Yeah, but it just doesn’t read with that spirit to me.
I feel he’s describing a complicated situation in which both parties acted inappropriately: In the men’s case, it was making a penis joke in a professional setting, which is a bad idea for obvious reasons. In Ms Richards’ case it was making the story public even though it had been dealt with. That’s just a fact that’s part of the event Ronson is relating. I think Ronson goes to great lenght to show how it happened but also that all parties’ original lapses were small and easy to make in haste and that none of them deserved the disaster that ensued.
Then again, while I feel that is Ronson’s view, there are many people out there who are determined to pit sides against each other and draw blood no matter what’s written or how. After all, the people who fired the men and the ones who threaten Ms Richards clearly feel that it IS what they deserve, or maybe they just have zero empathy.
The scare quotes were because this was not an example of sexual harassment.
I didn’t get the impression from that blog post Elusis posted that she had suffered anything like that in the past, of course I could be wrong and in that case any resulting psychological trauma would be deserving of sympathy and support, though still not reason enough to get this guy fired or to publically shame him. If however her reaction was the result of ideological indoctrination, then I’m going to have less sympathy for her.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with being alert and cautious, but this was a conference with hundreds of people around and not an enclosed space with no-one else present, the guy in question wasn’t even interacting with her in any way, she just overheard something he said.
Prisoners are officially disenfranchised by society. I’m talking more about the random “Lord Of The Flies” violence where one member of the peer group is randomly snatched and instantly torn to shreds based on some accusation about being penis stealing sorcerer or something.
So, it’s more about false accusations and scapegoating? I mean, those people in Ronson’s book did actually behave foolishly/badly. That still doesn’t mean their actions warranted the disproportionate response. I am, in general, skeptical of public shaming as a tool for positive change.
Karen Horney, the first feminist psychoanalyst really nailed it:
The creation of make believe feelings is most striking in those whose idealized image lies in the direction of goodness, love, and saintliness. They should be considerate, grateful, sympathetic, generous, loving, and so in their minds they have all these qualities. (p. 83)
Neurotic self-contempt make the neurotic hypersensitive to criticism and rejection … (this) feeling abused … (causes) vindictive resentment against others…(Awareness) of this vindictive hostility… must be suppressed because it endangers … his idealized inage of absolute goodness. (p 232) The amount of largely hidden vindictiveness in most neurosis is rather great (p 51)
The overemphasis on justice may be, but is not necessarily, a camouflage for vindictiveness (p. 55)
If he is proud of his vindictiveness, vindictive rage may be keenly felt. However is his vindictiveness is glorified and rationalized in terms of dealing out “justice,” he does not experience vindictive rage as such, although it is so freely expressed that nobody else has any doubt about it. (p 162)
(Their principles) lack the moral seriousness of genuine ideals. (p. 72) They are, in this sense, the neurotic counterfeit of normal moral strivings. (p. 73)
I have to connect and edit some of the points because so much of the early literature is written by people whose first language was German, and, no matter how good are the points they make, rarely does one find a truly pretty sentence.
Have you read the book though? He gives plenty of time to what happened to Richards. He harassment as a result of what happened is no overlooked. She doesn’t come across as a warm person though.
Her objections seem to have been specific towards men and sex. What if the remark had been tasteless but not sexual? What if it had been women?
Casting herself as the victim, she plays the Karpman Drama Triangle gambit of rushing around looking for a Rescuer so that she can turn the tables and become the Prosecutor.
Then she has to look for a larger audience for her personal drama on Twitter.
Justifies herself with a claim of a massive sexual anxiety attack.
Remarkably selective loss of control typical of a manipulative personality that all this involves a couple guys whose jobs can be threatened. Would she have bothered to do this a low value target? What if they’d been self employed and told her to take a hike - would she have responded by stalking or harassing them?
Overall, she shows a huge sense of emotional entitlement.
If making people uncomfortable is the standard for losing your job, she sealed her own fate. Besides, what employer wants someone that picks fights in public as a result of sexual panic attacks?
