFCON sense) do tend to follow alpha male mentality. Now mix that up with copious amounts of alcohol, the poor social adjustment that many geeks have, and the "anything goes" attitude of Sin City, and yeah you'll have problems.
On that note, the single biggest improvement in that respect would actually be to move DEFCON from Las Vegas. People just behave badly there - for better or worse this isn't just a geek thing or a DEFCON thing.
... and it's not "sexual harassment". It's "sexual assault". I've been seeing considerably more of people being inappropriately aggressive, and not just in hacker cons. It's happening in sci fi cons too, and tech business cons, and plenty of other places. Sales conferences have always been bad, but it's new to see so much of this in geek culture.
I'm pretty sexually liberated (OK, I'm a fucking slut), but that doesn't mean free for all. No matter how much you think they want it, never assume they're interested unless they respond positively to some gentle verbal flirting... And if they don't, they're not interested, so please fuck off.
I know this sounds obvious to many, but I keep seeing rather horrifying examples of geeks completely failing to follow that basic protocol.
It's true they harassment is IN PART defined by the attention being unwelcome. But if you take a case to court it is defined by a "reasonable person" standard. The jury must find that a reasonable person would have understood the behavior to be harrassing or contributed to a hostile working environment.
I have been going to defcon for many years. In recent years my non tech wife has been coming along. My wife is extremely hot and attracts unwanted attention everywhere we go. Its quite the task to keep creepers at bay most of the time. She has repeatedly made it clear that the attendees at defcon and the parties there have been completely respectful and gentlemanly to her. On the other hand, she has been propositioned for "shopping sprees and condo parties" from creepy Vegas men and attempted to be recruited to be a stripper and prostitute on different occasions at the Rio and Riviera pool by Vegas scum. At one point several random hackers came to her defense as she was trying to get away from Vegas scum at the pool. By the time I got out of my track and to the pool random defconers had "solved" the issue in a ways an angry older brother would. These type of problems are what makes my wife wary of defcon and Vegas in general, Vegas scum, not the defcon attendees.
If this is all about some drunk kid asking someone to show your tits, well those kids are everywhere there is alcohol. If someone assaults you, sexually or otherwise, charges should be pressed.
Crotch grab, tit grab, unwanted sexual contact both are considered. At best its a battery charge in most of the US, and most likely its a sexual battery charge in most of the US. Assault (for some weird legal reason) is all the yelling and screaming, threatening gestures etc that go on before or after unwanted physical contact.
This was a felony. The guy who did it, even if he was drunk, in a place he expected such behavior was accepted, etc (and it IS Las Vegas, they adopted a don't ask, don't tell policy as their tourist motto) should be facing prison time for this under US law as well as permanent (oh yeah its forever and ever here in the US) listing on the sexual offenders list.
It's a multi-part problem.
First, a subculture that has very few women, and many of those few that seem to be there* are total attention whores.
Second, with that general lack of women, combined with the disproportionate amount of attention whores, objectification and grandstanding becomes much more common, and fairly violent and derogatory terminology gets bandied about as normal.
Third, many who participate perceive themselves as flaunting the law/rules, and that can lead to a mindset for flaunting the rules outside of the technical realm.
Combine those, and you get a bunch of undersexed, maladjusted men, expecting the few women present to behave in a sexual way, who are used breaking the rules. It's really not much of a surprise to me that this happens.
* I imagine that a lot of the "women" are just men who get their jollies off of role-playing loose women, essentially manipulating the women-characters in to doing what they'd want a woman to do.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Your stereotypical geek may be awkward with women and he may even be a misogynist but he's also probably not terribly social and keeps to himself and his group. I don't see anyone who I'd class a proper geek being the sort to grab someone's ass.
However some ruby on rails rockstar douche bag is almost required to be grabbing ass and treating women like shit in between going to the gym and downing red bull. But brogrammers aren't just a pita to women, real programmers hate them too. They're a cancer on our culture.
Oh bullshit! Assange was accused of sexual misbehavior because he treated women like dirt, apparently. OWS got accused of rape because rapes occur when you have a large number of people gathered for a long time in defiance of police and therefore without police protection. Such sitiuations draw rapists along with their intended participants.
