Right, I was going to try and ignore this, but the circus that is being made out of it, is really starting to piss me off.
First of all, I want to make this very clear: I am all for treating everyone equally, regardless of gender, sexuality, or any other kind of 'metric'.
That said, what happened at PyCon is absolutely and completely ridiculous and over the top. When I say that I am all for treating everyone equally, I actually mean equally, and that does not include reverse discrimination as happened here.
A summary of the story as I have been able to figure out: two guys in the audience make dick jokes, a woman in the row in front (Adria Richards) gets offended, tweets out a picture of the two guys to 'shame' them, and then goes on a PR offensive to complain about sexism, unwelcome atmosphere for women, and so on, eventually leading to (one of?) the guys apparently being fired. The problem? The jokes weren't actually about women.
These two guys were, as far as I can determine, making generic dick jokes, aimed at no one and no gender in particular. While that could be considered unprofessional, that does not automatically make it sexist. Women do not have a monopoly on sex. The assumption that they somehow had sexist intentions, was really nothing more than that - an assumption. And that's not even taking into account that if the jokes were about women, plenty of women make similar jokes about guys, and plenty of gay (!) people make similar jokes about their own gender respectively. They are jokes, for fucks sake - grow up and learn to deal with them.
At this point, the victim mentality came into the picture, and Adria Richards started complaining about things in public. If you read her blog post, you'll see that there are copious amounts of over-dramatization, numerous claims or implied claims of sexism, and various other things that, when looking at the actual jokes made have nothing to do with the real situation whatsoever. I will not go into guessing what makes Adria do something like this, but I find it very worrying that a situation like this can be blown up into such a circus, or that one would have the desire to do so in the first place.
The cherry on top? Adria is removing negative comments from her blog post. Something to think about.
1G4JG9oFPmpwzEmSH4gnLCdE8hBprdJuDG