Yeah, well. In a former life I did give pretty great parties - but then I was an overpaid software professional in a big house on a private acre with a hot tub and wood burning brick oven. I like my life, overall, a lot better now... but I'll admit the parties have taken a serious turn for the sedate. (Well, that and that I'm usually in bed by nine.)
And for me it's just the opposite - I sit down at my computer frequently. I not infrequently am sitting at my computer and want a mental break - and oh look, there's the SCOTUS blog tab! (Or Science, or The Economist...)
The Economist and Science are my top two... though I mostly read them both online (and my roommate reads the print versions because it's cheaper to buy the print versions than online only.)
I've let my New Yorker subscription lapse, but will probably resubscribe one of these days. (I'm a doctoral student who lives in a zen center and teaches martial arts. Not a lot of time. Or money, for that matter. But mostly, the back issues were getting ahead of me, and I felt guilty every time I looked at the pile.)
I'm considering picking up The Smithsonian - it'd be a nice change of pace, and it's only a monthly.
Actually, you're sort of on to something, but not necessarily the way you mean it.
As a result of various lawsuits which accused Microsoft (accurately, IMO) of using contractors ("a dash" employees, aka dash-trash, for the a- designation on their email addresses) as a de-facto permanent labor force without the benefits, contractors now have various limitations built into their contract, including, I believe, a 90 day mandatory period between contracts totally a year of employment. (It is worth noting that every time these lawsuits went through, the end result was in the contractors being treated worse.)
Of course, in terms of running projects, having your permatemps disappear is a major pain in the ass, so a lot of companies have gone over to using "vendors" or "v dash" employees - under a different set of legal rules, part of which involves that their parent company is providing a workspace for them - so they "rent" it from microsoft. From what I can tell it allows for a group of slightly better treated permatemps.
(Disclosure: When some of the early restructuring contracting relationships came down in the mid nineties... I took a perm position. But that was back in the day when you could make more money - well, salary - as a temp than a perm employee. And I can't complain about my stock option. I'm long gone from the company, but have a few vendor friends... and even fewer perm employees. Most folks long ago sought greener pastures.)
There's a difference be having a lot of support among women (what I said) and having at least some support from women (what you said).
Andrea Dworkin made her comments about sex in marriage being rape in the eighties, I'm pretty sure. It was highly controversial in the feminist community at the time, though, yeah, it had a few supporters. But it got airtime there because so many people didn't agree with her. (And, of course, what she was saying was much more nuanced than the short quote that is generally cited.) And you still have men now pulling it out as being representative of feminists all this time later. These days I only hear her brought up in feminist contexts in a historical context. She's just not that relevant. (I mean, really. Andrea Dworking for crying out loud.)
She's being brought up not because she has support from feminists, but because men like to bring her up to make feminists look bad. And in my experience, that's a fairly common tactic - look at all the invocations of feminazis and the like here, and all the "that's just what feminists are like!" comments. (And, for that matter, the nasty comments about women generally. And how people who have made civil and reasonable comments in support of women have been modded down as flamebait.)
Well, yes. But the reason they get the headlines is not because they are either particularly common, or that they have a lot of support among women, but because it give men an excuse to disregard what women say more generally. Caricature feminists and then diregard them.
I was just going to jump in with a recommendation for Cook's Illustrated (the magazine that predates and is affiliated with the show).
I'm can't really evaluate it in terms of being beginner friendly in terms of terminology and such. (I had already cooked professionally by the time I first got a subscription.) But if you want tested? Oh yeah. It was first described to me as the popular mechanics of cooking, and I can't disagree. For quite a while my two favorite cooking related mags were CI and then Saveur, for the food porn.
So do you in fact think making sexually charged jokes in a professional setting should be legally protected free speech in terms of employment? Because I'm having trouble seeing how you could write a law that's going to distinguish between relative mild comments that at most deserve a slap on the wrist and a "don't make us look like idiots when representing the company, doofus" and speech where being given the boot is pretty appropriate.
From what I know of this case - and everyone on this board is working off of incomplete information - both firings were overreactions. It's entirely possible that if I knew more it would make more sense to me.
