I work in sales, not gaming. Maybe there is harassment at Riot Games, however sayings like "no doesn't necessarily mean no" is part of a sales mindset. It is not condoning rape, it is saying that just because the customer says no doesn't mean you should give up. Sales takes some persistence to see if you can get them to say yes. I imagine that is what the recruiter was saying, that just because a candidate says no, does not mean you should take it and give up.
That does not mean you should "rape" them, which in this analogy would either be forcing them to buy from you, or forcing them to work for you, without consent. That is obviously not going to happen.
It just means that you need to keep trying to get to yes, because you're going to hear no a lot, and some of those nos will later become yeses.
Just because you interpreted that saying as being related to rape doesn't make it a bad saying. It likely just means you're unfamiliar with sales, and reading something else into it. If you do a search for: no doesn't mean no, you will find a ton of sales material on it. For example off the top of a search:
I get what you're saying... but what's the available context of "No means No"?
It's specifically a slogan about sexual assault.
So when you modify that statement to "No doesn't necessarily mean No" you're making a play on words associated specifically with a PSA slogan about rape.
It could be a casual coincidence I suppose, or you could add further context like in the examples you supplied, but on it's own there's really no other way to see it. Sure, while the underlying principle may hold true; be persistent, don't give up too easily, etc., there are plenty of different ways to convey that and specifically choosing this wording seems deliberate.
I suppose it would come down to whether the statement was delivered as a joke in an attempt to get laughs or simply some folks found it funny. Based on the story seems more like the former.
Either way seems like they eventually developed an approach to dealing with culture fit (or lack thereof):
It's older than just "a slogan about sexual assault".
"No means No!" is a common parenting phrase to teach kids when a parent says "no", they mean it. If you asked for an ice-cream, and I said no, then stop asking again!
I have no data on the origins on the phrase in English as such, but certainly the concept has been around even back to the 1st Century - with the Phrase "let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no, everything else comes from the evil one" back in Matthew's gospel (5:37).
You have to go by what it means today. The meaning of phrases (especially implied meanings) changes based on what happens. At one time, "gay" just meant happy, and 9/11 was just another date.
I think it's fair to say it's in a transitional phase at worst and while it would be ideal to avoid one cannot assume the connotation in every single use.
In the context of sales, you can have a conversation about perseverance and not taking no for an answer. However:
> At the end of that example, Brandon laughed and said, “I was about to say something.” He paused, and then went on to say, “No doesn’t necessarily mean no.”
Brandon _changed_ the context into something offensive and then made the joke. This was an attempt at rape joke. He even prepped the audience for it by laughing and saying, "I wasn't going to say this, but..."
This is the crucial detail here. In a vacuum this is innocuous, but Beck specifically went and gave a nod to the context he wanted you to see it in, and that context was rape.
I get what you're saying, but if someone says "the way you phrased that really bothers me because it sounds like a rape joke", I think the best response is to say "sorry, I didn't mean it that way, let's find a better way to phrase that", not "no, it's not a rape joke and you shouldn't be upset."
Hearing "no doesn't necessarily mean no" as a play on "no means no" is not some insane unreasonable interpretation, and "no means no" has been pretty consistently used as an anti-rape slogan for ages.
And maybe that phrase has been used that way in sales for ages, but the commonly accepted language has changed over time and will continue to change in response to changes in culture.
Yes! Exactly. Intent and the meaning of what you say is important, sure, but equally if not more important is the effect and interpretation other people have upon hearing it. If you say X and others hear Y, if your goal is to communicate in an efficient and respectful manner, then the clarity of Your own words is Your problem.
Responding as "sorry, I didn't mean it that way" if you really didn't mean it that way requires you to say "sorry" and thus take responsibility for an offense that was not committed. Obviously if you prefer to say it that way, maybe because your personality is leaned towards the conflict-avoidance side, sure. But not everybody wants to be held culpable for something they didn't do and don't want to say it that way. If you really meant no harm, then you shouldn't lose cred for simply responding "it wasn't a rape joke" and expecting to be taken at your word.
It actually doesn't. "I'm sorry your mother is sick", in no way claims responsibility for making your mother sick. It simply shows empathy toward how the other person is feeling.
Even if it did, communication is a two way street. You can't accept even the slightest bit of responsibility for not considering how your words might affect other people? I apologize when I bump into someone in the hallway. Doesn't mean I was out to get them, or it's all my fault, just that I was part of this interaction.
The problem is they intentionally turned it into a rape joke in a social setting where very aggressive sexual language was the norm.
I suspect there is a deeper issue that doesn't get talked about that is rooted in not only traditional gender roles, but, probably to some extent, gendered psychology. And I imagine it would be all kinds of drama to even try to describe it.
So I think it gets into some very sensitive territory that is essentially of the "unspeakable" variety, and that's why it is such a hot button.
But as someone whose read some negotiating books, etc, yes, you are correct that deals take work to broker and persistence is required in such things. But it also matters how you handle it. It matters a whole lot. And in sales you know they can say no and you need to work at getting a yes. A certain type of man doesn't really feel they need to genuinely respect a woman and they feel entitled to use rather ugly tactics to try to get what they want. People have very good reason to not want to give such men additional justification for their awful behavior.
So the issue here is not with the sentiment, but the fact that the slogan “no doesn’t mean no” is _very_clearly_ a play on the anti-rape slogan “no means no”. I get being against over-sensitivity, but mocking an anti-rape slogan to invert the meaning could make victims of sexual assault really uncomfortable.
Edit: literally the entire first page of google results for “no doesn’t mean no” are anti-rape articles. This is seems like a pretty black and white issue.
Google results are personalized so your first page is likely different from other people's. To be honest I would probably have to have been there to know for certain whether he was making a joke referencing rape or just making a more innocent comment.
That being said, tech recruiters as a rule are trash and bugging people about a job after they have refused is a pretty jackass thing to do anyway. So I'm fine not giving him the benefit of the doubt.
It's easy enough to google it yourself if you think "no means no" being related to rape is just a figment of google's algorithm that appears for some people and not others. What was returned when you googled it for yourself?
If Brandon meant that interpretation though, he should have said oops did not think about this, sorry. All the weird meetings and calling it humor clearly make it seem he meant this.
> however sayings like "no doesn't necessarily mean no" is part of a sales mindset.
Precisely why I abhor 'sales' folks. No really does mean no for some folks, and many people in sales cannot differentiate between the 'no means no' and 'no means meh, maybe?' groups. Here's a pointer: one group you will convert into mortal enemies (who can/will influence the other group), the other group you might make a sale.
I don’t think that phrase by itself would be problematic if it wasn’t for everything else that’s going on there. I mean, the dude was legit proud of his “just the tip” T-shirt and “suck my dick” jokes in the workplace. That’s pretty damning, if true.
I worked there for a very short time as a consultant and I remember Barry. I remember being astonished at some of the things I saw and heard at that company and I am surprised it's not them getting the scrutiny and instead the larger tech companies.
Working at Riot Games was like working in a frat house where you get paid, and I mean many of the bad parts of living in a frat house. Of the places I've worked, Riot had to have the lowest median age (early 20s), which probably contributes to the problem. The guys could be assholes, but I fear that some of the women, being young and this being their first job and an amazing opportunity, get disillusioned into thinking that this behavior is normal in industry and that is really sad.
I am surprised not more have spoken out. Riot (and other gaming companies, not just Riot) has some of the bro-est culture out there and it's going to cost them in a lawsuit, just give it time.
I think if you look at the incentives in that situation it's very understandable to not speak out. If you're a good employee working at Riot and you have a problem with the culture you have two options: Speak out or leave. If you speak out it can be incredibly damaging, you'll almost certainly destroy your career at riot because you'll be actively attacking people you work with. You stand a good chance of getting a reputation in the industry. The likelihood of changing the culture is microscopic - especially if you find out it's the CEO providing the lead in this behaviour. And if you succeed? Your career at Riot is still probably damaged, Riot's culture will be like any of the many other companies you could work at. During the time you're fighting for that change it's likely to be incredibly emotionally draining and you're bound to lose some friends.
If you leave, you have literally none of those downsides, you've still got a good career and you can go off to one of the many other companies that are just as successful without those downsides.
