- The Roast Duck Bureaucracy – Open City Local governments are often much more harmful to free enterprise than the national government. There’s also some ugly racial implications of having mostly-white Americans certifying the healthiness of immigrant cuisines that they may not understand at all.
- Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions – NYTimes.com
- Guest post: The moment he realized how horribly wrong he had been
- Study: White people see “black” Americans as less competent than “African Americans” – Vox
- A Free-Market Argument for the Social Safety Net | Thing of Things
- A lot of people are discussing Scott Aaronson’s comment 171, in which he argues that the acute pain he suffered as a male nerd means he doesn’t have male privilege.
Here’s another post on the same subject, from a different blog: Compassion, Men, and Me
And here’s a third: Neither empathy nor trauma are zero sum | Inexorable Progress
- A cultural history of inflation in America – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money “Overall prices in the American economy were about the same at the beginning of FDR’s presidency as they had been at the end of George Washington’s second term.”
- 6 Police Interactions That Were Different When They Were White | Scott Woods Makes Lists
- Ancient Trees: Beth Moon’s 14-Year Quest to Photograph the World’s Most Majestic Trees | Colossal
- Bizarro Back Issues: Batman’s Deadly New Year! (1972)
- The odds of Greece leaving the euro have never been higher – The Washington Post
- Want to reduce teen pregnancy and abortion? Start with long-term birth control. – The Washington Post
- “Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD. Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.“
- Obama is unpopular. He’s also accomplished an incredible amount. – Vox
- Michael Ramirez’s Pro-Torture Cartoon – The Atlantic
- How an embryo turns into a baby, in one hypnotic GIF – Vox
- Tamara Loertscher: Wisconsin mother is thrown in jail for refusing drug treatment she says she didn’t need.
- Forbidden Topic in Health Policy Debate: Cost Effectiveness | The Incidental Economist
- “The complaint claims that administrators read books written by sex-differentiated teaching specialists who believe that boys are better at math because their bodies receive daily jolts of testosterone, while girls have equal skills only “a few days per month” when they experience “increased estrogen during the menstrual cycle.”“
- Rape apologists, in an attempt to silence victims, hurt an innocent man
- When Speaking to Men about False Accusations
- Rolling Stone didn’t just fail readers — it failed Jackie, too – Vox
- Rolling Stone and UVA: How sensationalism has betrayed survivors of sexual violence
- New Evidence Emerges of Wage-Fixing by DreamWorks, Pixar and Blue Sky | Cartoon Brew
- The Backlash Against Serial’s ‘White Privilege’—and Why It’s Wrong – The Atlantic
- Book Review: On The Road | Slate Star Codex “I too enjoy life. Yet somehow this has never led me to get my friend to marry a woman in order to take her life savings, then leave her stranded in a strange city five hundred miles from home after the money runs out.”
- Chris Rock is right: White Americans are a lot less racist than they used to be. – The Washington Post
“Afterwards, poking around the corpse, it was discovered that it was 185 years old, and that it had survived the Civil War — its hide contained 9 musket balls that had been shot at it by Confederate troops. And the hunters are smiling, without a hint of shame or guilt or even doubt that it was appropriate to butcher such a magnificent beast.” Update: Hoax, hoax, hoax. Thanks to Doug S. for the correction.- Why Orson Scott Card Should Keep His Job | Thing of Things A reprinted post on Ozy’s blog gives me and some other folks a chance to rehash some old arguments about free speech.
- “And if Rolling Stone was so eager to keep Jackie’s story in the piece that they were ready to run it against her will, that suggests their willingness to bend their fact-checking standards may have had less to do with some feminist “sensitivity” to a survivor’s request and more to do with not wanting to risk losing a particularly shocking tale of a gang rape that would help their article go viral in the way it ultimately did.”
- I love this wonderful 1904 comic strip by the immortal Windsor McCay. (Source)
As usual, feel free to post what you want, when you want, in whatever state of undress you want, and accompanied by whatever music you like. (That link is to a youtube mix I played while putting this post together).
Anyone got any plans for 2015? I plan to finish the third Hereville book in February, and it’ll be in stores in November. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll burn down my room and start anew, if I can figure out how to do that without catching the rest of the house on fire. Look for a LOT more political cartoons from me in 2015, as well, and also a new comic called “Superbutch,” which takes place in the 1940s and features a Lois-Lane-style reporter trying to uncover the secret identity of a lesbian superhero, to be drawn by Becky Hawkins. And more blogging, I hope.
In view of the recent conversation about trigger warnings and Dear God, Where Does It END?!, I offer the following as both a Superb Example of the Form, and a Cautionary Tale.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/audience-instructions-for-our-immersive-experimental-theatre-production-in-an-abandoned-middle-school-in-bushwick
Grace
It’s true the complaints are the same, but I don’t think the administration treatment and policies are the same.
I might be wrong. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be an interesting topic for someone’s research.
things like this are where we part ways.
Of course students have a free speech right to protest people, and it’s nothing new. But it should be a test that it’s irrelevant unless it’s a free speech violation (you don’t do that do that in other contexts.) FIRE thinks its a valuable signal of free speech issues: not only because the students are asking, but because the administration is responding.
Meanwhile, it’s been months since PA passed legislation which penalizes colleges that invite prisoners or ex-prisoners to speak – one of the most blatant acts of government censoring campus speech so far this century
I don’t know why not. perhaps it because that law is so obviously unconstitutional that it’s almost a joke, and it was promptly challenged, and it will lose.
The story isn’t that she did something bad. Like you said, plenty of people do bad things.
It’s that the rules prompted her to do so, and the administration treated her rights as somewhat valid.
That has less to do with free speech and more about the evolving status of homosexuality as a protected class, I think.
I agree.
Yup.
I disagree.
Actually I don’t think that is true. You can copyright a speech but that doesn’t necessarily give you ownership over transcripts, newsreels, etc. Copyright isn’t my thing, though.
Because campuses are very powerful drivers of policy.
Of free speech policy? And campuses in general, rather than – say – what is written in influential law reviews? I don’t think this is true. Is there any evidence for this?
Not as much in the US, where we have not yet hit the dangerous levels.
Yes in places like the EU. You can’t deny the Holocaust–it’s illegal. And you can’t sand up in public and argue that the no-denial law is wrong, either, because the necessary argument (there was no Holocaust) is illegal.
that’s an extreme example with an unsympathetic person, but it also gets applied in much more difficult circumstances like “offending someone on the basis of religion.” If you think that ___ religion is a bad one, you can neither say it or explain why you should be allowed to say it.
Yahooo!
We’re talking about the same thing.
Laypeople’s definition of a “true threat” is not usually the same as the legal definition, though.
Agreed.
Also agreed.
No.
The reason I’m hesitating on this one is that she was a social media coordinator person, whose position exists to interact and be commented on. But generally, no.
As I recall there was ALSO a big outpouring of feminist “those guys were assholes” support and linkage, so they ALSO got fired, and tat was ALSO richards’ fault, so perhaps it is less “give a damn about them” and more “this was worse but not out of the realm of a comparison, and we’ll ignore both outcomes in favor of jusdging the actions at the con.
gtg, more late.
Thanks, Grace! I needed that laugh.
Okay, I officially don’t know what’s going on with your comment sidebar. I thought everything could be explained with trackbacks (as I went on about, at length, a few open threads ago…), but there aren’t any on this open thread and it’s still sending me to page 1 if I try to click directly on the most recent comments.
Having attended Sleep No More several times, I really appreciate those instructions, Grace.
And my argument, as I think you recognize, is not that her behavior justified anything that was done to her afterwards, which is why I don’t really see the relevance of complaining about the various people, of millions of Internet folks, who trolled her. In retrospect I should have chosen a less distracting example.
(FWIW, I also think it’s difficult to separate her behavior at the con, i.e. reporting and sending the tweet, from her behavior after the con, i.e. writing a long post in justification. The post-con activities were what really sparked the blowback, IMO.)
That’s certainly the most common strategy: the group currently in regulatory power imposes rules that it wants without considering much advance input from the group not in power; which leads to bad outcomes; which leads to arguments and pushback; which eventually, through trial and error, leads to revisions, and so on.
Another strategy is to try to have those conversations in advance. That’s usually a better strategy.
The word “felt” is crucial here, because it hits on one of the core disputes when it comes to rule making.
Should limitations on speech or conduct be based only on objectively evaluated behavior? Or should they include a measure of subjective analysis, and if so, to what degree?
Most of the subjective rules tend to be very broad, and their breadth limited by selective enforcement. This makes sense emotionally: I can obviously see why a Strom Thurmond video might be offensive in a way that a Chris Rock video isn’t, even if they had technically-equivalent levels of “commenting on people’s characteristics based on race.”) But it’s very bad in terms of regulations. Because the point of regulations is that people can read them and know what they require; and can push up to the boundaries without limit, thus maximizing freedom.
AFAIK, they were improved for 2014.
I think these things need to start by asking
1) whether something is a problem;
2) which can be fixed; and which should be fixed;
3) by the application of a rule/law
4) and THIS particular rule/law.
In that conversation, I think you need to be open to the counterarguments:
1) It’s not a problem big enough to require action;
2) It can’t be fixed; or it shouldn’t be fixed;
3) if it can and should be fixed, it should be addressed by means other than a new rule/law.
4) whether THIS PARTICULAR rule/law is the correct way.
I don’t limit this to free speech or liberals. I have the same views if it’s conservatives opposing illegal immigration. Unfortunately the people who usually lead a charge (whatever it is, from liberal to conservative) are pretty universal in saying This Is A Problem that Must Be Fixed Right Now By This Law.
But:
Certainly there is a conflict. Simply put for verbal stuff, there’s a conflict between “what the complainant wants to hear” and “what the accused wants to say.”
But the question of who should carry the burden of solving it (the complainant, the accused, or both) really depends on what the problem is, from an objective sense. Some things which people let go should be stomped on. Some things which people complain about are not worthy of protection, even if they make people upset.
