Tell the person to fuck off.
I'm serious. It registers disagreement, and to any rational person the lack of interest in attempting serious discussion. Ideal? No. Preferable to inaction? Absolutely. Plus where do you even start with a comment like that? I'd prefer to make it clear that I'm shocked than do someone who would say that the favor of jumping into a thoughtful discussion about how the merits of their opinion.
Like it or not the hackerverse is full of people who deemphasize social experiences in favour of other things. When someone makes a comment this inappropriate in public you're not just battling their sexism, you're going up against years of personality developed in an insular environment. I've known quite a few devs whose only social interaction in a year is GDC, barring a few friends of theirs who are like minded. They are awkward and inexperienced, and 360 days a year this is reinforced and tit jokes get laughs all round. Going up against that, I can really empathize with the authors central point. I'm tired.
The situation shows an active effort in eschewing societal norms. You have to work hard to shut down the mental filter that normally prevents you from making such an off-kilter remark
Tell the guy to fuck off, and if he doesn't immediately apologise then call a waiter over and ask them to find him a table on his own somewhere because he's no longer welcome at this one.
Surely decent human beings don't meekly sit back and let bullying happen like that?
Statement made, stupid comment brushed off, nobody got hurt.
The whole "down to their level and beat you with experience" thing comes to mind.
It grinds conversations to a halt. "I disagree, but.." doesn't register shock. That's not the kind of language people use when they witness horror, or abuse. It's not emotional. If anything, if I was at the table and that was your reaction I'd probably take it to mean that your primary takeaway is to be annoyed at pesky sexism and how these unfortunate jock-types ruin it for the rest of us.
That's not how you'd respond to abuse. This is abuse.
Fuck you registers shock, and anger. It's not a naughty word, it's a tool. I think there's an appropriate time to use language like this, and I think this is it. I definitely don't see it as "coming down to their level", with all due respect I find that kind of absurd.
One thing to keep on mind - the "offender" has given up any expectation or right of politeness or manners extended towards them - there's no need to craft a response that doesn't hurt their feelings, since they've already gone down that path. (I suspect if I were just the right amount of uninhibitedly drunk, I'd quite enjoy responding to "She only got the tickets 'cause of her tits" with "Yeah, that's what everyone with a tiny dick says…")
I would ask the offending person to leave. If they refused to leave, I would encourage all of my friends to leave.
Such a statement is so beyond-the-pale inexcusable that simply stating your opposition is insufficient. While I agree you don't need to "go down to their level", I see no reason to allow them any more of my time than is absolutely required (i.e. time spent organizing my friends' departure and paying for the check).
"What you just said disgusts me" seems more fitting. You're communicating how it is personally affecting you. That can't be argued.
Okay, I may get many downvotes here, but this doesn't seem like the solution to the problem. Rudeness and insults are rudeness and insults. Cursing doesn't help the matter.
Inaction is not the solution either, but I'm sure there's a more mature way to handle things. Asking the party to leave politely is better than keeping your mouth shut, and it also seems better than cursing them out.
Of course, if they refuse to behave, then tell them the magic words.
Fuck off.
And really, this is not just a problem of some guy saying something kind of sexist. It's a guy who thinks the scales are so much in his favor that he can just say such a thing to a stranger without really offending people. He's not beyond hope, but he's not someone you should break bread with without making clear at he was completely out of line.
Edit: I'm not helping much with the OP's guilt trip...it's never easy thinking about what you should've done when the shock was over. The OP shouldn't chastise himself for not throwing a punch or making some other dramatic stand. But leaving out of protest is always an option. If it makes the troll and everyone who decided to stay feel awkward, well, that's their decision.
Why should I ruin my evening due to this guy? What exactly are you protesting? Do you think this kind of person gives a shit if you walk away? Do you think the entire rest of the table will follow you? (Answer: No.) Stand up to him and resolve it; if no progress is made and it turns ugly, that person is no longer welcome at your table and you move on. I laid out a template here[0].
