It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves.
How common is this behavior at bars in general, independent from a hacker con?
Also: some of the girls that I know who are hackers are offended at the idea of red/yellow cards. The implication there seems to be that they're helpless, and need somebody to swoop in and save them.
That, at least to some of my girl friends, is utter bullshit, and is blatantly sexist against women.
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And to be completely honest, the red/yellow card thing has already become a flirtatious joke among people.
From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women.
I think it'd be helpful to identify why this problem exists in the tech field. Is there a chicken and egg situation where more women in tech would solve these problems, but something about tech prevents more women getting involved?
From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off.
People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up.
A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.
So well said. When people don't take you seriously, clever hacks are the next best solution. The "What She Really Said" IRC bot story reminds me of this as well.
"From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women."
Like Hollaback, this is a very imperfect, but apparently effective solution. I appreciate your appeals to straw Feminism, but "women should react the same as men to every situation to 'prove' they are strong" is not it, it's a mess of privileged assumptions.
It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally.
I'll concede that imperfect but effective solutions are probably necessary to help foster this sort of equality in the long run, though, and the more people who step up and take responsibility for pushing the change (regardless of gender), the better.
If a woman acts inappropriately towards a man, he rarely has any option to make her fuck off. "Men don't have to do it"? They can't. It's only that it happens less often (I guess). Seems to me that women have a lot more power in this regard.
I don't doubt that worldwide, men suffer sexual and physical assault from the opposite sex at a lower rate than women.
However, in developed countries, I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer than we collectively think. Here is an informative article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/07/feminism... Men are probably less likely to report incidents due to humiliation or rather, lack of action. Checkout comments on stories when boys get sexually molested by female teachers. Oh yeah, the boy is supposed to love it because he's a boy! Very different when the genders are reversed. Castrate the man! Execute him! Or how about physical assault? Did Elin Nordgren serve any time or get lambasted by feminists for assaulting Tiger Woods? Nope. In fact, she got a tidy settlement.
No. These are just a bunch of guys predictably derailing the discussion of how women are harassed at tech conferences with, "But sometimes it's a guy, too! Ergo, we shouldn't get anywhere in this discussion!"
If a person effectively says, "whatever, when men endure what women have to, then we'll talk," you bet I'll respond to that as it implies whatever men go through is less important. I don't have a downvote button so the only recourse is responding.
I was responding to the flippant statement: "When 1 in 4 men get sexually assaulted during their lives, I will start giving one iota of care about poor poor dis-empowered men," as if somehow men who are sexually assaulted are less important.
Who was I to think that the fact 1-in6 men are sexually abused while underage was a quick and easy response to a remark that men are not sexually assaulted in any real numbers.
I should have looked up the statistics on all demographics, because apparently that sexual abuse isn't good enough sexual abuse to refute the weight the parent poster was giving to the 1-in-4 women statistic.
Right, but that’s during childhood, not as an adult going to work and attending technical conferences. I can think of only one person I’ve met since turning 18 who was, umm, skeevy to me in a sexual way, and that person was male.
(He didn’t actually assault me, but I later learned that one MIT fraternity had nicknamed him “the NAMBLA man”, and a while after that there was an article in the school paper reporting that he had just done time for rape.)
Yeap, judging from the downvotes in all sibling posts, the "think of the women" PC brigade is on witchhunt tonight. God forbid someone brings up an area where men are less pampered. Oh well.
Your comment should get downvoted to oblivion for its sheer lack of originality, panache, and basic human empathy, but let me humor you with a response:
When 1 in N women can serve in the military without being raped by their fellow servicemen, then we can talk.
And then can we have the conversation wherein you attempt to defend your apparent belief that people dying in service of their country is superior to people being RAPED BY THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN in service of their country.
I don't regard rape as a fate worse than death. It should be regarded as a crime worthy of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, and right now it isn't.
If people in the armed forces were killed by their fellow soldiers at the rate women in the armed forces are assaulted and/or raped (which would mean a Fort Hood massacre every _week_), it would get a lot of attention, and the perpetrators would actually be prosecuted instead of shielded from consequence. But when a victim of assault reports it in the military, the consequences usually fall on the victim and the perp gets to walk. I think any rational human would find that sickening.
I also take umbrage with your sugarcoated characterization of rape as "involuntary sexual intercourse," as if it could happen by accident. There is no such thing as "involuntary" sexual intercourse. Sex requires consent. If consent is not given or is revoked, it immediately becomes assault and/or rape, and the person who disregards that becomes an assailant and/or rapist. Your use of dismissive, diminishing rhetoric to describe (or even excuse) the traumatizing act of sexual assault/rape is a lame and misguided attempt of political correctness of your own preference. Which is a nice way of saying that you're propping up rape culture.