I’ve always been confused by the sexual harassment policy thing.
The underlying argument seems to be,
1. We used to not have a policy. Also, harassment at our conventions made women feel uncomfortable and not want to attend.
2. Now we have a policy!
3. Yay!
It seems like there’s something missing from this.
With all due respect, Patrick, that seems as strawman-ish as straw can man.
Looking at the policy, I imagine it went more like this:
“we want a harassment policy.”
“Well, ask a lawyer; they write these all the time.”
“No, we don’t want to ask a lawyer. They’re expensive. Besides, most harassment policies are imperfect. We can do better.”
[goes and writes policy, using words which sound really nice and which are perfectly clear, easy to follow, and reasonable. At least to the person/committee who wrote the policy.]
or perhaps like this:
“I want a harassment policy.”
“Well, let’s use one from ____. They seem nice.”
“ok.”
I would eat my hat if it wasn’t a 100% well meaning person or group of folks who just aren’t the type to sit down and write that sort of thing. I make that guess because the policy looks a heck of a lot like the sort of things I see when people try to write their own contracts, esp. by committee.
One of the more nonintuitive skills that attorneys have is to look at language they wrote and try to interpret it differently. I can’t always do it no matter how I try: it’s very hard to imagine someone getting it wrong when my writing is so very clear to ME. Heh.
Sometimes the results are pretty funny though. My favorite part in the 2014 PiCon code of conduct, hands down, is
“Harassment includes …harassing photography or recording”
There’s no better way to define “harassment” than “harassing someone.” ;)
G&W, try to imagine that a typical convention is run by people who 1) are not idiots, 2) do not all agree on everything or come from one single “group currently in power,” 3) actually talk (and debate) about things extensively before making changes, 4) Constantly balance between different stakeholders and contrary goals as part of running a con, and 5) are not actively malicious.
And please realize that, even when different stakeholders are in the room and talking and work together on writing something, creating something perfect on the first go-round is a legitimately difficult thing to do.
I’m not going to bother responding to an “argument” that doesn’t embody those assumptions. And if you are making those assumptions, that’s not evident in the comment you just wrote (quite the opposite, in fact).
[Crossposted w/ G&W]
That is not usually how it works, I don’t think.
My town’s Affordable Housing Committee is made up entirely of volunteers, as is the associated affordable housing private fund. To nobody’s particular surprise, the AHC was started by a group of people who are all pro-affordable-housing, and has continued to be even more so. There isn’t a member on the committee who thinks that we should aim for the statutory minimum; who thinks that it’s perfectly OK to be upset about spot-zoning exceptions for housing; etc.
That’s usually how things work. If I knew you in real life I’d happily bet you an espresso that the PyCon policies were written by a group of people who either volunteered or spearheaded the committee, and who joined because they wanted to change the rules. So I suspect the end result was more of a debate about “how should we punish harassment” or “how do we stop harassment” and not “do we care and is this even harassment anyway?”
YOU ALL MUST READ THE TANYA COHEN ARTICLES!!!
When I read the first one Here Is Why It’s Time To Get Tough On Hate Speech In America, I joined many people in concluding it was very well-written “suck them in before making the point” satire. Read it yourself and decide.
Anyway, a LOT of people seemed to think it was an actual position.
But then Cohen doubled down. She recently published a second article, Why Do Americans Reject Human Rights When The Whole World Embraces Them?
If the first one was satire at all, it wasn’t the kind of satire which is instantly obvious to all people.
If the second one is satire–which I sincerely hope it is–it is even less obvious.
Read them. What do you think?
I got this email today:
Hi, Greetings from queen,
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lt is from me,
miss queen
I can see why miss queen would be interested in Jake Squid. The names cry out for a cartoon series, don’t they? Pinky and the Brain ———– miss queen and Jake Squid. I like it.
Amp @ 110
Wow! Amp, you recently suggested (if not outrighted stated) that people who want Voter ID are either evil (racist) or stupid (a dupe). That is a little simplified because you divided into 4 categories what I conveyed in 2.
But, now, you are not going to argue with people who do not stipulate that people on you side may have lily-white angelic motives, when YOU refuse to reciprocate. I don’t know whether you are being a hypocrite, manipulative, small-minded, or if it simply cognitive dissonance (or something else).
I will put this out there for you, though:
I would bet that the majority of people who disagree with you are more open-minded than the majority of people who agree with you (I.e. More likely to consider thoughtfully your point of view than vice versa).
To;dr: Wow!
-Jut
Regarding posts 22 and 23 – there’s one other group involved in the Rolling Stone story that was failed and betrayed:
These young men suffered emotional trauma, they had their reputations slandered, they were harassed and their home and property was vandalized. And they are innocent.
Amp, the University of Chicago has addressed the issue of free speech in a report recently released from their Committee of Freedom of Expression. Here’s the end of it. How do you think this compares to Harvard’s speech code? Which do you think shows a greater commitment to the ideas of free speech and the purposes of a university?
I do not know whether Tahia Cohen’s articles are satire or not. I am afraid they are not. But they are certainly full of factually incorrect claims, and laughably poor logic.
Speaking of Adria Richards, here is one of her many big dick jokes:
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/statuses/312265091791847425
But she was deeply, deeply shocked when a socially awkward guy was giggling about the word “dongle”. This woman is just a troublemaker (and her non-coding job was to “build bridges” between communities, huh), not Joan of Arc saving all of innocent womanhood against evil men.
Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History
fuck, fuck the dog sees me.
Jake, thank you for almost making me choke on my bagel. Sheesh. ;)
Amp’s comment @110 as asking for a different discussion of the rulemakers in the particular case of convention sexual harassment policies, which is a factual request: convention committees are not part of a partisan system; they can’t generally be divided into “the group currently in power” and “some other group(s) currently not in power.” Except inasmuch as only certain groups of people attend the various cons–but that changes slowly enough the committees are usually representative of the con attendees.
Also, Amp’s comment in the other thread is discussing whether a person is being racist, defined as taking positions that harm somebody of another race, whether they meant to or not. You can see that motive is sufficient but not necessary, because there’s at least one person in his list who doesn’t have racist motives but still gets called a racist in Amp’s schema. Whereas g&w’s argument was entirely a mindset argument, if not a motive argument (since thoughtlessness fits his description just as well as malice). So drawing a parallel between those two cases is not as probative as you seem to think it is.
g&w:
I too would be interested to read this. I admit I’m usually skeptical of “things about X have gotten so much worse” arguments without data: it’s been my experience that when I think that’s true, it’s usually because either I’m comparing to a reference point which was a historical outlier, or because the burden of X has shifted from consequences I wasn’t aware of to consequences I was. I think the classic example of this is the Steven Pinker and colleagues work on homicide and violent death rates throughout history.
Incidentally, the Daily Show had a funny mention of French free speech laws sometime this week (something like “So the government cancelled a tour because of the antisemitic content? I wish the tour had been cancelled because nobody wanted to see the antisemitic guy!” only phrased better because, y’know, they’re the professional comedians).
On a separate note, I’m not sure why we’re getting into sexual harassment policies w/r/t the Adria Richards thing. The only official reaction from the convention was that the guys were talked to privately and they agreed to apologize, which seems reasonable enough for the situation. They weren’t expelled; no further action was taken. Everything else that happened took place outside the purview of the convention and its sexual harassment policies.
I can name two incidents off the top of my head where considered sexual harassment policies were insufficient to handle known abusers–and one of them was Wiscon, where you’d think any problems with overzealous committees would be worst! Whereas I don’t know of any incidents with disproportionate effects on borderline inappropriate cases–which is not to say such cases don’t exist.
***
Perfidy:
At fan conventions, I have watched porn with some other attendees in a private room. (“Harry Squatter and the Sorcerer’s Bone”–we mostly sat around, making fun of the cinematography and trying to figure out who was supposed to be which character. Good times.) But I might still be upset if somebody made a sexual joke at a professional convention, depending on the joke. That’s because one of them is my hobby, and the other one is my workplace, and context matters.
Also, I get annoyed when people use “socially awkward” as some kind of get out of jail free card for problematic behavior. At most it’s an affirmative defense: “Yep, I did that, but I didn’t know better.” At which point the reasonable followup is “…so I will take steps so I don’t do that again.” I’m a pretty socially awkward person naturally, which I’ve put in a lot of effort to correct; I am friends and/or colleagues with a ton of socially awkward people, and somehow most of them manage to avoid offending me despite my rampant feminism. :)
Now, it’s possible what happened wasn’t problematic behavior–I wasn’t there, I don’t know. But if it wasn’t, then his social awkwardness doesn’t matter, and if it was, it doesn’t excuse him from the consequences.
@gin-and-whiskey: you are insisting there is a slippery slope, and when I disagree, demanding that I explain to you exactly where on that slope the downward slide becomes inevitable.
@Perfidy: By your logic, we should absolutely blame the men who made dick jokes for being whiny troublemakers. After all, we can be confident they would have expected to be shushed if they’d made dick jokes in the middle of reading “Green Eggs and Ham” during Parent Volunteer Time at their children’s kindergarten class, right? Therefore, since you believe context is irrelevant and being OK with a thing in one situation means being OK with it in all situations and always forever, the two men should STFU and stop pretending to be martyrs.
The rant that Joan of Arc was some kind of crusader for women’s rights is so ridiculous that it deserves pity, not scorn.
So very much this. Especially since I have NEVER seen it used for women. Us “socially awkward” women are somehow supposed to not only figure out how to make ourselves fit in, but also figure out which of the guys are “just” being socially awkward, and make sure their feelings don’t get hurt, either. But when we do “socially awkward” stuff, we’re just freaks.
I am as socially awkward man as they come – and I agree.
As others have already pointed out, just because something’s appropriate in one context doesn’t make it appropriate in all contexts. I swear all the time at home, but I’ll still give you the stink-eye if you use some of the same words on a public bus.
But also: WHY IS THIS EVEN RELEVANT?
