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Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

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Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably are a naive idealist; there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to get rid of that give the IAT on gender a try at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit I'm willing to bet that just the experience of taking it will make you somewhat uncomfortable.

Well, I took it and it determined that I don't associate gender with science or liberal arts. It also felt extremely contrived, and felt as though it functions largely on cheap tricks, like building a clear pattern of a theme being presented on one side of the screen for a long while and then suddenly switching it to the other side. To be frank, it seemed like the purpose of it was to induce cognitive stress from try…

The IAT is the bread-and-butter technique for determining implicit associations and are probably the best technique we have for assessing personal bias.

When you try it out for a topic where you do have a strong association you'll actually feel directly what it's measuring and why it's relevant.

P.S. Did you really try to answer as fast as possible? If you take your time it won't be able to measure much.

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#262
post #30

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…

I'm assuming some HNers are soon to arrive saying things like "why does it matter that a founder is a black person?", "why make an excluding event? isn't racism all the same", "imagine if someone made a 'white founders conference'?" I would like to ask you to think for a moment, before raising these concerns (I am not bothering here to debate with haters, only with those who are genuinely concerned that this might be…

I really liked the fact that you substituded "females" with "blacks". It forces feminist too look into the mirror. Sometimes they are so blind with their feminist feelings.

Most woman are not feminist, but the ones who are, tend to shout a lot. They are the ones that make things worse for the bigger group.

Of course, i'll now be marked as a "hater". I hope people will actually comment on your post with arguments.

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#263
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It calls into question one's worldview as a feminist if you are busy discriminating on gender expression. It seems logically inconsistent.

Much of "radical feminism" holds that gender isn't about expression, and that you can't switch genders as much as you can switch races. This makes people extremely uncomfortable, of course

Do you agree with the following definitions commonly used when discussing gender issues?

Sex: Assigned biological category -- male or female: designated at birth by visual assessment of anatomy based upon presumption of reproductive role.

Sexual Orientation: Term for an individual's physical and/or emotional attraction relative to their own sex such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight.

Gender: The social meaning given to biological sex.

Gender Expression: External characteristics and behaviors associated with gender that are socially defined and associated with masculine or feminine. For transgender people, their gender expression doesn't match their biological sex.

Transgender: People who identify with a gender that is different from their biologically assigned gender.

Intersexed: Describes people who are born with external genitalia, chromosomes, or internal reproductive systems that are not traditionally associated with either a "standard" male or female.

Cis-gender: People who identify with the sex or gender they were assigned at birth.

Gender is generally assumed to be defined as that part of 'sexual identity' which is a social construct and hence changeable.

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#264
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

MRA sighted!

It is unbelievably tempting to just lash out at you because you are such an unpleasant person. Instead of following me around on HN responding to my (lengthy, in-good-faith) posts with irrelevant one-liners, why don't you try actually contributing?

Do you have something to say?

Are you afraid you might be wrong? Is that why you cling to the relative safety of slinging content-free one-liners? Can you not think clearly enough to formulate an argument against?

Why don't you engage in the discussion rather than troll with useless, inane posts that fit better on /b/ than HN?

I'm not even close to an 'MRA', as you're using the term (which, btw, is in an implicitly derogatory fashion, which says a lot about you). I think that MRAs as defined by Internet Feminists like you suffer the exact same flaws I'm outlining in feminism.

I do, however, believe that men have issues and need advocacy. Groups that try to deny men the right to advocate for themselves -- which all of the above linked groups do, objectively -- are wrong, for the reasons I've extensively elaborated on in this thread.

You really think it is legit to physically prevent men from discussing men's issues by pulling a fire alarm (illegal, btw) and forcing them out of a building?

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#265

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…

Interesting, and legitimate sources. I don't disagree that there's a problem here, but there are far too many nuances to pick apart, so I'll go about this more obliquely.

First: the way you approached this engagement started with a claim that most feminism has a "tenuous grasp on reality". Claiming that the reasonable feminists are a tiny minority is a good way to suggest that every claim the person you're responding to is probably wrong, in your view. In other words, saying "often (not always!)" isn't enough; that doesn't introduce nuance. That introduces antagonism. The best suggestion I can give is to demonstrate a knowledge of feminism that you support while explaining why this particular school of thought is wrong.

Second: there is a systemic marginalization of women. Moreover, this is demonstrable by a lack of one-to-one gender representation. You start to address the issue reasonably in your complaint, but you revert back to dismissal rather than recognizing that people are working on control mechanisms. Yes, affirmative action style programs are a blunt instrument, but that's something to "fight on the merits of the argument". I can make arguments both for and against it, and I rather expect you to be able to as well.

