‘I don’t want to be assaulted’: Noirin Shirley
p2pnet view P2P:- On her personal blog, Google “Event Planner, Technical Writer, Multitasker Extraordinaire” Noirin Shirley (left) goes into detail, blogging about a sexual assault she claims she suffered at the hands of Twitter software engineer Florian Leibert (right) at a party.
At the end of her post, “It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all”, she says, adding:
“But it is the first time I’ve spoken out about it in this way, because I’m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it. I’m tired of the fear. I’m tired of people who think I should wear something different. I’m tired of people who think I should avoid having a beer in case my vigilance lapses for a moment. I’m tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression.
“But I don’t give the wrong impression, and it’s simply not true that guys can’t read me right. I don’t want to be assaulted, and the vast majority of guys read that just fine. It is not my job to avoid getting assaulted. It is everyone else’s job to avoid assaulting me. Dozens of guys succeeded at that job, across the week. In the pub, in the stairwell, on the MARTA, in my bedroom.
“One guy failed, and it’s his fault.”
Under ‘A Hell of a Time’, “It was great”, she says of the party, continuing >>>
The party moved up to my room. We had beer, and beer pong, and altogether too many people crammed in. It was more egalitarian than I remember last year’s being – lots of new people, lots of people who weren’t part of the old Apache guard. A charming Southern gentleman with the most awesome belt I’ve ever seen (Carl, where did you get that!?), an excited Berliner who picked me up and whirled me around and somehow managed to avoid having me kick anyone in the head. I lay across the bed, sat on laps, generally tried to squish in to any available space and get time to talk to all the fabulous people thronging the place.
Noirin makes a point of stating “I lay across the bed, sat on laps” and from the look of the post, the party was pretty boozy.
It shouldn’t matter how much a woman might seem to be asking for some kind of sexual connection, unless it’s absolutely, unmistakably crystal clear that’s what she wants, any moves on the part of males to act on what they see is an invitation are wrong.
No argument there.
But bad things happen when people are drunk.
Noirsin insists she’s “tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression”.
Her remark isn’t general. She says she’s “tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right” [our emphasis].
She also says “It is not my job to avoid getting assaulted. It is everyone else’s job to avoid assaulting me. Dozens of guys succeeded at that job, across the week. In the pub, in the stairwell, on the MARTA, in my bedroom.”
Now Leibert has been tried by Noirin online and, from the look of it, been found guilty.
“I understand the desire to out someone in the community who is like this so that other women will avoid him”, Says Jed Smith on Reddit, going on >>>
That is the kind of thing that a conviction does, however. They’re both quite prolific, and hold very high positions in communities, and throwing shit around like this on Twitter is a very serious thing to do.
This is public, media-involved character assassination of a degree that I have never seen before. We have one side of a story with potentially two, maybe more. There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to begin. Making this a media event instead of a police incident is a catastrophic mistake, and foreboding for our times, and that people are buying in to this shit is even worse still. The people pointing out the error of her ways on her blog are getting called out by the people who enjoy this public humiliation.
The issue is not whether Florian did or not, or whether Noirin was in the wrong for what she was wearing, or double standards, or any of that happy horseshit. The real issue is that we have a baseless allegation in a very public place, and once that gun is fired, there’s no pulling the bullet back. I would be disheartened indeed if this went forward and ruined Florian’s family and life, then was shown to be a vast overstatement of what actually happened. I would be equally disheartened if this was shown to be 100% true, or worse. The fact is, we don’t know, we’re taking one woman’s word for it, and it’s the word of someone who has apparently not involved the authorities on purpose on multiple occasions prior (based upon reading what she has written).
This reflects poorly upon Noirin, period. It might also reflect poorly upon Florian, but we cannot be sure until he is given a chance to respond. There are ways to handle these things, and this isn’t one of them.
The police were involved, though, as Noirin points out in an update: “ETA: My heartfelt thanks to the Atlanta police for their sensitivity and professionalism.”
However, she doesn’t say how or when they were involved, if any charges are to be laid and, if so, what they are and when they’ll be dealt with.
Stay tuned.
blogging – A hell of a time, November 5, 2010
Reddit – A hell of a time: Sexual assault at tech conferences, November 6, 2010
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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