251–260 of 295 posts
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>HN readers in these gender discussions are so outright condescending, hateful, and knowingly, deliberately unreasonable-- not to mention "othering" Seriously, wtf people? >Thank you for being a voice of reason Oh, I thought you were referring to the disgusting tripe you replied to. Wow, amazing how people can view things differently huh?
You can't see the irony in this.
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From a previous comment I made, "It's attempting to do successful intervention & marketing, essentially, by focusing on a specific demographic. As we all should know, focusing on a specific demographic is a fine way to produce a product targeted to that demographic's needs. Young black women have different pain points in tech than Zuckalikes or male first-born children of Chinese immigrants. It is obvious that other…
"whip shitties in the desert" As a European, I am unfamiliar with this term, can you explain?
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More like "men as a political class." I'm male, and I knew I was inviting this comment. To me saying "some men" is like giving the "good men" a cookie, when really all men should be concerned about these kinds of things, by virtue of being human.
>To me saying "some men" is like giving the "good men" a cookie To me, saying "some men" is being precise with language and not falling into generalization. "Men", in common usage, refers to individuals that are male, not a "political class".
The problem -- and the reason they are popular -- with identity events like these are that they give lots of people except the most talented women a cop out: Sexist males - "See, women can't hack it as founders in the real world. They need extra help." Non-sexist males - "Whew. I'll support this event and stop second guessing myself whenever I choose to fund a male-led organization." Mediocre females - "Sweet. Now I…
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>To me saying "some men" is like giving the "good men" a cookie To me, saying "some men" is being precise with language and not falling into generalization. "Men", in common usage, refers to individuals that are male, not a "political class".
"some" people always seem to jump up to make this pedantic argument when men are generalized about, and yet somehow talking about women as a general group never seems to invoke the same.
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>It's only provably false because you're making a semantic argument against it, sticking on the strict definition of "every" rather than interpreting it as heard by others. Yes, forgive me for making a 'semantic' argument. That is, an argument that is concerned with the meanings of words people use. How petty of me. Unfortunately many people who say things like "every other group is a men's group" believe and mean ex…
(Preface: I ended up scrapping my reply and approaching it differently due to "the sense" I'll talk about down below. The coherence of the comment will probably suffer as a result.) I'm getting the sense that you were introduced to specific schools of thought in college and mistook them to be a lot more pervasive than they actually are. Maybe I can ask you a question in different terms: of your professors, how many o…
Not one. Most were totally reasonable people, interested in furthering a gender-egalitarian version of feminism that seemed eminently fair. When I say I critically engaged with the issues, I don't mean I was out to destroy feminist arguments and advocate for the abolition of feminism. I agree with much of what (many) feminisms fight for. But there is always room to introduce nuance, and I found that most faculty really appreciated that kind of critical engagement.
However.
The student politics at my school -- and at many other campuses in my country -- were shockingly totalitarian. To give you an idea, the majority of student associations across the country are unionized, and are all locals of a national student federation. Every single student in each university pays mandatory fees (read: union dues) to these locals as part of tuition.
The national union was infamous for stifling even discussion of men's issues on campuses. See [1] for an example:
"This spring, the Canadian Federation of Students passed a motion encouraging all student unions to reject men’s rights groups, because they promote “hateful views toward women” and justify physical and sexual assault."
One student's union under the CFS umbrella became relatively well-known for cancelling a charity fundraising campaign for cystic fibrosis, Shinerama, because cystic fibrosis "disproportionally affects white males" [1.5].
We've got freedom of speech enshrined in our Charter up here, yet our campuses constantly rate abysmally in free speech indexes largely because of the student unions I'm talking about [2]. Groups that all students, including men, are forced to pay money to under the theory that these groups represent all students.
Feminist groups repeatedly [3][4] tried to block public lectures on men's issues from happening. In one case, even pulling a fire alarm in an attempt to force an end to the discussion. There is an extremely famous video of an anti-men's-rights protestor screaming at her 'debate partners' to "shut the fuck up" while she explains that feminism fights for men's rights, too, so men don't need men's rights groups [5]. This happened at a few other universities other than UoT, too.
So that is the environment in which I came up, and certainly it colored my views. Hence when I hear people saying that extremist lines like "every other group is a men's group" are emblematic of feminism in general, I find it disconcerting, and feel a need to argue against.
[1] - http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/08/01/angry-young-men/
[1.5] - http://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/carleton-student-group-votes-to-end...
[2] - http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/campus-freedom-inde...
[3] - http://thevarsity.ca/2012/11/17/arrest-assaults-overshadow-m...
[4] - http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/we-went-to-a-mens-rights-lect...
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>It's only provably false because you're making a semantic argument against it, sticking on the strict definition of "every" rather than interpreting it as heard by others. Yes, forgive me for making a 'semantic' argument. That is, an argument that is concerned with the meanings of words people use. How petty of me. Unfortunately many people who say things like "every other group is a men's group" believe and mean ex…
(Preface: I ended up scrapping my reply and approaching it differently due to "the sense" I'll talk about down below. The coherence of the comment will probably suffer as a result.) I'm getting the sense that you were introduced to specific schools of thought in college and mistook them to be a lot more pervasive than they actually are. Maybe I can ask you a question in different terms: of your professors, how many o…
I'm assuming some HNers are soon to arrive saying things like "why does it matter that a founder is a female?", "why make an excluding event? isn't it sexism all the same", "imagine if someone make a 'male founders conference'?" I would like to ask you to think for a moment, before raising this concerns (I am not bothering here to debate with haters, only with those who are genuinely concerned that this might sexism…
That's inherently wrong in my opinion.
I don understand your points. But there are better ways todo this. Like creating an organization to support female founders. But a conference about founders, and then disallow Men? That's not right in my opinion.
Basically what this does is acknowledge the fact the feminst females in our industry feel undervalued. The harder you reach out, the more attention you get. Sometimes, just sometimes, this doesn't make things better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Preface: I ended up scrapping my reply and approaching it differently due to "the sense" I'll talk about down below. The coherence of the comment will probably suffer as a result.) I'm getting the sense that you were introduced to specific schools of thought in college and mistook them to be a lot more pervasive than they actually are. Maybe I can ask you a question in different terms: of your professors, how many o…
>of your professors, how many of them would you say were male-exclusionary feminists? Not one. Most were totally reasonable people, interested in furthering a gender-egalitarian version of feminism that seemed eminently fair. When I say I critically engaged with the issues, I don't mean I was out to destroy feminist arguments and advocate for the abolition of feminism. I agree with much of what (many) feminisms fight…