I understand the feeling of being scared, but I don't understand why a joke about a dongle would provoke it. It seems to me that the level of threat from a room full of people who are not joking about dongles is exactly the same as the level of threat from a room full of people, two of whom are joking about dongles. I am obviously not arguing that it would be impossible to tell a joke with scary content, but I haven't seen an explanation as to why these jokes were scary.

Hi! Thanks for the civilized reply.

I understand you don't get it. I'm saying that's partly because you don't have a visceral fear of sexual assault. You also probably don't have much experience with unwanted sexual advances. And you've probably never been sexually harassed. You also may not have experienced being a visibly different minority in a situation where that raises your risk of unpleasantness or violence.

I don't think the jokes themselves were scary. I doubt Adira did either. But sexualization of a professional environment can be scary. So we are finally starting to say that it's not allowed at tech conferences.

Your invocation of some obscure situation where you would feel legitimately threatened in a sexual way has nothing to do with the reality of what happened. It's true that women can be put into sexually threatening situations. It's patently false that what happened at Pycon is an example of one.

I never said that they were.

I'm trying to help Joeboy understand why sexual content can trigger legitimate fears.

Note that at this very conference, there was other inappropriate stuff going on:

http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/pycon-2013-and-codes-of-conduct....

So although I agree that Adira was in no immediate danger, I think she was right to see jokes like that as being part of an environment that alienates women and enables problematic behavior.

> I think she was right to see jokes like that as being part of an environment that alienates women

I would agree that those jokes could alienate some women and men, and therefore don't contribute to an inclusive environment. And the other stuff in the post you link to sounds crappy. I'm in favour of having a code of conduct, particularly if there's a culture of inappropriateness that needs addressing. I still think your conflation of dick jokes with sexual threat is OTT.