I also don't think Adria overreacted. It was a microaggression. Jokes like that foster the uncomfortable boys club environment that is so inherent to tech. Were the jokes explicitly sexist? No, but in an industry that has more than just a bad track record, stuff like that is not okay. Context matters.
> Jokes like that foster the uncomfortable boys club environment
Maybe they make Adria uncomfortable. Maybe they make you uncomfortable. They don't make all women uncomfortable, and you should stop pretending you speak on behalf of women everywhere. Arguing that some humor should be saved for when women aren't around seems like the antithesis of equality. If anything it explains why a "boy club" would ever exist. To speak freely without fear of persecution.
Bullshit. It's not about whether ALL women are uncomfortable. Of course not all women are uncomfortable. So should we only frown upon behaviours that make every single member of a minority uncomfortable? Some is enough.
Yes, it is such a fucking inconvenience not making juvenile and unprofessional jokes at a conference where you are supposed to represent your employer.
Really? You can't make a dongle joke in public because of... what? Are women so fragile and weak that they are offended by a mildly sexual joke? Who's the sexist again?
most of the time, the person asking that sort of question
Nice misrepresentation of what I said, by the way. It's not about the joke, it's about what's behind it. Women are frequently objectified in jokes, and the Technology industry hasn't exactly been the most welcoming to women. When you make a sexual joke in front of a woman in this context, she might feel inclined to think about what's behind that joke. And you will feel that no matter the intention, the tech industry is not one that has proven itself to be mature enough to be given the benefit of the doubt.
Because sexual jokes are exclusive for men? For some reason a dingle joke is offensive to women, but it's ok between dudes? Sorry, I _really_ don't understand the argument. I'm no trying to be funny or anything. I live in a place where we don't have a big problem with sexism, so I'm trying to understand what's going on.
Again, context matters. When a man makes a sexual joke and a woman makes a sexual joke, it's not the same thing because there are different implications to it.
Women are often sexualized and/or objectified, specifically by men. When a man makes a sexual joke, even if he is not directly sexualizing a woman, that can make some women uncomfortable, because of the societal context behind it.
Tech conferences already have kind of a bad reputation towards building an inviting atmosphere for women. Now imagine you are in a place where you might feel a little bit vulnerable, and you hear something like that. It's easy to take it the wrong way, regardless of the intent behind the joke. All this is completely ignoring that in a professional settings, these kinds of jokes are inappropriate anyway.
>Again, context matters. When a man makes a sexual joke and a woman makes a sexual joke, it's not the same thing because there are different implications to it.
My brain cannot even comprehend how you can believe such bullshit. I feel like am living in some kind of satirical novel when these incidents happen and people defend it with these type of statements.
Imagine it's night, and you're a woman alone at a bus stop, in an empty street. Two men arrive, also waiting for the bus. While they're waiting, they start making sexual jokes.
Now imagine you're a man in the same situation, and two women arrive. They start making sexual jokes. Can you see the difference?
Just like you can tell your boss a joke where someone's getting fired, but you could feel uncomfortable if he was the one telling the joke. Asymmetry of power -- in the gender case, of physical power -- means that context matters.
No, I can't because every man is not a rapist. Your scenario assumes that the men are malevolent and the women benevolent. If you remove this prejudice, you will see the scene as I do. The same thing.
>Just like you can tell your boss a joke where someone's getting fired, but you could feel uncomfortable if he was the one telling the joke.
The comparison is flawed in three ways. Firstly, every boss can potentially fire an employee but every man is not a rapist. If two known rapists came and sat next to me at a bus stop and started making sexual jokes, I would feel scared even as a man.
Secondly, sexual jokes describe any joke that is related to something sexual. A joke where someone is getting fired is very specific and has a victim. You cannot compare the two (unless you are imagining a small subset of sexual jokes that have a victim but this is not what we are talking about).
Thirdly, In your bus stop scene the two men are engaged in private conversation. In your office scene, the boss is telling the joke directly to the employee.
Society treats people differently depending on who they are. Men have certain privileges not afforded to women. If examining situations in a social context, this cannot be ignored. There is a reason this conference was BOASTING about having 20% women attending.
We cannot treat everyone as if they are the same if the playing field is not level.
In a vacuum, there should be no difference. But we do not live in a vacuum.
Yes, treating people differently will almost certainly result in people being treated the same. Not really though, it has never worked and will never work probably because it is illogical.
This is part of the reason why so called "male privilege" is actually bullshit. There are so many double standards and exceptions negatively effecting males that they are actually at a disadvantage in a rapidly increasing number of areas.
I totally agree that it was a microaggression, and that microaggression is a real thing that isn't to be tolerated. I know that it's all part of a pervasively unwelcoming and alienating culture that I, as a straight white male, am also disturbed by. I get all of that.
I understand all of that and still think her reaction was out-of-scale.
The problem was the extremely public nature of the channel. It wasn't speaking softly to the usher that someone was being inappropriate and unprofessional, it was shouting into a megaphone that someone was being inappropriate and unprofessional.
It's the "megaphone" part that I think is out-of-scale. If we're going to be a civilized community, then gentle, discreet correction should be the societal norm.
I don't think she had any obligation to raise the issue quietly. Making things public works. Unless people start calling out this kind of behaviour in a public manner, there will be no pressure for anyone to change anything. I think this is just a variant of a tone argument basically.
