Correct -- if there are no legal or practical remedies, to focus on the speech or behavior can only waste time and energy. That's what the PyCon episode ought to have taught all of us -- it was purely negative in its outcome, for all involved.

> That's a great way to avoid holding anyone accountable for their peers' behavior or their own behavior.

Read the history of the PyCon episode before deciding that sounding an alarm at every slight is a constructive choice. The PyCon episode (which was based on speech, not behavior) is a perfect example of what goes wrong when everything is reinterpreted as a gender issue. It also shows the danger of escalation -- when the reaction is a bigger offense than the original stimulus.

> The way to address this is to call people out on their sexist bullshit and force them to own it, not to ignore it and thereby grant tacit approval.

If I believed that, I would call people out on their clear (reverse) sexist bullshit expressed in this exchange. But it's not worth it -- it's not important, it's below my personal radar, and I have better ways to spend my time. But clearly this is not true for everyone, for example those desperate to retain their victim status at a time of declining justification and rationale for that perception and status.

Better to ask yourself which actions move women forward faster -- constructive engagement with activities that will improve the status of women, or unconstructive complaints about imagined slights, or as a recent correspondent put it here a week ago, "microaggressions".

When I read the "microaggressions" meme, I almost fell off my chair. How can anyone think reacting to "microaggressions" represents constructive behavior?

Bottom line -- if the activity is simple speech, not a direct action that discriminates, you're better off ignoring it. Oversensitivity -- turning everything into a gender issue -- does more harm than good. It falsely portrays women as powerless victims whose ascending status can be undermined by words.