Let’s suppose you were right, and she was hypocritical. You’re not right, but let’s pretend. So Richards was a hypocrite, and complained about a joke herself.
Does this make the death threats okay?
Does this make the rape threats okay?
Does this make hundreds of tweets and emails calling Richards a cunt okay?
Does this make launching a denial of service attack on Richard’s employer okay?
Does this make Doxxing Richards okay?
Look, if I spit on the sidewalk, I’ve done a bad thing. But if a mob of enraged ruffians then beats the crap out of me for two hours with baseball bats, then the fact that I spit on the sidewalk becomes almost completely irrelevant. Because the response was so completely disproportional and cruel that it doesn’t matter what I did.
And if you respond to the case over and over by going “but Amp spit on the sidewalk first!,” then it really sounds like you’re saying what the baseball bat mob did was somehow defensible or appropriate or understandable or sympathetic.
The hundreds (ETA: or dozens of people posting many times each, perhaps?) of vicious assholes who attacked Richards, and the many more who cheered it on, are the actual scumbags here. They didn’t act as they did because Richards had previously told a dick joke. They did it because they’re a bunch of vicious, asshole woman-haters who get joy out of being mean and were just thrilled to have an excuse.
Fuck them. What they did has no excuse. So don’t bring up irrelevant shit, because irrelevant shit is irrelevant.
Yes. Twitter is a public messaging system. If you send a message on twitter the world can see it and there’s a reply option. You invite a response, which totally justifies people actually responding – that’s how twitter works. If you represent your tweets as part of your employment, then you bring your employer into it. It’s totally reasonable for anyone to go and take her up on the offer and tweet back – even if thousands of them do it and they disagree with her. She was literally asking for it.
Now death threats obviously cross a line. But it doesn’t seem to be appreciated that she clearly invited a reply in a way that that neither her employer nor the two guys having a private conversation at a private con did.
Quite. Joan of Arc wasn’t a feminist. She was a messianic figure who, inspired by delusions, lead a campaign against oppression until her preaching backfired and those she fought against had her burnt at the stake. Why is she being brought up here?
Yeah, I’ve certainly seen it applied to women but it’s interesting how when women are “socially awkward” that generally seems to mean they’re quiet, shy, not really noticed. When men are “socially awkward” that all too often is just an excuse to justify shitty behavior that almost all socially awkward people (of whom I count myself one) should still know better about.
Do you not understand the distinction between “response” and “disproportionate response”? Cuz that’s kind of an important distinction here.
I’m confused about how two people in a very crowded public place talking loudly enough for many people around them to hear could be considered to have some expectation of privacy – not even from a legal standpoint (they clearly didn’t), but just from a use-your-brain-and-don’t-be-an-asshole standpoint.
I’m convinced that Tanya Cohen is a parody – she seems to have too small of an internet footprint, plus she uses some phrases, like “re-education” (used positively) that I doubt a real lefty would use. (She’s talking about a policy that was proposed by some European lefties, but they didn’t use that term.)
There is a real thing at the heart of it – which is the enormous difference in free speech standards between Europe and the US. I definitely prefer the US standards. But looking at day-to-day life in the two countries, it sometimes seems that the actual difference made is not as large as we might imagine.
This is the best thing I’ve seen so far this year.
Why is she being brought up here?
You’ll have to ask Perfidy, who brought her up. Or did you conveniently miss that?
Mythago, the question was rhetorical. Go read the paragraph again.
Your recollection is incomplete. According to her own account of the affair, Richards also texted the conference organisers with her complaint, spoke to them, and in response to their intention to “pull the people in question from the main ballroom” pointed out the men concerned.
In other words, she did more than merely fire off an ill-advised tweet. She intentionally brought about an official response.
And yes I do criticise the fired man’s former employer. The “pulling out” from the main ballroom was, I understand was merely to give the organisers an opportunity to talk to the men. No further action was taken and the men were not thrown out of the conference. In my opinion, that should not amount to even a straw’s worth of cause for dismissal. Neither should a dick joke per se.
I do not, however, criticise her former employer for dismissing her. As they said in their statement “her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role…”
Finally I don’t agree that “dick jokes” were unambiguously “against the rules of the private event”. The relevant provision in the code of conduct is
which is open to considerable interpretation.
Daran: Yes she reported the men to the con organizers. But – to quite literally repeat myself –
WHY IS THIS EVEN RELEVANT?
Let’s suppose that reporting a sexist joke, told loudly enough for people around the jokers to hear, in a public space where people couldn’t leave, to the organizers is a wrong and blameworthy thing to do. I don’t agree that it is, but I’ll accept it for argument’s sake.
Does this make the death threats okay?
Does this make the rape threats okay?
Does this make hundreds of tweets and emails calling Richards a cunt okay?
Does this make launching a denial of service attack on Richard’s employer, and Richard’s own website, okay?
Does this make doxxing Richards okay?
Look, if I spit on the sidewalk, I’ve done a bad thing. But if a mob of enraged ruffians then beats the crap out of me for two hours with baseball bats, then the fact that I spit on the sidewalk becomes almost completely irrelevant. Because the response was so completely disproportional and cruel that it doesn’t matter what I did.
And if you respond to the case over and over by going “but Amp spit on the sidewalk first!,” then it really sounds like you’re saying what the baseball bat mob did was somehow defensible or appropriate or understandable or sympathetic.
What happened to Richards was wildly disproportionate and wrong and far, far worse than making a report to con organizers.
* * *
Re Richards being fired: giving in to the demands of a howling mob of misogynistic abusers surely isn’t an admirable act. But I can understand not wanting to put the whole company at risk to stand by one employee.
But it wasn’t what Richards did that caused that (contrary to what their statement said). The mob of misogynistic harassers were the people responsible. Richards could not fairly be expected to anticipate that wildly disproportionate response. And the people demanding she be fired were wrong, because firing someone for one mistake is disproportionate and cruel. (ESPECIALLY when it comes to our ability to earn a living, political partisans are WAY too quick to demand that other people lose their livelihood, IMO. I want to live in a world that isn’t that unforgiving.)
The people who made this such a big deal were the people responding disproportionately to Richards, not Richards herself. But somehow there’s not a word of blame for what they did, while there is an enormous energy to catalog every little thing Richards did that was less than perfect.
Daran, sorry, I guess you may need to explain it to me in very small words. The Joan of Arc comparison was made to someone who complained to the staff of a convention about a couple of dudebros loudly making dick jokes. If there’s some logic in the analogy to a fanatic religious martyr, or some dark allusion between feminists and the organized church that condemned Joan of Arc, I’m missing it.
Ok, ok, you win! Before I succumb to the temptation to use needlessly stigmatizing terms, I’ll try to count to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 … and one to grow on.
Mythago,
Here’s Pete Patriot again:
Let’s take that in parts:
“Messianic figure”. I don’t see Richards as in any way messianic to her defenders, but this is the only point in the comparison that fails.
“Lead a campaign against oppression”. “Lead” is perhaps inappropriate. “Waged” would have been a better word. Here are Richards’ own words describing her motivation for her actions.
And so on. That looks like a campaign against (perceived) oppression to me.
“Inspired by delusions”. Richards view of women seems positively Victorian. In her world, women appear to be basically overgrown children liable to a fit of the vapours whenever they hear a sexual joke. I do not share Richards’ frankly misogynistic view of women. I subscribe to the radical notion that women are adults.
“Until her preaching backfired and those she fought against had her burnt at the stake.” Hyperbolic of course, but the relevance should be obvious.
Actually, here’s Adria Richards own tweet about Joan of Arc:
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313442430848487424
Ampersand:
It’s relevant because it was, or appears to have been, a causal factor in the events as they subsequently unfolded.
It has not been established that the joke was sexist. Assuming that the first comment here is genuine (which I believe to be the case) the fired developer acknowledges that his double entrendre was intentional. are intentional double entendres necessarily sexist?
We don’t know exactly what the joke was, but Richards gives another example of an innuendo-based joke she took exception to:
Is that necessarily sexist? Why?
You know very well I abhor and condemn all these behaviours. Why are you even asking me this?
Spitting on the sidewalk wouldn’t matter even if you weren’t attacked by the ruffians. If instead, you had done something which mattered. It wouldn’t stop mattering merely because you had been attacked by ruffians.
I reject the notion that we can’t criticise Richards’ actions because trolls. We can’t criticise relationships between game developers and gaming journalists resulting in conflicts of interest because trolls. We can’t criticise a feminists’ series of vblogs alleging misogyny in games because trolls.
Before you object, by “can’t criticise” I don’t mean that our speech is literally suppressed. I mean that any and all criticism, irrespective of merit, is rejected, because trolls. Having said that, my speech is, in fact, literally suppressed, to millions of people who, if they visit my website, along with every other notable site which substantially dissents from mainstream feminism, will be met by an blocking page declaring it to be a “hate site”. I don’t believe that the ISPs doing this have looked at my site, or that they would really care about what I have to say, one way or the other. I think they’ve done this in response to lobbying by feminists. Because trolls.
That’s not my intention, and it’s not a reading someone giving me a reasonable benefit of the doubt would leap to.
Firstly I’m not “responding to the case over and over”. I made one comment pointing out your omission of a significant fact in your summary of events. Moreover, nothing in that comment was a criticism of Richards’ actions in any way.
* * *
Four premises:
1. The hundreds or, more likely, dozens of trolls harassing Richards are the same people who have been harassing other feminists since long before the Pycon affair blew up.
2. These trolls are not members of the Python developer community.
3. Richards’ actions split the developer community, resulting in her being incapable of doing her job.
4. This, and not the actions of people outside the community, was the reason for her dismissal.
Premise 1 seems to be a reasonable belief. Do you disagree?
Premise 2 is an almost certain consequence of premise 1. It would be an extraordinary coincidence or alternatively indicate that there was something very wrong with the Python developer community in particular, if it has been the sole or a major source of misogynistic trolls for the many years prior to the Pycon incident.