So to speak up you need to be incredibly principled AND you have to have some very deep stake in making THIS particular multinational corporation better. I think it makes perfect sense not to speak out for the vast majority of people.
While I think it's understandable when people don't speak out, I don't agree that those are the only two options. The small stuff Barry did is meaningful:
"My personal preference was to respond with clarifying language while addressing them by their first name, and convey 'can we just get through the conversation we need to have' non-verbally with my facial expressions and gestures..."
Not everyone has to be a leader like Barry, and not everyone feels the same degree of urgency about these issues. But to feel at peace with yourself, it's worth it to at least not actively participate and perhaps to push (however gently) in the right direction.
It is imperative more members of tech organizations consciously decide to act in ways that are respectful, inclusive and professional, such that environments like the one described are no longer the norm.
Any leadership rejecting this is indicative of their inability to grow up and be adults. We aren't in high school anymore.
It's pretty ridiculous to me that this even needs to be said. "We need to make a conscious effort to be professional in a professional environment". What is happening to our culture...
In this case I feel it's a particularly bad combination of the environment of a video game company and young male employees coming directly out of college, which especially in the US seems to be daycare for adults.
No part of the pipeline seems to teach these individuals what it means to behave professionally in a workplace environment, and often software companies do indirectly promote it by purposefully mixing up private and work-life (drinking at work, casual attitude, no hierarchies etc..)
As much as people lament corporate culture these days, I prefer it a great deal to the arrangement described in the post.
Feeling like very much the old guy leaving a comment here, but I've been shocked about behaviour of young employees before. When I was 40, I move to Japan and taught English. This is after a good 20 years of working professionally as a programmer. They sent a bunch of us English teachers to a conference (at considerable expense to the tax payer). The night before the conference a bunch of the younger people decided it was a good time for a party and ended up drinking until the wee hours. The next day, the supervisor was yelling at a group of them. Apparently they had decided to "call in sick". Their main argument was that if they didn't feel up to going to work, then it was their right to take the day off. You can imagine that this didn't go over well with the supervisor :-)
I remember thinking that I'd never seen anything like this kind of behaviour when I was young and first starting out -- well never mind that the startups I worked at would never send new grads to a conference. That was a privilege (and responsibility) for someone with more experience. But I remember thinking that nobody would do that.
Since I've returned to working as a programmer, I've noticed this kind of thing rearing its ugly head more and more. The idea of being a "professional" has changed quite a bit. For one thing, there is a lot more money in the profession and this has attracted a very different set of people to the industry. Back when I first started out, if you said you were a computer programmer, people kind of looked at you in pity. Now this is the "get rich quick" job. People who would have previously entered into more normal businesses with an aim to climbing the ladder into executive positions are looking more and more at programming as a good entry point.
Not only that, but the rise of the internet has also given rise to the programmer rock star. So not only money, but also fame is on the line. I think especially at a well known game studio, people are lining up not for money, but for status. This attracts a completely different sort of person than "Come join our startup that's writing new accounting software for airlines". I think that rock star attitude brings with it the rock star behaviour.
The thing is, I don't think this attitude is new to humanity. It's always been around. Drinking yourself unconscious has always been a thing on sales junkets. Rock star executives have always been doing incredibly inappropriate things. Back in my day, women would choose programming jobs because it was one of the few jobs where there wasn't a lot of discrimination and sexual harassment. I knew lots of women who became programmers because they perceived that the first glass ceiling (getting into management) was totally gone. When I first started hearing that discrimination based on gender was a systemic problem in IT, I couldn't believe it at first -- because it was not in the organisations where I worked at that time.
I honestly believe that this is just an evening out in culture. In my day quite a lot of people entering into university had never used a computer before. Now everybody is computer literate and they carry computers that are vastly more powerful that I started with in their pockets. They grow up playing video games with $100 million budgets and lead programmers/designers that are practically house hold names. When they start out as programmers, they read blog posts from people who have millions of followers and who influence thousands of companies. It's an attractive job for normal people in society. And, unfortunately, society still has a lot of problems to work through.
> Since I've returned to working as a programmer, I've noticed this kind of thing rearing its ugly head more and more. The idea of being a "professional" has changed quite a bit.
I'd argue that especially in the culture of HN and startups that the term "professional" only means your ability to interface between people in actual lines of work. A "professional" programmer is more akin to "professional" musician than a "professional" Dentist.
There's an overall lessening of professional employment almost everywhere - at a certain point teachers would always have suits and tie's and parents would have to dress up to go see them the same as they would a Judge or Congressperson. Nowadays the only professionals anyone actually interfaces with are doctors, and maybe lawyers.
I don't think it's only the people attracted into the industry but parts of the industry that attract these people. Ie the webshops that want to "Bring your whole self to work" (I think I heard that phrase from a podcast or something and believe it's quite fitting for some SV startups). It only invites unprofessional behaviour in my opinion/experience and makes your team less mixed/heterogen. In a good, professional team people should be able to work together even if they don't like each other, but apparently you can't have that in modern startups.
(Disclaimer; I'm one of the younger people, I just don't like to party or drink for no reason. I only drink to javascript code.)
Now this is the "get rich quick" job.
People who would have previously entered
into more normal businesses with an aim
to climbing the ladder into executive
positions are looking more and more at
programming as a good entry point.
I've started professionally working as a programmer in 2001 (but was interested in the field beforehand), and I would say that apart from a small reprieve straight after the dot-com crash I always remember this being the case (so at least since the mid/late 90s).
I remember stories of people moving/retraining from being lawyers & doctors to programmers in the 90s in hopes of getting some of that startup/internet $$$s...
If anything it's less crazy today than it was 20 years ago.
Also, bear in mind that a lot of these companies are founded or led by very young men who might not even have gotten through college (let alone have any actual experience what it means to be professional in a professional context)
With leadership that has no experience, what do you really expect?
It's very easy to never grow up when you're placed at the top essentially as soon as you reach adulthood. High profile examples of others who clearly didn't, and succeeded in spite of it, only confirms this belief.
You instead believe in your own exceptionalism, and act accordingly.
It doesn't help that politically in the US we have a movement to justify immaturity as a form of "freedom". Add to that the whole "echo chamber" effect which they've seemingly formed a perfect specimen of, and it's a perfect storm for a void of tact and, really, humanity. Woof.
I will say reading about all of this makes me even more gung-ho about focusing on this stuff as we grow our current company. There are so many implicit biases even if I'm not a horrible tech-bro. I think we're really good about this stuff but things change and we can always do better.
Freedom is incredibly important, but people need to be clear what they want freedom from. Freedom from tyranny? Sign me up. Freedom from government censorship? Yes please. Freedom from having any standards, basic decency, and accountability for how we exercise our freedom? Eeehhhhh... no thanks. The freedom to speak for example isn’t the freedom from criticism or reaction.
North American culture is increasingly interpreting freedom as a freedom-from as opposed to a freedom-to, as in, I am free from being an adult as opposed to I am free to be an adult.
Often it's "freedom-from" consequences. North American culture has a bad habit lately of focusing on people's responses to language/actions than the actual subject's language/actions in the first place.
"Yeah, sure this person did X, but why did people have to react like Y. What a bunch of snowflakes!"
It's extremely toxic, idiotic, and immature. It IS slowly seeping into professional environments. I personally don't abide by it in my teams. You are given creative and professional freedom, this is a privilege and power and with it comes responsibility. If you demonstrate that you are not willing to take this responsibility seriously I have no problem letting you go. We're a good solid company, we pay really well, and we work on cool stuff. Sexism, diet-racism, showing up late to meetings, randomly calling out after half off wine on Wednesdays, isn't tolerable.
I am not old (at least I don't think I am). I haven't hit 30 yet. But I personally feel like the above things seem to be happening in greater and greater frequency and it all comes down to a "freedom-from consequences" attitude.
Americans have a culture (at least a professional one) problem and we don't seem to be willing to discuss it, in my personal view. Maybe it's just constrained to the software development field? Though from what I see from my finance peers I don't believe this to be the case.
Speaking to company culture in general and not this specific incident we also cannot crucify every mistake and should give people an opportunity for personal growth.