People can’t help how they react to someones personality. I read the extract and Adria’s response and I think she has a point. Several, in fact. The problem is this; If a writer gets a sense that you are not a very nice person then they may consciously (or more often unconsciously) reflect that in their writing. This can happen either through natural conversation between subject and writer or by the writer prejudging them based on the subjects previous actions. I would guess that in this case it was a bit of both.
See, I don’t disagree with any of that. But the keyword is perception. The guys involved come across as humble and show at least some measure of contrition. Whether that’s genuine or not I don’t know. But Adria refuses to accept any responsibility for her part in the debacle. Lets look at the facts:
I get that she took the picture for identification purposes. But why can’t you just show it to the conference staff. Why did she feel the need to tweet it publicly? Does avoiding the inconvenience of temporarily leaving a lecture or enduring some off-colour jokes warrant shaming someone publicly? Does the fact that you had already been having a difficult day confronting these issues give you the right to slyly take someones picture and upload it to the web? I submit that it does not, particularly when your very job relies on interacting with the dev community on a daily basis and is about bringing people together. How can they ever trust you to do that again? As someone who works in tec, Adria must have known what would happen, or is willfully naive if she didn’t. The comments the guys made were stupid and impetuous, as was Adria’s response. In the endgame, they all helped get each other fired.
And the point is this: Even if you disagree with my view and you think Adria is wholly blameless, she still comes across as an asshole and in the court of public opinion that counts for far more than whether she actually has a number of valid points sexism in the tec culture and how what happened doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It comes back to perception; Between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow.
Cracked is worth checking out regularly because their editor (“David Wong”) is a best selling humor novelist, and their articles are often well written and researched.
There are TWO sides to EVERY story. Not one, not seven, not ten, but TWO. And only two. Think about it. Why else would it be important to report “both” sides of a story, if reporting “all sides of a story” was more grammatically correct? The other sides of a story, are merely variations upon the bipartisan nature of the conflict, and deserve to be marginialized.
Yep, she is what’s called an “all bad object” in object (family) psychology. People with fucked up childhoods look for symbols of evil to attack, and so they tend to single out people for relentless punishment. They are always prowling for the “persecutory object,” the “bad” person they can pounce on. Sounds sadistic? It sure is, but they have so many levels of denial that they can’t acknowledge their own boiling rage or the deep pleasure they take in hurting others. They have huge amounts of “neurotic entitlement” that states if they suffered the world owes the compensation, specifically in the form of controlling other people. Because they are so full of projection and fantasies about others, they are utterly convinced that these thoughts represent actual profound insights into other people even though they’ve never taken an actual interest in the subject, so there is a powerful streak of narcissism as well. They latch onto “enemies” and conspiracy theories because then their hatred becomes a compass, and they can keep attacking the same thing rather than attacking people randomly, so their behavior is often like a stalker although not up to the legal standard of stalking. If they don’t reek like the child abuser that raised them there is a very high chance of them marrying someone like their asshole parent.
Ew, I have learned something new and horrible today. I think I shall retire to bed early with a hot chocolate and a No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency book.
That is one of the best explanations of why the U.S. has gone wacko with reactionary political fundamentalism in recent decades I’ve seen.
If you think about it, undiagnosed PTSD in survivors of the Great Depression and WWII would be likely to cause all sorts of messed up parenting in the next generation…and now we’re seeing the result.
Conservatives and fundamentalists are definitely much better at using these principles for large scale mobilization, but liberals make full use of them around single-issue activism and stereotype SJW rage, such as what’s called sardonically “vegan personality disorder.” Politically it’s a paranoid us-against-the-world attitude. Also, in the context of this discussion, these shaming mobs represent spontaneous blood lust on the liberal side of the spectrum.
This is what gets me about arguments about tone, and pleas for civility and moderation, and people citing Godwin’s Law. GamerGate absolutely did not start out with good intentions. It started with a guy who wanted to publicly humiliate his ex-girlfriend approaching a group known for viciously racist and misogynist driving trollies campaigns, and it all got worse from there.
If we hadn’t successfully countered it, by publicly condemning GamerGate and rallying opposition against it, how much worse might things have gotten?
