"misogyny" meaning... being a misogynist? being labeled a misogynist? a documented history of sexual harassment? being a man raised in Western society? using misogynist language? the "B-word" or the "C-word"? talking over another panelist? forcible rape? eating miso soup? being socially awkward? getting called out on Twitter? having pictures of half-naked women in your slide deck, as a build-up to a joke? trying to pick up women?

I would hope that we all agree on "no misogyny" as an ideal, but that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What is the actionable threshold? Both personally, and for your community? (Rhetorical question.)

The reader might say "now you're infantilizing convention attendees" and I don't disagree. Over-specifying behavioral standards is indeed infantilizing. But I would say that, to the degree you refuse to specify acceptable behavior, you waive your right to criticize arbitrary action taken by the management.

I can't tell whether we agree or not. The idea that misogyny is such a third-rail issue that anything you can six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connect to it is lethal? That's (to me) repellant, and if Crockford is being uninvited from this conference because of his "strong stuff in programs" bit, that's ridiculous --- in the sense of, "worthy of ridicule".

That's my point: these things are judgement calls. There aren't simple rules. To me, sound judgement suggests that making allusions to physical strength as part of a metaphor about code is perfectly all right (you might not like the metaphor, but you might not like lots of things Crockford says).

I didn't mean that it's a third-rail issue, but rather that different communities (and the individuals within) can have completely different standards of what constitutes "misogyny" and it's better to have discussion about it beforehand rather than after an incident, and it's a mistake to assume judgment calls are obvious. If they were, this thread wouldn't exist, right?

Fundamentally, I'm wary of any argument that relies upon "sound judgment" when we see time and again that there is no consensus on what that is. It's like when you see "clearly" in a math paper. OBVIOUSLY it isn't clear to me, otherwise I wouldn't be reading it.

Online communities have values re: misogyny that range in permissiveness from "ban men entirely" (your 'safe space') to the 4chan /b/ model. You can see that there is indeed a spectrum of opinion and that the entire spectrum is dense with examples, and surely everyone thinks theirs is the most reasonable in that given circumstance.

In the extreme 'safe space' model, someone like Crockford would be right out for (e.g.) the implicit misogyny in reflexively valuing masculine physical strength over more typically feminine attributes. You could counter "but the community is not that kind of safe space and doesn't require that level of metaphorical precision" (and I would agree with you entirely) but then we're having a discussion about our common expectations around a community's values.

You can decide, in your experience, that your particular set of biases reflect the zeitgeist. You can conclude "my ruling will alienate the least amount of people" or "this action will give people the sense that justice has been done" with whatever ethical or societal minmaxing strategy you choose. The core task is this: we live in a world that includes all of white nationalists, misogynists, deeply traumatized people who feel pain simply from reading certain words, and all manner of non-normative people; who are you going to exclude, and will you do it implicitly or explicitly? "Just the shitty, grudge-holding radical feminists on Twitter" is a low-hanging fruit, there are plenty other groups to consider.

That is not my counter regarding Crockford. Rather, my judgement tells me that the notion that physical strength is inherently "masculine" in some way that excludes non-masculine people is nonsensical. I don't accept it, and so the whole argument falls apart.