I see lots of people saying "walk away" -- you're letting the troll win. That's your dinner. This isn't like high school where you can just up and walk away and get whispers going in the hallway about what happened at lunch last Tuesday, OMG! Handle it like a grown person.
This is important: TROLLS WILL CONTINUE TROLLING AS LONG AS YOUR SILLY CLINGING TO POLITENESS MEANS YOU WON'T CONFRONT THEM. Your being polite enables them. Think about that. Just don't get it wrong and draw down on a harmless comment that you misunderstood.
I would probably try to make him leave first, but failing that, walking away is the appropriate choice. You are passing judgment, in a way, on the whole party when you do this. You are saying that this behavior is not acceptable in your company and if the present company disagrees then this is important enough for you to remove yourself from that company because it is not something you can tolerate.
We cannot force people to be polite or even tolerant. We can choose who we keep company with.
It can happen. It takes some guts and if you don't have the social capital with this group you may not be able to pull it off. Everyone goes to a new table but leaves the dickhead sitting there.
For me, there are certain traits and ways of thinking that I just can't tolerate. In some cases, I can tolerate those beliefs if the person is able to keep them locked up when I'm around. Usually this person is smart enough to know a certain belief if controversial or similar and knows when to keep quiet.
Some people know when to keep quiet, some people don't. Some people can swear like a sailor when drinking with friends at a private location but have the good sense not to do the same when out at a family location on a normal day.
People probably can't / won't change. Discussion and arguments won't do it. Even if you could change a person, it's not worth the effort for you to try. It's best to just cut the cord right there and move on with your life.
Most of the people in her group shared the same reaction: they were surprised and defended her. I realize that ladies have it tough in our industry, but it's not a 50:50 men vs women war.
When you're in a jam like that, there isn't much you can do. You don't engage them. When someone says shit like that, you just ignore them. Or change the subject. Or leave. As the author said herself ... she isn't a confrontational person. Most women aren't. So, you just drop it and walk away. I do it all the time. I have no patience for stupid people, regardless of their gender.
Sure there is. You can switch majors. Or quietly put your resume out in a different industry. Go somewhere your superiors and peers actually give a shit about whether people are treating you horribly.
What do you think happened to all the women who aren't programmers?
If the broken person wishes to change, he can. He can ask for help. I hope this wasn't a cry for help because it got lost.
However, signalling that his behavior is not OK is important for everyone else at the table. Maybe there is some naive young guy sitting there who didn't think the jerk's comment was okay, but without seeing any kind of sanction he may start thinking "oh, that's how I'm supposed to talk to be respected." Make sure that he doesn't end up thinking that. It's also important for the person who was insulted, of course.
Perhaps I'm now over compensating, but I became "that guy" who always speaks up. That time, I was so shocked, I didn't know how to respond. Replaying it in my head over and over, now I don't need to hesitate when it happens again.
Note: you're not persuading the antagonist. Screw him. By speaking up, you're putting him and everyone on else on notice that pathological behavior will not be tolerated.
A year or two back, we had a guest female speaker at a local user group. I felt that she wasn't being given the same level of respect afforded every other speaker. People talked over her, interrupted her, etc.
So I said something. I pissed some people off. Others laughed at me.
But next time we had a female speaker, EVERYONE was super courteous. They even joked that if anyone was rude, Specialist (me) would bring on the hurt.
My advice to Andy Moore, and everyone, is to learn from his experience, and prepare for the next time, until such time that the trogs realize they can keep their sexism, racist, hatred, etc to themselves.
The guy who was making sexist statements is ignorant, not a "fucking loser."
How do you make these situations positive for everyone?
Empathy. Empathy for all sides.
Everyone exposed to this kind of social ignorance is a victim if you dig deep enough.
In the tech world we are quick to call users idiots, each other inept, ideas retarded...
I ask for empathy.
Empathy for this offensive guy who most likely grew up intimidated by social situations. He was picked on and bullied, and never grew past it. If I ventured a guess, I'd say he's still in pain, and still not sure how to act due to years of relative social isolation. He is simply ignorant of the effect of his actions. He literally knows no other ways to relate.