Premise 3 was asserted by Richards’ employer in their statement. Can you gainsay it? If so, upon what basis? As far as I’m aware, you’re not a member of the community and have no discernible contact with it. Why should I accept your view over theirs?
Premise 4 is even less gainsayable. Her employer’s explanation of its own motivation is authoritative.
These four premises lead me to conclude that Richards was fired because of the impact of her actions upon the developer community. There is no reason to believe that misogynistic trolls had anything to do with it.
I don’t agree. Her own account of the affair, shows she made a big deal of it. Moreover, it tells us precisely what that deal was.
And it’s that post, more than the specifics of what she did, that leads me to agree with her employer that she’s an unsuitable person to fulfill a “bringing people together” role. She didn’t do what she did because she felt harassed. She did what she did in furtherance of an agenda, namely to turn developer workspaces into a safe playpen for the overgrown children she believes women to be, oblivious to the fact that, in doing so, she’s making it into a hostile space for adults.
If Richards was alone in having that agenda and that blindspot, then the incident would indeed be of small account, and I doubt it would have garnered the attention that it did. But she isn’t alone, and consequently the incident exemplifies a wider issue.
I despise the misogynistic trolls. I really do. I want nothing more than that they just go away. I’m also realise, as I’m sure you do, that as long as there exists an internet which is remotely open, then a small minority will abuse it. And it only takes a small minority, a few hundreds or even a few dozen out of the billions with internet access, to make their targets’ lives miserable.
Trolls are a permanent feature of the internet, whether we like it or not. To say “I won’t listen to criticism of feminism, because trolls”, is to insulate feminism permanently from criticism. I don’t think that is a reasonable stance.
Yes, that would be unreasonable. It is also not what I said. If something I wrote can be fairly interpreted to mean that, then I miswrote.
I’m drawing, so I don’t have time to explain it in finely-parsed detail
for you; hopefully you’ll take my word for it that I didn’t mean anything remotely like that.“Since I’m only force-feeding you one drop of arsenic at a time, it can’t be having any negative effects on you, right? You’re just a whiner.”
Yes. “By the way, ladies, let me just remind you in the middle of this work presentation that I expect certain standards from the women I sleep with. No, I know it’s not relevant to what we’re discussing, I just want to remind you that in addition to programmers, you’re also sex objects. I am either deliberately ignorant of, or deliberately referencing, the fact that sometimes men will remind you of this in order to ‘put you in your place’ and ignore every contribution you’ve ever made and every success you’ve ever had.”
In some abstract world where women aren’t regularly discriminated against and dismissed, no, perhaps it wouldn’t be sexist, just a cheeky remark about this guy’s sexual preferences. But we don’t live in that world, we live in this one, and in this one, that’s sexist as fuck.
As to your four premises:
First of all, it’s not “more likely dozens”–see eg the little debate that went back and forth when one person purported to show that most of Gamergate was only the actions of like a dozen people, and then some other people showed that was roundly wrong. Only a few dozen may have been the main drivers, but lots of people probably contributed a comment or two–that’s how these things work.
Second of all, yes, many of those people were likely the same ones who yell at feminists all the time.
Why not? Is the Python developer community uniquely free of non-feminist people? In fact, it’s quite computer-savvy and male-dominated, as well as relatively open-source, so it’s quite likely to be drawn from the same demographic as your standard-issue Internet troll. Yeah, it’s probably lacking the teenage boys, but a fair number of trolls are older; some of them even have reasonably successful jobs, but also the Python developer community includes a bunch of people who do it as a hobby, so it’s not like you’ve limited yourself to “people with the social and employment skills to hold down a job” if you’re only talking about that community.
I mean, maybe? But it’s not a universal statement that “other people (group X) won’t work with customer service-oriented person Y because of trait or behavior Z” should result in person Y getting fired; the obvious extreme outlier case would be person Y being nonwhite and group X being racists. The case here is not as extreme as that example obviously is, but I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk statement that “part of the customer base doesn’t like person Y” should result in customer-service person Y getting fired.
Well, premise 4 implies your results from premise 2, that the trolls were not members of the community, and I’ve already disagreed with that. And also it implies that her employer was able to separate the response from the community from the response from the trolls: if they were getting lots of comments about her, were they background-checking every complaint to make sure it was from somebody in their potential customer base? Or were they just overwhelmed by the volume? But even ignoring those two points–employers sometimes lie, just like everybody else. Or make a statement that is defensible in court, for example, but not the entire story.
Basically, you seem to be trying to divide this into 2 different stories, “a muted response to Richards which was nonetheless severe enough to get her fired” and “a strong death-threat-y response from random Internet trolls with nothing to do with the question at hand”, and I don’t think those can be as cleanly separated as you think, either abstractly or in practice.
***
cc77, thanks for that link. I wasn’t aware of it, so the Joan of Arc thing seemed entirely out of left field (right field? :D). (Now I just find it odd, but whatever.)
“Messianic figure”. I don’t see Richards as in any way messianic to her defenders, but this is the only point in the comparison that fails.
Uh, it’s a rather important point. The whole parsing depends on the comparison to a specific historical figure whose raison d’etre and whose fame in history is the direct result of her and her followers’ view of her as a “messianic figure”. Take that away and the whole rant falls flat. (I’m kind of regretting asking you to waste time trying to salvage it, really.)
Though admittedly I’m also dog-tired of the talking point that any objection to acting like women are dick-wetters first and humans a distant second is “Victorian”, or treating them like delicate flowers, or whatever dishonest phrasing you prefer that attempts to deflect criticism away from the person who can’t shut up about how some of the people present have boobies, you guys, and onto the targets of that person’s inability to act like a grown-up.
Given that she posted a tweet likening herself to Joan of Arc (which I wasn’t aware of, when I posted my comment), I think it has stood up again.
In no way, shape, or form can anything dongle-guy or his friends are alleged to have said be reasonably construed as acting like women are dick-wetters first and humans second.
As for the suggestion that people who make sexual jokes are unable to act like grown ups, I consider that pretty damn insulting to the people in my social circle, three quarters of whom are women, who regularly turn the air blue with their sexual jokes and innuendo. We curb it, of course, when there are small children around. I reject utterly the notion that we should treat women the same way.
Do you also “reject utterly” the notion of context? Because for anyone who has the slightest awareness of the professional context in which that incident happened, this:
is pure bullshit. There’s absolutely nothing misogynistic or childish in thinking women shouldn’t have to listen to dick jokes at a professional meeting. If you disagree then you apparently don’t subscribe to the radical notion that men are adults, or at least should be expected to behave that way on the job.
No of course not.
I’ll return to this.
What I disagree with here is the framing. It’s not that I think women should have to listen to dick jokes. It’s that I don’t agree that dick jokes are something which are experienced by women as a generality as something they either have to, or don’t have to listen to. In my experience, dick jokes are something that women might want to tell, hear, laugh at, respond to in kind, tut at, or ignore because they have no great feeling about them, one way or another. I think this because the dozen or so women I’ve been meeting up with in a social context typically once a week or more for the past several years, and the several times that number I first met more recently or see less frequently, exhibit that that range of reactions.
You made a good point about my awareness, or more precisely my lack of it, of the professional context. As I have remarked elsewhere I have only been gainfully employed for three years in my life, and those twenty five years ago, so I admittedly don’t have much experience or awareness of workplace dynamics. It’s possible, I suppose, that the robust, give-as-good-as-they-get women I’ve grown to know and love over the years all turn into wilting flowers the moment they step over their employer’s threshold. I have to say, however, that the idea that they all change personality the moment I can’t see them seems a bit Heisenburgian.
I call it “Victorian” because it honestly, genuinely seems to me to be so. Victorian attitudes toward gender didn’t die with the old Queen. They were still quite prevalent in the sixties and early seventies when I was growing up. Then it was expected that women didn’t swear or tell dirty jokes, that men did, but that gentlemen did not do so in front of the ladies. Fast forward forty years and I find feminists advocating exactly the same code, on the grounds that women react to them in a way which is completely at odds with my experience.
Daran, okay. It’s possible that, in your life, you have never heard anybody make a dick-related joke that was simultaneously intended to put down women. In which case I congratulate you on your excellent choice of fellow human beings, but most of us haven’t been so lucky in our array of coworkers/family members/acquaintances/etc. And when you have a bunch of people telling you that this is true, it might be worth considering that your experience is the outlier, and judging other people based on it is unfair.
Like, I don’t know how to say this more plainly. Some things are not appropriate to the workplace. Some things are appropriate in a workplace among coworkers who are also friends, but not appropriate to a large gathering of strangers. Some things are fine around your peers, but not your boss. The world is not Geek Social Fallacy #2. Understanding context, modulating your behavior based on the people you’re interacting with, choosing the right time and place for certain kinds of discussions: those are all important steps people take to craft a functioning society.
Also, you seem to be under the bizarre impression that only women are bothered by this kind of behavior. It has the most direct impact on women, so that’s what we’ve been discussing, and of course Richards is a woman. But I also know plenty of men who will raise objections when this kind of stuff happens, because not everybody wants to listen to sexual jokes in the workplace. Especially when they tie into, like, actual harms that women still suffer.
Possibly of interest to those here: Booth Babes are Bad for Business. (Or, at least, they’re worse for business than having some knowledgeable people around to answer questions–even when those people are [gasp!] older women.)
Overhearing a dongle joke is like being force-fed a drop of arsenic? Seriously?
I do not agree that such a message was either intended by the speaker, or is likely to be heard as such by most women. The humour of such jokes stem from the double-meaning: One mundane and (at least tangentially) related to matters at hand, the other sexual, excretory, or otherwise taboo and irrelevant to matters at hand. Exactly what the two meanings are doesn’t matter to the functioning of the joke.
That’s what I think it was.
And I disagree. Now what? We have a joke that was or was not sexist, according to whether we do or don’t accept a feminist analysis of society at large. And we have a code of conduct which hangs on the issue. What could possibly go wrong?
