Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Business of Online Reputation Spin
The Guardian has a long, thought-provoking piece (it's an excerpt from an upcoming book) on the way that online PR works, when individuals or organizations pay online spin doctors to change the way they're perceived online. Embarrassing photos, ill-considered social media posts, even quips that have ended up geting the speaker into hot water, can all be crowded out, even if not actually expunged, by injecting lots of innocuous information, photos, and other bits of information. That crowding out seems to be the reputation managers' prime tactic. Besides a brush of his own with identity theft (or at least unwanted borrowing), the author spoke at length with both Adria Richards and "Hank"; both of whom ended up losing their jobs in the aftermath of what became known as Donglegate, after Richards tweeted about jokes that she overheard Hank and another developer share at PyCon 2013.
And no one should forget that she was also caught making at least one dick joke that same week:
http://media.tumblr.com/ed5aea...
I personally don't consider any of the jokes sexist, but they absolutely make her a hypocrite.
It wasn't the men beating their wives, raping them and so on?
That was never as socially acceptable in this country as the dogma would have you believe. Going back to the 17th century (before there even was a "this country"), the colonies were making laws against wife-beating. I can't find the link now, but there are images of newspaper announcements of men being publicly whipped for doing so.
The people, usually men, abusing their children or stepchildren?
Actually, according to "Child Maltreatment 2012" (US Dept. of Health and Human Services - PDF Warning), the numbers pretty strongly indicate that the opposite is true: among biological parents, mothers are about 2x as likely as fathers to be perpetrators of child abuse, and among non-parents, categories that are separated by gender go to females as well. "Partner of Parent (Male)" does beat "Partner of Parent (Female)", though, at 2.3% vs 0.3%, so if you're limiting the population to just children abused by stepfathers, what you said is not exactly false.
It's still going on in both directions. Domestic violence is instigated by both sexes at Similar Rates (PDF warning again. SAVE handout that contains citations). Enforcement, however, is not, thanks to the broken-by-design Deluth Model, sexually biased "primary aggressor policies", and social pressure against men reporting being hit.
Woman-on-Man and Girl-on-Boy violence, though, enjoys a great deal of public acceptance. Usually "played for laughs."