[pct-l] ULA and Anna

[Thelma Fredricksen]

Nicely explained Eric.
Thelma



On Oct 19, 2012, at 10:21 AM, Eric Lee <saintgimp at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Matt wrote:
>> 
> To all offended parties write an email to ULA inform them that you are too
> prudish to be alive in the current century!
>> 
> 
> I'd like to clarify what this is really about.  The person who originally
> started this thread did not say, "I'm offended because ULA tricked me into
> seeing part of a breast!"  I don't think anyone has said anything along
> those lines.  I'm sure that all of us here are adults and have either a
> healthy appreciation for the female form or at least indifference.  What
> *we* see isn't the issue.  The issue was stated clearly by the original
> poster: "It offends me because it dismisses and disregards the independence
> and empowerment and badassery of ALL who hike the trail."
> 
> This is a familiar theme to me because we're having a lot of conversations
> about this in my field of software engineering.  Recently there's been this
> phenomenon called "brogrammers" where young male programmers try to promote
> a frat-boy-style atmosphere in their work environments.  This leads to
> head-scratching things like guys inserting pictures of topless women into
> the slide decks for their presentations at technical conferences, "just to
> make sure everyone's still awake."  Doing something like that is
> unprofessional and offensive; not because "OMG someone made me see a boobie"
> but because it implies a profound disregard for and lack of respect of women
> peers who are sitting right there in the audience.  You can't turn the
> female body into the punchline of your tasteless joke (and by association,
> all women into sex objects) and then turn around and claim that you value,
> respect, and appreciate the contributions that your female peers are trying
> to make.  It's clear to everyone what's really going on.
> 
> A lot of these guys protest, "But I didn't mean to offend anyone!  It's just
> a joke!  It's funny!"  I'd like to tell them the same thing I tell my kids:
> it doesn't matter that you "didn't mean" to hurt your sibling with that
> stick you're waving around - the only fact that matters is that your sibling
> got hurt.  It happened and you're responsible for the damage.  It doesn't
> matter that men "don't mean" to devalue women when they make stupid jokes -
> it still happens.  Look, when I was a kid, Polish jokes were funny too . . .
> as long as you weren't Polish.
> 
> So, to bring it back around to the topic at hand - ULA put together a
> gratuitous joke at the expense of women.  By doing that, they broadly imply
> that they think the vast majority of their customer base is male and that
> they don't take any female customers very seriously, i.e. that very few
> women are credible long-distance backpackers.  I grant that that's probably
> not what they *meant* to say, but that's what in fact they communicated.
> It's not about whether we saw certain body parts or not; it's about the
> disenfranchisement of women hikers.
> 
> So in summary, there's a huge fundamental difference between, say, coming
> across a nude swimmer at a hot spring and the video that ULA posted.  One is
> just normal life (yes, women have breasts, get over it) and the other is a
> cruel joke.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
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