I pledge to overcome my social conditioning to be polite to creepy guys.
I pledge to be blunt but not angry.
I pledge to project body language of confidence and calm (even if I am feeling neither confident nor calm).

Instead of cringing and wishing he would go away, I will say "I am not talking to you. Go away."(*)
If he says "I was just trying to be friendly," I will say "You failed."
If he says "There's no need to be rude," I will say "Being polite wasn't working."
If he calls me names, I will say "That's why I don't want to talk to you."

(Prompted by this and re-reading this)

(*) There was a guy who was an ex-co-worker who was also a regular con-goer; I didn't like him, but I didn't want to be rude, so I would converse when he talked to me. I would cringe when I saw him at cons, and go in the opposite direction. Finally I got sick of trying to avoid him, so I said the aforementioned "I am not talking to you". Surprisingly, it worked.

Here is a metric for women's equality: 50% participation in all professions that do not require a penis. Contrary to expectations of the males of the species, there is only one profession that does require a penis: that of Gigolo.

Reposting an entry by eponymous_rose:

On this day in 1989, a man named Marc Lépine walked into a mechanical engineering classroom at the École Polytechnique in Montreal with a legally obtained rifle and told all the men to leave the room. He claimed he was fighting feminism: "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists." He then shot all nine women in the room, killing six of them, then moved through the hallways and killed another eight women. Fourteen women killed, ten women injured, and four men injured.

This is not an event that's well-known outside of Canada - I was still a baby when it happened, but as a woman studying science in Montreal, this is a tragedy that looms large. I'm sure there are going to be a lot of articles today pointing out the dangerous idiocy of the Conservatives tearing down the very same gun-control laws that emerged as a response to this massacre, and while it's important to keep in mind the political consequences of this tragedy and the political motivators behind it, that's not what any of this is really about. This is about the fourteen women who were killed for the crime of studying engineering while female.

Geneviève Bergeron, 21, civil engineering
Nathalie Croteau, 23, mechanical engineering
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, chemical engineering
Maryse Laganière, 25, budget clerk in school's finance dept
Anne-Marie Lemay, 22, mechanical engineering
Michèle Richard, 21, materials engineering
Annie Turcotte, 21, materials engineering
Hélène Colgan, 23, mechanical engineering
Barbara Daigneault, 22, mechanical engineering
Maud Haviernick, 29, materials engineering
Maryse Leclair, 23, materials engineering
Sonia Pelletier, 28, mechanical engineering
Annie St-Arneault, 23, mechanical engineering
Barbara Klucznik Widajewicz, 31, nursing

If this isn't something you'd heard of, please consider reposting on your own journal. These women - and the circumstances of their deaths - deserve to be remembered. In Canada, today is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. You can read more here.

(warning for sexual assault triggers)

Suppose I went to a tech conference, as I am wont to do every now and again. Further suppose that after the conference wound down, a large group of the attendees, including myself, decided to repair to the local pub for some food and a couple of adult beverages.

Say that Dave Frobzen, a guy I recognize from his presentations at the conference, accosts me in a way that seems friendly enough at first. He says "Hey Rick, can I talk to you?", pulls me aside, then punches me right in the face. After I manage to get the hell out of there and clean myself up, I post about the incident on my blog, saying that at the pub, right out of nowhere, Dave Frobzen punched me in the face.

Suppose all that happened to me. I wonder how people would react?

(signal boost thanks to yvi)