Calling him names makes us no different from him, or the people who encouraged his social isolation. Do you think shaming him will convince him we're right? He'll just view us as "another bully" and continue his anti-social behavior.
Encouraging growth through understanding, not through social imposition or public shaming is how we resolve these situations positively.
We do know that after hearing what other people had to say, he insisted on his sexist remark. He had a chance to reflect on it, and exhibited no remorse or apprehension. That kind of behavior doesn't deserve empathy, it deserves harsher correction and condemnation by his peers. Letting a situation like that slide only says, "If you insist enough, people actually shut up because they're agreeing with you or don't think it matters enough to merit dissent." Silence is just as bad as agreement in a case like this.
This guy doesn't need a kindergarten-level explanation of why it's not nice to tell a lady she got where she is "because of her tits" -- he needs someone to tell him to cut the crap because it won't be tolerated.
In my opinion, you've missed one very important detail. He's only getting "called names" in response to his "offensive guy" actions. Nobody involved in this conversation would have said a single word, good _or_ bad about the guy, except for the fact that he chose to publicly be a sexist jerk and intentionally offend someone in a social situation.
I _do_ feel empathy for people with poorly developed social skills - having been there myself and having friends and colleagues in the same boat (as I suspect most of us in this industry/profession do), BUT, if you've made it to 20 or 25 years old without having worked out that accusing a female of ony having accomplished something "because TITS!", you're clearly in need of stronger education techniques than "encouraging growth through understanding" - I'm not advocating punching him in the face, but if he were a puppy I'd be whacking him on the nose with a newspaper. Social imposition and public shaming are _entirely_ appropriate tools to deal with adults who make comments like he did.
Drawing moral equivalence between participating in hostility against women and hostility against the rude and ignorant is a bit of a stretch, too.
Our approach to ending racism was similar, and it was effectual, but over a great period of time incorporating generations of ignorance.
However, there were individuals who managed to help end the passive acceptance of racism by taking a vested interest in changing the thinking of one individual, all without guilting them into compliance.
Exhibit A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B24qxWPPVbM
The NAACP president of Oklahoma, Wade Watts convinced the imperial wizard of a national KKK organization to reconsider his perspective on race. Rev. Watts did not accomplish this through expressing disgust or disapproval, but through patience and empathy. Johnny Lee Carly was swayed from imperial wizard to anti-racism activist. Wade saved Johnny's progeny from harboring the same ignorance, accomplishing in a single generation what had previously taken acts of congress, violence, protest and over a hundred years of blunt disapproval.
I'm not saying Wade's approach is the only way to accomplish a means to societal change, but it can change the perspective of an individual.
And public shaming is absolutely the way you do it. You need to draw a very firm line in the sand which cannot be interpreted in any other way; some wishy-washy "I wish you wouldn't say that" isn't going to do it for some classes of people, who'll just think you're saying that because the woman is there.
Now, myself, I would probably not say "fuck off." I might stand up and say something like "I'm going to have to ask you to apologize for saying that. You disrespected her and you disrespected me." It is polite but firm. It brings to bear social pressure, letting him know in clear terms what he has done and how he can fix it in the near term.
On the other hand, I was kinda waiting for the twitpic to go with the story.
Some guy talking about how he's totally on side but somehow is unable to keep himself from commenting on her breasts; presumably he subscribes to the idea that if you can pretend to be ironic, you can still say it. Classic stuff.
1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachable_moment#section_3
Hmm. Why haven't I seen a single woman post an article about this issue? I'm tired of all the me-tooism from men about this subject. Yes, sexism is abhorrent fallacy, but inverse-sexism is still sorta sexism -- enough with the White Knights, already.
Not to defend the guy who made some joke about tits, but I look forward to the day when we can be more than humorless automatons regarding this issue. Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqUQ17sYm0
No yelling or arguing or rational reasoning: People like that guy just need to understand simply and clearly that it is not acceptable.