Coming from a woman's perspective: agreed, to an extent.
It's not that most of these guys are necessarily bad people, but hackers (in the DEFCON sense) do tend to follow alpha male mentality. Now mix that up with copious amounts of alcohol, the poor social adjustment that many geeks have, and the "anything goes" attitude of Sin City, and yeah you'll have problems.
On that note, the single biggest improvement in that respect would actually be to move DEFCON from Las Vegas. People just behave badly there - for better or worse this isn't just a geek thing or a DEFCON thing.
No, they don't.
They follow what a wimpy, pasty-white basement dweller THINKS is an "alpha male mentality".
Real alpha males stop acting that way about 11 or 12.
Isn't part of the hacker ethos that the code rules? Who cares the age, sex, color, national origin, or creed of the writer? Do any of these factors make for better or worse code? If not, then differentiators based on those factors have no place in the hacker culture.
Any type of harassment needs to be dealt with rapidly, firmly, and appropriately. At the hacker cons I've attended, I've been fortunate to attend sessions with female presenters. I've also had the opportunity to interact with female attendees and found them to be logical, intelligent, and well spoken. I go to such cons to learn, network, and have some fun. Playing grabass just isn't on the menu. Such things are the province of small minds with no social skills. I'm all for harassers getting a swift kick - or several. I have a feeling though that the goons wouldn't be enamored with that idea.
I'm old enough to have been in the military before, during, and after the 1991 Tailhook incident. Hopefully the pendulum won't swing so far in the other direction that personnel are tossed and/or banned based on unsubstantiated allegations. There are very real incidents that need to be dealt with firmly. There are also invented incidents that should result in sanctions against the person making the false allegations.
-ZPO
Reading that list... I'm seeing a lot of "twitter"/"tweet," a lot of things that are much more along the lines of people taking offense at something... and not really a whole lot of actual harassment.
Really, if this list is the worst that feminists can come up with, taking the whole of the vaguely defined "geek culture" into account, we're fucking saints.
Great Intellect...
Maybe I missed the /. thread on the ReaderCon fiasco, but here's the original complaint
http://glvalentine.livejournal.com/340623.html
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The major problem with Valerie's article is that she creates a strawman argument ("all you men say that if women don't feel comfortable, they shouldn't go") which she then leaps off of to claim that women are not made welcome and thus are being denied employment opportunities available at said conference. In prior discussions here on Slashdot, I have not seen a single commenter say anything similar to that. It is at best an extremist viewpoint. Most of the voices in this and prior discussions have been one of collective disapproval and support for women feeling comfortable at conferences.
The other problem is that Valerie and her cohorts think female-on-male violence is funny:
"The cards are a hilarious way to raise awareness of the problem of brutal sexual harassment at DEFCON and similar conferences."
http://singlevoice.net/redyellow-card-project/
Text from the red card: "You should be happy you got this card and not a punch in the face."
This is a perfect example of how culturally it has become completely acceptable for women to beat men in public or media; people stare, freak out, and intervene when a guy gets aggressive with a woman....but she can use his hair to thrash his head around, punch him repeatedly, etc - and nobody says a word or gives it a second glance. In movies, a woman getting hit is the ultimate bad-guy act...but a man getting hit? That's comedy! Funny! Let's not forget that the man is always portrayed in media as being a lecherous slimebag, and thus "deserves" this treatment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlFAd4YdQks
Please help metamoderate.
While I do not know her personally, her writing points to fuzzy thinking (For example her take on compare by hash is a complete fail and indicates some fundamental lack of understanding the subject matter, while she asserts that she does understand it. I can only speculate that there is some fundamental insecurity at work here and some mental blocks.) and a rather large chip on her shoulder.
I might be wrong on the second count (but I doubt it), but not the first one.
That said, while I only know the more academic side of hacker culture, I have yet to find any instance sexual harassment. Of course some amount of banter is normal in a relaxed environment. It only becomes harassment if somebody told to back of does not. Anybody can reasonably be expected to have that much self-defense capabilities.
