Amy Schumer had a guy kicked out of one of her shows just for being a man’s man! All he was doing was shouting manly things at her and wearing a manly t-shirt!
Censorship! Oppression! Free speech! Bi…aaaargh! I’m being silenced! <falls to floor writhing, foaming at the mouth>
We can all console ourselves with the high likelihood that he retired to a bar afterwards, where his fellow bros all congratulated him and pounded his back and bought him beer.
But even the dudebros can occasionally see the light. This thread about a guy who wants to host a stripper party for his business is an amazing example of obviousness. His new business did better than expected, so he asks if there are any legal problems if he brings in some strippers, right into the place where they work, to have a celebratory party.
Right away, people start ringing the alarm bells of “hostile work environment”, but he has an answer to that. No problem! He doesn’t hire women!
Female candidates are usually less qualified for technology and don’t come from strong cs backgrounds as often as their male counterparts. That combined with California’s ridiculous maternity leave laws make female applicants quite undesirable.
As of now we have 16 people, excluding myself.
Officially: I hire the best candidate for the job.
Unofficially: unfortunately California is one of the only states that requires paid maternity leave for female employees, making female employees quite a risk for smaller businesses.
Wow. Good thing he’s using a pseudonym, because that comment could otherwise come back to bite him on the ass. He’s outright admitting that he discriminates against women, because they are women.
At least the commenters there are slamming him hard, which is interesting, given the kinds of things Reddit users usually downvote.
The first words that caught my eye were the words “University of Minnesota student”. The second words were “pleads guilty to rape charges”. I read the story anyway and was horrified. It includes the full victim’s statement, and it was gut-rending. I can’t quite imagine the mind of Daniel Drill-Mellum — how can he do what he did to that woman? How can anyone cause that much pain to anyone?
Don’t read it. I regret having done so.
But there is one somewhat milder piece of the story that jumped out at me. The rapist was an acquaintance, as they often are, and a friend, the kind of friend you call after a traumatic experience, had praised the guy and acknowledged, after the fact, that Drill-Mellum had hurt other women before.
I remember stumbling out of the apartment and running in fear, thinking that he would surely come after me. That feeling still sticks with me to this day. I first texted a friend to come and get me, and then called another. The friend who, earlier in the day, told me, “I love Dan”. This friend answered the phone to me sobbing uncontrollably and said “don’t even say a word, I know what happened. He raped my friend too”. In the months to come, I would become angry about this statement, and the fact that this wasn’t the first time he had done this to someone, but at the time I was just happy that he had said “rape” so that I didn’t have to. I had no words for what I had just experienced, and I still don’t.
How do you do that, too? I hope this “friend” is also feeling some fraction of the guilt that ought to be wracking him right now.
Who knew? That stupid article about how to interrupt a woman wearing headphones has real legs, and is stirring up a lot of irritable snarling all over the place. One of the most interesting kinds of responses, though, is the horror story. This reaction by Alexandra Petri is beautiful, and sent chills down my spine.
You can talk to anyone, you tell yourself.
It is only a woman, you tell yourself.
But you know that it is not.
Women were something different.
Your comrade made the awful mistake of talking to the Woman Who Is Reading A Book On The Subway. You watched it happen.
He made her look up from the book and her basilisk eyes fell on him, unblinking, and he melted.
You still remember the screams.
They were so horrible that the city lay awake for days trying to forget them.
Yesterday half your comrades were ordered to shout “Smile!” at the Woman Who Is Walking.
And the woman did. Too wide.
So wide that her mouth engulfed the street and became a vast cavern.
Six of your friends were devoured.
You could hear the unladylike slurping sounds from blocks away as you beat a hasty retreat between the Scylla of the Woman Who Has Put Her Bag Next To Her On A Bar Stool and the Charybdis of the Woman Who Is Just Jogging.
You did not attempt to speak to either of them.
They passed you.
You were left unscathed.
You are about to talk to the Woman in Headphones.
My God, I pity you.
You are close now. Almost in range.