If random chance is determining the results of something, a 50/50 gender split is a reasonable expectation across a large enough sample. If that 50/50 split isn't present, then that suggests there's a significant effect besides random chance. We can claim that's a biological thing, or we can claim it's a cultural thing, but it's systemic either way, and this wouldn't be the first thing we decided culture ought to trump biology on anyways. (lol typing on keyboards at midnight)

I'm pretty sure you knew this, but it's unclear based on what you've said so far.

Third: It's worth pointing out that a lot of the people you're going to come across online are going to be American, which means our views are colored by the fact that feminism is losing as much as it's winning in this country. We have prominent public officials making unquestionably misogynistic statements, and the best we have to show for it is that a few of them were voted out of office.

Maybe feminism has achieved an unassailable victory in Canada. I don't know; I don't live there. But it hasn't achieved it everywhere else, and certainly not in America. I notice that I rarely see such an announcement for a program or conference in Canada. I see them for the US, for the UK, for India. These places are not bastions of feminism.

Fourth: There are some notable bits in your links demonstrating a problem. It's this: some men's rights activists are making the same mistake as the worst of feminists: they're tearing down all women in the name of being supportive. Claims like saying rapes are over-reported or slut-shaming with a public poster are petty and damaging. Creating a safe space for men who are abused or oppressed is fine, but leveraging that in order to push women down? That's not okay. It wasn't okay when women did it, and it's not okay when men do it.

The inevitable consequence? Exactly what you're complaining about: feminists who recognize a threat and respond to it. Which causes another round of men who are angry about being oppressed. Which results in an escalation of feminists yelling them down. And the worst of it is that they are both right. If you want to fight against this kind of feminism, then you need to temper that with the acknowledgement that what some men's rights groups are doing is in fact wrong.

Fifth: You know why people respond with "yeah, that's cool"? Because they're sexist. Because they unconsciously believe that men are stronger and should be able to tough it out. Because they believe women need to be protected. Because, you know, we still look down on women. Empowered women are still considered an exceptional case, rather than a natural fact. And that's probably not going to change in our lifetime. It's the kind of thing that needs to bleed out over generations.

Sixth: I believe I've met an example of what you're talking about, online, and if she's representative at all, this becomes a component in a larger theory. I am of the belief that people who bully, who oppress, are people who have taken it from others and are effectively passing it on, knowingly or not. This woman yelled at me about how rare decent men were, for instance. It put me into a months-long fugue, but I'm not the kind of person who has the luxury of support groups.

What it sounds to me is that you're seeing the tail-end of a cycle: you noticed a chicken hatch from an egg, so of course chickens come from eggs; you're just not viscerally seeing eggs coming from chickens.

Seventh, and finally last: This, "I find it disconcerting, and feel a need to argue against" is exactly what people feel when they read what you write. As previously noted, I don't really care about feminism. (...and checking back, that was part of the comment I scrapped. Bah.) But I do feel I have a strong enough grasp on the fundamentals that I can explain it usefully in argument.

When you make this kind of "men need advocates too" claim, that sets off warning bells. After I wrote all the above, I hope it's clear why. You caught me on a day I was feeling good. Other times, I'm more interested in handing out a beat-down and would not have stopped to ask for clarification.

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#266
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of "radical feminism" holds that gender isn't about expression, and that you can't switch genders as much as you can switch races. This makes people extremely uncomfortable, of course

Do you agree with the following definitions commonly used when discussing gender issues? Sex: Assigned biological category -- male or female: designated at birth by visual assessment of anatomy based upon presumption of reproductive role. Sexual Orientation: Term for an individual's physical and/or emotional attraction relative to their own sex such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight. Gender: The social meaning g…

When I say "gender" I mean the thing as described here (i.e. Rachel's working definition of it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot8cBm0YmXo

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#267
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MRA sighted!

It is unbelievably tempting to just lash out at you because you are such an unpleasant person. Instead of following me around on HN responding to my (lengthy, in-good-faith) posts with irrelevant one-liners, why don't you try actually contributing? Do you have something to say? Are you afraid you might be wrong? Is that why you cling to the relative safety of slinging content-free one-liners? Can you not think clearl…

You're the one commenting on a thread I started, so what you post here shows up in my "threads" page. I wouldn't follow you around.

