The problem, in a nutshell

Read from the bottom up here:

Those tweets were soon followed by this series of replies, all from one dude asshole:  

So a female poker player reports a session in which the sexual harassment was so thick that, in recounting it, she even forgot to mention the rape threat--and a male poker player is willing to go on the record publicly telling her that she has no right to play without being harassed, that she should "get over it," that she's being a "baby," that harassing "the new girl is not over the line," that she shouldn't "whine about it," that if she's being harassed she should "leave" and/or "man up," that "nobody cares" about her harassment, that her harassment is "Part of the game" and "standard," that she's being "2 sensitive," that surely what she perceived as harassment was said "in gest [sic]" (despite him not having been there), and that her complaints are "crap that doesn't matter." 

I think there are relatively few men who would lay on the sexual harassment at a poker game to the point that somebody like Cate Hall--who strikes me as quite evidently tough-minded and resilient--would take to Twitter to denounce it. But I think there are a very, very large number of male poker players who share one or more of Andrew's reactions to it: It's part of the game, it's not over the line, it doesn't matter, she should respond by leaving or enduring it without objection. 

IMHO, it is the latter group, rather than the former, who make this such a difficult problem to eradicate. If it were only handful of obnoxious jerks who were quickly, reliably, and sternly rebuked and shunned for their crass behavior by everybody else at the table (and, not incidentally, ejected from the game by the poker room staff), it would soon be extinguished. It's the fact that women end up having to deal with the ill-bred mouth-breathers all alone--with the silence of others constituting tacit approval--that makes their conduct so damaging. 

Thanks, Andrew, for encapsulating the problem so perfectly. 

(Please insert here all the standard caveats that as a male I can't know what it feels like, shouldn't be mansplaining, etc.) 

ADDENDUM: At first I couldn't figure out who "Andrew" was. But then it occurred to me to do a Google image search on the photo he uses on his Twitter account. The photo is of an Andrew Liporace; see here. Hendon Mob info is here. I assume, but do not know, that that's who we're dealing with here.