I think social pressure is what needs to make this stop. We need to be mindful of what's not ok and have the courage to say something. That means that the authority is open-sourced to you and me.
Someone else I know wrote a blog post about the Adria Richards thing. He then moderated one comment which was extremely offensive. In retaliation, the person that wrote the comment launched a denial of service against his blog. This industry is full of emotional children that cannot handle being adults, and most of them can never admit that they might be wrong. Had OP confronted this jackass, it probably would have gone nowhere, and running to the cops/conference people is just shoving your problems on someone else. There is just no easy solution here without stepping up and being confrontational.
I'm assuming the game development people (different industry) and GDC might have missed that brouhaha, even though it was all over the news, so I'm sparing the benefit of the doubt that game development should have learned a valuable lesson from the PSF's (and Python community's) misfortune.
1. Remember those silly class codes of conduct we had to do at the beginning of each school year? Bring something like that back at the beginning of each conference. OK, not quite that cheesy, but a reminder at the start about the code of conduct. Offer refunds at that point if people don't agree with them. Hell, we have to sit through the Health and Safety stuff anyway so it's a good time to add them in. (Speaking of which, I think it's too late to do anything int regards to the guy this year).
2. At a grass roots level. I know it's a horrible analogy, but I remember when I was taking my dog through dog obedience (OK, puppy kindy) that if you don't punish a dog within four seconds for something they've done wrong, you might as well forget it as they will have. In that respect, I think any social reactions have to be swift and to the point. Walk away from a group if something is unacceptable, or very quickly say something along the lines of 'that crossed the line and isn't cool'.
Doing nothing because you fear the verbal reprisals of a group of immature misogynists seems, to me at least, the worst of all possible options.
See you thought better than I did. I decided to insult him first, think logical second :-)
If somebody said that next to me in person, I'd probably punch them and apologize afterwards hehe.
It's an aggregation of stories from people working in the service industry who have horror stories to tell from the customers they serviced. If you read through a few stories you might pick up on a anomaly that seems to pervade. Particularly any story from the "Awesome Customers" category.
For some stories we see normal, self-righteous, mildly ignorant, comical behavior, typical of human beings in general I would say. Other stories have this strange, caricature, like quality about them. People come off like comic book villains, cackling maniacally as they monologue about how demographic X is inferior in way Y. They say statements which are way beyond the pale of current society, and in these stories one brave individual stands against their unwavering ignorance in a triumphant display, shaming the villain.
I think you'll pick up on it as well. These stories are fantasies. Spirited teenagers imagining themselves slaying the ignorance and wrong-doings of their bigoted elders, and reporting it as if it actually happened for the mass approval of people on Facebook.
This story has such a quality about it.
93 points and counting.
But these are the kinds of people you don't want to hire.
This isn't necessarily "firing offense." It is "fireable offense" and if you aren't sweating through your talk with HR you are messed up.
And if your company doesn't have an HR department: congratulations, now they need one.
She didn't speak up, either?
To paraphrase - she tried to make the witty comeback but was talked over, and part of the point is this isn't isolated, she gets rape threats every game release; can you imagine how wearing that is?
She suggests that others also need to speak up - a quick "Not cool, dude" to anyone who behaves like this.
seriously, the internet is a big rape threat. are there any smart people that treat random anon trolling seriously? (except opportunists and journalists that by occasion use such crap as a 'proof' of whatever)
When you are intellectually advanced to the point where sexist jokes simply make you want to rip out the throat of the party saying them, you begin to realize that disrespect for women is not only illogical but very perverse. Telling someone they have "good tits" is not funny or even sexy to the party that it is said to.
It's a fucking disgrace to humanity. Not only is it objectifying, but it's insulting, rude, and so incredibly improper.
I thought we had reached the point where our minds found others attractive based upon intelligence, and not on physical appearance. I thought we had reached the point where sexism had all but disappeared.
Of course, as I always am, I was wrong.
This is quite frankly getting ridiculous. I don't tell women anything about their physical appearance, unless I've known them for a long time; which is when an "You're a very beautiful person" may be appropriate.
