Friday, January 17, 2014

Third Law

This image was posted in our company-wide group Skype chat earlier today, and my immediate reaction was anger towards the person who posted it. It's ignorant, it's stupid, and it's offensive.

I don't know how to bring it up with him. I can't think of a way to phrase it that won't get me immediately dismissed, or actively ridiculed1. I wonder how many women would have to work here before it no longer seemed like appropriate workplace banter?

I'm so aware that I'm in the minority on this. It's so easy to dismiss this shit as harmless - and yeah, nobody in the office is being directly hurt by it - but at some point we, as decent human beings, need to have the fucking empathy to realise that there's something deeply suspect about the "logic" in that image.

The guy who posted it has daughters; is he okay with perpetuating this idea, that tells them, "every emotion you feel is excessive, unnecessary and an inconvenience to the rest of us"?

I think the most disappointing thing, though, is that I wrote this instead of calling him out on it.

1 There's a not-insignificant percentage of the workforce here that, while maybe not an entire generation above me, are certainly from a different era (or at least perspective). The idea of confronting some of them on this reminds me of probably the most heated conversation I ever had with my dad, about why he found Richard Branson's dressing up as an air stewardess funny.

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