These habits are ingrained into us by peer groups we often do not choose throughout high school, college, and past work environments. Even the most respectful and astute individuals will let their guard down under stressful, impaired, or distracted, situations.
But it's also true that the people who make mistakes need to take those opportunities to change. And this article is a prime example of someone being given such an opportunity and declining it.
“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”
I guess you have down votes because they feel riot's leadership can't grow?
> So, when people would say things to the group like “the other team raped us because our mid kept jungling,” I would attempt to reflect back more appropriate language by saying back to them “so you’re saying your team lost because you weren’t working together.”
I've noticed this in my gaming group and in the gaming culture at large. There's been this integration of much more sexual terms in the last three or four years - "raped", "cucked", "my butthole", "gaping", "shoved down the throat", etc. I feel like 10 years ago the words/phrases were less offensive - "destroyed", "wrecked", "owned", "dumpstered", "get shit on", etc.
I'm not really sure why this is, but I'm not a fan of the change. It feels like in the last half a decade stuff that used to be limited to the uglier parts of the web has bled out across a much greater area and become more accepted.
10 years ago it 12 year olds on xbox-live shouting as many overtly racist terms as they had ever heard in their lives. Now thats generally going to get you banned, at least. I don't honestly think its gotten worse. The stupid thing is if you go and play League of Legends and say most of those sexual terms you will be BANNED or at least muted for a week. And yet its cool to say that in the office.
> I feel like 10 years ago the words/phrases were less offensive - "destroyed", "wrecked", "owned", "dumpstered", "get shit on", etc.
Eh, I've been gaming since the 90's, and in my experience it's more or less the same. Honestly, with the proliferation of in-game voice and reporting tools it's probably gotten a bit better, esp. in regards to racist name calling.
In the 90s "suck it down" taunting was very common, among many others.
Gaming is a counter culture, I'm shocked, shocked that anyone is shocked, shocked that working at a gaming studio which hasn't had all its life sucked out of it by Business People isn't like some "Professional" (we say that despite our products having no warranty or any implied fit-for-purpose!) Corporation.
Really? In my experience, it's been the opposite; I graduated high school in '06, and had to make a point to unlearn some of those phrases which had become habit, when it finally became clear to me how problematic that actually was. I'm seeing the same thing happen with my younger brother as he enters high school, but to a lesser degree; at least now, it feels tongue-in-cheek rather than simply ignorant. All the same, I'm trying to steer him away from it becoming habit when we game, but when all your peers use a certain vocabulary, it's a struggle.
While I'm not going to condone those kinds of comments in the workforce or elsewhere, I'm not quite sure what the general justification is for putting "rape analogies" on such a pedestal compared to other major crimes.
Murder - "That went so badly, we just got slaughtered in that meeting"
Rape - "If we aren't careful the competition's going to rape us"
Theft - "We need to put in a plan to steal their customers ASAP"
What throws me is all of those are Big Bad Things, especially murder, but I don't feel like there would be anywhere nearly the same kind of pushback to anything except making a rape analogy. Maybe a slavery analogy would do it as well? People have gone through terrible experiences where someone they love has been murdered etc, so I'm not sure it's just about the level of trauma it can induce.
I think there are two things going on here. First, the general assumption is that rape is a gendered thing and that treating jokes about it as socially acceptable behavior helps to oppress women in specific.
I'm a woman and I've done a fair bit of research on the topic. I don't think it helps to use this framing. When I talk about my opinions, I am often accused of being a rape apologist. Women often perceive me as the enemy. Many of them seem to want to preserve some special victim card just for women rather than acknowledge that lots of men are also sexually assaulted, though it typically is not legally defined as rape because in many jurisdictions the legal definition of rape does specify that it is something only done to a woman. Nonetheless, men who are sodomized against their will in prison will say they were raped. The word encapsulates something that no other word quite captures.
Second, joking about being slaughtered in the meeting probably in no way increases the risk of actual physical violence per se, much less murder, in an otherwise civilized environment. But letting ugly and actively hostile sexual remarks become the social norm can start a slippery slope that can help make things less safe when it comes to sexual boundaries per se.
Most sexual abuse doesn't begin with rape. In a worst case scenario, it culminates in rape.
It begins with myriad forms of disrespecting your boundaries and that disrespect absolutely can begin as verbal disrespect and then move on to unwanted touching, etc. Rapists whittle away at your expectations of respect and act like you are being ridiculous to react negatively to their behavior. This is done very intentionally and persistently.
People who stand idly by and do nothing as they watch things go down this slippery slope are complicit, whether they realize it or not. It can't happen if other people stand up and say "No, this is not okay as a social norm."
I used to be a lot more affectionate and expressive than I am. But I did a lot of research and, these days, I try hard to err on the side of treating other people with respect first and foremost. I don't always get it right, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm too aware of how this stuff works to not feel that it needs to be taken seriously.
This is an intellectually dishonest strawman. The GP comment asserts rather that these statements create a context in which sexualization and boundary violation become more acceptable.
And yes, the last few years have demonstrated clearly that sexual harassment is a huge problem for the gaming community.
Would I ever work in place where rape jokes are acceptable? Good lord no, but I'm okay with that place existing.
>> Is rape more common among gamers?
> This is an intellectually dishonest strawman. The GP comment asserts rather that these statements create a context in which sexualization and boundary violation become more acceptable.
I don't have trgv's original comment (because it was deleted) but I don't think your characterization of their statement as a strawman is accurate.
More directly, I think trgv's question (at least the part you quoted) is relevant to the discussion.
We may reject the objectionable statements/offensive jokes on their own grounds for simply being offensive and unconstructive (I do). However, when you say "these statements create a context in which sexualization and boundary violation become more acceptable" that sounds like you are making argument that permitting such speech also encourages more serious (even criminal) behavior. In that context, trgv's comment sounds like an invitation to test that hypothesis.
I'd argue the difference is that rape is on a higher pedestal, simply because it's always unacceptable.
Regarding the slaughter analogy: it's not explicitly about murder, but killing. Slaughter doesn't apply only to humans, of course. Slaughter is typically associated with the killing of animals for food, after all.
The difference between rape, killing, and stealing, en mi opinion, is society still grapples with killing and thievery, for certain edge cases. There's no such gray area for rape.
Stealing if you're starving isn't condoned, but people do have more sympathy if you have extenuating circumstances. Murder is wrong, of course, but killing people in self defense is understandable. Killing animals for sustenance is okay. We need to eat or we'll die. Killing animals for pleasure is also okay. I could cut out steaks/Popeyes/breakfast sausages from my diet, but I've calculated the cost of a dead cow/chicken/pig is worth a nice meal.
There's no equivalent case in society where people find it defensible to rape.
Nobody's thinking of self-defense when they say "we absolutely massacred them."
I think arguing rape analogy is somehow worse than murder analogy because rape is always unacceptable is self-deprecating. NOTHING should be black and white in this world if you subscribe to the belief that murder is acceptable in some situations.
Yes, and society generally doesn't find it acceptable to rape animals, either, which was my point. As a counterpoint, try to think of the most contrived example where rape can somehow be justified. My argument is it doesn't exist in western society, whereas this isn't the case for killing and stealing.
>>Nobody's thinking of self-defense when they say "we absolutely massacred them."
My point is that there are other cases where the of killing people is justifiable in some way. Self defense may not apply, but that phrase could be used when both parties are complicit in the killing. Generally, you'd use the above phrase in competitive events - that is, two parties fighting each other and one side winning in a landslide. Same difference in warfare - what separate it from murder is the complicity of both sides. Murder keeps getting thrown out there, but again, the analogies are more in line with general killing than murder.
> Same difference in warfare - what separate it from murder is the complicity of both sides.
I'm a little shocked that you think warfare has two sides that are complicit when in reality it's full of young clueless kids who don't know what they're doing. Are you implying that soldiers are like UFC fighters on a ring? That there's some competitive element to killing in war and that makes rape worse than murder? I'm going to argue again that your argument is self-deprecating.
Rape happens a lot in war too, for strategic reasons. Are you going to argue that rape in war is also competitive?