I know that there is a school of though that says nothing sexual may even be said in the presence of a woman for risking to harass her. That is a fail as well, as it depicts women as frail creatures unable to fend for themselves or even make their views heard. If I were a woman, this view would insult me greatly.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
First, I must preface I am not saying these things do not happen and I will not take away from anyone's experience as these situations are inexcusable and horrific, but I do want to chime in and say they do not happen to ALL women.
I have been attending tech conferences for going on 6 years now. This year was my 2nd BlackHat, 3rd Defcon, I also speak at average 4-5 conferences in an associated industry each year. While I won't say I have never experienced an idiot or two (but wouldn't you in any situation) OVERALL the men have been supportive, giving, generous and career boosting. They are also very protective over me and if anyone treated me this way I know the person would find himself in a very bad way very quickly. That being said.
I worry when I see posts like this because though I am 1000% positive there are a few bad apples in a conference the size of Defcon (18k) I don't believe wholesale that there are a plethora of bad aggressive idiot men attending.
Most of the men I meet are respectful and helpful and by othering the men you separate women further and create and atmosphere where men are afraid to speak or befriend as they might offend.
So again, I do not wish to in any way detract or minimize the horrendous behavior that was mentioned here. I just caution that generalization can cause issues that do not exist, create a negative atmosphere where women are further separated from the goals they seek to achieve. We work in a predominantly male industry.
Men are not the enemy and I would not be where I am without the ones I know help and guidance. So just remember in a barrel of apples there are always some worm infested ones among the many bright and shiny.
Sounds suspiciously like a sociopath
a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
Those are bad. They tend to end up in jail or a mental institution... for good reason.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
You're not a hacker, you're a dick.
Short Answer: No.
Long Answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Calling yourself a hacker takes away all your credibility. Just saying.
No, your low ID doesn't help either.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Or positions of power and authority, if they aren't idiots about it...
On that note, the single biggest improvement in that respect would actually be to move DEFCON from Las Vegas. People just behave badly there - for better or worse this isn't just a geek thing or a DEFCON thing.
That's a terrible idea. What about all the women that have to live in Las Vegas?
Sexual harassment, assault, and battery must not be tolerated anywhere in society. Las Vegas does not deserve a special exemption as being a spot where men can go, and stop comporting themselves like gentlemen. That does not mean you can't get a little crazy either. I've been completely fucking plastered and flirting with women and I can tell you I still behaved like a gentleman. In Las Vegas too. I didn't grope them and make lewd comments about how I wanted them to service me sexually.
I don't know if a lifetime ban is appropriate in this specific case because there is no article on what actually happened. It seems that the women writing the article talks about having her crotch groped. That is sexual battery and a felony.
We have laws for this stuff. While I don't support multi-year sentences for just groping a woman, I would absolutely throw the bastard in jail for 6-12 months. People don't have a real grasp on just how long that is in a prison environment. Think about something like your two week vacation, that just seems a lot longer, and then multiply it.
Where the laws don't cover it, that's where organizations can step in and remove the person for whatever time period they deem appropriate. If it was for something as serious as sexual battery then, yes, it may well be appropriate to remove that person for life.
Simply removing a conference from an environment that may enable bad behavior is a half-assed response (respectfully), and does not really address the problem in the way it deserves.
It does not matter where it is. Nobody should be able to get away with behavior like this regardless of gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Reminds me of special capitalism zones in China where it is okay to temporarily not act Communist.
The biggest problem I have - not solely isolated to geek culture - is the refusal to believe that a problem even exists. When faced with some situation, such as "do I keep going when this girl who was making out with me before says, 'this is going too fast for me, I want to stop'?", a large percent of men will say "of course I stop" while a large minority will say "of course I keep going", but both groups by and large refuse to admit that there are so many people who take the opposite view.