I haven’t seen that discussion, but I’ll accept, for the sake of argument, that it’s hundreds. Heck, let’s just call it a round thousand.
Just how big do you think the community is? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands maybe? Surely not hundreds of thousands.
How many English speakers worldwide have internet access? Half a billion? Probably more.
One hundred thousand developers out of half a billion English speakers is 0.02%. If the a random python developer is 100 times as likely as a random English speaker to troll, then 2% of the trolls will be python developers. If there were a thousand trolls, then 0.02% of python developers will be trolls. They are, for all practical purposes, disjoint groups.
I doubt python developers will be 100 times as likely to be a troll, but to be honest I know very little about troll demographics. Do you? Does anyone?
I notice you say “trait or behaviour” and then give an “extreme outlier” example based upon a trait. What is at issue here is her behaviour. Also it’s not just random”other people”, it’s people who it’s her job to work with.
To summarize: “the people who it’s Y’s job to work with, won’t work with Y because of Y’s behaviour”. Additionally “Y’s behaviour is motivated by her commitment to a political agenda, a level of commitment she herself analogises to the religious fervour of Joan of Arc”.
No it doesn’t. 4 together with 2 imply that the trolls were not the reason for her dismissal, but 4 does not itself imply 2.
Another possibility is that they sought input from people they knew within the community. Honestly, I don’t know what they did. But I’m unpersuaded that you know their business better than they do.
Their statement is authoritative, by which I mean it’s from the horse’s mouth. Yes, people can lie on subjects upon with they speak authoritatively, but there’s no reason to believe they did in this case. To conjecture lying, every time someone says something which conflicts with your view of the world is to change the facts (at least in your own mind) to fit your theories, rather than changing your theories to fit the facts.
As a matter of interest, do you not think if her boss had rung up a few well-connected individuals within the community and said “hey, can you ask around, find out what people think of this”, he or she couldn’t get a sense of what the community thought, independent of the death-threat-y trolls?
(Again, I’m not saying they did this. I don’t know what they did. I simply maintain in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the presumption must be that they know their business better than you do.)
Or do you think that, if the developers wanted her gone because they felt she had damaged their community, and the trolls wanted her gone because they think she’s a cunt, the developer’s views alone could not have prompted her dismissal?
Harlequin
I’m well aware that sexual or body-part related jokes can be and sometimes are used to put down women.
Nothing I have said condradicts this. What I said was “I don’t agree that dick jokes are … experienced by women as a generality” as terribly oppressive. I’m not denying that some women might find some or all dick jokes oppressive. I’m not denying anyone’s personal experience here.
All I’m saying is this. Choose a female person at random. Without knowing more about her, you cannot say with any confidence that she would feel oppressed by dongle-guy’s joke.
So who is the straw feminist who argues otherwise? Answer: Adria Richards
If Richards had any kind of prior relationship with this girl, she would have mentioned it. You don’t refer to someone as a “girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop” if she’s your friend’s daughter So it was, for our purposes, a random female person. If Richards spent any time at all interacting with her at the workshop, I doubt it was to solicit her views on dick jokes. Yet Richards is convinced that dongle-guy, whose joke as far as we can tell wasn’t aimed at putting anyone down, and wasn’t even directed at Richards, would make participation in the community impossible for the woman that girl will become.
How can she think this about some random woman she knows nothing about, unless she believes it to be true of all women?
I totally get that some women are fragile. Some women are damaged. Some women are vulnerable. Some men too. But it’s the idea that all women are fragile victims that I find so terribly, terribly Victorian.
I’m well aware of all this. What on earth makes you think I’m not?
I was about to make the same complaint about you. My initial response to your first paragraph was to wonder how you could possibly talk about dick jokes being used to put down women without noticing that the cannonical dick-related put down is to suggest that a guy has a small one.
You’re missing the point about Richards. She didn’t complain merely because she was a woman who felt personally offended. She was crusading (or whatever the hundred-years-war version of that word is) on behalf of women and girls generally.
That’s a real good start…
…and such a disappointing finish.
You’re right of course, some men will object to sexual jokes out of concern for their impact upon women. And I’d be one of them, though in my case my concern would along the lines of “as best I can tell, is everyone in the room ok with all this?”, and if they were, I wouldn’t worry too much about any broader societal context.
But you know what? For a moment there, I thought you were going to acknowledge that some men might have objections to sexual jokes that relate to their own vulnerabilites or which tie into, like, actual harms that men suffer. My bad.
Once again, no acknowledgement, and once again, as a man who has such vulnerabilities and who has suffered such harm, I’m left feeling erased and invalidated, something I’m sure you didn’t intend, but which I feel anyway. It’s no big deal; it’s not like I’ve just been force-fed a drop of arsenic or anything. The constant stream of invalidation the social justice movement an unrelentingly exclusionary and hostile place to me, but it isn’t going to kill me.
How do you know that’s their motivation? Do you have a direct quote from them?
It seems to me that if you actually asked them, no matter how much Truth Serum you apply, you’d get some variation of:
(1) They wanted to get a laugh
(2) They like thinking of themselves as “edgy”
(3) They want the validation that comes with making a sexually charged at a woman and having her play along
… and “putting someone in their place” would be nowhere on the list.
Of course, someone’s motivations, and how an action is received by the recipient, can differ, and in at least some cases we should defer to the latter. If enough women claim that this is how they take sexualized jokes about them in certain environments, in real life I would defer to their interpretation when deciding whether or not to make a joke like that.
But I stress this point because when I or someone else complains that a group of guys feel like they’re being treated as lesser, the usual response from feminists and SJW’s is a demand to produce a quote admitting to it, with the implication that if we can’t then the particular hierarchicalization of society we see must not exist. Or otherwise prioritizing the stated motivations of the doer and not the interpretation of the recipient.
To sum up a somewhat scattered thought, you’re pushing an interpretation that basically no guy who makes sexualizing jokes would agree with (or admit to, depending on your perspective). That’s not necessarily wrong, because sometimes it’s the recipient’s interpretation that matters, but it would be wrong if you were to take the opposite tack when it’s a group of guys you don’t like who repeatedly make similar complaints.
No, I don’t agree with the framing that seeing someone in a sexual light and seeing them as human are antithetical, or that there is even an overall inverse relationship between the two. As do a lot of other people. This is where the disagreement lies.
Unwanted sexualization in a professional setting, or repeated unwanted sexualization in a casual setting, is wrong no matter what you call it, because that’s what unwanted means. But this “not a human” or “object” framing doesn’t work because it seems like the opposite is true. To the vast majority of people, other human beings are what register as sexual, while objects or non-human things are the things that inherently lack sexuality (barring very specific fetishes).
So it’s unwanted desexualization, rather than unwanted sexualization, that better fits the conceptualization of treating someone as an object or as less than human. By unwanted desexualization, I’m referring to something like, “(that person) in a sexual context? EWW! Or, (laughter)”, where others can hear.
You think that type of joke is mean? You personally wouldn’t make them? That’s all great. But do you support administratively banning them? That’s the relevant question. Which leads me to…
Not everybody wants to listen to all types of jokes in the workplace. And I’m not trivializing it by referring to jokes that someone merely happens to find unfunny, such as knock knock jokes. I’m referring to jokes that legitimately make some people feel like they’re lesser.
What if someone doesn’t want to listen to short jokes? Or the “desexualization” jokes above? Or “compensating for something” type jokes? Or just any jokes of the type where one person in particular out of a group is singled out to be ribbed a lot more than anyone else? I’ve intentionally picked those that due to the peculiar genderization of society, are more likely to be leveled at a man than a woman, are likely to hit men harder once leveled, or both. Because of this, I’d guess that however not-nice you find these jokes, you wouldn’t support administratively banning them, or pulling people out of conventions for making them. (Though I could be wrong on this.) Because that would be over-“regulating” everyday life, too authoritative, and besides comedy needs to be spontaneous and edgy sometimes! Have a sense of humor!
…which is exactly how most of the non-feminist majority (especially if you only consider other cultural liberals) feels about sexualized jokes. Including sexual innuendo type jokes that go much further than a riff on the fact that the name of an electrical plug shares a common syllable with a slang term for ‘penis’. (Would that joke even register as PG?) The only difference being drawn that I can see is whose feelings are being hurt.
I, like Daran I presume, realize that unwanted sexualization is shitty and making sex jokes can be inappropriate in certain contexts, but disagree that they should be placed into a special class.
Daran, I don’t have any trouble with the idea that some sexual jokes are funny. I have a problem with taking that fact to say with apparent certainty that Richards was wrong to be offended by a joke when, again, we don’t even know what the joke was.
Do you think this would have gone exactly the same if the person who took these actions was Anthony Richards? Do you think she would have faced the same backlash for reporting a joke that she found offensive to her based on some other characteristic than her gender? Because I think both of those cases would have been very different, and I can cite lots of evidence from similar blowups, the most obvious and recent being the differential backlash faced by women and men saying the exact same things about The Gaming Debate That Must Not Be Named. You can’t, in this case, divorce the behavior from the trait.
(Also, I thought the “people she’s supposed to work with” was implied in the “other people.”)
pocketjacks:
Well, first of all, the “sometimes” that appeared earlier in the passage you cite was very important to my meaning. I’m not saying that this is the meaning all the time; I’m saying that it’s occasionally the meaning, and once you’ve experienced that a couple of times it’s hard not to feel that jolt of adrenaline and wonder if that’s what this joke is going to be, too, because if it is it’s going to involve consequences you’ll have to manage.
As to how I know that–well, that comes from the very close relationship between “people who make sexist jokes when I’m around” and “people who ignore everything I say,” plus the occasional “people who mostly ignore me, then make some sort of sexist joke during a lull in the conversation, and then entirely ignore me.” This hasn’t happened to me a lot, thankfully.