>>Rape happens a lot in war too, for strategic reasons. Are you going to argue that rape in war is also competitive?
I'm honestly baffled at how you came to any of these conclusions.
I don't condone war at all. I don't condone murder or rape either. Like I said earlier, my point is that there are certain scenarios in which western society rationalizes killing as acceptable. There is no equivalent for rape.
While I'm not deeply familiar with the legal systems of all of these countries, I know at least one, and probably several, or the countries that maintain 'sharia law' still define rape as a property crime. "Was" here is restricted to only certain parts of the world.
I was trying to show how usages change, I shouldn't try to be clever after business hours. But at one time the loosening of norms around language and women was seen as a progressive thing, a breaking down of barriers and back room type behavior, but it seems like we've run up to the limit of how far it can go.
There's also the extremely gendered asymmetry of the victims of rape. If you don't want to make women feel uncomfortable and unsafe - stop normalising it by making "rape jokes" or enabling the people who do claiming it's just "their sense of humour".
Sure. So people who joke about murdering people are awful human beings too. I think the point still stands though - in general if you joked about murdering someone, most of the men listening wouldn't feel "unsafe and uncomfortable" thinking about the reality of how likely they are to be victims of murder.
The answer is pretty obvious to me: all of the above are potentially sensitive. They aren't professional. They suggest unsavory intent. They can harm people who have experienced those concepts within their personal lives. You wouldn't want to use them when reporting to shareholders. But the degree of consequence is more contextual.
That one or the other is being called out now, specifically, is a matter of political fashion. Sexualized language, racist language, those get airtime because there's groundwork there to carry those stories widely. In the past, it was religious oaths and the like that were transgressive. On the other hand, language around mental illness and disability, for example, has less of a support system now. You will easily get away with saying that an idea is "fucking retarded". I know I've said similar things many a time and I have some regrets about it.
And that's a thing that the culture negotiates one conversation at a time. It might not matter in any one instance, and if you look at it in more weaponized terms of "oh, I need to call out that guy for using a bad word" it gets embittered and negative really quickly, but any sensationalization ultimately hinders intended use of the term. When you go looking for strong language of this sort, you end up in a space where you're going to borrow the imagery and insert it in situations that are just flat out not the same, and make people think: "What? Is that normal? Should I play along?"
On an individual basis what's most important is just communicating clearly to make language and conversation pleasant and not going for "colorful" just because you can.
If you've ever suffered trauma or lived with a loved one who has, you know why rape analogies (or anything else which maps to a significant trauma, ie someone who has had a loved one murdered, someone in a war, etc) are put on a pedestal. It's not something you ever forget, and being reminded of it can be particularly visceral.
Further, I'd wager rape and sexual assault occur much more commonly than murder for those working in white collar, professional contexts, and that it disproportionately affects women, who already have a bad hand dealt in tech.
You're whitewashing it. Your example of a "rape analogy," which itself might be in poor taste (let's agree to be agnostic on that for the moment), isn't analogous to the rape joke that was said: "No doesn't necessarily mean no." The OP blog post implies that people were either dead silent out of shock at the rape joke, or they laughed at the rape joke -- meaning everyone understood it to be a rape joke.
You mentioned a "slavery analogy," which makes things interesting: I'm sure if you think hard enough you could come up with a slavery joke that, if uttered, would be obviously inappropriate.
Nothing you've said even gets off the ground until your counterexamples are analogous to the joke uttered.
For the same reason you shouldn't casually joke about the Holocaust, it's a HIGHLY emotional/sensitive topic. It's easy for guys to joke about it, but for women it's an all too real threat they have to constantly worry about.
The "reasonable fear of rape" is without doubt hugely asymmetric.
Men might be reasonably afraid of getting raped in jail.
Women have every right to have a reasonable fear of getting raped in a night club or an Uber or walking home from the grocery store. Because that happens all too regularly.
(I'm not saying "men don't get raped", but I am saying that "in general, most men never have any real fear that someone might be about to rape them".)
Of course, and I 100% do not ever want to deny or belittle your (or anyone else's) awful experiences.
I am though - still reasonably sure that the gender balance of people being coerced into sex is hugely asymmetric as well.
Rape jokes are 100% contemptible when made in front of men who are victims of or genuinely fearful of rape or sexual assault. They are 100% contemptible when made in front of women.
(It's contemptible when anyone does it in private with their frat bros or gaming friends/opponents, but I won't judge what they do in private so long as it stays private... But I will recommend they take a long hard look at what sort of person they are if that's what they think is an appropriate way to communicate with _anyone_...)
Estimates put the number of women who have survived sexual assault as high as 1 in 6, so it's likely there are survivors in your workplace. It sits in a grim area of being a serious crime and quite common.
Murder and theft are treated as obviously bad, in any context, by U.S. society at large. Getting murdered? That's bad no matter who it was. Getting robbed? That's bad no matter who it was. Getting raped?
* Well that sucks, but it was just a one off event.
* Oh you're a guy that's been raped, what are you some kind of pussy?
* Are you sure you're just not making rape claims for attention?
* Let's just probe you a bit more for evidence that we'll lock away and probably won't even use to help prosecute the criminal who did this to you.
Theft and murder also don't usually have undertones (or rather really overt tones) of homophobia and toxic masculinity.
The manner and context in which these jokes/hyperbole are delivered can be the difference between being topically hyperbolic and just outright revealing how ignorant of a person you are. To use your murder joke analogy, there's a difference between "You're gonna get slaughtered this game" versues "I'm gonna lynch you this round", to a presumably black competitor.
It's not the fact the action is being used in a joking, hyperbolic manner. It really is about the context and manner you deliver the joke. You can in that process play to darker aspects of our society's status quo. The author of the article gives explicit examples of this and pretty much spells it out.
I think the way you rephrase the murder reference illustrates pretty well how the expectations people have control their vocabulary.
Expectations are transient and certainly not universal.
Brandon's expectations about the way people perceive his dialogue were not universally correct. The condemnatory part of the article, in my mind, is that he tried to change the employee's reaction rather than his definition of insensitivity.
I don't think those norms within dialogue can be wholly avoided though, sadly. As far as I can tell, our id penalizes effemince in men.
Ps: your bulletins seem more like venting frustration than anything else. Hope you're doing alright.
As someone who seems to be roughly aligned with your positions and who admires your incisive analysis, I nevertheless find that your posts tend to be strident and that they send threads spiraling into flame wars.
I wish that you could find ways to engage which are more in line with the HN guidelines. Many of us with strong opinions, including myself, have had posts flagged and received constructive feedback from dang, just like you under your old identity. I think about those guidelines and dang's feedback a lot when composing posts.
>have had posts flagged and received constructive feedback from dang
I don't consider it constructive at all. In fact it's often just been used to stop a conversation with no clear purpose or direction. It's been pretty vague, with really whimsical throwbacks to the guidelines that he's never been able to elucidate on which part I'm violating.
>I nevertheless find that your posts tend to be strident
They're blunt when I know people are not commenting in good faith or they've made no effort to actually educate themselves about a subject (the former and latter are often intertwined). I will not be changing my tone on such posts.
>I wish that you could find ways to engage which are more in line with the HN guidelines.
Which guidelines? So far as I've seen it's only based on which opinions are popular and are worded in a faux-intellectual manner and then you can basically get away with anything. I had the CEO of Bitlocker basically tell me I was worth less than his dog (because his dog does not have the ability to criticize him) and lo and behold guess which one of us got dang's attention. There are countless examples of this pattern that do not involve me, but other users on this site.
I don't say anything I wouldn't say to anyone's face on here, so I'm certainly not going to be try to be even more academically-cutesy on the internet than I am even in person. A yesteryear account actually had my name and company information on it. Too bad that my place of employment started getting harassed by hard right-wingers for my comments on here (the only place any alias of mine has has had personal information on it has been this site).
But the point is I am being honest, topical, and forthright so any any claims that I'm causing threads to spiral into flame wars seem a bit over the top.
> They're blunt when I know people are not commenting in good faith
I think that may be where things start to spin out of control. From the guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Even when we may believe that someone is not commenting in good faith, adopting the constraint that we assume good faith nevertheless leads to more invigorating, challenging exchanges. By grappling with the strongest plausible interpretation, we grow to understand the opposition better and become stronger ourselves.