Dating's hard. Being female and a geek is a somewhat privileged position in terms of odds - heavens knows I pretty much never lacked company if I wanted it* but then it was still really difficult to get guys to see me as an actual human being** and often they were really caught up in their issues with women and how they resented women and how they wanted me to make up for those other women / fix them / caretake them / whatever. Taken as a group geek guys are not necessarily the most socialized bunch, y'know? And it's not my job to be anyone's girlfriend. (Except by prior negotiation, and even then, it's an at will agreement on both sides.) I have initiated a lot of relationships, both with men, and with women. (And yes, generically speaking there are different issues, though my tastes are somewhat esoteric.) Unless I know someone super well, and we have a common shorthand, I go for super direct communication "Hey, would you be up for me kissing you? Because I'd really like to do that." "I'm thinking of going hiking next Thursday, wanna come?" "Do you mind if I drag you off to bed?" (Though I'm only going to phrase that last in quite that way if I think the answer is most likely yes.)
In a lot of ways I'm a somewhat non standard gender conforming woman... but having heard whining from all sides I'm pretty sure that dating isn't actually harder if one is male. (It might still be a bit harder if you're a geek male, because there are still fewer geek women on average, and it's harder dating outside of your subculture. But that's just the first step of things. If you're geek female, it's either geek guys, who have their own issues,*** or again, dating outside of ones subculture.) It might be one of the few places where dating is equally hard for men and for women, and a lot of men seem to find the idea that women can reject them pretty personally offensive. (Not a lot of sympathy here on that one, I'm afraid. I mean, I'd better be able to reject guys. Also, women have rejected me - and so have men.)
In more stereotypical relationships, in our society it is most common for men to express the first overt statement of interest. 'Tis true. (And women are supposed to wait in an ornamental manner until asked. I never much had the patience for it, plus I figured if I was the one doing the asking, then at least I'm asking the guys who I'm interested in.)
Now, onto the social cues and such... I realize people have greater and lesser aptitudes and experience here, and I'm certainly lucky that I had no particular problem picking up on social cues (though understanding the motivations behind them sometimes left me flummoxed). But, and this is the important thing, the social skills can be learned. It's not easy, and I won't claim it's the same amount of difficult for everyone, but a lot of it is the willingness to sit down and work it out. And I think it is hard for everyone. (I hate it when people say "These things are so easy for you!" Yeah, because I put a huge amount of time and effort into learning them. And still I wouldn't say easy.) There are different ways of doing that - one dear friend seemed to get a lot out of reading up on interpersonal relationship theory. *shrug* I've heard of other approaches - everything from therapeutic relationships to finishing school for men, but I can't really comment on those. Having a good platonic female friend to run things past can also work.^
* Note here that by company, I just mean company. Finding someone who could be a partner in the ways that mattered to me? Not so easy. ** And this gets complicated. A lot of guys were so caught up into the "I've figured it out, if I'm nice to her these ways, she will reciprocate with sex and then we'll get married..." that they could barely see me and, well, I'm not shy and retiring. At all. Gods, if I had a blade server for every guy with whom I had a "no-strings sex" agreement who turned around the next morning and wanted a serious relationship, I'd have a good start on a data center. At least a pretty decent analysis clust
So basically they were twats. That doesn't mean that geeks, programmers or men are inherently sexist, it means that you worked with people that were utter cocks.
Well yes, of course. Note that this was a group I worked with briefly - and that their crap was much more overt than most of what I ran into. (Well, on a regular basis. I certainly ran into several assholes whose assholery took a gendered turn at least in my direction.)
*snip*
Alternatively, I've been accused of sexual discrimination in the workplace because I.. held a door open for a female colleague. Apparently my polite inclination to hold open a door for anybody that happens to be walking through it behind me isn't relevant.
How the hell am I meant to know what's acceptable? It's a fucking nightmare being a man in a modern office.
I think you're conflating several things here.
The cases you mention - I certainly can't evaluate them from the descriptions you give here, other than to say that obviously you had a guy who was adept at navigating the social cues, and had a good sense of what would be welcomed. Personally? Not only is butt pinching totally not okay for me in a professional situation, it's not something I like socially even from someone I'm dating.
But yeah, if you're not good processing social cues, then you pretty much have to play it conservative. Plenty of guys do manage to do this just fine, though, so to imply that the problem is being a guy strikes me as pushing it. But you might be in a particularly bad environment - I'm in no position to say.
