[gojomo]

Those taking offense are on too much of a hair-trigger.

Take it in context:

• This is in Norway, a very gender-egalitarian place (but also more open to sexual topics). They have the confidence to understand – and shrug off – things that are meant as goofy jokes, even if, when forwarded to a different context for the specific purpose of triggering a reaction, some can then find offense.

• The music is definitely in the style of the (big-in-northern-Europe) band 'Scooter'. (A commenter at Geeklist implies it is Scooter, I think it's just in their style.) That style is over-the-top, self-parodying. (See for example the music video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KL5bw6Mbho which mixes the lyrics of a campy 1979 european disco hit, acid-trip religious imagery, topless revelers, rapper braggadocio, a cryptic shout-out to art/music-pranksters The KLF, and a key quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. Yes, The Little Prince!) No one familiar with the style would take any word of it more seriously than a Stephen Colbert monologue. (When Colbert in character says something 'offensive', is it really 'offensive'?)

• Even so, I've watched it twice and can't find any implication that all developers are male. The lead voice in the song is male (and speaks the 'penis' line about himself) but the chorus auto-tuned voice is vaguely feminine and the dancers seem to represent 'developers' and are (mostly?) women.

• It's in a nightclub/danceclub, kicking off the conference party. Almost certainly alcohol was being served. Topics wander a bit from the button-downed professional voice at such events... in fact that's the very reason to have such events. Crude jokes about body parts aren't for everyone, but they are likely to come up in nightclubs and in spoofy music lyrics. If they're not specifically denigrating anyone they're harmless and non-exclusionary.

[Bodil]

My initial reaction when hearing the soundtrack (I was a conference attendee) was to walk over to the stage to see if that was really Scooter playing. The lyrics just didn't seem nearly as offensive as most people apparently find them in light of this clearly being either the actual Scooter or someone copying them - I'm assuming the latter, because the lyrics seem a bit too juvenile even for Scooter, but knowing the band and their typical over-the-top raver campiness certainly mitigated the offensiveness of the incident. It was still fantastically embarrasing to watch, but I didn't feel especially offended as a woman at a tech conference.

The stage, btw, was in the middle of the conference venue, and this performance kicked off the conference party, just after the talks had finished for the day. The atmosphere in the room as it was happening was mostly one of embarrassed disbelief that Microsoft's PR department had apparently stereotyped the lot of us as tasteless brogrammers - with the exception of a few already drunk brogrammers clearly enjoying themselves in front of the stage.