The misogyny of many of those who badgered Ellen Pao out of her CEO position at Reddit was about as subtle as an explosive fart at a dinner party. And it’s not exactly difficult to find evidence of widespread racism directed at her as well.
There was the whole “Chairman Pao” thing, for example, and the blatantly racist “humor” that it unleashed:
And, yes, it gets even worse than that (link very much NSFW).
But some of Pao’s more, well, imaginative detractors, it’s Pao’s defenders who are the real racists and misogynists.
A blogger by the name of Blixkrogg, a self-described “rational freak,” puts it this way:
Ellen Pao was ousted for incompetence. It didn’t matter whether she was Asian-American or had a vagina. Excusing incompetence and having a lower level of expectation just because someone’s Asian or a woman is condescending prejudice. Arguing that she should have stayed CEO despite her competence is the actual racism and misogyny.
Also, black is white and night is day and the car alarm going off outside my apartment is not annoying.
So the #RedditRevolt was about “incompetence?”
If you want to see the real incompetence at Reddit, look at the way in which the powers that be at Reddit allowed their site to be used to disseminate child porn and stolen celebrity nudes. Look at the toxic culture of hate and harassment that their tolerance of blatantly hateful subreddits has allowed to flourish — so much so that white supremacists have started using Reddit as a hunting ground for new members.
Pao’s detractors aren’t angry about the toxic wasteland that Reddit has become — and in some ways always has been. They’re angry at Pao because of the tiny steps she was taking to try to clean up the worst of that mess — by banning the FatPeopleHate subreddit and a few others that were actively harassing people.
The powers that be at Reddit have now made it abundantly clear that they can be bullied by the hate mob that their policies have essentially created. Setting that precedent seems like a pretty incompetent thing to do, if you ask me.
@Panda
Tabby Cat for president! Down with capitalism and catnip for all!
It’s about ethics in something something…
They aren’t trolling her very well . I mean the “NSFW” picture obviously was a doctored picture. You’d think they would have something she actually did/said to embarrass her instead of making something up out of thin air.
Sorry to hijack the thread again but it seems to have died out a bit anyway.
Wonder what the MRAs will make of this:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/this-woman-has-become-a-social-media-icon-after-allegedly-ki#.mrmDZklmk
Surprisingly, they haven’t taken over the comment section.
@Sunny,
wow, what a story.
It’s ironic that she killed him for repeatedly trying to force her into prostitution. Often when Turkish women flee abusive marriages, their children are told that their mother has run away to become a prostitute, many women are subsequently murdered by family members to ‘restore honor’.
I think the fact he was trying to pimp her out is what will gain her public sympathy more than the fact he was beating her.
The only way the MRAs will go near this is if they can convince themselves that she’s lying.
Hey, you have to admit, most guys like her husband deserve multiple deaths. /jk
OH SHIT I READ THAT WRONG.
Excuse: It’s 2am and I went to bed at 5am yesterday(?) and woke up at 9am so, I mean, pfft.
This seemed pertinent:
So Long, Reddit http://zite.to/1SiSx7E
@ This Handle – Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off as abrasive, but everything that judge is reported as having said made me think of Dolores Umbridge.
I don’t think any therapist worth a damn would consider foot-tapping in a child to be a severe indication of anything, and for children to be compared to Manson and branded as some sinister, wicked maladapts, without anyone apparently asking the children what they think about any of the stuff that affects them… it just strikes me as totally unethical.
I don’t care how many therapists, lawyers, or courtroom officials thought the handling of the case was appropriate. There’s an entire institution that continues to use electric shock collars on kids for much the same behaviours, despite legal interventions. I wouldn’t assume that the treatment of these kids is ok just because multiple adults had to have made the same failings.
@Mockingbird,
thanks for the link, that was a good article. I will be interested to see if Reddit degenerates into 4chan.
@sn0rk
Reddit’s been worse than 4Chan for years. At least 4Chan removes and bans child porn without media/law enforcement intervention.
To be perfectly honest, if I were in that situation then yes, I would allow it to happen. Because if it comes down to a choice between
a)having my children jailed, demeaned and forced to spend time with me or
b)them thinking I’m an awful person
the second is always the preferable option
Over here courts recognise that once kids develop a certain level of autonomy they’ll “vote with their feet” about contact anyway.