Think of all the women you know. One in four will be raped at least once in her lifetime. We're not even talking about sexual harrassment, things like unwanted grabbing of breasts and crotches, etc. One in four is just, simply, "rape". There is not some tiny, miniscule percentage of guys doing this; there's actually a rather large minority who seems to think that it's okay to do to women things that they don't want done to them. But just as much of a problem as these guys are, it's nearly as big of a problem that a large portion of the majority of guys who aren't like that seem to have trouble believing that so many men *are* like that. That they probably have several friends who wouldn't stop if the girl they're with said "no".
I think the Daniel Tosh / rape joke thing is a great example. Some comedians get all "freedom of speech" offended if anyone gets mad at them for telling rape jokes. "They're just harmless jokes!" The difference between a "harmless joke" and "offensive" when you say something over the top is whether you and/or your audience actually believe it. And whether you want to accept the fact or not, a sizeable percentage of your audience actually *does* believe what you're joking about. And a sizeable percentage of your audience are victims of what you're making fun of. So you can talk all you want about how you can stand up and tell genocide jokes without people getting offended, but unless you're prepared to go to the Kigali Chuckle Hut and do the same sketch to a bunch of Tutsis who had their families hacked down, you have no ground to stand on.
We're practicing our labials.
You are a part of this society. You damn well better care what we think, because if we judge you to be a threat to the rights of others, we can and will lock you away in some dark little concrete room where you can never hurt anyone again.
You are not a god. You are not an island. You are a sack of mostly water. No one cares about your little Slashdot manifesto. Learn to function in this society, or be removed from it.
Yeah, the idea that you should treat people with respect and dignity is just "political correctness". I love that term, it let's you be an asshole, and if anybody tries to call you on it, they're just being PC.
Guys like you should be dressed in a pair of speedos and forced to parade for an hour in a gay bar.Then we'd hear no more nonsense about "political correctness".
No.
Defcon just needs to enforce sensible policies that provide a deterrent against sexual harassment. Anything behavior that goes beyond sexual harassment and ventures into assault and/or battery is dealt with by the authorities with cooperation by people attending Defcon.
Moving Defcon does nothing and only provides a flimsy excuse for inexcusable behavior. That excuse being, "Las Vegas made us do it".
If you want to show a pattern, you have to make the so-called "incidents" have something in common. The Ecole Polytechnique massacre, really? Taking a computer science course (and dropping out) does not make one a geek.
A lot of the rest aren't much more convincing. A sexually suggestive ad ("support") which would not raise an eyebrow in the mainstream? The "OMG ponies" Slashdot April Fools joke?
The only pattern I'm really seeing is repeated attempts to smear geeks and geek culture with the label of misogynistic. I might think there was something to it except
1) I know a lot of geeks -- of them, only one might have an issue, and he's moved over to the sales side since. Also not a software guy.
2) I've seen "brogramming" used as an example. Not the existence of the joke, but the existence of the actual thing.
This isn't about hurt feelings. Read the article. This is about women -- human beings with all the same thoughts and feelings as men -- getting groped and molested by men who are so broken in the head that they think such behavior is merely "politically incorrect". Such people are a danger, because they either do not or cannot recognize the humanity of other people.
Some of them retreat from society, never hurt anyone, and live in their caves as hermits until they die. It's sad, and it would be good if we could help them, but in those cases we have no justification in forcing help on them.
But for those that actually assault women, yes, we have not only the right but the responsibility to remove them from society.
The very concept that women need to be treated a particular way is a large part of our society's gender issues..
Women need to be treated with respect for their boundaries. The same as men. There's not gender discrimination here; men can and have been sexually harassed, but in a place that is 90% male it's less likely. You seem to be confusing what's prevalent with what's possible.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
Many of these people claim to be experts, and in some cases even "rockstars" and "coding ninjas".
I have yet to meet anyone who actually writes code for a living who refers to themselves in these terms. Usually, I hear it from body shop recruiters or dotcom promoters (e.g "we're looking for a rockstar"). The strange thing is that they generally want a "rockstar" to do trivial work on a half-assed development platform to implement something that nobody needs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I apologize. No one should be allowed to grope or physically molest anyone. I'm a little tired and misunderstood what had occurred. Again I do apologize for the language and tone of my response.