And I certainly can't say from your description what's going on with the door-opening thing. I can tell you my experience - people hold doors for me, and I hold doors for people, and I think nothing of it either way (well, if my arms are full, or if I'm carrying my bike, I really appreciate it, and I do it for others in similar situations.) I'd run into a couple of guys who, in dating situations, tried to make a huge deal about always opening the door for me, and for me that's at least a turn off. Especially if it gets into them trying to tell me I shouldn't open the door myself - uh, no, you shouldn't be trying to control my behavior, that's icky. But, again, different tastes in such matters - and if someone who has heard my preferences adapts quickly, I won't hold it against them, but I also figure there are women who are into that kind of thing. (Really, I see if as a fetish on both sides.) And I don't necessarily expect people to guess my preferences, but I expect them to learn when I inform them of my preferences. Guys who try to convince me that my preferences are wrong and I should like what they're doing? *plonk*
In a professional situation, it had never been a problem when I was in the industry that I can think of. Which means there were probably a few guys doing some weird antics around door holding (if you're a reasonably decent looking woman in the industry, you'll see a vast array of antics at one time or another) but nothing that either got in my way nor was offensive. I'd always kind of shrugged in bemusement when I'd heard stories about women being offended when men hold the door for them - becase I'd never seen it, and it had never happened to me.
But then, after I returned to academia and moved to Ohio (and frankly, Ohio has somewhat more calcified gender roles than what I'm used to) I ran into professional colleagues (rarely, but memorably) who did things like making a huge point of getting the door for me, and them giving me the super predatory leer as I walked through the door. Ugh. But then, this could just be the start of gendered interactions that I don't like in Ohio (like the guy who responded to me telling him that I didn't want to talk to him - keep in mind, I'm not coy - by grabbing my arm. While shook him off in a stinging manner and told him not to touch me... I found myself wishing I was a little more high strung and dislocated his elbow or something. What an ass.)
I can only agree, but it is strongly culturally reinforced, both in the general media (where women are fairly often treated as prizes to be won or granted)... and in a lot of the more male dominated portions of geek culture.
Which I say as a geek. And someone who mostly dates geeks. But in geek culture you do see a lot of bitter entitled "nice guys" forming packs and turning feral and nasty. (It's certainly not unique to geek culture.)
I put "Noirin Shirley assault" into google and it pulled up a bunch of relevant links - having not gone through them I'm not going to recommend one in particular. (I was recollecting from when it happened, she's a friend of several friends.)
I mean, I do engage in consensual sparring, but it usually doesn't involve a lot of tit grabbing. (Mostly because tit grabbing just isn't that useful. No leverage.)
You ask really good questions, and I wonder many of the same things. Most of my comments in this forum have been general (I can talk about problems at tech conferences, but I wasn't at this one) because I don't feel like I have enough information. It's easy to Tuesday morning quarterback this stuff, but from this vantage it mostly looks like a clusterfuck all around.
And... I started in the industry almost twenty years ago. And seriously, it wasn't until years later that it even really occurred to me how much sexist crap I did put up with. And mostly didn't really notice (after all, I'm the daughter of a computer science professor, and a geek, coming out of a sexist culture - fish probably don't think about being wet, either.) So while I can talk about some of the crap I've run into personally, that did bug me (yo, no one grabs my tits without invitation*) even if I had more information I suspect it would be too easy for me not to think something was a problem.
* And aside from the physical stuff, the really gross stuff. I was briefly on a team where because of my background and seniority I was accepted as one of the guys... which meant that I got invited to the lunches where every other woman in the organization was trashed, their personal and physical failing dissected, and loving accounts were made of how much mayhem they would wreck on the persons of anyone they found out to have voted democatic. (Really, working with a bunch of button down shirt young republicans was nothing compared to the horror of their code. These guys got into CS because they thought they could make money, not because of any aptitude or interest in the subject.) I did what I could - and helped many of the women (and one gay man) find positions elsewhere before leaving.
I haven't noticed that many assholes particularly have the skills to keep it under wraps for any extended period of time.