In cases of parental alienation it’s obviously tricky. Where very young children are involved the courts will often leave the child with the alienating parent but order that when the child is old enough the child is given the court file, and can then make up their own mind about whether they want to get back in touch with the alienated parent.
That’s obviously a less than desirable practice (“Happy Birthday. Oh by the way your mum/dad didn’t really run off with the milkman.”) but it’s making the best of a horrible situation.
Regarding the Michigan case: There are obviously some people who should not have children, and it appears that at least one of the parents in this case qualifies for that category. (I have learned over the years that newspaper articles etc. are often seriously inaccurate — reasonable inferences drawn from them can be wildly wrong.) However, the judge in this case seems to have lost her temper and gone seriously wrong, almost to tantrum level — it seems as if, with a bit of creativity and a lot less anger, it should have been possible to come up with a much better solution. We pay judges for — among other things — not getting frustrated and angry easily.
Regarding Ellen Pao, I read the Vanity Fair article from 2013 about the problems she and her husband are having (http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletcher-ellen-pao). I am inclined to believe that her sex discrimination case is by and large justified — Silicon Valley sometimes seems like a cesspool of Men Behaving Badly. But this remark struck me::
Think about this for a moment. $20 million for Ellen Pao means having a fourth palatial home or having his-and-hers Lear jets. For the Walmart woman, it may well mean being able to send your kid to the dentist or being able to afford a reliable car that won’t break down when you drive through a bad part of town coming home at 2 AM. Think about the massive amount of condescension, sense of entitlement, and lack of ability to see Walmart workers as people that this comment demonstrates. People like that feel that the value of humans can be measured by their salaries — that they are actually WORTH a thousand times as much as a Walmart worker.
Obviously the abuse Pao has suffered is outrageous. But is anyone shocked that the guys on Reddit reacted like this? I have never visited Reddit myself — I don’t particularly enjoy swimming in a cesspool — and just about all I know about Reddit comes from reading WHTM. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that Pao took the job knowing that Reddit is a cesspool, and that she took it mainly for money and power, which makes her complicit in the shit Reddit does. I can’t think that she seriously believed she was going to clean the place up beyond maybe curtailing some of the worst of the worst. I don’t believe for a moment that she was naive enough to think she could swim in a cesspool and come out smelling like freshly picked lilacs, let alone that she could make the cesspool smell like lilacs.
@GOSJM – I’ll agree with you about the attorney’s classism in not recognizing the scale of $20,000 to the life of a Walmart employee. It’s still appropriate to file a discrimination lawsuit where discrimination has occurred, though. None of that is Pao’s fault.
And Pao probably did know the nature of Reddit before she stepped into the job role, but the fact that she managed to ban *any* of the harassing subreddits in her 7 months is something she can be proud of. I don’t think she reasonably expected to get rid of all the vile racism, etc that makes up a huge swath of Reddit, but she got rid of groups that were specifically harassing people, so that is something.
She smells better than any of Reddit’s other higher-ups in my estimation.
“It’s still appropriate to file a discrimination lawsuit where discrimination has occurred, though.”
“She smells better than any of Reddit’s other higher-ups in my estimation.”
Yeah, I’ll buy both of those comments. Sex discrimination should cost you, even if your victim is not perfect.
But smelling better than Reddit’s other higher-ups is not a very high bar. if someone told me that I smelled better than Paul Elam or Dean Esmay, I’m not sure I’d tale it as a compliment.
And the whole mess, I think, is a sad commentary on the sort of people our economic system has chosen to reward with huge wealth. I’m not disposed to give Pao MUCH credit for pumping a gallon or two of filth out of a huge cesspool.
I am. At least she tried. Every other CEO just wants to make it worse.
I’m not sure I believe she even tried. I think she was enacting edicts from on high, and was put in the position specifically because they knew the racist, misogynistic shitheels that are their customer base would heap all the blame on her for everything.
My interpretation is that she tried to shut down a sub that was likely to cause legal problems, so the idea that she did it out of exemplary motives is on shaky ground.
@GOSJM: Maybe, maybe not. But I think many of us will agree, that, regardless, Mrs. Pao still did do a good thing, and was unfairly harassed for it…..