I hope that you can engage under those terms, because if you can we'll all be enriched by your continued participation. But if that's not for you, I hope you'll find another venue. You write well and you're good at the harsh stuff (I'm reminded of Hunter from Daily Kos), but that's not what I come to HN for.
> lo and behold guess which one of us got dang's attention.
Here's someone who also thinks dang is biased, but in the opposite direction. :)
Dan's an effective moderator. He can't police every transgression, but under his watch the forum stays more-or-less to the liking of those of us who value exchanges under the HN guidelines.
Anyway, thanks for giving a busybody like me a hearing. :) Happy trails.
Indeed. There was the recent scandal about this Swiss astronomer who told a graduate student of hers that "she is like the hired help, she needs to perform". The level of abuse reached such heights that they actually closed her institute. I guess I'm saying that there are limits, and these limits hold even if the emotions do not run high.
> The accusers’ identities have not been made public, but—according to the NZZ report—students charged that Carollo expected “superhuman commitment,” including being reachable on weekends, rarely taking vacations, and participating in evening meetings that would sometimes go until midnight. According to the report, Carollo would criticize students’ postures and tell them to spend less time on makeup and more on research. The article says that one-third of Carollo’s Ph.D. students failed to graduate, and many of her postdocs left the field after they failed to publish enough papers.
b) "Brandon, imagine if I cut off your arms and legs one at a time..."
c) "Brandon, imagine if you shot yourself in the back of the head... with a shotgun... twice... and declared it suicide..."
d) "Brandon, imagine if I fed you to the pigs, and they never found your body..."
e) "Brandon, imagine if I tortured you to death..."
f) "Brandon, imagine if the Germans cut your d* off..."
I just don't really get their "sense of humor". Why is (a) funny? It's like when somebody says "that's what she said", it's just not very funny, but I can imagine they say that there.
I've actually never heard of Riot Games before this article, but I don't think I would ever want to work there. Seems like a waste of time.
Those kinds of comments I personally don't have a problem with, although I can see why others might.
The problem wasn't using rape in a verb like that sentence, definitely not as a one-off. It was the fact that everything was being reduced to rape analogies. And it was culminated by a comment that very much crossed the line, and was very much meant to cross that line.
There is a comment I saw quite a long time ago which was to the effect that the use of swearing to convey emotional intensity is a sign of immaturity, not maturity.
> What throws me is all of those are Big Bad Things, especially murder, but I don't feel like there would be anywhere nearly the same kind of pushback to anything except making a rape analogy.
You can't imagine seeing massive pushback to a Silicon Valley type deciding to make a tone deaf, poorly timed "slaughter" analogy in the U.S. in 2018?
I applied for a job at Riot Games a few years back, after I came out of hospital following my appendix bursting. I was still in pretty bad shape, and my initial phone interview went poorly, mostly due to the fact that I couldn't breathe properly as a result of a partially collapsed lung. The hiring guy was particularly pushy, and didn't really take no for an answer, encouraging me to take the phone interview anyway. That's when I decided not to bother. Probably blacklisted from ever working there in future, but having read this article, I know I definitely won't be wanting to anyway.
"So, when people would say things to the group like “the other team raped us because our mid kept jungling,” I would attempt to reflect back more appropriate language by saying back to them “so you’re saying your team lost because you weren’t working together.” I can’t say that I think it had much impact, but I figured this was the long game, and slow and steady would win the race. Cultural change requires perseverance and consistency over a prolonged period of time, right?"
As a Colombian guy, all these fuss over using certain words is really a problem when there are no other problems to be solved.. When you are are lucky to go to nice school, get paid lots of money, and work at a job in a really fun environment, and really, compared to our standards a perfect life, when you don't have problems, you create them.. If I tried to explain the type of problems this guy is having working at Riot Games to my friends or colleagues they would think it is absolutely ridiculous. Why would he work there if he was not expecting that? I have played LoL and this is how people being friendly talk to eachother, its not about hating women or something..
I wish I had problems like that.. You can't understand how hard it is for me to comprehend leaving a place of work that seems like heaven because some small language offends you..
I know where you are coming from. I myself being from Mexico find the "political correctness" trend happening in the USA quite interesting.
I used to work for a company that had HQ in California and offices down in Mexico. The head of HR was horrified when she visited the offices in Mexico and saw the interaction between colleagues... of particular interesting to her was that people were hugging each other!. She instructed our Country Manager to ask us not to hug each other. Of course everybody laughed when this was mentioned during an internal office meeting.
It is the same problem as with the "Puto" chant of Mexicans during soccer games. Sure, literaly it is a homophogic connocation, but in practice it is used just to show animosity to the goalkeeper. It does not mean that 5000 people believe the male goalkeeper preffers to have sexual relationships with other men... they don't care.
> Sure, literaly it is a homophogic connocation, but in practice it is used just to show animosity to the goalkeeper. It does not mean that 5000 people believe the male goalkeeper preffers to have sexual relationships with other men... they don't care.
I don't understand how you can say that "puto" has a homophobic connotation but then say it's not homophobic. Your argument is the same as a child who thinks calling things they don't like "fucking gay" isn't really homophobic. Yes the thing they are calling "gay" may not have anything actually to do with homosexuality, but the practice of associating the word "gay" with negative things is homophobia.
I'm a little more sympathetic to this argument in other contexts, but gay still means gay, fag is still a word used to insult and demean non-heterosexual people.
Um, no. If I say "that movie is so gay" and you understand that as an insult, even a joking one, it's because you understand "gay" to be an insulting thing. That is homophobic. That's not a United States thing, it's a "this is literally how language works" thing.
The question really is whether the gay people think it's fine, not whether you do.
It's true that insults generally require intent, but that's different from being aware that other people find the expression insulting and continuing to use it while arguing that your use in particular isn't an insult.
La verdad es que no creo que valga la pena tratar de explicarle a gente de paises privilegiados como trabajan las culturas de nuestros paises mas pobres, hermano. Es algo que des-afortunadamente no se puede explicar, si no que se tiene que vivir. Cuando uno experiencia tantas realidades duras del mundo viviendo en un lugar tan pobre y corrupto, con opciones limitadas, rapidamente se da uno cuenta en lo que verdaderamente mas importa, y digan lo que digan, las opiniones de otras personas, lo mas maldito que sean, de verdad no son causa para molestarnos tanto. Mientras tu y tu familia esten bien, y nada te esta previniendo vivir tu vida, siempre podemos confiar que todo esta bien. Pero eso lo sabemos porque emos visto y sobrevivido situaciones mucho mas peores, y solo la experiencia puede dar ese punto de vista. Si alguien no a sabido como es tener problemas mas grandes que lo que otra personas piensan del, por supuesto que les va a costar imaginarse como le gente puede tolerar ciertas cosas, aunque para nosotros sean pequenas.
Por supuesto que siempre van haber personas que tienen malas intenciones cuando dicen palabras como "maricon", pero la diferencia entre nosotros y los de paises mas estables, es que a ellos no les vale la intencion de uno, solo ven a las propias palabras como que si usar esas partes del lenguaje fuera pecado. Como que no tomaran en cuenta la realidad que el lenguaje y las definiciones de palabras son construidas por la gente que las usa, y que cambian todo el tiempo. He vivido en los estados por muchos anos ya, y todavia no entiendo por que la cultura es asi, pero ni modo, asi es la vida.
I wholeheartedly agree with you; even having grown up in the US. I've come to realize the unimaginable hardships of people in other parts of the world. Only in a hyper-privileged country like the US can people find insignificant 'wars' to fight because they have not experienced the reality that most people historically and around the world face.
I've always wondered if people here were to live in true hardship for just one month as truly deprived people did, then magically transported back to their privileged life, would they come to realize how truly petty their squabbling over language is? And perhaps even be grateful for their station.
I'd even like to indulge a bit and say there's too much focus on how the system 'fails' while being blind to the unimaginable good it has produced by the very fact that they can sit in comfort and complain. Not enough gratitude for the suffering of others (contemporary and historical) that has brought them to this point.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I have a serious genetic disorder and raised two special needs kids. I've known plenty of genuine hardship.