I *would* like it if people actually aspired not to be assholes. And while this particular case seems screwed up all around, the vast majority of what I hear butt-hurt griping calling politically correct is really just people being asked not to be assholes.
Of course, usually these exchanges can occur without everyone losing their jobs. This was a cluster fuck by pretty much any standards.
On the public side, are you familiar with what all went down with Noirin Shirley a few years back?
Personally, mostly of what I've dealth with is guys making random comments about my body and what they'd like to do with it, and a lot of random touching me without asking first - I'm talking here about putting an arm around my shoulder, that kind of thing. And a few cases of people grabbing my tits. (People who grab my tits with an invitation - and it's not like I'm going to be giving invitations at a conference, certainly not in public - get put in joint locks. Only one person to date has gotten put in a joint lock twice for this offense... and that was in a social context.)
Keep in mind, I am rather on the tall and muscular side, which can be fairly useful.
Do you get that in our current society, with our current social dynamics, being a man in a female dominated environment is not equivalent to being a women in a male dominated environment?
And seriously, I have been oblivious enough to have not really noticed that I was one of two women in a department of 120 (until it was brought to my attention). But that doesn't mean I don't understand how it can be an often is a problem.
I'm not even sure that this should be legally protected speech - but that the firings were unhelpful, I agree.
There is a lot of hugely inappropriate sexually charged behavior at a lot of tech conferences. I mean, this isn't a revelation, right? And at times it makes being female at a tech conference really unpleasant. (And it often feels unsafe. Not in the least because it often is unsafe.) I think calling out the behavior was appropriate. And I'm not particularly worried about the medium being twitter. Seriously - look how quickly this escalated to threats of violence. Now imagine being a woman in a really male dominated environment - would you feel comfortable calling them out in person?
(Note, I might. But I'm a 5' 11" martial arts instructor, and known to be straightforward, possibly to a fault, in personal communication.)
Slashdot Mirror
Those wild dance party weekends at the zendo!
Yeah, well. In a former life I did give pretty great parties - but then I was an overpaid software professional in a big house on a private acre with a hot tub and wood burning brick oven. I like my life, overall, a lot better now... but I'll admit the parties have taken a serious turn for the sedate. (Well, that and that I'm usually in bed by nine.)
And for me it's just the opposite - I sit down at my computer frequently. I not infrequently am sitting at my computer and want a mental break - and oh look, there's the SCOTUS blog tab! (Or Science, or The Economist...)
The Economist and Science are my top two... though I mostly read them both online (and my roommate reads the print versions because it's cheaper to buy the print versions than online only.)
I've let my New Yorker subscription lapse, but will probably resubscribe one of these days. (I'm a doctoral student who lives in a zen center and teaches martial arts. Not a lot of time. Or money, for that matter. But mostly, the back issues were getting ahead of me, and I felt guilty every time I looked at the pile.)
I'm considering picking up The Smithsonian - it'd be a nice change of pace, and it's only a monthly.
I can only agree about health care. Can we become a real country, please?
I think there is a lot to be said in terms of morale for standard benefits packages... but then that just incentivizes using non-employees.
Actually, you're sort of on to something, but not necessarily the way you mean it.
As a result of various lawsuits which accused Microsoft (accurately, IMO) of using contractors ("a dash" employees, aka dash-trash, for the a- designation on their email addresses) as a de-facto permanent labor force without the benefits, contractors now have various limitations built into their contract, including, I believe, a 90 day mandatory period between contracts totally a year of employment. (It is worth noting that every time these lawsuits went through, the end result was in the contractors being treated worse.)
Of course, in terms of running projects, having your permatemps disappear is a major pain in the ass, so a lot of companies have gone over to using "vendors" or "v dash" employees - under a different set of legal rules, part of which involves that their parent company is providing a workspace for them - so they "rent" it from microsoft. From what I can tell it allows for a group of slightly better treated permatemps.
(Disclosure: When some of the early restructuring contracting relationships came down in the mid nineties... I took a perm position. But that was back in the day when you could make more money - well, salary - as a temp than a perm employee. And I can't complain about my stock option. I'm long gone from the company, but have a few vendor friends... and even fewer perm employees. Most folks long ago sought greener pastures.)
One does not have to buy into either side of this particular binary reality. ...thankfully.