Exactly. The stupid sociopaths wind up in prison usually, because they'll do illegal things but they're too dumb to avoid getting caught. The really smart sociopaths become tycoons and run corporations like Apple and Microsoft, while the ones either not quite as intelligent (but still smart) or more motivated by power than money become President or go into other high-up political positions.
Fuck you. This isn't about hurt feelings, it's about sexual assault; reaching up a woman's skirt and grabbing her crotch is a criminal offense, and deserves prison time.
Not likely. There's two kinds of men who treat women like shit; there's the extroverts who are really skilled at reading body language and figuring out which women actually like their treatment, and which don't. These men do indeed get lots of pussy; it's pretty sad really, for the women, but IMO the fault lies with their parents for not clueing them into this and warning them about these men.
The other kind is men who think they're like group 1 above, but they're not, they're introverted losers (note: I'm not saying all introverts are losers, just these men), and they can't read womens' body language at all, don't know what they can get away with and what's over the line (group 1 above knows the difference), so they make pathetic attempts at emulating group #1, but fail miserably. These men are pathetic, lonely, and despicable creatures. These are the men that apparently are very numerous at hacker conventions.
Seriously, what kind of moron thinks he's going to get into a woman's pants by grabbing her crotch at a bar, then disappearing into the crowd before she can do anything about it? It shows a seriously juvenile mentality.
The very concept that women need to be treated a particular way is a large part of our society's gender issues..
Women need to be treated with respect for their boundaries. The same as men. There's not gender discrimination here; men can and have been sexually harassed, but in a place that is 90% male it's less likely. You seem to be confusing what's prevalent with what's possible.
People need to be treated with respect, in general.
what the fuck is this political correctness? All the women are asking for is to be treated the same as you'd treat the men.
Do you walk up to men and ask for sex?
Do you touch other men all over and give them massages?
Or do you just shut up and code? If the latter, why do you give a flying fuck about this?
Well if they can't treat women right no wonder those geeks are all virgins.
LOL!
Maybe you have never seen much of the world.
The guys who DON'T treat women right are the guys who have lots of women around them. It's the gentlemen who are lonely.
These Defcon guys are well on their way to drowning in poon.
Bullshit, and a common fallacy. A man can be strong, confident, even alpha yet still treat women with respect and get lots of lovin' in return. It's the sad little twats who think that being a 'bad boy' will get them something who wind up all too often alone, or have to settle for broken girls who have no self respect and seek abusive treatment.
Trust me, quality women don't respond to dickheads with the attitude you seem to think is a winning one. The girls who are truly worth it respond to strong, intelligent, confident gentlemen, not asshat children.
I happen to be homosexual and find that offensive - I can assure you most gay men have no desire to see some geek parade around in speedos or anything else for that matter. The suggested punishment implies that homosexuals lust after any and all males regardless, reinforces a sexual stereotype, and shows your own prejudice. In short, it's a bit hypocritical.
Those with insight will recognise that this post is in itself "politically correct" and infer further meaning.
That's not the case in the US. "Rape" has not become a meaningless term here.
It means rape. We're not talking about Swedish Rape.
No means no and stop means stop. If you confuse the two, it's on you, asshole.
The opposite of Sweden is Italy, where it's hard to get a rape conviction unless the woman is hurt enough to be hospitalized for a week. I love Italy, but women are treated like shit there. The rape laws in the US appear to be pretty reasonable by comparison to those two extremes.
The fact that we're seeing the kind of comments we're seeing to this story saying that "women cry sexual harassment just if you look at them", is pretty much proof that sexual harassment is a problem in "hacker culture". Those stupid comments come from the kind of problematic culture that creates a situation where women are abused. The cases where sexual harassment is found by a court are almost always real sexual harassment. When you hear some guy say, "Yeah, I just looked at her and the next thing you know I'm being charged with sexual harassment", you can pretty much bet that it wasn't about "being looked at" at all.
