@Waquo
Thanks for the reasonable comment! I think you make some valid points, even though I disagree, and it may sound like I'm picking them apart here:

First off, I don’t see where Violet paints apple fans as misogynist. Given how personally you took this, I believe this is a key point.

Yes, I did absolutely take it personally; I won't even attempt to deny that. But not even because I'd consider myself an Apple fan, but because I consider myself a man who thinks the whole idea of gender inequity is stupid. That's not even an attempt to make myself look good by saying "look how sexist I'm not" — it's just a bafflingly dumb and outdated concept. So I hate seeing anyone try to manipulate that. Of course, the reason I saw it in the first place was because I'm an Apple fan.

I think it'd be extraordinarily disingenuous to say that she doesn't paint Apple fans as misogynist. It's so blatant, it's laughable to even call it subtext. From the start, she frames it as two powerful men against a female blogger just trying to do her job. And couches that in terms of "Apple fanboys" and how they've long perpetuated a hostile environment where women are treated as outsiders.

Women are minorities in any tech culture. Maybe less so in Apple culture, but still. It is harder for her to get taken seriously just because she is a woman.

Well, I think the "but still" is key. She singled out Apple. There's an Apple logo in the post. Why frame it like that if not to suggest that this is a problem that's endemic to Apple in particular? Which is silly, because Apple "culture" in particular is better than most.

“In this particular instance the Apple fanboy target was female, and so the suggestion to openly dislike the target became ugly with what we all sadly know as the Internet’s root nastiness toward women.”
I think this is spot on, and doesn’t clam that Apple Fan(boy)s are any more misogynist than the rest of the internet.

But you can't just translate "fanboy" to "fan," any more than I can translate "slut" to "sexually empowered young woman." One is inherently and intentionally pejorative and inflammatory. (And no, The Internet, I am absolutely not saying that "fanboy" and "slut" are equivalently pejorative).

Incidentally: where exactly was the suggestion to openly dislike the target? I didn't see it in Gruber's posts, or in any of Shawn King's, or in the first couple of relevant comments to Blue's post offering a correction.

But this quote is indicative of the entire article. It paints "the Apple community" with the type of wide brush usually reserved for barns and airplane hangars. And my real problem with it:

She also whines about John Gruber’s “attacks”, although he didn’t quite do that. What he did, however, was amplify Shawn King’s vitriol by giving him a big audience. He unrelentingly enables the vitriol against Violet without any attempt to temper it.
With great power comes with great responsibility, and Gruber doesn’t handle his’ well.

I vehemently disagree with that. It's just plain wrong to say that Gruber is responsible for anything other than what he writes in a public forum. Period. It's the same for King, same for Blue, same for me.

I think it's appalling to say "Gruber should've known that by criticizing her, people on Twitter, blog comments, and email would start calling her a whore." It says that she's suddenly immune to any criticism of her work, because otherwise, some other people are going to be nasty to her. It says that Gruber and King are complicit in misogynistic attacks, even though they said nothing misogynist themselves.

That's not just patently irresponsible, it sets up a ridiculous double standard that's no good for anyone. Every writer should have to stand behind what he or she writes, male or female.

I suppose I have rather high standards, but I believe this kind of behavior ruins the internet by drowning us all in hate. I find this worse than anything Violet did, although the root problem is of course Shawn King’s aggression.

Well, we have different takes on that. I don't think King was particularly aggressive or vitriolic in this case until after he'd started to have ridiculous accusations flung at him.

Of course I agree that it'd be better if everybody could be more civil to each other. But I've seen plenty of people say completely reprehensible things in the most civil and polite way, and there's nothing to be gained by giving that a pass. It actually lowers the standard of discourse on the internet; we've already seen it in politics. It perpetuates the idea that you can say whatever you want, no matter how offensive, and as long as you word it nicely, it has to be treated as if it were a valid, reasonable idea.

It is easy to look at history and come to the conclusion that sex + women = exploitation. That sexualization = misogyny. Many feminists pretty much do that. Sexualization can be the result of misogyny, and in most environments, sexualization can easily lead to misogyny. But sexualization and misogyny are not the same.
[...]
A certain amount of push-back against sexualization is reasonable, given that sexualization is somewhat dangerous, and there shouldn’t be too much of it. But it is not reasonable to expect this to be “interpreted by any sane and reasonable person as being offensive to women”. It is not reasonable to demand an apology or to start petitions over this. This is just the usual contempt people tend to have for women who enjoy sex too much.

The first part of this is a totally valid point; there is indeed a nuance there that's often overlooked — the dangerous idea that it's only the chaste and proper women who should be respected. (And I agree about the absolute silliness of a petition too, by the way).

But I absolutely disagree that taking objection to Blue's description is "the usual contempt people have for women who enjoy sex." That just tries to make me sound like some kind of prude.

The problem isn't that Blue made a point of describing the woman as a "pretty brunette" with "breasts packed packaged air-tight in a tight, branded T-shirt" [I've quoted that like three times and it's only just now that I'm noticing it's lazily repetitive. FOR SHAME!] The problem is that she described the woman as that and nothing else. It's not offensive to acknowledge that yes, women actually have sexual characteristics and that yes, it's good to be sexually attractive. It is offensive to assume that that's all a woman's got going for her.

The word “babe” uttered by a woman is much like the n-word uttered by a black person. It tends to be okay when they say it, because you can be pretty sure about how they mean it. They are not the ones with a history of abusing it.

It's funny, because when I first started writing this post, I linked to Louis CK's bit about "the N-word". He sums up exactly how I feel about it: there's no such thing as an inherently bad word. (Except I make a somewhat hypocritical exception for "the c-word," because it's gross). Words are meaningless without the ideas they represent.

It has nothing to do with history, because that implies that I'm complicit in what a bunch of strangers have done. It has nothing to do with race or gender or sexual orientation, because "you can be pretty sure how they mean it" sets up a double standard that's inherently discriminatory. It's all about intent. You can't just make an assumption that because somebody's a woman, they can't be sexist, or because they're not white, they can't be racist. You have to actually take the time to consider what they're saying and how they mean it, which is harder than just making a sweeping generalization.

Blue's post uses all the right politically correct speech, but its intent is to make unfounded generalizations and accusations of guilt by association. King's posts occasionally use an archaic sexist word or demeaning terminology, but his intent is to call for responsibility and accuracy in writing. So which is the more offensive?

And again, it's not and never has been about the word "babe." What's sexist is seeing a woman and treating her like scenery, assuming that she's worth taking pictures of but not worth talking to.

Violet is a sex-blogger for god’s sake. The word babe crosses her lips rather easily. If you find her writing vapid, don’t read a column called “Pulp Tech”.

Yes, I'll happily agree to no longer read "Pulp Tech" so long as the writer of "Pulp Tech" agrees to stop publishing baseless accusations and hypocritically sexist comments.