I know many others that go by the same maxim. It's a shame some men haven't matured enough to behave.
Last night was the end of an amazing GDC trip. A handful of remaining friends and I made a journey out to JapanTown and we had an amazing meal. It was a great way to end the trip.
One of my friends, and a fellow game developer, was there for dinner. Her trip to GDC was planned last-minute, thanks to someone obtaining her a (very expensive!) all-access pass.
When recounting this chain of events, a male game developer at the table said that she only got the GDC pass “because of her tits.”
The table largely responded with aghast looks and silence. It was brought up that perhaps her ticket was thanks to being an award-winning game developer.
The same male responded with the ever-classy “sure, award winning tits.”
Defenses and arguments tried to be brought up, but conversation quickly moved on with the men talking over the woman until she just sat there quietly and resigned.
I’m posting about this because this shit has to stop.
I’m posting about this because I was silent when I should have spoken up. I shouldn’t have let the conversation sweep this transgression under the rug.
I’m posting this because I am tired of being made complicit (due to inaction) when these things happen. I’m tired of having to yell at people for this shit every night at GDC. I’m tired because I want this to end, and I’m tired of having this conversation over and over again.
I’m tired of feeling like shit because I don’t have enough energy to defend my friends every fucking DAY.
I’m terrified of losing friends over this.
I’m not a very confrontational person. Usually I deal with shit like this by making a mental note to avoid the person in the future. And now that my friends’ feelings are hurt and people are accusing me of inaction and being a bad person because of it, I feel like my last few years of championing anti-harassment policies (and ENFORCING them) doesn’t even matter.
It sucks that my entire personality can be judged on my last exchange.
So, hey: if you are a sexist ass around me, and think it’s just ironic meta-humour, know that it’s hurting me. It hurts me for days, weeks, months afterwards. It hurts my friends. It hurts my business. It makes me less creative, it makes me want to just hide in my basement all day. It makes me not want to go to GDC again.
If I don’t tell this to your face it’s probably because I’m tired of having this exchange this week. It makes me feel angry, upset, and sad. I hope someone links you to this.
And if you’re going to write me to apologize, you’d sure as shit better apologize to the actual people you pissed on first.
I’m so tired.
(the situation, not the reaction.. I would have asked him to leave (and have in similar situations), though I realise not everyone is as comfortable as with confrontation as I ;)
I would encourage people to name names in these situations. Group humiliation is a very good catalyst for change, if it comes to that.
He doesn't. He might try to direct the conversation to more agreeable matters. He certainly doesn't draw attention to the offense and impress it indelibly in the minds of the others.
Generally, you are better off improving your own behavior than that of others. As Dale Carnegie pointed out, it's not only more profitable; it's less dangerous.
There's a real story of discrimination here - against the woman who was insulted.
"I’m terrified of losing friends over this." - so you're against discrimination only to the extent that it doesn't negatively impact your life. This is meaningless.
0_o
That male at the table needs to have his balls removed for such a statement.
He may be male, but he isn't a man. A real man wouldn't behave like that.
Edit: OK, maybe having his balls removed is excessive. He is mocking a womens anatomy and the reverse would make him feel good. i.e saying he got into GDC because of his testicles isn't the same type of insult as the female getting in for her "tits". So this isn't an argument that levels the playing field.
Perhaps he is just a socially awkward human being that doesn't respect women. Someday he will cross the wrong path and insult the wrong women and then I guess Karma kicks in?
Edit 2: Thanks everyone for pointing about that I was indeed going overboard with the removal of anatomy phrase. Overboard from being outraged people still act like this and in front of a table full of people.
You're not scoring any magical man points with a comment like this.
Maybe him being a dick in front of people at the table is enough to help change him.
Thanks for your point.
Please desist.
Would it had been better if I said he needs to "have his mouth washed out with soap" like a 5 year old?
Seriously. To tell me he doesn't deserve a similar treatment to what he displayed to the female is naive. He needs to know that what he did is not excusable and wont be tolerated.