Before The Woman and behind her the ground is littered with shoes and hats and pick-up manuals and AXE body spray.
She sits patiently gnawing on a thigh bone.
You do not think she is single or looking.
You cannot make out the words she is listening to.You know how this will go.
You know what the headphones mean.
You know what will happen when you ask her to remove the headphones.
Read the whole thing. It’s bone-chilling beauty. Like women, apparently.
Can you stand one more story of men behaving badly today? I promise to stop after this one, but it’s just so classically awful–a nice guy
loses it when he’s turned down for a date.
tried being nice. From the time I wrote a MyTake honoring what I love most about women to when I defended older women from the misogynistic charge that they are worthless. I even wrote a letter to my future daughters, because I loved women and delighted in the fantasy of someday raising women of my own as a father. But now things have changed, and changed badly they have.
To those who have been following my recent escapades at work, this is the update you asked for.
Upon receiving my “Yes” and her phone number, I called the girl in question and tried to plan an official date. Not only did she reject me, which is strange after initially expressing interest and volitionally giving me her phone number of her own choice, but she told all of my coworkers that I stole her number off of Facebook and have been stalking her, and that I am a creeper.
She was a lying cunt, simply put, and has completely jeopardized my status in the workplace.
That’s only the beginning. The rest of the monster article is just JRICHARDS1996 raging about evil women who are nothing but whores and how he prefers a conniving prostitute to those wicked females and how he used to be such a nice guy but never again because women are so bad. And he leaves us with a final threat.
As it is, I will never approach another woman again. That nice guy that was once inside of me is completely dead. Dead, and you killed him. You crucified him. You nailed him to the Cross.
Show of hands–how many women reading this are now grieving at the loss of this Nice Guy
from the dating pool?
How many of you think it would be appropriate to scoop something out of the cat box and hand it to him, saying “Here’s a cookie”?
Jesus,no. You have to read another article by this guy: In Honor of Femininity: The 5 Things I Love Most About Women. It begins…
I have been accused of sexism and misogyny multiple times by females on this website. And even though those claims could not be further from the truth, I thought it would be in good taste to vindicate myself by composing a tribute to femininity. That is, a celebration of what it means to be a woman. So in honor of femininity, I have taken the liberty of listing the five things that I love most about women.
You can guess what follows. Just to spare you, the five things are:
They are Cute. Like, when they paint their toenails or bake cakes.
They are Sexy. “Have you seen just how sexy the female form is buck naked?”
They are Selfless. They take care of children and clean house for us!
They are Nurturing. “Even the most attractive, classiest ones still have a soft spot for crying losers such as myself, and are there to provide comfort.”
They are Emotionally Receptive. “Whether it is consoling a man on the verge of a suicide or expressing some little bit of kindness to an addict at rock bottom who needs to feel loved even if by a random stranger, women are capable of understanding emotion and doing what needs to be done.”
To put the W(t)F in awful, the whole thing is illustrated with half-naked pinup pictures.
Dan Bacon is oblivious. He’s written this longish article explaining how to get a woman to stop what she is doing and pay attention to a man, and never once stops to think about what the woman might want. He seems to think that if he’s cute and ingratiating enough, someone will like to be interrupted.
I have a shorter article explaining How to Talk to a Woman Who is Wearing Headphones, and here it is.
Don’t.
That’s all. Have some respect and understand that other people aren’t necessarily all about you, you narcissistic dork.
This story is so stale I ought to just scribble up some boilerplate and change the name of the discipline every time a new case comes to light. Now it’s an entomology professor behaving badly.
In February, two months after being charged with sexual assault and harassment against two students in his department, James Harwood resigned from his position as an associate professor of entomology without stated cause.
According to 122 pages of investigation documents that were leaked to the student paper, the independently run Kentucky Kernel, Harwood violated school sexual assault policies by “fondling” the two students at two conferences in 2012 and 2013. He was also found to have sexually harassed the students in each case. Three other students did not file formal complaints but testified to the investigator about other alleged incidents of sexual misconduct as recently as 2015.