And no, "She dresses like a slut" is not a valid defense. Nor is, "We were just playing. We always play like that here." People who are exploiting others almost never think they're doing anything wrong. The desire to rationalize - to excuse ourselves - is very strong. It's strong enough a group of slaveowners to get together and write some formal document about the "inalienable rights of man" and how "all men being created equal" and such bullshit, and then pat themselves on the back, when they own people who were brought here in chains. Like I said, people who exploit never think they're doing anything wrong.. We want to think we're good people so badly that we'll tell ourselves any kind of lie in order to excuse our behavior. It's how terms like "Right to Work" and "Free Market" come about. I mean, how can it be exploitation if it's the work of the "Free Market"? You're not against "freedom", are you?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The article is a slander attempt to co-op the conference. Simple as that.
total attention whores
violent and derogatory terminology
Um...
Yes, a fake GE training video on sexual harassment; the rules for men were "Be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive." The last scene was the "unattractive" guy walking down a hallway and saying hello to a woman at her desk, and her calling security. Which, unfortunately, isn't far from the truth; "Hi" with the response "Eww, get away from me you creep" isn't unknown in real life.
Really? Just because you don't know proper office behavior does not mean that the grownups are similarly defective. How does it feel knowing that you are the exact kind of loser that this entire chain of posts is all about?
hink of all the women you know. One in four will be raped at least once in her lifetime
That stat is not 1/4 of all women, it's 1/4 of women who attend college will survive a rape or attempted rape. In addition, it only takes a quick google search to see that this 1 in 4 number isn't without considerable controversy of its own.
Aww, that's cute. Too bad it's also bullshit.
Men don't overhear an off-color joke being told to another man and subject the whole office to PC-training.
Hmm, last place I was at, some idiot boss told an off-color (i.e. racist) joke that another man took offense to. Lawsuit. Settled for around $2M.
The only bullshit is people thinking their own views of what is professional conduct should somehow be the standard of their workplace. You think rape jokes or commenting on peoples' tits are acceptable? Feel free to call up HR and ask that that be added to the employee code of conduct. If they tell you to seek professional help, maybe you should.
>>Guys like you should be dressed in a pair of speedos and forced to parade for an hour in a gay bar.
>>Then we'd hear no more nonsense about "political correctness".
FUck off. What makes you think us gays want to be punished with that asshole too?
Nobody expects you to enjoy it. But it would be very helpful if you could stand around leering and whistling so the subject of our experiment could learn what it's like to treated like a piece of meat. The purpose of the exercise is not punishment, it's education.
One in four will be raped at least once in her lifetime.
I've heard this before, and it's complete nonsense perpetuated by feminists. The "one in four" myth began with a famous survey given to college students, in which the girls were told that if they had a sexual situation where they weren't completely comfortable, regretted it afterwards, or the guy didn't *specifically* ask for consent (even if consent was strongly implied by her actions), they should count that as rape.
In most American cities, typical rates for violent crimes (including rape) are a couple dozen per 100,000 people per year. In more hellhole-ish countries, it's maybe an order of magnitude higher. If we believe your "one in four" claim, then American college campuses would be more dangerous than the most dangerous hellholes in the world! See wikipedia's page on rape statistics for more.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
The Geek Feminism blog claims the use of Lena Soderberg's image as the first in a long list of geek crimes against women. This despite the fact that the crop of the image normally used shows no nudity, and that if it were in a different magazine, the full shot would have been considered an artistic nude.
To be clear, the behavior described is wrong and should not continue.
To be honest, as a woman, you don't have to go to a hackerspace to get this kind of abuse, it's widely available.
1) Believe it or not, a girl can *actually* be interested in you. No, I'm not kidding! You *don't* have to be a creeper!
You don't know me! Crazy talk. I was going to stop reading, but I didn't and found this little gem:
6) Do not, in any circumstance, talk about your penis. Not usually too much of a problem with American guys, but to guys from more sexually-liberated countries... we know you've got one, and yes, we've seen big ones before; now can you get on with the "being human" thing before we leave?
If I don't talk about penises, how will you know that I'm not gay? You should think before you say stuff like this.
First off, that's not the stat I'm referring to (see my post above); that's a totally different one. And secondly, that should be even more concerning, as college is just a few years of one's life; to amass such a high odds of rape or attempted rape in just a couple years is even more disturbing.