And you are. (Well, in the sense that I’d support the kind of action that was taken here–taking the person aside and asking them not to do it again. I wouldn’t support removing people from the conference–but that didn’t happen to the people Richards reported, either.) “Don’t make people feel shitty about irrelevant stuff they can’t control” seems like a decent baseline for a workplace, don’t you think?
***
I’m having trouble responding as civilly as I would like to this thread of the conversation, so I’m probably going to bow out at this point. Sorry for the hit-and-run. :)
There are SEX jokes. And there are SEXIST jokes. They aren’t the same.
I think folks are objecting to the concept that every/most comments involving sexuality, sex, genitals, etc. are inherently harassing or sexist. That can be seen to some degree here in the thread by the tendency to conflate “sex related” and “sexist.”
I will deliberately select certain examples from one of my friends’ most popular jokes. In the last month, I’ve heard
“wow, that was absolutely incredible” (lunch) and “shit, that’s huge” (old hardware) and “well, I’m not sure if it’ll fit but I can try to squeeze it in” (server rack)
followed by “THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!”
(Which, actually, was pretty funny. Every time.)
Sex related? Yes, absolutely.
“Appropriate for work?” Well, it depends on the work. A simple test is whether you can swear without consequence. If you can say “jesus fucking christ on a stick this project is giving me a goddamn migraine” without your boss caring, then perhaps the “appropriate for work” filter should be adjusted. But ignore this for now, since “appropriate” is just like saying “because because.”
Intended to demean, put down, harass, objectify, etc? Nope.
Objectively harassing? Which is to say, objectively demeaning, diminishing, dehumanizing, objectifying, etc?
Clearly given the arguments there are plenty of folks who would say “yes.” But the words themselves don’t seem to be demeaning, diminishing, dehumanizing, objectifying–they’re just about sex. Sex isn’t dirty, bad, or anything else, right?
Can someone who would classify those jokes as harassing explain what makes them say so?
In my place of employment, the odds are 50:50 between me saying that to my boss and my boss saying that to me.
On occasion you’ll hear it yelled out, which can be inconvenient when I’m on a conference call. We’ve learned to mute our phones unless we are actually talking.
I remember one memorable time when a similar line was followed by the speaker hurling his phone across the workspace. There were absolutely no sanctions taken against him. He just got a new phone.
I don’t know if I’ve ever linked this here, but I do translations from the Analects, with commentary, at this tumblr here: http://dailyanalect.tumblr.com/
(aka the Confucian Analects, the sayings of Confucius, etc.)
I try to take the text seriously as a political and philosophical text with relevance to the modern world.
Some of you might be interested.
yrs–
–Ben
I appreciate that you’re trying to strike a moderate tone, but it appears that either my initial point was unclear or you’ve misunderstood what I’ve said. I wasn’t actually, for realsies, asking for a direct quote because I doubt this invocation-of-sex-as-power-play dynamic exists. I already think it exists. I brought it up to make a point.
Essentially no man who makes envelope-pushing jokes at women would agree that he’s doing it to “put them in their place”, or anything in that general zip code of motivations. In light of this, the correct parsimonious response would be to surmise that this attitude doesn’t exist at all, not that it only exists sometimes.
This is a framing I’ve heard before, one that many women insist upon, and when people deny it, they insist harder and louder, again and again. Insist, insist, insist. As I’ve been very insistent in saying, this does not necessarily make them wrong in all cases. (Though I’d agree that “sometimes” is the best word to describe its frequency.) Sometimes, it’s the interpretation of the recipient of actions that’s important, regardless of intent. Sometimes that interpretation isn’t even wrong, because people are good at rationalizing and hiding their true motivations even to themselves. And sometimes, people just lie about their motivations and manage to keep it up. (Of course, other times things are exactly what they say they are.)
Other people too, including men, are often at the mercy of societal dynamics that people go to great lengths to avoid admitting to existing. When we press our claim, we’re met with this snooty “can you provide a quote?” attitude. So you bet that when they’re the ones on the vulnerable, complaining end having to resort to the exact same thing, I’m banking that shit into my memory to throw back at them later.
When a bunch of people complain about being at the ass end of a particular social dynamic, and their stories are remarkably similar, there’s probably something to it.
Why do I push this? Because I’ve very recently come across a manifestation of this attitude from SJW’s and Harlequin’s comment piqued out at me with its symmetry. How is it related to the whole Adria Richards scenario? It’s not, really, but this is an open thread.
My essential point is that agreeing that desexualizing jokes (and I suppose the “small dick joke” example Daran brought up falls under here), every-pick-on-one-person type jokes (in a mixed-gender setting, the safest target is almost always a male, and it seems that the severer and more persistent it is, the more likely this is to be true), short jokes, etc. etc. are “mean”, and that people should not make them, and that I would not make them… is not enough. Not when you’re (general you, not Harlequin) supporting administrative intervention against very mildly inappropriate sexual jokes. I don’t support putting things that happen to hurt your feelings more into a special class.
It appears that you (specific you again) agree. But I hope you understand that I can’t take that as representative. I’ve commented on here several times now and you (and sometimes the bloghost) have been the only ones to really try and engage. Both of you seem to represent the very moderate end of your ideological camp. So while this discussion has been nice, it’s done nothing to disabuse me of the idea that pushback attitudes like mine are necessary and that I should continue to pushback as hard, to counter the more unreasonable people out there.
(As for the final word on the whole dongle-gate nontroversy, I think mildly unpleasant jokes of all stripes should not merit administrative intervention. Not unless it’s persistent behavior over repeated objections. Of course, I’m not entirely of the “people have no sense of humor these days!” camp, either.)
pocketjacks:
Awhile back, during briefing, the Officer-in-Charge briefed the oncoming shift concerning recent calls, including a domestic. In this case, a woman had been assaulted. One of the officers commented, and this is word-for-word, “She hot? Probably hotter after she got beat up, huh?” And the OIC laughed, and made a comment about another aspect of her appearance.
On many other occasions, I have heard men joke, “Hey, sometimes you’ve got to put her in her place.” Sometimes it’s not a joke. I was once training an officer who received a call from his wife on his cell phone. I paid no attention to the conversation until he suddenly barked at her, gave her an order, and hung up. I raised my eyebrows and looked at him. He said, “Sometimes you’ve got to tell them who’s boss.”
When you hear it said with a straight face, it gives the “jokes” a different tinge, that’s for sure.
Many times, often at domestics, I’ve heard men say, “You know how women are.” Since I transitioned socially, they usually append, “…no offense.”
I don’t make a hobby of remembering all of these things or writing them down. I don’t hear them every day. But they’re common enough that they don’t shock.
In fact, now I’m put in mind of a relation-by-marriage whom my mother and I visited when I was maybe eight years old. He knew that she was a feminist, and he “joked” with her, “A woman’s place is in the kitchen… and she should go there directly after work!” AAAAAAhahahaha! There was certainly no doubt in my mind that his purpose was to belittle my mother’s opinions, to tell her that they didn’t matter, to put her “in her place”.
Yes, I would say that many of these comments are “in that general zip code of motivations”. Not all of them, perhaps. Many of them. Some of them are in the laser-guided center of that zip code.
Oops. Good thing I qualified my assertion.
There is no doubt whatsoever that this attitude exists. It’s not always the primary motivation. Perhaps it’s not always the tertiary motivation. It’s usually a reasonably foreseeable consequence, though, and avoidable. So what does it say that many people select it anyway?
Exactly so.
Before I transitioned, when I heard a fellow officer remark to a dispatcher, “Hey, did you see the he-she who came to the Dispatch window?” it didn’t hurt my feelings, it made me feel less safe in my workplace. (And correctly so, since that particular officer has done me some damage since I transitioned, afterward.)
Before I transitioned, when I was chatting with a group of officers late at night during a slow shift, telling “war stories”, and one brought up as a point of interest that he had “stopped a he-she the other night” (that is, he had pulled over a driver who was visibly trans), and at first he couldn’t be sure, so he was getting down lower, and trying to see into the car better to make out “his” face… it didn’t hurt my feelings, it made me feel less safe in my workplace.
When, in that same conversation, another officer grinned and said, “a shim?”… it didn’t hurt my feelings, it made me feel less safe in my workplace.
When another officer described how, in another job, he was taught to determine whether a prostitute he was dealing with was transsexual by doing a “junk check”, that is, by feeling her crotch — by committing sexual assault in uniform — and all the officers listening (except me) laughed genially… it didn’t hurt my feelings, it made me feel less safe in my workplace.
So, there’s that.
Grace
pocketjacks:
It sounded to me like in your last comment you basically agree that unwanted sexualization and unwanted desexualization (I’d call them “negative/derogatory sexualization”) jokes are both bad, and ideally you’d like to ban both from the workplace, but you feel like most of the people who are against sexualizing jokes aren’t against desexualizing jokes, so you would rather work to have a bad outcome for both sides so that it’s “fair” than to only advocate for fewer desexualizing jokes.
What if someone doesn’t want to listen to short jokes? Or the “desexualization” jokes above? Or “compensating for something” type jokes? Or just any jokes of the type where one person in particular out of a group is singled out to be ribbed a lot more than anyone else? I’ve intentionally picked those that due to the peculiar genderization of society, are more likely to be leveled at a man than a woman, are likely to hit men harder once leveled, or both. Because of this, I’d guess that however not-nice you find these jokes, you wouldn’t support administratively banning them, or pulling people out of conventions for making them.
Like Harlequin, I would in fact support similar consequences for these jokes. The only one I’d hesitate on is the short jokes, but I would support a rule of “Repeatedly mocking someone for a trait [such as shortness] after being asked not to is harassment and unacceptable workplace behavior,” in any case, and I don’t have any real desire to NOT ban them.
I agree that short jokes hit harder for men, but I’m kind of mystified that you think that “EW! I’d never sleep with them!” jokes are either less likely to hit as hard or less likely to be made about women. (It also sounded like you didn’t think that such comments would be categorized as sexual harassment [if made about a coworker] or inappropriate for the workplace, which, again, is kind of mystifying to me.)