In a completely expected twist, the University of Kentucky has also been working to keep the information about James Harwood quiet.
The investigation, which concluded in December, was initially kept secret. The investigator recommended that Harwood’s “employment with the University be terminated and his tenure as a faculty member be revoked.” But Harwood’s subsequent agreement with the university allowed him to resign instead of going through the lengthy process of a disciplinary hearing. This also means that the investigation won’t be disclosed if he applies to new jobs.
Well, so much for keeping his harassment history under wraps — now everyone knows. And that’s good.
So they might as well drop the lawsuit against their own student newspaper, right?
You will not be surprised by what Andrea Tantaros says.
“Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny,” Ms. Tantaros’s suit says.
Tantaros is a wingnut, but even wingnuts should be able to expect some decency and fair treatment in their workplace.
I wonder if these revelations will have any effect at all on the evangelical Christian conservatives who do so dearly love the network?
Nah, I’m lying. I don’t wonder at all. If they can swallow Trump, they can choke down anything.
Wow. This reddit thread by a guy whose girlfriend left him is amazing. He’s getting good advice, but what was so strange was reading this guy’s own version of the story and seeing how wrong he was.
Short version: his girlfriend quietly left him, has a lawyer call him and tell him he has 45 days to pack up and move out; she paid the deposit on the place, the lease was in her name, he says they’ve been sharing the bills, and she’s offered to pay the last bit of rent until he’s gone. But she wants no contact with him, has moved all her stuff out, hasn’t told him where she has gone, and has blocked phone contact. He’s baffled about why, and wonders if she can really do all that.
Along the way he casually mentions that he’d hit her in a domestic dispute a few years before, and that they’d recently had an argument in which the police were called. He downplays these events, but it seems to me that such a thorough, calm, and well-planned departure was probably a rational response to abuse. He writes as if he’s the victim here.
He’s the sole source of information, and even he can’t twist the facts to exonerate himself, which tells me he has to be far worse than he lets on. And his ex-girlfriend? She’s brilliant. It’s a textbook example of how to terminate an abusive relationship, if you have the financial resources (that’s a key modifier: abusers often force dependency, this woman was lucky her boyfriend was a slacker).
Undark has a very good article on how journalism could be changing the problem of sexual harassment in academia. It really is a big mess that needs cleaning up.
Katze, BuzzFeed wrote, had been admired for, “preaching calm in the face of fear” during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Yet the laboratory he had led for nearly 30 years “was descending into chaos.” He was found to have “misused university resources for personal gain, including by asking an employee to do chores for him and solicit a prostitute,” the story said.
Katze responded by suing the university in federal court for violating his rights as a tenured professor. He also sued BuzzFeed to block release of the documents in the investigation, which included more than 100,000 text messages, emails, and other material. Both suits were unsuccessful, a fact noted in the story by Azeen Ghorayshi, a staff reporter at BuzzFeed, who has been tracking cases of sexual harassment by scientists for months.
I’ve noticed, over the years, how often harassers use legal intimidation to try to suppress word of their actions getting out…and how often it totally fails and often serves to spread the news even more. There are processes in place to examine these issues; rushing to the courts means you’re either a) trying to suppress an unwanted finding, or b) trying to prevent an unwanted finding from occurring. There is a place for the legal recourse when an unjust ruling is made in the process, but it’s awfully hard to argue that Katze’s case was unfair.
I’d also point out that it’s peculiar because usually the process is weighted in favor of the harasser, anyway.
But maybe the science journalists will actually make a dent in the problem. It’s also a good sign that these reporters are tackling the hard cases.
And yet, reluctant whistleblowers and tangled knots of competing interests and motivations have forever been the hard stuff of journalism, whatever the beat, and science journalists are as obliged as any member of the profession to keep digging, keep writing, keep exposing. Sure, such work won’t change things overnight. But change — however sluggish and freighted with cultural inertia — can’t happen without it.
“I think in the long run,” Balter said, “[a] cultural change will take place that will make sexual harassment more difficult to get away with.”
We can hope.