I think respect as expressed via language matters.
Hardship has given me more sympathy for the suffering of others and made me somewhat more patient with certain things. But it hasn't convinced me that arguing about language is too petty to bother with.
Quite the contrary. I think demanding respectful language is a gateway to demanding equal rights.
The very reason they are taboo or sensitive words are the reason we use them to express extremity. We are violating the fragility of the term as a means of expression. It's somewhat like what extreme art or film can do, but on a much smaller scale.
If people in a culture say that they are using terms as a means of expression and don't believe they are actually homophobic, isn't it a little presumptuous to assume they are? Maybe they are, but if they otherwise don't exhibit homophobic behavior, I tend to believe they are not. Words and actions are entirely different.
Also, who should judge whether the word is 'good' or 'bad'? You? A committee? Language evolves organically, and a small cadre of privileged Westerners don't get to decide how a culture uses them. Especially if that culture otherwise doesn't condone violent or homophobic behavior.
Since I do not speak fluent Spanish, I wouldn't dare judge this specific use case.
I was merely disputing the idea that if privileged people knew real suffering, they wouldn't bother to argue about language.
My maternal grandmother came from a low level noble family. The family sold the title when they fell on hard times, which is why I am not nobility. I was homeless for about a year before I finally grasped how upper-class my mother's expectations are.
I think I fully qualify as someone from a very privileged background who has experienced real hardship, and for far more than a mere month.
I still think it's telling that an entire people that come from a country where the system functions much more poorly and suffer from a relative lack of privilege can look on in bemusement at our language games.
I think external perspectives do really make us take a step back and help us see what we are really doing.
Hardship is hardship regardless of where it's experienced, or by whom, it doesn't make it any less real, but it does take on very different flavors depending on the cultural context, and that can shape one's outlook a lot. Being in a bad spot while surrounded by examples of people that are doing well is inevitably going to be a different experience from going through hardship somewhere where everyone around you is also in a shit situation. They both suck, and I'm not about to try and compare one to the other, but it wouldn't surprise me that alone produces different results for the people experiencing the hardship.
For example, since I moved to the US ages ago, I've regularly found a lot more in common between myself (a central american) and the world views of immigrants from china, vietnam, and russia, than I have with people from the US, and it wasn't because my american friends were all super well off (most of them live paycheck to paycheck, and more than a few have dealt with homelessness, drug addiction, or involvement with other dubious activities). It's hard to describe, but it encompasses a sort of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" type of outlook that seems to form the basis of much of the thinking in these cultures. At least in my experience.
And in the case of slurs in spanish in particular, it's actually part of a broader context that includes the casual use of words that would be considered blunt insults in the west (though not necessarily slurs), as expected parts of conversation, and often times even as terms of endearment. Like, getting someone's attention by calling them the spanish equivalent of "fatso", "bastard", or "idiot" would be considered normal and non-offensive by the person receiving the remark. It's viewed in the same vein as calling someone skinny/short/tall/black/white/asian/etc, which is to say, it's treated as light-hearted mocking that doesn't really mean anything other than something to get your attention by. If a person wants to take a mild jab at you, they might call you one of the more infamous "slur" words like puto/pendejo/maricon/idiota/etc, but the terms in this group vary wildly by region, and they're generally not considered to be any more severe than calling someone an ass here. If you really want to get under the skin of someone in spanish, you have to basically insult their mothers or physically threaten them somehow. Basically, so long as you aren't literally threatening a person's family or physical safety, it's not really taken seriously very much, and I believe this is largely because your physical safety can very realistically be in serious danger in those parts of the world. For example, it's been several years, and I still find it odd to not hear gunshots going off outside my house at night every now and then; which is weird because it's not something you'd normally associate with a comforting sound that would remind someone of "home".
That being said, latin-america is huge, and I don't claim to speak for all the countries there, but there is a decent amount of overlap in the cultures.
While homeless, I camped someplace where hearing gunshots happened, though not, say, nightly.
My father grew up in the Great Depression and fought in two wars. My mother grew up in Germany during WW2 and it's aftermath.
Let me suggest that cultural misunderstanding and difficulty adequately translating a word is universal and not simply a rich versus poor thing.
Let me also suggest that if language mattered so very little to you because your hardships have made it clear to you that this is trivial and not worth arguing over, then you would have dropped it already. You yourself disprove the idea that people who have really suffered wouldn't bother with such a minor detail as it's unimportant.
You admitted that you don't speak fluent spanish, yet you decided to put words in my mouth about a post I wrote entirely in spanish, that was written that way because it was directed very specifically at the poster I replied to. I never said language was a "rich versus poor thing", and I never belittled your hardships, especially since the first thing I did in the post you're responding to was validate them, yet you interpret this as us having an argument: why? If anything, it is that very interpretation that proves the entire point I've been making about the cultures picking their battles very differently. I might not see why any of these things need to be met with such emotional resistance, but it is clear that some people do, and that's the only difference I was pointing at. Everything else I said was an attempt at having a discussion clarifying why such a difference might arise.
And if in a bit of irony, I'm misinterpreting you, then please do clarify, cause I might be fairly assimilated, but I'm still not perfect. I can't even begin to describe how many egg shells I regularly walk on trying to talk with americans to this day still.
I don't think I've said anything about your post in Spanish. A third party replied to that post fully in English and I responded to that.
Let me suggest this is a misunderstanding.
I haven't said anything was taboo. I merely said that people who have suffered can still believe use of language is worth arguing over and that your willingness to continue this argument aligns better with that assertion than with the assertion that if you've known real suffering, you wouldn't bother to argue such a thing.
I don't believe I've put words in your mouth. Yet, you feel disrespected at the idea that I might do so. Disrespected and affronted. And you feel compelled to defend your words.
FWIW, I did run your comment through Google translate since I can only pick out a few words here and there. I think it likely butchered it and I believe it also cut it off somewhere in the middle.
It struck me as both impassioned and compassionate. I wish I had a proper English version of it to consider. But my desire to enjoy your thoughts seemed too trivial to remark upon and it struck me as egomaniacal hubris to impose upon you with such a request, so I didn't bother.
I'm cool with that. Misunderstandings happen more often than people like to admit, even when speaking the same language; the interpretation of language seems to be universally subjective and particular to the person interpreting it. You never know for sure how something will be received until you throw it out there.
> your willingness to continue this argument aligns better with that assertion than with the assertion that if you've known real suffering, you wouldn't bother to argue such a thing
I agree with that, because I never argued to the contrary, like the person that first responded to me might've. I believe it's most likely the product of an entire country/population suffering without any sources of comparison nearby that can produce a certain cultural cynicism/stoicism that habitually overlooks a lot of things. There will always be exceptions when it comes to individuals from these cultures, but I think it's at least worth exploring why some debates that are popular in the US right now likely wouldn't rise up to the level of national discourse in countries like china/russia/colombia/guatemala/etc anytime soon (dubious political regimes aside).
> I don't believe I've put words in your mouth.
The notion of word translations ever being suggested as a "rich vs poor thing" was a pretty notable one, but since I just explained my position a bit more, it's fine. Hopefully it's clear that it's a far more nuanced observation than "americans are spoiled" or something like that.
> Yet, you feel disrespected at the idea that I might do so. Disrespected and affronted
One thing I've learned in interacting with people from a variety of different cultures, is that their ideas of what's considered "respectful" or "disrespectful" are often quite different from each other. In this case for example, I would never use the word "disrespected" to describe myself in this situation. I actually think "confusion" would suit my interpretation of the whole language debate a lot better, which is why I usually try to respond with clarifications of some sort (which I can see how that can come off as "defending my words", but I'm usually much more concerned with being understood than I am with defending any particular point of view). In my mind, "disrespect" is something I associate mostly with gang members getting upset and overreacting about trivial nonsense. But that could just be me!
but I think it's at least worth exploring why some debates that are popular in the US right now likely wouldn't rise up to the level of national discourse in countries like china/russia/colombia/guatemala/etc anytime soon (dubious political regimes aside).
That's a completely different sentiment from (roughly) "Hey, brother, the truth is that folks in privileged countries simply can't comprehend the lived experience of those from poor countries where corruption is the norm."
