Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 298 posts

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#71

Post by sabraham »

_3u10 wrote: post #49

I take great offense to my culture being defined as "relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them" Yes some people do that, but VERY few. It's as silly as thinking that all gay men speak with lisps, yes some do and those that do are very identifiable as likely gay. Yes there is always that guy in the bar that is inappropriate with wom…

As to being bigger and stronger, perhaps we should look to the nation of Japan and the feats its military was able to achieve with men roughly the size of north american women. Women are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to, just like smaller men are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to. These are again averages and if you look at the deviances you'll see that there are a lot of women who are larger than a lot of men.

Also, keep in mind that a man is twice as likely to be assaulted as a woman so from a statistical perspective it is men who should be fearing for their safety as they post their gender online.

Blatant misuse of "statistics." Not all assaults are equal. How many assaults toward men lead to their having thoughts of or committing suicide? Also, the implication that we should train women to a military standard so they are ready to fend themselves off from attack is absurd-- by your rationale, we should put all be proficient with switchblades and blame ourselves if we were unable to stop an attack. The causal is the perpetrator, and the culture that breeds feeling of ownership by men of women.

It wasn't so long ago that the law explicitly treated women as property, so let's not forget that too quickly. In the UK, it was in our parents' generation that women were allowed to have a mortgage (Sex Discrimination Act of 1975) and only two decades ago that marital rape exemption was abolished (until 1991, in the UK, legally a husband could not be charged with raping his wife).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Rape_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_English_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Common_law_and_the...

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#72

Post by olalonde »

He's quite a bit harsh with his own culture (presumably the American culture). American culture is way ahead of most cultures in terms of respect for women. Travel to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll realize your culture isn't all that bad. (Disclosure: I'm not American)

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#73

Post by olalonde »

demallien wrote: post #63
_3u10 wrote: post #49

I take great offense to my culture being defined as "relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them" Yes some people do that, but VERY few. It's as silly as thinking that all gay men speak with lisps, yes some do and those that do are very identifiable as likely gay. Yes there is always that guy in the bar that is inappropriate with wom…

"but VERY few" I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. You know, if it's only 1% of men that act in a sexually predatory manner (workplace sexual harrassement, groping on public transport, all the way through to rape), how am I as a woman supposed to react? Online it's even worse, I can expect sexually explicit comments to be made to me with a probability approaching 1.0 if I reveal my gender (HN is a pleasant exce…

There seems to be deep ignorance of what it's like to be an old fat bald guy in our culture. Who do you think had the worse night? My guess is that it's the old fat bald guy who had to go home with his right hand, got publicly humiliated in front of all of his friends by getting rejected and physically pushed by a girl half his size. Not to forget his wallet is probably much lighter after paying all those drinks to women he won't ever have a chance with.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#75

Post by lhnz »

dazzer wrote: post #11
andreyf wrote: post #6

Why not simply reword the question to ask whether you prefer to be referred to as a "he" or "she"? In the rare case that it doesn't align with your genetic or anatomic gender, it's not exactly the end of the world.

At first glance at your comment I said "how would that help". Then I thought about it a second time, and I think this is actually a legitimate way to approach the problem of gender identification. So +1 for me. Wonder what others think

Some might prefer the gender-neutral pronoun "they".

However, I think doing things this way is going to be quite difficult to implement when you consider multiple languages. Male/Female/Other with an option to hide this information is much easier a solution.

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#76

Post by waterhouse »

pvarangot wrote: post #47
Qz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vote for the text field option.

I'm with you! It would also be ideal, given the current sexist state of language, to add a combo box to choose if you want to be refered to as "he", "she", or, in what now seems like a distant utopia, gender-neutrally, obviously given each language possibilities. That would be so much a big step into having gender equality on the net that the fact no big social network has done it yet tells us about how misunderstood…

The user specifies what pronouns to use, and perhaps there would be default values (or you could fill them all in by selecting a "traditional" option). I actually really like this idea. Users would be able to hide their gender if they wanted, and if they wanted to use something like "he or she/him or her/his or her" or "ey/ey/eir", they would be able to just fill it in, and the system would use it in its automatically generated notifications and stuff (Alex posted a comment on eir webzone). This would give us an easy way to gain exposure and experience to the various attempts at creating gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns, and maybe figure out which ones are good (or whether it's worth bothering about).

Also, it might allow for funsies like this.

  Possessive: His Majesty's
  Subjective: His [random from: Awesomeness, Sleepiness, Whimsy]

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#78

Post by henrikschroder »

silencio wrote: post #24

I'm just glad Google+ has an "other" option to begin with. Facebook lets you hide gender (which would be nice to have in google+), but they only offer male/female. Really, I'm more disgruntled that Google+ lets you put down your relationship status and types of relationships you're looking for, but no way to specify which genders if any you are interested in talking to. I've been mulling over removing that part from…

I used to work for a gay dating site where instead of presenting a table of data about each person, we generated a natural language text that described the person's age, location and sexuality. At the beginning you had a radio-button to select your own gender (male/female/other/none) and checkboxes to select which genders you were interested in.

With those limited options, it was fairly easy to construct this profile text, even though we were using VBSCript. (Yes, it was that long ago) Sometime later we wanted to expand and cover all the trans* options which resulted in that piece of code expanding into a horrible mess of weird cases, and those users not being happy with the result anyway. We got a lot of complaints of the type "I am an X looking for Y, but I don't want to be called Z".

I'd rather program date and time functions than that, ever again. :-)

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#79

Post by waterhouse »

silencio wrote: post #34
rimantas wrote: post #17

I don't get this trend at all. Something is wrong with priorities and perceived risk vs. real risk. It's pretty difficult to assault someone physically over the internet ( http://bash.org/?4281 ). On the other hand, woman broadcasts her gender when in public. Will x years from now we all be walking in some kind of uniform enclosures as to protect from anyone knowing if one is male or female? Also, in some languages n…

It has nothing to do with assault over the internet and everything to do with the way others perceive you. I would love to imagine I live in a world where it doesn't matter what chromosomes and sex organs you were born with, and really, I have kind of found that in the Cocoa developer community. That is why I enjoy talking to those people. But just /join an IRC channel with a female nickname. Play online games and ta…

As a random suggestion for the WOW raids, might it be possible to use software to distort your voice so that it sounds male (or at least androgynous)? Come to think of it, even males might want to do that so they can have, like, a really deep voice that sounds like the big heavy warrior character they're playing, or maybe an old gravelly voice if they're playing a wizard--or a female voice if their character is female, for that matter.

Does anyone else think that would be a cool idea?

Re: XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

#80

Post by corin_ »

olalonde wrote: post #72

He's quite a bit harsh with his own culture (presumably the American culture). American culture is way ahead of most cultures in terms of respect for women. Travel to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll realize your culture isn't all that bad. (Disclosure: I'm not American)

I would argue that it's better to rate something based on how it should be, not on alternatives.

It drives me mad when people say " is better than because they only lock up gay people, not kill them" or "country A is better than country B because women there can go outside without a man, even if they can't vote". Sure, it might be better, but can we not agree that it's still shit?

I can't really speak to sexism in America (I'm English, and on my trips to NYC/LA I haven't personally experienced it at all) - I'm not saying you should hate America because of problems, but don't brush them away as being fine just because there are far worse situations elsewhere.

Post reply on HN