The casual sexism in those statements popped out to me, too. I found the post overall interesting (although in some ways it felt like an advertisement), but those comments in particular were jarring and took me out of what I was reading.
A 'wall of porn' is unprofessional and unacceptable at just about any conference other than a porn conference. The goal of the network team should be control of the network, including the WoS. If they weren't able to do that, I probably wouldn't find much value in attending. All that is irrespective of whatever gonads I possess.
On the other hand, it doesn't take much empathy to understand why a woman might be put off by these statements that imply she is so delicate that the visage of porn 'hurts' her in some way. Nor would I be surprised if she were to find their actual sexism offputting and decided not to attend.
Even at a porn conference[1, SFW], it looks like a "wall of porn" would still be unacceptable. (Also from searching "XBIZ show" on Google images — NSFW.)
Many of the attendees are payment processors or dating websites, others are LGBT, and anyway everyone is "at work". From the pictures, something like 20-40% of attendees are women (not counting models, but also not counting the male models).
A 'wall of porn' is unprofessional and unacceptable at just about any conference other than a porn conference. The goal of the network team should be control of the network, including the WoS. If they weren't able to do that, I probably wouldn't find much value in attending. All that is irrespective of whatever gonads I possess.
On the other hand, it doesn't take much empathy to understand why a woman might be put off by these statements that imply she is so delicate that the visage of porn 'hurts' her in some way. Nor would I be surprised if she were to find their actual sexism offputting and decided not to attend.