[noobface]

You know what I'm tired of: condescension.

The guy who was making sexist statements is ignorant, not a "fucking loser."

How do you make these situations positive for everyone?

Empathy. Empathy for all sides.

Everyone exposed to this kind of social ignorance is a victim if you dig deep enough.

In the tech world we are quick to call users idiots, each other inept, ideas retarded...

I ask for empathy.

Empathy for this offensive guy who most likely grew up intimidated by social situations. He was picked on and bullied, and never grew past it. If I ventured a guess, I'd say he's still in pain, and still not sure how to act due to years of relative social isolation. He is simply ignorant of the effect of his actions. He literally knows no other ways to relate.

Calling him names makes us no different from him, or the people who encouraged his social isolation. Do you think shaming him will convince him we're right? He'll just view us as "another bully" and continue his anti-social behavior.

Encouraging growth through understanding, not through social imposition or public shaming is how we resolve these situations positively.

[mlent]

I don't think the person in this particular story is being ignorant -- he's being willfully sexist. This situation is not a misunderstanding. And we don't know why he thinks the women in the post can't get by on her own merits.

We do know that after hearing what other people had to say, he insisted on his sexist remark. He had a chance to reflect on it, and exhibited no remorse or apprehension. That kind of behavior doesn't deserve empathy, it deserves harsher correction and condemnation by his peers. Letting a situation like that slide only says, "If you insist enough, people actually shut up because they're agreeing with you or don't think it matters enough to merit dissent." Silence is just as bad as agreement in a case like this.

This guy doesn't need a kindergarten-level explanation of why it's not nice to tell a lady she got where she is "because of her tits" -- he needs someone to tell him to cut the crap because it won't be tolerated.

[bigiain]

"Calling him names makes us no different from him"

In my opinion, you've missed one very important detail. He's only getting "called names" in response to his "offensive guy" actions. Nobody involved in this conversation would have said a single word, good _or_ bad about the guy, except for the fact that he chose to publicly be a sexist jerk and intentionally offend someone in a social situation.

I _do_ feel empathy for people with poorly developed social skills - having been there myself and having friends and colleagues in the same boat (as I suspect most of us in this industry/profession do), BUT, if you've made it to 20 or 25 years old without having worked out that accusing a female of ony having accomplished something "because TITS!", you're clearly in need of stronger education techniques than "encouraging growth through understanding" - I'm not advocating punching him in the face, but if he were a puppy I'd be whacking him on the nose with a newspaper. Social imposition and public shaming are _entirely_ appropriate tools to deal with adults who make comments like he did.

[bcoates]

While I'm not going to argue against empathy in general, registering some blunt disapproval is less of a bullying behavior than saying nothing and passive-aggressively excluding someone, which seems to be the runner-up suggestion in the thread.

Drawing moral equivalence between participating in hostility against women and hostility against the rude and ignorant is a bit of a stretch, too.

[noobface]

Registering blunt disapproval may stop the behavior temporarily, but what caused it in the first place? It can't be entirely due to a general passive acceptance of such statements.

Our approach to ending racism was similar, and it was effectual, but over a great period of time incorporating generations of ignorance.

However, there were individuals who managed to help end the passive acceptance of racism by taking a vested interest in changing the thinking of one individual, all without guilting them into compliance.

Exhibit A. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B24qxWPPVbM

The NAACP president of Oklahoma, Wade Watts convinced the imperial wizard of a national KKK organization to reconsider his perspective on race. Rev. Watts did not accomplish this through expressing disgust or disapproval, but through patience and empathy. Johnny Lee Carly was swayed from imperial wizard to anti-racism activist. Wade saved Johnny's progeny from harboring the same ignorance, accomplishing in a single generation what had previously taken acts of congress, violence, protest and over a hundred years of blunt disapproval.

I'm not saying Wade's approach is the only way to accomplish a means to societal change, but it can change the perspective of an individual.

[wonderzombie]

Saying "fuck off" is not morally equivalent to implying a specific woman was hired for their purely physical assets irrespective of their intellect.

And public shaming is absolutely the way you do it. You need to draw a very firm line in the sand which cannot be interpreted in any other way; some wishy-washy "I wish you wouldn't say that" isn't going to do it for some classes of people, who'll just think you're saying that because the woman is there.

Now, myself, I would probably not say "fuck off." I might stand up and say something like "I'm going to have to ask you to apologize for saying that. You disrespected her and you disrespected me." It is polite but firm. It brings to bear social pressure, letting him know in clear terms what he has done and how he can fix it in the near term.