Person A: It's just plain not polite to flash someone when they're in the middle of a business meeting.Granted, that kind of sarcastic, "okay, maybe I should just do this extreme thing, then" tactic gets used on both sides. But that's the kind of thing that I think gets the "don't be obtuse" argument -- it's a calling out that "you don't really believe that, you're just trying to make me look foolish by exaggerating things to a nonsensical extreme and I don't appreciate that."
Person B: Fine, I guess I will never gesture at all during a business meeting. Or, maybe I should just quit my job altogether. Or maybe we should all go live as hermits so we never interrupt anyone in the middle of business meetings....
This sort of propositioning doesn't happen to me as a man at all, whereas every woman I know gets sent pictures of people's cocks. A lot.And immediately receives responses from five or six women who say, "Yes, it's true. This is what it's like for us."
Women of Metafilter, is this really true?
posted by gagglezoomer at 10:50 AM on June 19 [+] [!] [quote]
Wow is all I can say.And there's no drama. None! He asks a question, people relate their own personal experiences. Question answered. He accepts the answer.
posted by gagglezoomer at 11:21 AM on June 19 [1 favorite +] [!] [quote]
"...here is the official definition of Sexual Harassment, from the conference at which this incident occurred:Whether you or anyone else agrees or disagrees that this fits the dictionary definition of harassment, the couple's actions firmly fit the policies of the event they are attending. Ms. Anders' characterization of their actions as harassment is based on those guidelines, which also mention that: "Explicit sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue."
Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention."
Do not argue the issue here. Thanks.I mean, I didn't? I made that remark for ntg and also suggested that her comment would work really well in the original thread.
Increasingly, for American readers, there are no mistakes, only covert ideologies.posted by stebulus at 11:03 AM on June 19, 2012 [1 favorite]
" Actually, it seemed liked the majority of people agreed that the topic in question constituted sexual harassment. A vocal minority (that was eventually whittled down to one person) disagreed.I added the first line of that comment back in so we have a fuller sense of its meaning.
I think the reaction is natural, by the way, and I don't know why MetaFilter has to put up with people who for all intents and purposes do not believe there is a such thing as sexual harassment.
That's the real problem."
nadawi, you are not the only knitter on the Internet who's been solicited for knitting a cock sock. Maybe we should knit lopi ones, like little hair shirts for dicks, and distribute them to creeps. :/Heeeee!
... sexual harassment of the "handed a naked picture of a couple" or "emailed a penis picture" sort is that ... there's a level of interaction that I understand is uncomfortable, and that, because I'm male and have never really experienced the power dynamic from that side I'm willing to accept can be very disconcerting and demeaning, and yet acknowledging that as the huge blog-post-that-attracts-hundreds-of-comments-worthy kerfluffle seems to trivialize... well... "real" abuse.Well, for one thing, it's possible for someone who receives an unsolicited penis to also be someone who was raped who then spends the rest of the day feeling shitty about everything. For another thing, it's just not fun to be told metaphorically that as a female, your role in society is PENIS RECEPTACLE, and that people will often look past all your other roles (6th grader, conference speaker, person selling furniture on craigslist, potential date) to remind you that that is, in fact, what they think you should be for them.
You're objectively wrong here. Of course women can both be biased/prejudiced based on gender, as well as embrace sexist viewpoints- behind the bible-beating bigots is often a glassy-eyed docile wife who completely believes in all of those gender roles and "traditional" structures."women can be sexist too"Ardiril: On that, we will just have to agree to disagree.
Not surprisingly, Hoyt himself disapproves of such tactics [photographing flashers and posting their pictures on the Internet]. In his account, the perpetrator is Nguyen, who misread his intentions (he claims he was already mid-masturbation when she stepped onto the train) and then humiliated him by posting his picture on the Web. He says he didn’t even realize he’d been photographed. “Even so, I wouldn’t imagine somebody throwing it up on the Internet for millions of people and destroying your life like that,” he says. “It’s one thing to take it to the police. But on the Internet, I read a lot of people saying, ‘That was not too cool of her. That was really screwed up.’ ”I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that many people who send photographs of their genitals are dumb and inexperienced enough to think that's how you attract a mate, just as many men who badger women on the street think that's how you get a date.
Hoyt believes that if he and Nguyen had only met under different circumstances, she might really like him. “You know, she’d go, ‘That guy’s pretty cool. He’s got this restaurant, and he’s fun,’ ” Hoyt says. “She’d probably want to go out with me.”
It’s not okay to assume that any woman (or non-woman) is at a conference to be your plaything. But to reduce your keynote speaker to a thing you want to fuck, and not respect that she’s there as a professional is so much more than offensive to her personally. It’s disrespectful to the conference and its organizers.
Neither crayz nor anyone else on Metafilter ever, in any way, stated what you claim. Never.It’s not okay to assume that any woman (or non-woman) is at a conference to be your plaything. But to reduce your keynote speaker to a thing you want to fuck, and not respect that she’s there as a professional is so much more than offensive to her personally. It’s disrespectful to the conference and its organizers.zarq: It was later claimed (by crayz and perhaps others) that such an expectation on her part was unreasonable, given the informal nature of the event.
Ivan Fyodorovich: This is only true if you're asserting that no one in the thread ever said that it was okay for her to be seen as a plaything. Which, it's true, no one (that I recall) did [...] Given that you engage yourself in hyperbole in the very comment in which the above quote appears, it's hard to believe that you don't understand this, or that you don't hypocritically hold her to a standard to which you don't apply to yourself.(emphasis mine)Wait, so you agreed that in fact, no one on Metafilter in that thread or this one said that she should only be seen as a plaything... and yet claim that- after agreeing with me- my saying "no one ever" is 'hyperbole', that retroactively justifies the hyperbole of painting the swingers in such a light? It wasn't hyperbole- you even agreed to that. What then was your point? Or are your comments just performance art?
