[gatordan]

The blame the victim mentality sprinkled throughout this comment and a few others is the problem have with them.

"Not at all to excuse the behavior, but..." "I'm not excusing inappropriate or damaging behavior. It is important, though..."

Those sentences should end before you go on to give the impression that we just have to accept that sexual assault/harassment is going to happen when a room is dominated by men. There is no good reason why grown men who happen to be some of the brightest minds in computer security should be excused from treating their female peers with the same respect that they would want for themselves or their own daughters, wives, mothers, and aunts.

Your comment seems to suggest otherwise, because "In a conference of mostly lonely males..." hey what do those women expect? Apparently, they should have had more "situation awareness". It reminded me of the common victim blaming argument "she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want the (bad) attention".

[obituary_latte]

No. What I'm saying is that educating or helping these people might be a better solution than straight ridicule. Whether the education be how to control self, or how to appropriately engage woman, it would seem to strike the root of the problem.

If I came across otherwise, I appologize.

[gatordan]

I really appreciate you being open to discussion - its the biggest reason why I value the HN community and why I even bother to comment. I read your original comment many times and think that it needed clarity, eventually you did get to your point about education but that did not come off as your main point.

I assume the Ada Initiative's goal, at least in part, is education. Even through this post alone they have educated part of the HN community that women get harassed at conferences. But I don't think the problem here is that men need to be educated about these behaviors - every decent human being knows its not okay to grab a womans crotch and hide in a crowd. This article wasn't about borderline cases where it wasn't clear what acceptable behavior was. It was about blatant disrespect like telling a female peer at a conference to "show her tits".

I think the men who are doing the harassment need to be made to feel this is not tolerated behavior in this community. If a few perpetrators get embarrassed about being called out and being given a colored card, thats acceptable if it helps prevent sexual assaults/harassment and alters their behavior.