> “Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
> “Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she said.
Remind me when someone was last killed at a tech conference like she says? Very rarely, if ever.
Did she feel bad about him being fired? Nope.
> “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me
Read that last sentence again. In poker terms, that's a "tell". She doesn't say "I was offended".
I've known people like this in real life. They are to be avoided. The "tells" above are:
* claiming people do nefarious things to get ahead (he seeded the hate groups)
* claiming they're always the victim
* lack of empathy for people who get hurt
* claimed desperate fear in every day situations
She's saying she's in fear of her life. That the guy making the joke is evil and powerful. That she's small and helpless. And thus she thinks that anything she does to protect herself is by definition OK.
Very, very, scary.
And yes, before the downvoters come in, the torrent of abuse she got was wrong. Very wrong. Those people should be punished. But make no mistake here, Adria Richards is not Hanks victim.
The irony is, such delusional behaviour does nothing but foster more doubt and double standards. If I were Hank, I would react exactly as he wrote:
> I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life?
> “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”
Then enough people get cautious like that, and eventually we have people complaining about discrimination because groups of guys will suddenly get quiet when a woman enters earshot, and they act somewhat uncomfortable. "Why can't they just treat us like equals?"
I'm starting to believe that you can't really please everybody's sense of what is fair and equality in cases like this.
Such abuses do not foster equality, they validate discrimination. When you make a lot of people afraid of your group, they won't suddenly start being nice to you. They will start to hate you.
It was visible in case of the wave of antisemitism in Europe. People weren't hating Jews because the Jews went around demanding equality and talking about "misoabrachamism". They were hating Jews because overarching narrative was that they're the cause of evil, they're out there to get you economically, to take over the world, etc. etd. Being afrad breeds hate.
Honestly this list could use some trimming, you can't really have a "list of sexist incident" contain a change in the way blocking works on Twitter (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Twitter_Blockgate)! At least, you can't if you want people to take the list seriously...
No matter how sad the thing is, she cannot be really helped that much. I mean, a decent psychoanalyst might deconstruct her to pieces and put back together (same goes for psychedelics but probably with bad results), but very few people go that way, and even fewer are actually helped.
People like these are all around us, that's the really scary part for me. Some are quite obvious, some nto so much. Behaviour is same - playing victim, overreactions, their own twisted version of reality where they are right and everybody else isn't, some sort of attention whoring might be present too (some sad personal experiences here).
Have no doubt - I feel sorry for her. This shows how important is to have this happy careless childhood - investment that cashes back for the rest of our lives (I humbly think I am one of those, for which I am eternally thankful to my parents). Just as everybody else suggests - keep your distance from such people, or it might bite back.
I think asking for the removal of the line in his apology about him losing his job because of her actions is also a significant tell about her motivations. It's one thing to pull genuinely bad behavior (this was not) into the light and expose it, but it's quite another to want to control your opponents responses to your accusations.
> “Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
> “Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she said.
Remind me when someone was last killed at a tech conference like she says? Very rarely, if ever.
Did she feel bad about him being fired? Nope.
> “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me
Read that last sentence again. In poker terms, that's a "tell". She doesn't say "I was offended".
I've known people like this in real life. They are to be avoided. The "tells" above are:
* claiming people do nefarious things to get ahead (he seeded the hate groups)
* claiming they're always the victim
* lack of empathy for people who get hurt
* claimed desperate fear in every day situations
She's saying she's in fear of her life. That the guy making the joke is evil and powerful. That she's small and helpless. And thus she thinks that anything she does to protect herself is by definition OK.
Very, very, scary.
And yes, before the downvoters come in, the torrent of abuse she got was wrong. Very wrong. Those people should be punished. But make no mistake here, Adria Richards is not Hanks victim.