1.  I don’t understand the point of this post.  Seems to me that if you want to have a “reasonable discussion” about men and women in fandom, you should start by accurately representing the incident in question.  I posted a long reply, but comments are screened and despite signing my name and being logged into Google (which uses my real name) my comment was not posted.

2.  On a more positive note, my best friend Jessica linked me to this: Circle of 6 App which is designed to help prevent violence by enabling you to send out alert/help messages complete with your location with (I presume) only a few clicks.

3.  Related, given the recent discussion of sexual harassment at conventions, I thought perhaps this app could be used to help out women who go to cons.  I haven’t played around with the app yet (downloading now!) but it’d be nice if you could simply send out a quick message saying ‘help! Being cornered by creeper’ to six people at once.  The difficulty, I imagine, would be in locating the person within a building–but at least the people could call right back giving the person in need a chance to use the phone as a way to extricate from the situation, or to discretely give location info so people can come help.  Anyway, just a thought.  Either way, seems a good thing to have on your phone.

ETA: Now that I’ve downloaded the app, I can tell you a couple more things:

You must have six people in your circle before you’re allowed to send a message.  But you can add people more than once (I added my friend Jess 6 times so we could test it).  Once your circle is done, you select the three emergency icons which will bring up a pre-written and addressed group text.  The GPS coordinates are in latitude and longitude and click you through to Google Maps which is going to do nothing for floors/rooms but if you could sneakily add it in, then you can do so pretty easily when it brings up the page to send it.  At the very least it alerts 6 (or however many) that you’re in need of assistance.