Creeper cards at Defcon 2012, via Flickr / vissago
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Ms. Blue’s talk would've explored sex on various types of drugs, but from a harm reduction perspective. “Creeper cards” are cards that women informally pass at some technical conferences to men who are behaving sexually inappropriately. They are a symbolic response against the prevalence of sexual harassment at past conferences. At a recent hacker convention in Germany, someone immediately plastered the wall with some creeper cards in the outline of a nude woman’s body.Ada Initiative's statement focuses mostly on the fact that the talk would've been “off-topic” and that not enough warning was given--Ms. Blue only finalized her remarks a couple hours before she was set to appear--for women to avoid the talk if they found it triggering. "Moreover, unlike some highly charged other topics in the technical world," their statement goes on, "it is very unlikely that your audience has a uniformly, or even widely-held, negative opinion of harassment and assault.”What Ada Initiative has done here is the opposite of harm reduction. In addition, I want to state for the record that the so-called “creeper cards” are also the opposite of harm reduction. Both things, while seemingly not directly related, create damage to the community and offer no solutions to the very issues they trade on in order to advance the narrow agendas of the people behind them.
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