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I knew exactly how she felt

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Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

s_baby wrote: post #130
newnewnew wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we are experiencing is a particular flavor of secular religion called "cultural Marxism". Marxists believe that social forces are best understood through a model of class conflict . Economic Marxists explained the ills of society through the conflict between rich capitalists and the poor working proletariat. The rise of the middle class threw it a curve ball that it couldn't explain and it fell out of favor (out…

Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization. The discourse of modern day feminism is best characterized by writers like Michel Foucault. Where discourse is viewed as a postmodern power play. Where the logical validity of the discour…

> Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization.

No, it didn't. Feminism predates Marxism ; certainly, some strands of feminism were informed by Marxism in some way, and certainly there is a school of Feminist criticism that largely follows the same dialectic model as Marxist criticism (with the same understanding of the label but replaces the central struggle of the classes with one of the sexes), which split off from Marxist criticism as you describe, and which suffers from the same problem as Marxist criticism in that it is essentially takes the preeminence of a certain struggle as revealed unquestioned truth and reinterprets the world in light of that revelation.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#142

Post by yew »

lotharbot wrote: post #118
petercooper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen Star Wars . Well, I tried to but fell asleep 10 minutes in. Oddly, I'm not feeling like an odd one out here, even so :-)

I refused to watch Star Wars as a kid, because people kept telling me that if I was a nerd I had to watch it. I considered it a protest against their definition of "nerd". I did finally watch the original trilogy after I was married. It's OK I guess...

I've decided to protest against protesting against definitions, on the grounds that they're words and protesting against them will redefine them to something that someone else will protest against, ad infinitum, and I don't want to die from a stack overflow ;)

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#143

Post by s_baby »

eightpersimmons wrote: post #101
s_baby wrote: post #61

I see plenty of insightful comments here but no one acknowledging the conclusion. >It’s funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT. How many of these articles/talks put the impetus on changing women alienating women from tech? How likely are you to see some twitte…

Absolutely - women sometimes internalize and participate in misogynistic and cruel behavior, and it can be hard to talk about. I've seen this happen with the "fake geek girl" phenomenon - some women who feel that they are legitimate parts of the community participate in this kind of destructive policing because they've bought into the cultural misogyny and are often rewarded and have their status reinforced in their…

>Absolutely - women sometimes internalize and participate in misogynistic and cruel behavior, and it can be hard to talk about.

I think that's an understatement to say it only sometimes happens. From what I gather it's a part of almost every woman's life. Based on anecdotal data, while men are often a source of unintentional systematic sexism women are the more likely source of intentional malicious misogyny.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#144

Post by ht_th »

ritchiea wrote: post #23

How old is the young woman the author spoke with? Don't most smart, geeky people in HS feel a bit out of place? There's a whole PG essay on that [1]. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

To add to claudius's reply to your post, in the Netherlands we like to differentiate students around age 12 into levels: about 60 percent go to the vocational level, 25 percent to the general level, and about 15 percent to the academic level. Basically, all smart people are put together for up to six years of secondary education, after which they go on to university, meeting other smart people.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#145

Post by SPSteinbeck »

vec wrote: post #110
nhebb wrote: post #96

This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry. There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many…

> What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field. Which is exactly the problem. There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Something in the way we socialize children is convincing half the potential talent pool that they shouldn't develop an interest in technology fields, almost certainly because they see few if…

There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure.

The fact that such social pressure to enforce gender roles exists and the fact that such pressure independently arose in every advanced civilization to ever exist overwhelmingly suggests it is an intrinsic feature of the human race. Certainly, this would suggest the only way to overthrow the gender roles you despise is for some governing apparatus to coerce behaviour (which we already do to some extent); organically, humans will organize themselves in what you would call a "sexist" way.

Of course, even then, the shelf life on the sexless world you envision is short. American hegemony is waning and none of the candidates to fill the power vacuum will have much time for the 'isms that so occupy your mind.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#148

Post by Androsynth »

neya wrote: post #113
s_baby wrote: post #61

I see plenty of insightful comments here but no one acknowledging the conclusion. >It’s funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT. How many of these articles/talks put the impetus on changing women alienating women from tech? How likely are you to see some twitte…

This should be the top-voted comment. Well said!

i agree. the article is building up to the conclusion, not some stupid off-hand reference to star wars. Sometimes HN fills up with too many me-too comments.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#149

Post by Androsynth »

dragonwriter wrote: post #141
s_baby wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization. The discourse of modern day feminism is best characterized by writers like Michel Foucault. Where discourse is viewed as a postmodern power play. Where the logical validity of the discour…

> Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization. No, it didn't. Feminism predates Marxism ; certainly, some strands of feminism were informed by Marxism in some way, and certainly there is a school of Feminist criticism that largely f…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism
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