I don't know you, but based on your comments you seem to have very little to no empathy for victims of assault. I would implore you to examine why that is.
"From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women."
I agree that the props idea is stupid, but men do have things differently. Men don't have to resort to using crazy schemes largely because women overwhelmingly don't approach men. And men who are sexually or physically assaulted by women have a significant fear of being ridiculed by society for not fighting back (or in the case of sexual assault, enjoying it).
I'm curious if this is a unique problem for tech workers. I'm sure if you look at conferences from any field there will be incidents of sexual harassment. Is this a problem unique to tech or a general problem of idiot men working with women?
I've worked mostly in corporate environments. If I had to characterize a type that was in need of sensitivity training, it usually wasn't the tech guys, it was the "business" type (marketing, finance). Of course that's just my experience.
THIS is what prevents more women from going into tech fields. From academia to the workplace, IT/CS has been built into a self-reinforcing boys club. Until on a large scale it is no longer socially acceptable for geeks to treat women like shit, there won't be many women in technical fields.
I think what agpen is trying to say is, "Statements like this are offputting to some people [women] who want to participate in tech." That's going to vary by the individual, but acknowledging that these statements have an offputting effect is proof in itself. Most people reading those statements aren't going to step in and say "this makes me not want to participate," because they know they won't be taken seriously. So instead they just leave.
Your statement is more sensible and on the fence. She's implying men are the root of women's problems in tech. That there is a conspiracy to marginalize.
Women have broken into countless so-called "boys clubs". Doctors, lawyers, marketing, etc... How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women?
You're making a lot of assumptions that may not be correct in your reading, because they certainly weren't explicitly stated: in particular, that agpen is a woman (not a given from the comment in question), and two, that "men are the root of women's problems in tech."
agpen is criticizing boys' clubs, a term that encapsulates a certain culture, behaviors, and set of beliefs. The gender of those participating in that culture is typically male, but women can and do perpetuate boys' club cultures on their own, often because that's the only way they can gain admission. It's fairer to see criticism of boys' clubs as a criticism of that culture and set of behaviors, and the idea that one must participate in those behaviors in order to be accepted, not of men in particular.
How is tech an exceptionally hostile environment towards women? http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - Schneier links to this in the OP. If your response to that is "sexism happens everywhere," well, I'd like it to stop happening everywhere, and I'll start with my home turf.
>agpen is criticizing boys' clubs, a term that encapsulates a certain culture, behaviors, and set of beliefs.
What are these cultures, behaviors, and beliefs exactly?
To me, boy's club is another rhetorically nebulous term like patriarchy created by the girl's club. As long as we're speaking of generalizations, let me tell you about the girl's club. I used to date a girl that went to an all women's college. Every time I visited her in the dorms it was customary for everyone to yell out, "alert, man on board". When we ate at the cafeteria, five girls(FIVE), walked up to her and informed her there is no need for her to be dating a man. Without any consideration to my presence. Despite this unwelcoming atmosphere many were eager to inform me of the boy's club, patriarchy, and male privilege like they were reading a script of political talking points. These are women that are socialized to be hateful towards men and are blinded by this hate. They are socialized to feel like victims even though they go to a fancy school the average male couldn't afford.
Yes, there are gender centered problems that need to be addressed. But there is a lot of non-sense rhetorical noise out there created by the girl's club. It's like the girl who cried wolf.
The includes links to studies (like Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315,) that show a "lack of ambient belonging", that is being alienated by other group members, was the primary cause, and another that interacting with sexist male engineers lowered women's performance (
http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf)
Few people seem willing to accept that the lack of women in tech has something to do with men, but it does. Included the "high school girls" who aren't interested: the Girl Scout's study found that the biggest thing keeping them out was expecting to face sexism if they chose those professions.
Honestly, I don't care how common it is at bars generally. If it's my community, then I want this shit stopped.
Do you think some of those women would be willing to post here? There's nothing that says that women can't hand out these cards. Or that they can't be handed out to dudes harassing dudes.
The cards could be given for any non-appropriate behavior, not just sexual harassment of women. Keep in mind that there are also some sexist women that can't behave themselves.
EDIT: The cards don't seem to be gender specific, though it is implied that they will be mainly used by females.
"It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves.
How common is this behavior at bars in general, independent from a hacker con?"
This. Very much this. The formula is simple: Get a bunch of people drunk, and the lecherous ones will come out of the woodwork. This is not a problem unique to any particular field. In fact, I would go as far as to say this is a non-problem. If you can't deal with it, then stop choosing to hang out in bars.
Often, it is the women who cry the loudest, that crave and seek out the kind of negative attention described here, so that they can boast about their own attractiveness to other females, while pretending to be disgusted.