There's a difference be having a lot of support among women (what I said) and having at least some support from women (what you said).
Andrea Dworkin made her comments about sex in marriage being rape in the eighties, I'm pretty sure. It was highly controversial in the feminist community at the time, though, yeah, it had a few supporters. But it got airtime there because so many people didn't agree with her. (And, of course, what she was saying was much more nuanced than the short quote that is generally cited.) And you still have men now pulling it out as being representative of feminists all this time later. These days I only hear her brought up in feminist contexts in a historical context. She's just not that relevant. (I mean, really. Andrea Dworking for crying out loud.)
She's being brought up not because she has support from feminists, but because men like to bring her up to make feminists look bad. And in my experience, that's a fairly common tactic - look at all the invocations of feminazis and the like here, and all the "that's just what feminists are like!" comments. (And, for that matter, the nasty comments about women generally. And how people who have made civil and reasonable comments in support of women have been modded down as flamebait.)
Well, yes. But the reason they get the headlines is not because they are either particularly common, or that they have a lot of support among women, but because it give men an excuse to disregard what women say more generally. Caricature feminists and then diregard them.
I was just going to jump in with a recommendation for Cook's Illustrated (the magazine that predates and is affiliated with the show).
I'm can't really evaluate it in terms of being beginner friendly in terms of terminology and such. (I had already cooked professionally by the time I first got a subscription.) But if you want tested? Oh yeah. It was first described to me as the popular mechanics of cooking, and I can't disagree. For quite a while my two favorite cooking related mags were CI and then Saveur, for the food porn.
So do you in fact think making sexually charged jokes in a professional setting should be legally protected free speech in terms of employment? Because I'm having trouble seeing how you could write a law that's going to distinguish between relative mild comments that at most deserve a slap on the wrist and a "don't make us look like idiots when representing the company, doofus" and speech where being given the boot is pretty appropriate.
From what I know of this case - and everyone on this board is working off of incomplete information - both firings were overreactions. It's entirely possible that if I knew more it would make more sense to me.
Dating's hard. Being female and a geek is a somewhat privileged position in terms of odds - heavens knows I pretty much never lacked company if I wanted it* but then it was still really difficult to get guys to see me as an actual human being** and often they were really caught up in their issues with women and how they resented women and how they wanted me to make up for those other women / fix them / caretake them / whatever. Taken as a group geek guys are not necessarily the most socialized bunch, y'know? And it's not my job to be anyone's girlfriend. (Except by prior negotiation, and even then, it's an at will agreement on both sides.) I have initiated a lot of relationships, both with men, and with women. (And yes, generically speaking there are different issues, though my tastes are somewhat esoteric.) Unless I know someone super well, and we have a common shorthand, I go for super direct communication "Hey, would you be up for me kissing you? Because I'd really like to do that." "I'm thinking of going hiking next Thursday, wanna come?" "Do you mind if I drag you off to bed?" (Though I'm only going to phrase that last in quite that way if I think the answer is most likely yes.)
In a lot of ways I'm a somewhat non standard gender conforming woman... but having heard whining from all sides I'm pretty sure that dating isn't actually harder if one is male. (It might still be a bit harder if you're a geek male, because there are still fewer geek women on average, and it's harder dating outside of your subculture. But that's just the first step of things. If you're geek female, it's either geek guys, who have their own issues,*** or again, dating outside of ones subculture.) It might be one of the few places where dating is equally hard for men and for women, and a lot of men seem to find the idea that women can reject them pretty personally offensive. (Not a lot of sympathy here on that one, I'm afraid. I mean, I'd better be able to reject guys. Also, women have rejected me - and so have men.)
In more stereotypical relationships, in our society it is most common for men to express the first overt statement of interest. 'Tis true. (And women are supposed to wait in an ornamental manner until asked. I never much had the patience for it, plus I figured if I was the one doing the asking, then at least I'm asking the guys who I'm interested in.)
