Amanda Blum wrote a single widely shared 2013 post about the Adria Richards and PyCon incident.
HN commenters use it in debates over online shaming and harassment, citing the linked 'fuck them up' remark and the firing that followed.
"Unfortunately that isn't how she felt."
So ... a man's behavior made her feel a certain way, such that she bears no responsibility for her reactions and their consequences?
What is felt or what can be said is dependent on the circumstances of your birth, chromosomes, and DNA?
Take your argument and spin it, and you're allowing that women are responsible for men's actions based on how the women act and behave.
Or you can allow the one and deny the other. That's a hell of a double standard.
My read, from the original airing of this, and from Ron Johnson's interviews here, is that Adria Richards absolutely wasn't suited for her job. She's overtly racist and sexist, ascribing people traits, or passing judgement on what they can or cannot do or say, based simply on race and gender.
She's got something of a history of this, as Amanda Blum has pointed out:
https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/
She took what was, at the very worst, a slightly immature situation, and made it far, far worse. And continues to.
I've seen plenty of behavior from men (or boys) that makes me cringe. I've called it out at times. I've also seen (or received) it from women. And, for that matter, men. Truth is we're sexual creatures, and the boundaries between professional and personal do get crossed. Failure to recognize that (and behave accordingly) is a problem.
I've also had my own issues with behavior of others from time to time. Sometimes I'll comment, but if I'm at at a…
But the "discussion" about whether Richards did the right thing hasn't been a debate - it's been a general piling-on with a generous helping of condescension and chauvinism. There has been only a smattering of disagreement and it has been summarily dismissed with a combination of the most perfunctory hand-waving and sheer shouting down.
The tech community immediately and decisively latched onto a convenient portrait of Richards as an underhanded, incompetent, cowardly, race-baiting, gender-baiting fraud with a manipulative agenda to aggrandize herself at the expense of everyone around her.
No amount of counter-evidence could make a dent in this depiction, a depiction that is immediately slapped onto every woman who dares to speak up about gender issues in the tech industry [1]. Everyone read and referred to the Amanda Blum post [2], but totally ignored a detailed review [3] of the instances Blum cited that cast them in a far more detailed and less sinister light.
No matter how you try to parse it, it's unambiguously clear that our community whipped itself into an apoplectic firestorm of outrage when a woman complained about behaviour in a conference that violated the conference's code of conduct, but at best shrugged and at worst said she deserved it when that very firestorm of outrage turned into an outpouring of the most vile, vitriolic and disgusting abuse, insults, threats and mockery against her.
That says something most disturbing about our community, and the…
> Maybe you should actually think about the problem before dismissing it with a straw-man.
This is not a straw man. There has been at least one event where Adria Richards, a well-known feminist, mistakenly started a witch hunt by incorrectly assuming that the stick figures drawn by a (female) designer were specific genders. [1][2]
> It's called professionalism. Do you know what that word means?
Yes, to the average person it usually means "Yawn, I'm going to have to sit through a 2-hour lecture from someone telling me not to say 'sexy' in front of my co-workers. What is this, 1842? Meanwhile I wish we'd replace our piece-of-crap JSP website with something sexier." That is the sense in which sexy is used. It's not about sex.
> women are already disproportionately the target of privacy violations
This is a sweeping, and in my opinion incorrect, assertion. I would like to see some data on this. Just having the media write stories about women being harassed on Twitter because it makes good copy, doesn't mean that men aren't harassed too, in equal measure.
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[1] http://jenmylo.com/2011/08/03/wcsf-shirt/comment-page-1/#comment-326
[2] https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/
I'm pretty conflicted about this whole thing, and was back then, too.
I try to be supportive of anybody, and generally go out of my way to be inclusive. I also make really stupid, juvenile jokes, although I am audience-aware.
In this case, his audience was the guy he was sitting next to, and there was nothing overtly threatening in the joke. In fact, if anything, it'd indicate he was gay and not at all interested in the woman in front of him who overheard him.
Ultimately, and this will likely get me in trouble, but I think she handled this in the absolute wrongest way possible.
(Reading the old https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/ response post largely sums up why I think it was wrong, but I wasn't aware of the other times she didn't bother trying to resolve things in a way that might actually produce positive results.)
The threats made toward her are obviously reprehensible; I don't understand that reaction either.
Not sure I can agree with this letter.
1.) From what I can gather she wasn't the direct target of abuse, so to frame that was is disingenuous. I understand that making "dongle" jokes at a conference is inappropriate, but its nothing more than inappropriate.
2.) How she handled it was completely wrong and unprofessional. Again like Amanda Blum[1] states, she has frequently sidestepped the right channels and has taken issues into her own hands. This has caused considerable trouble for PyCon, SendGrid and PlayHaven. SendGrid, should not be DDoS for several hours over a dick joke. People lost money. More than anything that is the take away here. I doubt Adria would have lost her job if she took it twitter after coming to the conclusion that the men won't be apologetic and PyCon wouldn't do anything about it.
[1]https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/
Adria Richards really was harassed, by people that were extremely angered by something that should have been easily dismissed as a mistake. She got all sorts of nasty shit on twitter, threats, the whole works.
I don't think her initial reaction was a good one, but it certainly didn't justify all the stuff that followed. Her apparent pattern of reacting loudly to small offenses ( https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/ ) also isn't something to become angry and outraged over. I'm not sure how to handle that, but I'm sure it won't involve death threats.