Sae wrote:What I got from the two videos was less people connecting over shared interests and hooking up but more a guy hitting on women who did not want to be hit on and not taking 'no' for an answer, which does fit within sexual harassment,
Absolutely, and I don't have any objection to that. She was harrassed, and she has every right to talk about that. Criticising how she chooses to talk about it isn't criticising her for talking about it.
even if it's not a 'professional' setting, it wasn't one where dating was a premise either
debatable, but...
Absolutely.and 'no' means 'no'.
The former is more like how two friends of mine met, who're now married, as they met at a convention & sparked,
Exactly why I say "debatable". Conventions are places where lots of folk meet. Coupling up is essentially a social function of conferences even if that's not a spoken thing.
Hmmm... if by "the latter" you mean "harrassment", that also goes for singles clubs.but the latter are still frowned upon at things like conventions and sounds like against the conduct of that conference.
As I feel like if the former, it wouldn't call for an organiser to emphasise a rule they have for conduct or for a woman to say she felt harassed even after communicating she was uncomfortable, getting further advances and finding it happened to other women too.
Exactly. Coupling up is the unspoken social function and not to be taken for granted or expected uncritically.
I feel, yes, maybe naivity on it being a 'professional' environment. I've never been (plus I don't think I am good enough to call myself a polyglot), but from the sounds of it, it's more for ethusiasts, hence 'polyglot', than for professionals, but I will give some benefit of the doubt that 'conference' denotes a more formal function, whereas it sounds more like a convention to me.
That's exactly it -- it's a convention. Maybe I should have said that instead of using the term "pretend conference"...!
Though I still wouldn't expect harassment in either case.
Absolutely. And to make it absolutely clear, I'm definitely not defending the guy who she was talking about there.
And from the sounds of it, she's not calling out the organisers or discouraging people going to the event and sounds like she had a great time, made friends and intends to return.
...and yet, the video is called What REALLY happened at the Polyglot Conference.. and the thumbnail is a shot that doesn't appear to have been taken in the same spot as the video, labelled with Cholula 2022 and "polyglot drama", with what is either a still from a totally different video or her striking a pose, either way chosen for dramatic effect.
There's so much wrapped round YouTube stuff that it's actually quite difficult to take the message outside of the content.
All of which I agree with.It sounds more like calling out bad behaviour and the organisers trying to emphasise it's inappropriate and her suggesting how their rules of conduct could be more visisble, but ultimately something like sexual harassment should just be common sense...but at least more visibility accounts for where it isn't.
However, in fairness, I am taking it at impressions, the organiser's PSA and taking her at her word & experience and it sounds like you're coming from your own experience at these sorts of things and taking it less at face value in that it might not be as bad as presented.
And there's the thing: YouTube makes things seem bigger than they are.
[/quote]But if dude was harassing her and other women trying to pick them up when they're not wanting it, then obviously, I don't think that's welcome anywhere.
...and you finish with that, but she finished with a drunken fight in a restaurant.
And that's the thing. Putting those two things in the same video was a bad step. She could have talked about her personal feeling about being pestered by a stranger in a video all on its own. But she didn't. By putting two unrelated incidents together, it became a criticism of the overarching event. In fact, by finishing off with something that didn't happen to her, she made it a lot easier for people to see her as making a big thing over nothing.
And in fact she even made lots of clearly judgemental statements that would bias the listener. She talked about the "playful banter", suggesting there wasn't an argument, and even presented the younger guy trying to take the platter as though it was a joke. She comments on the young guys having ordered first, but didn't bother to say whether the time difference was just the waiter going down the table in order of seats or more substantial than that. She comments on his age rather vaguely, she talks about "bottles" of Bacardi in an unspecified number then revises to two, but doesn't really clarify what size of bottles she's talking about
Like, having said something that really is inarguable -- sexual harrassment is certainly never acceptable -- she then went on to say stuff that was very much arguable, and into which she had clearly pushed judgements that were genuinely questionable.
This presents a particular problem: conflating the two makes it very difficult for people to distinguish between them. Some people will take her word on the second incident because she was the victim in the
And it all feeds back into the problem of the clickbait title and thumbnail, because it creates an impression that the problem is the event, not the individuals involved. You say that's not what she's saying, and it sort of isn't, but it's what a lot of people will hear.