Now, onto the social cues and such... I realize people have greater and lesser aptitudes and experience here, and I'm certainly lucky that I had no particular problem picking up on social cues (though understanding the motivations behind them sometimes left me flummoxed). But, and this is the important thing, the social skills can be learned. It's not easy, and I won't claim it's the same amount of difficult for everyone, but a lot of it is the willingness to sit down and work it out. And I think it is hard for everyone. (I hate it when people say "These things are so easy for you!" Yeah, because I put a huge amount of time and effort into learning them. And still I wouldn't say easy.) There are different ways of doing that - one dear friend seemed to get a lot out of reading up on interpersonal relationship theory. *shrug* I've heard of other approaches - everything from therapeutic relationships to finishing school for men, but I can't really comment on those. Having a good platonic female friend to run things past can also work.^
* Note here that by company, I just mean company. Finding someone who could be a partner in the ways that mattered to me? Not so easy.
** And this gets complicated. A lot of guys were so caught up into the "I've figured it out, if I'm nice to her these ways, she will reciprocate with sex and then we'll get married..." that they could barely see me and, well, I'm not shy and retiring. At all. Gods, if I had a blade server for every guy with whom I had a "no-strings sex" agreement who turned around the next morning and wanted a serious relationship, I'd have a good start on a data center. At least a pretty decent analysis clust
You are correct - though you might notice someone mentioned this and I responded before you posted this comment.
So basically they were twats. That doesn't mean that geeks, programmers or men are inherently sexist, it means that you worked with people that were utter cocks.
Well yes, of course. Note that this was a group I worked with briefly - and that their crap was much more overt than most of what I ran into. (Well, on a regular basis. I certainly ran into several assholes whose assholery took a gendered turn at least in my direction.)
*snip*
Alternatively, I've been accused of sexual discrimination in the workplace because I.. held a door open for a female colleague. Apparently my polite inclination to hold open a door for anybody that happens to be walking through it behind me isn't relevant.
How the hell am I meant to know what's acceptable? It's a fucking nightmare being a man in a modern office.
I think you're conflating several things here.
The cases you mention - I certainly can't evaluate them from the descriptions you give here, other than to say that obviously you had a guy who was adept at navigating the social cues, and had a good sense of what would be welcomed. Personally? Not only is butt pinching totally not okay for me in a professional situation, it's not something I like socially even from someone I'm dating.
But yeah, if you're not good processing social cues, then you pretty much have to play it conservative. Plenty of guys do manage to do this just fine, though, so to imply that the problem is being a guy strikes me as pushing it. But you might be in a particularly bad environment - I'm in no position to say.
And I certainly can't say from your description what's going on with the door-opening thing. I can tell you my experience - people hold doors for me, and I hold doors for people, and I think nothing of it either way (well, if my arms are full, or if I'm carrying my bike, I really appreciate it, and I do it for others in similar situations.) I'd run into a couple of guys who, in dating situations, tried to make a huge deal about always opening the door for me, and for me that's at least a turn off. Especially if it gets into them trying to tell me I shouldn't open the door myself - uh, no, you shouldn't be trying to control my behavior, that's icky. But, again, different tastes in such matters - and if someone who has heard my preferences adapts quickly, I won't hold it against them, but I also figure there are women who are into that kind of thing. (Really, I see if as a fetish on both sides.) And I don't necessarily expect people to guess my preferences, but I expect them to learn when I inform them of my preferences. Guys who try to convince me that my preferences are wrong and I should like what they're doing? *plonk*
In a professional situation, it had never been a problem when I was in the industry that I can think of. Which means there were probably a few guys doing some weird antics around door holding (if you're a reasonably decent looking woman in the industry, you'll see a vast array of antics at one time or another) but nothing that either got in my way nor was offensive. I'd always kind of shrugged in bemusement when I'd heard stories about women being offended when men hold the door for them - becase I'd never seen it, and it had never happened to me.
But then, after I returned to academia and moved to Ohio (and frankly, Ohio has somewhat more calcified gender roles than what I'm used to) I ran into professional colleagues (rarely, but memorably) who did things like making a huge point of getting the door for me, and them giving me the super predatory leer as I walked through the door. Ugh. But then, this could just be the start of gendered interactions that I don't like in Ohio (like the guy who responded to me telling him that I didn't want to talk to him - keep in mind, I'm not coy - by grabbing my arm. While shook him off in a stinging manner and told him not to touch me... I found myself wishing I was a little more high strung and dislocated his elbow or something. What an ass.)