The Gooch: It was a blog post. People write about all sorts of topics on their blogs that aren't exactly worthy of stopping the presses at the NY Times over. If writing about incompetent Taco Bell drive-thru employees is fair game for a blog post (not-hypothetical, I read this) why should writing about receiving bizarre, unsolicited invitations to three-ways via nudie sex cards be off-limits?Well, in the sense that Elyse personally might benefit in life from not sweating the small stuff- but yes of course people can blog about all sorts of things, even small things, and then have thousand-comment discussions about those things. That doesn't mean that the event in question was noteworthy or traumatic or worthy of much discussion, and it also doesn't mean that, once the discussion starts on the blue, that everyone who has an alternate take is a troll, operating in bad faith, to vent about their hatred of uppity women who don't know their place as sexual playthings.
Lexica: What does this mean? "Ethical and cultural DNA"? Culture isn't inherent, it's learned.I know what DNA is, it was a turn of phrase- kind of like "We share 98% of the same DNA with chimpanzees!". The idea being, the people being ostracized as misogynists here on Metafilter are probably not misogynists, or even bad people. Further, if you were to sample a wide array of topics- including, I suspect, those relating to gender- you'd find that we probably agree on a ridiculously high percentage of these things. And yet- here are where your energies lie, convinced that those of us you disagree with are really just terrible, terrible people. This is like a microcosm of the failures of the Democratic party, or left-wingers: so determined to pounce on birds of a feather you don't even notice the approaching fox.
empath: I feel like hincandenza should write a guide book for women to tell them what sorts of unwanted sexual advances they should be offended by and how they should respond to them.Awesome! And I mean "zing!!!". That was a real humdinger. Shazam!
I think that would be super helpful. Maybe he should add it to his profile page.
posted by empath
shakespeherian: You know, you did this to me once too, and it was hilarious. I would like to express to you, directly and plainly, that sometimes when someone disagrees with you about something related to feminism or anything else sociopolitical in nature, and you think that they are wrong, that does not mean that the only explanation is that that person isYou make an interesting point, indeed!adopting a pose of enlightenment in order to look really great in front of other people.a knuckle-dragging anti-woman troglodyte.
jessamyn: f) Other ________hincandenza would be more agreeable if there was acknowledgment that hincandenza isn't the only one who sometimes needs to "dial it back".
hincandenza should learn to dial it back a little and he will probably find that conversations about touchy topics that he is also interested in discussing will go significantly better
crayz: "I mean, honestly, it seems like way too many people here value the right to show their genitalia to whomever they want, whenever they want, over any other individual's expectation that maybe in a professional setting they might not be seen solely as a sexual object.He's arguing that she's not there as a professional, and therefore
She was Facebook friends with a guy with a similar set of beliefs/interests, who went to a free Meetup event called Skepticamp, where she gave a talk but "everyone contributes in some way", at a meeting hall at Ohio State University, with a promotion tagline "How often do you get to meet and party with skeptics from all over the state?" A few of the organizers hanging out looked like this, and the event page had a picture of our blogger, "Ready to Kick Irrational Butt"
Are we really going to keep pretending she was presenting TPS reports to her boss when he pulled out his dick? Context matters"
"This is a woman who wants sex to be sequestered far far away from much of her life"hincandenza: No one said this woman or anyone woman exists to be a plaything- no one said that. No one hinted at that. No one alluded to that. No one paraphrased that.
It's a shame she needed several paragraphs of qualifications (decades of study, multiple degrees in womens' studies, etc.) to be accepted as having something valid to say. It's hard to escape the conclusion that no male could say the same thing without being attacked.Is in response to Palomar's request:
Could you actually post that statement here, msalt?To his statement:
But Elyse's statement appears to go beyond this one situation to a general statement than any sexual proposition is reducing someone to a vagina (or whatever). And others have made similar statements.This is kind of a derail - instead of supporting the statement, it's saying that asking people to support their statements is, or can be identified as, an act of misandry - that, in the face of the "feminist orthodoxy", women have to show their working at length, and men could not even escape being attacked if they were to do that. Which is being used here - I think not intentionally - as a direct reply to precisely a request to show his working - in this case, the working that led to the conclusion that Elyse's statement appears to go beyond this one situation to a general statement than any sexual proposition is reducing someone to a vagina (or whatever).
hincandenza: "hincandenza would be more agreeable if there was acknowledgment that hincandenza isn't the only one who sometimes needs to "dial it back"."Ah, you're at the "I will when you will!" level of development.
Because I think in many ways, the fact that the majority of Metafilter holds opinions that, in the outside world, are minority opinions, makes them feel like they can't possibly be piling on, they can't possibly be bullies.But then you've got a big excluded middle, where you are expecting the reader to infer that in case [x] this - piling on, bullying - is what's happening. Which brings us back to msalt, in a way. Without some sort of context, "pile on" and "bullying" are just emotion words - they inspire a sense of horror in those who feel themselves to be generally the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of same.
I think the crux of the argument is: we all are in agreement that "different people look at the world differently." However, some of us seem to be using that fact as justification for "therefore, I shouldn't be held accountable for doing something someone else objects to," while other people are using that fact as justification for "therefore, it is my responsibility to ascertain what other people's comfort level is before I act."
I think that's why so many are talking past each other - because you have the people who think "everyone's different, so OTHER PEOPLE should accomodate MY difference," and you have the people think "eveyrone's different, so it's MY responsibility to work with OTHER PEOPLE'S difference."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:38 AM on June 19, 2012 [73 favorites]