I would say that you need a certain amount of cultural capital and baseline material wealth to have the resources to spare for certain things that might be deemed luxuries or trivial details when you are really struggling to simply survive. That doesn't mean they actually are trivial.
There is also the complicating detail that sometimes people argue about trivialities because it is vastly less threatening than wrestling with the real problems.
We can discuss such further if you like. But I'm not interested in being perceived as arguing it in the sense of fighting about it or being confrontational.
This is to be expected as people get closer to equality - the more low hanging fruit we pick, the smaller the gains will be. But does that mean we should stop shooting for equality as "close enough" because it's not on the same magnitude as ending slavery?
>does that mean we should stop shooting for equality as "close enough"
the question is, which definition of "equality" are we even aiming for: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? In reality, most people would likely agree with you that we should aim for "equality", but there are some pretty big fundamental differences about what people mean when they say that. Equal opportunity inherently means that we have to be ok with accepting less than equal outcomes if the process is the same for everybody; while equal outcomes mean we have to be ok with the possibility of favoring more opportunities for some people over others. These two interpretations of the same exact word are as close to mutually exclusive as you can get, so it's no surprise that there's so much tension around it. Doesn't mean people don't want "equality" though, it just means that the way they view the world led them to a different (equally defendable) interpretation of what it should mean.
Another way of thinking about political correctness is respect for your fellow workers. When a too large percentage of women have encountered regular harassment or rape, having an office environment where that becomes a joke is insulting, disregarding, and painful. Why do that when it's just as easy to communicate without it?
Would you say the same thing if it were the N-word? Of course not. Because you have misogynistic biases that make you more accepting of rape jokes. That doesn't mean rape jokes are better, it just means they are more tolerated.
apples and oranges, there is no 'N-word' in Mexico or Colombia.. I remember when H+M had that fiasco when they had a black kids wearing a shirt that said something about being a monkey.. here in Colombia 'mono' or monkey is what you call white people.. And if I see a black man dropping his wallet in the street, nobody would think it is strange if I yelled at him and said "Hey BLACK MAN, you dropped your wallet!"
"when you don't have problems, you create them" - no. Just because there aren't any of the problems you mentioned, does not mean that this isn't a problem. Should we just stop caring about anything that is wrong so long as there are things that are more wrong?
"The head of Communications said that we were edgy, and that if we as Riot started chipping away those edges, we would become shapeless and bland, like EA or Blizzard. I responded that if we told everyone starting today there could be no more rape jokes in presentations and talks, it would still be a multi-year effort for us to no longer be edgy.”
By the sounds of it Riot is in a very deep culture hole. I hope they can turn it around in the years to come.
Riot isn't regarded by anyone as edgy, because they police their players speech, apparently more strongly than they do internal speech. The most common refrain in the reddit thread on this article is "Wait, they thought they were edgy?"
Edginess isn't even a successful way to make games. Remember Kixeye? They don't seem to be a mobile games leader despite their edgy marketing and their racism lawsuits. Rockstar Games is like the only major game developer that embraces edginess, and even they have matured in recent years.
Clearly there was a culture clash and that can take a terrible toll on a person - if you've invested a lot into a company should you adapt to them, even if it's against what you believe is right? At what point does the compensation or sunk costs make adapting easier? I'm sure that's more common (and not always related to toxicity) than people think.
The head of the company made an incredibly poor play on words by mocking a popular anti-rape slogan, by anyone's judgement. Sure, it's perhaps a sales slogan, but context matters. And by this account it's pretty clear what he was doing and what he was saying. That being said, this is the only account I've read and there is always another side to the story. But it takes a lot of guts to stand up for what you believe in and the author clearly believed Mark crossed his line. Right or wrong, bravo for not being swallowed up.
the whole thing sounds crazy but I'm genuinely confused why the author didn't take a stand at the crazy offensive statements that were shared earlier in the article. is it because the female colleagues took issue?
if someone at my place of work used some of the language about my wife, etc, I would be trying to get it on audio and have that person terminated.
It is hard and risky to take a stand against the prevailing culture. I completely understand it when people hesitate.
There are techniques to do it less confrontationally, as suggested by the poster elsethread who urged giving people the "opportunity for personal growth". I'd argue that the author of the article did an admirable job of handling things, under extreme duress -- even though he was not ultimately successful.
There's also a place for in-your-face obnoxious confrontation (e.g. ACT-UP), civil disobedience (breaking the law when the law is unjust), and even violence (American Revolution). None of those are the easy path.
While I agree with everything you've written, it seems like taking a stand against the executive would require a lot more courage than wrecking someone lower in the ranks.
That's not what the article says at all. It says that 25% of the staff fired in the year prior to the experiment would have been given the "toxic" label had they been subject to the experiment rather than fired for whatever reason. Most of the employees labeled "toxic" were, as you might expect, younger and junior, with less experience in "the working world". The article suggests nothing about some huge portion of Riot's "OG" staff being fired by this policy.
> Riot looked at the preceding 12 months of gameplay of every employee and discovered there was a correlation between in-game and in-Riot toxicity. They determined that 25% of employees who had been let go in the previous year were players with unusually high in-game toxicity
Note that the article you cite also reports Riot as being one of the best places to work (according to Fortune) and indeed explicitly makes the claim that it is not a toxic environment.
It sounds more like the wanted to reduce the turn-over of their hiring process by pre-screening candidates for behavior, rather than dealing with a systemic problem in their organization.
It could be that the results of the re:work article were glossing over unaddressed toxic behavior (i.e. crude language) but it could also be that they were targeting different kinds of toxic behavior.
Now, I wouldn't use the kind of language described by the OP, nor do I think I would feel especially comfortable working in an environment that did. However, I can conceive of other kinds of behavior (with regard to playing the game) that they might have been looking for, including:
* being a "lone wolf" and generally not cooperating with teammates
* persistently blaming others for one's own failings
* taking undue credit for successes
* rage quiting, or otherwise being a sore loser
* trolling others rather than actually playing the game
It doesn't surprise me that this comes straight from the top leadership.
I worked in varies companies (maybe too many). But there was 1 things that was always clear: the company culture always reflects the top leadership.
I also once wanted to change something within a company, and had the support of various other managers. We were all pushing hard for the best of the entire company. But then I learned something: you can't change the top management, and you can't change the top managements opinion. Either accept it, or move on.
All of us moved on to other jobs, and the company went bust a few years later.
When I read the recent stories about Riot Games, I knew it was trickled down from top management. It always is. They define the company culture more than you would imagine.
Does anyone have a good reason for why workers in the video game industry should not be unionized? Because if Susan Fowler and wage-fixing don't convince you that the tech industry as a whole shouldn't have labor unions, what about all of these horror stories coming out of games?
"On a personal level, I feel very alone and "unsafe" at work, having to watch what I say around whom and always be filtering what I say based on how it might be misinterpreted or misused."
An interesting quote by the author, referring to himself. His tale went the long way around to being in total understanding with his former colleagues and employers, except he still seems to be viewing himself in a somewhat special, if not superior, light.
He 1) gave his colleagues examples of how he thought their behavior should be, 2) gave them every opportunity to change their behavior to what he expected, 3) challenged them on what their standards of humor were, 4) brought in others on his concerns to witness them, 5) had a fear of potential liability or reprisal over something he felt could not be compromised on, 6) decided that he wasn't a good culture fit.
I don't know that the irony ever struck him along the way. And I wonder, did he start out wanting to be martyred, or was it a decision he made somewhere further down the line?
I wouldn't say that having a problem with rape jokes at big presentations that make it into the recruiting material qualifies as "extreme sensitivity on sexual jokes"...
Do you think anybody in that riot story thought rape was fine ? Either the guy that did the joke, or the HR that wrote it on the slide ?
It is a lousy joke, with bad taste, and it sure would offend anyone who had any real life experience of a rape ( like probably half the joke woukd probably hurt somebody somewhere for some reason) . But that’s all it is.
I don’t think this should be confused with actual sexual harrasment ( which maybe also took place at Riot, i don’t know).