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Interesting, and legitimate sources. I don't disagree that there's a problem here, but there are far too many nuances to pick apart, so I'll go about this more obliquely. First: the way you approached this engagement started with a claim that most feminism has a "tenuous grasp on reality". Claiming that the reasonable feminists are a tiny minority is a good way to suggest that every claim the person you're responding…

1. I'm kind of unclear on why you quoted me the way you did. I didn't actually say that most feminism has a tenuous grasp on reality, I said exactly what you later quoted me as saying ("often (not always!)"). Yeah, it introduces antagonism, but it isn't, in my view, unwarranted. It's hard to have an argument without some antagonism.

2. If you really want to take that path, then yes, there's systemic something at play by virtue of the fact that the male-female distribution isn't always uniform across human activities. Is it marginalization? That isn't a given. You take it as a given.

e.g. 99.9% of women can have babies, 100% of men cannot. Is that marginalization? Or just systemic? 76% of US public school teachers are female. Is that marginalization, or just systemic? About 20% of congress/senate are female, 80% are male. Marginalization? Or just systemic? 92.2% of Federal inmates in the US are male, 7.8% are female. Put another way: one out of every eighteen men in America is locked up in a Federal pen. Is that marginalization? Or just systemic? [1][2][3]

Once again, my gripe is mainly with the type of feminism I originally, way back responded to. The kind that says we can't have men's groups because "every other group is a men's group".

And again again again, I don't have a problem with fighting female marginalization where it occurs. I have a problem with groups who say we should fight female marginalization and ignore men entirely because men aren't marginalized. That's bullshit, and needs to be fought vocally and persistently wherever it is encountered. Men need advocacy too, and groups who say otherwise are, frankly, an enemy to justice as far as I'm concerned.

3. Point taken.

4. Great, but I'm not advocating anyone to take some predefined MRA position and set it in opposition to feminism. I absolutely agree that often (not always!) MRA groups are victims of the exact same ideology-induced blindness that I'm complaining about in some feminisms.

Why I linked those articles is because they lay out events that objectively did occur where feminist groups or institutions actively tried blocking men from discussing men's issues. The men's groups that applied for funding at UoT and Ryerson had nothing to do with these controversial positions you're talking about. The instigators of the men's group at Ryerson included two women.

About the posters. If you're referring to the "just because you regret a one-night stand doesn't mean it wasn't consensual" one, I don't see how that's slut-shaming. It's turning a City of Calgary/Battered Women's Support Services campaign's own logic around. Their posters said stuff like "just because she's drinking doesn't mean she wants sex". If the men's rights poster implies that women are sluts, then the City's poster implies that men are rapists. That's the point. The drinking poster implies that all men are potential rapists; the one-night stand poster implies that all women are potential liars. Heads, meet tails.

Nobody wants to think about that one logically, though. People just want to react.

5. Yeah, and really I'm just pointing that out.

6. Point taken.

7. Well, if people want to react to what I'm saying that's fine. I'm equipped to handle that. I'm obviously not making these posts to have people not engage me in argument. It's having the argument that is important, imo.

I don't really understand what kind of warning bells "men need advocates too" claims would set off, and forgive me if after reading your posts I don't see what in your posts should have illuminated that for me. I still fervently believe that men do need advocates

[1] - http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

[3] - http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30261.pdf

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#269

When is there going to be a conference for male founders only? - where we sit with legs spread and scratch our balls without females giving us dirty looks - where we can wear sweatpants and football jerseys and watch sports - where we can talk about cars and cheerleaders and drink beer all day - where there's no threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit if some feminist witch overhears you and decides she doesn't like yo…

"There are some things that women just don't get about men" Seems more like you don't really get what it means to be a man.

I'm curious to know why you say that. I wrote down a bunch of different stereotypes that people have about being a man, as a joke.

What do you think it means to be a man?

Re: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

#270
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jeez what's with all of these MRAs coming out everywhere when somebody tries to do something for women? this shit happens every single time

Men always become very nervous when women try to have their own spaces, talk amongst themselves, organize into groups, etc. It's like reality can't pass the Bechdel Test.

The opposite is also true.

Women (and some men) tend to be very suspicious of male-only spaces because they think that said men are plotting to reestablish the Patriarchy. Not really, though.

Sometimes it's nice to have a safe space where you don't have to police yourself for the opposite sex and risk being misunderstood by them. I don't begrudge women their own space, and I would hope that women, feminist and otherwise, would not begrudge men theirs.

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