Also, yo! Your use of “drama” and “butthurt” minimize the feelings of participants. Perhaps you could adjust your language in the future.

Larry Summers found out the hard way that you can’t truly separate your private opinions (even at a private event) from your public persona. And just like Harvard was in their right to fire Summers for comments that he made privately, I think Adria’s employer was in their right. But similarly, it was in her right to make those comments – but she had to realize the consequences.

Obviously sexism is a problem in this situation because it caused it… but I don’t think it plays much of a role beyond being the cause.

If you want to do what you say you want to do (make a better world for everyone by making a better world for women) then you cannot use another metric to evaluate decisions. How much progress did she make?

She and her supporters collectively taught men to be wary of women and not to defend the speech itself or the joke on face. In a very subtle way, I suspect they reinforced the idea that radical women and women are two different classes.

@Hoover – I am interested in what you *do* think is worthwhile, and how it is so completely detached from how we treat each other. Admittedly, sociology is a lens through which I see the world. Never said it was a silver bullet – simply an additional way of understanding and tackling large problems.
As to being worried about a village well – go do research on how closely linked quality of life and empowerment of women are. Even if that were not the case, why give up insisting on increasing dignity in all places for all people? Seems Cartesian to me.

So… this argument is a good sign that society has reached a certain level, but a terrible sign because it’s so mind-numbingly trivial.

On the inside, it seems incredibly important. But if you’re concerned about whether the village well is going to dry up or how many cows you own, it looks like self-indulgent insanity.

Incidentally, a good way to gauge how unimportant an argument is, is to work out the ratio of abstract words to concrete nouns people use. The more abstraction, the less importance.