Not a lot of people in my workplace have made “EW that person is hideous” comments at my workplace, probably because most of them know better, but the couple I can remember were 1) a printout of a fat woman in short cutoff shorts with a lot of cellulite, from the back, with a sarcastic comment about her being [not actually] hot; 2) One of my coworkers intensively questioning another about whether/how many women in Paris shaved their armpits, with a a strong implication that not shaving was obviously repulsive. (I asked said coworker why he was asking and if he was thinking of getting a French girlfriend; he said “No!” with an intonation that suggested he was horrified that I might think such a thing. I realized afterward that an even better response would have been to intensively question Coworker Who Went To France about the men and their chest hair or lack thereof. That would have made everything nice and awkward!)
Both of those situations were irritating to me. I don’t think they are professional behavior in any case, and their impact on me personally was a brief moment of insecurity followed by “Fuck those guys! I don’t care about their opinions! They’re not exactly attractive themselves!” I do have defenses, after all–but having to have your defenses up all the time is draining, and it can be distracting, especially if you’re doing not-highly-riveting intellectual work. It’s in a similar category to dealing with unpleasant people generally, but combined with the idea that I should not have to be dealing with this, because this is not appropriate workplace behavior. (I don’t think that it’s irrational or a sign that women are delicate flowers to decide, “Hey, computer science seems to be full of difficult people; I think I’ll major in biology instead.”) Hear hear to what Mythago said about being sick of hearing the “Victorian”/”delicate flowers”/”women getting the vapors” argument. In this instance it narrowly avoids being sexist itself, perhaps, by saying that that’s what Richards thinks rather than what women who object to it are actually like, but I think it’s born from a too-strong desire to find a way in which your opponents are hypocrites, rather than an accurate description of what Richards thinks–but I’ve been trying to say away from the Richards situation specifically rather than the more general arguments because I haven’t followed it closely.
To add on to Harlequin’s points about the “bare, just the way I like it” joke, it would be one thing if it read as “just this one guy’s preference”, but lately, in pop culture, there seems to be an understanding that obviously female pubic hair and any woman it’s attached to is repulsive. One example that has particularly stuck in my mind, as much for its lack of awareness that sexual preferences aren’t universal as anything else, was this alleged account of a sexual experience with a politician: “When her underwear came off, I immediately noticed that the waxing trend had completely passed her by. Obviously, that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest.” [Anecdotally, even the guys I’ve seen express a preference for no pubic hair don’t claim it’s so important that they’ll immediately lose interest in sex, so “obviously” seems like quite a stretch here.]
Grace:
“who apparently thought about rape in the same way a desert-dweller thinks about getting wet when it rains, as something which happens to other people, far away.”
This is a great way of describing it, and reminded me of this:
(I don’t remember where I got that link. Maybe I got it from here.)
I read the first Song of Ice and Fire book but not any of the others and did not watch the TV show. I can deal with some kinds of violence/horrible things better than others. I think I am more sensitive than average to both rape and torture/mutilation. Although there were some elements of the books I really liked (direwolves are cool! the dragon eggs hatched!), I think what got to me was both “I’m not exactly enjoying myself when I have to read about so much rape/torture/mutilation” and feeling like I was being manipulated… like keeping me guessing what horrible thing would happen next, would or wouldn’t character X suffer threatened horrible fate, would the damsel tied to the train tracks be run over by the train (OK, that last one wasn’t in there…)–it felt kind of cheap.
Also, my sister and I (mostly my sister) got sick of hearing everyone talk about GoT and how great it was, and came up with alternate names:
A Game of Drones
A Storm of Words
A Dance of Dragging On and On
A Song of Ice and Tired of Hearing About It
An amazing piece from National Geographic:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/healing-soldiers/img/soldierInfoModule/mcnair.jpg
One more, which really belongs in one of the Islam threads, but I don’t want it to distract from the conversation that looks like it’s about start over there: From Newsweek: The Koran Does Not Forbid Images of “The Prophet.”
RJN,
Yes, I had read that already. (Although she is way more qualified than I am, didn’t you also wonder why Newsweek is asking someone with a PhD in Art History rather than someone with a PhD in Islamic Studies or something?) I’d have been curious to hear a bit of a better explanation of why nobody really did them for the last few centuries, and/or how much the existing historical ones were made by outliers.
Anyway, as an additional interesting read, here’s a wikipedia article that quotes at least some hadith on the issue.
I’ve been contemplating the nature of bullshit for the past few months, and this popped into my field of vision. A German performance artist that includes animal torment in her performances.
From a blog post about a petition concerning it.
Now I signed the petition to MOMA asking them to cancel using deliberately terrorized animals as “art.” So at the VERY least, I’d like a few of you to do the same.
But I was wondering what this group thought of self-promoting bullshitters pretending to be avant-garde, hipsters, revolutionaries, intellectuals etc?
http://www.sandrachile.com/journal/2015/1/20/animal-cruelty-masked-as-art
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/182/764/384/moma-please-stop-anne-imhofs-cruel-performance/
http://news.artnet.com/art-world/anne-imhofs-massive-bunnies-debut-at-moma-ps1-226323
BLLLLIIIIZZZZZZZZARRRRRRD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stay safe and warm, everyone.
Delicious.
Feel free to send some of that sweet sweet frozen precipitation out west. It hasn’t rained since December, and we’re in our third drought year.
—Myca
We’re getting a lot more snow than predicted. I stayed home from work today because my hip is hurting and I’m having trouble walking, but it’s looking like it might have been a good idea from a safety perspective, too.
Richard –
I’ll put it here since that way you’ll read it, thank you very much. What you deleted was SPECIFICALLY AND EXPLICITLY MEANT FOR JAKE SQUID to answer HIS question, so deleting it was rude of you.
Jake, the Koran is meant to be the literal unchanging and perfect Word of Allah, with no further revelations to come and not a single letter of which is to be challenged. It is not a history, it is not a chronicle, it is a direct order of how to behave as the One True God commands. and it’s bloody awful. Start here for a good summary.
Richard, you said –
Now I’ve read translations of the Koran twice, once in 1987 again in 1994 along with the Hadith. I was going through a comparative religions phase, so I gave it a scholarly examination. I read about a dozen books in favor of Islam and another 9 or 10 against it.
So I’m not coming from a previous bias. I didn’t PRE judge. I judged. I used critical analysis, came to a conclusion and went on my merry way.
YOU on the other hand oh Vessel of Truth HAVEN’T EVEN READ THE KORAN. At BEST you’ve skimmed a few books that I would term “apologetics” and probably only the summaries from the New York Times Review of Books of some critical works on Islamic theology. That makes you deliberately ignorant of a subject you refuse to shut up about.Why Amp tolerates you posting on his blog is baffling, since the people you defend would cheer if he was executed or forced to be a Dhimmi. Since I would die for the guy, I find it doubly offensive.You make your points so poorly, half the comments are from people just trying to figure out what your point IS.I pity your English students. They deserve a refund on tuition.[Personal attack crossed off by moderator. Brian, please respect the norms of this blog.]
Boy howdy, you really do hate muslims.
Moderator, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name…
I think there is always a “full of shit” clause in personal attack rules. If you’re calling bullshit on a bullshitter, it’s not PERSONAL. It’s not about how they have their hair cut, or where they were born. It’s about the persona they present to the world, with the words they spew.
BUT…. since my motive was to call out a bullshitter whose very presence was making a one-time “best friend I ever had” look stupid by association, I stand by it. And if said bullshitter STOPS making my one-time “best friend I ever had” look stupid by association, I will retire from the battlefield. I have called him out, at LEAST two people witnessed it, and I have thus defended the fair lady Amp’s honour.
If you ban those who call bullshit on bullshitters, what will that leave you with, ladies and gentleman and smizzmars of the jury?
(Yes I’m drunk. I’m an alcoholic, so the question was meaningless.)
Brian, my friend, I have enormous respect and liking for you, because of our huge shared history. I love you, dude, and I know you know that. I never, ever would have made it through jr high or high school without our friendship. And I hope you’ll find a way to enjoy sticking around on this blog without insulting me and the other folks here.
But… Richard’s presence here doesn’t make me look foolish. And if it makes me look foolish in your eyes, then take it to email; don’t call me a fool in public, like you’re doing now, and then pretend you’re doing it to be nice to me.
And… I have a way I like to run this blog, which includes treating other people with respect. And you are shitting on it, right now. You are showing, through your actions, that you don’t give a shit about me, what I think, or my preferences.
To use an analogy, you are coming into my (online) living room and behaving like a jackass. You are insulting my friends – all of whom, unlike you, respect me enough so that they’re trying not to be rude to you.
If you actually give a shit about me at all, then STOP THIS.
If you actually have intelligent points to make, then you can make them without attacking (or even mentioning) Richard. And if you want a place where you can be a jackass, then GO MAKE YOUR OWN FUCKING WEBSITE. Stop coming to my living room if you’re going to continue treating my friends (and therefore me) me like shit. All you’re demonstrating right now is that you have no respect for me at all and don’t give a shit about what I want.
Ben, I hate anyone who as a core part of their belief system believes that God Almighty can be directly quoted with vile hate speech.
A Nazi by any other name still smells as vile. And if by definition the core text of your faith encourages horrible behavior, the faith encourages horrible behavior. You can’t worship Ba’al without baking babies. If you buy into the premise, you’re buying into the whole thing.
There is no “Nazi Lite.”
Hmm. Blizzard “everyone is asleep, what to do” debate:
Reread the JK Nemesin trilogy for the third time? That’s always fun.
Or watch “John Carter,” for the second time in four years, since we happen to have the disk from the library?
Or keep reading the new William Gibson book, which, for the first time in memory, is not sticking to me like a glue trap?
Super good trilogy. Long, though; I’ll be up till 3 to finish it.
Decent Gibson book. Not compelling so far. But I can finish it in an hour or two.