That's where I (respectfully) disagree. There are many ways to apply pressure for social change that don't involve identifying and shaming individual bad actors.
Even discussing the event in public is fine, (although I'm not convinced that the level of discourse on Twitter is appropriate for something as nuanced as Microaggression), but including the picture feels like an out-of-scale response to what the guys did.
That's the thing though - People always think that calling out microaggressions is overreaction, because they look at an individual incident, and not the whole. At the same time it needs to be clearly communicated that this kind of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable.
> People always think that calling out microaggressions is overreaction, because they look at an individual incident, and not the whole
How is publishing photographs of the individual offenders in a specific indicdent and a description of that specific incident not both looking at, and encouraging others to look at, an individual incident, instead of some broader problem that incident might be part of?
That's not the point. The point is we shouldn't brush off these individual incidents as insignificant because they are part of a whole. The problem is not going to get solved if you don't show that you do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, on an individual scale.
It's clearly not your point. But I think its an important point.
> The point is we shouldn't brush off these individual incidents as insignificant because they are part of a whole.
If the significance is because they are part of a whole, then they need to be addressed in that context.
> The problem is not going to get solved if you don't show that you do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, on an individual scale.
You can not-tolerate it by making a private report to conference staff; you can not tolerate it by making a public discussion of the general problem with the specific incident as one of the illustrations; you can not tolerate it in many ways. The argument that something shouldn't be tolerated, even when accepted, doesn't automatically justify every possible response.
>If the significance is because they are part of a whole, then they need to be addressed in that context.
How are you ever going to get any accountability if you don't address them individually. People need to be taught what a microaggression is and why it's important, and then punished if they continue to make them. Repeated sexual jokes are already considered a form of sexual harassment.
>The argument that something shouldn't be tolerated, even when accepted, doesn't automatically justify every possible response.
This is true, and we seem to disagree what a justified response is in this scenario. I don't think it was that big of a deal actually. The internet made it into a big deal, but that's not adrias fault. I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on this one, because I don't know where to go from this.
I wouldn't have thought that tweeting someone's picture was a sound method of conflict resolution BEFORE the brouhaha, no hindsight required...
although conflict resolution probably wasn't what was really being attempted. I'm not sure what was being attempted, but I'd venture to guess that "let the internet settle this" didn't have the intended result.
> Why? She reported the microaggression to the relevant organizers through a public channel.
As I understand it, the particular use of a public channel (particularly, the use of a photograph in it) was itself a direct violation of the Code of Conduct of the conference, and an unnecessary escalation. The only arguably excuse for such public shaming, independently of whether or not it was a violation of the Code of Conduct, would be if the act were more something significantly more serious on its own than she described (though a public complaint about the organizers would be in line if the act, as described, was privately reported and the organizers failed to deal with it in such a way that that failure was itself a hostile.)
The part of the code of conduct you are referring to was added AFTER this whole thing happened. So you don't think it was a serious thing. I disagree. It's brushing off these things as "not serious" that is part of the problem.
> The part of the code of conduct you are referring to was added AFTER this whole thing happened.
That's not what several of the accounts I've seen has said, but as I noted in my post I don't consider that particularly important in the final analysis one way or the other.
> So you don't think it was a serious thing.
I didn't say that; quite the opposite, I said that there was a legitimate grounds to expect that conference organizers would treat an appropriate, private report seriously and that it would be legitimately to publicly complain if they failed to do so.
Theft of even a small value is serious. Murder is serious. Most people who agree with both these propositions would still readily agree that the appropriate response to the former and that to the latter are not the same.
If it was "micro", a proportional response would have also have been micro. Public shaming seems out of proportion.
And "aggression" implies directed hostility or malicious intent, neither of which seems to be the case here.
> Jokes like that foster the uncomfortable boys club environment that is so inherent to tech.
I have to simply disagree here. There are other things that may foster such an environment, but focusing on dumb, non-hostile jokes like this are a distraction.
The idea of a microaggression is that it's many small things you are exposed to consistently, and a lot. The kind of things people will say "lighten up, it's just a joke" to, because they see it as an individual incident. (which incidentally has been happening in this thread, a lot)
I don't think the person who got fired should have been fired. I don't think she should have been fired. I don't think such an internet shitstorm would have been necessary, but here we are. All that I am saying is that I don't think she overreacted in reporting this in a public manner.
You know, if she wasn't such a publicity-seeking hypocritical douchebag, I'd take your point. However, her pattern of behavior clearly shows that to be the case (she was tweeting sexual innuendos while at the conference).
So I think her MO was not "I feel vulnerable because some guys are making me uncomfortable, this is wrong, I'll do something about it". It was rather "I have a bully pulpit from which I can demonize some schmoes and raise my status at the same time, so I'll do it". Therefore the discussion of her over or under-reacting is moot - this was a publicity stunt that ended up backfiring on her.
While I regret people being fired, I can't help but feel that her ultimate downfall is deserved.
>she was tweeting sexual innuendos while at the conference
besides the point. It's not about the sexual innuendo, it's about the context of the sexual innuendo. Clearly she is not a prude and against sexual jokes in general. But in that specific environment, they were inappropriate. Twitter is a different environment.