There are many more severe forms of oppression, that deserve our attention more than this.
Please go read the original post and pay special attention to the bit where con security gives out awards for people who run around demanding that women show their tits.
I'd like to see some evidence before believing such a tale. If such punch cards did exist, then I'm sure that there would be a picture of one online. In other words: Screenshot, or it didn't happen.
I’d like to give you a yellow card for your tired and sexist casual and nonsensical dismissal of a claim made by a woman about an actual experience she had.
With all the shit women get whenever they raise their voice on these matters, they truly have near-zero incentive to conjure up lies.
Worse, her example of the cards is hardly the worst, most inconceivable thing to be suggested as something that really does happen. Rape and assault really do happen, it's far less difficult to imagine that some guys don't understand how a bingo card with "get a woman to flash her tits at you" is a massive problem and not “just a bit of fun.”
Who says the guy didn't just make stuff up? Do you honestly think that is beyond someone who walks around asking women to show their breasts?
In other words: he didn't say she didn't experience it he doubts the veracity of the mans account.
As usual that much thought didn't occur to some white knight with his shiny 'sexist' club.
If we're talking about being hit on, then yes: at a bar, no one has the right to not be hit on. If one cannot handle having to fend off unwanted advances in environments where it is appropriate to make your attraction known, then you should stay out of that environment. However, one does have a right to not be harassed. If someone doesn't take no for an answer then they should be handled appropriately.
> at a bar, no one has the right to not be hit on.
Sometimes, people like to go to bars to hang out with their friends or significant others. Believe it or not, entering a bar does not give you the right to run around groping people.
The sexual assault apology in this thread is unbelievable.
I made sure to qualify the context of my comment to make my points as clear as possible. These strawman arguments that inevitably get trotted out get incredibly tired. You're not going to find too many people around here to fall for that argumentation tactic.
Hitting on != groping people and you damn well know it.
The original article was talking about a woman who was groped and assaulted.
To quote the parent:
> It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves.
No one started talking about specifically being hit on until you brought it up, so either you were talking about what the woman went through and mistakingly called it "hitting on", which is what I assumed, or you're talking about something unrelated to this discussion, which is apparently what happened. Don't get upset when someone tries to bring your unrelated argument back on topic.
Either way, people don't always go to bars with the intent to get some. Assuming everyone is there for that reason is ridiculous.
Rereading the conversation chain I admit to misunderstanding the context of this thread. Reading through a bunch of comments I'm sure context bled between threads in my head (HN's pythonesque block comment structure doesn't help matters). Although I qualified my statements very specifically as I anticipated possibly misreading or missing something along the way.
It's fine. I apologize for coming off so aggressively. I'm just tired of people literally defending sexual assault, and because of that, I end up making all my replies snappy.
I thought the context was established to be hitting on, as one might do in a bar. The problem with framing it as being about "harassment" is that the term is prone to equivocation in these types of discussions. Some would argue that any attention of a sexual nature would be harassment. This is probably true in professional settings, but the grandparent established the context of discussion as a bar setting. This is what I was replying to.
How to handle actual harassment and assault is obvious: you call the fucking cops. I'm not sure why that warrants a discussion at all.
No, what I am saying is this is how drunk people act, and if one finds it too offensive, then the logical conclusion is to remove one's self from the equation, rather than demanding that the world change. You can't boil the ocean.
There are plenty of bars where, if that's how drunk people act, and the bar staff has any sense, then the drunk people get kicked out. The drunk people get kicked out because it's bad for business, i.e. if people are made to feel unsafe (and I think that's a far better term to use than "are offended") and their only option is to leave, the bar loses the business of many people opting out in favor of one or more drunk assholes. There are some obvious parallels here that, IMHO, only help the argument that bad behavior should be called out and corrected, not seen as a fact of life.
Asking the world to change/ boiling the ocean... Plenty of people get drunk without sticking their hands up women's skirts. The "logical conclusion" is not to remove the women from the equation.
Escalating to physical violence looks a lot riskier if you're smaller than the person you're striking. And you can't know that the escalation will end with your hitting them: they may hit back, and they may not stop. Moreover, assault is a crime: you may feel justified, but if you can't prove the other guy hit first, you can be stuck.
Finally, women in our society are socialized to be nice, to not make waves, to get along. Maybe you don't like that, but you can't just make decades of socialization that millions of people have undergone disappear because you don't like it.
Because you're legitimately afraid that your assaulter could seriously injure you in a fight?
Because you just want to get out of there as fast as possible and escalating into violence is likely just going to draw it out?
Because you're afraid bystanders will take his side and you'll be seen as the aggressor?
Because there's a lot of cultural pressure for women to ignore sexual harassment and you don't want to "rock the boat" that badly?
