I have no problem with Adria richards reporting this to the PyCon organizaers - even if the joke was silly, even if it was not really sexual but anatomical or crude, even if it caused a bit of embarrassment to the joker and his friends to be verbally admonished.
It's a fact that people's sensitivities and thresholds of offense vary significantly, and even an impersonal, non-specific utterance like 'ah, shit' could cause offense in the wrong context. Sometimes the smart and decent thing to do is excuse yourself and tone down your personality a bit for the sake of social harmony. Nobody should ever feel afraid to challenge or report what seems like obnoxious behavior, no matter what the basis of offense. There may be no guarantee of a remedy, but there should be no penalty for expressing one's dislike of what others are saying.
The difference in this episode is doing it a) via an audience of thousands of Twitter followers, b) with pictures identifying specific people, c) some of whom were not involved, but whose names are now inextricably connected to this whole fracas, and whose images will continue to appear in related internet searches for some indefinite future period.
I didn't mean to indicate that I had a problem with her reporting conduct that is in violation of an event's attendance agreement. What I intended to express is precisely the other part of what you said - that the joke was not sexual, but anatomical in nature, and did not target her in as a female (Read the blog post if you haven't already - it clearly illustrates her position on the matter.). This is what I take issue with. That in framing it as an instance of gender discrimination or sexual harassment is a dilution of those terms that is damaging to these problems which absolutely do exist in the modern workplace.
It's a fact that people's sensitivities and thresholds of offense vary significantly, and even an impersonal, non-specific utterance like 'ah, shit' could cause offense in the wrong context. Sometimes the smart and decent thing to do is excuse yourself and tone down your personality a bit for the sake of social harmony. Nobody should ever feel afraid to challenge or report what seems like obnoxious behavior, no matter what the basis of offense. There may be no guarantee of a remedy, but there should be no penalty for expressing one's dislike of what others are saying.
The difference in this episode is doing it a) via an audience of thousands of Twitter followers, b) with pictures identifying specific people, c) some of whom were not involved, but whose names are now inextricably connected to this whole fracas, and whose images will continue to appear in related internet searches for some indefinite future period.