Just the rap music that isn't from a children's movie, harmless showing off of mostly meaningless wordplay, or a fusion with pop focused on subjects like love and breakups. Maybe certain politically woke songs will be tolerated, if they're by white rappers.
I'd say there's certainly a lot more to take away from this article then just that. It is a specific example for how Riot may inadvertently be harming their culture through blindspots management may not realize. It demonstrates how personal values collide with leadership and the challenges of standing by our values. Most importantly, it highlights how people are affected and hurt in this kind of environment.
I am confused as to why this specific issue has to be so slathered in a gross layer of politics and 'progressive' thinking.
Tons of people in the thread (as usual) are discussing it as a left vs right, men vs women, libertarian vs authoritarian, young vs old, etc. kind of issue. Why the fuck can't we all just agree that what they said was inappropriate and warranted professional consequences? Everyone deserves basic human decency and a professional attitude in their workplace, regardless of demographic, and thus it is silly to have the first sentence of your complaint be "As a white man..." or "As a woman..." To do so is to constantly compare the value of someone's experience over other experiences, when the answer is too obvious for this to be necessary.
If you were talking about society or public policy it would make more sense I suppose, but this is not a society, it's a game company with a terrible culture. I think part of it might be that HNers (myself included, to be honest) like to hear themselves talk and have a lot to say that some of these comments come about.
> There was more talk about culture and some people being too sensitive. The head of Legal spoke up again, saying that it wasn’t that hearing guys say the stupid stuff they did all day made her sad or upset, it just made her want to punch them in the throat because she was sick of having to hear it all the time. I really liked that part.
^ Isn't it hypocritical to crusade against certain types of insensitive speech and yet enjoy casual references to violence against males?
I'd like to ask a provocative question: if this was always the culture at Riot, why are people who joined the company surprised by it? Would it be wrong for people to self-select into a workplace that was tolerant of such jokes, knowing that it would not be totally inclusive?
At some point if you have enough employees leadership needs to grow the hell up - but it doesn't exactly surprise me to learn that game developers use language at work that anyone with gamer friends has certainly heard in private.
Most people are going to assume certain baseline standards at a large company. Maybe it’s not some big conservative financial firm but you’d be excused for thinking things like rape jokes are universally unapproved.
How would you know before taking the job that that was the culture? Would you expect it to come up in the interview somehow? People are generally on good behaviour when candidates are being shown around (which aptly emphasises that they know certain behaviour is wrong)
It's clear to me that there are two distinct camps in scenarios like this:
There's one camp (camp A) whose cultural norms contain offensive practices to those outside of the culture, and another camp (camp B) who perceives those norms at face value, without context and intent, for their offense. Another poster here used The F Word (South Park) as a great example of this.
> This behavior of male-on-male aggression seemed to be a mechanism of asserting control.
I don't know where Barry gets this, and it's written like a National Geographic-esque piece of a man trying to understand the actions and intents of animals in the Serengeti. He doesn't "get" them, cannot establish trust, and as a result can't influence anyone in this piece's mind about how these actions are perceived by others outside of camp A.
> now I am having to speak to you like an exasperated camp counselor.
This is reinforced by statements like this. This isn't edifying. This is belittling, and completely ineffective. Barry's downfall here is that he believes this is "the long game, and slow and steady would win the race." He's correct, but his execution is fruitless.
Instead, what about trying to befriend these people, and then have down to earth dialogues such as, "I'm not trying to be a buzzkill, but maybe we could tone it down with the rape stuff, my dudes. It's kinda not cool."
I'm sure there are better methods for getting the idea across, but ultimately you change people's hearts and minds by appealing to them and winning them over.
>I don't know where Barry gets this, and it's written like a National Geographic-esque piece of a man trying to understand the actions and intents of animals in the Serengeti.
I hate this trend. I don't have to agree with people to understand them from their own frame of reference. But it often makes me feel like an outsider to do something as simple as disagree with my southern relatives on political points without assuming conspiracy theories about their motivations and hating the core of their essence over it.
Here's a less charged example: The NY Times released a video about the late bodybuilder and internet personality Zyzz yesterday. He was simultaneously inspiring and a downright terrible role model. The vast majority of people that like him know that and easily separate the whey from the chaff (positivity = good, steroids = dumb). There can be a lot of light-heartness, sarcasm and trolling on fitness parts of the internet. It was all taken at face value, stapled to existing media narratives, and shoved in front of a huge audience. I feel like, at some point, most people trying to share an understanding of others online are thick, not really trying, or actively malicious. It was a pretty depressing video (especially because the angle of the piece was to pick apart kids in their teens/early twenties trying to figure out life, that made the mistake of doing so online).
The entire industry and gaming culture in general has been having the "let's tone down the rape jokes, guys" conversation for years and years. At this point if it's part of your corporate culture in 2018 then it means it's something you value.
Of course from an organizational perspective, it's not sufficient to address this in interpersonal relationships. My bottom line is that if you're going to attempt this, which is more relevant for most people, that you can't expect to belittle people and think you're going to "win" them over.
Well let's be clear - Barry is a product manager. It's not really his area of expertise to change an entire culture, and arguably it shouldn't have been his problem. So it's hard to criticize him for his attempts to improve their culture. At the end of the day though - once he found out the culture was taking its lead from the founder & CEO you kind of know you just have to get out of there. There's nothing a product manager is going to be able to do to improve the culture whilst there are senior people in the organisation propagating it.
From virtue signaling to virtue resigning. I wonder what's the next step, virtue self-immolation?
Let's keep giving berth to that kind of sensitivity in the work place and very soon, all the people will be exactly the same, bland, smooth, completely passive people.
The creative, the geniuses of this world are always full of spikes, full of defects, against the norm. Well, I guess we will just have to do without them from now on...
There's standing up for your value and there's drama. This is drama. This is "look at how good I am". You stand up for your values by going to the guy and tell him "you're an asshole for joking about that, and since I don't work for assholes, I'm gone". That is standing up for your values. Don't you think?
The drama is the blog post, the length, the minute details of everything, like if it was so big, so important. It's just a guy who said a stupid joke. If you feel so strongly, confront him for real, not with a bland "it's a problem" and then write a 5000 words blog post about it. Go tell him he's a piece of shit, something the guy could actually use to adjust his behavior. My 2 cents.
> ...and very soon, all the people will be exactly the same, bland, smooth, completely passive people.
As opposed to the brave people who dynamically and forcefully sit quietly by as asshats bake offensive rape jokes into company culture?
How can someone who is against being too sensitive argue against criticism, anyway? You should be like, “Fuck Yeah, bring it on!” Instead we get this sniveling whining.
Not sure where you're going with that, but anyway. If someone is an ass, confront him, don't quit and go whining on your blog trying to look good, is all I'm saying.
>By publicly resigning and publishing why, he's literally confronting them in the most effective way possible.
It wasn't public though. From the post: "I chose to leave quietly in February 2014, and not publicly state why I left."
He didn't say anything until now. If he was confronting it don't you think he should have done so in 2014 instead of almost 5 years later and after Cecilia D’Anastasio’s Kotaku article? This seems more like a means to distance himself from ever working at Riot.
Not really effective- it's the most confrontational way, and the most divisive, but I doubt it will really change anyone's minds. Instead you'll get zealots from both sides of the issue yelling down any reasonably conciliatory approach as they use it to further their own agendas.
I think I was pretty clear. Don't be so afraid of confrontation that you won't actually parse a difficult response. If there's something you don't understand let me know and I'll explain it to you.
If we believe the OP's story (I don't see why we shouldn't) then the asses were confronted, face-to-face, at the time, were they not?
That does not mean you should "rape" them, which in this analogy would either be forcing them to buy from you, or forcing them to work for you, without consent. That is obviously not going to happen.
It just means that you need to keep trying to get to yes, because you're going to hear no a lot, and some of those nos will later become yeses.
Just because you interpreted that saying as being related to rape doesn't make it a bad saying. It likely just means you're unfamiliar with sales, and reading something else into it. If you do a search for: no doesn't mean no, you will find a ton of sales material on it. For example off the top of a search:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gtyq6Lyt5Vc
https://www.amazon.com/Doesnt-Always-Mean-Influencing-Cooper...