Europe has its holy cows as well. Try publicly questioning the Syrian refugee program or come up with scientific evidence that nationals coming from war conflict zones have a higher chance of becoming criminals - you'll get crucified the same way.
Boy, and don't even begin to mention that refugee programmes in Europe are probably the least effective way to evacuate people from a warzone (and that the majority of people coming in are likely not in fact refugees).
So according to this government, that majority of people coming in are not refugees, or at least not refugees that qualify for asylum. The majority of people that get to legally stay is however refugees. Naturally people from both side of the political spectrum disagree with how the government assess applications, and it should be noted that party in power is currently the social democratic party.
Sometimes old cultural artifacts go away in the "mother country" but persist in "the colonies." Seems like the witch-hunting mentality is something that's stuck around in the US, infecting both the political Right and Left.
Or maybe you mean to say that in Europe all men are so sensible that nobody cracks dongle jokes in presence of female coworkers?
Or maybe that majority of the European women would not complain to the HR if someone did crack that joke because they are not stuck up?
Because lemme just make it clear, they didn't get fired for the dongle jokes, they got fired for the shitstorm which arose because of their jokes and how people on twitter were rallying to fire those guys.
Also, the woman who caused the shitstorm was also fired from her company due to the counter shitstorm which ensued.
Maybe you mean to say that in Europe, a company wouldn't fire someone if a shitstorm is created due to an employee's juvenile actions, because I am pretty sure that it is incorrect too.
And yes, we have no trouble saying "fucking" without censoring it. And if there is a "nipple slip" on live TV, we don't make such a big deal out of it. It's a fucking nipple, get over it.
So to answer your question: 1. We see no problem in dongle jokes 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem) 3. If those complains would go public, we would treat that person as "Ah, some idiot has a problem with such a simple joke, weird." 4. But if somehow, there would be a public shitstorm where everybody seems to be losing their mind, the company would not fire an employee over a fucking dongle joke, get serious.
So how such a thing can escalate like that, is beyond any of our (European) comprehension.
If you reread my explanation above, you will see I make no difference between different groups of people. That might already give you a clue of what is going wrong.
And if you would treat each other with more equal respect (men, woman, blacks, whites, ...), maybe you wouldn't be so uptight when someone makes a simple joke.
Who is 'we' here? You think most Americans have a problem with dongle jokes? Or you mean to say that most or all Europeans don't have a problem with dongle jokes.
> 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem)
This is when you end up with Uber, where these complaints were ignored and they eventually ended up with Susan Fowler incident.
The company fired the woman who complained because their servers were getting DDoSed.
Look I know what you're saying, it isn't that a day passes by when someone on the Internet, Europeans don't remind Americans (And many Americans remind themselves) that Americans are very prude compared to Europe.
But what you're not doing is understanding the problem here. The problem isn't the 'prude American culture', rather, there is a civil life culture, and then there is a work culture. The complaint feminists have made is that work culture needs to be more welcoming to women.
So the question is 'What constitutes as welcoming work culture?'.
Saying "Hurr hurr, we are Europeans, we don't have problems like that" is just sidestepping the issue.
Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be? If not, then how are you dealing with it?
Sorry, but Susan Fowler did not complain about 'dongle' jokes, this was a serious case of sexual harassment. Not seeing the distinction between the two is a serious problem.
> Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be?
From my personal experience, the women I worked with were a minority in tech, and they actually enjoyed working in a male dominated environment. They told me guys are more up front, and they preferred that over working in woman dominated environments where there is a lot of backstabbing going on. I worked for a lot of female managers, and they were very good at their job. Probably because women are socially softer than men (=men have more ego).
That's what I mean with respect. We will treat women as co-workers, not as people to have potentially sex with, and not with 'oh my god, there's a woman in the workplace, let's act totally different than we normally do not to scare her away'.
As a European, I find all these things very absurd. Like the guys with the "dongle" joke that both got fired [1], and if I remember correctly, so did the woman reporting them.
Maybe you should all start by treating each other with more respect, whoever it is. And don't go witch-hunting.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...