Or how about because these are grown men and women in an at least semi-professional environment and the idea that they should have to resort to violence to solve their problems is completely fucking absurd?
This is exactly the consensus that all but one of my hacker friends, including the women, have come to.
No. If you assault me, guess what's happening? I'm going to hit you in the fucking face, and most of the people here, since we're, you know, a community are going to physically remove you from the area.
Edit: if this wasn't clear, the "I" in this story is would be my female friends.
But hitting someone in the face is not an act of self-defense, it is an escalation. If someone hits you and you can't get away, hitting them back is justified. But if they grope you, hitting them back is not legally justified, because a groping is not the same thing as an attack.
Just because the groper deserves to get his ass kicked doesn't mean that doing so is legal.
The slapped puncher is not going to say that. He’s going to say something like “I was in a crowded bar and some crazy bitch hauled off and slapped me, and I don’t know about you, but when someone up and hits me, my first impulse is to hit them back. Now she says I ’touched her inappropriately’ before she slapped me. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe my hand brushed against her accidentally or something, but really, if she’s so hypersensitive she should keep the hell out of crowded bars.”
When the cops show up, and there's a crying women with a broken bloody nose or a black eye next to a guy with a faded pink hand print on his cheek, who do you think is going to jail?
There is a concept of escalation in most states' self defense statutes.
If a 110 pound woman slaps you in the face and you react with a force that could cause death or serious injury, you'd be hard pressed to make anyone believe that you reasonably feared for your life (or serious injury).
Yes, because slapping someone in the face is exactly equivalent to giving them a brutal beating resulting in lasting physical harm.
WHY does this topic come up so much in hacker/geek culture? Seriously, I'm starting to believe there are guys walking around who WANT to be slapped, just so they can finally live out their "equal rights mean equal lefts" fantasy.
Regardless, I don't like the idea of slapping someone. I think we can come up with a better idea, like the cards.
"Defending myself" implies the need to be defended. If she slaps you across the cheek due to you groping her, hitting her would not be justified. She wasn't continuously attacking you; she was responding to your assault.
My post was confusing. It was meant to say that my female friends' reaction was that if somebody assaulted them, they're not going to give them a red card, they're going to physically defend themselves.
I would like to see some sort of experiment between using these cards and slapping someone— although, slapping is pretty rare. What happens most of the time is the woman feels incredibly unsafe and awkward while she tries to understand the reason all those people are just watching her get assaulted.
So really, if you see this behavior, please step in. Tell the asshole he needs to get out. Make it known his behavior isn't appropriate.
Devil's advocate: Prove a grope occurred. It's a light, soft-tissue touch. A slap is a violent strike with an open palm, and a punch is a violent strike with a closed fist.
>A slap is a violent strike with an open palm, and a punch is a violent strike with a closed fist.
A slap from a 110 pound woman (just a hypothetical weight) is not equal to a punch from a 160 pound man.
A punch from the man can easily cause lasting harm--broken nose, broken jaw--an open-handed slap across the cheek from the woman cannot (barring some crazy edge case).
>Prove a grope occurred.
She's not going to have to. The cop who arrests you is going to believe the crying bleeding woman over the man with barley a scratch on him--and eventually the prosecutor and the jury will too.
It's best just not to punch someone much physically weaker than you are unless you actually fear for your safety, e.g., she's holding a knife.
yeah, hardly a good approach in a world of lawyers and lets face it, there will be alot of geeks there who would gladly like to be red carded and I suspect somebody will make up some teashirts saying "red carding welcome".
Still I'm sure some people will abuse this system like any system and lets face it the audience will not exactly be angels in not abusing any form of system. Lets face it, in Football it's not exactly perfect. Unless all events are video'd to death and can be verified then it is abusable. That said how long until somebody does a erect nipple/penis video recognition system, scary thoughts on many levels.
Today red cards, tomorrow video survalence and full location tracking with all your comminications monitored so you can be at a event were people complain about privacy.
There again I thought sexual harrasment was a against the law and that carries more weight than any token scoring system that trivialises the offence.
>There again I thought sexual harrasment was a against the law and that carries more weight than any token scoring system that trivialises the offence.
Was that a quote, because sexual harassment is not against the law--it's a civil matter that only applies in certain very specific situations.
Sure there are other laws you could break in the process of sexually harassing someone, but "sexual harassment" is not something you can be charged with.
How common is this behavior at bars in general, independent from a hacker con?
Also: some of the girls that I know who are hackers are offended at the idea of red/yellow cards. The implication there seems to be that they're helpless, and need somebody to swoop in and save them.
That, at least to some of my girl friends, is utter bullshit, and is blatantly sexist against women.
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And to be completely honest, the red/yellow card thing has already become a flirtatious joke among people.