Bad movie. Good with a beer, though. Or two. Even three.
Choices, choices. I’m leaning towards the movie though, for beer reasons.
…exactly how fast do you read?!
Fair enough. I’ll go fact check the folks at Red State.
Answer: Gibson (“The Peripheral”.) Turned out to be mildly better than it seemed in the first 100 pages though I don’t recommend it. definitely “library” (if that) and not “purchase,” IMO.
Harlequin:Bizarrely, inexplicably, fast. Always have since before kindergarten. Can’t say why.
So is anyone watching the American Revolution mini-series on TV?
So this is interesting: Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei has written an open letter to the youth of Europe and North America. You can read the text of the letter here. (Here’s a PDF.) And you can read one columnist’s response on Al-Monitor here.
I have not read the letter carefully yet, but I am struck by how different it is from the kinds of approaches Iran has taken in the past to the question of how Islam is viewed in and by the non-Muslim west. It is more personal, less dogmatic and ideological, though his position is clear and he of course gets in his digs at us, and there is something very honest about asking young people to try to understand Islam thought direct contact, rather than through media images and such.
His letter has a good point — and something I’ve tried to do — and I still think he’s a dictatorial asshole.
It’s an interesting approach, though. I can’t see another head of state doing the same (maybe, I don’t know, the Queen. But not the President of China.)
Seems to me that the provocation that has led to feelings of horror and hatred has nothing to do with any actions of Western governments. It seems to me that the provocation has been the actions of people claiming to be inspired by Islam.
A phobia is an unreasoning fear. Ask the editors of Charlie Hedbo if any fear they may have had of people asserting that they speak in the name of Islam (as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claims to do) was unreasonable.
Yes. That’s why they stopped it. Is Islam ashamed and chagrined of its own history of slavery and oppression of people of color and Christians – which continues to the present day?
Al-Queda slaughters in Afghanistan and Yemen and Paris. ISIS slaughters and enslaves in Syria and Iraq. A British soldier (or was it a cop?) is beheaded in England. Boko Haram is setting a new standard in slaughter and enslavement in Nigeria. In Egypt, Christians are stoned and their churches are set afire or torn down – sometimes with people in them. So please don’t point your finger at me, it’s dripping blood all over the floor.
From McSweeny’s: Reasons You Were Not Promoted That are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
No, but I’m told it’s fun. Are you liking it?
Nah RonF, you’re being far too charitable, the story’s much more twisted and disengenous than that. The reason people in the west became horrified by Islam is in 1989 Ayatollah Khamenei’s predecedor, Khomeini, issued the Rushie fatwa and kicked off a campaign of book burnings, bombings and murder. Can’t think why the Ayatollah went for Western malevolence and the fall of the Berlin Wall as the cause, I suppose it’s been a couple of years since they last uped the bounty – so the fatwa might have slipped the old guys mind.
Yup. I did. Mind you, having been brought up and having lived in and near Boston my education regarding the details of many of these events was pretty detailed and there were (as the producers took pains to emphasize) numerous liberties taken with the details of events. It’s a dramatization, not a documentary. But the main themes were pretty close, and I’m not a fan of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. My wife and I both watched it – in fact, I had a Boy Scout Court of Honor last night when it was initially running so she and I stayed up until quite late watching the re-broadcast.
This incredible video of someone who is studying historical archery in order to try to become what appears to be the world’s fastest/accurate archer is really fascinating.
via http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2015/01/7qt-terrifying-fish-lightning-quick-archers-and-some-cussin.html
There’s a refutation of that archery video here. (favorite quote: “He is a terrible archer who can shoot fast. He shoots very fast. He shoots very badly very fast.”)
Now, of course, I know nothing about archery, so either or both of those pieces could be full of shit and I’d never know. But something seemed off to me about the video (especially the “medieval art shows bows with arrows on the other side!” which I already knew was more about artist knowledge than accurate depictions of archery) so I’m biased to the refutation, I guess. :)
Thanks, Harlequin! It is fascinating to read both pieces. Like you, I think, I find the refutation somewhat more convincing and have now re-viewed the original.
In either case, since I can’t shoot worth a damn I still think it’s cool ;)
An exchange from our role playing game tonight:
Mythago: First food! Then whores.
Myca: I’m going to post on Alas that you said that.
Mythago: You should! Nobody will believe you anyway.
—Myca
I had no idea you guys were in the same gaming group!
yrs–
–Ben
That is a vile calumny, Myca!
Myca, as promised:
http://the-toast.net/2015/01/21/misandrist-lullabies/
Those are fantastic, Mythago. I literally LOL’d:
As long as we’re reading the Toast, as a companion piece to “Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History,” I offer Gleeful Mobs of Women Murdering Men in Western Art History.
—Myca
Neither did we, for several months.
—Myca
That’s pretty funny, mythago, but do wish the author had used “gents” instead of “men” in Mary Mack so it rhymed! (Like Myca, my favorite was the John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt one, though.)
If I may be nosy, is this an in-person gaming group (and you didn’t know each other’s real identities) or an online gaming group (and you didn’t know each others’ handles)?
A surprisingly good “listicle” from Cracked on being a male rape victim:
http://www.cracked.com/article_21884_5-awful-realities-being-man-who-was-raped-by-woman.html
I think my favorite of the series is Paintings That Wikimedia Commons Has Inaccurately Categorized As “Seduction In Art.” http://the-toast.net/2014/11/21/paintings-wikimedia-commons-inaccurately-categorized-seduction-art/
It’s an in-person group. We played together two or three times before realizing that we’d been talking online for … oh … a decade.
Weird as hell.
—Myca
@Grace Annam,
You describe a series of incidents, some of whom are more serious than others. (The police making jokes about DV and the anti-trans incidents are more serious, the husband “barking an order at his wife” on the phone and then his comment afterward less so. In the case of the latter, the gender-flipped example is incredibly common; you may not even register it because it fits into your expected background of “normalcy”. It’d be easier to point out the times when the gender-flipped example is not shown in a given pop culture portrayal of domestic life, with the female aggressor essentially portrayed sympathetically throughout.)
None of them, however, actually get at what we were talking about, which is about at least outwardly positive (and perhaps inappropriate) flirtation being actually intended as a negative attack to “put a woman in her place”. You seem to have taken as the field of relevant examples any and all instances in which a woman’s “place” is implied to be lower than a man’s, which is obviously a much broader field.
I don’t think that I’ve been misread a second time. I clearly said:
…and everything leading up to that, so I don’t know why you’re talking to me as if I’d disagree that such attitudes against women exist. In that light, I don’t understand the point of your entire post. It seems like “no, your implied equivalence of certain men and certain women being at the receiving end of this dynamic is wrong, because Women Have It Worse, and here, have some increasingly unrelated anecdotes to prove it!” is the intended meaning. Is that an incorrect or unfair assessment? What would be the correct or fair assessment, then?
@closetpuritan,
Actually, I’m not entirely sure which way to go with this. On the one hand, the best, fairest standard seems to be “repeated instances of a certain behavior after being asked to stop more than once constitutes harassment”. (The “repeated” requirement could be waived in cases of threatening behavior, defined legally.) On the other hand, there needs to room to criticize institutions repeatedly making unreasonable demands. My position on this would depend on the particulars of the situation. I wouldn’t say that I want to “ban both sides” as a matter of course.
As for the first bolded, would you disagree with that assessment?
For the second bolded, that’s actually an interesting philosophical point to discuss, but I’ll hold off for now because it would be a long, massive derail.
That is good to hear. I do look at people on your side better the more I hear stuff like this. However, my general position remains “trust, but verify” and “I’ll truly believe it when I see it in the real world”. As I would fully expect you to were the situation reversed.
My current girlfriend doesn’t shave either, and I certainly don’t see it as much of a turnoff. She’s of a more traditional mindset who associates shaved pubes with promiscuity, go figure. Makes me roll my eyes, but it’s certainly not worth arguing about. I kept myself shaved for a long time largely for the benefit of my partners, but I’ve let it slide since my current partner actually prefers the unshaven look. Having to constantly buy disposable razors for the sole purpose of shaving my pubes is one small inconvenience I can now do without.
I think there’s a general association of hairiness with poor hygiene, which isn’t baseless but overstated. I also think hairiness is associated with men, which is why pubic hair is seen as grosser on women than men.
However, to mirror my initial point to Harlequin, the bolded type of statement is inherently unprovable. If you want people to take yours seriously, extending the same courtesy to others is a likely prerequisite.
pocketjacks:
That is not my intended meaning. On re-reading my comment, it seems clear to me, so I’ll let it stand without further explanation.
Grace
Elusis, even though I want to slap everybody in that article except the author, thanks for linking. Cracked has some surprisingly thoughtful articles in between the explosions and dick jokes.
In the “Not sure how I feel about this but worth a read nonetheless” I give you a statistician’s take on some recent rape statistics.
http://www.datagoneodd.com/blog/2015/01/25/how-to-lie-and-mislead-with-rape-statistics-part-1/
http://www.datagoneodd.com/blog/2015/01/27/how-to-lie-and-mislead-with-rape-statistics-part-2/
courtesy of Simple Justice–whose owner, I should warn new readers, can be a total prick to opponents, as you can see from the linked post where he talks about Amp. I sometimes suggest reading a post because the author has some good things on civil liberties and such. But I never suggest posting a comment; the comment/response policy is not at all like Amp’s.
Heh. For my full adventures in the comments at Simple Justice, you’d have to read this thread first, and then the thread G&W pointed to. I’ll continue to subscribe to and read Simple Justice, because he often has good links on prosecutor abuses and the like.
But I doubt I’ll try posting a comment there again. I felt like a debate club member who’d accidentally wandered into a pie-throwing contest.
pocketjacks:
Re: you and your girlfriend, I’m not entirely sure what you were getting at, but I’m going to assume it was something like, ‘I agree, regardless of what’s in the media, pubic hair or lack thereof isn’t that important to most people when choosing a sexual partner.’