51–60 of 258 posts
Is there a term for the ridiculous rhetorical tactic of insisting that any attempt to refute one's claims as being illogical is itself only further proof of the claims made? I stopped reading when he said this: "I will pause now for the traditional arguments from my readers...Got all of that out of your systems? Good. Because that reaction is exactly what I'm talking about." Why bother having a discussion with someon…
Is it problematic that I'm sick of gender on HN? "Raising awareness" doesn't mean much when it essentially provokes the same inconsequential firefights. Can we just agree that men are pigs, women feel entitled, everyone's an asshole, startups need good engineers, and stop it? All this article really shows me is that the girlfriend was correct to avoid going into a comic book store. You cannot control culture you cann…
I'm not sure why the author of this article somehow thinks that geeks deny the existence of sexism in geek culture. The reality is that it's widely known and accepted. If the author wants to find something to rail against, he should have chosen the fact that everybody knows, but nobody cares . I'm not going to defend the treatment of women in geek culture, as much of it is indefensible. but it seems that few people b…
The irony here is that the stigmatization of "nerds" was/is a product of males falling outside acceptable gender roles as well. Calling these males "privileged" is a way to dismiss and marginalize them.
Why is it that the majority of feminist articles I run into feel the need to dismiss the problems of "privileged" in making an argument for their perspective? They are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's selection bias and only controversial articles float to the top but it really seems like this is the norm.
One comment I wanted to make about this the last time this came up... "Privilege" is a loaded word. It's a word that some people take great offense to, but it's a word that cannot rationally be ignored. Success can be a pretty fragile phenomenon. I never fully appreciated the benefit of privilege until relatively recently. I was an unfocused teenager who slacked in college, but stumbled onto a good career anyway (so…
[warning: slightly offensive] I really would hope, that women in video games are in fact judged by how attractive they are. I certainly wouldn't want an obese woman superhero saving the world, just as I'm sure the gay males and the straight women wouldn't want to see a tub of lard (excuse my language) in a male, who is supposed to epitomize the superhuman virtues that we lack. Yeah, it's shit easy to wave a finger an…
I think there's a subtle point being lost here. Female characters designed to appeal to women look different than female characters designed to appeal to men. For example, if the characters are designed to appeal to women, you can pretty much guarantee that they will not look like they have had basketballs implanted in their chests.
Likewise, massive male characters built out of a mountain of muscle are designed primarily to appeal to male power fantasies. Relatively few women will find this especially attractive, and male characters designed to appeal to more (straight) women would be built more along the lines of Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds.
I really enjoyed this article. Harris O'Malley seems to actually see the real problem , and expresses it with a hell of a lot more nuance than most other treatments of the subject do. >> And when you check back on Friday, I'll provide you with some concrete applications on how being cognizant of male privilege will improve your relations with women. I'm excited about the possibilities of the "practical applications"…
1. What do you want me to do?
2. What's in it for me?
Paint a picture of your ideal gender politics, and let me know why I'd like it better than the one we've got now. You might get further than you are just by attempting to convince me that people I like are "misogynists".
I really enjoyed this article. Harris O'Malley seems to actually see the real problem , and expresses it with a hell of a lot more nuance than most other treatments of the subject do. >> And when you check back on Friday, I'll provide you with some concrete applications on how being cognizant of male privilege will improve your relations with women. I'm excited about the possibilities of the "practical applications"…
At first, I enjoyed the article. However, I lost all respect for the author after reading some of his responses in the discussion thread. One post of his in particular caught my eye : "...And the first thing you did when confronted with this topic was to defend, counter, argue, and resist. And by doing so, you immediately lost based on the rules set forth by the article..." The notion that an argument cannot be refut…
One comment I wanted to make about this the last time this came up... "Privilege" is a loaded word. It's a word that some people take great offense to, but it's a word that cannot rationally be ignored. Success can be a pretty fragile phenomenon. I never fully appreciated the benefit of privilege until relatively recently. I was an unfocused teenager who slacked in college, but stumbled onto a good career anyway (so…
Credit checks for jobs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some ways the solution falls out of just knowing that it is a problem. If you think about it during your interactions with other people, then you can avoid the harmful things that could be said. The reality of male privilege is that it's so pervasive in our community (in many communities) that even a little bit of acknowledgment that it might exist, and the males in that communities trying to lessen the harm that…
I wonder how much of this acknowledgement can be done effectively as a group vs. as individuals. It seems like individuals can change their behavior very well this way, which eventually trickles to the community, but I've come to be a bit disheartened on the group side. In a thread not long ago, I made a comment calling out an article (of an article about Steve Jobs, not gender) for expressing a (to me) particularly…
If individuals don't take responsibility for their actions groups can never change.
I'm not sure why the author of this article somehow thinks that geeks deny the existence of sexism in geek culture. The reality is that it's widely known and accepted. If the author wants to find something to rail against, he should have chosen the fact that everybody knows, but nobody cares . I'm not going to defend the treatment of women in geek culture, as much of it is indefensible. but it seems that few people b…
"Some of us, however, remember the torment, the humiliation, the violence, the scorn and the ostracism of finding science, electronics, and computers fascinating. There was, indeed, such a time. Many nerds who endured poor treatment at the hands of their peers developed deep emotional traumas that, to this day, exist to some extent or another. One of these traumas is borne of the experience of being not merely reject…
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
You may disagree with the analysis behind the list's construction, but I see little if anything on that list that obviously gets crossed off the list by virtue of being a geek.
Social justice theorists also talk about different kinds of privileges, so the idea that geeks have male privilege does not exclude the possibility that there is another form of privilege that they lack that others have. Some other types of privilege that are sometimes considered are white privilege, class privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc. You can have male privilege but not white privilege, etc.
In other words, privilege isn't simply a binary have/don't have thing such that geeks have it and women don't.
You could make an argument that there is some sort of gender-stereotypical privilege that, say, football players share in but geeks do not. Is that where you were going?