And yes, anything having to do with rape is controversial, and there's no shortage of people trying to downplay it. But want to know the little bit of selection bias that makes it hard for you guys to understand how common rape is? Because the women you know in your life aren't just going to come up to you and tell you that they've been victims of rape or attempted rape. Maybe if you got really close to one and the timing is right. But your casual acquaintances aren't just going to say it to you. It's something that even women don't often talk about with each other unless the right topic comes up and people feel comfortable enough talking about it. After I got the courage to tell my little sister what happened to me, for example, only then did I learn that she's apparently the only woman in my immediate family who hasn't been raped. I've hosted four women in my house over the years as low-rent / rent-free guests. One had been the victim of a violent rape and has flashbacks, one had significant sexual abuse at various points in her life and it's really messed her up in relationships, and I never raised the topic with the other two. Let's pick another selection criteria - I've dated approximately equal numbers of men and women over the years. Of the women, two I don't know their pasts (it was a long time ago, we were young), another one was a victim of an attempted rape, another one had been raped twice (once at knifepoint, once with drugs), and one had never been raped but had for a long time been in a situation where she felt compelled to have sex with an old boyfriend whether she wanted to or not because he was stronger than her and demanding, and she didn't want a fight out of it.
I could start adding friends to the list if you want.
It's this sort of personal experience that makes it obvious that the numbers for rape are *at least* as high as cited. But most of the guys reading this will never learn about most of the rapes or other forms of sexual abuse in the lives of most of the women that they know.
We're practicing our labials.
Wait, are you really citing police conviction statistics here? I mean, really? You do realize that most rapes go unreported, right? And that most reported rapes lack sufficient evidence to prosecute?
Secondly, I'm not citing college statistics (see above). Although Wikipedia has a pretty impressive list of studies. Care to discount them all? Actually the college numbers are the most disturbing aspect, with most studies showing a 3-5% rate of rape *per academic year*, 95% of which go unreported.
We're practicing our labials.
Lack of empathy is a big problem when you have control over the lives of many people in the way that high ranking politicians do.
you have a different definition of violence if giving someone a red piece of paper with writing on it qualifies
And that's what this is about?
No, no, you're just strawmanning. Read about what this is actually about. Guy flirts, gets shot down, doesn't get the point, grabs girl from behind later and is subsequently constantly hovering just out of reach, waiting around for her.
Calling someone out on that kind of bullshit is not being PC. calling someone out on that is just simply informing some maladjusted shut-in that acting that way is not acceptable, that it's fucking creepy and not tolerated.
But I bet you don't know anything about members of the opposite sex showing you unwanted attention despite your protestations. Because you're not just dumb, you're ugly too.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Those studies, mainly the famous CDC 1995 college survey that is often cited, are pretty interesting. What's most interesting is how many liberal blogs quote the results "20% of college students were raped!" without saying exactly which questions were asked or what counted as rape. I haven't actually been able to find the list of questions, but I'd be curious to see what it is. As I said in my last post, they typically include things like "did not get explicit verbal consent" (the sloppy makeout and grabbing at each others clothes is apparently not enough), and the biggest gotcha of all: alcohol.
If she had anything to drink, the way most of those surveys are worded, it's automatically rape. If the man was drunk too, then a logical person would conclude that they raped each other, but the feminist worldview doesn't operate that way. Men can only be aggressors and women only victims, right?
It's true that many rapes are not reported, but we also know that many reports turn out to be false (that wikipedia page cites some studies to that effect). Also, nearly all district prosecutors have an explicit policy of not prosecuting women whose rape reports are later proven to be lies. I'm not talking about the guy being acquitted, I'm talking about *provable* lies, where she says "Joe raped me at 7:55pm on Tuesday" and later they find security camera footage of Joe sitting in a restaurant at that time. This creates a huge incentive to lie without repercussions, destroying the lives of men as you go.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
treating others with basic respect is communism
got it
you're probably the type of douchebag who thinks the definition of freedom means you can do whatever the hell you want without regard to consequences
good luck growing up kid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It could be argued that it's also required. After all it comes down to the old psychological quiz... a train is out of control. You're standing right next to a lever that will change it's path. Down the path it is currently going ten men are working on the tracks, and will be killed if you don't throw the switch. However if you do throw the switch, the train will barrel down the next tracks, where a child is playing.
