[zainny]

I wonder if the biggest reason why things like this keep happening is because we're all on a state of "high alert" in the tech community. Hear me out.

Right now in the tech world we've got ourselves in a big damn tizzy over anything even slightly sexual in nature.

By contrast, almost every single other medium we encounter on a day to day basis (TV, movies, magazines) is HIGHLY sexualised and makes absolutely no apologies for it. I've seen TV ads on primetime more offensive than some of these presentations.

I wonder if we're just going to keep running in to this issue again and again in the tech world simply because our standards are so out of whack with what the average person deems appropriate?

[graue]

First of all, not everything that's ok in an entertainment medium (TV, movies) is ok in a professional setting. I don't think presentations like these would have been appropriate at a conference of lawyers, doctors, artists, or biologists, either.

That said I think this also has to do with the extreme gender imbalance. Tech conferences are very male-dominated. I think the first photo here really gets this across, of the restroom line at another conference in SF:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/ridicu...

Imagine that you're a woman and you're walking to the restroom, past a line of 40 or 50 men. And now, imagine they've all just seen a "joke" presentation about staring at women's breasts. You might feel like a bit of a target, don't you think? It could be pretty uncomfortable.

Whereas, if we had a gender-balanced industry, and if we had, say, 47 men in the men's restroom line and 43 women in the women's restroom line, a presentation like the ones we're discussing would still be offensive and inappropriate, and still really not ok, but it might at least feel less personally threatening.

[zainny]

I think the difference here though is conferences like this are intentionally positioned at being more casual and less formal/professional. I doubt lawyers even have similarly casual conferences of this nature. In the tech world, we've intentionally positioned our conferences to be this way. I honestly think therefore that people will be more likely to bring their normal set of standards to bear in situations like this.

Now, I have a question for you. Imagine that you're a woman and you're walking to the restroom, past a line of 40 or 50 men. And now imagine those men have any time recently walked past a magazine store where upon they saw hundreds of magazines depicting women naked (ie. every single magazine store anywhere).

Or imagine those men are discussing the latest episode of Boston Legal, a typical TV show depicting a professional setting (legal firm) which contains highly sexualised themes (like, again, pretty much every show on TV today).

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm simply making the point that the standards people seem to be applying in the tech world seem to me to be completely out of whack with what society in general deems appropriate.

[maxcan]

Imagine that you're a man who has to pee really badly. Not every issue tips in men's favor.