I can only agree, but it is strongly culturally reinforced, both in the general media (where women are fairly often treated as prizes to be won or granted)... and in a lot of the more male dominated portions of geek culture.
Which I say as a geek. And someone who mostly dates geeks. But in geek culture you do see a lot of bitter entitled "nice guys" forming packs and turning feral and nasty. (It's certainly not unique to geek culture.)
I put "Noirin Shirley assault" into google and it pulled up a bunch of relevant links - having not gone through them I'm not going to recommend one in particular. (I was recollecting from when it happened, she's a friend of several friends.)
Oops. Indeed.
I mean, I do engage in consensual sparring, but it usually doesn't involve a lot of tit grabbing. (Mostly because tit grabbing just isn't that useful. No leverage.)
You ask really good questions, and I wonder many of the same things. Most of my comments in this forum have been general (I can talk about problems at tech conferences, but I wasn't at this one) because I don't feel like I have enough information. It's easy to Tuesday morning quarterback this stuff, but from this vantage it mostly looks like a clusterfuck all around.
And... I started in the industry almost twenty years ago. And seriously, it wasn't until years later that it even really occurred to me how much sexist crap I did put up with. And mostly didn't really notice (after all, I'm the daughter of a computer science professor, and a geek, coming out of a sexist culture - fish probably don't think about being wet, either.) So while I can talk about some of the crap I've run into personally, that did bug me (yo, no one grabs my tits without invitation*) even if I had more information I suspect it would be too easy for me not to think something was a problem.
* And aside from the physical stuff, the really gross stuff. I was briefly on a team where because of my background and seniority I was accepted as one of the guys... which meant that I got invited to the lunches where every other woman in the organization was trashed, their personal and physical failing dissected, and loving accounts were made of how much mayhem they would wreck on the persons of anyone they found out to have voted democatic. (Really, working with a bunch of button down shirt young republicans was nothing compared to the horror of their code. These guys got into CS because they thought they could make money, not because of any aptitude or interest in the subject.) I did what I could - and helped many of the women (and one gay man) find positions elsewhere before leaving.
I haven't noticed that many assholes particularly have the skills to keep it under wraps for any extended period of time.
I *would* like it if people actually aspired not to be assholes. And while this particular case seems screwed up all around, the vast majority of what I hear butt-hurt griping calling politically correct is really just people being asked not to be assholes.
Of course, usually these exchanges can occur without everyone losing their jobs. This was a cluster fuck by pretty much any standards.
That I will grant.
On the public side, are you familiar with what all went down with Noirin Shirley a few years back?
Personally, mostly of what I've dealth with is guys making random comments about my body and what they'd like to do with it, and a lot of random touching me without asking first - I'm talking here about putting an arm around my shoulder, that kind of thing. And a few cases of people grabbing my tits. (People who grab my tits with an invitation - and it's not like I'm going to be giving invitations at a conference, certainly not in public - get put in joint locks. Only one person to date has gotten put in a joint lock twice for this offense... and that was in a social context.)
Keep in mind, I am rather on the tall and muscular side, which can be fairly useful.
Do you get that in our current society, with our current social dynamics, being a man in a female dominated environment is not equivalent to being a women in a male dominated environment?
And seriously, I have been oblivious enough to have not really noticed that I was one of two women in a department of 120 (until it was brought to my attention). But that doesn't mean I don't understand how it can be an often is a problem.
Because making sexually charged jokes in public is central to your being a man? That's really sad, if so.
I'm not even sure that this should be legally protected speech - but that the firings were unhelpful, I agree.
There is a lot of hugely inappropriate sexually charged behavior at a lot of tech conferences. I mean, this isn't a revelation, right? And at times it makes being female at a tech conference really unpleasant. (And it often feels unsafe. Not in the least because it often is unsafe.) I think calling out the behavior was appropriate. And I'm not particularly worried about the medium being twitter. Seriously - look how quickly this escalated to threats of violence. Now imagine being a woman in a really male dominated environment - would you feel comfortable calling them out in person?
(Note, I might. But I'm a 5' 11" martial arts instructor, and known to be straightforward, possibly to a fault, in personal communication.)
But "not being an asshole" isn't.
If one takes what might well be a post-facto rationalization at face value.
I neither take it, nor dismiss it - I don't think we have enough information.