A high ranking politician has to be able to weigh those things dispassionately, calculate the loss to society as a whole from ten men (how old are they, how much do they benefit/cost the society?) versus one child (what can that child achieve, does it have a good or bad start in life, how much bad publicity will be caused by its death? - and yes, the last one matters, because bad publicity will affect the politicians possibilities to save ten more men the next day.)
Psychologists have found that when given a choice like that, many of us rather do nothing. We don't want blood on our hands by our own action, we feel less bad if it's by inaction. That's because these are people with empathy who will think of the first as a murder committed by us and the second as a tragic accident. The fact that we could have cut suffering from ten families to one by the throw of a switch... well, that doesn't carry into it for us.
Empathy is not always a good thing. High military command and high political command are two places where, for better or worse, it's a drawback. Those places need cold objectivity and goal oriented thinking... Of course then we come down to what goals someone is actually pursuing, but that's a whole other argument...
Note that I personally am against centralized government, partially because of this reason. Positions of power attracts, feeds, and needs exactly the kind of people in them that we wouldn't want there. Doesn't matter if it's a democracy or a dictatorship, when you're looking for someone to lead millions of people, then normal people won't step up to the plate. And if they try, they get run over by those that are better at it... the sociopaths, amongst others.
Right.
So someone who doesn't want women to be harrassed and physically intimidated, and makes a public stand against it, actually secretly wants it to be less obvious.
While the people who bring out strawman after strawman, and keep talking about jokes and political correctness, instead of the actual stuff at hand, are the ones who want to deal with it.
And your reasoning is "that it reminds you of this one guy", someone who checks out the territory first, then uses force to take what he likes. You know, that's exactly how politically correct people roll! Everybody knows that. They also poisoned the wells.
Holy fuck guys, TFA is not even about you and how you personally suck -- it's about that other guy, who you seem to be confusing yourself with -- yet you turn the whole discussion into a giant flare calling yourselves out? All the energy put into strawmen.. you know where it ends up pointing, right? I mean, there's misunderstandings, and there's repeated missing of the point and talking about a conveniently prepared narrative, over and over again.
I don't mean just you personally, a bunch of guys in this discussion. Maybe you really have such issues with political correctness that you just use this topic as a vehicle for your.. stuff.. even then, pay some fucking attention to what some women have gone through, and how there isn't even an equivalent for that, no likely way for women to do it to men. Also, don't spam, and don't just mindlessly repeat, ignoring counter-arguments and preaching to the choir.
OR MAYBE this story actually rubs you genuinely the wrong way, with what it is actually about -- in that case I'd say, keep talking fuckers, let the world know. We're cominagetcha, rawr! You had your fun, you left your scars - but I for one am praying there will a day where the only technically correct (TC) way to talk about this is the past tense. Cuz you're all dead and nobody learned your trade. Amen.
A high ranking politician has to be able to weigh those things dispassionately, calculate the loss to society as a whole
Here's your weak link - a sociopath is only interested in calculating the loss to the sociopath. Nobody's arguing that good leadership doesn't mean hard decisions, instead they are arguing that a group of people who are very able to get into leadership positions make for piss poor leaders.
Of course I don't believe such a system exists.
Interesting analysis. The way I see it, the US system was initially built to function that way, and it certainly can function that way (whether it ever actually has, I leave as an exercise for historians.
What it would take is a fully engaged and educated electorate. Activists approach the system with the assumption that politicians do not have souls, and react strictly based on negative and positive reinforcement. And for a politician, the stimulus is very predictable, and is based on publicity and money. With enough people educated and engaged, they politician's environment can be closely controlled, ensuring that their behavior is correct. And note that with democratically elected representatives, an engaged electorate will always be more effective than moneyed interests. Politicians do respond to lobbyists with money, of course, but in when constituents are paying attention, that money gets trumped every time.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia