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Re:Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons) by sethg on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @03:55PM (#4387864)
From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off.

People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up.

A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.

Re:Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons) by demewmew on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @04:13PM (#4387960)
So well said. When people don't take you seriously, clever hacks are the next best solution. The "What She Really Said" IRC bot story reminds me of this as well.
Re:Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons) by blhack on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @07:59PM (#4389097)
No they're not. The cards thing establishes the premise that women are incapable of holding social status.

They're not.

The cards enforce the very thing they're trying to prevent.

Re:Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons) by illuminate on Monday August 20, 2012 @12:41PM (#4408433)
The cards are a reflection of reality, not an endorsement of the current state of things.

Your tactic of putting your hands over your eyes and ears has been tried, at length in the past. It hasn't ever worked wherever it's been tried.