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

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

#81

Post by muuh-gnu »

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…

> until you've been in a bar and had a fat, bald guy

Since when is being bald become a derogatory term? How do you expect to get sympathy for your position if you at the same time totally deadheartedly debase a group of people purely on their looks?

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

#82

Post by jaredmck »

sabraham wrote: post #71
_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…

Fend themselves off from what attack? Oh yeah, a straw (wo)man attack. How is your argument not part of "the culture that breeds feeling of ownership by men of women"? Simply spectacular invocation of rape culture arguments, not that I've ever seen this topic discussed rationally.

No one needs to be trained to a military standard to fend off any type of vicious attack that might occur, because except in ultra-rare occasions they do not happen in first world countries. The true danger in our society is not physical at all, but mental- fear cuts down many lives by silently shaving off a million tiny slices, and those who fall victim to it never even knew they had a choice, or a chance. They just listened to the unspoken messages on TV.

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

#83

Post by henrikschroder »

waterhouse wrote: post #76
pvarangot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 automaticall…

I pity the people working on localization if you have that system.

Also, some languages, for example Finnish, doesn't have gender-specific 3rd person pronouns, so giving them that option wouldn't make any sense to them.

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

#84

Post by Steko »

_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…

Wow, just wow. It's almost as if you didn't read what Randall wrote. He's not saying "all men are ogres". He's saying "ogres exist and some women wish to avoid them".

"I take great offense to my culture being defined ..."

Total straw man, he didn't define any culture as this, he noted that it's one characteristic of our culture.

"Yes some people do that, but VERY few."

That's irrelevant. Baghdad is still a dangerous city for Americans to walk around alone at night despite an overwhelming majority of the populace not being insurgents. Do you want to walk around Baghdad at night alone?

"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"

Maybe in this context you should look at Japanese men and women and find that in this case, as in pretty much every culture, men tend to be bigger and stronger then women and violence from one to the other is heavily weighted in the same direction.

"Women are perfectly capable of defending themselves."

Nonsense, they are not "perfectly capable", hence the omnipresent criminal justice systems in modern societies.

"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."

Really you're quoting generic bar fight/domestic statistics when stalking (esp cyberstalking) is obviously far more relevant? Easiest thing to find showed women as 3-1 more likely to be stalked:

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/svus.pdf

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

#85

Post by olalonde »

corin_ wrote: post #80
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 Am…

I agree with you, but in this case it seemed that the author was putting emphasis on his own culture as opposed to other cultures. Replace "Our culture" with "America" here:

> America's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them

I might be wrong though.

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

#86

Post by gjm11 »

pvarangot wrote: post #54
yid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jokes aside, I like to fit people into two numbers between 0 and 1, non-inclusive. The first, number A represents your gender identification, with 0 being ideally female and 1 ideally male (remember the scale is non inclusive of the bounds). The second number B represents the gender identification that you're attracted to. So, for example: Hetero male: A=0.8, B=0.2 Gay male: A 0.7 b 0.9, or a 0.8 b 0.7 It's a conveni…

I don't know how much has your technique been exposed to the scrutiny of gay people, neither I want to be overly critic... But just be aware that many gay men are far from identifying with being "ideally female", and many gay women are far from identifying themselves as "ideally male". Making gender one-dimensional is of course richer than using a boolean flag, but I think the problem is even more complicated than th…

yid's scale doesn't propose conflating homosexuality with gender inversion, and ver[1] examples put the "gay male" at the same place on the gender scale as the "hetero male". That's the whole point of proposing two numbers.

[1] I normally don't use these funny gender-neutral pronouns, but here it seems called for.

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

#87

Post by silencio »

waterhouse wrote: post #79
silencio wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 femal…

I've considered it! I used to play with someone that liked doing that to poke fun at someone else who had one of the deepest voices I had ever heard, too.

I think the problem would lie in that the distortions might make it harder to understand someone. The primary goal of talking is to draw attention to a problem or strategy, not to make it harder to understand someone. Hard enough time doing that with accents and varied dialects and fluency of English :(

Usually when I am in a situation where I don't want to talk, I just say that I'm listening but I don't have a mic. It's usually not a problem because I type fast enough that I can yell in text without needing to pause playing my character.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

sabraham wrote: post #71
_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…

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by silencio »

olalonde wrote: post #73
demallien wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 w…

There is a lot more to it than "old fat bald guy". I don't know why so many people keep missing the extra clues, including in this past weekend's skeptic/atheist brouhaha over Richard Dawkins being ignorant. In short, it's the same damn situation. "Nice guy" (which is an unknown to the woman) approaches woman, gets rejected, is pissed off. Nice guy forgot to look at the situation, which was woman alone with man hitting on her in elevator at 3am.

> fat, bald guy 20 years older than you grinding his crotch up against your leg even when you've physically tried to push him away

When you're a fat, bald guy that does exactly that, you don't get to be treated like it's all okay and the girl is obligated to spend time with you because you bought her a drink or ten. It's the attitude that is the problem, not the fat or the bald.

If you are a considerate, nice, polite, friendly old fat bald guy that can respect boundaries and that people just have differing ideas of attractiveness (it goes both ways, and I know this as an overweight girl), you shouldn't be treated like a dirtbag, ever. Anyone that does treat you as such is a dirtbag in their own way.

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

#90

Post by T-R »

jaredmck wrote: post #82
sabraham wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fend themselves off from what attack? Oh yeah, a straw (wo)man attack. How is your argument not part of "the culture that breeds feeling of ownership by men of women"? Simply spectacular invocation of rape culture arguments, not that I've ever seen this topic discussed rationally. No one needs to be trained to a military standard to fend off any type of vicious attack that might occur, because except in ultra-rare oc…

> except in ultra-rare occasions they do not happen in first world countries

...That sounds a lot like you're implying that rape and assault don't happen very often in first-world countries... which would be a statement quite divorced from reality. Care to clarify?

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